The Wealden hall house is a type of vernacular medieval
timber-framed hall house traditional in the south east of England. Typically built for a
yeoman
Yeoman is a noun originally referring either to one who owns and cultivates land or to the middle ranks of Serfdom, servants in an Peerage of England, English royal or noble household. The term was first documented in Kingdom of England, mid-1 ...
, it is most common in
Kent
Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...
(hence "Wealden" for the once densely forested
Weald) and the east of
Sussex
Sussex (Help:IPA/English, /ˈsʌsɪks/; from the Old English ''Sūþseaxe''; lit. 'South Saxons'; 'Sussex') is an area within South East England that was historically a kingdom of Sussex, kingdom and, later, a Historic counties of England, ...
but has also been built elsewhere. Kent has one of the highest concentrations of such surviving medieval timber-framed buildings in Europe.
The original
floor plan usually had four
bays with the two central ones forming the main hall open to the roof with the
hearth
A hearth () is the place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking, usually constituted by a horizontal hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos (a low, partial ...
in the middle and two doors to the outside at one end forming a
cross passage. The open hearth was later moved towards the cross passage and became a fireplace with chimney, sometimes the chimney pile even blocking the cross passage, which had soon been screened off the main hall. Beyond the cross passage the outer bay at the "screens end" or "lower end" of the hall, usually contained two rooms commonly called
buttery and
pantry, while the rooms in the bay at the other end, the "upper end", were called
parlours. The end bays each had an upper floor containing
solars, which did not communicate with each other, as the hall rose to the rafters between them. The upper stories on both ends typically extended beyond the lower outer wall being
jettied on at least one side of the building. As the main hall had no upper floor the outer wall ran straight up without jettying, and thus the central bays appeared recessed.
The early buildings had
thatch
Thatching is the craft of building a roof with dry vegetation such as straw, Phragmites, water reed, Cyperaceae, sedge (''Cladium mariscus''), Juncus, rushes, Calluna, heather, or palm branches, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away fr ...
ed roofs and walls of
wattle and daub often
whitewashed. Later buildings would have a
brick
A brick is a type of construction material used to build walls, pavements and other elements in masonry construction. Properly, the term ''brick'' denotes a unit primarily composed of clay. But is now also used informally to denote building un ...
infilling between timbers, sometimes leading to a complete replacement of the outer walls of the basement with solid stone walls.
Examples
Examples are the "
Bayleaf farmhouse" from Chiddingstone, relocated in 1968–69 to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. the Yeoman's House in
Bignor, the
Anne of Cleves House in Lewes, the
Alfriston Clergy House, the Plough at
Stalisfield Green, the
Old Punch Bowl and the
Ancient Priors at Crawley, the
Pattyndenne Manor in Kent and the Monks' Barn in
Newport, Essex, Hole Cottage near
Cowden (operated by
Landmark Trust) and The Old Bakery, in Hamstreet, Kent.
The northernmost examples are in York, and include the
Wealden Hall on
Goodramgate.
References
External links
Geograph online article about Wealden Hall Houses
{{Housing in the United Kingdom
House types in the United Kingdom
Architecture in England
Vernacular architecture
Timber framing
Hall houses