. Vanishing England . nseemly with the ancient structures. HappilyKeble is far removed from the heart of the city, so thatthat somewhat unsatisfactory, unsuccessful pile of brick-work interferes not with its joy. In the streets and lanesof modern Oxford we can search for and discover manytypes of old-fashioned, humble specimens of domestic art,and we give as an illustration some houses which dateback to Tudor times, but have, alas ! been recently de-molished. Many conjectures have been made as to the reason whyour forefathers preferred to rear their houses with theupper storeys projecting out
. Vanishing England . nseemly with the ancient structures. HappilyKeble is far removed from the heart of the city, so thatthat somewhat unsatisfactory, unsuccessful pile of brick-work interferes not with its joy. In the streets and lanesof modern Oxford we can search for and discover manytypes of old-fashioned, humble specimens of domestic art,and we give as an illustration some houses which dateback to Tudor times, but have, alas ! been recently de-molished. Many conjectures have been made as to the reason whyour forefathers preferred to rear their houses with theupper storeys projecting out into the streets. We canunderstand that in towns where space was limited itwould be an advantage to increase the size of the upperrooms, if one did not object to the lack of air in the IN STREETS AND LANES 73 narrow street and the absence of sunlight. But we findthese same projecting storeys in the depth of the country,where there could have been no restriction as to theground to be occupied by the house. Possibly the. i udof i \cr» fashion was first established of necessity in towns, andthe traditional mode of building was continued in thecountry. Some say that by this means our ancestorstried to protect the lower part of the house, the founda-tions, from the influence of the weather; others with 74 VANISHING ENGLAND some ingenuity suggest that these projecting storeys wereintended to form a covered walk for passengers in thestreets, and to protect them from the showers of slopswhich the careless housewife of Elizabethan times castrecklessly from the upstairs windows. Architects tell usthat it was purely a matter of construction. Our fore-fathers used to place four strong corner-posts, framedfrom the trunks of oak trees, firmly sunk into the groundwith their roots left on and placed upward, the rootscurving outwards so as to form supports for the upperstoreys. These curved parts, and often the posts also,were often elaborately carved and ornamented, as in theexample whi
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