Cross Hall

“ Many people who live in our great overgrown modern London—who dwell in the West End, and never wander further east than Drury Lane Theatre or St. Pancras Station—have never seen Crosby Hall, and know not where it stood. If you go along Cheapside and to the end of Cornhill, and then turn to the left, up Bishopsgate, the old house stood on the right hand side; or you may approach along Holborn and London Wall. ”

“ Entering by the tall Wren steeple through the rubicund brick gateway, crossing the court, the great Hall is seen with its huge emblazoned windows illuminated from within. This vast chamber, of extraordinary length and loftiness, is a modern work, but a signal success. The dimensions and spaciousness are really extraordinary, and it will readily hold several thousand{251} persons. It has its music gallery at one end, with an organ large enough for a cathedral, and at the other end rows of raised seats for eager spectators. ”

“ It means a great school of debate, a college that grants no degrees. It gives me a sadness that is not akin to pain, to hear a young person designate a building as Lyceum Hall, using the word as if it were Grampian Hall or Hamilton Hall, having no glorious, clear conception of what the name of the hall signified to the early community. Tradesmen, farmers, professional men, themselves readers and thinkers, above all restless and eager disputants would meet night after night to discuss the unselfish problems of life. ”

“ Lord Horsham came over to the Hall the very next day, but nothing came of that, as might so confidently have been expected. He came over several times more before he went back to Oxford in October. He was the admitted friend of the family; there was no young person who was there more often, and no young man of those who came to the house who could be considered in the light of a rival, now that Fred Comfrey was off the scene. It seemed to Miss Baldwin that there was an air of expectation abroad; that both Colonel and Mrs. Eldridge were waiting for something. ”

“ In the centre of the hall was a huge plate-warmer, elaborately worked in brass with the college arms. Founders and benefactors were seen, or suggested, on all sides; their arms gleamed from the windows in all the glories of stained glass; and their faces peered out from the massive gilt frames on the walls, as though their shadows loved to linger about the spot that had been benefited by their substance. At the further end of the hall a deep bay-window threw its painted light upon a dais, along which stretched the table for the Dons; Masters and Bachelors occupied side-tables ”

“ Before entering, I must give the reader an idea of the internal arrangement of the noble old Hall, [78] which in beauty and size excels most of the college halls in Oxford or Cambridge. At the east end is a raised dais, on which is the “High table,” where the Dons dine in Election week. Along each side are rows of tables. Those on the north side, allotted to the Præfects, were called, “Tub, Middle, and Junior Mess,” respectively. The others, when occupied, being each presided over by a Candlekeeper, were called respectively senior, second, and so on to junior “End.” ”

“ This arrangement is still found in some of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, such as those of New College, Christchurch, Wadham and Magdalen, Oxford, and in Trinity College, Cambridge. In private mansions, however, the kitchen and offices have been removed to a greater distance, and the great hall is only used for banquets. ”

“ The most important room on the ground-floor of the house was a large hall, entered directly from beneath the vault of the porte-cochere. Few people know the importance of a hall in the little towns of Anjou, Touraine, and Berry. The hall is at one and the same time antechamber, salon, office, boudoir, and dining-room; it is the theatre of domestic life, the common living-room. There the barber of the neighborhood came, twice a year, to cut Monsieur Grandet’s hair; there the farmers, the cure, the under-prefect, and the miller’s boy came on business. ”

“ The printed records of the early American halls are 250 too meagre to warrant definite conclusions; but they seem to show that the halls were conceived in the spirit of the English hall of the seventeenth century, in that they provided for separate social and residential communities without separate endowment or teaching force. If the increase of students at Harvard had been rapid, it is not unlikely that many new halls would have been established, each the home of a complete community ”

“ The wide hall is so generous in its proportions that it made a perfect ballroom, its hardwood floor reflecting the charming pageant above its polished surface. Even the delights of dancing paled before the alluring opportunities for tete-a-tetes that invited the soul to loaf in the long library before the baronial fireplace, or in the drawing-room with its deep comfy armchairs, its shaded lamps just made for a sly whisper of pretty nothings all a deux ”

“ The long galleries, the superb chambers, the scenes of revelry or of pomp, were like the court companions who amuse, yet attach us not; but the hall, the old hall,—the old, hospitable hall,—had been as a friend in all seasons, and to all comers, and its mirth had been as open to all as the heart of its last owner! My eyes wandered from the place where it had been, and the tall, lone, gray tower, consecrated to my ill-fated namesake, and in which my own apartments had been situated, rose like the last of a warrior band, stern, gaunt, and solitary, over the ruins around. ”

“ Of the domestic buildings there is built against the keep and the west curtain the smaller hall, 18 feet broad by 30 feet long, one end abutting on the keep, the other on a retiring-room common to it with the great hall. It is of two floors, the lower on the ground level, having a handsome door and windows. The hall, with a timber floor and roof, occupies the upper floor. The fireplace is in the middle of the west side, let into the Roman curtain, which has been raised. In the east side are four windows looking into the ward, each of two lights divided by a transom, with cinquefoil heads. ”

“ It possesses close scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge universities. The Waterhouse charity school occupies a handsome set of buildings forming three sides of a quadrangle, erected in 1855. The Crossley almshouses were erected and endowed by Sir Francis and Mr Joseph Crossley, who also endowed the Crossley orphan home and school. Technical schools are maintained by the corporation. Among other public buildings may be noted the Piece-Hall, erected in 1799 for the lodgment and sale of piece goods, now used as a market, a great quadrangular structure occupying more than two acres ”

“ Attached 85to the Hall of Liberty are large lecture-rooms, studying-rooms, and reading-rooms, and in connection with these a monster library. Outside the building are the stables, one of the wonders of London, the grooms being entirely composed of girls and women; and clustering round the mother structure like a miniature town, are the pretty cottages and dwellings of the immense staff of instructors, teachers, and lecturers connected with the institution. It is a wonderful structure, and its erection is a triumph, the magnitude of which can hardly be measured, for Hector D’Estrange. ”

“ Curzon Hall, another building of large and good dimensions, was erected and opened in 1866, and may be called, in close resemblance to a celebrated Venetian edifice, the Dogs' Palace. Although a circus occasionally performs within its walls, it is really devoted to the greatest provincial parliament of dogs in Great Britain. Hundreds of every lineage, use, name, size, stripe, and language, arc here assembled about Christmas time, and discuss questions of canine and social economy with a gravity and earnestness which few human conventions frequently imitate. ”

“ For, formerly, those who were held in honor and had high office in this always sacred House were aged and white-haired men who arrived at this distinction but a year or two before they had to die. But we of the Holy College are as stalwart, as strong, and as young as any man in the Hall. And so have we been for hundreds of years, and so we mean to continue.
In the Public Hall, we take our meals apart in our own Hall; yet the food is the same for all. Life is the common possession ”

“ If the ground glass of the vestibule door be exposed and staring, the hall floor bare and cold, the hall chair hard and stiff, the doors to the reception or sitting-room all closed, rising black and grim before you, and the hall itself so dark that you can not see even where to lay down your companionable umbrella, does there not come over you a chill, as if you were being repelled by the spirit of inhospitality? ”

“ The furniture of the hall at the manor-house of Croxdale, in the county of Durham, in the year 1571, consisted of one cupboard, one table, two buffet stools, and one chair; yet Salvin of Croxdale was looked upon as one of the principal gentry of the Palatinate. In enumerating the furniture of the ancient hall, we must not forget the arms which were usually displayed there, especially by such as had dependent upon them a certain number of men whom it was their duty or their pride to arm. ”

“ The buildings surround two court-yards, or quadrangles, the entrance being surmounted by an embattled tower; the main buildings and large tower are also embattled.
The banqueting-hall is a noble apartment, 42 feet long by 22 feet wide. It has a remarkably fine timber roof, with intersecting arches in its compartments. At the upper end, to the left, the lord’s table stood beneath the bayed window, and opposite to it a doorway leads to the principal staircase. At the bottom of the hall are three doorways, one of which led to the great kitchen, and the other two to the buttery and the cellar. ”

“ In an all-the-year country house a vestibule is a necessity as much as in a town house, and the hall should be treated with the dignity a hall deserves, and not as a second living-room. In many English houses of Tudor days the stairs were behind a carved screen, or concealed in some manner, which made it possible to use the hall as a gathering place. Our modern hall is not a descendant of this old hall of a past day (the living-room is much more so) , but is really only a passage, often raised to the nth power, connecting the different rooms of the house, and should be treated as such. ”

“ The second house was speedily furnished as a Hall for clerks and students, and already was full to overflowing. The personal popularity of the young Master was great, and his determination to accept as his pupils only men who really desired to study, and who would refrain from joining in the tumults and riots of the city, made something of a new departure amongst the keepers of Halls, and attracted at once the better sort of student, to whom a quiet place of abode, where study was the rule, was regarded in the light of a boon and a blessing. ”

“ Stow describes the hall as a fair house. After the Great Fire it was rebuilt (about 1670) by Wren and Jarman, and the west side of the great hall facing Little College Street is of this date. The present College Street front was built in 1886 from designs by Mr. J. Douglass Mathews, architect. It is a very handsome three-storied building of red brick. The door is of remarkably fine carving, of curious form, having the appearance of two doors, the smaller imposed upon the greater. Above the door under a pedimental canopy are the Company’s arms. ”

“ The last public trial in the Hall was Lord Melville's in 1806; and the last coronation dinner in the Hall was that of George IV., when, according to the custom maintained for ages, and for the last time probably, the King's champion (Dymocke) rode into the Hall in full armor, and threw down the gauntlet, challenging the world in a King's behalf. Silver plates were laid, on the same occasion, for 334 guests,"--Murray.
The Central or Octagon Hall is an elegant and well lighted apartment eighty feet in height. It is covered by a groined roof ornamented with 250 bosses. ”

“ In Church Street stands Brotherhood Hall, a very charming ancient building, long used as a Grammar School, flanked by overhanging houses, which, though less imposing, are often more quaint and ingratiating. ”

“ Other similar foundations were soon created: the King’s Scholars (later incorporated as King’s Hall) in 1317, Michael-House in 1324, Clare in 1325, Pembroke in 1347, Gonville in 1348, Trinity Hall in 1350, and Corpus Christi in 1352. Every new college that was established provided fresh definite ties with the locality, and rendered less likely the break-up of the University and the scattering of its members—a serious risk to which in early days it was always subject. ”

“ In Lady Pembroke’s Summer Dressing-room there is a Gothic window by Price, “to whom Parliament granted £5,000 for having discovered the ancient method of staining glass.”
The Hall.
The house is made thoroughly comfortable as a home; it has never been abandoned by the family, but has been their continual residence. Everywhere, consequently, there is an aspect of thorough comfort. Grace, elegance, and indeed splendour, are sufficiently apparent, but the obvious study has long been to render the dwelling in all respects the abode of an English nobleman who loved to live among his own people. ”

“ As I have already said, a wide hall divided the lower floor into two halves. The hall itself reminded me of the pictures I have seen of the great halls in feudal castles, with its beamed ceiling, its waxed floor, its great fireplace and its impressive furniture. On one side were the state apartments, the parlours, connected by a double door. They had apparently been hermetically closed for years, and were very musty and dusty. They were furnished in hideous horsehair, and we closed the door behind us after the merest glance into them. ”