What is the importance of a Great Hall in a medieval building?

Answer 1

The great hall of a castle or manor house was the most important room for many purposes. It was the place where formal functions happened, guests were entertained, and dinners were eaten. It was often divided by partitions into many areas for different purposes, including offices, other work areas, a dining area, and the sleeping quarters of at least the lord and his family.

It was a very large room, and very high, typically having no ceiling but the roof. There was an architectural reason for such a great room, which was that chimneys were unknown at the time of construction of most castles and manor houses. The chimney was invented in the 12th century, and caught on rather slowly because chimneys were expensive, required understanding to construct, and required maintenance. The result was that there were no fireplaces in buildings before the 12th century, and very few after that in the Middle Ages.

The great hall was usually heated by an open fire on a hearth in the middle of the room. The smoke rose through the room to the ceiling, which was why the ceiling was so high. It passed out of the room through openings under the gables or in the roof. An opening in the roof was usually capped by a structure called a louver with openings in the sides, so the rain or snow would not come in.

An alternate to a central fire was to have the hearth against a stone wall and have a smoke canopy over it to gather the smoke and vent it through the wall. This was done in kitchens, but seems not to have been done in the great halls. We have pictures of smoke canopies, but they seem always to have been in kitchens.

The greatest difference between medieval architecture and the Tudor style that followed in the Renaissance was that the great hall was either absent or much smaller in Tudor buildings. Rooms could be built over the great hall, and so it was not as high. The need for distributed heat from a central fire was gone, so bedrooms, dining rooms, offices, and so on, could be placed as the owners wished and heated by their own fires in fireplaces.

There is a link to a picture of a medieval great hall below, showing the placement of the central hearth, with firewood piled on it.