THE Gothic age left to the Tudors several types of town-house. The largest type was that
which was in all essential respects the same as a country manor-house, having a hall,
buttery, and solar, and lodgings arranged round a courtyard. That type was gradually
eliminated from the towns with the passing of the class of people who had built it -- either
members of the feudal ruling class or else merchants whose exceptional wealth qualified
them to adopt the manners and style of that class.

The successor to that 'manorial' type was the very rare formal courtyard type, in-
stanced by the great house which Sir Thomas Gresham built for himself in Bishopsgate,
London, shortly before 1566 and, later, by such town palaces as Northumberland House
(see p. 47 ) and the Derby town-house in Cannon Row, Westminster, recorded by Thorpe.

But the Middle Ages bequeathed also a much simpler type -- a type essentially of the
town: the house with a narrow frontage to the street, rooms back and front on each floor
and a long court or garden at the rear. That type of house, which we may conveniently
call the unit-house, was dominant in all towns where space was a great consideration; and
its plan remained dominant for the whole period covered by this book.

The unit-house must have originated as a hall with a solar or chamber above, a mere
two-cell dwelling. Long before Tudor times it had developed considerably, and been
doubled in depth. The ground-floor, instead of a hall, had a shop in front and a kitchen or
parlour (or both) behind. The hall was promoted to the first floor, which meant, of course,
that it was no longer a hall in the historic sense, with entry and screen at one end, but
simply the main living-dining-room. The use of the word 'hall' for such a room in a
town-house survived till far into the seventeenth century, but the hall as the main com-
ponent was already obsolete before the century had started.

This unit-house, with its shop and kitchen at ground level, a cellar below and one, two,
or perhaps three floors above with a garret in the gable and various projections in or over
the court was already, in early Tudor times, a flourishing type of town architecture.
There were, moreover, several sub-types, notably that which had a side-entry and long
narrow open passage, enabling the whole depth of the house on one side to be windowed.
Other sub-types were determined by the position of the single massive chimney-stack,
structurally the most substantial part of the house.

The unit-house by itself, however, was not capable of rising to the requirements,
either as to accommodation or stateliness, of the merchant princes of Elizabethan England.
It might perhaps have done had they been inclined to copy the merchants of the Baltic

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