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Roman-Medieval Courtyard Tenemant

scormus_c3ab4e5c4escormus_c3ab4e5c4e Posts: 83
in Product Suggestions

We have lots of palaces and castles and lots of small huts but few city tenemant-type buildings that most city-dwelling people would have lived in.  They would be a mixture of wooden half-timbered with masonry perhaps for the ground floor and up to three or four floors high (if you include attic garratts - and every inch of space would be lived in).  These buildings were usually built facing inwards around small courtyards with wooden balconies and narrow staircases jutting inwards.  They would have housed dozens of families and the ground floor would probably be a business of some sort - perhaps a bakery or inn.  The building would have one side facing outwards into a street or alley and all other walls would be back-to-back with other similar buildings, perhaps separated only by narrow alleys - roofed over like tunnels.  There would be an archway out into the street.  Windows would have wooden shutters rather than glass, which only became common after the 16th century.  This sort of building didn't change much from Roman times until the Victorian age.  For anyone doing anything involving ordinary people until that time would find this a useful scene.

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 99,305

    I thought there was a considerable difference between Roman insulae and the hosuing of later periods, at least in northern Europe.

  • SpottedKittySpottedKitty Posts: 7,232
    Richard Haseltine said:

    I thought there was a considerable difference between Roman insulae and the hosuing of later periods, at least in northern Europe.

    Not really all that much difference. I've seen two or three of those "how they used to live" documentaries over the last couple of years, exploring the preserved buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the few surviving bits and pieces of Empire-era Rome that aren't palaces, monuments or temples. The insulae are recognisable as early versions of modern multi-storey blocks of flats.

    Come to think of it, I'd like to see something like that in the store as well.

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 99,305
    SpottedKitty said:
    Richard Haseltine said:

    I thought there was a considerable difference between Roman insulae and the hosuing of later periods, at least in northern Europe.

    Not really all that much difference. I've seen two or three of those "how they used to live" documentaries over the last couple of years, exploring the preserved buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the few surviving bits and pieces of Empire-era Rome that aren't palaces, monuments or temples. The insulae are recognisable as early versions of modern multi-storey blocks of flats.

    Come to think of it, I'd like to see something like that in the store as well.

    I was thinking later as in post-Roman but pre-modern.

  • scormus_c3ab4e5c4escormus_c3ab4e5c4e Posts: 83

    A basic three story courtyard building lined with balconies and rickety stairways and with small shuttered windows could pass as anything from Roman through to late Georgian.  Brick or stone for ground floor and halftimbered above was pretty standard construction in cities for centuries.  Think tudor slums.  They were never rebuilt unless they burned down, just patched and mended with bits added on or cut out. Nice housees followed fashions but these weren't nice, just cheap tenements.  Of course there were variations over time - chimneys added in late Tudor times, for example, but a generic enough model could cover a wide range of periods and anyway they were full of character, not to say smells as well.

  • JimbowJimbow Posts: 557

    ...and rats.

  • jardinejardine Posts: 1,201

    good suggestion.  i'd go for something like that, too. 

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