Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/36

 1 6 Hijiory of Domejlic Manners right is the domeftic chapel, and the little room attached is perhaps the chamber of the chaplain. It is evidently the intention in this pifture to reprefent the walls of the rooms as being formed, in the lower part, of mafonry, with timber walls above, and all the windows are in the timber walls. If we make allowance for want of perfpe6live and proportion in the drawing, it is probable that only a fmall portion of the elevation was mafonry, and that the wooden walls {parietes) were raifed above it, as is very commonly the cafe in old timber-houfes Hill exifting. The greater portion of the Saxon houfes were certainly of timber ; in Alfric's colloquy, it is the carpenter, or worker in wood {fe treo-wyrhta), who builds houfes ; and the very word to exprefs the operation of building, timhrian, getivihrian, fignified literally to conftruft of timber. We obferve in the above reprefenta- tion of a houfe, that none of the buildings have more than a ground- floor, and this feems to have been a chara6terillic of the houfes of all claifes. The Saxon word Jior is generally ufed in the early writers to reprefent the hatm pavimentuvi. Thus the "variegated floor" {on fagre flor) of the hall mentioned in Beowulf (1. 1454) was a paved floor, perhaps a teffellated pavement ; as the road fpoken of in an earlier part of the poem {fira't u'ccs ftdn-fdh, the fl:reet was ftone-variegated, 1. 644) defcribes a paved Roman road. The term upper-floor occurs once or twice, but only I think in tranflating from foreign Latin writers. The only inftance that occurs to my memory of an upper-floor in an Anglo- Saxon houfe, is the fl:ory of Dunftan's council at Calne in 978, when, according to the Saxon Chronicle, the witan, or council, fell from an upper-floor (0/ ane iip-floran), while Dunftan himfelf avoided their fate by fupporting himfelf on a beam {iippon anum leame). The buildings in the above picture are all roofed with tiles of different forms, evidently copied from the older Roman roof-tiles. Perhaps the flntnefs of thefe roofs is only to be confidered as a proof of the draughtfman's ignorance of perfpeftive. One of Alfric's homiHes applies the epithet^eep to a roof — on tham fticelan hrofc. The hall is not unfrequently defcribed as lofty. The collective house had various names in Anglo-Saxon. It was called hiis, a house, a general term for all refldenccs great or fmall ; it was