LITMIR.BIZ

      FIG 3 A survey of the Buckinghamshire village of Akeley, based on an enclosure map of 1794. The distribution of pottery and of surviving buildings that pre-date 1700 clearly show that the centre of the original medieval village had been abandoned. Documentary sources suggest this happened very early, before 1400, but the new pattern continued largely unaltered into the sixteenth century.

      Although the population declined in the later Middle Ages, the housing stock was deteriorating. This partly reflected the fact that many medieval buildings were made of timber, which soon begins to decay if maintenance ceases for any length of time. So the houses of ordinary rural people of the sixteenth and earliest seventeenth century are remarkably scarce. Very often the best way to find them is to examine seemingly late medieval buildings, which often, on closer inspection, prove to be more complex. A good example of this is given by Maurice Barley in his very readable and pioneering study The English Farmhouse and Cottage (1961).⁴² Maurice used to be the Chairman of the Nene Valley Research Committee when I excavated at Fengate, in Peterborough, during the 1970s, and I used to look forward to his site visits keenly. He was excellent company and like many of his contemporaries was equally at home in an excavation or working out the different phases of a medieval house. He certainly needed these skills when it came to a house in Glapton, Nottinghamshire, which was torn down in the senseless orgy of post-war destruction in 1958.

      The Glapton farmhouse showed how a post-medieval farmer had made the most of the then dire housing supply by adapting an earlier, medieval, cruck-built barn sometime around 1600.⁴³ Readers of Britain in the Middle Ages will recall that crucks were those long, curved beams that ran from the foot of the walls up to the apex of the roof.⁴⁴ Many crucks were made from black poplar which was abundant at the time and which always curves its trunk away from the prevailing winds. But what makes this building so fascinating is the fact that the original medieval cruck beams had been numbered by the carpenters who erected them. Maurice quickly spotted this and was able to deduce that the eastern bay had been demolished when the building of the new conversion began.

      So our anonymous Nottinghamshire farmer – who knows? Possibly an early yeoman – had spotted the Glapton barn as being ripe for conversion. The original building was of three bays and he still required half of it (i.e. 1½ bays) as a barn, for storage. He converted the remaining half-bay into a small farmhouse which he extended well beyond the old barn, mostly to the east – just as one sees so often today when Victorian barns are converted into houses, or second homes. The new timber-framed house was laid out in a way that was not strictly speaking medieval, but would nonetheless have been familiar to someone from the Middle Ages: there was a hall and parlour facing each other on either side of a cross-passage which led to service rooms (dairy, kitchen and buttery) behind the parlour. The house continued to be modified in various small ways for the rest of its long, but sadly finite, life.

      If, as the Glapton barn/house showed, physical evidence for the rise of the first yeoman farmer families can be hard to track down, the success of their descendants has left a distinctive mark on the landscape, in the form of some fine seventeenth-century houses. These houses indeed proclaim the message ‘We have done well in life’, but without the over-the-top ostentation and tasteless vulgarity of the much later ‘financial crisis’ profiteers. The latter eyesores are aggressive and lack any charm whatsoever, whereas their seventeenth-century antecedents reflect the fact that their builders were still rooted in the real world of cattle and sheep, ploughs and ploughmen. I suppose in the final analysis the surviving yeoman farmhouses of Britain can justify their prominent place in the countryside, because they were based on genuine risk and on real, non-paper products that actually fed the rapidly growing population.

      The century after 1720 witnessed the rise of a new type of carefully laid out and planned farm whose architecture reflected the classical ideals of the great landowners of the time. These buildings are often Italianate in style, reflecting Palladian grace just as much as the need to house cattle or store turnips. What a great shame it is that modern farmers have completely abandoned any attempt to give their crudely functional buildings any architectural merit at all. It’s as if they felt obliged to proclaim that their structures were erected to do the job cheaply and efficiently and to hell with the look of the landscape. They could learn much from later eighteenth-century architects such as Daniel Garrett or Samuel Wyatt whose elegant Italianate farm buildings still function as they were originally intended. Some of his best-known creations can be seen around the estate of ‘Coke of Norfolk’, at Holkham Hall.⁴⁵

      Many of the elegant Italianate buildings of eighteenth-century model farms were still successfully in use during the next major phase of British farming, sometimes known as Victorian high farming, which began around 1830 and lasted until the great agricultural depression of the 1870s. This was a period of unparalleled prosperity which saw the construction not just of well-planned and laid-out new farms, but of farms which, even by today’s standards, would be regarded as industrial. Designs for farms of this sort can be seen in contemporary pages of the sort of journals that progressive landowners read, such as that of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, where the range of buildings by J. B. Denton, illustrated here, first appeared.⁴⁶ Today nearly every medium-sized farm in Britain can probably boast a few buildings of this era, but those belonging to large estates where capital-rich landowners were able to choose competent tenants and together form mutually beneficial partnerships, are particularly well endowed and have left us a rich legacy of fine farm buildings. I shall have more to say about the development of farms and farming on large rural estates in the next chapter.