House & Household

Excavations on the sites of Southernhay and the Guildhall Shopping Centre have recovered the only examples of Prehistoric houses excavated in the city: large round structures, which can be reconstructed as conical in form with thatched roofs.

From the Roman fortress period, much is known of the barracks of the legionary soldiers but the evidence for the character of later Roman civil houses is very fragmentary, the fullest plan being of one large courtyard house with costly mosaic floors.

Although the discarded sturdy timbers of houses of the Anglo-Saxon town are known, no such buildings have been excavated. The earliest standing house in Exeter (indeed in Devon and Cornwall) is the much-altered Bishop’s Palace of late Norman date. From the later Middle Ages the picture from standing buildings is fuller and more varied: examples of grand clergy houses rows of lodgings for minor clergy a modest town house and a substantial merchant’s house are represented here.

The transition to the early modern town house, in which the old medieval open hall was normally abandoned and more intimate spaces used, can be followed instructively in Exeter. The museum collection holds fragments from some particularly important examples of Tudor and Stuart town houses, and this aspect of the city’s architectural history is especially richly represented in the museum’s collections of topographical drawings. From the Georgian period the museum holds some architectural material, but it has rarely ventured into collecting such material of later date.

The excavated household objects from the city span the entire period from the 10th to the 19th century, and amount to one of the best series of such goods in any provincial city in Britain. In addition to the inevitable local ceramics, there is a fine series of imported pottery, and important groups of wooden objects, leather and, to a lesser extent, metalwork.