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Continuity and Change in the Urban House: Developments in Domestic Space Organisation in Seventeenth-Century London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Frank E. Brown
Frank E. Brown
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Extract

The object of this article is to present the main findings of a study of the functional organisation of the house in postmedieval London. It will also discuss a formal approach to plan analysis that is considered to have wide application in the comparative study of domestic space.

Type
CSSH Discussion
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 1986 , pp. 558 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

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References

1 This article is based on part of the author's Ph.D. dissertation, “The Spatial Development of the City of London in the Later Middle Ages” (The Open University, 1982).Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Barley, M. W., “A Glossary of Names for Rooms in Houses of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Culture and Environment, Essays in Honour of Sir Cyril Fox, Foster, I. L. and Alcock, L., eds. (London: Routledge, 1963), 479–501Google Scholar; and Priestley, U, Corfield, P. J., and Sutermeister, H, “Rooms and Room Use in Norwich Housing, 1580–1730,” Post-Medieval Archaeology, no. 16 (1982), 93–123.Google Scholar

3 Recent archaeological work has uncovered a considerable number of buildings, both medieval and postmedieval, within the city, but these are still too few for our purposes. See Schofield, J, A. Dyson et al. Archaeology of the City of London (London: City of London Archaeological Trust, 1980).Google Scholar

4 “City Lands and Bridge House Properties, 1680–1720,” 2 vols., manusc?pt. Corporation of London Record Office.Google Scholar

5 Clothworkers' Company Plan Book, pubs. 72–75 (London: London Topographical Society, 1938). Most of the remaining plans have subsequently been published in the London Topographical Record. The plan book is kept in the company archives.Google Scholar

6 Guildhall Library, London, MS. 12, 805.

7 One of the drawings, albeit an unrepresentative one (note 9), is reproduced in Glanville, P, London in Maps (London: The Connoisseur, 1972)Google Scholar, and a copy of the drawing of the Crown Inn appears in Schofield, J, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London: British Museum Pubs., 1984), 162Google Scholar. A forthcoming publication by Schofield will include reproductions of most of the plans, together with a history of the individual properties. I am indebted to John Schofield for providing me with a draft of this study and for discussing his findings with me. For a short published discussion of the evidence book and its contents, see his Ralph Treswell's Surveys of London Houses, c. 1612 in English Map-Making, 1500–1650, Tyacke, S., ed. (London: The British Library, 1983).Google Scholar

8 Schofield, J., ed., The London Survevs of Ralph Treswell (London: London Topographical Society, forthcoming 1987).Google Scholar

9 The exception is the drawing of property in Tothill Street, Westminster, which shows the group of buildings viewed from the outside, and thus provides no information on internal arrangement.

10 Schofield, , London Surveys of Ralph Treswell.Google Scholar

11 A similar range is evident among the Clothworkers' Company property, which included a very grand courtyard house in Fenchurch Street in the tenancy of Sir Edward Darcy, and a group of tiny almshouses in Whitefriars, consisting of ten rooms on two floors, each in separate occupancy (Clothworkers' Company Plan Book).

12 Jones, P. E., The Estates of the Corporation of London: Property Records as a Source for Historical, Topographical and Economic Research, London, Guildhall Miscellany, no. 7 (08 1956), 3.Google Scholar

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14 “City Lands and Bridge House Properties,” I, 81.Google Scholar

15 Hill, C., Reformation to Industrial Revolution, Vol. II (1530–1780) of The Pelican Economic History of Britain (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican, 1969), 87.Google Scholar

16 For a complete enumeration of possible access patterns for the three-room plan, see Steadman, J. P., Architectural Morphology: An Introduction to the Geometry of Building Plans (London: Pion, 1983), 218–19.Google Scholar

17 Houses of four and one-half and five and one-half storeys in height are also recorded in the Clothworkers' Company Plan Book, e.g., 21–22.Google Scholar

18 The documentary record demonstrates that this kind of arrangement—two main rooms to each floor—had a long history. In 1410, for example, a carpenter and a timber merchant undertook to build three houses in Friday Street, each of which was to have, on the ground floor, a shop with a sale room and office; on the first floor, a hall, larder, and kitchen; on the second floor, a principal chamber, a retiring room, and a privy. Salzman, L. F., Building in England down to 1540, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press), Appendix ?, Contract no. 51.Google Scholar

19 Archaeological and historical studies have shown that the kitchen began as a detached building, possibly because of the danger of fire. See Wood, M, The English Mediaeval House, (London: Ferndale, 1965), 247Google Scholar. In Paris, a similar arrangement is found among the earliest houses. See Roux, S, “L'habitat urbain au moyen age: le quartier de l'Université à Paris,” Annales, 24:5 (09-10 1969), 1196–1219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Mr. Barber's house in Needier's Lane is another example. See pages 561–64 and Figure 4 above.

21 The canons of Palladian design have been well described elsewhere. See, for example, Godfrey, W. H., A History of Architecture in London (London: Satsford, 1911), 234–35.Google Scholar

22 These terms are taken from Hillier, B and Hanson, J, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Ibid.

24 Hanson, J and Hillier, B, “Tradition and Change in the English House,”Google Scholar Unit for Architectural Studies, the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London, mimeograph (August 1979), 32ff.; idem, Social Logic of space, 158–59.Google Scholar

25 Defoe, D, The Compleat English Tradesman, (London: C. Rivington, 1727), II, pt. 2, 162–65.Google Scholar

26 This terminology follows Hillier, and Hanson, , Social Logic of Space, 19.Google Scholar

27 Public Record Office Inventories, London, E. 154.4.34.

28 Orphans' Inventories, Misc. Transcripts, 29c, no. 2; Corporation of London Record Office.

29 George, M. Dorothy, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925; rpt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966), 103.Google Scholar

30 Orphans' Inventories, Misc. Transcripts, 29c, no. I.

31 The Clothworkers' Company Plan Book contains a survey of a row of tenements backing on to Foxe's Court, each of which has the ground-floor room sequence, shop-warehouse-yardkitchen (p. 15).

32 Cf. Barley, , Glossary, 496Google Scholar; Priestley, , Corfield, , and Sutermeister, , Rooms and Room Use, 108.Google Scholar

33 Orphans' Inventories, Misc. Transcripts, 29c, no. 21.

34 Ibid., no. 13.

35 Hillier, and Hanson, , Social Logic of Space; idem, Tradition and Change.Google Scholar

36 Priestley, , Corfield, , and Sutermeister, Rooms and Room Use, 106.Google Scholar

37 Orphans' Inventories, Misc. Transcripts, 29c, no. 9.

38 Barley, , Glossary, 483Google Scholar. The buttery appears to have taken precedence over the kitchen in Elizabethan Leicester; see Hoskins, W. G., Provincial England: Essays in Social and Economic History (London: Macmillan, 1964), 106.Google Scholar

39 Public Record Office Inventories, E.154.4.34.

40 Barley, , Glossary, 484.Google Scholar

41 Orphans' Inventories, Misc. Transcripts, 29c, no. 4.

42 Ibid., no. 8.

43 Barley, , Glossary, 497.Google Scholar

44 Stone, L, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 15.Google Scholar

45 Stone, L, “Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700,” Past and Present, no. 33 (1966), 28–29.Google Scholar

46 The almshouses in St. Peter's Hill referred to on page 564 were built in 1576. One of a row of houses in Blackman Street, Southwark, has been dated to 1585–87, and the fronts of two houses in Pudding Lane were rebuilt in 1573–75 (Schofield, London Surveys of Ralph Treswell).

47 Schofield, , Building of London, 158–59.Google Scholar

48 Ibid., 88–89.