New Inn - The Rosemary and Thyme

dagorhir

The second inn of my expanded village of Hommlet: The Rosemary and Thyme

DaltonSpence

Okay, here we go:

1. It's rare outside a castle you get outer walls that are five feet thick and when they are they usually are made of stone, not brick. (Hey I rhymed! Didn't mean to.) I think you have enough structural pillars to support an upper story or two with thinner walls although they might be a bit bigger.
2. Is that supposed to be a stable off the courtyard? If so, those horse stalls are much too wide. A single horse doesn't usually get that much room at an inn and putting two in a stall is just asking for trouble. At an inn space is money and you don't waste any.
3. The courtyard should be a bit messier and muddier if the inn is getting a decent amount of traffic. Maybe a bit of hay strewn around? A horse trough or two with a couple of horse rails for customers that can't afford stabling the fees? Horse and wagon tracks maybe? With a horse cart or carriage parked inside the wall?
4. The bar should extend to the outer wall with a flip-up panel at the end to get by. The wall behind the bar should be extended five feet; I don't insist on a door between the kitchen and the bar (although I'd prefer one) but a ten foot wide gap is too much.
5. Is that an outside door in the kitchen? If so there should be a path from it to where ever the kitchen staff are going. Maybe some place they are dumping trash? An outside privy perhaps? The customers use the one in the basement under the stairs (well ventilated of course).
6. The staircase in the upper corner is a bit wide; five feet is plenty for two people to pass each other (unless they giants but the tables on the floor seem too close together for that ).

Hope this helps.

Loopysue

Just one little snippet of information here - I once lived in an eighteenth century cottage. The walls were over 4 feet thick on the ground floor, and much thinner on the first floor. The building material was local flints, which are quite small - about the size of a fist. We think the reason for the thickness of the walls is the poor nature of the building materials and the fact that they had to support 2 floors and an immensely heavy thatch on top of that.

Wyvern

As the medieval wall thickness point has come up a couple of times recently, it may be worth anyone interested reviewing the comments to this query posted on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange back in Dec 2016. The querent was fantasy mapping using CC3. There are some interesting notes there, though perhaps that of greatest relevance relates to an article, The Construction of Medieval and Tudor Houses in London (link is to the free PDF download of the article), which mentions, for instance, an early 13th century London regulation requiring house walls to be built from stone at least 3 feet thick. That not all were seems to have resulted in collapses, hence the regulation. It discusses other materials and construction methods too for the period from circa 1200 to circa 1600, so is worth reviewing.

Most of the other information readily available online relates to medieval castle walls, so is fairly useless for this kind of discussion, but if you dig around, you can find a few architectural and archaeological reports on individual medieval house buildings if sourcing more precise details for specific cases would be useful for your mapping.

As for the Hommlet D&D setting, the original T1 module makes the particular comment from the settlement's heyday (page 2): "Prosperity was great, for the lord of the district was mild and taxed but little. Trade was good, and the land was untroubled by war or outlaws or ravaging beasts." So, plenty of spare cash floating around, it would seem, at least when the original properties were built and enhanced, before disaster overtook things (it's a D&D module; what did you expect?!).

pvernon

Dalton made many good points. I think that the window north of the band stand (?) could be a door then a path from it and from the kitchen could go to privies on the other side of the hedge. A kitchen garden could also go along the path from the kitchen. I am not a fan of inside privies in a public buildings. Remember when you do the second floor if there is a privy then either it is on the outside wall so the slops go straight out, or some poor sod has to carry the buckets out. Note the route that they have to take.

I am not sure how the beer barrels get to the bar and kitchen end of the building. Do they come into the court yard and then get rolled through the common room, or maybe there is a basement stair either south or west of the kitchen and they get rolled down to basement storage? Same with other food supplies.

dagorhir

https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/comment/107379#Comment_107379

1. Not that rare. When good building stones were not available, bricks were used. Also, I've actually stayed at inns in France that had walls that were 3-4 feet thick. None had been castles before. One had been an inn since the 13th century and one was built out of bricks and dated to the 16th century. I chose were I stayed because they were old buildings. I find it's a good way to see how they were built.
2. The stable is built for comfort (That has something to do with the individual who had the inn built), but two horses can share in single stall. A single giant mountain goat can only fit in a stall (that was something to do with the adventure itself.
3. The inn is new. Also, I don't have the available symbols for it and I'm not talented enough to create it. If I add anything it just looks worse.
4. This is a early medieval setting, the hinges to do that are not that common and difficult to make.
5. As previously stated, the inn it new and that door doesn't see all that much traffic. As for the trash, it is taken away by the chamber pot cleaner. There are no privies as they use chamber pots.
6. The staircase is wide because the owner wanted it to look grand. The spacing between tables is to avoid the inn getting to crowded. The patrons must see the stage, mostly. Everything about this inn is a little over the top. This design has caused problems on the upper levels.

There is a staircase in the stables that lead to the cellar. All supplies enter the inn that way and are stored in in the cellar until needed. And everything come up from the cellar using the staircase in the kitchen.

jslayton

When good building stones were not available, bricks were used.

Yep, that's people for you. Can't find a rock, make a rock out of whatever you have handy. Don't like the rocks you have, try lighting them on fire and see if that helps.

DaltonSpence

Some responses to your comments:

1. There has been a lot of discussion about thick walls being period appropriate so I will concede this.
2. As long as the horses are friendly. I was looking at it like a business that would do things as cheaply as possible. If the owner is a romantic it would explain some of the more impractical elements.
3. I keep thinking of the courtyard of the Tendril's Oak Inn with its puddles and muddy tracks. My single-horse stalls also came from there. This was the third Cartographer's Annual issue I ever saw and a most of my ideas about what an inn should look like come from it.
4. Just put a regular hinge on top of the bar and a cut line showing where the counter top was sawn away. If you have no hinge symbols make the gap between the bar and the wall half a square wide. That's a standard door width today and plenty of room to get by.
5. For me a "privy" would be a small room with a door or curtain for privacy containing a wooden chair with a hole in the seat and a chamber pot underneath. I was imagining basement toilets like in my local diner with the stairs to them under the "Grande Promenade". (It's not nice to make your customers go outside to the stable to poop.)
6. Is there a balcony over the tavern floor? A 10' wide balcony wrapping around the second level would explain the double stairs. There could be stairs from that to a third floor with rooms and a chandelier in the center to light the whole tavern. Maybe a small "dumbwaiter" at the end of the bar so the barkeep can send drinks up to barmaids serving the tables on that level.

The table spacing seemed okay to me; you want your customers and staff to be able to move around freely in a high-end place like this. There could be a private dining room over the kitchen on the second level with its own dumbwaiter to serve VIPs a hot dinner.

dagorhir

The owner, Vantar of Burford, could be described as romantic. He was a travelling bard/adventurer until he arrived in Hommlet with a royal charter allowing him to build an inn at the southern end of the village where the road splits into the west and south direction. He doesn't really care about the business aspect as he sees the inn as a stage for his performances. He also doesn't know much horse, or even running inns.

Early medieval hinges could be a rather massive affair that do not resemble modern hinges. They would be a set of large metal bands on top of the bar, on both sides of the cut. They would also be a risk of the mobile part of the bar slipping out of the hinge. Doors don't have that problem because gravity holds them in place.

Privacy for doing one's business on the pot is truly a modern concept. Privies became more common somewhere between the 11th and 12th, I'm not certain exactly when. They certainly arrive in Britain after 1067 since the are typically referred to as a "garderobe normande" which is French for Normand wardrobe.

There is no balcony as the second and third floor are dedicated to rooms. Vantar truly had an inn in mind even if is understanding of what an inn is was limited.