The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Landscape and townscape from AD 1500
• 267 •
cruck frames still in place. Houses of this type may
have required more regular maintenance than their
successors with mortared stone walls and slate roofs
but were not necessarily less durable. They were
demolished in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries not because they were no longer usable but
because they could not be readily converted to
accommodate current fashions in housing and rises
in living standards.
Post medieval housing styles first appear in
southern England before 1500, generated by profits
from production for the London market and rents
that lagged behind rising prices. Medieval halls were
floored over and chimneys and staircases installed
to provide greater privacy, comfort and warmth.
Brick began to replace wattle and daub with timber
framing, while glass was used more extensively.
Figure 15.1 Shieling huts, Lewis, Scotland, probably dating
from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.
Source: I. Whyte
Even within southern England there was a mosaic of rural economies, some of them less well
integrated into the market than others, so that there can be distinct local variations in the
timing of housing improvements. Regional variations in the evolution of peasant houses from
medieval times onwards are still far from clear. In the North York Moors, for example, a
sizeable group of modified longhouses survives, but in the Yorkshire Pennines, if such houses
were common in medieval times, few now exist. Longhouse layouts continued, with upgraded
standards of comfort in parts of England, such as Devon, into the eighteenth century, while
laithe houses, with farmhouse and outbuildings constructed as a continuous range but without
a common entrance, continued to be built in the Yorkshire Pennines and the Lancashire lowlands
well into the nineteenth century.
The ‘Great Rebuilding’ of rural England, first identified by Hoskins, took a century or
more to penetrate to many parts of northern England. In less prosperous areas, like Wales and
especially Scotland, traditional housing styles and construction techniques remained in use
through the eighteenth century and later. Many people continued to live with their animals in
longhouses. Only gradually were such dwellings upgraded, with the byre being turned into
storage accommodation. Upland Wales preserves many farmhouses that at their core have a
converted longhouse. In Scotland, the change to better quality housing came only in the second
half of the eighteenth century in the Lowlands, and the nineteenth century in the Highlands.
In the Outer Hebrides, traditional ‘black houses’, typified by the surviving one at Arnol in
Lewis, were occupied as late as the 1960s. Excavation is especially important in areas like
northern England and Scotland, where housing standards were poorer and ordinary domestic
buildings from the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have virtually
disappeared from the landscape.
With the end of private warfare under the growing power of the Tudor state, country mansions
began to replace medieval baronial castles. Excavation has played little part in the study of the
evolution of English country houses, apart from vanished royal palaces like Nonsuch, Surrey,
but, as with churches, there is much scope for the detailed survey of surviving structures. The
shake-up in landholding with the Dissolution of the monasteries provided many gentry families
with additional land and income. In some cases, the domestic buildings of monasteries were
converted to secular uses; elsewhere they provided useful quarries for building stone. The country
house and its surrounding parklands, emphasizing the control of great landowners over the