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Originally Posted by JennyHallu
Nice discussion: But Nogrod, I fear I must bring up a point of procedure. Any kitchen hearth in the middle ages would NEVER go out. If it goes out, you have to start with a cold hearth in the morning, and it can take hours to get it to cooking heat, especially since a kitchen fire is mostly coals. What you do is rake it over so that the coals are insulated, and there's no live flame, but that can still burn down a house.
Ever wonder where we got the phrase "Keep the home-fires burning"? A Middle-Ages hearth-fire isn't ever put out, and I think Stigend would know that. That's equally true, by the by, in a serf's hovel and a lord's summer palace. That's another reason a kitchen in a castle might be built separately: with a constant flame, heat against the building's walls in summer would make the building near unbearable.
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Yes I know. I have indeed "lived" in a cottage like that in my childhood for short times - and been in old farmsteads in Finland later. The oven is left smouldering for the night and then in the morning it's relit or "woken up" by just raking the coals and adding more wood.
The idea of an outdoor oven / grill was just to solve the summer-heat problem - and during summer the oven outside wouldn't be any more colder than one inside in the morning...
And as I put Stigend to think to himself, most of the fires were caused by total carelessness or bad construction - after all, stone is not so flammable
and even a hot stone-oven doesn't set fire to a wooden wall next to it just by itself when it is made large enough. Oftentimes the construction was made in a way that there was the oven, then there was a stone/brick wall built around it. Then depending on the size of the building, that stone/brickwall might be anything to ten yards on both sides of the oven - so that wall comes warm and heats the building, but from the fringe areas (from where it is attached to the wooden wall) it's not hot but only warm.
Okay. Just to add...