Friday 14 August 2015

Cottage Pie

Whenever I show you pictures of the thatched houses, of which there are many remaining in the villages around here, I get lots of interested comments. So here is a collection of pretty homes for those who wish to dwell deep in a dream of Olde England. (With apologies to at least one regular reader who will say "Yuk! Too twee by far!").


So what is a cottage? Well, not necessarily what I'm showing you here! The Domesday Book mentions "cotters" which were that class of people who lived in homes with a small amount of ground, enough to just about sustain a small family. These were poor people and were often worse off than serfs, who were themselves little more than slaves.


Over the centuries the cotters, or cottagers, could do little to improve their lot and, despite them being the bedrock of the economy, the rest of society did little to help them either. The homes in which they lived were mostly little more than huts; the word "cott" actually meant a hut for livestock originally. It was only the romantic poets who appropriated the word to mean a cosy, idyllic rural homestead.  



Unsurprisingly very few of the hovels that the true cottagers lived in survive. The buildings I'm showing you here would have been the homes of small farmers or tradesmen, though some are the houses which wealthy landowners constructed in traditional style for their workers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.



Another definition of "cottage" is "a small, rural house of traditonal style". This raises the question of "what is traditional style?" It would of course vary across the country depending on what building materials were available locally. So it doesn't have to have a thatched roof at all; it could be of slate, tile or even turf. Around here it just happens that thatch, either of straw or reed, is the cheapest and most plentiful material.


In this area you can't usually see how the walls were constructed because they are generally covered in some sort of plaster. Underneath there's usually a wooden frame which is infilled with woven willow to which the plaster adheres. It's called "wattle and daub" and sometimes the wooden beams are left showing which again is "the essence of Olde England".



Another feature of the cottages around here is that the upper storey, which is where the bedrooms are, is at least partly in the roof-space. In the oldest examples it's been shown that initially there were no such things as bedrooms, just a platform reached by a ladder. Proper floors were a later innovation and were inserted afterwards. This leads to many odd steps and low beams in some old cottages.


I can speak with some authority and feeling about the architecture of one cottage in particular as a friend of mine lived in it. All his family were short people but I was seldom able to visit without one or two painful blows to the head from low beams.


Fashions changed over the centuries too. All the stone-built cottages in the English Lake District were once left their natural colour. By Wordsworth's day people had started painting them white, much to the annoyance and dismay of the poet who campaigned against this ghastly practice. Strange then that today nearly every visitor to the area remarks on the delightful white-painted cottages. 


Meanwhile, down here in England's deep south, sometimes the whitewash was coloured pink by the addition of ox-blood. Though I don't think they were ever quite such a shocking shade as the one above!



Take care.



19 comments:

  1. Can I say, "a bit twee" - but pictureskew? Great post and great pictures. It amuses/irritates me that places which are far removed from being cottages are described as such by estate agents and other scamps and ne'er-do-wells.

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  2. I'm always happy to look at thatched cottages:) Especially the ones in Suffolk that are limewashed in the teaditional Suffolk pink. As you say it's not at all like the bright pink in your photo.

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  3. I am impressed by the old traditional 'cottages', mainly for the workmanship that obviously goes into the thatching. Traditional cottages here we're pretty simple places too, bit they tend to be big, fancy and expensive now.

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  4. A nostalgic post for me and your photos show them off beautifully John. I never knew the origin of their name though. Interesting bit of history here :)

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  5. Lovely looking place! I'm a victim to the Tudor beams in my local pub, one of which at the bottom of the stairs I regularly and painfully clonk

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  6. The cottages do look charming to my 21st-century eye. I bet those who lived in them 200 to 300 years ago would be amazed at how we now romanticize them. ;)

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  7. Interesting how it has now become very fashionable to live in such cottages and they have largely been prettified and fetch huge sums of money.

    Even as recently as 1960 my brother in law, who was a builder, offered to buy such a cottage and modernise it for my parents to live in. My mother was horrified and would not entertain such an idea.

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  8. Oh, how I would love to see these for myself!

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  9. Ooh be still my beating heart, simply breathtakingly beautiful !
    Is there anything so quintessentially English as a thatched cottage and country garden, I miss them so...
    Thank you for sharing this today, I needed a little bit of 'home'...
    ~Jo

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  10. O dear gawd them houses be retchingly twee! I bet it has been awhile since muddy booted feet have ever stepped inside of them. By the way did you forget to photograph the local pump ?

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  11. They may be twee, but as a former owner of a thatched cottage, they are A LOT of hard work and money. We used to refer to our Sweetbriar Cottage as a money pit. As soon as one thing was fixed the next thing fell apart. They look so innocent and beautiful, but believe me, the owners would be tearing their hair out most of the time - especially at night when the little critters can be heard making their homes in the thatch! Still miss my old Sweetbriar though :-)

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  12. I love them and especially if there are roses too!

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  13. Any one of these would do for me. In North Yorkshire they used to thatch haystacks too!

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  14. They always look very pretty but the thatched roof would worry me as to what might be living in it - love the different shapes of the roofs and windows in the cottages in your photos:)

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  15. When I look these wonderful cottages, I never say "Yuk! Too twee by far!". These are so lovely and so english-type. I love the roofs. I would like to live in anyone of them.

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  16. Another gem of a collection of photos and history. A bit more romanticized than they initially were of course, but that is nothing special when it comes to houses. Personally, my first thought when I saw the photos were: "Has he been to Denmark?", where they exist in great numbers. But the, the Danes were once in England ...

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  17. Great post, John... really interesting history on cottages (I had no idea)! The thatched roofs are so quaint, and makes me wonder if there are still workers who have the knowledge and skill to install and repair these roofs.

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  18. John -- the term cottage in the US is similar to the UK as you describe. However we do not have thatched roofs. Where I was raised in Michigan many folks had cottages as summer homes on one of the many lakes in the state. They were small and simply built. Many of these cottages have either disappeared or been rehabbed to more grandiose structures. Your photos are outstanding. -- barbara

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  19. For those of us that don't get to see them for ourselves, I don't thing there could be twee overload. Keep on posting them and we will keep on smiling. :)

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