It’s grim up north.

It’s hard to keep track of this multi-faceted tale now tbh. Especially to remember my own thoughts from 3-4 years ago.

I remember feeling I should sort the place out and get it up for rent again, so it was earning me money rather than costing. so I started doing the obvious stuff, whilst also word of mouth advertising for tenants. It wasn’t ready for a estate agent letting, and tbh I wasn’t sure if it ever would be.
I very, very nearly rented it out to a quite nice couple with a son with autism/other behavioural issues, they were looking for something a bit alternative to fit with their a bit alternative lifestyle they’d built around him. They’d agreed to it then pulled out at the last minute for no given reason. Tbh I wasnt that bothered as it was a lot of work in a short timescale to sort it out for them.
I had a distant family member sniffing round it, but kicked them to the kerb when I found out they’d been advertising for a ‘private landlord’ a few times, which in letting terms means ‘doesn’t pay the rent so letting agents won’t touch em’.

I did get an EPC done, it obviously failed by miles with it not even having heating, and highlighted the expectations of the market were not at all in line with the reality of period property. I didn’t want to ruin the house tarting it up to jump through letting agents hoops, so it sat empty for a while.

In the meantime I was researching it’s history as much as possible. I was really keen to know more about the house and everything I’d found. Thankfully this village is fairly well documented for various reasons, and I found some good stuff online.

Eddie rattley sent me a link to an historic maps archive, and I found this really quite clear one inch map from 1893 showing the house.
The attached barn wasn’t a surprise, I’d been told about it by both my grandad and Harold.
It’s amazing it shows even the path though!

Also notice the road is in a different place. It was moved in the ‘60s when the factory over the road expanded, gaining me a ‘front garden’ and the lay-by (it’s just the old road, the cars eyes are still there) that services my house and my sisters. This is a great boon to both houses, they just wouldn’t be the same if the road was as close as it used to be.


Further digging found a couple of arial photos taken in the ‘30s. Their purpose was a survey of the brickworks over the road, presumably as part of its expansion plans, so they are framed around that, and show the old, smaller road running straight past the house. Notice the barn is gone by this point in 1937, which is interesting as my grandad and Harold were both born in 1930 but can remember it being there, which is a fairly tight time period for it to disappear in. You’ll see the old brickworks entrance was straight opposite the house on that fairly narrow road.



An amazing find was this postcard. The village was the home of William Bradford, one of those terrible pilgrims who went and created/destroyed America, depending on your ethnicity, so we get a boatload of annoying American tourists turn up every year trying to prove their bible bashing credentials. But it does mean an early local photographer called George Brocklehurst put together some promotional postcards to flog them sometime around the turn of the last century. Yes we’ve been putting up with them for that long!


What is utterly amazing is my house is front centre in the ‘village street’ shot! What are the chances?’
I don’t know the exact date for this short, but the unmetalled roads put it reasonably early.

The house is a bit different to now in that it is lime rendered, the chimney stack is different, the windows are Yorkshire sashes not normal ones, and it has shutters and a rather ostentatious door frame, not to mention the barn still being there and the roof being pan tile not slate, but they’re enough diagnostic features to identify it as the same house, mostly because there’s few houses here that run along the road rather than perpendicular which narrows it down hugely to start with, then that wall tie and the adjacent houses confirm it.

This was huge news to me and only spurred me on to find out more.

Lastly, I found a video of the tour de Britain going through the village a few years back, with Harold surveying the scene from the front door.
It must have been a great event for get him up from watching the cricket!

Good tales, barn looked pretty substantial to be removed, be interesting to understand what happened there. Wonder if there were tax implications or something.
Great find of the tour going past.
James

i’ve have saved the link thanks

that’s the sort of thing you dip into and come out a couple of hours later and wonder where the time has gone ha ha

Great... as if I needed another rabbit hole to explore...

I’m working to the principle that it burned down at the minute. I have some evidence of this, and plan to back it up with some archive work. The Doncaster archives have been shut for a while whilst they building was refurbished but they’ve just reopened.

It’s as bad as domestic piping sizes- 3/4” copper pipe, which bit is 3/4” diameter? None of it!
Another thing based on measurements so archaic most people have forgotten what they mean.

She wasn’t born until 25 years later 😬

My grandad was born in 1930, he was at a maximum 7 years old by the time it was gone, probably less depending on when it went.

My problem is that when I get into something I get *really* into it and have to know everything and become an expert in it. Yes I know that puts me on a certain spectrum, but I see it as an advantage, and f-k those people who can do things in non-obsessive ways 😂

I really started to see that this house was pretty old, and I wanted to know how old. There was little documentary evidence, and tbh I still agent seen what there is becuase all this happened through covid.

So, I’ve spent the best part of 4 years learning about old houses, and dating them in physical ways. I’ve read a few rather good books in that time, and they have served to highlight that pretty much everything anyone thinks they know about houses, especially old ones, is wrong.
To understand a lot of things about old houses, you have to understand the feudal system of the medieval period that brought most of them and their associated lands into existence, then the transfer to a capitalist system leading up to the Tudor period that brought them into private hands.
This is a really interesting period of English history with roots in the norman invasion, but is is littered with words and names that have come to mean much different things in the modern age.

You can learn a lot about properly old houses from seemingly quite innocuous things like the sizes of rooms, their siting, and the basic building materials used. You also get thrown a lot of false leads by people using incorrect terms to describe things, or solemnly parroting utterly ridiculous ‘facts’ they’ve heard somewhere and taken as gospel.

The first word I take umbrage with is ‘cottage’. No, not hanging around in public toilets to get ya kicks, but what in the modern vernacular means generally a ‘small old house’. The thing is Proably 90% of ‘cottages’ are not and never have been. That is to say, they have never housed a cotter. A cotter or cottar was a person who essentially rented a cottage with attached parcel of land to use as their own from a lord in return for servitude on the lords lands. A cotter was not a husbandman (no that doesn’t mean what you think either!) in that they didn’t own land, they rented it.
Their houses would have been as small and cheaply built as possible, with whatever materials were available locally. The usual size was one ‘baye’ or ‘cell’, that is one pole(or rod) square, about 16.5ft by 16.5ft. Second stories don’t come into the equation at all, they weren’t really a thing in domestic houses until the 14th century or so.

Any dwelling of larger size was almost certainly too big for a cotter to have rented. A house of that size would have belong to a husbandman or yeoman. Someone who was still a commoner, but owned their own land and was comparatively wealthy. A husbandman had a land value of below 40 shillings (in 1430) and a yeoman above that. Yeoman had the right to vote but husbandmen did not.
A husbandman would almost certainly have been engaged in agriculture in some form, as although it was possible to fall into the category of husbandman (husbandman literally just means ‘householder’ or ‘master of the house’) even if you were in other lines of work, you would not have styled yourself as such as other professions were seen as higher in society, so you would have described yourself as such.
Occupation was an important thing in the middle ages.

So, if you own a Tudor or older house larger than 16.5ft square, it isn’t a cottage. It’s going to be a farmhouse belonging to a husbandman or yeoman. These were typically just a multiplication of bayes/cells as thats what building materials were based around. You cut trees down when they were right for making beams one pole long- remember pretty much all buildings were still timber framed at this period.

The reason all this is relevant is this house is 17ft by 33ft. So it’s not a cottage. At 2 bayes it’s Proably not grand enough to be a yeoman farmhouse, unless it had a lot of land with it. But it would be a perfectly adequate farmhouse for a husbandman.

the feudal system that set these things out was abolished in 1660, but that doesnt mean any house that conforms to these criteria is earlier than that, it just means there wast really any reason to change them after. In a roundabout way it’s why a sheet of plasterboard is 8ft long nearly 400 years later.

So although it’s interesting and gives some good clues, it doesn’t really date the house at all. For that I’ll have to start looking at other things…

Super interesting. Every day’s a school day here and in a good way, not like double French first thing on a Monday morning. Thanks for sharing.