ABSTRACT
Housing was an area in which you might suppose that the aristocracy would rejoice at the opportunity to display wealth and exclusivity. Yet the march of sophistication was not at such a quick step here as elsewhere. Reviewing developments over the period from 1000 to 1300 we find one obvious change of great consequence: the move from wood to stone as a building material for lordly residences; but this was a slow shift, spanning two centuries. It was not until the end of the twelfth century that poets and writers assumed as a matter of course that the aristocratic house would be built of stone. It is at this point that there is at least one example which confirms the lesser standing of wood. The timber hall of the bishop’s palace at Hereford (one of the few such to survive to be recorded) was built late and copied the form of contemporary stone halls. It declared by this affectation that it was the hall in stone which was taken to have prestige. Earlier generations thought differently, seeing length and size in a timber hall as a sufficient declaration of wealth and status. Such seems to be the message of Beowulf. What its poet saw as most impressive about the timber hall Heorot that Hrothgar built was its hugeness: ‘greatest of houses’. After that came the rhapsodies on the plates of gold nailed to its beams, the carved drinking benches, the tapestries and trophies. There was also some idea in the ninth century that growing sophistication demanded bigger and better residences: the greater the man, the more he excelled his forebears in the elaboration and magnificence of his hall. Asser observes of Alfred that amongst all his tribulations, the king was able ‘to erect buildings to his own new design more stately and magnificent than had been the custom of his ancestors’.1
