By the 17th century traditional open hall houses like Bayleaf with their clearly obsolete. Many medieval houses, like Walderton, were modified with the insertion of a chimney stack and second floor. Others, like Pendean, were built according to a new domestic plan. The reasons for the decline of the open hall are unclear. The technology of chimney construction was already available and the cost of adapting traditional houses was not excessive. Historians agree that the reasons are more likely to be located in broader social and cultural changes; they disagree on what those changes were.

Whilst identifying the agents of change may be difficult, we can be more confident in our analysis of changing patterns of room use and in room terminology in the ‘closed’ house thanks to the extensive survival of 17th century probate inventories. A probate inventory was, as its name suggests, an inventory of the deceased’s movable estate taken immediately after death. The ‘appraisors’ (usually two) normally began with cash (‘money in his purse’) and clothes (‘his wearing apparel’) and then proceeded around the house from room to room listing and valuing the deceased’s movable goods, before moving outside to list the contents of agricultural buildings, livestock and crops growing in the fields. Anything that was not movable was omitted, which means that you might get a list of cooking utensils but no oven, window curtains but no windows.

A 16th century manuscript plan of a house to be built in Suffolk. It has an identical plan to Pendean, but the room names are different. The unheated end room is called the buttery, the middle room is the parlour, and the end room, with the widest fireplace, is the hall. The two fireplaces are labelled ‘chimney’, and the stairs are behind the chimney.