the neighbouring courtyard or perhaps from a window placed in the’ side walls, but this was practicable only if the adjoining house was shallow enough or low enough to avoid blocking them in. In many cases, the subsequent rebuilding of the neighbouring premises would have excluded any light to the hall, and there is evidence that in some cases the former end block beyond the hall has been either demolished or rebuilt as a single extension and windows put in to serve the hall. This difficulty in lighting the hall is presumably why in many cases the service end of the house was omitted and perhaps built beyond the courtyard. There was also a similar problem in providing access from the street to the hall, service rooms and courtyard beyond if the plot was entirely enclosed on both sides. To overcome this, a through – passage was provided, running the entire depth of the house from front to back and incorporated within the width of the house. This
through-passage, it seems, went through the hall, the top presumably used as a gallery to connect the first-floor rooms at opposite ends of the hall.
Frequently medieval timber-framed houses stood on vaulted cellars which often elevated the ‘ground floor’ above the level of the street by up to three feet. When this occurred, a flight of steps was necessary to obtain entrance to the house. At Chester these raised ground floors developed into so-called ‘rows’ which are raised covered galleries at a half-storey position looked at from the street. There is no convincing reason to explain their existence, but A. L. Poole puts forward a theory that the space between the steps was occupied by stalls which eventually became permanent structures attached to the houses, the fronts of these houses subsequently brought forward to incorporate the stalls, narrowing the street by some four or five feet on either side by providing a covered footway at upper ground-floor level. Although these Rows are referred to in the city records of the thirteenth century, in their present form they date chiefly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with many dating from the half-timber revival which started in the city in about 1850, when many of the houses of Chester were rebuilt. Perhaps the best of the Rows can be seen in Watergate Street, the least commercialized of the main streets where they retain something of a semi-domestic character. Within the Row is Leche House, one of the most notable timber-framed houses in the city, basically a fifteenth-century building on a late thirteenth – or early fourteenth-century cellar which underwent a certain amount of modernization and additions in the seventeenth century and again in the eighteenth century but escaped the restoration which affected the character of so many houses in Chester in the nineteenth century.
The gardens to the rear of these hall-houses were over the centuries filled in, either with further domestic buildings or with workshops, warehouses or other minor industrial buildings. Where the hall-range was flanked by a courtyard or passage, the range could be extended indefinitely with no difficulty, but when the house occupied the entire width of the site, this was not possible and any additional buildings had to be detached and sited beyond the courtyard. In medieval times these ‘back-blocks’ probably took the form of a detached kitchen or other single building, but this has to be conjecture for they have generally been rebuilt. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries one finds more elaborate buildings of two or more storeys, frequently connected to the main house by a passage or gallery, occasionally at both ground and first floor. These galleries still remain a feature of many town houses in Devon, one notable example being the Elizabethan house (70 Fore Street) in Totnes, although this and the staircase have recently been rebuilt. Other examples of these back-blocks linked by a gallery have been found in Chester and Taunton.
As in rural houses, the open hall in town houses began to be abandoned by the end of the fifteenth century in eastern England and the South-East, though it was not until during the sixteenth century that it was superseded elsewhere. Medieval houses were modernized and altered by the insertion of floors in the open hall and the provision of enclosed fireplaces and chimney stacks. New house-types were also evolved, with those improvements in rural houses also to be found in town houses. One noticeable change was the use of the top floor, which in the medieval house was originally unceiled and open to the roof but towards the end of the sixteenth century usually ceiled to provide greater comfort and at the same time boarded to provide additional accommodation, the rooms being lit either by windows being inserted in the gable or by the insertion of dormer windows. At the commercial heart of the town, where space was expensive, the houses on the street front could be extended only upwards, with the result that in some towns houses which had up to this time been of two storeys were constructed of three. In such towns as London, Bristol and Exeter it was not uncommon for houses to be four or even five storeys in height, as well as having an attic. Given the width limitation imposed on many building sites and the continuing need to gain access to the rear, the side-passage house continued to be the most convenient urban plan. Within it the stair was of considerable importance, often situated in the centre of the building and providing access to more intensively used upper chambers which were now heated by one good chimney stack. Gable-end houses continued to be built; some were only one room deep on each floor but the majority were two-rooms deep, as in the earlier examples, often had a back-block at the rear to form a kitchen or perhaps a parlour with a kitchen beyond that.
Away from the prime sites, town houses continued to be built with their long sides to the street. Unlike the end-gable houses, these houses varied enormously in lay-out according to the width of the plots available, and all post-medieval house plans are represented, but certain variations of design obviously proved more suitable than others. The two-storey lobby-entry house with a continuous jetty became the standard house type almost universally adopted in many of the smaller towns, particularly Suffolk, while houses with a cross-passage are to be found in the west Midlands.
The largest of the timber-framed town houses which survive in England were frequently the residences of successful merchants and are generally to be found in the towns of the West. Shrewsbury has a number of such buildings, of which the finest is Ireland’s Mansion, a three-storeyed jettied building with attic, built in about 1575, of four
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