young, old): the poor widow in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale lived in her ‘narwe’ (i.e. The number of people accommodated within these small buildings can only be guessed at: the average peasant family size was approximately five but actual family size would have varied enormously depending on wealth (wealthier households tended to have a larger number of children), survival and position within the life cycle (e.g. Chambers were used primarily for sleeping but might also be used for storage. The hall was the main social space in a house and might serve numerous functions, including eating and sleeping. A living house might be divided into one, two, three or more rooms separated by screens and walls. a byre or sheepcote) and a barn or granary for crop storage grouped around a yard. The typical toft would include a separate living house, a building for animals (e.g. The plan of Hangleton uncovered during excavation, although incomplete, indicates that the village fell in the latter category. Other settlements were ‘polyfocal’ that is, small groupings of holdings in close proximity to each other, representing a more organic development. The regularity of some medieval settlements with each house occupying the same sized piece of land along a street or a green suggests that they were the result of a deliberate planning or re-planning by the lord. A typical medieval nucleated village plan consisted of a street with peasant holdings or ‘tofts’ arranged on either side. In fact the cottage would have formed part of a nucleated village (as can be seen in Figure 2) in a pattern of settlement found in other medieval rural communities. The location of the Museum’s cottage suggests an isolated building, set away from its neighbours and without any associated agricultural buildings. Alternatively, a timber frame could have been encased in flint walls. If this was the case the infill could either have been flint or wattle and daub. However, the possibility exists that the timber frame was not replaced but was simply underpinned with a flint footing when the wooden post-holes rotted. The Museum’s cottage was therefore built with flint walls to a height that seemed to be consistent with the amount of tumbled flint that was discovered. When Holden excavated the site he found the remains of timber post-holes below the flint walls in building 3 and concluded from this that a 12th century timber framed building was rebuilt with flint in the 13th century. The structure of the buildings also remains conjectural. There has always been some debate about their function: although they have been interpreted as living houses the possibility exists that they were free standing kitchens or bakehouses. Both of these buildings contained two rooms, an inner room with a large domed oven and an outer room with a hearth cut into the chalk floor. The Museum’s cottage is an amalgam of two buildings (buildings 3 and 11) because no house was sufficiently well preserved to allow for reconstruction on its own evidence. The pattern of building combined with the dating of pottery sherds suggested that the period of densest occupation was from c.1250 to c.1325 and that the population of Hangleton contracted substantially at some point after that. The remains of six ovens were found, two within what otherwise appear to be living houses, three in separate outshuts (two in one outshut and one in another) and one within a freestanding kitchen. All the other buildings were less than 30ft long, some with two rooms, some with one. The remains of two ‘longhouses’ were found, measuring approximately 40ft by 20ft, each divided internally into three rooms. 102 (1964) by J G and D G Hurst.įigure 2. This style of building appears to be somewhat earlier than that of all-flint rubble construction.įull descriptions of the excavations at Hangleton were published in Sussex Archaeological Collections Vol. The spaces between the posts were probably filled originally with wattle and daub, but later these panels were removed and replaced with flint. The posts were let into the holes in the chalk, with one at each corner of the building and at least one in each of the longer sides. For example, some of the smaller cottages at Hangleton were first constructed with a framework of timber posts. The plan and interior space are also probably fairly typical of many cottages of the early Middle Ages.Īlternative reconstructions are possible. In spite of conjectural elements, it was decided that this full-scale archaeological reconstruction was justified as the cottage represents a form of building in rough flint rubble which was once widespread over the whole of the chalk area. Section of the roof inside the Hangleton medieval building.
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