On the market place of Lavenham, Little Hall is a medieval drapers' hall house, the only example of domestic architecture of this type open to the public in the village. Its interest lies in what it shows, very concretely: how a medieval house was 'modernised' in Tudor times, matching the evolution of Renaissance domestic comfort.
The house of the Caustons
Little Hall was built in the 1390s for the drapers' family the Caustons, then enlarged from 1425 to 1450. Like all drapery Lavenham, it prospered on the cloth trade, whose apogee peaked under the early Tudors. It was originally a medieval hall house: at the centre, a great hall open to the rafters, heated by a central hearth whose smoke escaped through the roof. This kind of dwelling, without chimney or floor above the hall, was the norm in the Middle Ages.
The Tudor 'modernisation'
It is here that Little Hall becomes a living document. In Tudor times, the house was modernised according to the new taste for comfort: a chimney was inserted (at last evacuating the smoke through a flue) and a floor was added in the hitherto open hall, creating rooms upstairs. This transformation — to pass from the smoky hall open to the rafters to a partitioned, heated and floored interior — concretely illustrates the revolution of domestic comfort in the sixteenth century, one of the great silent evolutions of the English Renaissance. Few places make it so visible. To see: the crown-post roof of the upper chamber, the hall 'modernised' in Tudor times (chimney + floor), the Gayer-Anderson art collections.
Did you know?
The great domestic transformation of the English Renaissance comes down to two acts that can literally be read at Little Hall: to add a chimney, and to lay a floor above the hall. Before, people lived in a single smoky room, open to the roof; after, they had chambers upstairs, fire without smoke, privacy. This 'great rebuilding' of comfort, spread over the sixteenth century, changed the daily life of the English more surely than many great events.
Notes
Little Hall lies on the market place of Lavenham, Suffolk; a house-museum open to the public since 1978. Own GPS to be specified. Seasonal hours to check.
Quiz
- For which family was Little Hall built?
- The drapers' family the Caustons
- The de Veres
- The Tudors
- How was the house 'modernised' under the Tudors?
- Addition of a chimney and an upper floor
- Addition of cannon
- Addition of a spire
- What does this transformation illustrate?
- The evolution of domestic comfort in the sixteenth century
- The end of wool
- An invasion