The Great Hall was built in about 1430, on the site of an earlier hall. It was the room where the household ate alongside the family. The family sat at the raised high table and the lesser folk at the side tables flanking the central fireplace. There’s a smoke hole directly above the fireplace. The hall has elaborate folding shutters at its windows with elaborate iron hinge-straps, which are copies of early 15th century examples in the Zouche Chapel of York Minster.

The far end of the hall, where the glass panel is now, originally opened directly onto an internal corridor between the front and back doors of the house, so the food prepared in the kitchen and buttery could have been carried straight across the corridor into the Hall. After the medieval period, when the house was broken up into smaller units, the corridor became a public alleyway, which it remains to this day. Later still, the hall itself was divided horizontally into 3 rooms, one above the other. The joist holes for one of the later floors can be seen in the beam above the glass panel. The Hall you see today has been restored to its original height and the tiled floor archaeologists discovered during excavation has been reconstructed.

Meals served here might have consisted of a first course such as beef and herb pottage, brawn in mustard sauce, a dish of thrushes in salt and cinnamon, and apple fritters. Later courses may have included lamb and ginger, curlew in a sauce of salt, sugar and river water, and creamed almonds. Dessert might have been wafers and sweet wine or spiced hippocras and figs with cheese.

Meals in houses such as Barley Hall would have been governed by complex etiquette and elaborate table manners. They also required very different tableware from that used today. The spoons you see were cast in pewter, and the acorn-ended spoon reproduces an original in the Yorkshire Museum, which is possibly the work of a medieval pewterer working in Stonegate. The glasses would have been imported. These replicas are from Prague, where the Czech craftsmen have revived the techniques of the medieval glassmakers. Ordinary diners drank from turned wooden bowls, which are also depicted in this room. No forks were used at table, and diners normally provided their own eating knives. One of the knives you see here is replicated from a 15th century example excavated at Bedern in York. The rectangular pewter ‘trencher bases’ were used as individual chopping boards.

The table linen or ‘napery’ in this room would have been amongst the most prized status symbols for a medieval household. Linen illustrated social status; therefore the High Table was furnished with fine diapered linen, whilst the lesser folk made do with plainer versions.

The painted linen hangings in the Great Hall were very popular in late-medieval York, particularly amongst those who could not afford the more expensive figured tapestries. The linen canvas you see here was first sized with rabbit-skin glue and then painted with background colours of rich burgundy and green. Dyes for these textiles were produced using natural (vegetable) dyes such as those used in medieval times. Weld or Dyers’ Rocket produces a strong yellow colour; this was over-dyed with blue woad or indigo to provide the green colour. The decoration is derived from the Book of Hours; a manuscript produced for the Bolton family in York, who may have known the Snawsell’s, using pigments hand-ground from authentic ingredients.