Archaeologia Aeliana, Or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity Volume 18 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 Excerpt: ...by fifty-nine and a half in breadth, and had, like the earlier one, all its dependent offices of solar, pantry, buttery and kitchen complete. The former were, as usual, beneath the solar at the west end, but the kitchen, now destroyed, was a separate building, and connected with the hall by a covered passage way. And such would seem generally, where these great halls were attached either to castles or manor-houses, to have been the case. At St. David's, the magnificent palace, built by bishop Gower about the middle of the fourteenth century, shows an ingenious and somewhat different arrangement. It is all of one date, and of extreme magnificence; the principal buildings, which are of the same height, occupying the southern and eastern sides of a large quadrangle. The southern range contains the great hall, with a solar at the west end. The eastern, the smaller hall, with a large kitchen or kitchens at its southern extremity, which, occupying the angle between it and the end of the great hall, would therefore, in this case, probably, be common to both. 14 In the wall supporting this platform towards the east, two large stones are inserted bearing the following inscriptions in Roman capitals. To what particular work the first and most important of them--erected originally by the famous bishop Butler (1750-52)--refers, cannot now, I think, be said: --arches of its arcades. There the bays are all either actually, or practically, alike. Here it is otherwise; the two extreme ones at either end, though harmonizing perfectly with those towards the centre, being of very perceptibly wider span. Nothing finer than the general justness, unity, and variety of effect, however, could possibly be conceived. That there were other than artistic reasons for such treatment--whi...