art, and we give as an illustration some houses which date back to
Tudor times, but have, alas! been recently demolished.

[Illustration: Tudor Tenements, New Inn Hall St, Oxford. Now
demolished]

Many conjectures have been made as to the reason why our forefathers
preferred to rear their houses with the upper storeys projecting out
into the streets. We can understand that in towns where space was
limited it would be an advantage to increase the size of the upper
rooms, if one did not object to the lack of air in the narrow street
and the absence of sunlight. But we find these same projecting storeys
in the depth of the country, where there could have been no
restriction as to the ground to be occupied by the house. Possibly the
fashion was first established of necessity in towns, and the
traditional mode of building was continued in the country. Some say
that by this means our ancestors tried to protect the lower part of
the house, the foundations, from the influence of the weather; others
with some ingenuity suggest that these projecting storeys were
intended to form a covered walk for passengers in the streets, and to
protect them from the showers of slops which the careless housewife of
Elizabethan times cast recklessly from the upstairs windows.
Architects tell us that it was purely a matter of construction. Our
forefathers used to place four strong corner-posts, framed from the
trunks of oak trees, firmly sunk into the ground with their roots left
on and placed upward, the roots curving outwards so as to form
supports for the upper storeys. These curved parts, and often the
posts also, were often elaborately carved and ornamented, as in the
example which our artist gives us of a corner-post of a house in
Ipswich.