Hall was early of importance on account of its salt-mines, which were held as a fief of the Empire by the so-called Salzgrafen (Salt-graves), of whom the earliest known, the counts of Westheim, had their seat in the castle of Hall. Later the town belonged to the Knights Templars. It was made a free imperial city in 1276 by Rudolph of Habsburg. In 1802 it came into the possession of Württemberg.
HALL (O. E. heall, a common Teutonic word, cf. Ger. Halle), a term which has two significations in England and is applied sometimes to the manor house, the residence of the lord of the manor, which implied a territorial possession, but more often to the entrance hall of a mansion. In the latter case it was the one large room in the feudal castle up to the middle of the 15th century, when it served as audience chamber, dining-room, and dormitory. The hall was generally a parallelogram on plan, with a raised daïs at the farther end, a large bow window on one side, and in one or two cases on both sides. At the entrance end was a passage, which was separated from the hall by a partition screen often elaborately decorated, and over which was provided a minstrels’ gallery; on the opposite side of the passage were the hatches communicating with the serveries. This arrangement is still found in some of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, such as those of New College, Christchurch, Wadham and Magdalen, Oxford, and in Trinity College, Cambridge. In private mansions, however, the kitchen and offices have been removed to a greater distance, and the great hall is only used for banquets. Among the more remarkable examples are the halls of Audley End; Hatfield; Brougham Castle; Hardwick; Knole Stanway in Gloucestershire; Wollaton, where it is situated in the centre of the mansion and lighted by clerestory windows; Burton Agnes in Yorkshire; Canons Ashley, Northamptonshire; Westwood Park, Worcestershire; Fountains, Yorkshire; Sydenham House, Devonshire; Cobham, Kent; Montacute, Somersetshire; Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire (vaulted and with two columns in the centre of the hall to carry the vault); Longford Castle, Wiltshire; Barlborough, Derbyshire; Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire, with a bow window at each end of the daïs and a third bow window at the other end; Knole, Kent; and at Mayfield, Sussex (with stone arches across to carry the roof), now converted into a Roman Catholic chapel. Many of these halls have hammer-beam roofs, the most remarkable of which is found in the Middle Temple Hall, London, where both the tie and collar beams have hammer-beams. Of other halls, Westminster is the largest, being 238 ft. long; followed by the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, 110 ft.; Wolsey’s Hall, Hampton Court, 106 ft.; the Egyptian Hall at the Mansion House; the hall at Lambeth, now the library; Crosby Hall; Gray’s Inn Hall; the Guildhall; Charterhouse; and the following halls of the London City Companies—Clothworkers, Brewers, Goldsmiths, Fishmongers. The term hall is also given to the following English mansions:—Haddon, Hardwick, Apethorpe, Aston, Blickling, Brereton, Burton Agnes, Cobham, Dingley, Rushton, Kirby, Litford and Wollaton; and it was the name of some of the earlier colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, most of which have now been absorbed in other colleges, so that there remain only St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
HALLAM, HENRY (1777–1859), English historian, was the only son of John Hallam, canon of Windsor and dean of Bristol, and was born on the 9th of July 1777. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1799. Called to the bar, he practised for some years on the Oxford circuit; but his tastes were literary, and when, on the death of his father in 1812, he inherited a small estate in Lincolnshire, he gave himself up wholly to the studies of his life. He had early become connected with the brilliant band of authors and politicians who then led the Whig party, a connexion to which he owed his appointment to the well-paid and easy post of commissioner of stamps; but in practical politics, for which he was by nature unsuited, he took no active share. But he was an active supporter of many popular movements—particularly of that which ended in the abolition of the slave trade; and he was throughout his entire life sincerely and profoundly attached to the political principles of the Whigs, both in their popular and in their aristocratic aspect.
Hallam’s earliest literary work was undertaken in connexion with the great organ of the Whig party, the Edinburgh Review, where his review of Scott’s Dryden attracted much notice. His first great work, The View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, was produced in 1818, and was followed nine years later by the Constitutional History of England. In 1838–1839 appeared the Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries. These are the three works on which the fame of Hallam rests. They at once took a place in English literature which has never been seriously challenged. A volume of supplemental notes to his Middle Ages was published in 1848. These facts and dates represent nearly all the events of Hallam’s career. The strongest personal interest in his life was the affliction which befell him in the loss of his children, one after another. His eldest son, Arthur Henry Hallam,—the “A.H.H.” of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and by the testimony of his contemporaries a man of the most brilliant promise,—died in 1833 at the age of twenty-two. Seventeen years later, his second son, Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, was cut off like his brother at the very threshold of what might have been a great career. The premature death and high talents of these young men, and the association of one of them with the most popular poem of the age, have made Hallam’s family afflictions better known than any other incidents of his life. He survived wife, daughter and sons by many years. In 1834 Hallam published The Remains in Prose and Verse of Arthur Henry Hallam, with a Sketch of his Life. In 1852 a selection of Literary Essays and Characters from the Literature of Europe was published. Hallam was a fellow of the Royal Society, and a trustee of the British Museum, and enjoyed many other appropriate distinctions. In 1830 he received the gold medal for history, founded by George IV. He died on the 21st of January 1859.
The Middle Ages is described by Hallam himself as a series of historical dissertations, a comprehensive survey of the chief circumstances that can interest a philosophical inquirer during the period from the 5th to the 15th century. The work consists of nine long chapters, each of which is a complete treatise in itself. The history of France, of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, and of the Greek and Saracenic empires, sketched in rapid and general terms, is the subject of five separate chapters. Others deal with the great institutional features of medieval society—the development of the feudal system, of the ecclesiastical system, and of the free political system of England. The last chapter sketches the general state of society, the growth of commerce, manners, and literature in the middle ages. The book may be regarded as a general view of early modern history, preparatory to the more detailed treatment of special lines of inquiry carried out in his subsequent works, although Hallam’s original intention was to continue the work on the scale on which it had been begun.
The Constitutional History of England takes up the subject at the point at which it had been dropped in the View of the Middle Ages, viz. the accession of Henry VII.,[1] and carries it down to the accession of George III. Hallam stopped here for a characteristic reason, which it is impossible not to respect and to regret. He was unwilling to excite the prejudices of modern politics which seemed to him to run back through the whole period of the reign of George III. As a matter of fact they ran back much farther, as Hallam soon found. The sensitive impartiality which withheld him from touching perhaps the most interesting period in the history of the constitution did not save him from the charge of partisanship. The Quarterly Review for 1828 contains an article on the Constitutional History, written by Southey, full of railing and reproach. The work, he says, is the “production of a decided partisan,” who “rakes in the ashes of long-forgotten and a thousand times buried slanders,
- ↑ Lord Brougham, overlooking the constitutional chapter in the Middle Ages, censured Hallam for making an arbitrary beginning at this point, and proposed to write a more complete history himself.
