The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings. Simon Thurley

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Fig. 82 Lady Row, York was a commercial development built in around 1316 in Holy Trinity Churchyard as an endowment for the chantry of the Blessed Virgin in the church. They are the earliest timber buildings in York and are a very early example of jettying.

      Many townhouses were also shops. Trade was, of course, central to the purpose of towns; by 1234 Canterbury had 200 shops and by 1300 Chester had 270. But, as today, London was England’s shopping Mecca. Its principal shopping street, Cheapside, was 450 yards long and 20 yards wide. The shops, 400 of them lined on either side, were occupied by goldsmiths, mercers, drapers, spicers, saddlers, girdlers, chandlers, wiredrawers, bucklemakers, pursemakers, buttonmakers and more. The shops themselves were very narrow, typically only 6ft to 7ft wide, and about 10ft to 12ft deep. Elsewhere in the city, where land was less valuable, shops were wider, their frontages measuring between 15ft and 20ft. The shops had a window opening and a narrow door, and window shutters were lifted during the day to reveal large, round-headed openings. Most shoppers would have been served standing in the street, rather like in an Arab souk today. Jetties overhead would have kept off the rain. Like a souk, too, the interiors were crammed with goods, and merchants’ houses elsewhere in the city would have acted as warehouses to supply them. Most shops were of timber, but some party walls and some larger shops were of stone.²⁶

      No early medieval shops survive today unaltered and so we have to study later examples to get an understanding of how retail premises originally looked. Lady Row, Goodramgate, York, is a row of shops dating from 1316 that have lost their original windows (fig. 82). Lady Row is not untypical of what we know of commercial developments of shops built by single landlords and then rented to shopkeepers. The upper rooms may have been separately let as housing, or traders may have lived above their showrooms. A rare survival from c.1350 is 169 Spon Street, Coventry, a different type of shop, probably built by a merchant with a showroom on the street and a substantial house with a hall for the family behind (fig. 83).²⁷

Fig. 83 169 Spon Street, Coventry. Although restored in 1970, this shop is a rare survivor from the 1350s in a district of Coventry devoted to the cloth and leather trades. No medieval shop in England survives with its original ground floor openings intact.

Fig. 84 The Jews House, The Strait, Lincoln of around 1190. The plans show that, unusually, the fireplace was placed over the ground floor passageway, a way of emphasising on the street front that the house had such a luxurious facility.

Fig. 85 58 French Street Southampton, though dating from the 1290s, was heavily restored after 1972. It is a rare survivor of a building type that was once very common in towns, the merchant’s house-cum-emporium.

From the 13th century there were shops and houses built of stone; a remarkable surviving group can be found in the lower city at Lincoln, which, in the mid 13th century, was one of the largest and richest towns in England. Here two stone houses still stand and the remains of 30 more have been excavated. The Jews House, The Strait, of c.1190, was a prestigious structure probably containing three shops – two on one side of a central door and one on the other (fig. 84). The door led to a secure back range (now lost) for the storage of valuables, with a staircase to the first floor. The first floor contained two residential rooms, one with a fireplace. The external elevation was magnificent, with a fine zigzag-moulded door and heavily moulded two-light windows above. The chimney stack was incorporated into the front elevation as a badge of wealth and sophistication.

In contrast to Lincoln, stone houses in most other towns had undercrofts rather than rear strong-rooms. A complete, though restored, example is 58 French Street, Southampton, built for a merchant called John Fortin in the 1290s (fig. 85). It was one of about 60 stone and timber merchants’ houses in one of England’s most important ports. As at Lincoln there was a shop at the front, but behind was a hall and private chamber for the owner, and upstairs were two bedrooms. The whole was set upon an undercroft built for the secure storage of merchandise. This was typical of its type: a building that was a home, a showroom, a warehouse and an office all in one.28 Towns were also home to the houses of the aristocracy, prelates and the Crown. Again, in Lincoln, one such high-status house survives, probably built for a visit of King Henry II in 1157. Like 1 The Strait, it presented its prestigious front to the street with not one but two large chimney stacks. The principal archway, which survives, was clearly the entrance to a very special house. On the first floor was a huge hall raised up above ground-floor vaults, and at right angles to it a withdrawing chamber for the king. This was a compact, but grandiloquent town house of the first order.29

Fig. 86 St Mary’s Hospital Chichester of 1290–1300 looks like a church: its ‘nave’ was a ward for the patients who would lie on beds at right angles to the outer walls; they had a clear view of the ‘chancel’, a chapel at the east end separated from the ward by a fine screen.

As well as shops, many other trades were practised, particularly those concerned with food and drink, especially butchery and baking. Many of the larger towns such as Lincoln, York and Oxford specialised in the manufacture of woollen cloth and served an international clientele. Merchants were cosmopolitan; the best houses would have been comfortable, luxurious even, with goods from all over the world. The contents of a rubbish pit at one of the stone houses in Southampton not only СКАЧАТЬ В начало < 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 > В конец