Great hall
**Architectural Details of Great Halls:**
– Rectangular shape, typically longer than wide.
– Features like screens passage, windows, dais, and minstrels gallery.
– Central hearth or large fireplaces.
– Elaborate decorations including overmantels and window frame moldings.
**Examples of Great Halls:**
– Westminster Hall, Ridderzaal in Binnenhof, Vladislav Hall.
– Penshurst Place in Kent.
– Eltham Palace, Longleat, Darnaway Castle.
– Collegiate institutions like Cambridge and Oxford.
– Ruined examples like Linlithgow Palace.
**Survival and Modern Usage of Great Halls:**
– Continued use in colleges, Inns of Court, and Livery Companies.
– Retention of high table seating arrangement.
– Inspiration for newer dining halls.
– Preservation of hierarchical layout.
– Continued use in collegiate and institutional settings.
**Decline of Great Halls:**
– Loss of purpose by late 16th century.
– Decrease in noble household size.
– Growing social gap between master and servant.
– Emergence of private rooms and separate servant areas.
– Newer houses with halls as passageways.
**Decline, Revival, and Cultural Significance:**
– Transformation of functions in the 15th century onwards.
– Use for large-scale entertaining in the late 17th to 19th centuries.
– Revival in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for banqueting.
– Popular culture references like in the Harry Potter franchise.
– Historical significance of great halls like Winchester Castle’s Great Hall.
A great hall is the main room of a royal palace, castle or a large manor house or hall house in the Middle Ages, and continued to be built in the country houses of the 16th and early 17th centuries, although by then the family used the great chamber for eating and relaxing. At that time the word "great" simply meant big and had not acquired its modern connotations of excellence. In the medieval period, the room would simply have been referred to as the "hall" unless the building also had a secondary hall, but the term "great hall" has been predominant for surviving rooms of this type for several centuries, to distinguish them from the different type of hall found in post-medieval houses. Great halls were found especially in France, England and Scotland, but similar rooms were also found in some other European countries.
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A typical great hall was a rectangular room between one and a half and three times as long as it was wide, and also higher than it was wide. It was entered through a screens passage at one end, and had windows on one of the long sides, often including a large bay window. There was often a minstrels' gallery above the screens passage. At the other end of the hall was the dais where the high table was situated. The lord's family's more private rooms lay beyond the dais end of the hall, and the kitchen, buttery and pantry were on the opposite side of the screens passage.
Even royal and noble residences had few living rooms until late in the Middle Ages, and a great hall was a multifunctional room. It was used for receiving guests and it was the place where the household would dine together, including the lord of the house, his gentleman attendants and at least some of the servants. At night some members of the household might sleep on the floor of the great hall.