Early
Welsh Homes with Reference to Dyfed.
1) the first-floor
hall and its derivative, the tower, and
2) the hall-house,
which was primarily a single-storied building, and was by far the more numerous
over the country as a whole.
Most of the examples
of type 1) are to be found in the province of Dyfed, and it was indeed in the
examination of houses of this type in Pembrokeshire that the study of the Welsh
house began.
In this first-floor
hall, as its name suggests, the primary accommodation is on the first floor,
most usually over a vaulted undercroft. Houses of this design are pictured in
the Bayeux tapestry, which suggests that they were the normal type of Norman
upper class dwelling in the eleventh century. It is perhaps, therefore, no
coincidence that there are more houses of this tradition to be found in
Anglo-Norman Pembrokeshire and Glamorgan than elsewhere in Wales. The classic
instance of the first-floor hall is the Bishop's Palace at St. David's. This
structure consisted of a suite of rooms, lesser hall, solar; and kitchen, great
hall and chapel on the first floor over vaulted undercrofts, built at various
times from the late thirteen to the mid-fourteenth century. Other residences of
the Bishops' of St. David's, at Lamphey and Llawhaden illustrate the same
principle of placing the major rooms on the first floor over vaulted store-rooms
below.
Not
only amongst the great however did the first-floor hall flourish but also
amongst lesser householders. A group on the south coast of Milford Haven
deserves mention. The most elaborate is at Monkton, a T-shaped house standing on
a ribbed vaulted under croft, probably fourteenth century in date (Prate 14b).
Although it may have formed part of Monkton Priory, it is essentially a domestic
building. Eastington standing hard by the shore; may like Monkton, be
fourteenth-century in date. The building consists of the usual vaulted basements
with two rooms above, probably hall and solar. A newel stair leads to a turret
on the roof.
Several
vaulted houses have also survived near Tenby. The smallest appears to have been
Carswell, consisting of a Hall over a single vaulted room below. On larger
places, the lower part consisted of several vaulted store-rooms.
An
important off-shoot of the first-floor hall is the “tower-house” - a
military farmhouse of what was originally an essentially civilian design. Welsh
tower houses are not numerous but of the few there are, it is not surprising
that most are to be found in areas where the first-floor hall tradition was well
established, namely in Dyfed and Glamorgan.
The most fully delineated Pembrokeshire tower is the ‘Old Rectory’ at Angle
which consisted of three rooms above a vaulted undercroft connected with a newel
stair. Rather larger is the ‘Rectory’ at Carew as also is ‘Bonville
Court’ near Tenby. The vaulted gatehouse at much ruined Haroldston near
Haverfordwest seems to belong to the same class of building. There appear to be
only two buildings in North Wales strictly comparable to these, namely two
vaulted houses near Mold - ‘Llyseurgain’
and the ‘Tower’. ‘Llyseurgain’ is clearly a first-floor hall. ‘The
Tower’ has been much reconstructed but was probably a fortified building as
its history suggests. The
tower-house flourished greatly in Scotland and Ireland in the troubled
fifteenth, sixteenth and for Ireland, disastrous seventeenth century. If the
mere handful of Welsh tower-houses is compared say with the 400 in county
Limerick a1one, the great difference in the social and political history of the
Briton and the Gael at this time becomes very clear. South Pembrokeshire and to
a lesser extent south Glamorgan have many building features distinguishing them
from the rest of Wales. They are areas where the mason was the major craftsman,
as was realised by the Elizabethan Pembrokeshire antiquary George Owen. The
buildings of his native county were he wrote “altogether of stone an no of
timber. Most houses of any account
were builded with vaults very strong and substantial”. In Pembrokeshire and
south Glamorgan the house is essentially, a stone structure, with stone walls,
partitions, and often stone, vaulted floors.
Elsewhere in Wales the carpenter is more important.
I E. L. Barnwell "The Domestic Architecture or South Pembrokeshire'' Arch. Camb., 1867