Medieval: Kitchens

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Lean-to penthouse to house kitchens

The character of the smaller (Gloucester) cottages which lined the side lanes of the central area and the outer areas, such as St. Mary's Square, Hare Lane, and Watering Street (later St. Catherine Street), is indicated by a building lease of 1413 for four tenements on the west side of Craft's Lane (later College Court). Each was to have a hall and shop on the ground floor and a solar on the jettied upper floor, while a lean-to penthouse (shura) with brick chimneys was to be built along the back of the tenements to house kitchens.

By the end of the period many additions, in the form of penthouses, posts to support jetties, and the occasional new chimney, had been made to houses on the principal streets and side lanes of the central area. The resulting encroachments, though an added source of income, were sometimes a matter of concern to the town corporation, as in 1497 when it disputed alterations made by Gloucester Abbey to a house in the central row of buildings at the top of Westgate Street. Built wider and given cellar steps, steps up to the doorways, and shutters to the windows, it had narrowed the roadway on either side.
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"Penthouse" (outbuilding) can be traced back to the Anglo-Norman word pentis (defined in AND#1 as ‘pentice’ and ‘small building’). This word, pentis, is an aphetic form (i.e. a word that loses its prefix, a process which is not uncommon in Anglo-Norman) of apentiz (also listed, separately, in the AND as ‘penthouse’ or ‘outbuilding’).

A pentis seems to have referred to any kind of structure appended to the wall of another building, and the evidence suggests that this structure may have been anything from a covered walkway, projecting porch, or shelter to a shed, annex or outhouse. Thus, a small house or annex with a sloped roof – which, as the dictionaries suggest, was one of the interpretations of what a medieval pentis could be.

http://anglonormandictionary.blogspot.ca/2015/04/word-of-month-penthouse.html

Word of the Month: Penthouse

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Kitchens - Medieval