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retainers and guests to seek privacy.
Twelfth century houses, by contrast, gradually featured retirement chambers behind the dais, so that withdrawal could be made more easily and less obviously. Total privacy was, however, not to be imagined. The Norman house at Christchurch in Hampshire, for example, built around 1150, has the hall on the first floor, and has large windows closed by shutters. There are no private rooms, although there is a good, large fireplace, and there are kitchens at the end of the hall. There are also garderobes or lavatories coming off the hall at right angles in the corner near the kitchens.10
Similarly, Old Soar at Plaxtol in Kent, built around 1290, has a single large hall on the first floor, a separate garderobe at one end and a chapel at the other.11
Birth, the creation of life, and death were all public affairs throughout the middle ages. Servants characteristically shared the bedchamber of the lords and ladies, sleeping on trundle beds that could be stored in the daytime underneath the main bed. The lord and lady would be likely to share their own bed with immediate members of their family, enjoying whatever measure of privacy they might have from the servants by the simple refuge of a curtain around the bed.
But gradually, even if modern ideas of privacy can not be imagined in houses throughout the medieval period, there was an increased number of private chambers in Northern houses. Separate rooms for daily living and for eating, and the growing size and complexity of houses all point to the increased possibility of an inner life.
Houses were not only slowly becoming more complex and more private, but also more pleasant.
At sites such as Bisham Abbey (c.1280), the private chambers are set over the service rooms, and off set to one side, so that the end of the hall can be pierced with large windows to let in light.12
And some private houses of the twelfth century, such as Clarendon Palace in Wiltshire, were made more pleasant by the addition of chimneys, a simple device which made possible the drawing off of excess smoke without letting in wind and rain. Earlier houses, and especially castles, had made do with simple holes in the roofs, sometimes more elaborately protected with louvres and shutters.
But it should always be borne in mind that the impact of new wealth and new technology did not transform medieval life overnight.
Fireplaces, for example, were known in northern Europe by the twelfth century, but did not become common until the fourteenth century, and open hearths were still in use in the great inns of the church in the fifteenth century.
Whether the new style of housing was due directly to Crusader architecture is again difficult to prove. It may simply have been that increased trade resulting from the opening of the Mediterranean routes, coupled with changes in social customs and increasingly settled existences in towns and cities all converged to create this image of more luxurious domesticity.
Yet by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, women were gradually becoming freed from the burden of lives lived constantly in the presence of warriors. No longer was it necessary for men and women to live constantly cheek by jowl in a single, badly lit room. With the addition of solars and bedrooms, they could retire, especially when the men's games grew more boisterous later in the evening. In relative comfort, there was room to read, to listen, to discuss, to contemplate.
A room of one's own, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, has a special significance for women, as a place whence springs an inner life.
1. Twelfth century lyric by St Godric in R.T. Davies (ed.), Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology Faber and Faber, London, 1971.
2. Atiya, Crusade Commerce and Culture, p. 236.
3. Runciman III, pp.379-80.
4. E. Stone ed., A Documentary History of Art Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1981, p. 37.
5. T. Copplestone (ed.), World Architecture: An Illustrated History Hamlyn, London, 1963, p.217.
6. W.Anderson, Castles of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Renaissance Omega, Ware, 1984, pp. 52-3.
7. Aziz, The Palestine of the Crusaders, pp. 140-3.
8. Anderson, Castles of Europe, pp.134 ff.
9. M. and C.H.B. Quennell, Everyday Life in Roman and Anglo Saxon Times Dorset, New York, 1959, p.213-4.
10. Ibid., p.184.
11. M. Wood, The English Medieval House Ferndale, London, 1981, p.69.
12. Ibid., p.73.
Chapter 17:
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