is Moreton Hall in Cheshire, which, though a highly-ornamented building, is entirely composed of wood, and was erected at a time before stone was generally used even for the lower apartments. The earliest date about this ancient remain is 1559.
4
Hist. Middle Ages, vol. iii., p. 420.
5
Hist. of Whalley. In Strutt's view of Manners, we have an inventory of furniture in the house of Mr. Richard Fermor, ancestor of the Earl of Pomfret, at Easton in Northamptonshire, and another in that of Sir Adrian Foskewe. Both these houses appear to have been of the dimensions and arrangement mentioned. And even in houses of a more ample extent, the bi-section of the ground-plot by an entrance-passage, was, I believe, universal, and is a proof of antiquity. Haddon Hall and Penshurst still display this ancient arrangement, which has been altered in some old houses. About the reign of James I., or, perhaps, a little sooner, architects began to perceive the additional grandeur of entering the great hall at once. This apartment subsequently gave its name to the whole house.—See an interesting paper on Old English Halls,
6
Hist. Middle Ages, vol. iii., p. 423.—The most remarkable fragment of early building which I have any where found mentioned is at a house in Berkshire, called Appleton, where there exists a sort of prodigy, an entrance-passage with circular arches in the Saxon style, which must probably be as old as the reign of Henry II. No other private house in England can, I presume, boast of such a monument of antiquity.
7
Vide Introduction to Owen's Translations of the Elegies of Llywarch Hen.
8
Gaelic Antiquities, p. 21.
9
Vide Richard of Cirencester.
10
Herodotus describes the subject more minutely.
11
See also "the Druids and their Times," from the German of Wieland, p. 20 of the present volume.
