The Percies had a great mansion in Walmgate.  In other parts were the mansions of the Scropes and the Vavasours.  It is, however, the houses of the prosperous traders that are the most interesting, for in them we see the kind of house a man built from the results of successful business.  Most houses were of timber; those of the more wealthy were of stone and timber.{original had “,”} The use of half-timbering, when the face of a building consisted of woodwork and plaster, made houses and streets very picturesque.  The woodwork was often artistically carved.  Each storey was made to overhang the one below it, so that an umbrella, if umbrellas had been in use then, would have been almost a superfluity, if not a needless luxury, besides being impossible to manipulate in the narrow streets and ways of a mediaeval city.  The upper storeys of two houses facing each other across a street were often very close.  Usually there were no more than three storeys.  The roofs were very steep and covered generally with tiles, but in the case of the smaller dwellings with thatch.  From a house-top the view across the neighbourhood would be of a huddled medley of red-tiled roofs, all broken up with gables and tiny dormer windows; there would be no regularity, just a jumble of patches of red-tiled roofing.

The present streets called Shambles, Pavement, Petergate and Stonegate, contain excellent examples of mediaeval domestic architecture.

Shops were distinguished by having the front of the ground floor arranged as a show-room, warehouse, or business room which was open to the street.  The trader lived at his shop.  In the case of a butcher’s, for example, the front part of the shutters that covered the unglazed window at night, was let down in business hours so that it hung over the footway.  On it were exhibited the joints of meat.  Butchers’ slaughter-houses were then, as now, private premises and right in the heart of the city.

The rooms in the houses were quite small, with low ceilings.  The small windows, whether they were merely fitted with wooden shutters or glazed with many small panes kept together with strips of lead, lighted the rooms but poorly.  The closeness of the houses made internal lighting still less effective.  The interior walls were of timbering and plaster, often white- or colour-washed.[5] Panelling was used occasionally.  The ventilation and hygienic conditions generally were far from good, as may be imagined from a consideration of the smallness of the houses, the compactness of the city, particularly the parts occupied by the people, and especially of the primitive system of sanitation, which was content to use the front street as a main sewer.  There were, of course, no drains; at most there was a gutter along the middle of a street, or at each side of the roadway.  It was the traditional practice to dump house and workshop refuse into the streets.  Some of it was carried along by rainwater, but generally it remained:  in any case it was