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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
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.
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- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986
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
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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
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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).
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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
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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
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