Read The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 Online
Authors: Graeme J. White
The evolution of this plan can be traced through the twelfth to early fourteenth centuries from several manor house excavations.
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Among examples still standing, however, it is usual to find greater elaboration, with a central hall open to the roof flanked by two-storey wings at one or both ends to form an L-, T-, H- or half-H shaped plan, the last being where the wings project forwards but not back from the hall; in all these, the concept of service and solar areas was retained but the accommodation therein was greatly enhanced. The so-called ‘hall-and-cross-wings’ H- or half-H shaped plan was especially popular, well-established over much of the country by the fourteenth century, sometimes built anew in that form, sometimes developing in stages from a T or L: in Yorkshire, for example, Rawthorpe Old Hall, Dalton, of the early sixteenth century, has been identified as an example of a single-build, Sharlston Hall near Wakefield as a case where the original hall of about 1425 had one wing added around 1450 and the other about 1500. And by the end of the middle ages, there was a growing tendency to elaborate further by adding appendages to the cross-wings, and in a few cases to extend these wings and add a fourth side to create a full courtyard. Penhallam, Jacobstow (Cornwall), part of the complex at the aforementioned Berry Court, is a very early example of this phenomenon: excavation has shown the evolution of a hall-and-cross-wings plan, in place by the middle of the thirteenth century, to
a full courtyard with gatehouse commanding a drawbridge over the moat, by (at the latest) the early fourteenth. More typical timing was that at the manor house at West Bromwich (Warwickshire), which is known to have developed from an original T-plan in the thirteenth century to an H-plan by around 1425; by 1500 further annexes, including a chapel, had appeared on both wings and early in the seventeenth century the addition of a gatehouse completed the courtyard.
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Turning from here to the homes of the majority, we need to say first that some of the conclusions reached in the 1960s – admittedly with an expectation that they would be overturned by further work – have not stood the test of time. One of these is the classification of different types of peasant dwelling. Excavations up to that time suggested that there were recurring patterns in peasant house types, ranging from the humblest dwellings (labelled ‘cots’ and presumed to be for the poorest peasants or ‘cottars’) which might be one-roomed at about 5 metres by 3.5 metres or two-roomed about 10 metres by 4.5 metres, to ‘longhouses’ (for the most populous group, the ‘villeins’) anything up to 30 metres in length and distinguished by having space for animals at one end, on to ‘farms’ where living standards were sufficiently high for humans and animals to occupy separate buildings within the same toft: though whatever their length these buildings were at most 6 metres wide because of the constraints of available timber to span their roofs. Work since then has challenged the assumption that different house-types and house-sizes can automatically be assigned to particular categories of peasant, has pointed out that ancillary buildings – indicative of ‘farms’ – can be found in tofts and crofts associated with various sizes of dwelling (not necessarily the largest) and has demonstrated that not all long narrow houses were necessarily ‘longhouses’ in the sense of being intended to shelter livestock at one end: to be identified as longhouses under this tight definition, there needs to be evidence that animals were actually kept within them, such as substantial open drains, tethering rings or post-holes for stalls.
The other major change in our perception of peasant housing is a rejection of the idea that much of it was not built to last. In the pioneering days of medieval settlement excavation, archaeologists were impressed by recurring evidence of repeated rebuildings, seemingly every few decades, as at Wharram Percy where in ‘toft 6’ the original twelfth-century timber house gave way in the late thirteenth century to a small stone dwelling and thereafter to what was interpreted as one longhouse after another, also in stone; similarly, in ‘toft 10’, on the site of the late-twelfth-century manor house, a sequence of peasant dwellings was subsequently erected – first of timber, then of stone, then of timber-on-stone – with some rebuildings being on a completely different alignment. Likewise at Hangleton ‘building 9’ apparently moved from an alignment sideways to the street and a position at the
back of the toft in the thirteenth century to appear gable-end to the street and at the front of the toft by the fifteenth.
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But further documentary and archaeological work has questioned much of this. The small ‘cots’ which allegedly preceded longhouses in tofts 6 and 10 at Wharram Percy have been reinterpreted as portions of once longer dwellings and – given difficulties with dating and identification of function – there has been a challenge to the idea that the presence of several differently aligned buildings within a toft necessarily indicates sequential development: might we not be seeing contemporary structures, that is one or more houses (perhaps a second one for a retired couple) and an ancillary farm building or two? Excavation has certainly revealed medieval peasant houses which passed down several generations, as at Great Linford (Buckinghamshire); the pattern here was for modification but not wholesale rebuilding, with the result that houses whose basic structure was of timber frames on low stone walls lasted from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries to the seventeenth.
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In terms of construction technique, the thirteenth century is now seen as a time when the practice of placing timber uprights in ‘earthfast foundations’ – that is directly into the ground, so creating the postholes which can sometimes be identified by archaeologists – was replaced by setting them on stone walls or, if stone was scarce, on individual padstones. This did not happen everywhere – in Cheshire and Lincolnshire earthfast techniques seem to have persisted while in parts of the midlands they were succeeded by a phase of resting timbers on the ground surface without any intervening stone.
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But the phenomenon was widespread, despite the different types of stone available in different regions and resort in some places, such as Norfolk, to the building of ‘clay lump’ walls to support the timbers instead. This development implies a new expectation that houses would last longer than their predecessors, whose timber uprights had rotted in the ground. The impression that peasants were prepared to invest heavily in houses built for the long term is also apparent from the popularity over much of England of cruck construction, based upon the walls and roofs being dependent upon massive curved timbers set in bays at intervals through a house, for which there is both documentary and archaeological evidence from the thirteenth century onwards. The essential point about cruck construction is that the walls were built as screens without load-bearing responsibilities: they might frequently be rebuilt but this did not mean that the dwelling as a whole was being rebuilt, if the basic structure dependent on the cruck frames remained intact. This is possibly what happened in ‘toft 6’ at Wharram Percy, where the excavation of successive longhouses has been reinterpreted as revealing padstones to support a series of crucks: the apparent rebuildings of this longhouse actually involved the replacement of its walls but not of the essential cruck structure.
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Crucks in themselves were major investments,
based on the trunks of standard trees which might well have been over 100 years old; it is unlikely that they would have been replaced in a shorter period than the timbers themselves took to grow.
The picture which emerges from all this is one in which, at least from the thirteenth century, a high proportion of peasant houses were substantially built, many incorporating large timber crucks and, at ground level, some local stone if available. It would be wrong to forget the small one-roomed ‘cot’ altogether: for landless wage-earning labourers, whether working on farms or engaged in an industrial activity, this might be all that could be afforded and – with the addition of one or two outbuildings within the toft – all that was needed. Excavation of the deserted village of Tatton (Cheshire) suggests that modest dwellings often of one room only, built of local timber, straw and earth ‘obtained without money changing hands and erected without specialist assistance’ sufficed for most of the population, with any livestock being housed separately; comparisons have been drawn between this peasant accommodation and that on the Solway Plain in north-west Cumberland.
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But more substantial houses, of which the ‘longhouse’ with animals at one end was one version, were widespread elsewhere, even among those whose holdings in land were small. Late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century building agreements in the west midlands, where lords required incoming peasant tenants to repair or rebuild houses if there had been dilapidation, show the dimensions of some 80% of those listed to have been at least 4.6 metres by 9.2 metres (15 x 30 feet) but more usually 4.6 metres by 13.8 metres (15 x 45 feet); some of the longer houses went to the holders of 12 hectares or more but others to tenants of only a quarter of this. A key point is that, at least from the thirteenth century, peasants seem to have been prepared to engage in the market to buy building materials (especially the major timbers) and employ skilled workers (among whom professional carpenters were most prominent). It has been reckoned that by the early fifteenth century one of the typical longer houses in the west midlands would have cost between £3 and £4 to build – almost a year’s annual income for a carpenter, half as much again for a building labourer.
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Against this background, we can return to the standard plan of central space, cross-passage between opposing entrances, and private and service ends, this time in the context of the houses of freeholders and of peasants in general. Excavated examples of houses which show the classic four components, but appear to have had no association with a manorial lord, have been identified at Monkton (Kent) in the late twelfth century, and at Hangleton (Sussex), Tattenhoe (Buckinghamshire) and Meldon near Okehampton (Devon) during the thirteenth. From the fourteenth century onwards, houses are still standing, much altered since medieval times but with the essentials of this arrangement apparent. At Woolstaston near Church Stretton (Shropshire), for
example, an L-shaped house with open hall and solar wing at one end, known on documentary evidence to have been occupied by freeholders, has had the construction of its timber framework (including crucks) dated to the 1390s. All the basic components of service end, cross-passage, open hall and private end (the latter two-storeyed) can be identified in a surviving fifteenth-century house known as Forsters in Bridewell Lane, Shapwick, considered to ‘have been suitable for a prosperous yeoman farmer, a tenant of [Glastonbury] abbey’. And many of the surviving ‘Wealden’ houses of Kent and Sussex had their origin in late-medieval freeholders’ dwellings, built in the local style whereby the two ends projected on jetties at first-floor level, with a central hall open to the roof between them.
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Before leaving this subject, a final word should be said on longhouses. Among the examples of non-manorial houses mentioned in the previous paragraph, only that at Meldon in Devon can confidently be described as a longhouse in the strict sense of having accommodated animals at the end beyond the cross passage. In the others, this end was used for other purposes, perhaps for storage or as a workshop. Longhouses narrowly defined take us back to the regionalism we encountered in connection with the layout of tofts and crofts: Regions 1 (the south west) and 3 (the north and north west) were areas where they were common, Regions 2 and 4 (the south, south east and midlands) were areas where animals tended to be either left outside or housed in a separate building. One possible explanation for this contrast is that the drier and milder climate of the south and east allowed cattle to be overwintered without the need to bring them inside the house, a suggestion which accords with what may have been late-medieval enclosed ‘crew-yards’ for the keeping of cattle through the winter, found within tofts at the ‘Region 4’ sites of Barton Blount and Goltho.
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Even in ‘longhouse’ regions, however, there appears to have been a tendency by the later medieval period for those who could afford to house their livestock in a separate building within the toft to do so, not necessarily because of any objection to having animals under the same roof but to increase their domestic space. There is no suggestion, for instance, that the wealthy freeholders who occupied the late medieval L-shaped house at Woolstaston chose to share their accommodation with animals, even though they were in an area with a ‘longhouse tradition’.
It is worth adding that a move away from living under the same roof as livestock would not be the only example of dynamism in the approach taken to rural housing. A significant late-medieval change in the positioning of hearths has been detected, the central open hearth being replaced by one set against the partition which separated the hall from the cross passage: a switch apparent in Goltho and Barton Blount by the fourteenth century, in the Halifax-Huddersfield area of Yorkshire in the fifteenth century, and further north in West Whelpington (Northumberland) by the end of that century. In
this respect, freeholders and peasants can be regarded as ‘ahead’ of many lords of the manor, who retained an open hall with central hearth throughout the middle ages. The construction of a hearth against the cross passage was to continue to be a feature wherever longhouses continued to be built, as they did in some quantity in the south west into the seventeenth and the north until the eighteenth centuries. By then, however, there had been a fundamental change in house-type elsewhere, in the direction of dwellings which were not only intended solely for human habitation but were almost entirely two-storey: a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘Great Rebuilding’, involving the roofing of the hall and the insertion of fireplaces, which made the medieval plan redundant and evidence of its former existence correspondingly hard to find.
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