[Illustration: _No. 86. Plan of Ground-Floor of House at Millichope._]
[Illustration: _No. 87. Plan of the Upper Floor._]
[Illustration: _No. 88. Inside of Window at Millichope._]
Towards the fourteenth century, the rooms of houses began to be multiplied, and they were often built round a court; the additions were made chiefly to the offices, and to the number of chambers. They were still built more of wood than of stone, and the carpenter was the chief person employed in their construction. In the fabliau of Trubert, printed by Méon, a duke, intending to build a new house, employs a carpenter to make the design, and takes him into his woods to select timber for materials. It may give some notion of the simplicity of the arrangement of a house, and the small number of rooms, even when required for royalty itself, when we state that in the January of 1251, king Henry III., intending to visit Hampshire, and requiring a house for himself with his queen and court, gave orders to the sheriff of Southampton to build at Freemantle a hall, a kitchen, and a chamber with an upper story (_cum estagio_, sometimes called in documents written in French _chambre estagée_), and a chapel on the ground, for the king’s use; and a chamber with an upper story, with a chapel at the end of the same chamber, for the queen’s use. Under the chamber was to be made a cellar for the king’s wines.
The chamber had, indeed, now become so important a part of the building, that its name was not unusually given to the whole house, which, in the documents of the thirteenth century, is sometimes called a _camera ad estagiam_--an upper-storied chamber. Such was the case with a house built in 1285 for Edward I. and his queen in the forest at Woolmer, in Hampshire, the account of the expenses of which are preserved in the Pipe Rolls. This house was seventy-two feet long, and twenty-eight feet wide. It had two chimneys, a chapel, and two wardrobes. The chapel and wardrobe had six glazed windows. There was also a hall in it, but the two chimneys appear to have belonged to the chamber. The windows of the chamber and hall had wooden shutters (_hostia_), but do not appear to have had glass. The kitchen was the only other apartment in the house. The ordinary windows of a house at this time were not usually glazed; but they were either latticed, or consisted of a mere opening, which was covered by a cloth or curtain by day, and was closed by a shutter, which turned upon hinges, either sideways, like an ordinary door, or up and down, and which seems generally to have opened outwards. The rooms were, in this manner, very imperfectly protected against the weather, even in palaces. A precept of Henry III. has been quoted, which directs glass to be substituted for wood in a window in the queen’s wardrobe at the Tower, “in order that that chamber might not be so windy;” and in the same reign a charge is made in the accounts relating to the royal manor at Kennington, “for closing the windows better than usual (_et in fenestris melius solito claudendis_).”[24]