Roman Villas: A Study in Social Structure

ROMAN VILLAS

ROMAN VILLAS

A Study in Social Structure

J.T. Smith Drawings by A.T. Adams

London and New York

First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1997 J.T. Smith All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Smith, J.T. (John Thomas), 1922– Roman villas : a study in social structure / J.T. Smith ; drawings by A.T. Adams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-16719-1 (hc) 1. Architecture, Domestic—Rome. 2. Architecture, Roman—Europe. 3. Architecture and society—Rome. I. Title. NA335.E85S65 1997 728 '.09376—dc21 97–248 ISBN 0-415-16719-1 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-00405-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-22010-2 (Glassbook Format)

For Heather

CONTENTS

xiii xxvi xxix xxx xxxii

List of figures Preface Editorial notes on drawings Glossary List of abbreviations of locations PART I: AIMS AND METHODS 1

Aims and scope of the book Plan typology: some objections The terminology of social structure The history of villa classification Villa architecture What is a villa and what is its name? A representative sample?

3 4 5 6 9 10 11

2

Methods and assumptions What constitutes a type? Origins of plan analysis Relevance of vernacular architecture studies The principle of alternate development Room use House plans and social structure Classical canons: symmetry and axiality Matters ignored

13 13 13 14 15 15 16 18 19

PART II: TYPES OF PLAN 3

Hall houses Stahl and Mayen Classification and its problems Layout and functions of the hall

23 24 26 26 vii

— Contents — The hearth/entrance relation The off-centre hearth The lower end Broad halls with more than one hearth Narrow halls Single-ended halls The inner room subdivided Double-ended halls Aisled houses Ridge-post halls Wide-nave halls Nave and aisles of equal width Hall or yard? The case of Inzigkofen Hall and porticus unified: Sinsheim and Kingsweston Divided halls Halls: a summary

29 29 30 31 32 33 35 35 36 37 40 40 41 43 43 45

4

Row-type houses Introduction Interconnecting rooms: Newport (I.o.W.) and Lamargelle Newport enlarged: Sparsholt Lamargelle enlarged: Downton The size and forms of units Houses entered at one end The longitudinal lobby Longitudinal lobbies and reverse symmetry Houses with two front entrances Four-cell houses The compact row type

46 46 47 49 49 51 54 56 57 59 60 62

5

Developed forms of row-house Kirchberg: three-room and lobby units The elaboration of units: Laufen-Müschag Bierbach: how many units in a row-type villa? Lobby types Room proportions and their implications Articulation or separate rooms? Blocks of small rooms Transformation of lobbies The significance of disparate units

65 65 67 68 70 75 76 77 78 79

6

Developed forms of hall houses Narrow end rooms End rooms as byres? End rooms organised around lobbies End rooms: Inzigkofen and its analogues

80 80 82 83 86

viii

— Contents — Disproportion between the ends of the hall Larger apartments: Bocholtz-Vlengendaal Other large end apartments: Kinheim Social significance of room groupings Development of wide-nave houses

88 89 90 91 93

7

Problematic house types Bondorf: small house or large yard? Other villas of Bondorf type The problem of function Ranges of end rooms in broad halls Yard rather than hall? The smallest row-houses? One-room buildings: houses or what? Double-depth plans Back-to-back houses The interpretation of double-depth plans The axial corridor The social basis of axial-corridor plans Back-to-back halls

94 94 97 99 100 101 102 105 106 109 110 112 114 115

8

The porticus-with-pavilions: pavilions Pavilions: the classic form Where was the pavilion entered? Asymmetrical pavilions Practical asymmetry: the case of Rothselberg Asymmetry as an expression of status Small difference, significant social implication Oblong pavilions Pavilions not rectangular Minimal pavilions Pavilions in row-type houses Detached wings or quasi-pavilions One storey or two? Conclusion

117 117 119 120 120 121 123 123 124 125 126 128 128 129

9

The porticus-with-pavilions: porticuses Open-ended porticuses: an expression of social structure Hierarchy in porticuses open at one end The ultimate open-ended porticus: Csucshegy Tapering and splayed porticuses Two households: symmetrical entrances Two households: porticus-with-pavilions front and rear Porticus functions: recreation Recreation: ghost pavilions The porticus as living-space

130 130 132 132 134 136 137 139 140 141

ix

— Contents — Porticuses as workplace: wide or continuous porticuses

142

10

The elements and forms of villa complexes Irregular yards Divided yards Courtyards of geometrical shapes Tapering yards Fan-shaped yards Sub-triangular courtyards Rhomboidal courtyards and the problem of Hambach 512 Long rectangular courtyards Domestic courtyards and courtyard houses Parallel ranges and detached facades Linear villas Rectangular farmyards Conclusion

144 144 149 151 152 156 157 158 159 162 166 167 171 171

11

Palaces, peristyle houses and luxury villas Palaces Villas as seats of lordship Peristyle villas Luxury villas Formality and luxury Lordship or joint proprietorship?

172 173 178 183 190 193 195

12

The villas of south-east Europe Hall-type villas Square halls Row-houses Row-house equivalents Houses with one cross-wing Houses with multiple small rooms The ways of grouping buildings L-shaped plans Forms of courtyard and farmyard Rectilinear yards Courtyard villas and peristyles Fortified villas? Conclusion

199 199 201 202 202 205 207 208 211 212 213 214 215 216

PART III: THE VILLA SYSTEM IN OPERATION: MODES OF CHANGE 13

The late pre-Roman Iron Age background The evidence: limitations and problems Two-aisled houses: forms and distribution Two-aisled houses: interpretation

x

219 219 220 222

— Contents — Three-aisled houses Squarish and trapezoidal buildings Monospan oblong buildings Round-houses Complex houses Conclusion

226 227 229 230 231 232

14

Modes of Romanisation Native to Roman by easy stages: Rijswijk and St Lythans-Whitton Romanisation by luxury Houses built over boundaries Collingham and Radley: continuity or discontinuity? Built on ditches: Kaisersteinbruch and Rudston Removal to a new site Romanised courtyards and wooden buildings An implied first phase in timber? Building in stone: early halls Building in stone: round-house or round pavilion?

233 233 238 239 243 249 250 250 252 253 254

15

Patterns of villa development The open hall: its rise The open hall: its decline The aisled house The social development of a villa Sudeley-Spoonley Wood Change in a row-house: Great Weldon A stable villa population Prosperity without social change: Schupfart-Betberg

257 257 261 263 264 268 270 271 274

16

A model of development The hypothesis Before the Romans The emergence of villas The consolidation of settlements The diffusion of villa types Development of the villa system Social change in lls and yards Shrines as a unifying device Freestanding shrines and temples Why do large villas differ so much? The problem of a stable villa population Courtyards for kin or slaves? The emergence of hereditary lordship The end of the villa system Conclusion

275 275 277 278 279 282 284 285 288 291 292 293 295 300 301 301

xi

— Contents — 303 324 330 340 360

Notes Abbreviations of periodicals Bibliography List of villas and other sites mentioned Index

xii

FIGURES

1

Stahl and related villas: Bargen im Hegau Koerich-Goeblingen 1 [I], [II] Ludwigsburg-Pflugfelden Mayen im Brasil III–VI, VIII Saaraltdorf [I], [II] Serville Stahl [I], [II] Tiefenbach

25

2

Halls with evidence of use: Bollendorf I, III Börstingen Bruchsal-Ober Grombach A Konken Mamer-Gaschtbierg

27

3

British halls: (a) with evidence of use Farmington-Clear Cupboard I/F Somerton-Bradley Hill 1 I Somerton-Catsgore 2.1 Somerton-Catsgore 2.5 Stowey Sutton-Chew Park (b) others Byfield Langton Dwelling House I, II, III Laugharne-Cwmbrwyn North-Stainley-Castle Dykes [I], [II] Wraxall I/F

28

xiii

— List of Figures — 4

Halls used for stalling animals: Blieskastell-Altheim Böchweiler Crain

30

5

French hall houses: Brain-sur-Allonnes Grémecey Saint-Pierre-la-Garenne

32

6

Single- and double-ended halls: Brücken Heppenheim Overasselt Quinton II Rothselberg

34

7

Aisled buildings: (a) aisled houses Carisbrooke Denton II East Grimstead Exning-Landwade I, II Mansfield Woodhouse Petersfield – Stroud West Blatchington (b) wide-nave hall Hölstein (c) nave and aisles of equal width Winkel-Seeb A II, VI Winkel-Seeb B I, IIB (d) ridge-post hall Fishtoft

8

Halls open to porticus: Sigmaringen-Steinäcker Sinsheim-Sinsheimer-Wald

43

9

Divided halls: Bad Homburg Heerlen-Boventse Caumer Houthem-Vogelsang Laperrière-sur-Saône Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer Voerendaal-Ten Hove I

44

38–9

xiv

— List of Figures — 10

Row-houses: Ditchley I/II, III Downton Lamargelle-Versingue Newport I.o.W.

47

11

The varied positions of lobbies: Brixworth I–III Cléry-sur-Somme Ellesborough-Terrick Faversham I Mansfield Woodhouse [I], [F] St Stephens-Park Street VI Welwyn-Lockleys I, II/III

51

12

Unit-system villas: Cenero-Murias de Belono Gargrave-Kirk Sink

52

13

Row-houses with two entrances: Hemel Hempstead-Gadebridge Park III Maulévrier North Cerney-The Ditches Romegoux-La Vergnée

53

14

Virtually identical units: Boos-Le Bois Flahaut Hérouville-Lébisey

53

15

End entrances: Farningham-Manor House I Ormalingen

54

16

Longitudinal lobbies: Eaton by Tarporley Huntsham N Wellow

56

17

Reverse symmetry: Beadlam I, II High Wycombe

58

18

Compact row houses: Civray-Le Poirier Molet Hummetroth – row house equivalent Lussas-et-Nontronneau Primelles-Champ Chiron

61

xv

— List of Figures — 19

Lobbies and room groupings: Anthée, detail Bierbach Cartagena-El Castillet L’Ecluse Leckbosch Küttigen-Kirchberg [I], [II] Laufen-Müschag [I], [F]

66

20

Lobbies and related forms: (a) longitudinal lobbies and elongated rooms Haccourt I Liestal-Munzach, detail Puig de Cebolla Vouneuil-sous-Biard (b) L-lobbies Fontoy-Moderwiese, aedicule North Leigh-Shakenoak B IIa/b, IIIa Stadtbergen I (c) widened lobby La Roche-Maurice

71

21

Unit variations in row-houses: Les Mesnuls Sarmentsdorf

78

22

Halls with long end rooms: Courcelles-Urville Grenchen I–III Mundelsheim Wahlen

81

23

Halls with complex end blocks: Buchten Evelette Mauren Nuth-Vaasrade Rheinbach-Flerzheim Tholey-Sotzweiler II/III

84

24

Halls with double-depth end blocks: Bocholtz-Vlengendaal [I], [F] Kinheim [F] Newel II, III, IV

85

25

Halls or yards? Alpnach-Dorf

96

xvi

— List of Figures — Bad Rappenau-Zimmerhof Bondorf Eckartsbrunn Messkirch Niedereschach-Fischbach 3 Remmingsheim Sigmaringen-Laiz A 26

Halls with freestanding corner posts: Bilsdorf Ludwigsburg-Hoheneck

97

27

Halls with rear columns: Hechingen-Stein I, F Inzigkofen Neckarzimmern-Stockbronner-Hof Schambach Stuttgart-Stammheim

98

28

Halls subdivided by timber partitions: Lörrach-Brombach

99

29

The smallest row houses: Bouchoir Dury L’Etoile Harbonnières Kempten-Loja 1 II Kempten-Loja 2 I/II, III Niedereschach-Fischbach 2 Plouneventer-Kerilien II Rheinfelden-Herten-Warmbach Vaux Wancourt

103

30

One-room houses: Biberist-Spitalhof Koerich-Goeblingen 2 I–V Monreal I–III Pin-Izel Sontheim an der Brenz 2, I–V

104

31

Adjoining parallel ranges and back-to-back halls: (a) parallel ranges Ambresin Basse-Wavre [I], [F] xvii

108–9

— List of Figures — Frilford Günzenheim-Staatsforst-Sulz Kernen-Rommelshausen Lendin Munzenberg-Gambach I/F Villers-Bretonneux (b) back-to-back hall Walsbetz-Hemerijk 32

Anomalous double-depth houses: Ashtead Frankfurt-Bornheim

111

33

Houses with internal corridor or yard? Bad Dürkheim-Ungstein Geislingen-Heidegger Hof Hohenfels Mézières-en-Santerre/La Croix-Saint-Jacques Neuburg a.d. Donau

113

34

Pavilion details: Bristol-Kingsweston, detail Hüfingen Stahl, detail Titelberg, aedicula Whittington

122

35

Minimal and quasi-pavilions: Langenau-Osterstetten Stratford-upon-Avon-Tiddington

126

36

Terminal rooms: Bachenau Beckingen Brighstone-Rock Broichweiden Rainecourt

127

37

Open-ended porticuses: Budapest III-Csúcshegy Démuin Mainz-Kastel, aedicule Shipham-Star II A

133

38

Tapering and splayed porticuses: Laufenburg

135

xviii

— List of Figures — 39

Houses with two porticuses or two porches: (a) halls Dirlewang Doische-Vodelée Herschwerler-Pettersheim Manderscheid (and detail) (b) row-house Gayton Thorpe

137

40

Ghost pavilions and porticuses as living-space: Bergen-Auf-dem-Keller Great Staughton Ovillers

141

41

Irregular and divided yards: (a) irregular Ludwigsburg-Hoheneck I/II, III Regensburg-Burgweinting (b) divided yards Bruchsal-Ober Grombach Ewhurst-Rapsley Friedberg-Pfingstweide, yard plan Friedberg-Pfingstweide 1, 2 Lauffen am Neckar Messkirch Olfermont

145–7

42

Yards not rectangular: (a) tapering Cachy Ecoust-Saint-Mien Niederzier-Hambach 69 Mansfield Woodhouse Mayen Le Mesge (b) fan-shaped and sub-triangular Darenth Hambleden-Yewden Manor Rockbourne II–IV, VI, VIII (c) development of yards Bignor IIA North Leigh I, IV, V

153–5

43

Rectangular courtyards: Athies Fliessem

160–1

xix

— List of Figures — Hungen-Bellersheim Marchelepot Warfusée-Nord, Abancourt 44

Rectangular courtyards with hints of rebuilding: Belleuse-les Mureaux Davenescourt Marboué-Mienne Marboué-Mienne, west range North Wraxall Sudeley-Spoonley Wood Wiesbaden Höfchen

164–5

45

Parallel ranges and detached facades: Arradon-Lodo Leutersdorf I–III Orton Longueville-Orton Hall Farm Plomelin-Perennou Pulborough Winterton Winterton G, I–III

168–9

46

Linear villas: Bocholtz-Vlengendaal Halstock II Jemelle-Neufchâteau Maillen-al Sauvenière

47

Palaces: Budapest-Aquincum Budapest III-Aquincum, officers’ lodgings Fishbourne Palace Fishbourne Palace, officers’ lodgings Rome, Flavian Palace, administrative part Rome, Flavian Palace, general plan Woodchester

174–5

48

Seats of lordship: Almenara de Adaja Badajoz-la Cocosa, general plan Badajoz-la Cocosa, peristyle Bignor, detail Bignor, general plan Box North Leigh Rielves

180–1

170

xx

— List of Figures — 49

Spanish peristyles: Cuevas de Soria Jumilla-Los Cipreses Santa Colomba de Somoza

184

50

Lalonquette I–V

186–7

51

Montmaurin I, II

188

52

Luxurious formal villas: Graz-Thalerhof Haccourt II Montrozier-Argentelle

192–3

53

Joint proprietorship – grandeur, not luxury: Fliessem Fliessem, detail Fliessem, interpretation Haut Clocher-Saint Ulrich

196–7

54

End-entrance halls: Bistrica Budakalász Gyulafirátót Majdan Telita

200

55

Square halls: Bihác-Zalo
je Lisiicí II Mali Mounj Stolac 2

201

56

Row-house equivalents: Draevica I–IV Keszthely-Fenékpuszta 8 Travnik-Rankovic Sarmizgetusa Winden am See II, III

203

57

Houses essentially of two cells: Cincis Fischamend-Katharinenhof Maria Ellend-Ellender Weingärten Sarajevo-Stup Sarica

205

xxi

— List of Figures — 58

Houses with one cross-wing: Proboj Regelsbrunn Stolac 3 Stolac 5

206

59

Houses with multiple small rooms: Apahida Ciumafaia [II] Keszthely-Fenékpuszta 7

207

60

Ways of grouping buildings: (a) linear plans Iskar-Gara Konska Kralev Dol (b) block plans Hobita-Gradiste Izola Manerau Novi Saher (c) yards Hobita-Gradiste Kaisersteinbruch-Königshof C, D Lisiici III Ljuina Orlandovtsi Panik

61

Aisled buildings: (a) two-aisled or ring-post Beegden Eching-Autobahn Haps T Haunstetten Oss-Ussen Zijderveld (b) two-/three-aisled Befort-Aleburg Heuneburg Königsbrunn Verberie

222

62

Square buildings: (a) larger Braughing-Skeleton Green

227

210–11

xxii

— List of Figures — Danebury Hornchurch Landshut-Salmansberg (b) the smallest square houses Croft Ambrey Mailhac-Cayla Martigues-L’Arquet The Wrekin 63

Monospan halls: Babworth-Dunston’s Clump Kaalheide-Krichelberg Niederzier Hambach 59 Radley-Barton Court Farm 3

229

64

Grouping of houses: Draughton Pilsdon Pen St Michael-Gorhambury Sigean-Pech-Maho Villeneuve-St-Germain

231

65

Stages of Romanisation: Barnsley Park, I, III, V/VI, VIII Hartfield-Garden Hill II–IV Rijswijk IA–D, IIA–B, IIIA–B St Lythans-Whitton I–VI, VIII

235–7

66

Building over boundaries: Aylesford-Eccles I Condé-Folie I, II Kingsweston, Bristol Laugharne-Cwmbrwyn Marshfield II, IIIB Uplyme-Holcombe IIA

242–3

67

Building along or over ditches: Hamblain-les-Prés Hemel Hempstead-Gadebridge Park Jublains-La Boissière Kaisersteinbruch-Königshof Milton Keynes-Bancroft II, V Rudston

244–5

68

Problems of continuity: (a) discontinuity?

246–8

xxiii

— List of Figures — Collingham-Dalton Parlours Radley-Barton Court Farm I–III (b) moving to a new site Port-le-Grand Sparsholt I–III (c) timber predecessors of stone houses Bedburg-Garsdorf Bellikon Bözen Hemel Hempstead-Boxmoor I Neumagen-Dhron-Papiermühle Osterfingen I, II (d) the significance of round-houses Manfield-Holme House II–IV Ringstead I, II 69

Rise and decline of the open hall: (a) rise Francolise-San Rocco I, IA (b) decline Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler [I], [F] Bristol-Kingsweston [I], alternative [II] Bruckneudorf-Parndorf [I], [II], [F] Friedberg-Fladerlach [I], [III] Frocester Court I–III, alternative [II] Frocester Court, alternative II Graux Maidenhead-Cox Green, I, II Mehring I, F Schleitheim Weitersbach I, II

70

The social development of villas: Blankenheim IA, IIA, IIIA Great Weldon I–IV, V/VI St Stephen-Park Street VII, VIII Sudeley-Spoonley Wood

71

Social stability in villas: Köln-Mungersdorf I, II/III, VI Schupfart-Betburg II, III

72

Second-phase enlargement: Leiwen-Bohnengarten I–III Noyers-sur-Serein [II], [F] Winkel-Seeb, Switzerland

258–60

266–7

272

280–1

xxiv

— List of Figures — 73

Diffusion of a type: Deva [I] Schaanwald, Grabungen I Tholey-Sotzweiler I

283

74

Yards as indicators of social relations: Bondorf Chedworth I Katzenbach Koerich-Goeblingen Köngen Pforzheim-Hagenschiess St-Germain-lès-Corbeil Sontheim a.d. Brenz Vierherrenborn-Irsch

286–7

75

Unit-system villas of the Late Empire: Anthée, main house Aylesford-Eccles [F] Köln-Mungersdorf Milton Keynes-Bancroft V Norton Disney

294–5

76

Courtyards for kin or slaves? Anthée-yard Anthée, buildings 2, 3, 10, 15 Levroux-Trégonce Liédena Liestal-Munzach Noyers-sur-Serein Oberentfelden

296–8

KEY TO FIGURES 왖 왕 M

= certain doorway = conjectured doorway = Mosaic

H he

xxv

= Hypocaust = hearth

P R E FA C E

This book is the culmination of an interest which began nearly fifty years ago when the late Sir Ian Richmond urged me, on the slender basis of attendance for two weeks at his Corbridge training excavation, to accept an invitation from the then Ministry of Works to dig the villa at Denton (Lincs.), at that time threatened by ironstone mining. Parallel interests in the history of houses, which entailed study of room function and of timber construction, soon revealed problems hardly considered hitherto by students of Roman Britain; and the potentially fruitful interaction of the three strands of my life’s work, conducted at considerable intervals and at very varying intensity, has at last produced the ideas set out in the following chapters. The approach here adopted, which is founded on the assumption that house plans reflect accurately the relations within and between the various groups or classes comprising a society, gives rise to a difficulty of presentation. Few people engaged in these studies have analysed plans in any depth and consequently few are familiar with more than a small proportion of villas in their own country – and here I refer to the major countries, Britain, France and Germany; the point applies with less force where there are fewer villas or where analytical gazetteers or summaries exist. Furthermore, hardly anyone has looked at plans from a functional standpoint, so that points of that kind made about even the few villas reproduced internationally, such as Köln-Mungersdorf, Montmaurin or Welwyn-Lockleys, require illustration for the present purpose. Because the approach is unfamiliar, all villa plans mentioned should, ideally, be illustrated, and generous aid from several bodies has enabled a considerable proportion of them to be presented. Nevertheless, every reader will deplore the omission of this or that plan, and to one and all I can only say that I have done my best. One hoped-for result of this work is the internationalisation of villa studies, something already done splendidly in a general way by John Percival’s The Roman Villa, but now in greater detail. Archaeologists presented with an unfamiliar kind of pottery or brooch will scour excavation reports and museum catalogues for the whole of the Empire until they find a parallel; it is time they did the same for villa plans. The attitude of many of them was summed up by a member of the regrettably short-lived Roman Villas Research Group who remarked to me: ‘I regard your function in the Group as that of gadfly.’ I hope this book will secure my promotion, in the eyes of that person and others like-minded, to the status of hornet. xxvi

— Preface — A few words are necessary to explain how the book was written. As the collection of villa plans proceeded, a thematic index of elements was compiled, commonly accompanied by very brief remarks scribbled – the word is used advisedly – on the photocopy itself. No separate notes were made on individual sites. When a new element was perceived, memory often brought to mind other examples whose significance had gone unnoticed, and from time to time the whole corpus of plans was combed for omissions. To interpret the many details in any one plan required repeated examination over a long time and, since the text was written directly from index and plans, constantly taking new material into account, some inconsistency arising from new ideas or changed opinions is inevitable. Even now, revision of the text with all the plans would sometimes produce a better example to make a point or permit interpretation of some overlooked feature. A book with roots as distant as this demands numerous acknowledgements, some to persons long dead. Foremost among the latter are my former history tutor and friend at Birmingham University, Philip Styles, an inspiring teacher to whom I owe an awareness of the use of architecture as historical evidence; K.D.M. Dauncey, also then of Birmingham University, for a stimulating introduction to Roman Britain; Sir Ian Richmond, who provided an opportunity far beyond reasonable expectation; Gerald Dunning, who encouraged me at Denton and was invariably helpful in Roman matters; and Edith Wightman, who sent offprints and drafts of articles and whose discussion of villa problems was enlightening. Among the living I am indebted to three people who, unlike so many scholars in the field, did not dismiss out of hand early outlines of my ideas. At the first presentation, to the Society of Antiquaries of London, Rosamond Hanworth and Richard Reece gave immediate support and have continued their encouragement. In the discussion following the Antiquaries paper Richard remarked: ‘I think we may be seeing the beginning of a new way of looking at villas.’ I hope the long-delayed result does not fall too far below that optimistic expectation. After the second presentation, delivered at a conference at Nottingham University, Malcolm Todd urged me to put into print, under his editorship, a paper which an eminent scholar had instantly dismissed as unbelievable (Todd 1978). Among others who since then have lent welcome support are Cary Carson (of Colonial Williamsburg, but with academic roots in Roman Britain), Simon James, Martin Millett, John Percival and Tim Potter. I have special reason to be grateful to Richard Reece for reading drafts of the whole of Parts II and III, and to John Wilkes for reading certain chapters. Adrian Havercroft also read and commented extensively on a few chapters, and provided valuable assistance in photocopying the whole of the text. Several other people have helped me over the years through discussion, the exchange of letters and the gift of offprints, notably Roger Agache, V.H. Baumann, Ernest Black, Wolfgang Gaitzsch, Herman Hinz, Fridolin Reutti and Franz Schubert. I am profoundly grateful to a friend and former colleague in the Royal Commission, Allan Adams, who undertook all the drawings at short notice after an initial setback. Sarah Brown and Anne Neville laboured to remove inconsistencies and obscurities in a complicated text drafted and revised over several years; I thank them warmly for their meticulous work. Any defects and mistakes that remain in text and drawings alike are my sole responsibility. xxvii

— Preface — Several foundations, institutions and libraries have aided my studies. On my retirement from the staff of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, University College London very kindly conferred on me an Honorary Research Fellowship. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington DC granted a six months’ Fellowship to write much of the first draft. During that time occurred the only public presentation of the essential ideas, to which Professor A.G. McKay of McMaster University proved a kindly and helpful respondent. The Römisch-Germanisch Kommission at Frankfurt a.M. several times provided hospitality and access to an incomparable library of periodicals; I am especially grateful to Dr Eckehart Schubert for assistance of many kinds. At different times the British Academy awarded a personal research grant for travel and the Leverhulme Trust a Research Fellowship; and the Academy, the Marc Fitch Fund and the Robert Kiln Charitable Trust all made generous grants towards the cost of illustrations. The library of the Society of Antiquaries of London has been an invaluable resource; I thank two Librarians, John Hopkins and Bernard Nurse, and their staffs for much help. Other people too numerous to mention individually have provided information: some are thanked in notes; all, I hope, will accept this grateful acknowledgement of their help. Finally, I give most heartfelt thanks to my wife, Heather, for creating the conditions which made my work possible, for her interest in it over many years, and for helping me through discouragements; without her assistance and understanding this book would not have been finished.

xxviii

EDITORIAL NOTES ON DRAWINGS

Names of villas are those of the commune, parish, etc., followed as necessary by the local name and by the country or an administrative division of a country. For Germany the villa names given in RiBad-Württ, etc., are used, supplemented by reference to Müllers Grosses Deutsches Ortsbuch, 1982–3. Phases of villas are shown in Roman numerals, e.g. I, II, . . . where they follow the excavation report, and [I], [II], . . . where the phases represent the author’s opinion. [F] = final state. A phase preceding the first Roman villa is designated [pre-I] except where a succession of pre-Roman buildings follows the numerical sequence of the report. Houses on villa sites are designated by compass points or, where the original report is followed, by a number or letter, followed by a phase, e.g., Beadlam N I. Rooms retain any numbers given in the report or are numbered following the sequence of letters, hence Blankenheim 33. Drawings of houses are reproduced to a scale of 1:1000 except for a few particularly large ones which have a drawn scale. Courtyards and farmyards are generally reproduced to a scale of 1:3000. Exceptions have a drawn scale.

xxix

GLOSSARY

The following entries define only how terms are used in this book and may in some instances be additional to the senses given in OED. Aisled house: combines domestic accommodation at one end with working space or a byre in the remainder. Anteroom: a larger lobby; a room in its own right giving access to a more important one. Apartment: two or more rooms interpreted as forming a self-contained suite; an alternative to unit. Cell: a spatial unit of the plan defined by load-bearing (usually external) walls and transverse walls or partitions; the term takes no account of axial partitions. Corridor: a passage with rooms (one of which may be a porticus) on both sides. Courtyard plan: having buildings, not necessarily continuous, on three or four sides of a large open yard. Cross-wing: see Wing. Farm: used as the equivalent of the German Ackergut, Gutshof, Herrenhof, Meierhof and the French exploitation. Farmer: used as the equivalent of Bauer, Grossbauer. Galerie-facade: see Porticus-with-pavilions. Houseful: all the persons, of whatever status, inhabiting a house, which may be a single structure or comprise two or more structures. Household: a unit of consumption and reproduction corresponding to an elementary (or nuclear) family and its dependants, both relatives and servants. Hypocauston: a small hypocausted room heating adjoining rooms. Living-room: any room not serving a special purpose such as kitchen or diningroom; probably multi-purpose, providing for work, storage, eating and sleeping. Lobby: a room through which a larger one is entered; a means of approach without a major function of its own. Transverse lobby: a corridor closed at one end. Square (or small) lobby: a room about half the width of a cell in a row-house. Pavilion (tour d’angle, Eckrisalit): a squarish room at the end of a porticus. Porch: a squarish room, commonly within a porticus, giving entry to a building. Porticus (galerie, Portikus): a neutral term for a comparatively narrow roofed xxx

— Glossary — space adjoining an external elevation which in plan looks like and often is a passage or loggia but can function as a room or balcony. Porticus-with-pavilions: equivalent to Portikus-mit-Eckrisaliten, galerie-façade, maison à tours d’angles; intended to replace winged corridor. Representational room: assumed to have been used by a kin-group for feasts which reinforced group solidarity and had a religious element, as demonstrated by the presence of a shrine in the room (Newport) or in a smaller adjoining room (Kinheim); also an imposing room for ceremonies of mutual obligation, accompanied by feasting, between a grandee and his dependants. Row-type house (Reihentyp, linear-aufgereihten Haus): comprises a series of rooms, usually squarish, often interspersed with lobbies. Veranda (Laubengang): an open earthfast timber porticus. Villa: (1) the principal house(s) of a country estate or farm (= Herrensitz); (2) farm (Herrenhof, Meierhof, Gutshof). Wing: a long room or row of rooms assumed to be roofed at right-angles to and in front of the main range of a building. Cross-wing: one roofed transversely to the end of a building. Winged corridor: see Porticus-with-pavilions. Workhall (Wirtschaftshalle): a domestic hall, presumed to be for either a family forming part of a kin-group or farm servants, in which work, commonly smithing, is an important function.

xxxi

A B B R E V I AT I O N S O F L O C AT I O N S

Aus. Bad.-Württ. Bay. Belg. Berks. Bucks. Bulg. Cambs. Fin. Glam. Glos. Hants. Herefs. Herts. Hung. I.o.W. Lincs. Loire-Atl. Lux. Neth. Nordrh.-Westf. Northants. Notts. Oxon. Pembs. Pyr.-Atl. Pyr.-Or. Rhld-Pf. Rom. Saarld Seine-Mar. Som.

Austria Baden-Württemberg Bayern Belgium Berkshire Buckinghamshire Bulgaria Cambridgeshire Finistère Glamorgan Gloucestershire Hampshire Herefordshire Hertfordshire Hungary Isle of Wight Lincolnshire Loire-Atlantique Luxembourg Netherlands Nordrhein-Westfalen Northamptonshire Nottinghamshire Oxfordshire Pembrokeshire Pyrénées-Atlantiques Pyrénées-Orientales Rheinland-Pfalz Romania Saarland Seine-Maritime Somerset xxxii

— Abbreviations of Locations — Staffs. Switz. War. Wilts. Yorks. Yugosl.

Staffordshire Switzerland Warwickshire Wiltshire Yorkshire Yugoslavia

xxxiii

PART I

AIMS AND METHODS

CHAPTER ONE

AIMS AND SCOPE OF THE BOOK

A

nyone confronted with a new book on Roman villas must ask whether anything new can be said, given that two Empire-wide studies exist, one by A.G. McKay of every kind of house and another by John Percival of the villa as a social and economic institution;1 and these are supplemented by innumerable regional surveys. Yet the question can be answered positively, for this book has an entirely different purpose and method. Its primary aim is to classify and make intelligible the innumerable and extraordinarily varied villa plans excavated over the past two hundred years. Villas form a large body of evidence which at present is either misused or totally neglected: a failure unwittingly revealed in Webster’s remark that ‘most villa excavations have been very scrappily recorded . . . short of physical re-excavation there is little that can be done significantly to increase our knowledge’.2 This unwarranted pessimism, founded in ignorance of the history of villa studies, provided a spur to prove the contrary. A second aim, to understand the structure of rural society in the Roman Empire, was, like the first, limited initially to the provinces of north-west Europe. As villa plans were collected for comparative purposes, it became apparent that sufficient resemblances existed over the whole length of the Empire from Wales to Bulgaria to make some comment on social structure possible for those areas peripheral to the main theme. The evidence is plentiful for Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Switzerland, and in these countries sufficient sites have been dug to their lower levels to establish broadly how villas developed in that large part of the Empire. Plans are not lacking for Spain, Austria and Hungary, although phases other than the latest have rarely been explored. The sparser evidence for Romania and the former Yugoslavia, taken overall, reveals a different pattern which, nevertheless, contains a few links with that of the north-west provinces, and even Bulgarian villas have some connections. Brief enquiry into the villas of Italy and Greece suggested that they add little to the theme, although the former country will certainly be enlightening when more villas are properly dug. Throughout, villas are dealt with by modern countries because neither villa types nor their modes of development are limited to particular provinces and consequently it is less tendentious as well as less demanding of geographical knowledge of the Roman world if they are kept in a modern framework. 3

— Chapter One — The analysis of ground plans, which will be described in the following chapter, is strongly influenced by the study of medieval and early modern houses as it has developed in Britain during the past forty years. In that field, recognition of the structural complexity of old houses arising from their successive adaptation and enlargement has led to a strong emphasis on forms of plan and has produced subtle ways of determining and interpreting their development. In vernacular architecture this has resulted in the establishment of a series of types characteristic of particular periods and capable of correlation with social classes or groups; the intention is to devise a typology for the Roman Empire though without periodisation. Links of this kind enable historians to add architecture to the sources for social history rather than using it as a mere backcloth to a narrative based on documentary and literary evidence; this is proving to be true of periods for which the written sources are far more abundant than they are for the Roman Empire. Since the vast majority of villas can only be known through excavation reports, the application of the methods used in vernacular studies is limited to certain kinds of inference and particularly to the recognition of plan types. In a historical period in which hardly more than the foundations of houses remain it may be hoped that an awareness of types will lead to more sophisticated analysis of villas, not only by historians interpreting them but also by the archaeologists who dig them and who need hypotheses to test in the course of excavation.

PLAN TYPOLOGY: SOME OBJECTIONS Plan, it has been asserted, is not the only determinant of a building’s historical significance – which is self-evidently true – nor even the most important,3 which is certainly untrue. It goes without saying that style, ornament and decoration have much to tell us about the social position of the person who commissioned a house, yet archaeologists rarely realise how closely their interpretation is bound up with plan; the study of mosaics, for example, which has been so largely concerned with dating, technique and schools of craftsmen, has a strong bearing on the uses and relative importance of rooms and the understanding of how villas functioned. Little will be said about mosaics because I am not sure what the social as opposed to the iconographic significance of individual examples is, although their more obvious implications are sometimes used to elucidate a plan. An objection sometimes made to house typology as social history is that a rich man might choose to build a comparatively small house or a poor man build beyond his means, so invalidating any close correlation between size or form of house and social class. Clearly, exceptions to that rule did occur, and indeed an instance from seventeenth-century England establishes the truth of the general proposition that a man’s wealth and social position and the size of his house were closely linked. Thus the Nonconformist divine Richard Baxter records admiringly how his friend the Lord Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale refused to conform to this social norm: ‘His garb and house and attendance so very mean and low . . . that he was herein the marvel of his age.’ Roger North put a different gloss on this situation: 4

— Aims and Scope of the Book — I shall not forgett a relation I heard the Duke of Beaufort make of the advice his country-man the Chief Justice Hales gave him when he was building at Badmanton, to have but one door to his house, and that in the ey of his ordinary dining room, or study where he past his time. This shews how all men measure things by their owne education and circumstances, and expect others should governe their actions accordingly, tho farr from the like engagements. North was in tune with his times, Baxter not, as one of Samuel Pepys’s observations confirms: ‘all men do blame him [Clarendon] for having built so great a house, till he had got a better estate’; this of the great Lord Chancellor, the dominant political figure of the early Restoration period, to whose downfall pride in what another diarist called his ‘new built Palace’ contributed much.4 Exactly the same attitudes governed building in every age prior to the late twentieth century. A house was one of three kinds of display or conspicuous consumption, the other two being dress and entertainment (Baxter’s ‘garb’ and ‘attendance’), which together provided the means whereby a man established his power and rank in the eyes of his contemporaries.

THE TERMINOLOGY OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE Whether the model of society proposed here finds acceptance or not, it can hardly be doubted that something better than the present one is needed. Most scholars who have studied villas have implicitly equated Roman society with their own as it was in the heyday of the country house or château or Schloss about a hundred years ago. It is a society dominated by landowners great and small operating a market in which land is freely bought and sold without reference to any constraint of law and custom and whose lives mirror those of late nineteenth-century country gentlemen. Beneath them is a class of farmers whose more prosperous members aspire to the higher status of gentleman landowner, whilst the others are tenants;5 and an insular aberration sees many British houses occupied by bailiffs with, below them, the ultimate absurdity of the cottager in the ‘cottage house’. One notable proposal has been made to reform this inadequate framework. A French scholar has suggested that if reference is made to such categories as country or manor house it should be systematic, using the whole range of terms describing the houses of the society selected as analogous – implicitly, that of the European Middle Ages or early modern period.6 The idea is attractive; the difficulty is to apply it. It assumes, first, that the later society is comparable in detail to its Roman predecessor, yet it cannot be taken for granted that such terms as manor house, farmhouse and cottage correspond to the social reality of Roman houses. Second and more fundamentally, it assumes that the structure of the medieval or early modern society in question has been correctly understood from purely documentary evidence, something that, for England and Wales at least, is open to question.7 Even what is often taken to be the perfectly neutral term ‘farmhouse’ has historical connotations: what kind of farmer do we envisage – a peasant farmer, a tenant analogous to a husbandman or yeoman (and if so, on what terms), or a freeholder? These are only 5

— Chapter One — the British problems; a German would interpret a farmhouse as a combined shelter for family and animals. As far as possible the word ‘farmhouse’ will not be used below and when it appears will have only the minimal sense of the dwelling place of a person engaged in agriculture. Any deductions about social structure rest on three principal categories of evidence. The first comprises classical texts: the problems of reconciling them with archaeological evidence have been encapsulated in the felicitous phrase ‘text-hindered archaeology’ and are exemplified by the endless argument about the reliability of Julius Caesar’s description of British and Gaulish society. Inscriptions form a subdivision of this category – a more reliable one but of limited scope. A second comprises the objects found in the course of excavation. Few illuminate the use of rooms, and the difficulty of interpreting them is illustrated by the contrast between fine objects, especially those connected with feasting or dress, and the simple houses in which they are sometimes found.8 The third is provided by villas or contemporary indigenous houses, all of them requiring interpretation. My own view is that those house plans where the grouping and intercommunication of rooms is known or can be inferred provide objective evidence of social organisation, showing how people actually lived and how social relations changed. It is a view based on research over the past fifty years into Welsh and English houses. First, in 1942, certain gentry seats in west Wales were found to comprise three or more independent houses instead of the one that would normally be expected. The existence of a seventeenthcentury kin-group thus implied was taken up a decade later to account for the presence in some farmyards in south-east Wales of two houses. Subsequent fieldwork established that the same phenomena are widespread in England at various social levels.9 Now joint habitation by kin-groups in these two countries at so late a date had never been suspected by historians despite intensive research, nor even by genealogists working in Wales where family and descent have been studied as keenly as anywhere. If house plans can produce surprises of this kind in a period incomparably better documented than the Roman Empire at any time, their primacy as a source of social information ought to be accepted over the uncertain weight of literary evidence; and that is the line taken throughout this book.

THE HISTORY OF VILLA CLASSIFICATION Most historians recognise that villas form a potentially important source of information; the problem is how to use the material in bulk, rather than picking out particular villas to make an impressionistic point. Classifying villas into types makes this possible, provided always that the typology has a definable social or economic significance. Thirty or more scholars in several countries have attempted classification and it might be expected that their cumulative efforts over more than a hundred years would by now have achieved a satisfactory conclusion. Far from it, as a brief review will show. Arcisse de Caumont appears to have been the first person to study villas as a distinct class of building, bringing together many French and English examples and relating them to classical texts. Many were large and, since nobody could divide 6

— Aims and Scope of the Book — them into structural phases, they were too diverse for types to be recognisable. German scholars took the first tentative steps in that direction, beginning with the energetic first director of the Trier museum, Felix Hettner, who, in 1883, in the course of a wider survey, divided villas into two classes: those with an internal courtyard, including Fliessem and most of the smaller villas; and the pleasure or luxury house (Lusthaus), such as Nennig and Oberweis. Hettner, though, like de Caumont, was hampered by treating complicated plans of large buildings – as many villas then known were – as a single building campaign.10 Towards the end of the nineteenth century the establishment of the Reichs-LimesKommission resulted in a number of villa excavations in the Roman frontier areas of Germany which produced mostly simple, little-altered plans. Using four of them, Schumacher recognised a type defined by two common elements, a gallery or portico (Halle) and, behind it (following Hettner), an open yard flanked by rooms. A few years later Haverfield, summarising current knowledge of Roman Hampshire for the Victoria County History, coined the term ‘corridor house’ to denote a range of rooms joined by a front corridor or portico. He also recognised a kind of rectangular building divided internally by two rows of columns which, a few years later, was named by Ward, not altogether happily, the basilican type. Otherwise Ward took over from Haverfield ‘the ordinary or “corridor” type’ and the courtyard type of villa built around three or four sides of a large courtyard. Indigenous houses persisting in the Roman period he called ‘cottages’.11 Meanwhile, two more German scholars addressed the problem of villa typology. Anthes, seeking the origins of villas in Germany, found the direct Italian inspiration he expected in the north-western provinces only in a peristyle ‘house’ at Caerwent – a building which subsequently elicited the qualification ‘if a private residence at all’. His almost incidental comment on the great villa of Haut Clocher-St Ulrich, that it was of three distinct parts and gradual growth, was a key to progress not otherwise used. Kropatscheck went further in the same ultimately sterile directions as Anthes, dealing with a large number of villas in neighbouring countries as well as Germany and attempting to relate them all to Italian models and the writings of Vitruvius. In a brief summary of Ward’s book he rejected the idea of the basilican building in favour of an elongated internal yard gradually built over, thereby assimilating the type to the many German villas then invariably interpreted, following Schumacher, as a courtyard with rooms on two or three sides and a gallery at the front.12 Kropatscheck’s article is the culmination of many years’ work in Germany, England and elsewhere. A decade later much of it was obsolete. The first step towards a clearer understanding came in 1918 with a remarkable book by the young Austrian art historian Karl Swoboda which proclaimed itself to be, not altogether accurately, about Roman and Romanesque palaces. This was the first study to embrace the whole of the Roman Empire and its importance for the present purpose lies, first, in its singling out the porticus-with-pavilions (Portikus-mit-Eckrisaliten) as an architectural feature common to villas everywhere; and, second, in the recognition that this element was a display feature, at once a mark of status and a proclamation of Roman values. The second and even more important step was taken by a German archaeologist in whom an incomparable knowledge of the architecture of the ancient world was applied to an understanding of the complexity of buildings and an interest in how 7

— Chapter One — they functioned. Franz Oelmann’s mind is the keenest that has ever been applied to villas and in his paper on the villa of Stahl and its analogues he achieved an astonishing feat of pure typological study, one which transformed the subject in Germany and Holland. His analytical method is considered in detail below (Chapter 3, p. 24); by it he established that what had been thought of as a yard behind the porticus was a large hall. Within six years this hypothesis was fully confirmed by his own classic excavation of the villa at Mayen.13 In these two publications Oelmann provided for the first time a method of analysing villas and an effective way of using them as documents of social history. A few years later Fremersdorf put the study of villas as agricultural enterprises on a firm footing at Köln-Mungersdorf with the total excavation of a house and its outbuildings; it was the culmination of a long-standing interest among his countrymen and marks the high point of German villa research. At the same time Paret, in comments on Remmingsheim and other villas, applied Oelmann’s ideas briefly but failed to develop them systematically.14 No progress has since been made with typology in Germany, although some brief remarks by Samesreuther suggest that the Second World War deprived us of a scholar willing to tackle the fundamental problems of villas and keen to follow the lead given by Oelmann and Fremersdorf.15 Not that scholars elsewhere have done any better. In Britain Collingwood, aware of Swoboda’s book and the Mayen report, ignored their implications in producing a purely formal classification of no historical significance. Calling the porticus a corridor and the pavilions (Eckrisaliten) wings – both names misrepresent the architectural form and function of these elements – he created two types, the bipartite corridor house with only a front corridor and the tripartite with one at the back as well. Courtyard and basilican houses he took over from Ward. Meanwhile, in France, Albert Grenier summarised Oelmann’s articles and also his earlier report on the Blankenheim villa. Awareness is one thing, understanding another: the two pages reproducing the plans of Stahl and its analogues fail to grasp their significance and the accompanying comments reflect Swoboda’s conclusions rather than Oelmann’s. Regrettably, neither Collingwood nor Grenier understood sufficiently the method so brilliantly expounded by Oelmann to apply it themselves. That was left to de Maeyer, who analysed a few hall-type villas on the lines of Mayen, something he could hardly avoid doing since the Belgian villa of Serville figured in the 1921 paper.16 Since 1945 several British archaeologists have endeavoured to improve the classification of villas, confining their attentions to insular sites; the results are deplorable. Nash-Williams’ schematic ‘evolution of the Roman villa-plan’ was futile. Hawkes, going flat contrary to Harmand’s view that modern terminology should be applied consistently, misapplied the term ‘cottage’ at much the same time as Richmond did in his revision of Collingwood. This was particularly depressing in the light of Richmond’s keen understanding and appreciation of many other kinds of architecture, not only Roman, as is his failure to develop a few tentative remarks about hall-type villas and their resemblance to those in Germany. Worse was to come. In the mid1970s Branigan stepped smartly backwards in interpreting several British villas as having what he called intra-mural yards, a point he clinched without further argument by reproducing several of the plans from which Oelmann had drawn precisely the opposite conclusion.17 No further attempt has been made to classify plans. 8

— Aims and Scope of the Book — Europe outside Germany was more fortunate in these years. Drack, in assembling all known plans of Swiss villas, coined the term ‘row type’ to describe what British archaeologists call a corridor house, thereby recognising that the significant part of a house is what lies behind the façade. He applied Oelmann’s method, unargued, to virtually all reasonably complete plans and, had the conclusions been published with a commentary, they would have had the impact they deserved and have affected for the better the course of both Swiss and German villa research. Agache, who appears to have been unaware of Oelmann’s Stahl article, analysed plans of villas in the Somme basin comparatively, the first time anyone had done this from air photographs and not the least noteworthy aspect of a very remarkable achievement. This sunny picture had a dark side. The study of Spanish villas, many of them only partially excavated, produced in typological terms one step forward and one back. Maria Cruz Fernando Castro took the step forward in putting them into more or less convincing groups. Three years earlier J.-G. Gorges had produced a pretentious classification which deserves to be widely known as an awful warning and which mars an otherwise informative and well-organised book. Lumping together into one table several typologies – those of Swoboda, Richmond, Grenier, Agache – and adding to them the notions, for they hardly amount to typologies, of E. Thomas, M. Biro and G.A. Mansuelli, then decorating the columns with schematic plans of varying degrees of improbability, Gorges produced a result best described in words once applied to a work of Latin scholarship: ‘What it most resembles is a magpie’s nest.’18 In the light of the author’s all too briefly expressed insights into the spatial organisation of peristyle villas he should have been equally independent in classifying plans. Elsewhere, Vasic failed to find types in Yugoslav villas; three authors commissioned to survey Germania and Gallia Belgica did no more than heap up materials; and with Nikolov’s opinion that ‘no meaningful classification of villas is really possible’19 Webster’s know-nothing attitude finds its continental match. I would not be so scornful of some of these performances if Oelmann’s penetration and insight had remained confined to the comparatively obscure 1921 paper, but most emphatically they did not. For many years past no archaeologist concerned with villas anywhere can have failed to become aware of Mayen and, once the report is consulted (even via Grenier), the plans there reproduced from the earlier paper establish that Oelmann’s theoretical approach had that rare attribute, the power of prediction. This was surely one of the greatest triumphs of typological reasoning and must have a powerful impact on anyone who reflects on its implications. Going back to that seminal article, which parallels the ways developed by architectural historians to interpret church and house plans alike, is an inspiration few have found.

VILLA ARCHITECTURE It may be asked why so little attention is given in this book to the villa as architecture. The reason is simple: too little is known about the matter, for all that a large number of drawn reconstructions have appeared in print. Those of Pannonian villas form what may be the largest group so far published; most are fantasy. At least one famous reconstruction, Mylius’ of Blankenheim I, defies the specific evidence of 9

— Chapter One — excavation adduced by Oelmann without, apparently, any realisation of the fact on the part of those who have reproduced the drawing subsequently.20 Hardly any reconstructions take account of the precise form of foundations, their authors taking refuge in drawings which ignore problems of variation in width and construction. As for roofs, the appearance of the cladding, whether of tile, stone slates or thatch, is the only aspect considered; how they were supported, who knows or cares? In drawn reconstructions of timber buildings archaeologists have solved the problem of continuity from Roman to medieval many times: villa houses in Sussex, FrancheComté or the Rhineland have exposed framing looking exactly like that of their respective sixteenth-century counterparts. The current vogue in Britain is for villas of two or more storeys. So strongly is this idea canvassed that in conversation one eminent Romano-British archaeologist offered the luxury villa of Oplontis on the Bay of Naples as reason for thinking that British villas too might have had upper storeys. In fact, no evidence of an upper storey has yet been found in any of the many villas of the province except over the odd room and, indeed, not a scrap of positive evidence for the necessary staircase has been found anywhere except Spain, Italy and North Africa. The structure and appearance of villas need much detailed study before generalisation for one country is possible, let alone Europe generally. For Britain some recent papers21 give hope that these matters may one day be tackled with authority, but until then I prefer to stick to a subject on which it may be possible to make some progress. If exclusion of every aspect of villas but the plan needs more justification than this, the reader should consider the crushing burdens further work would impose.22 To deal systematically with their topographical setting and the light it throws on the form of the buildings, or with their economic function – that is, to go beyond the valuable generalisations made for so many parts of the Empire by Rostovtzeff, Percival and many other writers – would require local research so detailed as to impose an impossible burden on an individual. Similarly, to relate them to particular kinds of agricultural production may be thought important. Whether plans are much affected by considerations of this kind, apart from the presence of animals in some part of the house or the ‘agricultural factory run by slaves’,23 is quite uncertain; the many corndriers alleged to have existed in British villas did not noticeably affect their planning, which can be explained on purely domestic lines. Storage of crops, notably wheat on the stalk, is a possibility suggested by early modern German and Dutch farmhouses but one that does not seem to have left recognisable archaeological traces. Only in olive-growing regions have the presses required for production of the oil-modified house plans in a distinctive way and only a handful of the villas noticed below come into this category.

WHAT IS A VILLA AND WHAT IS ITS NAME? Every effort has been made to discover villa plans. Villa in that context corresponds generally to Edith Wightman’s sensible definition: ‘all farms or country-houses built at least partly in stone’.24 In the light of recent discoveries, though, even that may not be quite wide enough. What do we call the group of rectangular timber buildings 10

— Aims and Scope of the Book — laid out on three sides of a courtyard at Druten in Holland? This pre-eminently Roman form of planning is common in French and British villas and is quite unlike native farmsteads. And what about those settlements acquiring the beginnings of Roman buildings and manners such as Harting-Garden Hill or Barnsley Park IV, where bath buildings appear among round or rectangular timber structures? They hardly qualify even under Wightman’s broad definition and, since the main house is not of stone, may be referred to, like Druten, as proto-villas. In the end it hardly matters; an historical approach must treat pre-Roman and Roman buildings and settlements as a continuum. Even in the context of provincial-Roman societies the word ‘villa’ presents difficulties, meaning at different times the house of a farm or other establishment; the house and the adjoining buildings within an enclosure or courtyard; and the entire establishment, land and buildings. Here ‘villa’ is used principally in the second sense and houses are called just that. Complete consistency of usage has certainly not been achieved because so often the house is the only thing excavated on a villa site and it is hard to avoid referring to it simply as the villa of ——. Then there is the question of nomenclature. How should a site be referred to: by its most localised name, that of the field or hill on which it stands, or by the name of the commune or parish? British archaeologists tend to prefer the first option and so the reader is confronted with names like Spoonley Wood, Wadfield, Lockleys and Dicket Mead, whose geographical location someone working at a distance – I have in mind an archaeologist working in the Danube delta – may find difficult to discover. The general rule, though, is that the city, commune or parish name prefaces the local one, hence that has been taken as the appropriate standard form.25 The advantages of this system have been demonstrated in Roger Agache’s many publications on the Somme villas. It is useful, on seeing a plan of Warfusée-Sud (or -les Terres Noires) which is about 370 m long, to be reminded by the name that another villa almost as large, Warfusée-Nord (or -le Petit Chêne et le Chaufour), is not far away. That some parts of Britain may have been almost as densely covered with villas as the Somme basin is now generally recognised, but for some British and all continental students of the subject the question will the more readily be called to mind by SudeleySpoonley Wood and Sudeley-Wadfield or Welwyn-Lockleys and Welwyn-Dicket Mead, not to mention the greater ease of finding where they are. Although the precise location of villas is not important for the present study, the occasional need to learn the whereabouts of one in, for example, Germany, has brought an appreciation of the merits of continental nomenclature and awareness of the difficulties the British way of doing things must sometimes present to scholars in other countries.

A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE? How firmly based is this work in terms of the numbers of villas considered? The total number of plans reviewed is roughly 1,100, including some fragmentary and uncertain examples. Many plans must have been overlooked but their involuntary omission is not likely to have affected the conclusions drawn. Probably a reasonable proportion of the villa plans in every one of the various countries has been looked at, especially 11

— Chapter One — those where a fairly recent descriptive catalogue of all known plans exists. Such are Spain and Portugal, Switzerland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary – more precisely, the province of Pannonia – and Holland, to which may be added a fifty-year-old work on Belgium and a more recent but unimportant catalogue for Luxembourg. For Austria and former Yugoslavia it is hoped that a reasonable proportion has been found. These countries account for about a quarter of all the plans examined. Britain, Germany and France have more or less equal shares in the remainder, probably in ascending order, although the difference – and it is only in the number of usable plans – is comparatively small. Regrettably, but hardly surprisingly in view of the magnitude of the task, no publications with plans and commentary cover these countries, although for the first two they exist in unpublished form. Britain now has a comprehensive catalogue of all published and many probable, possible and doubtful sites. For France the Carte archéologique de la Gaule is rapidly providing comprehensive departmental lists, often accompanied by plans, and for northern Gaul as a whole the situation is redeemed by a recent study dealing with the rural sites of Late Antiquity.26 Every plan has been considered carefully, most several times. At first many were unintelligible but, as understanding grew, the number put aside diminished until most of those now remaining are simply too fragmentary to make any sense of. Ideally a catalogue should list all plans examined, with a summary interpretation of each. Space prohibits that but a full list of all those mentioned, with the source of each plan, is appended (pp. 340–59). How representative are they and what proportion do they form of the total number of villas at present known to have existed? The second point could be calculated laboriously from the gazetteers accompanying more recent sheets of the International Map of the Roman Empire. Only for Britain is it easy. The latest edition of the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain lists 275 villas and 285 ‘other substantial buildings’, a total of 560. Of these about 200, or rather more than a third, have plans sufficiently intelligible to be assigned to one or other category of house plan, even if sometimes the detail is obscure. It can reasonably be regarded as a representative sample of the whole. There is little point in guessing the corresponding fraction of German villas; although certainly considerably smaller, it is probably large enough to be representative. France, with its innumerable villas, presents the real problem, especially southern France, corresponding approximately to the provinces of Aquitania and Narbonnensis, to which can be added Spain and Portugal. In these countries big villas of great complexity are common and in Spain are the norm. Until several of them have been thoroughly explored down to the lowest levels the course of their development will remain obscure; consequently their treatment in this book is bound to be unsatisfactory.

12

CHAPTER TWO

METHODS AND ASSUMPTIONS

WHAT CONSTITUTES A TYPE?

I

n dealing with so large a body of plans, hardly any two of which are alike in their final form – and it is only the final form that is known in most instances – the first requisite is to establish types and the second is to recognise that a typology is not a series of pigeon-holes in which to place identical examples. Here experience in the vernacular field, where exactly the same problem has been faced, can offer a solution. It appears that English houses both great and small are usually the product of successive partial rebuildings, with the frequent consequence that they do not conform closely to a type but rather resemble it in the number and relative size of the various rooms: a consideration likely to apply to all domestic buildings that survive for a hundred years or more. Viewed in these terms a house type is an aggregation of functions, largely inferred, which approximates to a particular form of plan; a latitude permitting houses varying in detail to be grouped together, whether of several building phases or only one.

ORIGINS OF PLAN ANALYSIS An approach of this kind is implicit in Swoboda’s demonstration that the porticus – the architectural term he preferred to the earlier Halle and here used in its fairly general Latin sense – was a standard form of architectural display added to many kinds of house plan. Oelmann developed this line of argument to different purpose in relation to villas which have in the middle a sizeable space which was at that time regarded as a yard.1 By stripping away rooms which appear to have been added around the central space or to intrude upon it he demonstrated that the middle space must have been roofed and was therefore a hall.2 Now this is a mode of reasoning applicable to any kind of villa, because what really matters in a house is what lies behind the formal front; and it follows that the expression of Roman culture, the porticus-with-pavilions, ought not to form part of a plan typology. The pavilions (Eckrisaliten) themselves present more problems than a reading of the literature might suggest, and they will be considered separately.3 13

— Chapter Two — In his classic paper of 1921 Oelmann opened the way to a radical new approach to villas of all kinds, one in which the basic elements of facade, baths and core rooms (Kernbau) could be treated separately and more fruitfully, yet the method continued to be applied only to halls. This was certainly due to the lack of a concept capable of establishing the core of complex groupings of comparatively small rooms; and in Germany political considerations probably deterred some.4 Nevertheless, at least one attempt was made to analyse a villa in terms of its room groupings, an attempt which owes nothing overtly to Swoboda’s or Oelmann’s ideas. This is Koethe’s analysis of Oberweis, in the course of which he pointed out that like groupings occur on both sides of the central axis of this large villa, which thus combined a measure of symmetry in plan with that of the elevation.5

RELEVANCE OF VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE STUDIES With these observations Koethe provided a foretaste of a kind of analysis not undertaken again until the late 1970s, when attempts were made to discover recurrent distinctive room groups in row-type villas (defined in chapter 4), of which Oberweis may be regarded as a very grand example. They rested on a different basis, that of vernacular architecture. Two papers by the present author made a modest beginning to the enterprise; they were succeeded by Drury’s bolder demonstration of how this might be done, although he failed to find clinching arguments in favour of the various possibilities.6 Recurrence of distinctive room groupings is one key to the social analysis of villas. A second is the relation of principal elements of an open hall or of a room to one another. By this is meant, for example, how the open hearth in a hall or the fireplace in a room is positioned relative to the entrance, and how it relates to the whole floor space; is it in the middle or near one end, and if the latter, what are the implications for the use of that end which receives little warmth? And where the position of fireplace or hearth is known, its position relative to any inner room and particularly to the doorway leading into it are important. This way of looking at plans comes directly from the study of medieval and early modern houses, in which characteristic lines of movement can be discerned. To the corresponding patterns in villas can be added the evidence of domestic religion, which can reveal, through the position of shrines, the ways in which rooms were used and approached. To many people those remarks will appear excessively optimistic, for the most serious difficulty in studying villa plans is ignorance of the positions of doorways and fireplaces or hearths. It goes without saying that intercommunication between rooms is the single most important key to the way they were used, a point recognised unhelpfully in reconstructions bespattered with doorways arbitrarily, without supporting argument, such as Basse-Wavre (Belg.). Students of villas, faced with no more than footings, have tended to despair of ever knowing how they functioned. This, though, is a matter on which comparative study can throw light, because some villas in France, Germany and Switzerland, of types found also in other parts of Europe, remained to a sufficient height to reveal a few doorways and in a few cases nearly all of them. 14

— Methods and Assumptions —

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATE DEVELOPMENT All villas occupied for any considerable length of time were altered and enlarged, often several times. Archaeologists take this for granted and indeed the process may be regarded as a natural response to changing social needs, so that a little-altered villa of long duration presents a serious problem of historical explanation. Nevertheless, the implications of rebuilding or addition merit more discussion than they commonly get, and again a concept drawn from the study of vernacular houses is useful. Farmhouses of any considerable age are almost invariably of two or more building phases, as has been observed in several European countries. One process by which such change takes place is called ‘alternate development’, meaning that only part of an existing house is rebuilt at any one time. This often results from a change of function in one part or end of the house, especially where a part devoted to farm purposes is converted to domestic use.7 Romano-British aisled houses, which appear to have begun as a form of long-house – a combined shelter for family, stock and crops – are a generally recognised instance of such change. Alternate development can also occur when, through the addition of a wing or other form of extension, the older part declines in importance, after a while appears old-fashioned, and is then altered if not rebuilt. This phenomenon is observable in the smaller country houses where rebuilding begins with the domestic or upper end and only later is the lower, service end rebuilt – sometimes not at all. The division of medieval open halls into smaller rooms is also well known; it can be paralleled in Roman times, though not with the insertion of an upper floor such as is usual in early modern England, and so can the total rebuilding of the hall. It is not that changes of these kinds have gone unnoticed by archaeologists, simply that no underlying principle has been recognised and commonly no explanation is offered. In drawing on parallels from late medieval and early modern England it is not the particular historical period that matters but rather the architectural forms, the ways in which they were used and were changed, and their social implications. It is not intended to suggest that English society was closely comparable to Roman Britain in its social structure, though it may be added that the two had more in common than Roman Britain has with the all too frequent model of Victorian England.

ROOM USE Buildings in the Roman period were often enlarged without undergoing substantial alteration to the core; this is a process observable in English country houses and farmhouses too, and in both cases houses often grew to a very large size. What were all the extra rooms used for? Two related concepts may sharpen the analysis of houses in an era for which documentation is confined to a few inscriptions. One is the observation made in connection with the English gentry in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that they needed an irreducible minimum of living-space comprising an entrancehall, four living-rooms, bedrooms and accommodation for servants; any more rooms than these were intended for the hospitality and display essential to maintaining social position among peers – ‘parade’ in the vocabulary of the day.8 15

— Chapter Two — This notion that only a certain number of rooms are necessary to maintain different facets of a way of life can be applied to villas to see if anything of the kind can be inferred in the very different circumstances of provincial Roman life. The second concept is that a social hierarchy is reflected not only in the size of buildings, from palace to cottage, but also within the buildings themselves, whether by a hierarchy of rooms graduated by size and appointments or by the disposition of fittings and furnishings within rooms. This may appear self-evident but the corollary, that a society whose buildings do not display marked differences is more egalitarian, is rarely recognised. Taken in conjunction with the notion of minimum room needs for any given level of society at any particular period, it may help to distinguish between changes which correspond to those in the social structure and those reflecting increased prosperity.

HOUSE PLANS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE Running through all that has been said so far is the assumption that house plans, provided they are interpreted correctly, reflect the reality of social structure, irrespective of whether this goes counter to contemporary laws or descriptions. The point, adumbrated in chapter 1, can be amplified from early modern Wales, where the laws imposed after the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542 abolished partible inheritance, otherwise known as ‘gavelkind’. Theoretically, the equal division of estate and goods among heirs ceased, yet the houses suggest that sharing continued without the parcelling out of the land into ever smaller and less economically viable farms that made the practice so ruinous. Two examples show the conflict between the letter of the law and the custom of the country. Thus in north Wales, at Park, Llanfrothen, where documentary evidence suggested an orthodox gentry family headed by sheriffs and justices of the peace, something like a kin-group existed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, occupying both the great house and several small ones close by.9 The second example is from south Wales: For a long time the whereabouts of Edwinsford-uchaf had puzzled students of Carmarthenshire documents. The wretched house simply could not be found . . . a . . . survey of Edwinsford . . . revealed there were two houses on the site embedded in a mass of Victorian accretions which enclosed them both. Edwinsford-uchaf was in fact next door to Edwinsford-isaf; at one corner the two houses touched.10 These examples of apparent conflict between the written and the architectural record are particularly significant for Roman villas because parallels exist in the Roman provinces for both the architectural solutions adopted to tackle the inheritance problem – the problem of conflict between fairness towards all descendants – and the overriding need to preserve the economic viability of the family land. That does not preclude other interpretations of the same architectural phenomena, provided equally informative historical circumstances occur in conjunction with them. Yet if so fundamental an aspect of family organisation remained undetected in the written 16

— Methods and Assumptions — sources, and indeed remains so even now, as a structure in the Braudelian sense – something taken for granted, not needing comment or explanation – how much more likely that it and others are undetectable in the scanty information we have for the Roman provinces. So far I have suggested that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century house plans in England and Wales or, more specifically, elements of plan, may help to explain analogous (but not identical) features in Roman villas. To this it has been objected that comparative interpretations of this kind ought to be tied down reasonably closely to one period of time: that a plan of part of a medieval hall-house means something quite different about social structure from a similar plan which is part of an eighteenthcentury stately home. This raises the spectre of uniformitarian assumptions about which people really must be more explicit.11 It is, of course, true that a medieval hall, open to the roof, heated by an open hearth, and forming the focus of household life as well as the point of entrance, was very different in function and social significance from the similar-sized and equally lofty space, heated by a wall fireplace and with an elaborate ceiling, which likewise served as an entrance and point of reception for strangers in an eighteenthcentury ducal mansion; but the relation between the two rooms and the rest of the respective houses is so utterly different that confusion of function, in any reasonably subtle analysis, is impossible. With some plan elements such as lobbies or inner rooms, the problem does not arise; they reveal their function by their relation to larger rooms or entrances, even where lines of movement can only be discerned in a general way. Moreover, if sufficient examples can be found, one or more are likely to have archaeological evidence of function which, used judiciously, can throw light on the others. In fact, as indicated earlier, no overall comparison between provincial-Roman and early modern Anglo-Welsh society is intended. Given that house plans at both periods are essentially a series of rectangular blocks subdivided in various ways, the occurrence of similar features in a comparable relation to one another at both periods suggests a similar mode of use. Two front entrances where one would normally be expected is an example; and, although that may be thought too obvious to be ignored, archaeologists nevertheless managed to avoid discussing its implications at Maulévrier (Normandy), Sinsheim (Bad.-Württ.) and Chedworth (Glos.) for all the years since they were published in 1836, 1846 and 1868 respectively, and architectural historians have been equally blind.12 The occurrence of the same kind of architectural change taking place in the Roman provinces and early modern England argues that similar forms of change took place in both societies. In fifteenth-century England a house incorporated a principal room or hall heated by an open hearth and open to the roof. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the principal room of a new house had a ceiling and a chimney-stack, and old houses were either replaced or altered to conform to the new pattern; only a few survived for hundreds of years in their original form. As will be shown below, a comparable process is observable in the Roman world. 17

— Chapter Two — Some villas which began with open halls were later subdivided into several comparatively small rooms; others were demolished to be replaced by larger houses of different plan; a few persisted for a long time beside those of more advanced type. These changes were by no means identical with what happened in early modern England but are close enough to provide clues to the nature of the social changes represented by the transformations of house plan. All these general points about the interpretation of plans have to be related to the situation in the Roman provinces, where indigenous populations, after the initial conquest, gradually adopted the architectural trappings of the conquerors; this they did because, as had been the case with Roman imports before the conquest, such forms carried prestigious associations with political power, both the Roman conquerors’ and their own, and also with social status. Luxury spending – conspicuous consumption – was an essential element, as is borne out by sites like Hartfield-Garden Hill or Barnsley Park, where the first element of Roman architecture to be built was, or included, a bath house. On other sites the first consideration was to build a recognisably Roman house, more in the sense that it was different from any indigenous building than that it was truly a piece of classical architecture. The many finds of painted and sometimes moulded plasterwork from the demolished earliest phases of villas suggest that ornament and decoration were as important as the form of the building itself in proclaiming that its owners had made the social transition to the ways of the new masters. Only slowly did the canons of classical architecture gain ground; axiality and symmetry had to be adapted to the reality of social life. How far, though, are those classical canons bound up with public architecture, and to what extent were they modified or ignored in private houses?

CLASSICAL CANONS: SYMMETRY AND AXIALITY In the grandest houses, those of a size approaching that of public buildings, symmetry and axiality were combined in a genuinely classical composition. Nennig, which has one of the most frequently reproduced plans, and Oberweis, which is not as well known as it deserves to be, are among the best examples. Even there, though, not every function could be accommodated in a single unified composition; a bath house at Nennig was placed at what seems like an inordinate distance away, perhaps in order not to detract from the house, perhaps for deeper social reasons; and at Oberweis a long porticus linked the house to an otherwise detached minor block. These examples show that total symmetry, embracing all the parts of a house large enough to lend itself to the application of classical canons on the grand scale, was rarely achieved and may well not often have been sought. Unified British courtyard houses, however big, lacked such monumental classicism; symmetry was much more in the eye of the beholder. Many villas were like some eighteenth-century English country houses in having a perfectly symmetrical front elevation flanked by very different-looking service quarters. From the latter, an unavoidable blemish, the architectural critic averted his eye. This consideration makes symmetry an ambiguous quality, requiring fairly subtle evaluation of its representational significance. To take two examples, both on a 18

— Methods and Assumptions — large scale; Echternach in Luxembourg is as symmetrical as can possibly be, both house and subsidiary buildings, whereas Winkel–Seeb, even larger overall, displays perfect symmetry in the subsidiary buildings but not, surprisingly, in the great house. Much smaller houses present the same kind of contrast. Most have a generally symmetrical front formed by a porticus and its two balancing pavilions, yet the latter are often of slightly unequal size. Similarly with house plans: often what were evidently intended to be balancing rooms or pairs of rooms around a central axis differ slightly in size. Such partial or imperfect symmetry will form a recurring theme of the book. A caution is necessary here. Late nineteenth-century architects of the Beaux Arts school sought perfect symmetry in neo-classical and classical buildings alike, and this led Mylius, for example, in his well-known reconstruction of Blankenheim, to disregard the archaeological evidence which showed the building was asymmetrical. Acceptance of this turn-of-the-century outlook and the restorations it gave rise to has led many archaeologists to complete partially excavated houses with perfectly symmetrical plans, as was done for Rivenhall, Cenero-Murias de Belono and Sarmizegetusa.

MATTERS IGNORED Any attempt to found an account of social structure on a typology of plans runs into a problem of chronology. It has often been said that a typology does not necessarily have chronological implications, yet it can be disconcerting to find a house plan recurring a century or more after its first appearance. In fact it implies no more than the continued usefulness of a particular kind of plan for purposes which changed little over a long period, or for social groups of similar composition. The phenomenon does, nevertheless, require a specific and not merely a general explanation, and one is offered below (chapter 16). Many villas, including some of those excavated with proper attention to stratigraphy in the 1930s and even later, present problems concerning the chronology of their various phases, while for most of those dug before then the dates of their beginning and end are very uncertain. The nature of the problem is revealed by a reassessment of the Welwyn-Lockleys villa, in the course of which the commencement of the Romanised stone building was revised from c. AD 60–70 to c. AD 300 on the basis, principally, of pottery, of which ‘not a single piece is illustrated of the first and second centuries’ apart from an early group and a few samian fragments. This sounds convincing, yet Ward-Perkins thought the new dating ill founded because he had caused many of the early sherds then considered uninformative to be thrown away.13 Just as archaeologists in the 1930s improved greatly on their predecessors’ study of finds, so a later generation made a further advance, and in doing so tended to forget that strong continuities of excavation technique masked their own different and far less selective attitude to pottery and other small finds. Thus, despite more refined dating of pottery forms which permits building phases to be reassessed, uncertainty remains about how reliable the surviving sample is, whether only drawn and published or available for re-examination in a museum. 19

— Chapter Two — For many villas the most that is to be had is a coin list, commonly extending over two or three hundred years, with a considerable number (in Britain) of fourthcentury coins. While a comparative profusion of coins can be taken to indicate activity on the site, the old assumption that the earlier coins indicated when the villa began cannot. Often a thin scatter of late first- and second-century coins has been taken to date the early occupation of a villa but greater awareness of monetary history, following the work of Richard Reece, has made such simple deductions unacceptable without corroboration from pottery.14 No account has been taken of these changed views; it would have been impossible to do so systematically and in any case the theoretical basis of this book sidesteps the need for a precise chronology. Nowhere does the main thrust of the argument stand or fall by dates. Finally, no account is taken of the surroundings of villas apart from the occasional mention of that most characteristic siting on a hill slope overlooking a river or stream. This is because the aim of the book is to establish the significance of types of house and of variations of those types, not to elucidate why a given villa developed in a particular way. To embark on the latter course would have been an impossible task. If the argument about types has any validity, others can apply it to the villas of a locality, bringing in revised chronologies, topography, field systems, pollen and bone analyses and much else besides. Agricultural buildings are hardly mentioned. To understand their architectural simplicity needs specialist knowledge, preferably of the practical kind which Applebaum has brought to the subject. An author who lacks that understanding had better leave it alone.

20

PART II

TYPES OF PLAN

CHAPTER THREE

HALL HOUSES

W

hen the inhabitants of a native community, of whatever size or social composition, decided to adopt a Romanised way of life in an appropriate architectural setting, what kind of house did they choose to build? Essentially they had a choice between what may be called from their plan forms the hall type – the simpler of the two – and the row type. It was not necessary to begin with the simplest version of the simpler type; a more developed one might correspond better to the needs of a particular community. The implications of this will be dealt with later but the first step is to establish the existence of the two types and their variants, beginning with halls. The simplest kind of house to be built wholly or partly of stone comprised a single large room open from ground to roof and heated by a central hearth. It must have had a general resemblance to the medieval open halls which survive – most of them much altered – in considerable numbers in England, so that when Oelmann wanted a comparison for the villa he excavated at Mayen, the first of its kind to be recognised as such in the course of excavation, he chose Penshurst Place in Kent. England was the only country where so elementary a form of purely domestic building could still be found, and although no hall survived with its open hearth in use, whereas not a few north German aisled farmhouses of the same structural type did, the house with the higher social status – rather too high, as Oelmann implied – was thought more appropriate. ‘Simple’ and ‘elementary’ here refer only to the plan, since buildings of this kind were commonly quite wide and consequently their roof construction and its supporting walls presented greater technical problems than those of smaller structures of more complicated plan; some, especially in Germany, must have had sophisticated forms of roof construction. Commonly such halls had, at one end or both, subsidiary rooms which, in most cases, were under one continuous roof. In the course of time the number and size of the end rooms tended to grow but provided the hall remains the principal room and is big enough to dominate the rest, the term ‘hall house’ remains appropriate. These developed examples were all that Oelmann had to work with when he first established the existence of the hall type, and it is necessary at this point to set out his method more fully. 23

— Chapter Three —

STAHL AND MAYEN In 1921 the prevailing opinion was that many villas had an open courtyard in the middle. In seeking to controvert it Oelmann1 took as his prime example the villa of Stahl (Rhld-Pf.) which had been carefully dug and recorded some forty years earlier (II, Fig. 1). He observed, first, that the facade corresponds to the type of porticusand-pavilions lately identified by Swoboda and that it is not joined organically to the building behind; they form two distinct parts, and whether of one build or two is immaterial to identifying the core elements of the house. Second, the middle space contained a hearth which formed the only source of warmth in the building, and cellar steps which required protection from the weather; and the hearth in particular argues for an enclosed room, not a mere shelter. Third, on the east side five rooms form a bath suite which, like so many others of the kind, has the appearance of having been added to an existing building, as do the rooms on the north side and the internal porch which are hardly separable from the bath block; these are all additions. On these grounds Oelmann concluded that a yard interpretation was ‘as good as impossible’ and that the middle space was a large hall open to the roof, with a smaller room partitioned off it ([I], Fig. 1). The latter, he thought, might have had a low upper storey reached by a staircase rising above the one to the cellar – almost the only sensible suggestion ever to have been made (without prejudice as to its correctness) about access to the many upper storeys alleged to have existed, and not the least notable aspect of this brilliant demonstration. Analysis of eight analogous villas, of which two at least, Serville (Belg.) (Fig. 1) and Saaraltdorf (Moselle) (Fig. 1), were built as simple halls with only a porticus-and-pavilions additionally, confirmed this conclusion. This logical demonstration began to change the interpretation of German and Dutch villas immediately but the argument was clinched by Oelmann’s own excavation of what was undeniably an open hall at Mayen (Rhld-Pf.) (Fig. 1), one which had developed in exactly the ways he had envisaged. A theory with the power of prediction is irresistible; henceforth what had gained currency as the Stahl type became the Mayen type and the high quality of the excavation has caused its conclusions to be widely quoted, to the neglect of the feat of deduction behind it. Subsequent excavations and re-examination of other long-known villas have provided more evidence of halls. Ludwigsburg-Pflugfelden (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 1) and Konz-Lummelwies (Rhld-Pf.) are recent discoveries. Bargen im Hegau (Bad.Württ.) (Fig. 1), dug in 1925 and published three years later, has a ‘yard’ in which the only two rooms had straight joints to the outer wall and which is fronted by porticusand-pavilions; it must be a hall. But the closest parallel for Stahl [I] may be KoerichGoeblingen 1 [I] (Fig. 1), which is somewhat more advanced in detail but illustrates almost the same stage of hall development. So common are halls like these that German archaeologists can refer to them as villas of the normal type.

24

— Hall Houses —

Figure 1 Stahl and related villas

25

— Chapter Three —

CLASSIFICATION AND ITS PROBLEMS Hall houses can be divided into categories based on several criteria: proportions and dimensions, notably breadth; forms of roof support; whether shelter is provided for animals as well as a family; the position of the entrance; and the forms which development of the basic type took. Two classes of plan stand out by their proportions. The first and by far the more numerous is commonly 9 m or more wide and often has proportions of length to breadth ranging between about 5:3 and square, although they can be 2:1; this is the broad hall type. The other is often no more than 6 m wide and commonly has more elongated proportions, often 2:1, sometimes even 3:1; this is the narrow hall type. It goes without saying that this classification is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For the purposes of social interpretation aisled houses provide a useful category which is based partly on the form of roof support and partly on the combination of house and byre. Forms of roof support provide two more types, the ridge-post hall and the wide-nave hall. The various types have characteristic possibilities and limitations of development and in these derivatives additional rooms can increase until they finally dominate the hall. With the chosen method of analysis it is not difficult to discover broad halls in old publications, though harder with narrow. To understand the halls themselves is much harder, even from recent reports of high quality, because the vast majority have undergone changes which add to or subtract from the functions for which they were originally designed, and it is difficult to be certain how far the internal dispositions correspond to the original ones. Halls surviving with a little-changed plan tend to be the humbler ones, hence their internal arrangements may not be altogether typical of the type as a whole, and those found under houses of different type have usually lost all internal detail.

LAYOUT AND FUNCTIONS OF THE HALL What was a hall like? What functions, domestic, craft or agricultural, were carried on within it? No single example is sufficiently well preserved to answer these questions; the evidence has to be assembled from several, including those in the poorer settlements which were little altered and which are commonly referred to as cottages or craftsmen’s workshops. Nevertheless, they belong to the same generic type and throw light on their grander cousins. A rudimentary and well-recorded British example, Somerton-Bradley Hill 1 I (Som.) (Fig. 3), adds detail to the impression drawn from Mayen III. It was a small hall house entered in the middle of the south side, and facing the doorway was a cluster of three hearths, only two of which, probably, were in use at any one time. The two biggest were very close, one of them being the equivalent of the central hearth at Serville. The other, almost abutting it, was fired from an elongated pit on the north side and resembles what is sometimes described as a bat-shaped ‘oven’. A third hearth was placed a little way to the left of the entrance, corresponding, perhaps, to what is called in medieval halls the upper 26

— Hall Houses — or socially superior end, so that at some time the hall may have had two focal points rather than one. Otherwise there was little indication of use except for two enigmatic shallow pits, one of them quite large (over 2 m long), at the putative lower end, and there was no drainage or other provision for cattle. Houses like this must have been common but are hard to recover on sites which persisted for centuries. Chastres (Belg.) and Dragonby are structurally superior forms of the Bradley Hill house. For halls at any social level, one of Oelmann’s observations about Mayen is relevant: that throughout the villa’s existence the open hearth was used for cooking as well as heating,2 the nearby drain serving for the disposal of waste water. This raises the question of just what the ‘ovens’ at Bradley Hill I/1 and elsewhere were for; in fact they may have served essentially the same purposes – warmth, cooking – as the open hearth at Mayen. In some of the humblest British halls a social differentiation between the upper and lower ends is apparent, as was certainly true in the much grander Köln-Braunsfeld,3 whereas others with three hearths or ovens, none of which is of special importance, imply a different pattern of living. Generally the British and continental halls reflect similar ways of life.

Figure 2 Halls with evidence of use

27

— Chapter Three —

Figure 3 British halls

28

— Hall Houses —

THE HEARTH/ENTRANCE RELATION Broad halls provide evidence for the relation between the two most fundamental elements, the principal or domestic entrance and the principal or only hearth. Most fall into two groups with many minor variations. In the first a central hearth stands more or less opposite an entrance in the middle of one of the long walls, so that the hearth was the first thing seen by anyone coming in; Mayen, Serville and Courcellessur-Nied-Urville are like that. This position for a hearth, where its warmth had most chance of being dissipated by draughts and without any screen to alleviate them, must be determined socially, and the likely explanation is that the hearth was shared without sharp distinction between upper and lower ends. Villas of the Mayen/Serville type, a hall with porticus and pavilions, can be paralleled with minor differences at Neuss [I], Tiefenbach (Fig. 1) and many other places. Most probably had a central hearth. Not infrequently, though, the hearth was slightly towards the rear of the hall and nearer one end than the other – often the left-hand end – so that the person entering was able to orientate himself and go to the upper end, where the hearth was, or the lower end, whichever befitted his station. This disposition of hearth relative to entrance suggests, by analogy with medieval English halls, some distinction between the part nearer the doorway and that beyond the hearth, the place of honour being at the point furthest from the entrance. Persons entering would see, on the other side of the fire, the place reserved for those on whom authority or seniority conferred privilege, and they themselves would be noticed and their deportment observed. A pattern like this can be inferred in a hall as simple as that at Lavans-les-Dole (Jura), where one corner is shielded by the hearth from the rest of the hall to create a privileged area equivalent to the medieval dais.

THE OFF-CENTRE HEARTH In the second group the fire is near the end of the hall and often in the far corner to left of the entrance. Sometimes a well-built stone fireplace is set against a wall near the corner, as at Stahl (Fig. 1) and Bollendorf (Rhld-Pf.) (Fig. 2); sometimes a hearth is actually in the corner, as at Börstingen (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 2) or, after a doorway into the adjoining pavilion was blocked, at Neumagen-Dhron-Papiermühle [II] (Fig. 68). Since these were the only hearths discovered, they were presumably just as much the place of privilege as a central hearth, yet they imply somewhat different social relations: the persons around a corner hearth were not well placed to observe those entering, nor did the hearth itself form a visual and social barrier between the entrance and an inner, private room. Evidently it no longer mattered: this category of hearth/ entrance relation implies a different order of importance as between the hall and other rooms. Some difference of function is apparent within the hall, so that at Stahl, for instance, entrance to an inner room was quite divorced from the hearth, and the removal of the latter from a dominant central position may be bound up with the transfer of the representational function which went with privilege to one of the unusually large pavilions. 29

— Chapter Three —

THE LOWER END These tentative interpretations of the socially superior part of the hall leave the lower end to be explained. Where the hearth is central, domestic or agriculturerelated work may have been carried on anywhere within the hall except around the hearth and dais. If the household were large, a division can be envisaged in which the right-hand side on entering was occupied by servants both indoor and outdoor, or by dependants of some kind. Steiner made the point about Bollendorf that ‘The lack of work-rooms permits the belief that the building – at least in its last manifestation – was less a farm than a villa in our modern sense’;4 yet in this particular house the off-centre hearth makes craft-related use of the rest of the hall likely. Various kinds of domestic, non-agricultural work are conceivable: spinning, weaving, making wooden tools and equipment for farm use – any or all of these occupations could have been carried on in the lower end of the hall. An obvious alternative function suggested by the north German aisled farmhouse of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries and its Iron Age counterparts at Ezinge (Neth.) and Feddersen Wierde (NiederSachsen) is the stalling of cattle in winter. Mayen provides a widely accepted interpretation on these lines, although one not applicable to the whole of the lower end. It had in III and IV a doorway in the gable-end which must have provided access from the farmyard to the working end of the hall and to the narrow partitioned-off L-shaped room running round two sides. Whether this oddly shaped space was for cattle, as was suggested by the architect Mylius, is not absolutely certain. In accepting the idea Oelmann was influenced by north German farmhouses, yet the absence of any drain at the rear of the hall, which was built into the hillside, is surprising. Moreover, the space in question, only 2 m wide, is not enough for fully grown beasts, only small cattle or sheep. 5 Nevertheless the gable-end doorway points to a close connection between the lower end and the farmyard and it is hard to think of it as anything other than a byre. Just such a doorway at Crain (Yonne) (Fig. 4) leads to a quite narrow undrained space marked off by a light partition, and here, too, the farmyard access implies a byre.6 At Blieskastell-Altheim (Saarld) (Fig. 4), where no doorways were traceable, interpretation of a lightly partitionedoff room at the east end as a byre is bolstered by the presence of a fodder trough. The absence of drainage is nevertheless remarkable but is explicable if enough

Figure 4 Halls used for stalling animals

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— Hall Houses — straw were available to absorb the urine of stalled cattle.7 Despite doubts on this score, it appears that some simple halls, lacking any other domestic room, sheltered cattle as well as the owning family.

BROAD HALLS WITH MORE THAN ONE HEARTH Larger halls frequently have two or three hearths, one of them conspicuously more important than the others. Thus Mamer-Gaschtbierg (Lux.) (Fig. 2) has a well-built hearth at the west end of the hall close to the inner room (later divided), whilst in the corners at the inferior end are two large areas of burning. This is a social differentiation between the hearth around which the privileged congregated and two used by other people for the dual purposes of work – including, probably, blacksmithing and cooking – and warmth. In past ages the practice of living away from one’s workplace did not apply, and those who worked at the hearths are likely to have eaten and slept near them.8 At the villa of Bruchsal-Ober Grombach (Bad.-Württ.) one of two or perhaps three halls (1; Fig. 2) had two certain hearths and a third which is neither located on the published plan nor described. One was in the middle of the hall – in 1911, a yard – in a position comparable to that at Serville. A second, of tile and stone, lay nearer the west end and backed on to what is described as a Halle, that is to say an opensided room with a ceiling or roof carried on posts and interpreted as an entrance-hall within the ‘yard’. Although no details of the post structure were published, the relation of hearth to upper end suggests it resembled the dais of a medieval house, even to having a ceiling or canopy; and something comparable appears to have existed at Konken (Rhld-Pf.) (Fig. 2). So the Ober-Grombach hall had two principal focal points and a third less important one somewhere in the east end or near the north-east corner, an arrangement reflecting a more stratified houseful than those at Mayen and Serville, or Mamer-Gaschtbierg with its functional distinction. Outside Germany broad halls are not very common. France has a scatter represented by Grémecey (Moselle) (Fig. 5), Saint-Pierre-la-Garenne (Eure) (Fig. 5) and Clinchamps (Calvados); also the enigmatic Brain-sur-Allonnes (Main-et-Loire) (Fig. 5) which looks like a villa but had three bronze cauldrons containing votive deposits.9 Hall derivatives found at Izernore (Ain) and Lalonquette (Pyr.-Atl.) (Fig. 50) show that halls may come to light anywhere. Broad halls are rare in Britain. Byfield (Northants.) (Fig. 3) resembles continental halls as closely as any but lacks all internal detail. Its true classification, though, is uncertain following the excavation of a villa similar in size and general appearance at Stratford-upon-Avon-Tiddington (War.), which proved to have an unusual kind of aisled construction (Fig. 35). Swindon-Okus (Wilts.) (19×11.2 m) is very broad for a British hall yet lacks any sign of being aisled. Farmington-Clear Cupboard (Glos.) (Fig. 3) is smaller (21×8.5 m), and has, like Byfield, the characteristic elongated British proportions and preserved informative detail. Here the principal ‘hearth/ oven’ stood nearly opposite to and just a little to the left of the entrance, and beyond it, further into the hall and next to the inner room, was a paved area equivalent to the ‘open-sided room’ of Ober-Grombach A; though not raised like a dais above the 31

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Figure 5 French hall houses

general floor level, its treatment demonstrated superiority in a less literal way. Beyond the paving was an inner room. At this end ‘shallow fire pits’ near the hearth were perhaps places where the fire had once been. To the right of the entrance and near the south-east corner was a second hearth, thought to be a working area. Whatever the truth of this – and the building of a bath suite must have distorted the original arrangements to some degree – there was less paving hereabouts, so the hall provided for two social foci of unequal importance. How many people this implies is quite uncertain, but at all events the space available was intended for considerably more than a conjugal or even a stem family. A second hall of comparable size to Farmington may be discernible in the incompletely recovered plan of North Stainley-Castle Dykes [II] (Fig. 3).

NARROW HALLS Stowey Sutton-Chew Park (Avon, formerly Som.) (Fig. 3) is a good example of the narrow-hall type. The hall area is 114 sq. m, about the same as Stahl and bigger than Serville (101 sq. m); Mayen is not much bigger (135 sq. m), Bollendorf and Grémecey (both 220 sq. m) are twice as big. As with Stahl, the idea that the central space ‘was probably not roofed’10 can be dismissed. It sheltered three ovens, one at each end and one near the middle of the rear wall; and there was also a ‘rough fireplace’ or hearth, probably secondary and in an unusual place, tucked away in the near lefthand corner on entering.11 This seems usually to be the upper end of a hall, and this was where the best-built oven – ‘really more in the nature of a furnace’ – stood. Since no animal bones were found in the vicinity ‘it is not quite certain . . . whether [the oven] was in fact for cooking’,12 yet there was no evidence of industrial activity either. That point applies to all three ‘ovens’ none of which showed traces of any

32

— Hall Houses — activity other than generating heat; could that have been their principal purpose? The lack of a fireplace in the middle of the hall and of a dais are significant in the light of Farmington and other villas. Presumably three groups of people or households used the hearths in a communal hall – it is quite big enough. The dominance of one household, if it existed to any considerable degree, must have been expressed in terms of access to the inner room or pavilions. Another British hall interpreted by its excavators as a yard is Wraxall (Som.) (Fig. 3), which appears to have had a flagged stone floor throughout. Its hall had the proportions of Stowey Sutton and about the same overall area as Mayen IV. A few barely Romanised halls were even more elongated, one of the most rudimentary – not a villa – being building 2.5 in the Somerton-Catsgore settlement (Fig. 3). Its proportions were nearly 4.5:1 and although described as a barn it had two built hearths/ovens and two other hearths. A building so provided cannot have been solely for storage;13 it must be a house in which ancillary farming activities were carried on. It is not surprising that the proportions of the remote and barely Romanised house at Laugharne-Cwmbrwyn (Fig. 3) in west Wales (Pembs., now Dyfed), the one most distant from an urban centre, should resemble those of the hardly more Roman hall Somerton-Catsgore 2.5. A much smaller hall, the ‘Dwelling House’ at the well-known villa of Langton (Yorks.), began in I (Fig. 3) as a simple hall, to which, as at Cwmbrwyn, a small room was added at one end. A few narrow halls are known outside Britain. The most notable is Schimmert-op den Billich, commonly called Ravensbosch (Neth.), which is part of a villa or perhaps a small town (vicus).14 It has proportions of 4:1 and porticuses front and rear; that at the front has pavilions, one being recessed into the hall; that at the rear is wide, as if for some work purpose. A broad hall like Mayen IV and a narrow one like Stowey Sutton, despite their comparatively small difference of size, carry quite different social connotations. The single large central hearth so characteristic of the broad hall implies a unity within the houseful not demonstrated by the three ‘ovens’ of the narrow one or the two hearths of the elongated broad hall at Farmington. If, as these examples show, elongated broad halls have much in common with narrow halls, their proportions ensure different possibilities of development. Neither class shows much sign of stalling cattle; Blieskastell-Altheim and Mayen III are exceptions and the building at Böckweiler (Saarld) (Fig. 4) called the Wirtschaftshof or work-yard may be another. Most have no definite evidence of accommodation for cattle.

SINGLE-ENDED HALLS Improvement of the basic hall could take several forms. A room of equal breadth or two small rooms might be added; or a porticus-with-pavilions; or a small room at the rear; or a cellar; or a combination of these. The simplest development was to add a room at one end of the hall. Parallels from medieval England are called single-ended halls, an illogical but convenient expression which will be adopted here. The new room may serve some completely new requirement or accommodate a function previously performed in the body of 33

— Chapter Three — the hall and, since evidence on which to form an opinion is usually lacking, the question remains open. Maidenhead-Cox Green I (Berks.) (Fig. 69) was a narrow hall with an inner room entered, it is reasonable to suppose, from the hall. The corresponding room at Farmington had a hearth and well-made floor and provided space enough for a family. Some indication of the social relations between the inhabitants of the villa is provided by the position of the doorway between hall and inner room. Sometimes this can be inferred from the limitations imposed by other features, as at Farmington, but in most cases, as at Stahl or Doische-Vodelée (Belg.) (Fig. 39) it is guesswork. At UplymeHolcombe IIA (Fig. 66), a house of the same plan-type as Maidenhead, the threshold between the two rooms was recovered; it was in the middle of the partition and implies a different relationship between the rooms from that at Farmington. Instead of the inner room being reached by a doorway behind the hearth, access to it was less removed from the body of the hall and more open to general view. Both houses are assumed to have had the inner room at the upper end. This may not always have been the case; just as single-ended medieval halls could have the extra room at the lower end so, perhaps, might provincial Roman halls such as Stowey Sutton, and as Somerton-Catsgore 2.1. certainly did (Fig. 3). Another form of improvement was to build a cellar in the hall. Sometimes it was in a corner, as at Dreieich-Götzenhain (Hessen), Stein (Neth.) and VoerendaalUbachsberg (Neth.), sometimes clear of one, as at Overasselt (Neth.) (Fig. 6). Whether, in such cases, a room stood above the cellar is impossible to know from the published evidence.

Figure 6 Single- and double-ended halls

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THE INNER ROOM SUBDIVIDED An alternative way of providing special-purpose space was to have a pair of rooms at one end of the hall, as at Rothselberg (Rhld-Pf.) (Fig. 6), Frankfurt-Bergen-Enkheim [I] (Fig. 40) and Michelstadt-Steinbach (both Hessen). In all three one room was larger than the other, with a cellar beneath the smaller. The location of the cellar entrance at Rothselberg does not preclude the possibility of a doorway from hall to smaller room but may indicate that this room was an inner, private room entered through the larger one and overseeing access to the cellar. At Bergen-Enkheim the high status of this part of the house is underlined by the hypocaust in the larger room.15 The best British parallel, a much smaller narrow hall at Quinton (Northants.) (Fig. 6), had a hearth nearer the west end of the hall where there are two rooms, one of which was enlarged at the expense of the other. A doorway opened from the hall into the larger room. In the hall a raised and better-surfaced floor was marked off by a simple kerb on the side nearest the doorway – a dais. Friendship-Taylor, who excavated the site, considered a light partition might have stood on the line of the kerb, rather like that around the dais at Ober-Grombach A. Whether the end rooms formed a suite, the smaller reached through the larger, or were entered separately, is unknown, but the whole conveys the same impression as the upper end of a medieval domestic hall. The larger hall house at Overasselt (Fig. 6), with proportions of about 3:1, has, besides the cellar already mentioned, two rooms at the south end of not quite equal size, one of which had a hypocaust. The presence of important domestic rooms at both ends of this building supports the negative evidence of Quinton, that cattle were not stalled within the hall. In broad halls the paired rooms are sometimes separated by a space that looks like a through passage leading out of doors; but it often became so through alteration and was not necessarily so originally. In its simplest form this disposition appears in Mehring I (Fig. 69) and at the east end of Grémecey, and raises the question of why the rooms should be separated. Implicitly they were not connected functionally, as might be expected with two service rooms or two rooms of a suite; possibly the ‘passage’ was a lobby with two doorways shielded from the hall.

DOUBLE-ENDED HALLS A double-ended hall (another term from vernacular architecture) has rooms at both ends, like the German halls of Brücken (Rhld-Pf.) (Fig. 6) and Heppenheim (Hessen) (Fig. 6), which have two small rooms at one end and an undivided fullwidth room at the other. Great Staughton (Cambs.) (Fig. 40) has only one room at each end. In houses of 10 m span and upwards such a room might be very narrow in proportion to its length. Larger groupings of rooms occur, differing very much in detail and complicated by the presence of the pavilions at each end of the porticus. In trying to understand how the hall itself functioned it has been possible, so far, to ignore pavilions, something the more easily done when the pavilions stand largely or wholly beyond the ends of 35

— Chapter Three — the hall, as at Serville; but in analysing the more highly developed houses, where the pavilions are integrated architecturally with other rooms at the ends of the hall, the possibility that they intercommunicated with them cannot be ignored. Two Dutch villas, Nuth-Vaasrade and Buchten (Fig. 23), illustrate the point, which will be taken up later (chapter 8).

AISLED HOUSES Broad halls may be divided by roof-supporting posts set either axially as ridge-posts and forming two aisles, or in two rows forming, in the customary English terms, nave and aisles.16 In Britain one large group in the latter category has a distinctive bipartite character consistent with its accommodating, in its early forms, a family and livestock under one roof; originally called the basilican house,17 it has been given the name aisled house to distinguish it from aisled buildings devoted almost entirely to agricultural or industrial purposes, and from the aisleless house-and-byre.18 Contrary to expectation, the enormous amount of villa excavation and aerial photography during the past thirty years has produced only a handful of possible examples in mainland Europe.19 In its simplest form the aisled house is a long timber building with two internal rows of earthfast posts and no structural partitions from end to end of the middle span. Functional divisions were marked by the position of the hearth or by no more than different kinds of floor – hard-rammed and swept clay in the domestic part, a rougher cattle-trodden surface in the rest. Many such have been excavated in the coastal regions of Holland and north-west Germany and within the Empire it was the dominant type at Rijswijk (Fig. 65). In Britain, Exning-Landwade I (Suffolk) (Fig. 7), Denton I (Lincs.) and Lechlade-Claydon Pike (Oxon.) may have been like this, for although positive evidence of cattle is hard to find, an agricultural use for one end is established with some probability by a doorway in the gable-end wall wide enough for animals or carts. In the aisles, though, especially at the family end where alteration is always more destructive, light partitions may have been entirely lost; for whereas in the nave the division between living and work parts seems to have been customary rather than structural, elsewhere some separation of family space from cattle is likely. With aisled houses as with monospan halls, original form and function have to be inferred from such evidence as remains after extensive alteration. It seems that half the length of the nave or a little less was living-space. Denton had a large hearth, the only one in the building, about half-way down its eight-bay length. To one side of it, after partial rebuilding in stone (Fig. 7), were domestic rooms, and it can reasonably be assumed they perpetuated earlier usage. How much of the nave beyond the fire, if any, was living-space? Since the hearth is the only cooking place, the area around it must have been domestic, and similarly, when the day’s work was done, people will have congregated around it. A much bigger aisled house, Winterton D I (Lincs.) (Fig. 45), had a hearth in the nave at a comparable point, about where the aisle rooms ended; the large open space beyond did not have a wide doorway at the end and revealed no trace of cattle, only a hearth, five trench-furnaces and some paving slabs. A smaller building B I was similar; both acquired rooms at the end of the nave. 36

— Hall Houses — Other aisled houses hint at a similar division. West Blatchington (Sussex) (Fig. 7) looks as if it was entered, by analogy with Denton III (Fig 7) and halls such as Serville, through a doorway opposite a hearth, and so into the domestic part which was cut off from the rest in [II].20 Carisbrooke (I.o.W.), Norton Disney (Lincs.) (Fig. 75), Petersfield-Stroud (Glos.) (Fig. 7) and West Dean (Wilts.) are similarly proportioned. Exning II, East Grimstead (Wilts.), Mansfield Woodhouse (Notts.) (all Fig. 7) and Weyhill-Clanville (Hants.) all acquired domestic rooms at both ends and in much of the aisles, leaving a large irregular-shaped space in the middle: essentially the same process of development as occurred in many a German broad hall. Clearly many aisled houses, especially the large ones built with stone footings, never sheltered cattle, whereas Denton and Stroud, which retained their wide end entrances throughout, may possibly have done so, although some doubt exists.21 Only those which were minor elements of a villa, such as the one outside the courtyard at Sudeley-Spoonley Wood (Fig. 70), are likely to have been part house, part byre. Moreover, Winterton D and the aisled house at Darenth (Kent) (Fig. 42) were both preceded by aisleless buildings lacking any positive evidence of stalling cattle, so that the apparently obvious link between aisled houses in Britain and those at Rijswijk and the Friesian coast must now be questioned. Phosphate analysis is needed on a suitable site. An aisled house at Odiham-Lodge Farm (Hants.), which seems from its plan to have developed in much the same way as Winterton D, has been interpreted in a more detailed way than any other villa through the artefacts found in the rooms.22 Certain rooms are assigned to men, others to women, a small one to both. A wing at what is conventionally regarded as the upper end of a house of this type comprises two ox-byres and a stable and perhaps a second small stable. This west part of the house did not communicate directly with the rest. A raised granary occupying one aisle adjoined that part of the nave used for threshing. How much weight should be attached to these attributions? Some aspects are very odd: the animal stalls did not communicate with the house, yet those who looked after valuable livestock surely slept close to it so as to respond quickly if a beast fell sick; there is no wide doorway for waggons to deliver corn on the stalk for threshing and take away grain; and the removal of one of the two major functions of this house type to the opposite end, confusing upper and lower ends, is hard to parallel in any house type – indeed, hardly conceivable. Odiham needs reassessment from the excavation archive and from an architectural standpoint. All the examples quoted so far are British. A building likely to be of this type at Villeneuve-sur-Cher/les Augerets (Cher) is exceptionally long, the aisles have stone footings throughout, and the ends are less differentiated than is usual, but it has a much closer resemblance to a British aisled house than most in France.

RIDGE-POST HALLS A second category classified by structure comprises halls having, on the long axis, a row of posts rising to the apex to support the ridge-piece, to which the rafters are affixed. 37

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38

— Hall Houses —

Figure 7 Aisled buildings

Two buildings of this type were excavated at Bedburg-Garsdorf (Nordrh.Westf.) (Fig. 68). The smaller, the principal house, with proportions of 5:2, combined in II stone footings for the hall and end room with earthfast ridgeposts. On one side of the yard was a larger building of the same type, a workhall with four hearths set slightly off the long axis, probably because it was easier to contrive some kind of smoke vent to one side of the ridgepiece than across it. Nor surprisingly, major villa buildings of this primitive type are rare and it is to be expected that derivatives in which some of the inconvenient middle posts have been replaced by monospan trusses will be found; Saaraltdorf (Fig. 1) and Heidelsheim (Bad.-Württ.), each with a single axial post-hole, may be two such. Rudston 3/II, of the same structural type, occupied the same position relative to the main house and no doubt served the same purpose; Fishtoft may be a minor British example (Fig. 7). A less fully reported example at Verneuilen-Halatte II (Oise) is likely, from its position in a large courtyard, to have been a workhall, for all that the main house of that phase was not discovered. Less certain is the function of a well-built structure at Bocholtz-Vlengendaal (Neth.) (Fig. 46), the middle one of three sizeable buildings set out in line. Neither of the suggested uses, barn or storehouse (possibly of two storeys), is compelling. Halls of this kind are related to the wide-nave type. 39

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WIDE-NAVE HALLS This category of hall is more instructive than the fewness of examples might suggest. The only one excavated to modern standards, Hölstein (Switz.) (Fig. 7) has a nave to aisles proportion of approximately 3:1 instead of the 2:1 of the aisled house. Structurally the type is linked to the previous one by the use of one or two ridge-posts or some equivalent support; most pairs of posts carried a king-post construction on tie beams. Hölstein began as a hall open from end to end and with a porticus, perhaps entered at the end, along most of the north side. In II, two rooms at the upper (east) end, occupying two bays of the colonnades, were partitioned off, one being provided with a hypocaust, and a small square room was created at that end of the porticus; these rooms may have replaced a similarly used but structurally undivided space in I. A bath suite was added at the opposite end in [III]. No evidence of the stalling of cattle was found at the lower end of the nave, only agricultural and cooking equipment and horse-trappings. Hölstein evidently developed and was used in much the same way as Winterton D. Kaisersteinbruch (Aus.) (Fig. 67) has comparable nave–aisle proportions. Lacking ridge-posts, it must have had king-post trusses throughout except at the north end, where lengthwise stability for the roof appears to have been provided by an axial wall. Rooms were partitioned off, probably in [II], to make a unit or apartment, and near it the only entrance discovered may, by analogy, have been opposite the principal hearth. It has frequently been claimed that these two buildings belong to the class of ‘basilican’ or aisled houses, whereas their proportions speak against any direct connection. Others like them have a thin but wide distribution: they include NeerharenRekem (Belg.), Wollersheim-Am Hostert (Rhld-Pf.), a building at Liestal-Munzach (Switz.) (Fig. 76) and possibly the strange building at Ash (Kent), to judge solely by its proportions; and from aerial photographs, Saint-Aubin le Mazaret E. Perhaps the alleged peristyle villa at Bennwil (Switz.) belongs to this class.

NAVE AND AISLES OF EQUAL WIDTH Differences in nave–aisle proportions are primarily structural matters, yet they also govern the conditions of use. Winkel-Seeb (Switz.) raises questions of this kind more acutely than any other. The principal building (A, Herrenhaus; Fig. 7) incorporates a hall 31 m long but only 9 m wide and open to the roof which was divided up by two rows of thirteen columns into three spans of about 3 m. What were they intended to support? An upper storey carrying heavy loads is the only reason that comes to mind for so many columns so close together, yet few loads except bulk grain needed that much support. Furthermore, in VI–VIII, when only the middle third of the hall retained columns, an upper storey is scarcely possible. In VI a ‘roundish-concave’ wall about 8 m long and occupying the whole of the south ‘aisle’ was built, and in front of it was ‘exceptionally heavily burnt earth’: an installation described as a ‘chimney-like hearth with a roundish 40

— Hall Houses — heat-radiating wall’.23 It is hard to envisage a chimney or smoke hood of the requisite size rising above this through an upper storey; an open hearth is more likely. On the other hand, columns so closely spaced are unnecessary for any kind of roof. A second building at Winkel-Seeb presents the same problem. In the inner courtyard, B IIB (Fig. 7) has two rows of poorly aligned columns forming three more or less equal aisles in an overall breadth of 8 m. It is described simply as a hall and has open hearths, yet is reconstructed with an upper storey because, as in A, there are so many columns;24 but no explanation is offered for their number or spacing. In fact, both A and B present such contradictions that no solution can be offered. It is an odd situation because building E (Fig. 72) has more usual proportions like those of Hölstein. A few other buildings with three equal aisles are known. A large one occupies the north side of the domestic peristyle at Liédena (Spain) and a much smaller British example is East Dean-Holbury (Hants.). In France there are two at SaintAubin le Mazaret and two subsidiary agricultural (?) buildings at Maulévrier and Châtillon-sur-Seiche.25 Although the Maulévrier hall is so much less important than the Seeb buildings, it is over twice as wide (19 m) and can perhaps be compared to a granary at Rome-Via Gabina with equal aisles and nave (also 19 m). The SaintAubin buildings are wider still – one about 28 m – so that they may have had three parallel roofs. And in that unsatisfactory state the problem of Seeb A and its analogues must be left.

HALL OR YARD? THE CASE OF INZIGKOFEN For half a century Oelmann’s interpretation of Stahl and its analogues held undisputed sway until, in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of archaeologists working in central and southern Germany have asserted, without challenging Oelmann’s conclusion formally, that this or that villa had an open yard more or less surrounded by rooms, while ignoring the problems thus created. Discussion will be divided between probable halls which are dealt with here and more problematic examples which are reserved for chapter 7. The argument, insofar as any is advanced, is that the width of the central space is too great for a monospan roof, therefore it must have been a yard, and the occasional presence of a hearth or a staircase to a cellar is taken to imply partial roofing. And despite the demonstration that the plans of Stahl and Mayen make good sense as a number of rooms subordinate to and opening off a hall, nobody has attempted to show the relation between the rows of rooms on two or more sides of a yard; how they functioned as a house, that is. Nor, since the idea that the porticus-with-pavilions is a characteristic of provincial Roman culture is not specifically rejected, is it explained why so distinctive a facade should have been thought appropriate in front of an open yard. And whereas a hall makes the central space intelligible, the purpose of a comparatively small, enclosed and usually undrained yard requires explanation not so far offered. Inzigkofen (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 27) is a key site in this debate. Reim, arguing that the space in the middle (16.60 m overall; 13.50 m clear) is too wide for a roof 41

— Chapter Three — without posts, and that the foundations of the inner porticus wall are not only too slight to support the weight of tiles but are slightly narrower than the outer wall, concluded that the inner space can only be a yard. This justification of a courtyard, in a footnote listing hall interpretations, makes a veiled challenge to orthodoxy;26 it stands or falls by the roof arguments, which will now be assessed. First, the foundations. They were of limestone fragments, only partly held together by mortar.27 It is hard to know just what ‘partly’ signifies, but provided the rear wall of the porticus, of which nothing remained, was well built, its 0.90 m thickness need not preclude a roof of wide span. Given a roof which did not exert a strong outward thrust and was not subject to heavy lateral wind pressure – and a Roman roof of low pitch with king-posts in tension would meet both conditions – the support afforded by a masonry wall would suffice. Moreover, the wall could have been of mixed construction, incorporating posts at the truss ends. As for the span, the row of bases on the west side are larger than needed for a lean-to;28 freestanding posts supporting roof trusses would reduce the span to 13.5 m. Oelmann anticipated the objection about wide roof spans and his demonstration that Roman technology was capable of roofing impressively wide spans need not be recapitulated. It is sufficient to add a few examples from villas. Blankenheim I (Fig. 70) had a hall 12 m wide, Bruckneudorf (Aus.) [I] (Fig. 69) one of 14.5 m, while that at Laufenburg (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 38) was yet wider at 17 m.29 Clearly wide spans were perfectly feasible in villas of high status. How far such technical feats can be envisaged lower down the scale is an open question, but spans of 12–13 m were not exceptional and can be assumed in all the villas in Rheinland-Pfalz in respect of which doubts have been raised, few of which exceed 12 m in the clear. If 13.50 m is thought impossible, that has to be argued. That leaves unanswered the point that cellar steps need a roof.30 Unfortunately, nothing is said about the surface of the interior space; whether yard or hall, surely some part of it was paved? If a yard, were there drains? Nor is it explained what activities took place within it. A kitchen garden is a possibility, an ornamental garden more appropriate between the domestic ranges, yet no paths were found. We are not told what was found in this space; the evidence is not given; the question seems not to have been asked. Inzigkofen prompts another question: how did the two rows of rooms flanking the yard function as a house, and why are they set out so differently from those in other villas with a Romanised frontispiece? At only some 4 m wide they are narrow compared with British row-houses, which themselves tend to be narrower than their European counterparts. They have no room of particular importance. More important, no veranda or gallery links them with the porticus and one another, yet intercommunication, producing a series of passage-rooms, is inconceivable. As rooms opening off a large open hall they are credible; regarded as two separate blocks of rooms (houses? apartments?) fronting a yard, the way they functioned needs explanation. In the light of these remarks the uncertainty expressed about the 9.5 m wide interior space of Hirschberg-GrossSachsen I (Bad.-Württ.)31 is unnecessary, and indeed for any span less than 13 m. It may even make intelligible such oddities as LörrachBrombach (Fig. 28). 42

— Hall Houses —

HALL AND PORTICUS UNIFIED: SINSHEIM AND KINGSWESTON A rare plan-form occurs at Sinsheim-Wald (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 8). It has a four-bay colonnade familiar in southern Germany and another, quite differently spaced, forming the rear wall of the porticus. All the column bases both front and rear are 0.60 m square and have in the top surface a mortise intended to receive the tenon at the foot of a timber post of large cross-section. Now the rear of the porticus – the front wall of the hall – comprises several closespaced posts interrupted by a length of wall and was thus well capable of supporting a very considerable roof weight. So was the rear colonnade, which is of four bays varying in length between 3 and 5 m. Given posts of dimensions appropriate to the bases, a roof is perfectly feasible;32 and such large bases and posts would be unnecessary for lean-to roofs. Sinsheim is without parallel in Germany, although Sigmaringen-Steinäcker (Bad.Württ.) (Fig. 8) resembled it if any of the four bays of the colonnade or arcade facing the porticus were open. A British villa, Bristol-Kingsweston, provides a more certain parallel with its open arcade separating hall from porticus. The underlying intention was to obtain, in effect, a wider hall than the customary British proportions allowed by adding to it the partly separated-off porticus; it follows that the porticus was enclosed, not arcaded, at the front.

DIVIDED HALLS A few villas in which the hall is divided structurally into two parts tend to bear out the idea that such houses could be occupied by more than one household. At Voerendaal-Ten Hove I (Neth.) (Fig. 9), a transverse wall divides the hall into two equal parts, each about 13.5×8 m. A greater number of additional rooms on one side is balanced by larger ones on the other, resulting in approximate equality; and an oblong room is shared unequally. Heerlen-Boventse Caumer (Neth.) [I] (Fig. 9) may have been a bipartite hall with porticus-and-pavilions. At Vesqueville (Belg.) the hall

Figure 8 Halls open to porticus

43

— Chapter Three — appears to have proclaimed division very simply by opposite pilasters forming an intangible boundary, one respected by all that could be crossed as occasion warranted; and that idea is supported by the presence of a hearth in one corner. Vesqueville represents a half-way stage between an open and a part-structurally divided hall.33 The simplest bipartite division occurs at Laperrière-sur-Saône (Côte-d’Or) (Fig. 9) and Bad Homburg (Hessen) (Fig. 9), and at the latter is matched by an oblique wall dividing the yard.34 Such walls can occur indoors too, as at Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer (Fig. 9), where the hall is divided by a wall running obliquely across it into two not quite equal parts. Division is not always equal. In several houses a square hall adjoins a smaller room of the same depth which is bigger than any ordinary end or inner room; both are under one roof. One such is Nünschweiler (Rhld-Pf.), where the hall (13×10 m) is larger than the second room, which is approximately square, but the latter is so big that it must be a second hall. Both were subdivided, the principal hall structurally by a cellar with – perhaps – a room above, the smaller hall functionally by an L-shaped paving of rubble stone.35 One of the analogues for Stahl, Neckarrems (Bad.-Württ.), has two only partially separated hall-like rooms; a wide opening (4.5 m) in the wall between them permitted intercommunication, so that here, as at Vesqueville, the hypothetical two households were closely linked in their daily lives. A final example

Figure 9 Divided halls

44

— Hall Houses — is Houthem-Vogelsang (Neth.) (Fig. 9): phase [I] is a large bipartite block fronted by porticus and pavilions; the two rooms in the south hall may belong to [II].

HALLS: A SUMMARY Halls with a remarkable variety of structure and plan are found over a wide area of Europe and in more regions than those mentioned. The categories used above may make the diversity intelligible by using the fragmentary evidence of individual houses and a multitude of examples to establish a coherent type having many variants. Viewed as a whole, they have much in common. All are good-sized buildings and some are very large; all are capable of accommodating more than a nuclear family. To suppose such a family living at one end of, for example, Farmington, and working at the other would be an inconceivably wasteful use of so large a space. If an owning family and its servants, both indoor and outdoor, be thought of as occupying the upper and lower ends respectively, there is little sign of the spatial differentiation that might be expected in a situation where there is great disparity of wealth; for Farmington, and still more some of the bigger broad halls, must have been quite costly to build. In a very few instances there is definite evidence of dual occupation, the most striking being Sinsheim, which has two entrances into the porticus. That villa, like so many, has lesser rooms at both ends of the hall, and these are sometimes the product of a single building campaign, sometimes of gradual growth; the tendency is towards duality, even if it is only manifested in the two pavilions at the ends of a porticus. Then there is the question of the extent to which cattle were stalled in a hall. Even aisled houses in their Romanised forms are doubtful as combined shelters for family and animals. As for other halls, the claims made for many are dubious and can often be dismissed out of hand. The indoor crafts necessary to keep agrarian production going are a much more likely use of the space in most instances. More will be said of this in discussing how hall houses developed (chapter 6) but before that the second fundamental type, the row-house, has to be considered.

45

CHAPTER FOUR

ROW-TYPE HOUSES

INTRODUCTION

S

cattered throughout the northern provinces are many houses which lack a dominant room in the sense that the open hall at Mayen dominates the whole house throughout its history. They take the form of a row of two to five rooms – larger houses will be treated separately as far as possible – which are interspersed with smaller squarish or corridor-like rooms, and will be designated the row type. The underlying concept was first used by Drack in classifying Swiss houses, and was devised independently, though not given that name, to meet the somewhat different houses in Britain.1 At the outset other problems of terminology have to be tackled. The first arises from the presence in the row of rooms, especially where there are five or more, of one somewhat larger than the rest: what to call it? Room use in villas is mostly unknown and the designations given to rooms by Romans are uncertain in their provincial application. In medieval and early modern architectural history nomenclature is just as much a problem, the same name being used by contemporaries for an enormous single-room building open to the roof such as Westminster Hall, for the 5 m-square principal room, lofted over, of a sixteenth-century two-room peasant house, and for the splendid point of entry of an eighteenth-century country house; the continuity of the old name reflects the gradualness of change in room use and the consequent lack of urgency at any given time to devise a new and appropriate one.2 Not only are the uses to which such a principal room was put uncertain, they can often be inferred to change even where the room stays the same size. In this situation ‘hall’ must often serve for want of a better term but consistency is unattainable; where a more definite use can be inferred, living-room or representational room will be employed. A second problem emerges from considering the implications of row-houses for social structure. The recognition that they may provide accommodation for more than one household has led to the borrowing from vernacular architecture studies of the term ‘unit system’; hence ‘unit’ refers to one component element of two or more in a row-type house, each of which corresponds to a household.3 The neutral term is useful in making comparisons, although alternatives will be used, but the real problem is to decide the number of rooms in a unit; different interpretations group 46

— Row-Type Houses — rooms differently.4 A further complication stems from the marked variations of room size – essentially, depth – which can be found in this kind of house.

INTERCONNECTING ROOMS: NEWPORT (I.o.W.) AND LAMARGELLE The first task is to establish the forms that these domestic units might take. Newport (I.o.W.) (Fig. 10) is unusual in retaining evidence of doorway positions and is one of the few row-houses where intercommunication between rooms can be known almost completely and their uses, to a lesser extent, inferred. If porticus-and-pavilions are set aside, it comprises a range of rooms that can be matched at many other sites.5 In the middle the largest room is entered by a wide opening (2.4 m), just inside which, buried in the floor, were two boulders. The larger had a flattened top and the smaller one a hole for a metal pin; both probably had something to do with a shrine.6 At the back of the room, which did not intercommunicate with those on either side, was a hearth. It was hardly a living-room but rather a place, open to view from the porticus, where the household gods were venerated and ceremonial feasts held: a representational room, a place where those symbolic acts were performed, no doubt often reciprocally, which were designed to bind the whole household together. On either side of this, the principal room by size but not ornament, is a suite of two rooms

Figure 10 Row houses

47

— Chapter Four — entered from a lobby, each room in the suite to the left being smaller than its counterpart to the right and probably better finished. From the first the house had a porticus and it is possible that the bath block and right-hand pavilion are both part of the original design, whereas an identical plan at Gargrave-Kirk Sink A (Fig. 12) lacks the baths. Yet another simple version of the Newport plan appears at Lamargelle-Versingue 2 (Côte-d’Or) (Fig. 10). A square middle room, having only a doorway to the porticus – not found, though it certainly existed – is flanked by simpler suites, each comprising a passage leading to a doorway near its blind end, from which an adjoining square room was reached. These passages,7 members of a numerous class, had no other function and will therefore be called transverse lobbies. Newport has rooms which perform a similar function: one is only half the depth of the range, hence small lobby; its elongated counterpart will be called a longitudinal lobby; and obviously these two may vary in their proportions. A lobby of whatever kind ensures privacy in the room it serves by shielding the entrance from the gaze of the curious, whether strangers or servants whose business lay elsewhere. It thus appears that at both Newport and Lamargelle the flanking suites were completely separate; one, perhaps both, had access to a pavilion, and in both villas the underlying concept of a middle room between and independent of two units of habitation, and implicitly in common use, is clear. At Lamargelle the flanking rooms are the same size, at Newport not, so the two suites could be equal or slightly differentiated. Which was the more important, the larger (to the east) or the smaller, is not quite certain at Newport because total destruction of floors in the larger one precludes comparison with the mosaics of the smaller; yet the complete absence of tesserae in the east part of the house argues that there never were any mosaic floors there and that the smaller rooms were the better finished. This contrast between size and finish recurs in other villas, Chedworth, for example. Such sets of rooms may be described by the seventeenth-century English term ‘apartments’, that is to say they provided for two persons or, far more likely here, two households (and their personal servants),8 leading separate lives in many respects but sharing some common activities. Among the latter were some carried on in the large middle room, which, if the shrine is conjectured correctly, was the focus of domestic religious observances and, no doubt, of the feasts accompanying them. This room, entered by a wide opening which was not necessarily closed by doors, and open to the view not only of the households but also, being the first part seen by them, of strangers, contrasts strongly with the seclusion of the apartments. Here all made offering to the household gods before receiving hospitality or transacting business. An alternative to the occupation of each apartment by a household is by an individual – husband in one, wife in the other, each with at least one personal servant. No evidence of such a division of the sexes has been advanced in a RomanoBritish context, so henceforth it will be assumed that an apartment corresponds to a household. In that case Lamargelle and Newport show the number of rooms appropriate to a nuclear family of a certain social position at the time they were built: fewer in the French villa than the English, only one large room and access (presumably) to the nearer pavilion. Since pavilions are, typologically, additions to 48

— Row-Type Houses — the basic plan, it appears that the minimal requirement of a household may have been only a single sizeable room, with access to other facilities.

NEWPORT ENLARGED: SPARSHOLT This form of interpretation can be applied to other row-type villas, most of which have not revealed doorways. Sparsholt (Hants.) (Fig. 68), though, has several. The five middle cells of the principal house [I] are identical to Newport save that they are not a mirror-image pair flanking the middle room (as Newport nearly is); the righthand lobby and large room are interchanged. This illustrates an important principle governing the planning of row-houses, that the rooms of the individual units comprising them can be arranged in any order. But Sparsholt is larger than Newport, having at each end a narrow room of the same width as the adjoining small pavilion, itself no wider than the porticus. These rooms may, indeed, be additions to the original core and are shown as such in the hypothetical development. Fortunately, doorways were preserved in this part. Entrance to the new room at the south end was from the porticus through what may have been in formal architectural terms a pavilion and this doubtless applied at the north end too. A new unit was thus added at each end, doubling the number of households. A feature of Sparsholt requiring explanation, and it is one found in most rowhouses, is the variation of room size. The principal rooms of the two original apartments differ slightly, the one to the south being bigger than its fellow to the north, yet its lobby and adjoining room are smaller: an apparent inconsistency in making the relative importance of the two units clear and one not found at Newport, where all three rooms of the better finished apartment to the left are smaller than their counterparts to the right. In fact, differences of size between units are common, indeed normal, in row-houses, and are observable in the biggest of the kind. This asymmetrical disposition of the two apartments at Sparsholt no doubt had a social basis, a desire to remove the entrance to the inferior, workaday apartment away from the front entrance, and this in turn had an architectural consequence; the three doorways facing the porticus could not be symmetrically placed, as they often were, and as reconstructions of villas almost invariably show them.

LAMARGELLE ENLARGED: DOWNTON A seven-cell plan of comparable size to Sparsholt and with equally instructive detail occurs at Downton (Wilts.) (Fig. 10). A middle room with mosaic pavement is flanked by two equal-sized blocks, each with what looks like a wide transverse lobby between two square rooms. The greater than usual width probably denotes some common use, not simply circulation; hence it can be assumed that the two rooms it serves were used by the same household. This two-unit villa was built with a porticus. By comparison with Newport or Sparsholt the most striking element is a small architectural feature blocking direct access from porticus to middle room; it stands at the back of an internal porch, with 49

— Chapter Four — doorways on either side, through which the two apartments had to be reached, and was probably a water shrine of some kind, the modest counterpart of the wellknown and more elaborate structure at Darenth (Kent) (below, p. 156). If the small middle cell of three is viewed as a transverse lobby, each apartment is a more spacious version of the major apartments in the previous villas, yet the better-preserved part of the porticus to the south reveals a complication. At the end is a pavilion-like room serving the very humble and unpavilion-like function of furnace room, so that it may never have had an internal doorway. Between it and the porch is a small room that appears to have functioned as an anteroom to the lobby proper, as if to shield the porticus from the disagreeable sight of a menial task. That hardly affects the general sense of a plan comprising two apartments, each having access to a middle room of common use which was furnished with a mosaic pavement and opened on to a little nymphaeum. Classification is further simplified by recognising that the small lobby, though a refinement of the transverse lobby, performs fundamentally the same function and is interchangeable with it. These considerations applied to the core of the plan make intelligible other houses with a big middle room and symmetrical or near-symmetrical flanking suites. The best known is Ditchley (Oxon.) (Fig. 10). It must have been an imposing example of its kind, having two good-sized wing rooms in addition to the main range. Little Milton (Oxon.), Hemel Hempstead-Boxmoor II (Herts.) and MaidstoneLoose Road (Kent) have exactly the same core rooms as Ditchley although the small and transverse lobbies change places; whilst, at Walton on the Hill-The Heath, a small lobby leading to one of the two apartments stands at the end of the building instead of flanking the middle room. In houses without a large middle room such as Faversham I (Kent) (Fig. 11) and Gargrave-Kirk Sink D (Fig. 12) transverse and square lobbies stand back to back. These variations reinforce the point made earlier, that the rooms of the individual units comprising a house can be arranged in any order. The principal house at Mansfield Woodhouse (Notts.) (Fig. 11) differs only in that the supposed transverse lobby is wide enough to be virtually a room in its own right; Cobham Park (Kent), destroyed at one end, is certainly of this class; PangbourneMaidenhatch (Berks.) and Deanshanger (Northants.) are variants of Lamargelle. In short, five-cell plans of several variant forms are common in Britain. No conclusive evidence has yet come to light to confirm the idea that houses of this kind were for two households but one tantalising hint that the idea may be correct appeared at North Cerney-The Ditches (Glos.) (Fig. 13). There partial excavation of the first stone building revealed what looks like half of a five-cell plan – a simple straight range – and it has, leading up to the one transverse lobby that was uncovered, a stone-lined path. It may be that a second lobby and path are waiting to be found, analogous to the two parallel approaches found in some much larger villas such as Romegoux-La Vergnée (Charente-Mar.) (Fig. 13) and Winkel-Seeb (Fig. 72). If this suggestion is correct, it confirms the impression given by lobbies that unitsystem villas were the norm in Britain.

50

— Row-Type Houses —

Figure 11 The varied positions of lobbies

THE SIZE AND FORMS OF UNITS Row-houses could consist of several virtually identical units: Hérouville-Lébisey (Calvados) (Fig. 14), Boos-Le Bois Flahaut [I] (Seine-Mar.) (Fig. 14) and Rockbourne W Bldg III (Hants.) (Fig. 42) all have three rooms, each with a transverse lobby. Bramdean [I] (Hants.), where one of three lobbies is small and square, shows the beginnings of differentiation by form; Newton St Loe W [I] carries this further in having three lobbies, all different. Analysis is easy where each room has an obvious lobby, but in many villas at least one living-room stands next to what is either a wide 51

— Chapter Four —

Figure 12 Unit-system villas

52

— Row-Type Houses —

Figure 13 Row houses with two entrances

Figure 14 Virtually identical units

53

— Chapter Four — lobby or a narrow room, and the difficulty is the greater where no large middle room divides the range into apartments. It is hard, in all but the simplest houses, to decide how many rooms constitute a unit – changes over time are likely – and how many units (or households) comprised the houseful. Romegoux (Fig. 13) is an interesting case. It has a large courtyard screened by a porticus, in front of which are two square porches and, between them in the middle, a little open-fronted building that can only be a shrine. Across the courtyard two paths ran to two more porches within a porticus; and it is observable that, whereas the outer porches are placed perfectly symmetrically, the inner righthand porch is slightly nearer the east side than its counterpart. In a villa as rectilinear as this an apparently trifling difference cannot be dismissed as carelessness in setting out; in fact it conforms to the different importance of the rooms – entrance-hall and living-room combined, probably – into which the porches lead, the west one being twice the size of the east. That may imply four units each comprising one room and a transverse lobby – a larger Hérouville-Lébisey: four units of living-space grouped in pairs of not quite equal importance beside a common living-room/entrance.

HOUSES ENTERED AT ONE END Romegoux and Downton show that no simple correlation exists between villa size and unit size, and Farningham-Manor House I bears that out (Fig. 15). As built, it was a series of units on an L-shaped plan, entered at the south end of the wing and so along the porticus; only in II did it acquire an impressively wide entrance in the middle. In the way it was approached Farningham resembles Blankenheim I (Fig. 70), and it has, at the end of the wing, a wide doorway opening into a shallow room which may have an equivalent in the shallow unexplained structure in the German villa. It is inconceivable that this was the entrance9 because, unless it were itself a passage-room with other such behind it, it can only have led to one room. How many units there were is open to argument, as in most other villas of this size. Two parts of the house can be interpreted with reasonable confidence. The wing is a hall-like room 13 with a lobby 12 and was probably a workhall like the

Figure 15 End entrances

54

— Row-Type Houses — comparable room in Blankenheim I. At the other end of the porticus, furthest from the entrance, is the largest and most private apartment, comprising a transverse lobby and two rooms 1, 3,10 like the Downton units or Ewhurst-Rapsley 6 V (Fig. 41). Probably the rest comprised three units. Two units which were, functionally, a mirrorimage pair with square lobbies, had intercommunicating living rooms 6 and 7, the doorway between them being well established, and a third, in the corner, had a transverse lobby. If the suggestion of intercommunication between units be thought to invalidate the whole mode of interpretation, early modern houses show this need not be so. Where units form two detached houses they could be joined corner to corner to permit intercommunication, and where they form a single range a doorway may be found linking different units, exactly as at Farningham.11 Whatever the truth of this, an important aspect of Farningham is that the accommodation it provides might elsewhere have been divided between several buildings, as at St Lythans-Whitton (Fig. 65) or Gargrave-Kirk Sink. Upchurch-Boxted (Kent) has points of resemblance to Farningham-Manor House but the report has too little detail to allow the comparison to be pursued. Another member of the same class may be Alresford (Essex); in [I] it appears to have been entered at the end of the left-hand wing and so along the porticus, and in [II] acquired a second wing, like Farningham. Reach (Cambs.) and Ridgewell (Essex) may have developed in a similar way. Once variation in the number of cells in units within the same house is recognised, the way is open to interpret other villas, particularly those entered along the porticus rather than at right angles to it. Aylesford-Eccles I (Kent) (Fig. 66) becomes more intelligible if the unusual open-ended room at the south end, like that at Farningham I or its simpler version at Blankenheim I, is seen as a shrine, and to give some idea of what it may have looked like, the shrine (aedicula) from the fort at Mainz (Fig. 37)12 has been modified with a king-post roof (Fig. 66); and the ornament would be simpler, achieved with plasterwork and paint. There, the person entering paid his respects before proceeding towards the two transverse-lobby units and the larger one with superior floors beyond. But did all five rooms with tessellated floors belong to that unit? The transverse lobby and adjoining rooms certainly, by analogy: the narrow north end room presumably; the biggest room in the house, between the superior unit and the rest, perhaps not. That may have been common to all the units because a number of villas seem to have one room additional to those which adjoin lobbies, as at Box (Fig. 48), Compton Dando-Littleton (Som.) and St MichaelGorhambury. Even if the five end rooms prove to have been wrongly divided up, the unit system offers the only reasonable interpretation of so long a range. Continental examples are less easy to find. Generally, end-entrance plans have more complex forms of lobby and will be discussed later (chapter 5). One particularly relevant house which deserves mention here is Ormalingen (Switz.) (Fig. 15), which was recognised from the first as having been entered at the south end of the porticus. It differs from the British houses in having, at about a third of its length from the entrance, a wall in which stood a doorway of large dimensions; tufa voussoirs of its round-arch head were found.13 Its purpose is clear, to form a social barrier between the room at the south end – a workhall? – and the three apartments, although its 55

— Chapter Four — placing hints that the south apartment may have been of slightly lower status than the other two.

THE LONGITUDINAL LOBBY A lobby of one form or another is an essential component of all but the simplest row-houses. Besides the two already mentioned, a third kind lies parallel to the front wall of a house and provides access from the entrance – usually the porticus – to a principal room at each end, while directly in front of the entrance is a third inferior room – or sometimes two – that may have been reached either from the lobby or from the major rooms. Entry into the house in this way is so unimpressive by comparison with entry into a hall or even into any good-sized room that it must have connoted some important aspect of social structure – taken here to be duality of power or ownership. Houses of this type demonstrate as clearly as any the joint occupation implicit in a particular architectural concept, despite the small size and restricted development of many of the examples. In its simplest form the type occurs at St Lythans-Whitton VIII W (Glam.) (Fig. 65), in a house comprising an elongated lobby serving two rooms, that to the left being larger than the one to the right. How the room behind the lobby was used, whether in common or in connection with only one of the large rooms, is unknowable. In the light of Huntsham N (Herefs.) (Fig. 16) – the misnamed ‘cottage-house’ – where the corresponding space is divided into two unequal rooms, the former may be the more likely. Huntsham, though, has its own problem, for it was not divided simply into major and minor units; instead, the larger major room (1) adjoins the smaller minor room (3). As with other small distinctions of this kind, the social nuances underlying them must have been of considerable importance to be worth bothering about. This is precisely the kind of counterpoise of rooms found in quite different circumstances, whether in the conjunction of the larger pavilion with the smaller end chamber of a hall or, in a row-type house, that of the larger lobby with the smaller main room. Although difficult to understand, this very common balancing of component parts of a house must correspond to some aspect of provincial Roman social structure that required concrete expression; and it provides a contrast to those houses where the larger major and minor rooms go together, such as Gargrave-Kirk Sink C [I] and (excluding the wings) Eaton-by-Tarporley (Cheshire) (Fig. 16). It is

Figure 16 Longitudinal lobbies

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— Row-Type Houses — precisely the smallness, variation and repetition of these architectural differences that shows how important they were. Some subtler model of society is needed to explain them than the current ones of a quasi-manorial lord or capitalist farmer or even a farmer operating with little more than his family’s labour. Where the room behind the lobby was structurally undivided, it may have been a common workhall, as the Dwelling House II at Langton (Yorks) (Fig. 3) implies. It began as a superior version of St Lythans-Whitton W, the big room to the left having a hypocaust and its fellow to the right another occupying only half of the room. In the narrow room behind the lobby were a small plunge bath – presumably used in common – and a furnace serving the right-hand room. The use of the rear space seems to have varied between a workaday service room and two high-quality rooms, but probably it was always shared between the apartments. The most ambitious application of the longitudinal lobby in a British villa is at Wellow (Som.) (Fig. 16), where, despite the lack of doorway positions, the implied pattern of circulation is clear. An unusually large middle room with a mosaic floor is flanked by transverse lobbies which may have connected the porticuses; more importantly, each led to a longitudinal lobby at the rear, from which opened two square rooms. The purpose of this was to ensure the upmost privacy for the tworoom apartments. A further point of interest is that, in a large and well-appointed house, the accommodation deemed necessary for the personal use of those persons occupying the most important suites was no more than two rooms – exactly the same as in Downton and many others. It exemplifies the truth of Laurence Stone’s observation that a certain minimum number of rooms were required for daily living by members of a given social class or order, and this deserves to be kept in mind when alternatives to the unit system are put forward. In a few instances the longitudinal lobby is wider than appears necessary for its primary function. Cenero-Murias de Belono (Oviedo) N (Fig. 12) is one such. It is as though the lobby were used as work- or living-space for the family occupying this unit. Similar conjunctions of three rooms are widespread, occurring in Belgium and Germany, for example.

LONGITUDINAL LOBBIES AND REVERSE SYMMETRY Architectural duality is a constant theme in the houses of the Roman provinces and takes a great variety of forms. One of them, very obvious once remarked, is reverse symmetry, that is to say the provision of two like rooms or sets of accommodation facing in opposite directions, a peculiarity which has been noted occasionally in individual buildings14 but has never been examined as a recurrent phenomenon. Of the several forms it takes, only those including a longitudinal lobby will be considered here and of these the most easily explicable is Beadlam N I (Yorks.) (Fig. 17). It had three doorways at the front, an imposing one 2.3 m wide in the middle and one near each end, sited as near symmetrically as the plan allows. Their placing and associated features demonstrate how closely architecture mirrors social relations. In I, access is principally by the two side doorways. The left-hand one opens into a longitudinal lobby 5 and so to the west unit, comprising rooms 7 and 8 and also a 57

— Chapter Four —

Figure 17 Reverse symmetry

little workhall (6) in which was the furnace for 7 and two sets of iron tools. At the east end, where the porticus terminated,15 the doorway opened into a general-purpose living-room heated by an ‘oven’, and just inside is a doorway into what became in II the best-appointed room in the whole house, embellished with a tessellated floor; thus the external doorway and the best-room doorway stand in exactly the same relation as does the doorway from the lobby and that into the pavilion (8). The two apartments shared a common middle room like the one at Newport and, like it, were entered by a wide doorway. A shrine might have been expected about here in I, something a little more elaborate than the pot (for a votive offering) just beside the west doorway. The plan is in effect a rearrangement of a row-house with a middle room flanked by two two-room units, into neither of which does an additional room (6) fit easily: a situation resembling that in several other villas except that in them the extra room either always was, or developed into, something far superior to a workhall. Beadlam N suggests that the middle room (4) – a modest representational room – and the workhall (6) were held in common by the two households. The two rooms were easy of access for both, and the reason for cutting off the workhall by a doorway may be because it was in the inferior part of the house rather than for any utilitarian considerations of the smoke and smells arising from its use. Beadlam is the most intelligible example of a mode of planning found in much of the Empire and over several centuries, the reverse symmetry of the side-by-side halls at Francolise-San Rocco [I] (Italy) (Fig. 69) being the earliest example. However close the formal likeness of the two sets of rooms, they were rarely identical, a condition paralleling the small differences between the units of row-houses. High Wycombe (Fig. 17) is another British house organised on this principle. As at Beadlam, the longitudinal lobby at the front is cut off by a wall and doorway from the middle room and the one at the rear is open to it, and since no menial or dirty task was performed here the difference must have a social explanation. More difficult to understand 58

— Row-Type Houses — is the function of such elongated and at the same time so extraordinarily narrow (6×2.5 m) rooms. The proportions can be matched in continental row-houses but there the greater width of the main range, usually 8–10 m, makes it earlier to envisage a use.16 Bedrooms were the excavator’s suggestion, but whether rooms were specialised to that extent is open to doubt, and if they were, why were they the closest to the public space of the entrancehall? Whatever they were for, this house is one of the few which do not have the principal rooms in the main range. But of its bipartite character there can be no doubt.

HOUSES WITH TWO FRONT ENTRANCES The idea of joint occupancy aroused instant hostility when first mooted. Two defences were erected against such unwelcome thoughts.17 Thus Ferdière dismissed the hypothesis of collective property as the result of (among other things) ‘erroneous interpretations of plans of the living-quarters of villas’, and ‘adventurous hypotheses on the symmetry of villa plans’; yet he, like his compatriots, has never explained the plan of the little villa at Maulévrier (Fig. 13), first published in 1836 and republished in 1934 by the man he acknowledges as ‘the great specialist on Roman Gaul’, Albert Grenier,18 or even that of Romegoux, well excavated in the late 1930s. Almost everyone takes it for granted that a country house or a farmhouse has a conspicuous main entrance, with a minor one at the back for servants or farm-hands and, probably, a doorway into the garden: only archaeologists and architectural historians can take two front doorways for granted. Yet two doorways can only be intended for two sets of persons – who must surely correspond to two households, not family and servants – to enter separately; and Maulévrier can be interpreted in these terms without straining the evidence. It is divided internally by a cross-wall midway between the two front entrances into two parts of equal size but with a different disposition of rooms. The wider entrance leads to a unit like the equivalent part of Sparsholt, the narrower to a Downton-type unit, and the different kinds of lobby show that each carried a social meaning. Romegoux (Fig. 13) tells a similar story on a larger scale; it is important for the informative detail lacking at Maulévrier. Two porches in front of the outer porticus match two within the inner porticus; parallel paths like those at Winkel-Seeb connected them. The house comprised, on the west side, what appears to have been a common hall, the largest room in the building, which was flanked by two units, each with a transverse lobby and living-room. A third such unit lay to east, followed by a somewhat enigmatic room in which was a sunken structure of squared masonry; this contained a considerable quantity of cinders and put the excavators in mind of a vasarium or wash-house.19 Last came a unit identical to the three preceding ones but superior to them in having, in part of the lobby, a hypocauston20 giving indirect heat to the larger room. In all this, only the alleged wash-house causes surprise, its lowly function sitting uneasily with the porch in front of it. A more likely analogy for a room so approached is Downton, with its nymphaeum in front of the common middle room. Viewed in this light Romegoux has two rooms of common use – a representational room and a larger hall (workhall?) – each standing between two domestic units. It is a grander cousin of Ormalingen (Switz.) or Aylesford-Eccles (Kent). 59

— Chapter Four — Hemel Hempstead-Gadebridge Park (Herts.) (Fig. 13) is more easily understood in a general way than in detail. On the north side, from which the villa must have been approached in III and IV and probably throughout, are two small projecting porches21 proclaiming two points of entry and two apartments behind them. The west porch stands opposite what looks like the central lobby of a two-room unit, the east porch does not relate to anything in particular, and all that can be said is that the five rooms broken by two lobbies constitute a row-house to which two entrances would be appropriate.

FOUR-CELL HOUSES Houses comprising four cells are common and typologically they precede the fivecell category with a middle representational room. One group has back-to-back lobbies, usually one transverse and one small, for example Faversham I.22 The different kinds of lobby reveal that some social distinction, some difference in status and authority, existed in the kin-group. How big a change this represents from the earlier situation, where villas like Hérouville-Lébisey [I] or Boos [I] had three units differentiated only by size, is hard to say, but probably the effect on those who entered such houses was as great as must have been the contrast in the storeyed houses of post-medieval England between a cross- (or through-) passage and a lobby entrance.23 Faversham I (Fig. 11) was entered from the south by a timber veranda not covering the full length of the building. Verandas coupled with differently placed lobbies occur in other four-cell row-houses such as Welwyn-Lockleys I (Herts.), Brixworth I (Northants.) (both Fig. 11) and Chilgrove 2/II (Sussex) and there too they do not extend the whole length.24 The reason must be that it was not needed; a utilitarian shelter went only as far as the final point of entrance, that being the extent to which protection from dripping eaves was needed. In that case the north unit of Faversham I had a doorway either into the transverse lobby (for otherwise the lobby had no conceivable purpose) or, as the logic of the veranda dictates, into the hall-like livingroom (1), where it was opposite a hearth, as in many hall houses. Brixworth I (Fig. 11) lacks the transverse lobby but is otherwise like Faversham I; the point where the veranda ends suggests that the doorway into the unit further from the house entrance was in room 2. The different placing of the square lobby in Welwyn-Lockleys I makes it impossible, strictly speaking, to be sure that it comprised two units. Only its general likeness to the others suggests that is so, in which case the veranda terminated exactly as at Brixworth, at the entrance to the bigger room (4) of the far unit. If that were so, the doorway faced a hearth, and there may have been another doorway into the end room (5) placed comparably to that at Beadlam N I into room 2. The general type, irrespective of the position of lobbies, is common. At Gargrave D [I], Cléry-sur-Somme (Fig. 11) and possibly Hartlip W [I] (Kent) the lobbies are back to back, at Ellesborough-Terrick (Bucks.) (Fig. 11) they are at the ends, and Combe St NicholasWadeford W (Som.) is probably the same but with two transverse lobbies. As far as their primary purpose is concerned, the two kinds of lobby are interchangeable.25 60

— Row-Type Houses — Four-cell houses with a single lobby are thought to comprise two units because those with two lobbies do, but it is conceivable that the two rooms extra to the obvious unit were a common hall and a one-room apartment. One corollary of the row-house style of life, that entry into a living-room should be through another and usually smaller one, makes it unlikely that a unit of whatever size would be reached through a common hall. Thus consideration argues in favour of a second two-room unit at Welwyn, and in other adequately excavated and fully published examples the same conclusion is probably justified, but one French villa with a comparable plan certainly incorporated a common hall. Civray-Le Poirier Molet (Cher) (Fig. 18) comprises three square cells and a transverse lobby at the end, and, since the middle cell of the three is open to the porticus, that part must have been public space common to all. It was roofed over, no doubt, so that apart from its having a front opening of full width instead of a wide doorway, this room is the counterpart of the middle room at Newport. One further example, one of the most frequently quoted British villas, deserves discussion – St Stephens-Park Street (Fig. 11). In VI (the first Roman phase) it was a four-cell building, including what was either a narrow room or a wide transverse

Figure 18 Compact row houses

61

— Chapter Four — lobby (2.4 m) over a cellar.26 It had a porticus on the west side which is likely to have been continuous around the south end; and if, as is generally assumed, the house was approached in VI from the east, as it certainly was later, a porticus existed there too. That assumption is compatible with the longitudinal lobby (2) on that side serving the big room (1), and from it opened a second lobby leading to a small room with a hearth (3). The whole is the equivalent of one of the apartments at Newport, which leaves the putative narrow room over the cellar looking like a lobby to the second large room.

THE COMPACT ROW TYPE In central and south-west France many houses, most of them known from aerial photographs, have a more compact plan than those so far described. From five to seven rooms are arranged within a rectangle having proportions of about 5:2 or 5:3 and at first sight these houses, which are mostly of symmetrical plan, can have absolutely no relation to the row type. On closer examination the rooms vary in size in much the same way as do row-houses, so that comparison between the two categories is enlightening. This kind of plan is obviously unrelated to the hall type, and because its elements correspond to those of the row type and could just as well have been strung out in a line, it will here be called the compact row type. The relation between the orthodox type in its several variations and the compact version can be demonstrated by some examples, all in the department of Cher. It may be appropriate to begin with an unquestionably orthodox villa. La GuercheLe Grand Chausseroi W comprises a porticus and three cells, the middle one with a wide opening to the middle room, Newport-style. The right-hand cell is like one of those at Maulévrier, the left-hand one an undivided elongated room; each is assumed to be a unit or apartment. A kind of plan not diverging much from this appears in the villas of Primelles-Champ Chiron (Fig. 18) and Morthommiers-Le Crot; both have a porticus, a middle space completely open to it, and a room on either side. But the middle space, which must have been roofed, is subdivided, and here is the only difference between the two houses. Morthommiers has, partitioned off at the back, a narrow room looking like a lobby giving access to one or other flanking room. Primelles has in the corresponding position a chamber wide enough to be either an anteroom serving the same purpose or an inner room to the hall/porticus; similarly transformed, it, too, would not look amiss. A still simpler combination of the basic three rooms is found at Lazenay-Les Sales. There the porticus as an architectural entity is suppressed, to be replaced, for the two rooms beside the hall, by front lobbies like the one on the right-hand side of Maulévrier; the person entering presumably came into the hall by a doorway in the middle, to be received there or to proceed through a lobby to one of the apartments. This is not so different from Lamargelle except that entry at Lazenay is into a public space which is also living space. And with Vallenay-Patureau Fourneau the concept of transformation within the row type is complete: it is like a poorer version of Boos or Hérouville-Lébisey with each unit turned on its side so that the lobby is at the front, thus eliminating the need for an orthodox porticus. In such a case the middle 62

— Row-Type Houses — lobby, being at the front, may rather have been a short porticus giving access to the adjoining lobbies. Again a comparison with orthodox row-type houses comes to mind between this arrangement and the quasi-pavilions at Sparsholt through which the end rooms were presumably entered; the difference lies in the proportions of porticus to lobbies. Sparsholt has a bearing on another house, one known through aerial photography, at Fromentières (Mayenne). The core comprises three square cells separated by two transverse lobbies; but the middle cell, which has a transverse lobby-like room at the rear, is open to the porticus, which terminates, like the British villa, in two small square rooms. Only one British house, at Brislington (Avon), probably, but not definitely, had a middle room completely open to the porticus. Both these villas are minor variants of the row type. Two general observations can be made about the compact row type. The first concerns the porticus which, where it formed an undivided space with the common middle room, must have been part of the common living-space, and to that extent resembles the porticus of other villas where the porticus was in all probability enclosed, such as Great Staughton (Cambs.) (Fig. 40). That leaves unresolved the purpose of the narrow room at the rear of the hall and, since it appears in four houses of the small sample available, it must be important. Its lobby-like appearance may be misleading; the presence at Vallenay of such a room, in addition to the three at the front, argues for some other function than an aid to circulation. One possibility, suggested by the position of this small room, is that it accommodated a shrine. Uncertainties of this kind, though, may be held to matter less than the overall resemblance of the variant forms to the row type proper; if so, a general likeness permits a linkage with more complicated versions of these houses which can be found in other parts of France. At what point do divergences from the concept of a row-house demand the creation of a new type? The question arises with a villa in Aquitaine, Lussas-etNontronneau (Fig. 18), where the principal house, though composed entirely of features found in row-type villas, looks very different from any other so far discussed. It is entered from a colonnaded porticus through a quite large porch – large enough to provide a waiting space for servants – and so into the rear living-quarters. Beside the porch to the left is the exact counterpart of the middle room at Newport, with its front walls reduced to pilasters to give an opening the full width of the room – like Brislington, perhaps. It no doubt served as a representational room and perhaps contained a shrine. The smaller room on the other side of the porch, which also has a wide doorway, may have been a small workhall/kitchen. In the rear part of the house the most notable feature is the unequal size and reverse symmetry of the two apartments to the left and right; both preserve a fireplace backing on to the partition between room and lobby and situated in a characteristic relation to the doorway. Between them is what is described as a court, although it must have been roofed. These dispositions afforded maximum privacy for the apartments, divorcing them from the public spaces of the house to a degree impossible in all but the largest rowhouses such as Bierbach (chapter 5 and Fig. 19). The reverse symmetry of Lussas-et-Nontronneau finds not a parallel but an echo in the mirror-image pair of rooms of the only German example of the compact row 63

— Chapter Four — type. Hummetroth-Haselburg (Hessen) (Fig. 18) has, in its two principal rooms, the thickened walls found in Jemelle-Neufchâteau (Fig. 46) or Bierbach; they mark off the most important inner part of the room and are the equivalent of a dais in a hall or the apsidal termination of some grand rooms in other villas. The pair of rooms on each side of the middle hall-like room and the little apsidal room could be strung out in line like an orthodox row-house. Looking at Lussas-et-Nontronneau and Hummetroth as row-type derivatives may be thought to strain classification to its limits. Nevertheless, it is useful to regard them thus on the grounds that the transformation of component parts, of which these villas are such striking examples, is merely done in a more radical way than in most forms of the type, while the whole retains the underlying concept. That is important for social history.

64

CHAPTER FIVE

DEVELOPED FORMS OF ROW-HOUSE

M

any houses comprise a string of rooms of various sizes that do not relate one to another in any clearly discernible way. They have two features in common, one being the absence of anything that could be described as a dominant hall, the other that a number of usually squarish rooms are separated by cells divided into anything from two to five rooms. That is enough to put them into the row type, and, as before, only the main range, the essential core of the building, will be considered. At the outset, though, it has to be admitted that many of the larger villas can be interpreted in more than one way in detail; the forms which lobbies take vary greatly and only the additive principle underlying the planning of this kind of house is insisted on. Two comparatively uncomplicated examples will show a line of development from the row-houses described earlier.

KIRCHBERG: THREE-ROOM AND LOBBY UNITS Küttigen-Kirchberg [I] and [II] (Switz.) (Fig. 19) began as a house of seven cells, the ends of the first build being marked, as Drack observed,1 by thicker walls. Being sited on the edge of a fairly steep slope to a river, it was necessarily entered by a rear porticus, very little of which remained. A middle room (5) has on each side two formally identical units, each a more advanced form of those at Downton (Wilts.) and virtually identical with the domestic end of Schupfart II (Switz.) (Fig. 71) or Ferpicloz [I] (Switz.).2 The result can only be described as symmetrical, yet the two smaller rooms (3 and 4) in the west unit are very slightly narrower than the corresponding ones (6 and 7) in the east, and this, in a building set out with characteristic Roman accuracy, is certainly intended to express some difference. So slight a difference of size must be a matter of status rather than function; it can hardly have been perceptible even to those living there, although it may have been emphasised by equally small differences in architectural ornament or decoration. It is not easy to appreciate the significance of such small distinctions between one part of a house and another from a plan alone, yet they must have been thought very important to be so carefully made. Again, a comparison with seventeenth-century English houses may help. A minor manor house in Hertfordshire, Aston Bury, has two staircases, to all intents and 65

— Chapter Five —

Figure 19 Lobbies and room groupings

66

— Developed Forms of Row-House — purposes identical, serving a not very large straight range of rooms. The details are not exactly the same but only someone very familiar with both could distinguish one from the other in photographs. Yet the staircase projection at the upper end is very slightly wider than its fellow at the lower end and projects slightly more – something that is only appreciated at the rear of the house, and more apparent to the modern eye after looking at a plan, so used are we to accepting near-symmetry as true symmetry. So, too, in a farmhouse at Pirton, Walnut Tree Farm, which has two formally identical porches: yet the one at the upper end is just a little wider than the other at the lower end.3 To people lacking the printed material through which most knowledge is acquired today, these small differences no doubt leapt to the eye and conveyed an instant social meaning, as they certainly did in Roman Britain. To return to Kirchberg, like many continental row-houses it has, not the squarish rooms that were the rule in Britain, but oblong ones: 1 and 10 are half as long again as they are wide. If they were entered at one end, the first third of the length must have been, to some extent, a passage-room; if near the middle, the room was effectively divided into two parts. In either case the superior end was probably at the display front of the house (south). Further differentiation is provided by the front porticus, embellished with pilasters to give the house an imposing appearance when seen from the valley below. It is wider at the west end where the very slightly inferior unit is; and that the narrowing is intended to proclaim the superiority of that end is confirmed by the nature of the additions in [II]: service rooms, including a kitchen, to west, a suite of rooms with hypocausts and mosaics to east. Kirchberg, larger and more complicated than Downton or Newport (I.o.W.) shows how architectural features apparently without significance are given meaning when interpreted in a social sense. A further point is that the two smaller rooms reached off each of the transverse lobbies, though formally similar to the square lobby and adjoining room of Newport, in fact perform a different function. These considerations are observable in other villas like Kirchberg. Another Swiss villa, Vicques [I], though more pretentious, with the porticus extending forwards to pavilions totally unconnected with the main domestic activities, is otherwise almost identical in the body of the house except for the different sizes of the smaller rooms in the two units; and here the existence of a rear porticus, which Kirchberg [I] must have had, is well established. A larger version appears at Landen-Betzveld [I] (Belg.). It has the same plan as Kirchberg [I] with the addition at each end of a smaller unit comprising a large room entered from a transverse lobby.4

THE ELABORATION OF UNITS: LAUFEN-MÜSCHAG As provincial Roman society developed, more varied and complex kinds of household required the elaboration of the lobby-and-three-rooms type. It is easier to point to the new forms than to explain them, as Laufen-Müschag (Switz.) (Fig. 19) shows. There phase [I], excluding the porticus-and-pavilions, resembles Kirchberg [I] in a general way, with two units, each with a transverse lobby, flanking a middle room (6),5 yet on closer examination much is different. 67

— Chapter Five — The north unit has a room (2) twice as long as wide, so it must have been used somewhat differently from the corresponding room in Kirchberg and still more so from that at Landen. The lobby (3) is awkwardly shaped because the other rooms off it are of unequal width. It must have been important to make room 5 wider and to enter it at the far end, not at what could have been the easiest point architecturally, where it adjoins 4; and from these assumptions it follows that the important part of 5 is likely to have been at the east end.6 Doorways into the lobbies and middle room would give the symmetry normally sought.7 An oblong shape for the middle room (6), assuming it had a common representational function, is appropriate. At the far end, no doubt, was a shrine or seat of honour to be used on formal occasions, including ceremonial dining, and approached with the degree of respect the occasion required. The south unit comprised, on one side of the lobby (9), two rooms (7 and 8), much like those at Kirchberg, and on the other the largest room of all (10/11), half as big again as its counterpart (2) and looking like a domestic hall. The large pavilion (15) which adjoins it has three hearths of various periods and is probably the workhall.8 This analysis shows that the two units of Vicques had acquired different functions and that the house had lost the near equality of the two parts of Kirchberg. Clearly we are dealing with a different kind of houseful. Rooms 3–5 are important indicators of a new style of life not so far observed in row-houses and present a conjunction of shapes reminiscent of the block of rooms in the middle of Köln-Mungersdorf (Nordrh.Westf.) (Fig. 71). Laufen appears to represent rather different styles of life in the two households, one of them markedly superior. It is still a row-house but has lost the ethos of earlier ones. One other Swiss villa deserves mention in this connection. Zofingen has two cells subdivided in the same way as rooms 3–5 at Laufen, but they are extraordinarily elongated and in inverse symmetry. I do not accept Drack’s view that this arrangement and that at Laufen are the result of alteration.9

BIERBACH: HOW MANY UNITS IN A ROW-TYPE VILLA? Row-houses develop in size as well as in the variety of their lobbies and some are so large that they must consist of more than two units; thus, even if the interrelation of lobbies and rooms is hard to explain in detail, their general significance may be clear enough. At Bierbach (Saarld) (Fig. 19) the essentials of the latest phase are simple: excluding the middle room, five large rooms are served by four lobbies.10 The front elevation of this stately house was dominated by a wide portal leading into the porticus and on to the wide doorway of a very grand hall. At the ends of the porticus two lesser entrances appear originally to have led directly to lobbies: to the left a transverse one (between 18 and 20), to the right a half-depth one (between 2 and 5) for although no doorway from porticus to 3 was found, the major room 2 is unlikely to have been reached only through two lobbies and another large room. The different forms of lobby, paralleled in so many row-type houses, evidently connoted a social difference in the eyes of anyone entering the house; the smaller lobby led to the most important private room and the most important household. 68

— Developed Forms of Row-House — To demonstrate the importance of rooms 2 and 20 each has, at the end furthest from the doorway, a thickening of the walls, whose purpose was probably to support a vault or canopy of timber over the socially important end of the room, on which the narrowing would focus attention; and standing in opposite relation to the porticus, these rooms provide an instance of reverse symmetry. At Bierbach this arrangement appears to be secondary if, as the report argued on the basis of masonry joints, the west end room (20) originally intercommunicated with the adjoining pavilion;11 but that leaves the wall thickenings incomprehensible. A large and imposing villa with two social focal points so carefully balanced in importance cannot be the residence of a single proprietor and his immediate family: it must correspond to some larger kin-group. There are two more lobbies. As Kolling, reporting on excavations of thirty years earlier, noted, the block of four rooms 6–9 to the west of the narrow corridor connecting the porticus to a rear doorway stand in close relation to one another; in fact they and 5 look remarkably like St Stephen-Park Street VI (Fig. 11). In this little block Bierbach reveals another manifestation of reverse symmetry: one of the two large rooms, 5, is entered at the south end, the other, 9, from the north, a point which may have a bearing on the British house. At the other end of Bierbach the relation of the remaining rooms to one another is less clear. The large room 16, a workhall and kitchen, was entered from the porticus through a square lobby (14). Opening off it were two rooms (15 and 17) which were probably both service rooms and places where those responsible for food and cooking slept. The function and point of entry of the remaining room (13) are unknown. What emerges from this analysis is that a villa as large and architecturally impressive as Bierbach was far from the conventional interpretation offered for it as the house of a great proprietor – a wealthy man who built, near the country town of Schwarzenäcker, a summer seat appropriate to his style of life.12 The wealth is all right, and quite likely the town connection too, but it was as much the seat of a kingroup as of the person who was its head and representative for the time being; certainly not just a summer residence. It can be interpreted as a houseful comprising two major households centred on 2 and 20; two lesser ones in 5 and 9; and a sizeable fifth one in the service block (12–17) which is centred on 16. In this last group of rooms, 13 may have been ancillary to the great hall, perhaps a shrine room like the comparable room at Kinheim (Fig. 24).13 That leaves rooms 18–20, which do not intercommunicate with 15–17, as a separate household. It is all a far cry from a luxury villa like Mayen-Allenz (Rhld-Pf.) or even the sophisticated Blankenheim III (Fig. 70) with its dining-room and baths. The same problems appear, commonly with far inferior evidence on which to base discussion, in many other elongated houses and also in a few unusually complex row-houses. A remarkable example of the latter kind is Cartagena (or Cabo de Palos)-El Castillet (Murcia) (Fig. 19), which is divided by two transverse lobbies into three units. Those to the west and east are nearly identical, with three rooms and a longitudinal lobby; the middle one is simpler, with four rooms; all are somewhat more developed forms of the Bierbach units. The key to understanding such villas is to break up hitherto unintelligible ranges by describing and classifying the several types of lobby used to articulate them. 69

— Chapter Five —

LOBBY TYPES The Longitudinal Lobby: a Variant Form This distinctive room grouping, comprising a room or rooms opening off a lobby parallel to the porticus, was described earlier: Wellow (Som.) is a good example (Fig. 16). Functionally it is equivalent to a transverse lobby off which two rooms are reached, as at Kirchberg. It has a variant form in which the two rooms opening off the corridor are of unequal size, so that the smaller one has the appearance of one lobby opening off another; in effect, an L-shaped lobby, the smaller part of which is separated by a wall, in which (it is here assumed) was a doorway from the larger. St Stephen-Park Street VI (Fig. 11) is an example, where the smaller lobby may have provided a way through to the rear (west) porticus without the need for an outside doorway in the adjoining large room. It has a French parallel. Hombleux (Somme) has the more elongated rooms characteristic of so many continental villas and an unusually wide porticus facing away from the courtyard. If entry be assumed on that side, the plan is exactly like Park Street. Sometimes longitudinal lobbies appear in pairs, set in reverse symmetry on either side of a transverse lobby from which, it is reasonable to deduce, they were reached; but that deduction awaits confirmation from the discovery of doorways. Vouneuilsous-Biard (Fig. 20) has a group of rooms like this on the north side of the main block, so that the longitudinal lobby further from the porticus formed, with the transverse lobby, an L-shaped approach to the room it served. At Sainte-Solange (Cher) a similar grouping incorporates two principal rooms of unequal size. In such a plan the narrowness of the spaces in question tends to confirm them as being lobbies, since any other use, given their proportions, is hard to imagine apart from fantasies about staircases. Haccourt I (Belg.) (Fig. 20) has this kind of room disposition in a modified form, the longitudinal lobby (5) being wider and more like an ante-room. In the light of earlier comments about lobbies as expressions of social difference it is worth noting that Haccourt has three kinds of lobby and that the south end (rooms 7–11) resembles Faversham I or Ridgewell (Essex) adapted to the greater width of a continental house. The L-Lobby A variant of the quasi-L-shaped lobby has no doorway between the two parts and so wraps unbrokenly round two sides of a room. To understand how such an arrangement functioned requires positive evidence of where the doorways were and, equally important, negative evidence showing where they could not have been, because the several positions possible imply different ways of use: whether the doorways were at the ends of the lobby or near the corner of the room matters a good deal. Unfortunately such evidence is scarce. A striking example of the L-lobby occurs at North Leigh-Shakenoak B IIA (Oxon.) (Fig. 20) where, assuming the porticus to have an entrance in the middle, another doorway opposite it would have led straight into the lobby. What was the 70

— Developed Forms of Row-House —

Figure 20 Lobbies and related forms

71

— Chapter Five — purpose of guiding those entering the house into a minor space rather than, as in many villas, an important room? Two factors may have produced this situation. The first is that the house is essentially like Maulévrier in being divided into two not quite equal parts, but differs from it in that the two units have been moved sideways to accommodate a lobby; and the second is an unusual degree of concern for the privacy of the superior unit in a house of this size. The lobby may well have given access to the other room of the middle range which had a hearth and appears to have been given over to workaday activities including, perhaps, cooking. That leaves the porticus providing access to the cellar and what were structurally wings, not pavilions; the general appearance of the house is conveyed by the model from Fontoy-Moderwiese (Lorraine) (Fig. 20). Lobbies like that at Shakenoak occur at North Wraxall (Fig. 44) and in the little house at Hales (Staffs.); both lead to the principal room, whereas a similar lobby at Folkestone B does not. The L-lobby could be used to achieve somewhat different purposes, as appears from the two ways it could be situated. At Shakenoak and its like the room approached from the L-lobby is at the rear of the house, whereas at Latimer (Bucks.),14 Piddington (Northants.) and Selongey (Côte d’Or) it was at the front; the former looked out over a garden or fields, the latter over the farmyard. Selongey is different again; the room reached from the L-lobby may in [I] have been the principal of two units. This difference of detail is important and may be compared to the way the two longitudinal lobbies at Beadlam N (Yorks.) (Fig. 17) and High Wycombe (Bucks.) (Fig. 17) are approached. In all three instances it has to be presumed that one lobby was entered by a normal-sized doorway and the other by a much larger opening of the same size as the structural members framing it; and it was itself framed, perhaps, by pilasters of wood or plaster. This was one of the many ways the variations in the status of the units accommodating households were distinguished. Many houses have two lobbies but comparatively few have two of the same type, so that, in Britain, a transverse lobby in one unit is commonly matched by a square one in the other. L-shaped lobbies are much less common but Upchurch-Boxted (Kent) – a villa remarkable for the variety of ways in which rooms are articulated – has two, albeit with unusual proportions because the lobbies are so wide that one of the rooms is reduced almost to insignificance. Piddington resembles Boxted to the extent that it combines an L-shaped lobby15 with a quasi-L-shaped one, that is, a longitudinal lobby opening off a transverse one. L-shaped lobbies, on present showing, are rarer in continental villas, although discoveries in recent years suggest that more will appear. One such, Selongey, has already been mentioned and Hamblain-les-Prés (Pas-de-Calais) (Fig. 67) appears to be another. It has, in the largest structurally undivided cell, an unexplained L-shaped space which encloses and, so far as the plan indicates, is not partitioned off from what is called a floor (aire); this must be an L-lobby.16 Champagnole (Jura), in the part excavated, has one cell similarly subdivided. In Germany at Stadtbergen I (Bay.) (Fig. 20), an L-lobby may have existed from the first or it may have been added shortly afterwards. In making comparisons between continental and British villas their respective sizes should be remembered; Champagnole has, adjoining the L-lobby, a hall-like 72

— Developed Forms of Row-House — room some 15×8 m which is not far different in size from the open hall of an English villa. The formal approach adopted in this book takes little account of such matters, important as they are, because they cannot be considered systematically until the groundwork for comparison has been laid.

Lobby, Room or Both? Lobbies vary in width relative to the rooms they serve or enclose. Sometimes what is formally a lobby is too wide to be a mere passage and in a few cases is clearly as important as the room itself. At Zofingen two rather narrow elongated cells are described as having ‘small enclosures’17 within them, or a room within a room; yet, that said, the inner rooms are so small and so elongated – one is 4.8×2.4 m, the other 6×2.1 m – that they must surely be service rooms, but to what? Puzzling though these two subdivided cells are, they must have been of some importance because they are in reverse symmetry. Fremersdorf, discussing the Köln-Mungersdorf villa, drew attention to a comparable, though not identical, grouping of three rooms (13/14, 15, 16) at the middle of the house (Fig. 71); the undivided space 13/14 may be called a widened lobby. He noted the lack of a doorway between 13 and 14 as something unusual but certain, there being no foundation for a threshold between them,18 and explained the rooms thus: entrance by 14 from the front porticus led to the passage (room) (13) and on either to the rear porticus or through the service room (15) to the kitchen (17);19 the structural block or bay is completed by the dining-room (16). This is the only explanation that has been offered of how such a lobby/passage might have functioned and virtually the only attempt to emulate Oelmann on Blankenheim. It is not satisfactory insofar as it involves two passage rooms (13 and 15), and 17 is an unlikely kitchen, but Fremersdorf deserves credit for this all too rare essay in interpretation. Blankenheim in phase IIIA (Fig. 70) acquired a group of rooms closely resembling those at Mungersdorf. A new and much smaller principal room (35) was created and, because of its wide doorway, was interpreted as having the same representational role as its much larger predecessor (33/38) but also as the oecus or dining-room. No explanation of the adjoining rooms, a corridor (34) widening at the rear into 33 from which 36 – a ?service room – was reached, appears in Oelmann’s report. The space at the end of the corridor (33) may have been what was known in English country houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a waiting-place, where servants congregated after a task was done to await their next instructions. In those houses another requirement is recorded that may have had a counterpart in the better houses of the Roman provinces, that of a surveying-place where a supervisor could monitor movements between kitchen, food stores and dining-room in order to ensure efficient service and, no doubt, deter theft.20 That cannot have applied at this particular spot but such a function should be borne in mind. An Italian ancestry might be expected for an element of the plan far removed from the comparatively simple, though subtly expressed, requirements of earlier villas in the north-western provinces. Although no systematic search has been made, 73

— Chapter Five — the villa of Orazio has an arrangement comparable with that at Mungersdorf, in the cell to the east of the large middle reception room.

La Roche-Maurice Widened lobbies of any kind are not common. They appear in two very much smaller French villas, La Roche-Maurice/Valy-Cloistre (Fin.) (Fig. 20), which is the only one fully published, and Saint Acheul W (Somme). Its plan, which is said to be ‘perfectly logical’,21 has been equated, in a misuse of terminology remarkable even by the customary standards of archaeologists, with the British ‘cottage-house’. In fact, La Roche-Maurice is instructive about why L-shaped and widened lobbies are as they are, and about the close link between their shape and the ways in which rooms were distinguished to make their relative importance clear. Furthermore, because doorway positions are so rarely found, the plan deserves discussion for the light it throws on much larger row-houses. As in so many houses, the middle room has a wide entrance; here 5, unusual by its shallowness and smallness, is dominated by a 4 m-wide opening to the porticus and must have served some representational purpose. The doorways into the lobbies 4 and 7 were close to the wide middle opening and carefully differentiated by width – 1.2 m and 0.8 m respectively – so that anyone approaching knew at a glance which one it was appropriate to use. The narrower of the two led into the lobby (7) and so through another wide doorway (2.2 m) into the hall (8), which was a kitchen and may have had something of the character of a workhall. Facing its entrance was the next widest doorway into a smaller room (6) which was no doubt the most important in the house from a social standpoint. Beside the doorway is space enough for servants to stand or sit as they awaited summons. On the less important side of the house the lobby (4) apparently led only to the narrowest of the internal doorways and the smaller of two rooms, 3. Restrictions on excavation precluded discovery of the doorway into the remaining room (2), which was assumed to have had an external entrance in the south wall.22 If this is correct it has functional consequences; it suggests some use connected with the farm, rather as one pavilion at Marshfield (Glos) was used as a smithy. Nothing was found to show how room 2 was used and it may have been a workhall having the same relation to 3 as the hall (8) had to the innermost room (6). The villa of La Roche-Maurice was interpreted very differently by its excavators. In their opinion the open-fronted middle room was where a landed proprietor periodically sat behind a table to collect rents in kind from tenants waiting in the corridor, who then made their way out by a kind of ‘one-way system’:23 an astonishingly explicit equation of Roman villa and nineteenth-century country or manor house, and at the same time a confusion of functions as between owner and bailiff. But when far-fetched comparisons are set aside, what was the composition of the houseful? It was obviously far removed from any hypothetical kin-group comprising more or less equal households. Fundamental to any interpretation is the way the lobbies divide the house into two parts, leaving the shallow room 5 with its inordinately wide opening 74

— Developed Forms of Row-House — as part shrine to the household gods, part representational room, in common use. Beyond that, much depends on whether the rooms are envisaged as being either living-rooms or bedrooms or as having a dual purpose. Room 8 is the easiest to interpret. To judge by its size and open hearth – in both respects it is much like the hall of the Frocester Court (Glos.) villa (Fig. 69) – it is more than a living-room for the occupants of the principal private room opposite; rather, it can be envisaged as a hall for a household living and working there. Across the lobby, room 6 provided for a somewhat superior household which may well have shared the hall. At the lower end are, again, two rooms, 3 being for a household of lower status and 2 given over entirely to work except, probably, for housing the persons whose work it was; and if this room had only an external entrance, theirs was a menial position. All that can be said about Saint-Acheul (Somme), given an inadequate report and small-scale plan, is that it appears to have at the south end two rooms and a lobby resembling rooms 5-7 of La Roche-Maurice, and, forming a near-mirror-image to it, three more rooms.

ROOM PROPORTIONS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS Lobbies in their various forms occur throughout the western provinces and the houses in which they appear are recognisably of the same generic type. Nevertheless, as between British and other row-houses, a difference is apparent: in the former, rooms are mostly squarish; in the latter they are commonly oblong and sometimes almost passage-like, as in Haccourt I and Puig de Cebolla (Valencia) (Fig. 20). Rooms so different in shape cannot have been used in the same way. An oblong room entered in the middle of a long side is thereby divided to some degree into two parts; entry at one end automatically creates lower and upper ends, the former being to some degree a passage space to reach the latter, the more private inner part. These considerations are less true of a square room. Entry near a corner can be aided by the position of a hearth or fireplace, by furniture or by a mosaic to create an upper end or superior part, but such effect does not stem naturally from the shape of the room; in an oblong room it is unavoidable. Where an oblong room appears to be a representational room, like that at the middle of Laufen-Müschhag (Switz.), it can reasonably be assumed that the far end from the porticus was the point of importance where there was a place of honour for the household deities or the head of the houseful. It is not easy to see how a room measuring 4×9 m could be used for feasting and entertainment of a rather formal kind, although its proportions are not very different from the middle room at Hummetroth. Conceivably some non-structural distinction of function existed, as, for example, between an area where offerings were made and the remainder which was used for ceremonial dining on religious or social occasions. Dual use is possible and to some degree likely in any oblong room. The shapes and conjunctions of rooms will have conformed to their intended use, even where, as must often have been the case when buildings were altered, architectural considerations limited the possibilities. To understand room use at all several assumptions have to be made, the most important of which is that each unit 75

— Chapter Five — or apartment was occupied by a separate household. A household, which varied in numbers according to the life cycle, is here taken to be a group of persons occupying an apartment by virtue of status within a kin-group; it might be a conjugal family or an elderly couple or even a single person, according to circumstances. A further assumption is that at least one personal servant slept in each apartment. In provincialRoman society under-employment is likely to have been endemic and servants correspondingly plentiful; and before the introduction of bells operated from a distance, servants necessarily had to be close at hand at all times. In many, perhaps most, households, both master and mistress will have had valet or maidservant in attendance at all times and one or two more servants available on call. Room and lobby shapes all had to provide for families in the early modern sense of the word, which included servants.

ARTICULATION OR SEPARATE ROOMS? The subdivided cells punctuating the rows of large ones are of very varied kinds and it can be hard to tell room from lobby. One guiding principle is that passage-rooms are unlikely to have found favour. A particular pitfall in the present approach is how to distinguish a narrow space leading to a room – a lobby – from a not much wider one which served some other purpose in addition to intercommunication, or was not a passage at all but a narrow inner room. In villas of considerable depth from front to rear the division of a cell into two compartments by a longitudinal wall need not imply that the smaller one was a lobby. The point is illustrated by Liestal-Munzach (Switz.), where unusually detailed evidence is available (Fig. 20). A transverse mosaic-floored lobby (4) leads to a room with a hypocaust and mosaic (1) – a well-appointed and comfortable room, approached in suitably dignified fashion and shielded from the curious at the front of the house. Between it and the porticus was, not a lobby, as might be argued from a less detailed plan, but a small room entered only from the porticus. To some extent proportions provide a safeguard against wrong interpretation, and only where the small room is quite narrow is it virtually certain to have been a lobby. Even then, the alternative of a passage from one flanking cell to another remains a possibility, provided some plausible need for it can be suggested. This, incidentally, is the objection to the common interpretation of transverse lobbies as passages, in houses with no rear porticus like Frocester Court I: what is the point of an enclosed way from front to back? Where the rear space of a subdivided cell is wider, it may not have been limited to transit but be best described by the term ‘anteroom’, a place where people wait before entering a superior’s room or where some business is first transacted; but since those purposes cannot be discovered archaeologically the word will rarely be used. These considerations explain why a simple form of lobby may be hard to identify, as some examples show. In the north half of Anthée (Belg.) (Fig. 19) the cell comprising rooms 40/41 looks exactly like a room and longitudinal lobby, yet the doorway positions show this to be wrong. Room 41 is entered from the west porticus, and doorways into 40 were not found, so that even if the two rooms intercommunicated they cannot have been 76

— Developed Forms of Row-House — related as lobby and inner room. Nor is 41, as its position might suggest, a superior room reached from the transverse corridor and so placed for privacy, like the one at Liestal. On the other side of the corridor, room 46 looks as if, with 40 and 41, it formed a unit comparable to the domestic end of Schupfart I; yet it was entered at both ends and cannot have been used in the same way. Although villas of the size and, particularly, the complexity of Anthée present unusual difficulties, the articulation of simpler plans only one room in depth is not always easy to understand, as Stadtbergen I (Fig. 20) shows. It had two rooms, 5 and 11, which might be considered longtudinal lobbies to the adjoining larger compartments (6 and 12) of their respective cells and which were approached by the transverse lobbies 7 and 13; and, although 7 is uncomfortably wide for a lobby, the two blocks of rooms can be seen as two units or apartments. A third comprises the lobby (3) and room 4. That leaves 8, 9, 10 in the middle, bearing some resemblance to the core of North Leigh-Shakenoak IIA, to account for. But an alternative interpretation is possible if Reutti’s opinion, that 7, 8, 9 were originally one room, be accepted. That provides a hall-like room fronted by a portico of four columns in the middle of the house, and two threecell apartments entered at the ends by 3 and 13.24 So far, an appropriately classical, symmetrical exterior; to go beyond that and interpret the apartments presents difficulties. The north end is easy: entrance by lobby 3 into the living-room 4 at the west end and thence to the lobby 5 and inner room 6. This pattern is not repeated to south, where the lobby 13 leads to the longitudinal lobby 11 and so to the inner room 12, but leaving the large living-room 10 approached by 11, which is something it would be hard to parallel. Neither solution is wholly satisfactory, and only further evidence of doorway positions will bring certainty. Stadtbergen is an instance of the problem posed by Drury with reference to simpler plans,25 and Farningham-Manor House I (Kent) would be another if no doorways were known.

BLOCKS OF SMALL ROOMS A number of villas incorporate a group of four small rooms of different sizes at one end or, occasionally, both ends. Köln-Mungersdorf and Newel (Fig. 24) are examples in hall derivatives. A rare instance where such a configuration produced evidence of doorways is Les Mesnuls (Yvelines) (Fig. 21), where a block of four rooms (1–4) was quite separate from three larger rooms, all linked by doorways, which form the rest of the house. A strange feature of the plan is that the sole room with a hypocaust is only 3.5×2.8 m, so small that it ought to be what Black has distinguished as a hypocauston – a small room giving indirect heat to the adjoining rooms;26 yet its warmth benefited only two lobbies and the porticus. This oddity apart, the four rooms look like an apartment for a household of superior status to whoever occupied the ?representational hall 5 and the unit comprising 6 and the workhall 7.27 Similar groupings of rooms, bigger than those at Les Mesnuls but small by comparison with the three very large principal rooms, occur at both ends of the Swiss villa of Kulm. At the west end are four intercommunicating rooms reached from a transverse lobby. A group of five rooms at the east end is better articulated by a 77

— Chapter Five —

Figure 21 Unit variations in row-houses

transverse lobby giving independent access to four of the five rooms; perhaps one did not belong. In this group only two rooms intercommunicate. Although these two blocks are not easy to explain in detail, the differences between them, despite their similar size, and their siting at opposite ends of the house, must correspond to the existence of two households of high status. Kulm is a highly developed row-house on the grand scale, suitably enriched with mosaic floors and marble panelling. For a villa published as long ago as 1761 we know a good deal about it.28 The end blocks at Kulm are unequal. Other villas have somewhat simpler variations on the same theme, notably Olfermont (Haut-Rhin) (Fig 41), where four small rooms are grouped together at what looks like the east end of the original main range.

TRANSFORMATION OF LOBBIES The idea of transformation has already been used to create the compact variant of the row-type house; it is applicable to lobbies too, as has already been implied with a comparison of Wellow and Kirchberg (above, p. 70). A very simple case is the lobby off which opens a second, shorter lobby from which the room within it is reached. The first lobby can be either transverse or longitudinal; assuming that the room is entered by a doorway at the far end of the combined lobby and that the focus of attention is in a constant relation to it, the only difference made by turning the lobbies through 90 degrees is to the lighting of the room. In a room of some importance, that will affect how those entering will see anyone occupying a place of authority, whether in direct light from a window or against a small amount of indirect light from the porticus. Something comparable can be envisaged with the small square lobby of the type found at Newport. There it and its adjacent small room are set transversely to the main body of the house – they had to be, because the range in which they stand is narrow. In a larger continental villa it was possible to turn the lobby-and-room around to lie parallel with the porticus, although no villa so far has revealed where the doorways were. But such a transformation would make a small part of Anthée (Fig. 19; rooms 55, 56, 59) intelligible, and also Saint-Julien and Aubigny (Somme), known only from aerial photographs, may be susceptible of the same explanation. Caution is necessary in applying this kind of interpretation to pairs of small rooms at the rear of a cell, at the far end from the porticus. Only if there is also a rear porticus, 78

— Developed Forms of Row-House — or a transverse lobby gives access to it, can one of the rear rooms be regarded as a lobby; in Switzerland, Sarmentsdorf (Fig. 21) is an example. It is not obvious that the lobby-and-room are secondary, as Drack supposes,29 but even if they are, the interpretation may stand. Otherwise, and this is the usual situation, they must be a pair of inner rooms at the end of a comparatively large living-room facing either a porticus, as at Trouey (Cher), or a peristyle, as at La Roquebrousanne (Var). In that position the two little rooms stand in the same formal relation to the larger room as do those at Quinton (Northants.) or Rothselberg (Rhld-Pf.) to large open halls.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DISPARATE UNITS Row-houses comprising two units with identical lobbies occur fairly frequently, Boos, Downton I, Lamargelle (Côte-d’Or) and Kirchberg [I] being examples.30 Many, though, are like Faversham I or Ditchley I in having two lobbies of different form, placed in series or back to back. In houses with a large middle room, like Ditchley, there is comparable variation. And size makes a difference: in the bigger continental villas a British square lobby and its accompanying room could be placed parallel to the porticus, not at right angles, while functioning in exactly the same way. If that is the situation in a simple villa it is hardly surprising that the lesser rooms in a large elongated one should show the variety of size and shape they do, nor that they are not symmetrical. Moreover, if the preceding classification of lobbies and their association with other rooms as household units is anything like correct, it breaks up long rows of rooms into intelligible groups and provides a reason why they invariably differ. That general explanation by no means accounts for every big row-house fully, for in each case there are likely to be uncertainties concerning the size of units and the purpose of particular rooms – whether lobbies, anterooms, waiting-rooms or what were called in the eighteenth century closets, which were small rooms opening off larger ones and adaptable for many purposes. It also leaves open a question about certain rooms slightly bigger than the normal cell which are not necessarily linked to lobbies and have something of the appearance of a workhall. In the kin-group hypothesis adopted here to explain the additive nature of villa planning, attention has several times been drawn to slight variations in size of the principal rooms. Different forms of lobby were another expression of those variations, one which is likely to have been enhanced by treating the doorways facing the porticus somewhat differently. These ways of displaying status were, in all likelihood, primarily for the benefit of members of the group. Strangers must occasionally have visited a villa and when they did they are likely to have been shown to the appropriate room or apartment by an inferior member of the houseful; then they, too, will have understood the code of ornament and position which expressed the relative status of the two or more households. A plan such as that of Bierbach permits the appreciation of all these points except for the ornament.31 A few long villas show little distinction between the superior and inferior ends, for example L’Ecluse-Leckbosch (Belg.) (Fig. 19) and some fairly large villas such as Fitten (Saarld), which lack any clear articulation by lobbies, are incomprehensible in detail yet certainly belong to the category of row-type villas. 79

CHAPTER SIX

DEVELOPED FORMS OF HALL HOUSE

H

all houses grew from simple beginnings in ways which reduced the importance of the hall itself to the point where the typological connection is almost lost. In taking up the story from the elementary forms of addition mentioned earlier, it has to be recognised that, as with row-houses, the many variables make a tidy account of their further development impossible. A hall house could gain additional accommodation by the addition of rooms at both ends of the hall, at the rear, in wings or by encroachment within it, and all of these might be accompanied by removal of a function to another building. An almost invariable addition is the porticus-with-pavilions, combining architectural display with extra rooms whose relation to the adjoining rooms in the main range is usually uncertain; and it needs to be emphasised that addition is used in a typological sense and does not refer exclusively to a later phase of construction. End additions could take the form of a single narrow room; a number of rooms, from two to four, of uniform width, sometimes with a passage-like room as well; two or three rooms of different width, sometimes separated into two blocks by a passagelike room or entrance; three or four rooms, uniform or not, similarly separated; and all these may be present at either end of the hall in almost any combination. Virtually every villa excavation report treats them simply as a collection of rooms without meaning or significance beyond their number and the quality of their decoration. Since little attempt has been made hitherto to understand them in social or functional terms, several houses will be examined in order to reveal common elements underlying their diversity. They will be treated, not in typological order from simple to complex, but by discussion of their possible purpose.

NARROW END ROOMS The simplest kind of addition is the narrow undivided room extending the full depth of the hall from front to back. Few such rooms have produced evidence of flooring or fittings. Köngen I (ex-A) (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 74), exceptionally, revealed what was thought to be a stone cistern, 2.5 m in internal diameter and 3 m deep.1 Although its purpose is unknown, it implies some utilitarian or service purpose. Evidently this 80

— Developed Forms of Hall House — was the lower end of the hall, a point confirmed if we assume that the cellar was in its customary position near the upper end. Weitersbach (Bad.-Württ.) I (Fig. 69) is another house with a narrow room at each end. The one to south is entered from the hall, that to north perhaps in the same way2 but with doorways also into both a pavilion and the rear porticus; it can scarcely have been more than a wide passage. As usual, the cellar was at the upper end of the house, being placed beneath a small room which opened off the hall and did not communicate with the porticus.3 Although there can be little doubt that one end room in Weitersbach I served as a passage, the need for the function is not obvious. As will appear later, long narrow rooms are so common in German villas that other purposes must be envisaged, however difficult it is to discover them. At Manderscheid (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 39) the narrow room (8) could only have linked two pavilions and it was certainly not a porticus of any kind, so storage related to activities in the hall appears to be its most likely use. Similar considerations apply to Weitersbach I (Fig. 69) and Heppenheim (Fig. 6). Mundelsheim (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 22) has a plan resembling Manderscheid. Paret,

Figure 22 Halls with long end rooms

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— Chapter Six — who dug it, was clearly troubled by the long room 5 and sought to explain it as being ‘probably divided by two cross-walls into three rooms (bedrooms?) accessible from the middle hall’;4 but no evidence of such division is recorded and parallels argue the contrary. Moreover, he does not mention an element of the plan which may relate to the end room, namely, that the pavilion 6 does not relate to the end of the hall in the usual way, like 7, but is reached by a small oblong space. It looks like a lobby, but why there? Not simply to shield the doorway into the pavilion; that would normally be achieved by the little square projection from the porticus found in some houses, as at Gayton Thorpe [F] (Fig. 39). This lobby may have been entered from the porticus by a doorway on the side nearer the hall, then a turn to the right led to the end and the pavilion doorway and one immediately to the left into the narrow room. Whatever the true situation, it suggests a fairly close connection between porticus and end room but one stopping short of the intercommunication found at Weitersbach I; and if that be accepted, a domestic or service use is far more likely than the agricultural ones sometimes proposed. Two Swiss houses have a long narrow room at both ends of the hall.5 Grenchen (Fig. 22) has a room (3) at the upper end which is about 12×4 m and one at the lower end (7) which is marginally narrower, both being devoid of floors or finds. A little privy entered only from 7 may imply a domestic use for the latter.6 The end rooms at Wahlen (Fig. 22) have similar proportions, and their description as ‘porticuslike annexes’ or ‘side-porticuses’7 does not advance understanding; it argues a disproportion between living space and circulation space that requires explanation – a problem recurring in villas like Hemel Hempstead-Gadebridge Park III (Herts.) (Fig. 13). A further description of these extraordinarily proportioned rooms as ‘decorated living-rooms’8 is reinforced by the way the house was entered; a rear doorway is diagonally opposite another into the north room, so that they stand in much the same relation to one another as the hall and inner-room doorways at, for example, Frocester Court (Glos.) (Fig. 69). This likeness is the stronger for the absence, first, of a middle doorway into the hall from the porticus and, second, of a hearth, for although one was looked for in the centre of the hall and not found, that may be because it stood nearer the north (or inner) room doorway. On the available evidence the long rooms in both villas appear to have been domestic and that must influence interpretation elsewhere.

END ROOMS AS BYRES? The longest of these end rooms, at the end of the hall-house at Betzingen (Bad.Württ.), is five times as long as it is wide (20×4 m) and was regarded from the first as a cattle-byre, ‘not only on account of its elongated form’ but also because its position conforms to Vitruvian precept.9 Since it has been presented by Applebaum in the standard history of English and Welsh agriculture as one of a number of houses incorporating rooms which are claimed, largely on the evidence of proportions and position, as byres,10 his argument requires discussion, irrespective of how closely other examples conform to Betzingen. Applebaum’s interpretation is founded on an ‘especially close correspondence’

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— Developed Forms of Hall House — of plan detected by de Maeyer11 between an eighteenth-century farmhouse at Limerlé (Belg.) and the hall-type villa of Sauvenière (Belg.) which had been interpreted in a largely agricultural sense on its publication in 1900.12 De Maeyer, remarking that the ‘porticus-type’ did not wholly go out of fashion in later times – in other words, that it survived for a millennium and a half – assimilated the Limerlé house to the Roman one and accepted nearly all the room uses first proposed for the latter except that the central yard, in deference to Oelmann, became a barn flanked by stables.13 Applebaum accepted this, balking only at the idea that the porticus sheltered carts and farm implements. Chance likenesses between whole plans of houses built some fifteen hundred years apart are not likely to add to understanding, nor is another of Applebaum’s suggested byres, at Gerpinnes, convincing. There an apartment is said to be divided by ‘internal masonry counterforts’ into six stalls, one of which had painted plaster walls and which the excavators thought of as stores or lodgings for domestic servants.14 Then follows a string of British villas – Cherington, Colerne, Rodmarton, Titsey – with long compartments at the end of the hall: ‘their dimensions as well as their positions correspond so closely to the examples at Gerpinnes and Betzingen that their identity as accommodation for livestock can hardly be doubted’.15 In the end, all that remains of this particular argument is Sontheimer’s belief that the long room he excavated at Betzingen in 1905 was a byre. So it may be, for it is hard to think of any more likely use, but it has to be recognised as the conjecture, unsupported by evidence, that it is. Nor do parallels help, since they too show no clear signs of cattle being stalled in them: for although drains are not essential to byres16 it might be expected that one or two would have them, or a mucking-out hole as in Welsh long-houses, or two or three doorways to avoid the inconvenience and waste of space caused by cattle moving along them. Among the parallels for this feature of Betzingen is Neckarzimmern-Stockbronner Hof (Bad.-Württ.)17 (Fig. 27), where a long narrow room (7) on the south side of the hall was entered by a full-width opening next to a probable doorway in the west end of the south wall. The width of the opening into the room implies some nondomestic function, perhaps a cart-shed.18 A similar room (8) seems to have existed on the other side of the hall. Another example at Niederzier-Hambach 403 (Nordrh.West.), though producing no evidence of use, faces the working side of the farmyard and away from the secondary domestic building. Given the uncertainty of the evidence, it might be wise not to interpret the end rooms cited by Applebaum and others like them such as Courcelles-Urville (Fig. 22)19 as cattle-stalls until some positive indication appears.

END ROOMS ORGANISED AROUND LOBBIES Halls having two rooms at one end, or sometimes two rooms flanking a lobby, have already been touched on (chapter 3). There are more complex groupings. In hall houses, as in row-houses, any articulation of rooms is achieved by lobbies of one form or another. Thus Mayen VI (Fig. 1) included a rebuilding of the east end to provide a passage from the lower end of the hall to the garden(?), off which 83

— Chapter Six — opened an oblong space possibly divided into two rooms by a timber-framed(?) wall of which there were only scanty remains.20 No mention is made in the report of the two doorways shown on the plan which, since they would have proved the rooms’ existence, are presumably an interpretation rather than a factual record of the excavated remains. Oelmann’s judgement was not influenced by any comparisons, yet now Evelette (Belg.) (Fig. 23), a house where the hall is less dominant than at Mayen, has exactly the same combination of lobby and two narrow rooms at the lower end; a combination also seen in a different context at High Wycombe (Bucks.) (Fig. 17) in the two pairs of rooms of unusual proportions, each reached from a lobby or passage. A more striking likeness between halls and row-houses appears in the domestic end of Schupfart (Fig. 71) and the apartments of Küttigen-Kirchberg [I] (Fig. 19) or Vicques [I] (all Switz.), all of them having groups of three rooms organised around a transverse lobby; and it has been suggested that the incompletely explored east end of Tholey-Sotzweiler (Saarld) (Fig. 23) was like this.21 This kind of plan was developed at Newel (Rhld-Pf.) (Fig. 24) by replacing the largest room with two squarish ones (5 and 6) and having a short lobby (8) branching off the main one (4).22 Schupfart III (Fig. 71) turns this arrangement through 90 degrees, reduces the lobbies

Figure 23 Halls with complex end blocks

— Developed Forms of Hall House —

Figure 24 Halls with double-depth end blocks

to an L-plan and adds a small fifth room, a hypocauston, providing indirect heat to the adjoining rooms. Those who lived in the end blocks of Schupfart and Newel must have organised family relations in much the same way as their counterparts at Kirchberg and Vicques. Yet another hall house with rooms looking like a row-house is Koerich-Goeblingen 1 I (Lux.) (Fig. 1), where at the east end, a lobby like that at Newport (Fig. 10) is flanked by two square rooms. The result looks exactly like the principal part of the little house at Drax (Yorks.) and is no different in principle from the more elongated Langton Dwelling House II (Yorks.) (Fig. 3).

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— Chapter Six —

END ROOMS: INZIGKOFEN AND ITS ANALOGUES A cursory glance at German hall house plans reveals that few have the same number or size of rooms at each end. One explanation could be that the two ends were given over to different functions, the obvious analogy being the parlour and service quarters at opposite ends of the medieval English hall – not that even that distinction is clear in every instance. Another is that their occupants differed in status: family and servants, parents and children, are possible divisions of the household, or functional and social components could be combined in different ways in the two ends. These considerations underlie the following analysis. The most elementary division is between houses where the two ends are more or less equal and those where they are conspicuously unequal. In the first category, if the simpler ones with only two rooms such as Leutersdorf [I] (Rhld-Pf.) (Fig. 45) be excluded, Inzigkofen (Bad.-Württ.) (Fig. 27) is the best example. It was not entered in the same way as the similar house at Stuttgart-Stammheim (Fig. 27), at the end of the rear aisle; rooms line the hall from front to back. At the west end the narrow room 5 is probably an annexe to 6 and entered from it, because there is insufficient clearance to allow a ‘bridge’ like that which appears to have existed at Stammheim (below, pp. 100–1). At the south end the square room 11 and the smaller one 10 may correspond to the room and annexe 6, 5 opposite, while the third room (9) is of quite different proportions, more than twice as long as wide. A feature these rooms have in common with those of row-houses is that hardly any two are the same size, and the difference between them is so small that some social purpose must underlie it; and the exception, 9, is so much bigger than any other that it must have been used for common activities, forming public rather than private space. Since this room cannot have been entered at the porticus end, and an entrance in the middle would be uncomfortably close to the cellar staircase, the doorway is likely to have been at the west end and, like that to 6, facing the middle of the hall. Which was the superior end of the hall, north or south, is not obvious from the plan alone, and the unusual feature of two ramps implies either a partition dividing the exceptionally large cellar into two parts, which was not found, or common use of the whole. Using the analogy of row-houses, Inzigkofen provided for at least two households, north and south, but more likely three with a further one of unknown size, and of lower status, in the hall. A measure of equality between two sets of rooms is expressed differently at the end-entrance hall of Mauren (Bay.) (Fig. 23): a hall, that is, with porticus-and-pavilions on one of the shorter sides. The hall is flanked by two ranges of rooms identical in depth but of markedly different width. Presumably each set fulfilled very similar purposes for different numbers of people or, more likely, for people whose different status was expressed in terms of space and comfort. Entrance to the house proper was by three openings of graduated size between columns, the widest into the hall, a narrower one to the right-hand rooms23 and the narrowest – the most restrictive and exclusive – to the bigger left-hand rooms. The right-hand range is like its counterpart at Inzigkofen, first a lobby-and-room unit, then one of two rooms, a pattern repeated opposite. Whatever functions were performed in room 9 at Inzigkofen were either carried out in the hall at Mauren or not at all. The differentiation so 86

— Developed Forms of Hall House — carefully observed in the rest of the building did not, curiously enough, extend to the pavilions, which, unlike those in many villas, are of equal size. Despite this, Mauren reinforces the impression of duality so commonly found in villas. No two houses of any size are really alike. The most that can be expected is that they show resemblances, as Schambach [I] (Bay.) (Fig. 27) does to those just discussed. One feature which sets it apart from similar broad German villas is the slope from rear to front, so sharp that it is said to have been terraced – something which is very hard to envisage.24 It has a probable row of three columns and two responds at the rear of the hall, their positions being marked by gaps in a stone kerb or foundation, and at each end is a row of rooms, four to north, three bigger ones to south. The latter are interrupted by a passage from the south porticus by which the house was entered; the west porticus probably stood over an undercroft, like Stammheim, or a crypto-porticus like that at Buchs (Switz.). Surprisingly, the west side lacks pavilions; perhaps a doorway can be envisaged to separate the two porticuses on the lines of the arched opening at Ormalingen. Even though Schambach is different from Mauren in several ways, they have a family resemblance in the width and number of rooms in their respective ranges, and in their large halls. Whatever kind of ownership be envisaged for the inhabitants, it can hardly be the conventional landed proprietorship proposed here as at other villas as unlike it as La RocheMaurice (Fin.) or Aylesford-Eccles. The social implications of these houses can be carried further. Inzigkofen, Mauren and Schambach all have two sets of rooms which can properly be called apartments and are separated by a room of common use so large that they are appendages to it. This resembles the situation in row-houses with a large middle room except that there the work element is transferred to a separate workhall. There is nothing to suggest that either row in Inzigkofen and its like was devoted solely to service or storage or work purposes unless the relative width of those at Schambach be interpreted that way. At Mauren inequality of the two sets of living accommodation is obvious enough in a plan yet in the building itself only the graduated entrances revealed it; within the hall they are likely to have presented, if not a symmetrical appearance, at least a uniform spacing of openings. The dual activities of the occupying group, however shared, were so important as to find expression in the cellars: two staircases at Inzigkofen, a division into two parts at Schambach. Although dual use is apparent in all of them, the three houses reveal the direction of change, from near-equality of status at Inzigkofen to the predominance of one unit at Schambach. When all three houses are compared with simpler hall-house plans like Serville (Belg.), Quinton (Northants.) or LudwigsburgPflugfelden (Bad.-Württ.), it is apparent that an altogether more complex and potentially more stratified society is emerging. Very few house plans, excluding the simplest, show true symmetry. Among the small number of villas in the Netherlands are several which come near it, and one, Buchten (Fig. 23), was built symmetrical and never altered. At each end of the large hall a passage between two square rooms leads to a sizeable hall-like room (7×4.5 m), the whole forming a three-room unit essentially like those at Kirchberg but entered differently. Just what that difference signifies is not clear but for the present 87

— Chapter Six — the likeness, bringing together elements of plan not hitherto thought to be connected, is sufficient.

DISPROPORTION BETWEEN THE ENDS OF THE HALL In many houses inequality between the ends is apparent even in the first building phase. Nuth-Vaasrade (Fig. 23) is a Dutch example; Manderscheid (Fig. 39) is perhaps an extreme case, having at one end three small rooms, two with hypocausts, and at the other the undivided room mentioned earlier. Otherwise it was symmetrical, with porticus-and-pavilions on both display front and entrance front, and two doorways on the north side. This unusual degree of symmetry makes doubtful the assumption that the simpler end was no more than a service room or servants’ accommodation. The two doorways might, at a pinch, be thought to provide for family and servants, but if that were so, two external doorways would be even more necessary. In fact, here as much as at Inzigkofen, everything speaks of equality except the long narrow room, which was perhaps living-space, as was conjectured at Wahlen or Grenchen, though here markedly inferior. Stuttgart-Stammheim (Fig. 27) shows less discrepancy between the two blocks of small rooms. At the north end of the east row (the upper end) 3 has, surprisingly for so small a room, a doorway in the middle. To south the largest room