172 



PREBENDAL HOUSES AT LITTLE CHESTER. 



the fireplace in good preservation, mostly fancy subjects in a pink 

 colour, with one or two blue ones representing Scripture incidents. 

 At the top of all is a curious room in the roof open to the rafters. 

 There is an improbable legend that this was used as a place of 

 confinement by the monks ; but it is not old enough. In a small 

 bedroom, the beam which supports the floor above is a rough tree 

 trunk of the rudest workmanship, while in other rooms the beams 

 are very nicely moulded and correspond exactly with others in the 



Manor Farm — Back View. 



house, shown in the distance in the drawing in Vol. XL, so that 

 the date of portions of both these houses are the same. Each of 

 them has a good panelled room, but the oak has been painted, 

 and, unlike the stone prebend, neither have any carving, the 

 nearest approach to anything of the kind is in the Manor Farm 

 house, where there is a nicely moulded oak door to a cupboard 

 in the wall of a passage, of which we show here a portion (Fig. i ) 

 with a curious old iron hinge. 



In the roof of the other part of this house, where the chimney- 

 stack rises through the roof, there are remains of stone coffering 

 which appear to have at some time or other been part of a flat 



