[ILLUSTRATION]
295. EZINGE (GRONINGEN), THE NETHERLANDS
EXTERIOR VIEW OF SETTLEMENT, 4th CENTURY B.C.
[redrawn from reconstruction by H. Reinerth, 1940, 88, fig. 25]
The discovery of this Iron Age village in 1931-34 was a great landmark in the history of premedieval house construction in transalpine Europe.
The find showed that a house well portrayed by Albrecht Dürer (fig. 335) and Peter Bruegel the Elder (fig. 336) was already fully developed
and in common use for close to 2,000 years.
Later excavations brought the even more startling discovery that this same house type was a standard construction form as early as 1250 B.C.,
and perhaps even in the 14th century B.C. (fig. 323). In the lowlands of Holland and Northern Germany, the same house is used even today
with only minor modifications, for the same purposes for which it was originally conceived (Frisian Los-hus, Lower Saxon Wohnstallhaus).
Its life span is at least 3,300 years, and does not yet appear to have entered its terminal phase.
The most distinctive trait of this type of structure is that it offers, with only a minimum of materials, an ingeniously simple method of covering
large spaces beneath a vast roof carried by a frame of light timbers; these divide the interior of the house lengthwise into nave and two aisles
(figs. 297, 298) and crosswise into a multitude of separable yet transparent bays.
The building type owes its longevity to its ability simultaneously to offer spatial
unity and spatial divisibility. In pre- and protohistorical times almost exclusively
confined to dwelling, sheltering of animals, and harvest storage, the structure entered,
in response to growing complexities of medieval life and social organization, a
virtually explosive phase of functional variety, and came to fill many diverse needs.
On the highest of society, it appeared as residential and administrative seat for
feudal lords and their retainers (figs. 339, 340, and 344-348), including the king
himself. It was used as church (Horn, 1958, 4, figs. 3-8) and Horn, 1962); as
hospital for the sick and infirm (figs. 341-343); as meeting and council hall for the
guilds. And from the 12th century onward in response to the rise of international
trade it became, in Paris and countless smaller towns of France, the standard form
for urban market halls, under whose sheltering roofs the local peasants and traders
from distant places could rent stalls from which to sell produce and goods (Horn
1958, 15ff; Horn and Born, 1961, Horn, 1963).
