Page:The castellated and domestic architecture of Scotland from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (1887) - Volume 2.djvu/589

 SUMMARY 573 FOURTH PERIOD although some might be stowed away with the horses and cattle in the basement,, or the loft in the vault over it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the amenities of life came to be somewhat better appreciated, and the number and size of the sleeping apartments in most of the houses was considerably increased, and a separate kitchen was generally provided within the building. The Z and L plans, when carried up five or six stories in height, enabled this to be done to almost any extent desired, while in the castles designed or enlarged on the courtyard plan, the halls, reception-rooms, and bedrooms were easily multiplied as wanted, and there is frequently more than one kitchen. The following passage from The Life of Simon, Lord Lovat, by Dr. John Hill Burton (p. 172), gives as clear and authentic an account as we have met with of life and customs in a Scottish keep, even in the middle of the eighteenth century. Castle Douiiie stood on the slope rising from the Beauly Firth, where the Castle of Beaufort now is, but was razed to the ground after the battle of Culloden. Dr. Hill "Burton says : " King, in his Munimenta Antiqua, tells us that the birthplace of Lord Mansfield was ' a great square tower, with walls of near thirteen feet in thickness, having small apartments even within the substance of the wall itself. At the bottom of one of which is a noisome dungeon, without light, or even air holes, except in the trap door in the floor, con- trived for lowering down the captives,. . . and to speak the truth, even the residence of the well-known Lord Lovat in the Highlands, at Castle Dounie, so late as the year 1740, was much of this kind. " ' Here he kept a sort of court, and several public tables, and had a very numerous body of retainers always attending. His own constant residence, and the place where he received company, and even dined constantly with them, was in just one room only, and that the very room wherein he lodged. And his .lady's sole apartment was also her own bed-chamber; and the only provision made for lodging, either of the domestic servants, or of the numerous herd of retainers, was a quantity of straw, which was spread overnight on the floors of the four lower rooms of this sort of tower-like structure ; where the whole inferior part of the family, consisting of a very great number of persons, took up their abode. Sometimes about 400 persons, attending this petty court, were kennelled here, and I have heard the same worthy man, from whose lips the exact account of what is here related has been taken, declare, that of those wretched dependants he has seen, in consequence of the then existing right of heritable jurisdiction, three or four, and sometimes half-a-dozen, hung up by the heels for hours, on the few trees round the mansion/ " At the long table at Castle Dounie the guests and the viands had a