Great hall

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For other uses, see Great hall (disambiguation).

The Great Hall in Barley Hall, York, restored to replicate its appearance in around 1483

The great hall of The Abbey, Sutton Courtenay in 1906, filled with hunting trophies

Great Hall at Stokesay Castle

A great hall is the main room of a royal palace, castle or a large manor house or hall

house in the Middle Ages, and continued to be built in the country houses of the 16th
and early 17th centuries, although by then the family used the great chamber for eating
and relaxing. At that time the word "great" simply meant big and had not acquired its
modern connotations of excellence. In the medieval period, the room would simply have
been referred to as the "hall" unless the building also had a secondary hall, but the term
"great hall" has been predominant for surviving rooms of this type for several centuries,
to distinguish them from the different type of hall found in post-medieval houses. Great
halls were found especially in France, England and Scotland, but similar rooms were
also found in some other European countries.
A typical great hall was a rectangular room between one and a half and three times as
long as it was wide, and also higher than it was wide. It was entered through a screens
passage at one end, and had windows on one of the long sides, often including a large
bay window. There was often a minstrels' gallery above the screens passage. At the
other end of the hall was the dais where the high table was situated. The lord's family's
more private rooms lay beyond the dais end of the hall, and the kitchen, buttery and
pantry were on the opposite side of the screens passage.
Even royal and noble residences had few living rooms until late in the Middle Ages, and
a great hall was a multifunctional room. It was used for receiving guests and it was the
place where the household would dine together, including the lord of the house, his
gentleman attendants and at least some of the servants. At night some members of the
household might sleep on the floor of the great hall.

Contents

 1Architectural detail
 2Examples
 3Survival
 4Decline
 5Decline and revival
 6In popular culture
 7See also
 8Notes
 9External links

Architectural detail[edit]

Plan of Horham Hall, including a screens passage, leading from the entrance porch; a dais; a bay window. The
main staircase is at the dais end, and the hall was the full height of the two-storey house

The hall would originally have had a central hearth, with the smoke rising through the
hall to a vent in the roof, examples can be seen at Stokesay Castle and Ludlow Castle.
[1]
 Later chimneys were added, and it would then have one of the largest fireplaces of the
palace, manor house or castle, frequently large enough to walk and stand inside. The
hearth was used for heating and also for some of the cooking, although for larger
structures a medieval kitchen would customarily lie on a lower level for the bulk of the
cooking. Commonly the fireplace would have an elaborate overmantel with stone or
wood carvings or even plasterwork which might contain coats of arms, heraldic mottoes
(usually in Latin), caryatids or another adornment. In the upper halls of French manor
houses, the fireplaces were usually very large and elaborate. Typically, the great hall
had the most beautiful decorations in it, as well as on the window frame mouldings on
the outer wall. Many French manor houses have very beautifully decorated external
window frames on the large mullioned windows that light the hall. This decoration
clearly marked the window as belonging to the lord's private hall. It was where guests
slept.

The Great Hall at Stirling Castle built for James IV. The larger windows lit the high table

In Scotland, six common furnishings were present in the sixteenth-century hall: the high
table and principal seat; side tables for others; the cupboard and silver plate; the
hanging chandelier, often called the 'hart-horn' made of antler; ornamental weapons,
commonly a halberd; and the cloth and napery used for dining. [2]
In western France, the early manor houses were centred on a central ground-floor hall.
Later, the hall reserved for the lord and his high-ranking guests was moved up to the
first-floor level. This was called the salle haute or upper hall (or "high room"). In some of
the larger three-storey manor houses, the upper hall was as high as second storey roof.
The smaller ground-floor hall or salle basse remained but was for receiving guests of
any social order.[3] It is very common to find these two halls superimposed, one on top of
the other, in larger manor houses in Normandy and Brittany. Access from the ground-
floor hall to the upper (great) hall was normally via an external staircase tower. The
upper hall often contained the lord's bedroom and living quarters off one end.
Occasionally the great hall would have an early listening device system, allowing
conversations to be heard in the lord's bedroom above. In Scotland, these devices are
called a laird's lug. In many French manor houses, there are small peep-holes from
which the lord could observe what was happening in the hall. This type of hidden peep-
hole is called a judas in French.

Examples[edit]
The mid-14th century Great Hall at Penshurst Place, looking towards the Screens Passage, pierced by two
large rectangular doorways. Gothic arched doorways lead into service quarters, the Kitchen, Buttery and Pantry

The classic mediaeval layout of three doorways to service rooms, at the Old Rectory, Warton. These doorways
would originally have been hidden by the wooden screen of the screens passage. The central doorway leads to
an outside kitchen. The other two doors are to the pantry and buttery

Great Hall of Stirling Castle, Scotland, view towards the north showing screens passage, with minstrels'
gallery above

Many great halls survive. Two very large surviving royal halls are Westminster Hall and
the Vladislav Hall in Prague Castle (although the latter was used only for public events,
never used as a great hall here described). Penshurst Place in Kent, England, has a
little-altered 14th century example. Surviving 16th and early 17th century specimens in
England, Wales and Scotland are numerous, for example those at Eltham
Palace (England), Longleat (England), Deene Park (England), Burghley
House (England), Bodysgallen Hall (Wales), Darnaway Castle (Scotland), Muchalls
Castle (Scotland) and Crathes Castle (Scotland). There are numerous ruined examples,
most notably the roofless hall at Linlithgow Palace (Scotland).

Survival[edit]
The domestic and monastic model applied also to Collegiate institutions during the
Middle Ages. Several colleges at Cambridge and Oxford universities have medieval
halls which are still used as dining rooms on a daily basis. So do the Inns of Court and
the Livery Companies in London. The "high table" (often on a small dais or stage at the
top of the hall, farthest away from the screens passage) seats dons (at the universities)
and Masters of the Bench (at the Inns of Court), whilst students (at the universities) and
barristers or students (at the Inns of Court) dine at tables placed at right angles to the
high table and running down the body of the hall, thus maintaining the hierarchical
arrangement of the medieval domestic, monastic or collegiate household. Numerous
more recently founded schools and institutions have halls and dining halls based on
medieval great halls or monastic refectories.

Decline[edit]
By the late 16th century the great hall was beginning to lose its purpose. [4] Increasing
centralization of power in royal hands meant that men of good social standing were less
inclined to enter the service of a lord to obtain his protection, and so the size of the inner
noble household shrank. As the social gap between master and servant grew, the family
retreated, usually to the 1st floor, to private rooms. In fact, servants were not usually
allowed to use the same staircases as nobles to access the great hall of larger castles
in early times, and servants' staircases are still extant in places such as Muchalls
Castle. Other reception and living rooms in country houses became more numerous,
specialized and important, and by the late 17th century the halls of many new houses
were simply vestibules, passed through to get to somewhere else, but not lived in.
Several great halls like that at Bank Hall in Lancashire were downsized to create two
rooms.

Decline and revival[edit]

From the 15th century onwards, halls lost most of their traditional functions to more
specialised rooms, first for family members and guests to the great chamber
and parlours, withdrawing rooms, and later for servants who finally achieved their
own servants hall to eat in and servants’ bedrooms in attics or basements). [5] The halls
of late 17th, 18th and 19th-century country houses and palaces usually functioned
almost entirely as impressive entrance points to the house, and for large scale
entertaining, as at Christmas, for dancing, or when a touring company of actors
performed. With the arrival of ballrooms and dedicated music rooms in the largest
houses by the late 17th century, these functions too were lost. There was a revival of
the great hall concept in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with large halls used for
banqueting and entertaining (but not as eating or sleeping places for servants) featuring
in some houses of this period as part of a broader medieval revival, for
example Thoresby Hall.

In popular culture[edit]
 In the Harry Potter franchise of books, movies, and video games, the Great
Hall within Hogwarts is the site of meals, feasts, assemblies, and awards
ceremonies.[6]
 Winchester Castle's Great Hall is an important site in British history; it was the
location of the trial of Walter Raleigh and partially of the Bloody Assizes and it
also contains a well-preserved imitative Arthurian Round Table.

See also[edit]
 Manor house
 Tapestry
 Mead hall
 Moot hall
 Hall and parlor house
 Great room

Notes[edit]
1. ^ Michael Thompson, The Medieval Hall (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 101-3, 120.
2. ^ Michael Pearce, 'Approaches to Household Inventories and Household Furnishing, 1500-
1650', Architectural Heritage 26 (2015), p. 79
3. ^ , Jones, Michael and Gwyn Meirion-Jones, Les Châteaux de Bretagne (Rennes: Editions
Quest-France, 1991), pp. 40-41.
4. ^ Michael Thompson, The Great Hall (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 182-192.
5. ^ Michael Thompson, The Medieval Hall (Aldershot, 1995), p. 186.
6. ^ https://www.pottermore.com/explore-the-story/the-great-hall

External links