Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/214

198 19<s ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE. Part II. that the architects lavished their art, and, generally speaking, these are most entitled to be considered as architectural features. Even now there are in England at least a hundred of these halls, either entire and in use, or sufficiently perfect to render their restoration easy. All have deeply and beautifully framed roofs of timboi-. In this respect they stand alone, no wooden roofs on the Continent being comparable with them. Among them the largest and grandest is, as it ought to be, the hall of the King's Palace at Westminster, as rebuilt by •Richard II. Internally it is 239 ft. long by 68 ft. in width, covering about 23,000 superficial feet. The hall at Padua is larger, and so may some others be, but none have a roof at all approaching this either in beauty of design or mechanical cleverness of execution. In this respect it stands quite alone and unrivalled, and, with the smaller roof of St. Stephen's chapel ad- joining, seems to have formed the type on which most of the subsequent roofs w^ere framed. The roof of the hall at Eltham (Wood- cut No. 632), which belongs to the reign of Henry lY., is inferior both in dimensions and design to that at Westminster, but still dis- plays clearly the characteristics of the style. It would have been better if the trusses had sprung from a line level with the sills of the windows, and if the arched frame had been less flat ; but that was the tendency of the age, which soon became so ex- aggerated as to destroy the con- structive proportion altogether. We are not able to trace the gradual steps by which the hammer-beam truss was per- fected, but we can follow it from the date of the hall at Westnunster (1397), to Wolsey's halls at Hampton Court and Oxford, till it passed into the Jacobian abominations of Lambeth or tye Inner Temple. Among all these, that of Kenihvorth, though small (86 ft. X 43 ft.), must have been one of the most beautiful. It 630. Plan of Westiuiiister Hall. Scale 100 ft. to 1 iu. ^T" 031. Section of Westminster Hall. Scale 50 ft. to 1 in.