work. Institutions were founded to support these people, combining charitable aims with a rigorous liturgical regime. Some were built, as earlier hospitals had been, by bishops or the aristocracy, but many were founded by the corporate efforts of rich townsmen. Most were sited on the outskirts of towns, partly to exclude the sick from the centre and to provide for the incoming wayfarer, but also because it was believed that the stress and noise of town centres discouraged recovery.28
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| Fig. 109 Norwich, Blackfriars, now known as St Andrew’s Hall. The only complete surviving friars’ church in England, it dates from 1440–70 – a rebuilding of the original foundation of 1307 after a fire. Yet the layout is entirely 14th-century. |
| Bishop Walter Suffield of Norwich founded the Hospital of St Giles just outside the precincts of his palace in 1245, and by the end of the century it was richly endowed with nearby rural estates, as well as a portfolio of urban properties. In 1270 it absorbed the nearby parish church of St Helen, adding parochial duties to its responsibilities. Its prime purpose was to care for the sick and aged priests of Norwich, but it also cared for a minimum of 30 others and fed – and in the winter, warmed – 13 others each day. Four sisters assisted by four lay brothers cared for the sick, while the master and four chaplains saw to their spiritual needs and prayed for the soul of the founder.29 St Giles’s Hospital was large and well endowed, one of the reasons for its survival to this day (p. 175). Many others were not. Hospitals that tended to the needs of wayfarers, especially pilgrims, were often overwhelmed and under-funded. The roads of medieval England were brimming with the ill, the disabled and the mentally disturbed making their way to nearby shrines, or sometimes on long pilgrimages in search of healing. Monasteries and other great houses had a duty of hospitality, but small hospitals played their part, too. |
| Life of the Rich and Powerful |
| The 13th century was a good time to be an English landed magnate. Throughout the century incomes rose and landlords had increasing disposable wealth. Six earls had an income of more than £3,000 a year and two of them grossed more than £6,000; at least half a dozen were on £400 to £3,000 a year and most barons earned between £200 and £500. To put these figures in context, a good annual wage for a labourer was £2 and the peacetime revenues of the Crown were only £30,000 a year. So there were a lot of rich people and in total their disposable income was probably in the region of £500,000 a year, more than ten times the income of the entire state. These people invested in building to a greater or lesser degree. Building maintenance probably absorbed about 5 per cent of a magnate’s annual resources and there were also almost always capital investments, such as for barns and mills. In addition, a significant proportion of their disposable income was spent on new domestic architecture, in some cases up to 25 per cent.30 |
| The general increase in the wealth and architectural capability of landlords contributed to social changes that were already underway. Communal feasting and hospitality remained at the heart of medieval life, and lords found ways of making their halls even larger and more spectacular. At the same time they increasingly wanted to spend time in more intimate spaces and withdrew from their halls to chambers in which they could spend time with their families and peers. This led to important changes in the design of high-status houses that become apparent from the 1180s.31 |
| Up until the late 12th century the houses of the rich were generally an agglomeration of separate structures: hall, chamber and kitchen. But from the 1180s houses began to adopt a new arrangement that was to become the standard layout for all houses of pretension for the following 400 years. Essentially what happened was that kitchens began to be built on to one end of the great hall, forming a single unit; then, from the 1220s, chamber blocks were also constructed integrally with the great hall but at the other end from the kitchen. This gave the great hall an ‘upper’ end adjacent to the lord’s private rooms and a ‘lower’ end adjacent to the kitchens. Whilst the hall was generally still on the ground floor the chambers at the upper end were stacked above it, so a stair led up from the lord’s end of the hall to his rooms above. The kitchen, also on the ground floor, often had guest chambers above it, and a secondary stair would have led to these (fig. 110). |
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| Fig. 110 Ashby de la Zouch Castle, Leicestershire. Most of what is shown here was built by William, Lord Hastings in 1473–83. In its axial arrangement of kitchen, buttery and pantry, hall and great chamber, it displays a typical plan for a substantial medieval house. |
Access to the great hall was no longer from a door in the centre of one of its long walls but through a door at the lower end; this door led to a passage that was screened off from the rest of the hall by a timber partition. Doors from the kitchen, from the buttery (for beer) and pantry (for bread) would lead into this enclosure, which became known as the screens passage. This more integrated arrangement allowed lords to spend more time in the comfort of their chambers while coming and going through their halls. This private space was a badge of rank, part of the charisma of greatness and wealth. To be inaccessible was to be important, as it enabled favour to be shown and intimacy to be conferred and withdrawn. More exclusive rooms that often included private chapels (or oratories) were further symbols of exclusivity.32
Fig. 111 Lincoln, Bishop’s Palace: reconstructed as it would have been seen from the great courtyard of the palace. To the left is the great hall with its porch and bay window; on the right there is the kitchen linked to the hall by a passage. The palace was built on sloping ground and so the kitchen was raised up on a vault.
Many of these innovations in domestic planning were led by the bishops, who were single, rich and less conservative in outlook than the monarchy or the magnates. In the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral lies the now ruined bishop’s palace, once among the most lavish buildings in the kingdom. Here modern-day visitors can see one of the earliest instances of a kitchen linked to the lower end of a hall, with three doors serving the buttery, pantry and kitchen (fig. 111). The hall was started in the 1220s and about 20 years later Bishop Grosseteste set out 23 rules for the smooth running of a household. In these he was careful to cover appropriate behaviour in the hall, and rules for the serving, seating and attire of dinner guests.33 Such household regulations were increasingly enforced by chamberlains, the guardians of the lord’s dignity and privacy. The chamberlain was not the only officer in a great household as, by 1100, most aristocrats were accompanied by men holding posts such as steward, butler, constable, marshal, clerk and huntsman. These people – and their more humble followers – were the human backdrop to aristocratic power: a household such as that of Bishop Grosseteste would have had as many as eighty attendants, that of a duke or an earl perhaps twice that.34
These structured and hierarchical households with their integrated kitchens, halls and chambers presented new architectural opportunities. Stokesay Castle, Shropshire, is a miraculously unaltered house of the 1280s built by the super-rich wool merchant Laurence of Ludlow, an early example of a man, enriched by trade, who set himself up as a country squire. Laurence built himself a fine great hall with tall windows and a central hearth; at its south end was a block containing his own chambers, leading on to a tower with three large, well-lit rooms. At the lower end of the hall were more chambers, possibly for guests or perhaps his family (fig. 113).
Fig.
