The gallery in England: names and meanings

Gallery: in Elizabethan and Jacobean houses, a long room or ‘long gallery', usually on the upper floor and extending the whole length of the house...

J. Harris and J. Lever,Illustrated Glossary of Architecture 850-1830 (1969)

The ‘long gallery': a name and a room perfectly familiar these days to anyone visiting or reading about English country houses and, indeed, equally familiar since the midnineteenth century to those acquainted with prints and descriptions of country-house interiors. Does the name, however, as we use it today, go back much further than the nineteenth century and what are the problems which the word ‘gallery' itself can present?