I have written much about the material background of the house and farm in the two books already mentioned; and they form a necessary adjunct to most of the following chapters. Many authors have written about the physical shape of the typical East Anglian house and some of their books are here recommended. In the first few chapters I have attempted to supplement this information with material from my own experience. I have given the book the title it has because its subject bears an analogy to the crop marks seen in the aerial photographs of some of our fields. Just as the pattern of the ancient settlements is still to be seen in spite of years of repeated ploughings, so the beliefs and customs linked with the old rural way of life in Britain have survived the pressures and changes of many centuries. They are so old that they cannot be dated; and on this count alone they are historical evidence, as valuable as the archaeological remains that are dug from those sites so dramatically revealed since the development of the aeroplane.
Helmingham, Suffolk
November, 1965.
1 Henry A. Murray (Editor), Myth and Mythmaking, New York, 1960, p. 141.
2 Dilim Okafor-Omali, A Nigerian Villager in Two Worlds, London, 1965.
3 Iorwerth C. Peate, The Study of Folk Life, Gwerin, Vol. II, No. 3.
4 Prehistoric Europe, London, 1952, pp. 52–3.
5 Ibid., p. 58.
Part One
THE HOUSE AND THE HOME
1
The House
OWING to the shortage of native building stone, the timbered or half-timbered house is historically the typical house of East Anglia. There are thousands of these buildings in the eastern counties, and they can be easily recognized as such. But hundreds more have been so altered by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century building that they are not always identified as timbered houses. Whole streets in some of the small towns of Suffolk – Needham Market or Hadleigh, for instance – show at first glance few examples of timber construction. Yet the steep pitch of many of the house-roofs gives a clue; and behind the brick or plastered fronts the old timber core will be found intact and durable in the majority of dwellings. In the countryside, in isolated cottage or farmhouse, the timber-work is to be found in its most characteristic and unspoiled form.
Most of these houses were constructed during the period of the great rebuilding,1 the time of intense social ferment and upsurge which fell roughly between the years 1570 and 1640. The majority of parishes in the region can show at least a few good examples, and some also have an occasional example of an earlier house. The Suffolk village of Framsden, for instance, has a fifteenth-century open hall type of house that was ‘ceiled’ a century or so later; and it illustrates how hard it is to determine the age of some of these houses without a fairly detailed examination of the interior. Few people standing outside Framsden Hall would suspect that at one time its interior had more in common with the nave of a local church or one of the more solidly constructed barns, so common in this district, than with the ordinary, storied dwelling house its exterior now presents.
The main framework of these houses, then, has lasted between four and six hundred years; and in most houses it is likely to last a few hundred more, in spite of the fact that they were constructed of what some modern building bye-laws would describe as short-lived materials. These houses have also been much studied, though the local variations of the different types within the separate counties – and even districts of counties – often fall between the meshes of the architect’s or historian’s generalizations. Moreover, anyone who has lived for a fair length of time in an old timbered house will testify what an amount of hitherto unnoticed detail he is continually discovering about the building – particular and often minute detail that not only illuminates the structure of the house but often the mode of life of its former occupants. Most of the present chapter is concerned with the writer’s own experience in finding constructional and other detail in a half-timbered house2 during a period of six years’ occupation.
One such detail is the carpenter’s or construction marks found in many timbered houses. These were first noticed on an old stairs leading to a loft at the back of the house. The stairs, really no more than a solid oaken ladder, were undoubtedly the original Tudor stairs demoted to the back of the house when the house was reconstructed later. As well as the oaken ladder, the trap door above it is still in position; and it is an excellent example of the means of access from the ground floor to the bedrooms in Tudor houses of this type. The trap door and ladder remained the only access in houses built during the sixteenth century, and in earlier ones that had been ceiled; and stairs as we know them today did not become common in farmers’ and merchants’ houses until well into the seventeenth century,3 so we are told; and this generalization is supported by the date of the stairs in the Needham house – late seventeenth century with a typically Jacobean balustrade. But the steps of the Tudor ladder bear the marks the carpenter made to ensure that each tenon fitted into the mortice cut for it. The marks, made in this instance with a chisel, are usually stylized Roman numerals, and they are most common where a tie-beam or a joist is tenoned into a wall-plate or vertical member. The examples given here are from houses of similar age, and some from a house in the same street.4 They were made by an implement called a timber-scribe. The longest arm gouged out the straight marks on the timber; one of the two short arms was a point around which the other rotated to cut a circular groove, as in the merchant’s mark on page 39. A similar tool was used by coopers up to recent years.
The carpenter’s marks on the timbers indicate that the main framework of the house was pre-fabricated. Each tenon on any member of the framework was made and marked to fit into a particular mortice; and the trusses, the floor joists, the main rafters, the studs and the wall-plates were all constructed and fitted together in sections, to try them out, in the wright’s or carpenter’s yard before he transported them for erection on the actual house-site. This had to be the method when most of the sawing was done in a sawpit, a permanent structure close to the carpenter’s workshop.5 After finding out the owner’s requirements the chief carpenter designed and was responsible for the construction of the house. He was in fact the architect6 as well as being the wright or chief craftsman; and the prevalence of the surname Wright in East Anglia (there are about two hundred Wright’s in the telephone book of one area – north Essex and south Suffolk) is perhaps an indication of the importance of the carpenter in this region during medieval times and later.7
But the house framework, once constructed and dismantled and carried piecemeal to the site, then had to be fitted together again, and this time raised. The huge frames had to be lifted off the ground and held upright long enough for them to be fixed temporarily together. This task was usually beyond the resources of the wright and the future owners of the house. They sought help, therefore, for the heavy task of lifting and pushing the frames of heavy oak into position. They went to their neighbours. This house raising or rearing (levatio in medieval Latin), sometimes referred to also as ‘the setting of the house upon ground’, was in fact a real communal occasion, a working together; and after the work was done a time for cakes and ale and merry-making. This was also so in Kent,8 and in Ireland9 where the ‘house raiser’ took the precaution of hiring a fiddler to ensure that the work went with a swing. The North American colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries built their houses to the same plan using exactly the same method as they had used or seen used in the home country. An extract from a book published in 1913 at the bi-centenary of the township of Needham, Massachusetts illustrates what happened:
‘It was a morning in August 1774. The scene was the great social function of the olden time, called “a raising”. The solid frame of the new meeting house had been hewn and put together, and now it was to be raised and placed on the massive sills, tenon fitting mortise and the whole jointed together very much as the Apostle Paul describes the Living Church in one of his epistles. To lift one of these huge structures was no
easy work. The entire male population of the town was summoned.’10
This custom has endured in the United States up to the present day. The old American barns – just as their counter-parts in East Anglia – are essentially the same in structure as their timbered houses. ‘A barn-raising’ was one of the occasions in the American countryside when neighbours came in to help; and this occasion was afterwards sealed with a frolic or jollification in which the wives and the children also took part. American photographs11 show that the house raisers pushed up the frame with long poles, as well as pulling it with ropes. To prevent the poles from slipping they first cut notches in the vertical members of the frame; and when they had raised it into position they next secured it by nailing the pole into the notch, for the time being, removing the pole when they had fixed the other timbers which joined the frame to the one at the other end of the bay. These notches are still visible in many East Anglian buildings notably in Lavenham,12 and in a timber-and-thatch cart-shed at Hemingstone Old Hall, Suffolk. Here, the nails which temporarily held the timbers at the raising, are still in position in the sunken notches.
The raising ceremony survives to a certain extent in the modern custom of placing a flag on the roof of a house when it is ready for slating; also in the ‘topping out’ ceremony which has enjoyed a revival in recent years. In this there is a ceremonial drink13 taken by the workmen who have been engaged on the building and by its promoters. In a recent14 ‘topping out’ ceremony at the new halls of residence at Nottingham University the purpose was reported to have an added significance: ‘to ward off evil spirits’; and it is true that this purpose was also in the mind of some of the early builders who took precautions to safeguard the house. There is, for example, a tradition in the Suffolk village of Gazeley that on completion of the house-raising a bone was placed on the roof, later to be incorporated into the thatch. The bone, discovered in one house15 during recent years while it was being re-thatched, is the shin-bone of an ox; and there seems little doubt that it was placed there as an amulet;16 a custom that will be discussed more fully in a later chapter.
But a house that had been pre-fabricated could also be taken down and constructed elsewhere without too much trouble, if its main structure was already appropriately marked by the carpenters at its original raising. The Paston correspondence contains a letter from Sir John Wingfield of Letheringham in Suffolk about the removal of a house a distance of about twenty miles. The letter concerns Thomas Ratcliff, the owner of Framsden Hall just mentioned:17
‘Brother Paston, I recommend me unto you praying that ye take the labour to speak with Thomas Ratcliff for the deliverance of part of a house which lyeth in the wood at Framsden; which house the owner hath carried part thereof to Orford, which, so departed, the remanent that remaineth there in the wood shall do him little good and it shall hurt greatly the workmen and owner thereof also, which is my tenant; and the house should be set upon ground.’
But occasionally some of the old timbered houses were moved bodily without dismantling, so securely were their timbers jointed together. One such building was the alms-houses at Stonham Aspal, Suffolk. These were originally built in the churchyard, but were removed bodily to a site further down the street. The workmen used wooden rollers and teams of horses to drag the heavy structure along the road. At one stage the horse-traces broke, but the change of site was successfully carried out.
From the same Suffolk village also comes an account of a comparatively modern form of truss raising:18 ‘We used to take a big old wagon-wheel off its axle. If you could get a wheel from a “timber-jim” – you know, they’re about seven feet in diameter – so much the better. You got your wheel near your building and then you fitted a straight-boled fir-tree into the nave of the wheel. If the fir pole was the same diameter as the axle, so much the better fit. We first of all fixed a pulley-block and rope to the top of the pole; and then we up-ended it, using the pulley to hoist up the truss to roof level. People I’ve told this to always ask: “How did the wheel keep steady?” There was no trouble at all about this, because – as you know – all those old wheels had a right good dish on ’em; and the dish gave the structure stability.’
Marks, very like the construction marks and again in Roman numerals, are to be found on the only piece of considerable stonework in many of these old timbered houses. This is the shallow stone sink, the original installation rarely found now even in East Anglian farmhouses. There was a typical one in the backhouse of the Needham Market house until it was removed into the garden. This appears to be the typical manner of exodus; and many of these old Tudor sinks are to be seen forming the centre-piece of a rockery in cottage or farm gardens. The sink was used for ordinary domestic purposes and was placed near to the indoor pump; but it was very shallow, not more than five or six inches in depth. Many farming families gave this type of sink a greater capacity by building a wooden framework on its wide rim, and making the framework secure and water-tight with cement. It was used in this form for many years by at least one farmer’s wife from north Suffolk.
1 W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England, The Rebuilding of Rural England, London, 1963.
2 111 High Street, Needham Market, Suffolk. A town-house built probably by a substantial wool-merchant during the early sixteenth century.
3 W. G. Hoskins, ‘The Englishman’s House’, The Listener, p. 996, 20th June, 1957.
4 60 High Street, Needham Market, Suffolk.
5 v. A.F.C.H., photograph facing p. 142.
6 Pensaer (literally head-carpenter) the Welsh word for architect preserves to this day the former identity of functions.
7 Suffolk wrights made the roof of the Royal Exchange at Battisford Tye to the order of Sir Thomas Gresham. (Norman Scarfe, Suffolk, London, 1960, p. 25.)
8 George Ordish, The Living House, London, 1960, pp. 20–1.
9 I.F.W., p. 57.
10 cf. C. F. Innocent, English Building Construction, p. 86.
11 Holbrook and Rugoff, Down on the Farm, New York, 1954, p. 41.
12 89 High Street, and a house in the centre of the square.
13 This ceremony was called Closing-hale in parts of England. The flying of a flag from the chimney top of the nearly completed house was a signal for drinks.
14 The Times, 4th June, 1964.
15 The Hutch, a fifteenth-century house in Gazeley.
16 It is well to define this here: an amulet wards off evil; a talisman brings luck.
17 Paston Letters, Letter XLV. Vol. 1. p. 47 (Everyman Edit.). See also Ipswich Journal 31st March 1759: ‘To be SOLD at Badley Hall (near Needham and Stowmarket in Suffolk).
The Frame of a Building, about fifty Foot long and eighteen Foot wide; the whole is of good sound Oak Timber, and fit to be fixt up in any other Place with very little Alteration.’
18 A. W. Wythe of Stonham Aspal.
2
Surface Detail
THE lintel-beam or chimney-breast over the open fire-places of the East Anglian timbered houses often shows a wealth of the ‘skin’ or surface detail that helps us to fill in some of the house’s history. The Needham house is no exception. The beam in one of the largest rooms is covered by a flock of ‘face-marks’, haphazard cuts made purposefully in the wood with a chisel. The face-marks represent a stage which is common to the development of the timbered house in this region. This was the time when neo-classicism had filtered down to the yeoman’s or merchant’s house and it became fashionable to give a decent covering to any part of the house’s anatomy that was exposed. In this particular dwelling the remodelling seems to have taken place comparatively late – about the middle of the nineteenth century. The Tudor front of the house was given a severe façade of Woolpit brick; and in one of the front rooms the exposed timbers – notably the lintel-beam – were plastered over. But the plasterers first of all pitted the comparatively smooth surface of the wood with these face-marks to ensure that the plaster adhered to the beam and did not flake off when it was exposed to the heat rising f
rom the fire beneath it.
On the right of the beam there is a large circular hole, over an inch in diameter. This was made with an auger, and its purpose was to take the rod which held the spit engine, the spring device that was connected by an endless band to the spit hook in front of the open fire. On the side of the beam opposite to the hole there is a vertical scar that had obviously been burned into the wood. It is about three inches in length, and tapers towards its top, giving it the appearance of a candle flame. Similar scars occur on the lintel-beams of many houses of this period, and they are sometimes explained as taper-burns made by the flame of a wax taper that was fixed in brackets attached to the beam. But the scar looks exactly as if a younger member of a former household had been experimenting with a red-hot poker. And in fact this is what these burns possibly are: scars made by hot pokers, not wielded though by irresponsible youngsters but by a sober paterfamilias who mulled his beer by heating a poker in the fire and plunging it into the copper beer-muller, but not before he had first either tested or partially cooled the poker on the lintel-beam.
The Pattern Under the Plough Page 2