age are there more than a very
few, which are still, in their chief rooms, inhabited by gentry. But
houses, which by their marks of decoration, or by external proof, are
ascertained to have been formerly occupied by good families, though now
in the occupation of small farmers, and built apparently from the reign
of the second to that of the fourth Edward, are common in many counties.
They generally bear the name of court, hall, or grange; sometimes only
the surname of some ancient occupant, and very frequently have been the
residence of the lord of the manor.

The most striking circumstance in the oldest houses is not so much their
precautions for defence in the outside staircase, and when that was
disused, the better safeguard against robbery in the moat which
frequently environed the walls, the strong gateway, the small window
broken by mullions, which are no more than we should expect in the
times, as the paucity of apartments, so that both sexes, and that even
in high rank, must have occupied the same room. The progress of a regard
to decency in domestic architecture has been gradual, and in some
respects has been increasing up to our own age. But the mediaeval period
shows little of it; though in the advance of wealth, a greater division
of apartments distinguishes the houses of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries from those of an earlier period.

The French houses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were probably
much of the same arrangement as the English; the middle and lower
classes had but one hall and one chamber; those superior to them had the
solarium or upper floor, as with us. See Archaeological Journal (vol. i.
p. 212), where proofs are adduced from the fabliaux of Barbasan. [1848.]

NOTE III. Page 451.

The Abbe de Sade, in those copious memoirs of the life of Petrarch,
which illustrate in an agreeable though rather prolix manner the civil
and literary history of Provence and Italy in the fourteenth century,
endeavoured to establish his own descent from Laura, as the wife of
Hughes de Sade, and born in the family de Noves. This hypothesis has
since been received with general acquiescence by literary men; and
Tiraboschi in particular, whose talent lay in these petty biographical
researches, and who had a prejudice against every thing that came from
France, seems to consider it as decisively proved. But it has been
called in question in a modern publication by the late Lord
Woodhouselee. (Ess