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History by numbers

I find a lot of old maps in the course of my research and find them utterly absorbing. Some, such as estate maps, were commissioned by landowners to record the holdings of their tenants and the value of their estates. These were often exquisitely drawn with a level of detail way beyond that required for such purposes, such as drawing hedgerows between fields, shading the ridge and furrow of a ploughed field, or the trees in a plantation. Others, such as tithe maps, although simpler in definition, also provide important detail, particularly in recording the owner and occupier of each plot of land, its name, acreage, and how it was used. One aspect these maps have in common is that each plot of land is numbered in some way with associated information recorded in an accompanying key, schedule or apportionment.

All this information helps to determine how land and property changed over time; however it is not always easy to visualise this information. So using a technique not dissimilar to painting by numbers, each type of land usage can be coloured to depict whether the land was arable, meadow, pasture or plantation, using the information contained in the accompanying documentation. If this is done on a series of maps covering an extended period, a visual image of how land use changed is suddenly much more apparent. Comparative graphic representations such as these make it immediately obvious how the extent of a property’s land changed over time, how it was used and highlighting fields that were merged or divided.

In addition to looking at the land, the location and shape of buildings is of course crucial to understanding the history of a property. Changes to building outlines depicted in maps can help determine when a property was extended or even rebuilt, as well as determining the number and shape of its outbuildings, some of which may be described in property surveys. I never thought that the childhood pursuits of painting by numbers and spot the difference would ever be so useful.

Paying the rent

Scouring a 200-year old book of estate accounts may not be everyone’s idea of fun, but to me it’s a treasure hunt that can ultimately deliver the holy grail of house history – finding out when a house was built. So discovering that a house was part of a large estate whose records are neatly tucked away in an accessible archive is likely to result in me spending a prolonged spell exploring stacks of account books that may not have been touched for years.

Tracing the tenants of an old house can sometimes be easier than finding its owners, particularly if the property was part of a large estate. Some estate records contain rentals, accounts, and surveys, as well as leases, records of building works, and the activities of the land agent who had to hold it all together, all of which are fantastic resources for the house historian. Tracing a tenant back through these records can reveal what rent they paid, what other services they had to provide such as keeping a dog, delivering two ounces of pepper, a cheese, or a strike of oats at harvest, and so on.

In the days before house names became popular, many properties were known simply by the name of the person who lived there. The rental payments were usually listed in the same order within a parish or township, and once the tenant has been found, it can be relatively easy to go back through the records, picking them out each year.

A typical rental entry might be ‘Joseph Corbett for Bennett’s Tenement’. Pursuing Joseph Corbett back through the records might identify his predecessor as  ‘Richard Bennett for Bennett’s Tenement, late Drews’ and, ultimately, to ‘Henry Drews for a newly erected tenement’. Such a find would send you scurrying to the estate accounts looking for ‘monies paid to workmen’ in the hope of finding the bill for the actual bricks and mortar.

Even if the property was not named in the rental records, sometimes their predecessor is named, often for years after they have left the property or even died. So for example ‘Thomas Edwards, late Sarah Wright’ might be preceded by ‘Sarah, widow of John Wright’ and before that ‘John Wright’. And if John Wright, Sarah Wright, and Thomas Edwards all had to deliver a fat capon to the estate office each Christmas, that might just clinch the deal.

Tea with the Drapers

Cucumber sandwiches are not my normal Sunday fare, but tradition is big at the Shrewsbury Drapers Company and I was delighted to partake of their hospitality while enjoying the fine panelling and antique furniture at Drapers Hall in the company of fellow admirers of vernacular architecture. The tea rounded off an excellent day with the Drapers and the Friends of Shropshire Archives in which we learned a great deal from some eminent speakers and had a whistle-stop tour of Shrewsbury buildings with Drapers Company associations.

Drapers Hall, Shrewsbury

The present Drapers Hall was built in 1576, just over a century after the Shrewsbury Drapers Company was granted a royal charter by Edward IV, and wealthy drapers commissioned some of the finest buildings in the town. Awash with close studding, cable mouldings, carved vines and figureheads, lozenges of every kind, fancy bracing and finials these buildings display the skill of the Shrewsbury carpenters to great effect, and it was a delight to have their features highlighted by our guide. The recommendation that one should walk around the town looking up was good advice indeed.

An introduction to the wool trade in Shrewsbury reminded us of the drapers’ role as merchants of wool and woollen cloth, and the importance of wool as a source of wealth that provided the exchequer with a good deal of taxation revenue. The drapers bought raw woollen cloth in Oswestry, the official market, and travelled back with it to Shrewsbury to be finished by the fullers, dyers and shearmen. The Drapers Company provided alms to the poor, and their modern almshouses built in the 1960s to replace earlier buildings are still in use in Shrewsbury today. We were privileged to see the great chest that held the Shrewsbury Drapers Company’s deeds and papers before making our way down the sloping staircase and across the rolling floor to tea.

Ships’ timbers

If I had a fiver for every person who’s told me their house was built from ships’ timbers, I would probably have enough money to buy my own boat. It’s a romantic notion and part of the appeal that old buildings often evoke along with priest holes, bread ovens, and blind passages and blocked-up doorways in cellars. Lying in bed staring up at unexplained slots and grooves in the aged beams above your head you could be forgiven for thinking of storm-lashed vessels broken up on a rocky shore or an old ship being taken out of service and its salt-washed timbers recycled. If you think it through though, the probabilities just don’t add up.

Ships’ timbers, if they were going to be re-used, would surely have been so employed on the coast, not 150 miles inland along green lanes and unmade roads nowhere near a navigable waterway. Transporting massive heavy timbers across country to a remote location would have been logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive. In any case, salt-hardened wood would have been as hard as iron and difficult to work with the hand tools employed by the craftsmen who built timber-framed houses.

Most old timber-framed houses were built from local timber, used green, for obvious reasons of minimising cost and using available materials. The most common explanation for apparently redundant slots and grooves in house timbers is that they have been re-used from another building in the vicinity or even a previous house in the same place. Now, about that smugglers’ den at the end of the garden …

Chez nous

If your house has a name, did it influence you choosing to move there? Go on be honest. Who could resist living in … Hall or … Manor? Or perhaps The Old Schoolhouse / Vicarage / Forge or even Curiosity Shop. The corollary of this is perhaps to touch the brakes with the estate agent who suggests you might like to view Bide A Wee While or Dunroamin on the grounds of maintaining any kind of credibility with your friends, potential visitors and of course the postman.

Some house names have obvious derivations such as their former function, while others such as Hill Top may reflect their topographical situation, The Chestnuts a stand of trees close to the property, or Edwards Farm after a former owner or occupier. While The Old House may be seen as a give-away to anyone seeking an explanation of its origins, New House can be equally baffling when it is clearly at least 300 years old. Well, it was new once.

Of course, houses can often be renamed over time, and numbers are a relatively recent introduction although even they can change. A Victorian house I used to live in began life as number 4, and gradually moved down the road as new properties were built, eventually coming to rest at number 26. Even more dramatic is when the street itself ‘disappears’ mysteriously turning up in a later map with a completely different name.

As a house historian I’m grateful for any name at all that has lasted more than a few year, whether it be Foresters Hall, Feverfew Farm or Faerie Nook. And it makes finding out about the person who gave it its name even more intriguing.

In the blue chamber, a bedstead

I don’t suppose probate inventories feature among many people’s favourite reading material, but for me they embody, if you’ll excuse the phrase, a remarkable record of the contents of someone’s house from three or four hundred years ago – and the chance to have a good nose round. Inventories were taken for the purposes of assessing the value of a deceased person’s estate and of course they are very personal documents. However at a distance of several centuries, they are one of the best means of learning how people lived, what possessions they had as well as giving us the opportunity to walk round a house and ‘see’ how each room was furnished. It is fascinating to stand in a property with the inventory of a former occupier and try to identify each of their rooms.

When it comes to contents, beds feature largely among the furnishings, each part of the bed being named individually (bedstead, feather bed, pillows, bolsters, curtains, etc) and, sometimes, evidently the one in which the deceased passed away, the room being described as ‘in the chamber where he lay’. Fire tools were crucial and feature strongly: spits, tongs, andirons, bellows, etc and sometimes ‘bacon upon the rack’ (£1 5s). ‘Napery’, or bed and table linen, was also important, as were horses and livestock. Dung cribs were evidently essential and even ‘muck in the yard’ had a value – 10s in 1709.

1575 probate inventory

Once you move into the working part of the house – the buttery, kitchen, bakehouse and dairy – a dictionary and glossary of terms can be called for as one encounters unfamiliar items such as a posnette (cooking pot) and cobbarous (iron bars supporting a cooking spit), and I’m still trying to establish what a whinible might have been. Of course the writing can be tricky and spelling variable, so difficult words have to be transcribed letter by letter turning ‘fyve payre pothokes’ into ‘five pairs of pot hooks’ being one of the easier examples. Despite these challenges, inventories are a fantastic historical resource and you never know whether you may come across a whinible in the attic one day.

And you are …?

While many of us are on first name terms even with people we’ve only just met, from time to time we have to announce our full name – which is where, for some of us, the fun starts. Those with straightforward, no-nonsense, names may never have given the matter a second thought: John Smith and Mary Jones have it easy. For others, being misheard or asked ‘Can you spell that for me?’ on announcing their name is part of every day life and they very quickly develop a strategy for ensuring smooth introductions.

Going through life with a name that many suppose is Chinese, I’ve been asked a thousand times whether my father was an immigrant when in actual fact the Society of Genealogists traced the name back to a Baron Ming of the Cinque Ports in the mid-13^th century. My father got so fed up with people misunderstanding his name that he used to introduce himself as ‘Ming-Em-Aye-En-Gee’ and even then would be asked to spell it. Me, I’ve tried various ruses in order to avoid being mistaken for Ms Milk, Mink or even Mange. ‘Ming as in dynasty’ has a certain ring to it, but I had to stop using it when a TV series of that name was screened in the 1980s and people used to say there was noone called Ming in it – duh.

I’ve also tried ‘Ming as in vase’ but this is greeted by certain elements of the population with complete bewilderment so I have to be selective. I went through a very tricky period when the film Flash Gordon was released, and Ming the Merciless and Princess Ming were on everyone’s lips except mine. Even worse was an extremely dodgy counterpart that I’m not even going to mention. Oh, and I also have to say ‘Jill with a J’.

One person whose name I have never forgotten was a former colleague, Joe, who used to introduce himself as ’Robeson, as in Swanee River’. How he would get on with that line today is anybody’s guess.

Inside knowledge

I may soon be featuring in someone else’s house history and it feels weird. My brother recently spotted that our childhood family home was up for sale and looked up the estate agent’s website. Nowadays anyone can browse through the intimate details of any property on the market whose details are online, nosey neighbours and former occupiers included. So at a comfortable distance of 170 miles, I took a look.

The first thing that struck me was that a shade over a million pounds seems an awful lot of money for a 2-up 2-down cottage even if it is in south-west London in a housing recession. I think my grandfather paid about £300 for it, but I may be wrong. Perhaps it was the insight of putting a fancy balustrade round the flat roof over the former shop and calling it a ‘roof terrace’ that has added considerably to the price. However it was inside that the memories came pouring back and one in particular.

When the arrival of two children forced my mother to give up the shop at the front of the house, the area was converted into living space and part of the wall removed to allow light into the room behind. A pole that was essentially a not-very-decorative acroprop was inserted in the opening as a support, and I have a photograph of myself aged about six and wearing an extremely complex Christmas hat with streamers, sitting on the step next to this pole examining one of my presents. For a million pounds I would have expected that pole to have been replaced, but it’s still there bolted to the floor. Elsewhere, the brace and latch door into the back kitchen is also present, although I expect the bath that was in the kitchen has been relocated, together with the loo that was to all intents and purposes in the former pantry. The ivy leaf diamond trellis wallpaper has gone of course and I couldn’t see whether there was still that patch in the dining room ceiling where my mother put her foot through, shedding whitewashed plaster onto the table below.

I delight in finding interior shots of my client’s properties to add to their house history. Now I have the opportunity of offering the occupier of my childhood home images from my own archive. And that does feel strange.

Cutting it fine

A strong contender for the most unpopular word of the year, at least in public debate, is ‘cuts’. With so many budgetary ‘tough decisions’ facing local authorities across the country it is inevitable that the arts and cultural services will be affected. As far as the archives are concerned, the impact of service cuts could have far-reaching long-term consequences.

The potential loss of archive staff is of most concern. These are the key people who conserve, catalogue, store and retrieve the original records in their care, whose work makes it possible for the public to find and access the documents for their research. Another key function of their role is to provide advice and assistance to archive visitors, explain their collections and finding aids, run courses, give talks and behind-the-scenes tours to schools and groups interested in our history. Many archive staff have specialist knowledge and have undergone years of study and training to become experts in their field. Losing or not replacing such valuable staff will have a knock-on effect on access to archives through reduced opening hours as well as affecting the resources available to admit and catalogue new accessions and continue vital conservation work.

Volunteers are one ‘solution’ to this resource shortfall and there are very many dedicated and knowledgeable people who give their time freely to provide help and advice, particularly in the field of family history, but also with cataloguing and conservation work. Record offices welcome these volunteers as a supplement to their already limited resources yet it is difficult to see how existing services could be maintained simply by replacing staff with volunteers.

Much of our cultural heritage originates from the primary sources cared for by our archive services, whether local history centres, county record offices, research libraries or The National Archives. These unique records are our history. They are the source material from which we learn about the past and develop our understanding and appreciation of our heritage whether economic, political, social, environmental, community or our own family. We need to keep the expert archive staff to conserve and administer these priceless collections and make them available to researchers. Without access, the records will effectively be lost to us all.