As the fireplace gradually became a firmly established part of the structure of a house, the embellishment of the surround to the fire quickly developed. The early plaster smoke canopies were decorated with cast and moulded decoration and later the projecting stone canopies were carved with architecturally conceived mouldings such as might be used to decorate a door opening. It did not take long however for the householder to realise the possibilities inherent in displaying his sense of family pride and social position by enriching the extended chimney-piece - as it was to be called - with his coat of arms and the family motto. The early decorations of shields and architectural detail later developed into the gloriously carved melange of decorative detail incorporating mythical creatures and pictorial story-telling, an example of which can be seen at Burton Agnes in Yorkshire. The medieval idea of displaying the weapons held by a private army and the accoutrements of war which formerly often hung over the fireplace persisted in later centuries. For example, at Mawley in Shropshire, an impressive overmantel was designed by Francis Smith of Warwick in the 1730s which depicts, in high relief, trophies of war and Roman armour similar to those at Osterley in Middlesex, where Robert Adam set cartouches of armour and weapons into the panels of the entrance hall, the vestigial great hall of an earlier period. Later, in the 1870s, when John Francis Bentley designed the chimney-piece in the Venetian drawing-room at Carlton Towers in Yorkshire, he used practically every device of arms and emblazonment of the Stapletons and Beaumonts available - all to the most glorious effect.
In the eighteenth century generally, the period to which we longingly look back as one in which a sense of taste and design reached a height seldom achieved since, the work of the best sculptors and architects eschewed the vulgarity of over¬statement of their Elizabethan counterparts. The chimney-piece designs of Inigo Jones, William Kent and the other strictly classical designers looked to the classical world as interpreted by Vitruvius and Palladio for a vocabulary of form. As a result the chimney-pieces were often like miniature architectural studies complete with columns or caryatides, entablatures, pediments and sculptural detail derived from well-researched sources.
It should not be thought that there is a straight line of continuing development generation by generation in the evolution of the fireplace, from the central hearth on an earth floor to the refined detail of the chimney-pieces created by sculptors of the eighteenth century, for the central hearth, fuelled by charcoal, continued up until quite recently in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. No fuel other than charcoal is really suitable for such braziers, coke producing an offensive smell. Similarly, the crofters' `butt and ben' held on to the ancient tradition of a peat fire set against a central reredos, where in southern parts of our isles the brick-built recess or inglenook had a chimney to carry away the smoke. I have confined the present survey to the British Isles, but, looking further afield, even to countries closely allied to us in cultural background and race such as Scandinavia, Germany and France, it is possible to see that the development of the fireplace was affected by considerations other than solely that of the desire to keep warm. Scotland cannot be much warmer in winter than Denmark, and yet the development of the closed stove, largely in cast iron (compared with the ceramic stoves of Germany and Austria) was widely adopted throughout Scandinavia, but scarcely pen¬etrated on the same level here. One is tempted to look for a more primitive Celtic desire for the immediacy of the crackling log and curling flame, and yet so many of the surviving customs associated with fire ceremonies seem to be Scandinavian in origin. Such idiosyncrasies of fashion or taste continue today when, as we are told, A reredos hearth from the Shetland Islands, (The English Fireplace by Shuffrey.)
A fireplace in the Keep at Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire. The Keep was begun in 1435 by Lord Treasurer Cromwell, and the purse which frequently occurs in the panels refers to the office held by him. These are probably the finest remaining examples of Gothic fireplaces in the country.