CHAPTER I

BARNS, HOSPITALS, DWELLING-HOUSES, AND "HÔTELS" OR TOWNHOUSES OF THE NOBILITY

Civil architecture could boast no special characteristics before the close of the thirteenth century. Its earlier buildings bore the impress of religious and monastic types, as was natural at a period when architecture was practised almost exclusively by monks and by the lay disciples trained in their schools.

It was not until the following century that domestic architecture threw off the trammels of religious tradition, and took on the character appropriate to its various functions. Artists began to seek decorative motives in the scenes and objects of daily life, no longer borrowing exclusively from sacred themes, and convention in form and detail was abandoned in some degree for the study of nature.

_Barns._--Throughout the Romanesque and Gothic periods, barns, hospitals, and houses were constructed in the prevailing style. We propose, of course, to deal only with buildings possessing real architectural features.

The barns or granaries of mediæval times were rural dependencies of the abbeys, but were built outside the enclosure of the monastery proper, and formed part of the _priory_ or farm. The entrance of the barn was a large door, opening upon the yard in the centre of the front gable end; access was also obtained by means of smaller doors in the side walls, and often a postern was constructed beside the main entrance for ordinary use. The great central doors were then only thrown open for the passage of carts, which, entering at the front, passed out through a similar door in the opposite gable end, as at the barn of Perrières, which, though situated in Normandy, was a dependency of the Abbey of Marmoutier, near Tours.

Such barns were generally large three-aisled buildings, the central aisle divided from those on either side by an arcade, or pillars of wood or stone, which supported the pointed timber roof covering the whole.

In some of these barns it was the practice to pile wheat, barley, or rye in the centre and in one of the side aisles; in others the central aisle was kept free for passage, and the grain was stored in the sides.

The façades differ only in unimportant details. They consist of vast gable ends, following the lines of the roof, and strengthened by pilasters. A large doorway, with a small postern to the side of it, occupies the centre of the base, and the apex is pierced with narrow openings to light, or rather to ventilate, the interior.

Tithe-barns were very generally constructed on this plan. When large and important they had two stories, as at Provins.

These were not as a rule vaulted, but the granaries, or _greniers d'abondance_, were often built with three stories, that of the ground-floor, and even the one above it, being vaulted. The granary of the Abbey of Vauclair, in the department of Aisne, built towards the close of the twelfth century, is a very interesting example of such structures.

Some idea of the importance of religious establishments at this period may be gathered from the foregoing details. The great abbeys were miniature towns, and their dependencies, the priories, consisted of vast farms, round which large villages soon grew up. The cultivators of these great holdings combined agricultural labours with their religious exercises, and the priors in especial were not only priests, but perhaps even in a greater degree stewards or bailiffs, whose duty it was to collect payments in kind, such as tithes or other revenues, to store these, together with the crops of their own raising, and finally to administer the wealth of every description--lands, woods, rivers, and ponds--belonging to the abbey.

_Hospitals._--A large number of charitable institutions, called in the Middle Ages _maisons dieu_, _hôtels dieu_, hospices, hospitals, and lazar-houses, were founded in the eleventh century, and greatly developed in the twelfth and thirteenth.

A hospital was attached to most of the large abbeys or their dependencies. The cities also owned hospitals founded or served by monks.

Lazar-houses had multiplied throughout Western Europe by the end of the twelfth century, from Denmark to Spain, from England to Bohemia and Hungary; but these buildings gave little scope to the architect. They consisted merely of an enclosure surrounding a few isolated cells, and a chapel, attached to which were the lodgings of the monks who tended the lepers.

But many of the hospices or hospitals built from the end of the twelfth to the fourteenth century are magnificent buildings, in general arrangement much resembling the great halls of the abbeys.

It must be borne in mind that hospitality in the Middle Ages was obligatory; each monastery, therefore, had its eleemosynary organisation, which included special buildings for the accommodation of monks whose business it was to tend the sick and to distribute alms to them and other travellers and pilgrims.

We learn from Viollet-le-Duc that so early as the Carlovingian period taxes were levied in aid of the poor, the sick, and pilgrims. Charlemagne had enjoined hospitality in his ordinances and capitularies, and it was forbidden to refuse shelter, fire, and water to any suppliant.

The communes vied with kings, nobles, abbots, and citizens in the discharge of such duties. Hospices and hospitals were founded on every hand, either in deserted buildings, or in specially constructed edifices.

Refuges were also built on roads much frequented by pilgrims to shelter belated travellers, and hospices were constructed outside the walls and close to the city gates.

Pilgrimages were much in vogue in the Middle Ages, especially throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The sanctuaries of St. Michael in Normandy, and of St. James of Compostella in Spain, were the most frequented. At the beginning of the thirteenth century a hospice was founded outside Paris, near the Porte St. Denis, which was dedicated to St. James. This hospice, with its chapel, was served by the confraternity of _St. Jacques aux Pèlerins_ (St. James of Pilgrims), and offered gratuitous shelter each night to pilgrims bound for Paris. Its buildings covered two acres; they included a great hall of stone, vaulted on intersecting arches, and measuring some 132 feet by 36, for the accommodation of the sick.

In a file of accounts of the fifteenth century, concluding with an appeal for funds, it is stated that, for the convenience of pilgrims--_y a lieu pour ce faire XVIIJ liz qui depuis le premier jour d'aoust MCCCLXVIIJ jusques au jour de Mons. S. Jacques et Christofle ensuivant on estés logés et hebergés en l'hospital de céans_ XV^m VI^c IIII^{xx}X _pèlerins qui aloient et venoient au Mont Saint Michel et austres pèlerins. Et encore sont logés continuellement chascune nuict de XXXVI à XL povres pèlerins et austres povres, pourquoy le povre hospital est moult chargé et en grant nécessité de liz, de couvertures et de draps._[69]

In the first years of the fourteenth century several hundreds of _hôtels dieu_, hospitals, and lazar-houses received help from the King of France. St. Louis founded the _Hospice des Quinze-Vingts_ for the blind, and in many towns hospitals were erected for the insane, the old, and the infirm, in addition to the usual lazar-houses. Special hospitals had already been established for women in labour, and a chapel was founded for their benefit in the crypt of the _Ste. Chapelle_ of Paris, dedicated to Our Lady of Travail, of Tombelaine, in Normandy.[70]

[69] "Eighteen beds have been in use, and from the first day of August 1368 to the feast of SS. James and Christopher following (July 25, 1369) this hospital has lodged and sheltered 16,690 pilgrims journeying to or from St. Michael's Mount, besides others. And it has further given shelter each night to some thirty-six to forty poor pilgrims and other needy persons, whereby the poor hospital is heavily burdened and in sore straits for lack of beds, sheets, and blankets."--Ed. Corroyer, _Description de l'Abbaye du Mont St. Michel et de ses Abords_; Paris, 1877.

[70] _Idem._

Several hospitals of the Gothic period still exist. That of St. John at Angers is one of the most remarkable. It comprises a great hall, divided into three aisles, and vaulted on intersecting arches, and a chapel dating from the close of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. The fine barn at Angers is of the same period; the plan and details of construction are very curious, and resemble those of the barns and granaries already described.

The _Hôtel Dieu_ of Chartres dates from about the same period.

The hospital of Ourscamps, near Noyon, is very similar as to the scheme of construction which seems to have been one generally adopted by the religious architects of the twelfth, and more notably of the thirteenth century. The grandiose proportions of the vast building recall the great vaulted halls of contemporary abbeys, such as those of St. Jean des Vignes at Soissons, and of the _merveille_ at Mont St. Michel. Certain individual features characterise it as a hospice specially designed for the sick, the poor, and pilgrims.

The Hospice of Tonnerre appears to have been rebuilt in the fourteenth century. The vast design is very impressively carried out. The great hall, over 60 feet wide by some 300 long, is covered with an open timber roof, boarded in so as to form a semi-circular vault, which is singularly effective.

The internal arrangements are very ingenious. A wooden gallery in the half-story commanded a view into each unceiled cubicle, by means of which it was possible to keep constant watch over the patients without disturbing them.

The hospital of Beaune has been so often described as to call for little comment. The painted timber vault of the great hall seems to have been imitated from that of Tonnerre. Its distinctive character has unfortunately been destroyed by the construction of a ceiling, the joists of which rest on the tie-beams of the original skeleton. But the inner court is intact, with the arcade and well and wash-house so familiar from descriptions and illustrations. Another picturesque and often described feature is the great roof on the south side, with its double row of dormer windows surmounted by a rich ornamentation of hammered lead.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the practice of vaulting the great halls of hospitals with stone was abandoned. It became usual in France and in Flanders to cover the vast aisles with timber roofs, the boarded vaults of which were either pointed or barrel-shaped.

The term _maladrerie_ was applied to the small lazar-houses, numbers of which were built in France in the neighbourhood of abbeys or of priories remote from towns and great religious centres.

The _Maladrerie du Tortoir_, not far from Laon, on the _Route de la Fère_, is a type of such rural hospitals. Both in plan and in the details of construction it recalls the hospital of Tonnerre, more especially in the ingenious arrangement of the interior.

In the planning of these charitable institutions mediæval architects exhibited the same skill and ingenuity which distinguished their treatment of religious monuments. Viollet-le-Duc has pointed out the strange illogicality of such a theory as that which would make artists who showed extraordinary subtlety in religious buildings responsible for so much coarseness in civil structures. We must not hold them accountable for the destruction of their well-planned hospitals from the sixteenth century onwards, and the substitution of buildings, the main preoccupation of whose architects was to provide accommodation for as many patients as possible. Louis XIV. endowed the hospitals built in his reign with the revenues of the lazar-houses and _maladreries_, for which there was no further occasion, leprosy having disappeared from his dominions. But his hospitals leave much to be desired from the hygienic point of view; the mediæval hospitals, on the other hand, have a monumental simplicity of appearance, and offer a liberal supply of light, air, and space to their patients. We do not assert the superiority of the cellular system commonly adopted in hospitals from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, over that of the open wards of our own times, but we may be permitted to point out its great moral advantages. And, as our learned authority remarks, the system owed its adoption to a noble delicacy of charitable feeling in the mediæval founders and builders of our _maisons dieu_.

_Houses and Hôtels, or Town-Houses of the Nobility._--The history of human habitations is a subject of such interest that to treat it adequately a special work would be necessary. Such an undertaking has, moreover, been admirably carried out by a famous architect.[71]

[71] Ch. Garnier, Member of the Institute, whose picturesque embodiment of research, in his reconstruction of human habitations from the lacustrine period to our own times, attracted so much attention at the Exhibition of 1889.

We must refrain from discussion of prehistoric or Merovingian dwellings, or of those rural hovels, the typical variations of which, in different countries and climates, offers so wide a field for study. To keep within the limits assigned us by the arbitrary term Gothic Architecture, we must confine our rapid sketch to the architectural period which dates from the middle of the twelfth to the close of the fifteenth century.

Nothing remains of habitations constructed in France before the twelfth century, save the vague and scanty records of ancient texts, manuscripts, and bas-reliefs. But we may reasonably infer that the houses of the period were built of wood, as was natural in a country containing great tracts of forest. We know that most of the important buildings were timber structures, which explains the fact that numbers of twelfth-century churches were founded on the sites of earlier buildings destroyed by fire.

Roman, Gallo-Roman, and Merovingian houses were arranged to suit the habits of the times; they were lighted by windows opening upon an inner courtyard, in accordance with the ancient custom of separating the women's apartments from the rest of the habitation.

But by the end of the twelfth century the urban dwelling was adapted to the needs of a family. The doors and windows of the house were made to overlook the street. The building consisted generally of a hall or shop, in which a handicraft was carried on, or manufactured goods were offered for sale. It was lighted by a wide arcade of round or pointed arches, and was either on a level with the street, or raised above it by the height of some few steps. A back room, opening upon a courtyard, served for kitchen and dining-room. To the left of the façade a little door gave access to a staircase which led to the first floor, where was a large _solar_ or living-room and an apartment overlooking the courtyard. Above these were the chambers occupied by the inmates of the house.

The architecture of such houses varies according to the climate, the materials of the country, and the customs of the inhabitants. The houses had no special individuality as long as the windows were treated merely as apertures for the admission of light; but directly these began to take on a certain elaboration, and such features as mouldings or sculptures were introduced in the façades, a system of decoration was borrowed from the neighbouring churches or abbeys of monkish architects, a consequence either of the far-reaching influence of monastic schools, or of the spirit of imitation and force of habit.

Certain houses at Cluny, which date from the twelfth century, exemplify the style. They are built almost entirely of stone. The arcading recalls various details of monastic buildings which the constructors very naturally took as models.

The same may be said of the other houses, of which we give drawings as illustrating the urban type of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is easy to trace the successive developments of religious and monastic architecture in the domestic buildings of the period.

It is not until the close of the fourteenth century, and more notably in the fifteenth, that such influences gradually die out, and change, if not progress, becomes evident in the altered form of the arcades, which no longer resemble those of cloisters or churches, but have elliptic or square apertures. These, in the windows, are no longer subdivided by a stone tracery of ornamental cusps and foliations, but merely by plain mullions and transoms, forming square compartments which it was possible to fill with movable glazed sashes of the simplest construction.

The façades are generally of durable materials, such as stone or brick, and the use of wood is restricted to the floors and the roofs.

Houses of the fifteenth century in the Northern departments, where stone is scarce, were built mainly of wood, the more solid material being used only on the ground-floor. The overhanging upper stories were of timbers, the interstices being filled in with brick. The principal members, such as corbel tables, beams, ledges, and window-frames, were decorated with mouldings and sculptures. The façade usually terminated in a gable, the projecting pointed arch of which followed the lines of the timber roof. In other cases it was crowned by richly decorated dormer windows. In rainy districts the roof was covered with slates or shingles.

It was usual in the North to detach each house at the upper story, even when it was not practicable to allow a narrow passage or space between. This was not merely a concession to the vanity of the citizen, to his desire to make his independent gable a feature of the street. It was also a precautionary measure against fires, which were frequent and disastrous in cities built mainly of wood, and possessing but very rudimentary appliances wherewith to meet such a catastrophe.

The fifteenth and notably the sixteenth centuries were marked by the building of a new class of dwellings, the _maisons nobles_, or town-houses of the nobles, who, down to this period, had lived entirely in their fortified castles. These great seignorial mansions differ essentially from the houses of the citizens. The _hôtel_ occupied a considerable space, in which a courtyard and even gardens were included. The house of the citizen or merchant was built flush with the street, whereas the _hôtel_ was placed in an inner court, often richly decorated, and the street-front was devoted to stables, coach-houses, servants' lodgings, and the great entrance which gave access to the court and the main building.

The names at least of some famous Parisian _hôtels_ of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have survived, such as the _hôtels_ des Tournelles, de St. Pol, de Sens, de Nevers, and de la Trémoille, the last destroyed in 1840. The Hôtel de Cluny, which dates from 1485, is a very curious example, and of remarkable interest, as having been preserved almost intact.

Several great houses of the same period still exist at Bourges. Among others, the Hôtel Lallemand, built towards the close of the fifteenth century, the inner court of which is especially noteworthy, and the still more famous _hôtel_ or _château_ of Jacques Coeur.

This beautiful structure dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and is built in part on the ramparts of the town. It is so well known that it will be unnecessary to describe or illustrate the famous portals and inner court. But the façade on the Place Berry, though less sumptuous, is hardly less interesting. Here we have the two great towers of the fortified _enceinte_, with their Gallo-Roman bases, and between them the _corps de logis_ or main buildings of the mansion, which retain many features of the feudal castle, and bear witness to the wealth and power of Charles VII.'s ill-used favourite, the famous banker, whose splendid fortunes suffered such undeserved eclipse.