buildings themselves, sometimes, though not very frequently,
occupied by families of consideration, more often converted into
farm-houses or distinct tenements. Larger structures were erected by men
of great estates during the reigns of Henry IV. and Edward IV.; but very
few can be traced higher; and such has been the effect of time, still
more through the advance or decline of families and the progress of
architectural improvement, than the natural decay of these buildings,
that I should conceive it difficult to name a house in England, still
inhabited by a gentleman and not belonging to the order of castles, the
principal apartments of which are older than the reign of Henry VII. The
instances at least must be extremely few.[669]

France by no means appears to have made a greater progress than our own
country in domestic architecture. Except fortified castles, I do not
find in the work of a very miscellaneous but apparently diligent
writer,[670] any considerable dwellings mentioned before the reign of
Charles VII., and very few of so early a date.[671] Jacques Coeur, a
famous merchant unjustly persecuted by that prince, had a handsome house
at Paris, as well as another at Bourges.[672] It is obvious that the
long calamities which France endured before the expulsion of the English
must have retarded this eminent branch of national improvement.

Even in Italy, where from the size of her cities and social refinements
of her inhabitants, greater elegance and splendour in building were
justly to be expected, the domestic architecture of the middle ages did
not attain any perfection. In several towns the houses were covered with
thatch, and suffered consequently from destructive fires. Costanzo, a
Neapolitan historian near the end of the sixteenth century, remarks the
change of manners that had occurred since the reign of Joanna II. one
hundred and fifty years before. The great families under the queen
expended all their wealth on their retainers, and placed their chief
pride in bringing them into the field. They were ill lodged, not
sumptuously clothed, nor luxurious in their tables. The house of
Caracciolo, high steward of that princess, one of the most powerful
subjects that ever existed, having fallen into the hands of persons
incomparably below his station, had been enlarged by them, as
insufficient for their accommodation.[673] If such were the case in the
city of Naples so late as the beginning of the fifteenth cent