How do we know when the house was built?

Putting a date on a house construction is often – but not always – possible, using a range of sources, from clues in the house structure itself, through documentary evidence, to specialist techniques. In this post we will show how it is possible to put a construction date of 1530 on Wisson Hill.

Initial expert opinion (a specialist architect and an expert from Heritage England) estimated the date of construction as late fifteenth century, largely based on the timber frame structure and blackening from smoke. Earlier timber frame houses used a greater proportion of timber to infill panels, with later houses being less over-engineered and more economical to build. Relative scarcity of building timber may also have had something to do with it, as well as improved building technique.

Smoke-blackened timber visible around the house suggested that it had been an open hall house, with a central hearth, as that was common for the period. But as the restoration process has revealed more of the structure, which is still visible, a documentary history of the house has been researched and the dendrochronologists have visited, it is possible to tell a more detailed story.

What can the house itself tell us?

Approved changes and repairs have allowed later layers to be legitimately peeled back, revealing features that have not been visible for hundreds of years.

The biggest early clues are left by the ever-burning fire that would have been at the heart of the house. In the sixteenth century, few houses had chimneys, with smoke from a more or less open fire finding its way up and out through the roof. Many Tudor farmhouses had a central hearth in an open hall, which formed the core of the house, possibly with additional rooms. This layout led to a general blackening of the interior. However, at Wisson Hill, the pattern of smoke-blackening is more specific than previously thought, with significant variation around the house.

It is now apparent that that first floor was original to the house construction, and not inserted later, as it commonly the case with houses of this period. Looking closely at the the surface of timbers around the house, smoke-blackening is densest around the probable location of the smoke bay. This was a section of the timber frame without a ceiling, open to the roofspace, within which an open fire was used for heating and cooking.

Backing onto what was then the cross-passage, the beam across the kitchen shows significant deposits of soot and higher temperatures, as does the north wall of the kitchen – what would have been inside the the right hand side of the smoke bay. The left hand side of the smoke bay has been lost but you pass the smoke-stained lintel as you go up the stairs, at ground floor ceiling height. Smoke blackening of the exposed brace in the bathroom is denser than elsewhere and the floor joist exposed in the cupboard under the stairs shows significant blackening. Floorboards above the sitting room are blackened underneath where they would have formed the ceiling, but as clean as the day they were laid where the boards were in contact with joists.

Building a first floor into a building of this type would have been fairly innovative in 1530, perhaps speaking to the identity of the builder: their budget and familiarity with the latest trends, beyond Warwickshire. The main two-bay building can be fairly well understood, but less is known about the two ends of this space. The junction between the main and gable sections of the house is awkward in a number of ways: the large iron bracket supporting the cross-beam is one of the features indicating that something changed in this part of the house. Were the main section and gable section built at the same time, as concluded by the experts, or was there more of a phased story?

Probably the main feature of the gable wing is the large, four-flue chimney structure. During restoration it emerged that the chimney stack was built around the elm truss that can be seen in the gable bedroom, suggesting changes after original building. Also the apparently original bressumers of the fireplaces in the gable bedroom, and study below, have ovolo mouldings, which were most popular in the later sixteenth century and were not in use before the middle of that century. The same moulding is used on what was probably an earlier doorway lintel between the main and gable structures. This may all point to a phase of improvement: it’s very speculative but if the Payton family purchased the property from the Bushell family in 1589, the ovolo moulding would be consistent timing-wise.

At some point, relatively early in the house’s history, the timber frame of the south elevation was converted to stone, and this may have been done at the same time. The east wall of the jettied wing is in coursed blue lias stone, similar to the south elevation, so may have been done at the same time.

Other aspects of the gable, or jettied, wing tantalisingly suggest that there may have been an earlier structure on the site: less uniformly coursed smaller stones (under the study window and inside the study, behind the door) and an apparent lower layer of stone flooring below the main layer of flagstones in the study. It is very tempting to think that the gable wing sits on the site of the lost Chapel of St. Leonard, but this may never be proven either way and certainly not without extensive investigation.

What about the documents?

It has been possible to trace the property back through wills, inventories, tithes, hearth taxes and other local documents. Dr. Nathaniel Alcock has provided a report drawing on all these sources. Changes of ownership have to be traced meticulously to be reliable and we can be confident that the ‘Mr Bushell’ who sold the property in 1589 is Edward Bushell, grandson of Thomas Bushell, who was probably responsible for the construction of the farmhouse. This early stage of the house history is described in more detail in the History section but Thomas Bushell was a major local landowner and his will suggests that he may have picked up monastic lands at some point in his dealings. Wisson Hill in the sixteenth century is probably a fascinating story that we may be able to do no more than guess at.

The silver bullet that is dendrochronology

The timbers in an building can be reliably dated under certain circumstances. The starting point is that, for it to be possible to find a date range of the wood from the annual growth rings, the timber has to be of a slow-growing species. In the case of Wisson Hill, the main trusses are oak, so could be sampled, but most of the structure is made of elm, which grows too fast to be used in dendro dating.

Cores were taken from several oak timbers and a report drawn up. Three of the samples taken gave a felling date, for the oak trees used, of spring 1530. As ‘green’ or freshly cut oak is easier to work with, we can assume that construction started soon after that date.

What don’t we know?

We don’t know exactly why the farmhouse was built. Rural life in 1530 was based on the open field structure and Thomas Bushell must have owned – or had rights to – probably hundreds of acres, spread across the various strips of the large, open fields that would have surrounded the village. This area, like much of England, was also dominated by the church, with large monastic landholdings across the area.

In 1530, as the farmhouse started construction, nobody would have guessed at the change that Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries would bring. At a very local level, Victoria County History says that the chapel of St. Leonard in Barton, which had been a possession of Kenilworth Abbey or its daughter house, Stone Priory, was in ruins by 1547. In 1549 the chapel and some land in the common fields belonging to it, was granted to Thomas Dabridgecourt and Thomas Fisher. It seems likely that further changes of local land ownership took place during the Tudor period, in the aftermath of the dissolution.

We don’t know why or how the Payton family took up ownership in the new farmhouse. Although not owners originally, they must have done well to be able to buy the property within a couple of generations.

We also don’t know if there was a building on the site before the current structure was built. However, fragments of pottery found in the garden include pieces of medieval jugs or cooking pots, making it likely that the site was already inhabited. A piece of debitage (waste from knapping of Stone Age flint tools) was also found in the garden, consistent with the well-documented history of this immediate area over the ages: finds from Mesolithic onwards by local detectorists, Roman Icknield Street passing 600m mile away towards the site of a Roman ford across the Avon, the site of a significant Saxon settlement and the medieval arched bridge at Bidford-on-Avon.