Vernacular Architecture, Vol. 40 (2009) 36–50

© The Vernacular Architecture Group 2009 DOI: 10.1179/030554709X12528296422608

INTRODUCTION

The Northamptonshire village of Potterspury (SP 762 432) lies to the east of Watling Street, the Roman road from London to the North-West, and is three miles north of Stony Stratford (Buckinghamshire) and five miles south of Towcester. The underlying geology is almost entirely boulder clay with exposed limestone around the village and this provided the basis for a thriving medieval pottery industry (giving the village its present name) and a plentiful supply of building stone for houses. The parish of Potterspury is made up of the villages of Potterspury and Yardley Gobion, and includes part of Whittlewood Forest and Wake-field Lodge, the Northamptonshire seat of the Dukes of Grafton until 1920.

Potterspury was one of the fourteen parishes that made up the honour of Grafton, formed in 1542 from a large block of estates in south-west Northampton-shire, and was passed eventually from the Crown to the second Duke of Grafton in 1706.1 Potterspury village was a nucleated village based on open-field farming, mainly arable, with pasture in old enclosures, and a small amount of meadow. Sociologically it was neither an open nor a closed village but a mixture of the two.2 In 1727 the Duke of Grafton was the single largest owner with 55% of the land but just 22% of the housing stock, and there were over 40 smaller freeholders, just under half of whom were owner/occupiers, sharing the remainder. Farming was the principal activity, and remained so until the early

twentieth century, with estate and forestry work pro-viding further employment both for tenants and for other villagers. Most of the Duke’s holding of c.500 acres was divided between ten tenant farmers with between 17 and 95 acres each. The freeholders, num-bering about 60, were either ‘landless’ (in that they had no agricultural land in the open fields) or shared the remaining c.400 acres. On the eve of enclosure in 1776, through consolidation of the smaller farms and pur-chase of one other, the Grafton estate held about 740 acres, divided between three tenants.3 The Potterspury portion of the estate was substantially reorganised after enclosure and by 1875, with further acquisitions, amounted to 890 acres or 95% of the village land.4 It remained at this level until 1920 when the estate was broken up.

The pattern of land acquisition described above was accompanied by a similar increase in the number of houses owned by the estate; in 1727, 22% of the houses in the village were estate owned, and by 1910 this had risen to 43%. The details and the reasons behind this growth are discussed below.

In 1723 the second Duke of Grafton took full control of the estate and the following year appointed a body of commissioners to help him modernise its administration. This involved an up-to-date survey, undertaken by surveyors Joseph Collier and William Baker, to establish exactly what he had inherited and the income this inheritance generated.5 Entire parishes were surveyed and the resulting maps provide a bird’s-eye view of every house in each village. For Potter-spury a set of draft maps as well as a coloured ‘final’

RENEWAL AND REPLACEMENT IN A NORTHAMPTONSHIRE VILLAGE: HOUSING

IN POTTERSPURY 1727–1910

Rod Conlon

A quarter of all the houses that existed in 1727 in the Northamptonshire village of Potterspury survive today. This has been demonstrated from documentary evidence and from buildings survey work. The starting point is a map of 1727 which shows each building in detail in respect of the number of storeys and bays and also of the positions of windows, doors and chimneys. The sketches of the houses on the 1727 map when compared with the existing surviving houses show much similar or identical detail. By supplementing the map evidence with evidence from other contemporary documents, a complete picture of the 1727 village has been reconstructed. Following this picture through the later documentary sources and by examining the nature of the surviving and lost buildings, it has been possible to establish a full history of each house. This paper covers the period from 1727 to 1910 and identifies the main periods during which houses in the village of Potterspury were lost. The factors leading to those losses and the nature of the new and the replacement houses are also identified.

37 1727–1910

Figure 1. Collier and Baker map of Potterspury, final version. Watling Street crosses the lower part of the map with Blackwell End at the bottom left. Church End is top right, and the two are linked by the High Street

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version survive (Fig. 1).6 Generally the drafts have been used as the core source for this paper as the coloured version is eroded in places.

A systematic study of pre-1700 standing buildings in Potterspury was carried out as part of a wider English Heritage project, and was greatly aided by the exis-tence of the Collier and Baker maps.7 There is excellent correlation between the houses shown on the maps and about 20 existing houses with regard to details such as the number of storeys, the number and position of chimneys, doors and windows, as well as house positions in their plot. In many cases there was a near exact match; in others, where later alterations had been made, surviving 1727 details were easily

recognised (Fig. 2). Field study demonstrated the accuracy of the 1727 maps for Potterspury and established that about 25% of the Collier and Baker houses had survived to the twenty-first century. Comparison of the buildings in the neighbouring village of Blisworth with the sketches on the Collier and Baker Blisworth map reveals a similarly striking level of accuracy particularly in the recording of the positions of gable-end windows (Fig. 3). It is unusual to find such early surveys that can be relied upon for demonstrably accurate architectural evidence of vernacular buildings and which provide a ‘snapshot’ of the entire community at one point in time. The existence of a ‘trustworthy’ map makes Potterspury

38

ideally suited for studying a series of issues relating to its historic buildings, their attrition and survival, as well as addressing issues relating to alteration and rebuilding.

In the first part of this paper, the Collier and Baker survey is used to establish the nature of all housing in Potterspury in 1727. Based mainly on the extensive sources of the Grafton Estate collection at Northamp-tonshire Record Office (NRO) (Appendix 1) and on the results of the fieldwork undertaken in 2003, the rest of the paper examines the replacement and sur-vival of housing in the parish between 1727 and 1910, the year of a second comprehensive survey, the Inland Revenue Valuation Survey of 1910–15.8 In this survey, commonly referred to as the ‘1910 Domesday Survey’, the dates recorded in the Potterspury Field Books range from 1910 to 1914, but for simplicity, the date ‘1910’ has been adopted in this paper.

THE NATURE OF THE 1727 HOUSES

Potterspury is a nucleated settlement with a bi-focal plan (Fig. 4). One focus known as Blackwell End is sited alongside Watling Street and linked, by what is now the High Street, to a second focus in the east called Church End or Lower End. The origins of this arrangement are obscure but it is thought that it began in the early Middle Ages and was fully established by 1300.9 The earliest settlement was at Church End, with the church, watermill and probable site of the medieval manor house. This chronology is supported by field survey where the two earliest houses recorded are close to the church: Maltsters Cottage (house 69),10 the only cruck building in the village, and the Blue Ball Inn (house 79) with medieval roof timbers. Both have heavily smoke-blackened roof members and were dated stylistically to around 1500.

Figure 2. Comparison of standing buildings in Potterspury with their Collier and Baker drawings. 27 Church End, house 72 (left); 64 Blackwell End, house 23 (right)

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39 1727–1910

The 1727 maps are particularly rich in architectural detail and, because the final version has a different point of view to the draft, complementary information is provided. For houses set parallel to the road, the draft map shows the house in front elevation. For houses with their gable end to the road, the view is bird’s-eye, giving an impression of their length. Surpri-singly, the coloured version, which one would expect to be based on the draft, is seen from a fixed-point bird’s-eye view from the south-west and, therefore, gives supplementary information for some houses.

The maps show 80 numbered houses, most of which are occupied as single tenements. Some were originally built as two or three tenements (houses 5, 35 and 51), others were extended or sub-divided into two, three or four tenements and another four consisted of two attached buildings of different date in the same occu-pation (houses 6, 37, 38 and 40). House 40, Elmfield Farm (Fig. 5), comprised a medieval structure and a c.1700 house, recorded in Richard Scrivener’s will of 1723 as ‘my new built messuage in Potterspury . . . and

also that other messuage thereunto adjoining wherein I now dwell’.11

The net effect of the above is that the 80 ‘houses’ provided 96 ‘dwellings’, also referred to as tenements, which have been analysed for architectural details. The primary characteristics chosen to compare size and style were the number of bays and storeys depicted in the Collier and Baker sketches. Generally bays were counted on the basis of the number of ground-floor windows and doors shown. Occasionally some subjec-tive ‘adjustment’ was needed when a door or window bay included a chimney stack. Examples are given in Figure 6, and the results of this approach for all the 96 tenements are summarised in Table 1 and Figure 7. The most common house types, representing 82% of the entire housing stock, are of two or three bays; 63% of these two- and three-bay houses were single storey and 37% had two storeys. There were seven one-bay tenements, one of which was stand-alone (house 23); this was in Crown hands by 1650 and was described as ‘a little cottage in Blackwell End, one bay’ (Fig. 2).12

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Figure 3. Comparison of standing buildings in Blisworth with their Collier and Baker drawings

40

correlation between house size and wealth. A similar relationship between larger houses and higher social status was observed for surviving medieval houses in Kent.13

The larger farmhouses, mostly of two storeys and three or more bays, and set in wide-fronted plots of one to six acres, generally have the larger holdings in the common fields. This is illustrated in Table 2 which lists farms with more than 20 acres ranked by total land held (including home close, other closes and common land). The wealthiest farmers with the largest houses and most land tend to have larger home closes with more agricultural outbuildings. Tenanted estate farms feature in the upper part of the table; five of these properties were sited together in the High Street where most of the Grafton estate was concentrated (Fig. 11).14

The evidence is rather more illuminating when we come to look at the smaller houses. These, and those divided into several tenements better described as cottages, had small plots or gardens, varying in area from two perches (1/80 of an acre) to less than a quar-ter of an acre, and little or no common land. A group of seven such tenements, also on the High Street, all of two bays, is shown in Figure 12. Only house 46 has

Figure 4. Map of Pottersbury, OS 2nd edition, 1900. (Courtesy of the Victoria County History and British History online)

Figure 5. Elmfield Farm, High Street, house 40

The remaining buildings with four or five bays were farms (six), inns (three) or were owned by wealthy yeoman freeholders (two) (Figs 8, 9 and 10). Four two-storey houses had been upgraded from single-storey (physical survey) and ten were two-storeyed from the outset; the latter were all constructed after c.1650 (dated by physical survey and date stones).

What one might expect, a strong correlation betwee n wealth, status and landholding size, is borne out by the map evidence. Larger properties had more chimneys; 78% of four- and five-bay houses have two or more chimneys compared with 18% of the two- and three-bay houses, providing additional evidence for the

41 1727–1910

Figure 6. Examples of houses with two and three bays. Two bays (to left); three bays (to right)

Figure 7. Number of storeys and bays for the 96 tenements. The single-storey group includes those with 1½ storeys, i.e. with accommodation partly or wholly in the roof space

Table 1. Summary of the construction details of the 96 tenements

No. of storeys

No. of bays

1 2 3 4 5 Total %

1 3 21 4 0 0 28 291½ 3 19 6 3 0 31 322 1 12 16 3 5 37 39Total 7 52 26 6 5 96% 7 55 27 6 5 100

any common field land (just three acres), and the out-building attached to house 43 is a workshop not a barn. The occupations of known tenants in 1727 were blacksmith, tailor and labourer.

Houses built on the manor waste often appear in court records but rarely are any details of the building given. The survey depicts seven such houses, all but one single-storey, built on the roadside waste of Wat-ling Street (houses 1 to 5, 10 and 11). First mentioned in the 1650 survey, they were swept away around 1795 when the turnpike was improved (Fig. 13).

LIMITATIONS OF THE 1727 SURVEY

At first glance, the maps do not indicate how the houses were constructed. There is no obvious signifi-cance as to why the roofs of a few of the buildings are shown hatched and why the remainder are shown plain; most, if not all, would have been thatched.15 It is possible that the surveyors were recording different thatching materials or, less likely, the condition of the thatch — perhaps newly laid or in need of repair. Given that it was a woodland area, it is possible that they were identifying alternative materials such as shingles. Without a comprehensive study of estate mapping conventions, this question will have to remai n unanswered, although for such closely observed sur-veys it would be surprising if drawing conventions such as these were not significant in some way.

From the lack of differentiation of wall types, it has been concluded that by 1727 all the houses had stone external walls.16 Those surviving buildings that were sketched in 1727 all have masonry walls. Four houses (69, 13, 52 and 79) were timber-framed, dated to the sixteenth century, later encased in stone, and the rest were built in stone from the outset. House 69, a

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42

encased in stone by the latter. Houses 52 and 79, stylistically dated to the early sixteenth century, had timber frames within later stone walls. Examples of buildings using stone from the outset, which survive today and have either date stones or appear on stylistic evidence to be earlier than 1727, are house 9 (dated 1713), house 40 (dated c.1700), house 47 (dated 1689), house 64 (dated 1674), house 65 (dated c.1650), house 72 (dated c.1700) and house 78 (dated c.1600). All match their 1727 drawings. Possibly the earliest date-able stone building is the single-bay house 23 referred to above, identified in a 1650 survey and surveyed in 2003.17

The survey carried out by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England in the north of the county, where the prevailing geology is similar to Potterspury’s, noted that ‘surviving small houses of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were built of rubble without any freestone dressings, open-ings having timber lintels’, a description which could equally be applied to Potterspury.18

One aspect of the buildings that the Collier and Baker maps cannot address is their age in 1727. The 2003 survey dated four of the twenty surviving houses to the sixteenth century and seven to the seventeenth century. Three could confidently be dated to the period 1700 to 1727, but it could not be determined whether the remaining six were built in the sixteenth or the seventeenth centuries. The earliest documentary evidence for houses since demolished indicated a mid- to late-seventeenth-century date.19 There are also indications that complete houses may not always have been built or rebuilt at one time (changes are evident in the roof lines of houses 33, 38 and 80), and the possi bility of alternate rebuilding, common in

Figure 8. Toomb’s farm, High Street, house 53

Figure 9. The Old Talbot Inn, Watling Street, house 9

Figure 10. William Addington’s house, Blackwell End, house 16

Table 2. Relationship between house size and landholding

House ref. Total land, acres Storeys Bays Home close, acres Outbuildings Owner (tenant)

80 95 1½ 4 6 B Estate (Plowman)401 (92) 2 5 5 B R. Scrivener 50 74 2 3 1 B,B,S Estate (Barrow)52 73 2 3 1¾ B,B,B,S Estate (T. Scrivener)59 62 2 4 1½ B,B,S Estate (Packington)72 54 2 5 1 B,B,S Lord Bathurst 58 35 1½ 2 3¾ B Estate (George)78 32 2 3 ½ B Glebe23 30 1½ 1 ¼ – Estate (Horton) 9 27 2 5 1 B Lloyd **33 25 1 3 ½ – Kingston **27 25 2 3 1 B Jenkinson 54 20 1 2 3 B Beauchamp74 20 1 2 ¼ B Smith

1 Richard Scrivener lived in the early eighteenth-century part of the farmhouse (house 40) shown gable-end on to the road in Figure 5. His land holdings were entirely in neighbouring parishes, recorded as 92 acres in a terrier of 1667 and 103 acres when the estate purchased the farm in 1825.B = Barn, S = Stable, ** land not held with house but leased from estate.

three-bay cruck building, had a date stone of 1685 presumably commemorating its encasement in stone. House 13, externally of stone with a date stone reading ‘1574’ above ‘1707’, could convincingly be described as a timber-framed building of the former date,

43 1727–1910

extensive interpretation is possible.21 However, corre-lating inventories to houses is not an exact science, and some pitfalls need to be noted.22 Late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century inventories for Potterspury together with estate survey and manor court suit rolls (listing all the inhabitants in the village) offer further confirmation of the integrity of the evidence from the Collier and Baker drawings.

Of 40 or so surviving inventories from 1660 to 1740, 28 can be readily linked to 22 of the houses (six houses have two inventories). This restricted date range makes it highly probable that the inventories refer to build-ings standing in 1727, and the appraised value of the goods, from £2 to £590 (median value c.£50), together with the occupation or status of the deceased, indicates that a wide range of social classes is covered. The inven-tory descriptions correlate closely with the evidence of the 1727 survey: the smaller houses described by the survey have few rooms listed in the inventories and the larger houses have more rooms. Generally, house size is related to the value of appraised goods.

A summary of the analysis of the inventories is given in Appendix 2. Houses with two to four bays are represented, noting that for these smaller houses one bay equates to one room, and the inventories match the drawings in 19 cases (70%). Four of the houses where the inventory understates the number of bays (houses 7, 14, 27 and 68) have second inventories that do match the buildings, implying that in some cases only part of the house was being appraised. There is also good agreement between the number of heated rooms recorded in the inventories and the number of chimneys shown in the drawings, with 75% matches for all cases. For the smaller houses of two and three bays with a single chimney, 90% agreement is obtained.

Despite some shortcomings, Hearth Tax assess-ments of the seventeenth century have proved of value for the study of vernacular houses, especially for comparative analysis at regional, county or parish level, but have had only limited success for individual houses.23 The unreliability of the Hearth Tax data, the

Figure 11. Section of High Street showing estate farms. Farms are houses 50, 52, 53, 58 and 59

Figure 12. Five houses on the High Street, houses 42 to 46

Figure 13. Houses on the waste in Watling Street, houses 1 to 4

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cannot be excluded and, indeed, seems most likely. Almost one third of dwellings in 1727 were single-storeyed, some presumably with rooms open to the roof, and a small proportion of those, without chimneys, possibly had open hearths (for example, house 31 and part of house 44). Overall, the evidence suggests that by the early eighteenth century there had already been a significant improvement in much of the village housing stock.

EVIDENCE FROM PROBATE INVENTORIES AND HEARTH TAX

Probate inventories are a rich source for historians, providing insights into the relative wealth,20 social status and lifestyle of individuals as well as containing valuable evidence about houses and the way the space within them was used. Groups of inventories have been used to study the general character of whole vil-lages where few or no houses survive, and where it has been possible to match inventories to standing houses,

44

difficulty of matching the data to all but the largest houses, and the relatively small number of surviving houses, are some of the reasons for this.

For Potterspury, the ability to compare the 1674 Hearth Tax returns with drawings made just over 50 years later has shown good agreement for a range of one-, two- and three-chimney houses. A credible link was made between 27 householders paying the tax in 1674 and houses shown on the 1727 maps, and assum-ing that a one-hearth house had one chimney, a match was achieved between the house and its taxation in 16 cases (59%). Whilst most of the houses have gable-end chimneys, it is not unreasonable to assume that those with a central chimney (lobby-entrance types) have two back-to-back hearths, in which case, five further matches are achieved, or 78% agreement between tax returns and buildings. Nine householders listed as exempt from payment (five living in houses on the waste) can also be identified in the Hearth Tax listing, all having a single chimney. For all 36 houses where the building could be matched to the Hearth Tax return, a strong relationship exists between the numbe r of hearths and the size of the house (Table 3).

The 1674 Hearth Tax data for Potterspury is sum-marised in Table 4 and enables the parish to be seen in its wider geographical context.24 Half of those paying the tax lived in one-hearth houses, which is about the

median for the fourteen parishes in the Hundred, whilst at 46%, the number exempt from tax as a percentage of all householders is above the median.

LOSS AND SURVIVAL AFTER 1727

Chris Currie has studied the subject of attrition and survival in vernacular buildings and has derived attrition rates for loss by fire, rot and fashion for dif-ferent building materials.25 Using historical evidence for loss by fire, and assuming destruction was a series of random processes, attrition rates for wall and roof-ing material combinations of timber frame and thatch, and brick/stone and tile were calculated. Adopting Currie’s approach, and assuming that his timber and thatch model approximates to the Potterspury stone and thatch situation (i.e. thatch is the major contribu-tor to loss), his model predicts that 12 of the 80 houses in 1727 should have survived to the present day.26 That this is fewer than the 20 known survivors is perhaps not surprising since stone walls are more resilient than timber, and loss by fire was not as prevalent as in Currie’s chosen village model.27 Furthermore, Currie did caution that destruction was not always random, that attrition rates were not constant over time, and that the less remote the period, the less likely it is that random processes are at play.

But at Potterspury, as will be shown, it was non-random factors that appear to have been the main reason for the loss or replacement of housing. Two comprehensive surveys — the 1727 Collier and Baker survey and the comparable Inland Revenue Valuation of 1910 — when used in conjunction with Hearth Tax, enclosure and census data, provide the basis for tracing the historical development of housing in the village from the situation in 1727, when there were 96 tenements in the 80 houses, to the 217 tenements in approximately 120 houses recorded in the Valuation survey.28 By following individual house histories it has been possible to get precise data on attrition and to identify the main periods of loss, and in some cases the reason for the loss. In addition, because of the wealth of evidence in the Grafton archive, it has also been possible to address other questions relating to survival and replacement.

The documentary evidence supported by physical survey has established that about 60 of the 80 houses illustrated by Collier and Baker had been entirely lost before 2003, and that an exact or a close approxima-tion for the date of destruction could be established for 50 of them. The results for the period 1725 to 1975, plotted in 25-year intervals, are shown in Figure 14. Rather than a constant rate of attrition from random causes there are ‘waves’ of loss, with peaks in the

Table 3. Relationship between hearths and house bays for 36 matching cases

No. of hearths

No. of bays

1 2 3 4 5

6 15 14 13 1 12 1 7 21 1 8 2 1Exempt 3 5 1

Table 4. Summary of Potterspury Hearth Tax data

Hearths Paying % paying Cleley Hundred %

Median %

1 30 50 35–72 512 17 28 6–39 213 & 4 8 145–9 3 510+ 2 3Total paying 60 100

Exempt 51 46% of total

16–53 39

Total 111

45 1727–1910

late eighteenth century, the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century.

The documentary sources sometimes give an explanation for the loss of the house. For example, comments appear in rentals such as ‘house down’, and a conveyance dated 1818 for house 39 states ‘. . . my son Edward should pull down the said cottage (the same being dilapidated and in a ruinous state) and rebuild the same’.29 As to the removal of houses from the waste alongside Watling Street, the court minutes recorded the estate enclosing the waste in May 1795, which coincides with payments in the accounts of 1793–5 for the construction of new cottages to re-house some of those displaced.30

Of the 40 houses lost before 1910, 32, or 80%, were single-storey. Where evidence exists, it seems that the buildings demolished were nearing the end of their useful life; 12 had fallen into disrepair and were never replaced, 12 were rebuilt as single superior dwellings and 16 were replaced by two or more tenements.

1725–1825

The population and the numbers of houses in Potter-spury remained almost unchanged in the 100 years

prior to enclosure in 1776, and may even have dipped in the 1720s (Fig. 15). Then, like many agricultural communities responding to the increasing national demand for food, the village population increased, growing by 40% before 1811 and almost doubling by 1844.31 This was accompanied by an expansion in housing stock, partly through replacement of older houses and partly by new building. The inevitable delay in meeting the increased need for more housing resulted in more families sharing existing properties, an occurrence that was also observed by the Royal Commission in several parishes in the north of the county.32 In Potterspury between 1750 and 1800, eleven extra families were ‘accommodated’ within existing houses, as were at least another seventeen between 1800 and 1850. During the following 50 years only two further cases were noted, confirming that sub-division was primarily a response to the initial shortage of available housing. A rather extreme case involving one of the Duke of Grafton’s houses was reported to the Poor Law Union in 1841. In this case ‘four or five separate families were residing in one house with only two sleeping rooms’.33

In 1795 the estate built a row of six cottages on a ‘green field’ site in Blackwell End (Smalley cottages).

Figure 14. Houses demolished between 1725 and 1975

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Figure 15. Variation of population and number of tenements, 1674 to 1910. Based on hearth tax, 1727 survey, enclosure survey and census data. Population values have been normalised to 100 in 1674 to aid comparison

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15

Owned by Estate in 172771 Owned by Estate when demolished62 Freeholders

10 77 3760 3439 28 617 25 56

76part 18 465 11 16 44

5 15 21 70 634 14 42 57 67 293 6 41 74 27 26

75 2 49 54 73 19 2453 58 1 10 50 20 51 80

1725 1750 1775 1800 1825 1850 1875 1900 1925 1950 1975 2000YEAR

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46

Smaller landowners also played their part in addressing the housing shortage. A single house on a large plot in Woods Lane was replaced in 1795 by two ranges of three and four tenements, built of stone with clay-tiled roofs. (After the bankruptcy of the owner in 1814, they were purchased by the fourth Duke.) Before 1818, a house on Watling Street was demolished and rebuilt, and a further three tenements were erected along the street frontage (house 39). Driven by the continuing pressure for more housing, a piece of free-hold land in Culver’s Close, one of the few areas within the village envelope not built upon, was sold in 1818 to build a new house. Further piecemeal develop-ment followed and by 1845 seven more dwellings were listed, including the conversion of a barn attached to one of the houses (c.1831).36

In Church End, house 77, known as Pedder’s farm in 1596 and Atkin’s farm in 1542, became the meeting place of an Independent Congregational church. The old farmhouse continued to house the ministers and their meeting-house until 1780 (date stone) when a new brick and tile meeting-house and Manse were constructed.37

When presenting evidence to the Board of Agriculture in 1809, the estate steward identified these cottages as an example of how the Duke paid considerable atten-tion to the accommodation provided for his tenants; the comfort of the occupier rather than the outward appearance of the cottages was the main object. The steward also added, however, that the cost of building such cottages of stone walls and thatch was two-thirds that of brick and tile.34

New properties were inserted into existing plots (houses 20, 51 and schoolhouse) and houses were adapted by dividing up rooms or adding new ones (houses 66 and 67) (Fig. 16). Also, in 1810, the estate encroached on a wider part of the lane in Blackwell End to build a pair of cottages (house 23a), suggesting that there was nowhere else to build. All new proper-ties were constructed of rubble limestone with thatched roofs. Surprisingly, the estate did not take advantage of enclosure to build new farms, as often happened elsewhere in the Midlands,35 but the Duke did pur-chase the two remaining freehold farms in the village (house 72 in 1775 and house 40 in 1825) (Fig. 17).

Figure 16. Tenements built or rebuilt between 1725 and 1900

Figure 17. Property purchased by the Estate, 1725 to 1925

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76 6276 6171 6162 5762 5762 5734 5728 5628 4425 4425 4425 44 Estate16 39 Freeholders16 3116 2416 2415 24

77 15 2176 14 2139 Culver 1839 Culver 1839 Culver 1839 Culver 18

7Morgan Culver 187Morgan Culver 1860 Colling Culver 1860 Colling Culver 1860 Colling Culver 1160 Colling Culver 1160 Colling 10 The Cott60 Colling Grafton T Pott house60 Colling Grafton T Culver60 Colling Grafton T Culver

51W Grafton T Culver51E Grafton T 4120 26 Grafton T 41

Pest 26 Grafton T Drift 76Smalley Culver Grafton T Drift 76Smalley BWE23 HH cott Beech 76Smalley BWE23 HH cott Duchess 76Smalley 67ext HH cott Duchess 76

Furtho Smalley 66ext HH cott Duchess 73Furtho Smalley Schoolh Hill House Duchess 73

1725 1750 1775 1800 1825 1850 1875 1900 1925

YEAR

45

40

35

QU

AN

TITY

30

25

20

15

10

5

64657367 7866 Robinson60 5554 Morgan 47

76 42 45 41 7172 6 40 7 29 39 19

1725 1750 1775 1800 1825 1850 1875 1900 1925YEAR

10

5

47 1727–1910

1825–75

During this period, which included the era of ‘high farming’ in England, the Grafton estate continued to prosper as the earlier investments in buildings and farming practices began to pay off.38 In 1830 the estate owned approximately 810 acres in Potterspury, of which 700 acres were held in three farms, 68% of which was arable.39 As elsewhere in England, the estate was promoting new scientific ideas to improve yields. This is confirmed by the following entry in the accounts for 1836–7: ‘To encourage improvements in farming by liming and drainage half the cost is allowable by the Duke’.40 The three largest Potterspury farms took advantage of this offer, and neighbouring landowners bought tens of thousands of drainage pipes from the estate brick kilns. In 1865 the construction of the only farm to be built outside the original village envelope (Beech Farm) was begun.

Both the estate and the other freeholders were actively engaged in developing housing in the parish. There were further opportunistic purchases of older village properties by the estate, but more significantly the fourth Duke was responsible for regenerating much of the housing stock (Figs 16 and 17). Two large houses were built on Watling Street. The first, built in 1833, was a small farmhouse, replacing house 10. The other, Hill House, replacing house 6, was a ‘mansion’ begun in 1831 and first tenanted in 1833 by the estate steward. Both were of rubble limestone under hipped slate roofs, and the latter was the first double-pile house in the village. On a plot adjacent to Hill House, the estate built a row of three cottages (later tenanted as four) with two-centred arch doors and windows in the ‘gothick’ style.

The greater part of new building by the estate in this period involved the replacement of individual houses on separate plots by cottage properties for workers, often in terraces. The result was a very significant change to both the appearance and the spatial charac-ter of the village. The new concentration of cottage properties represented a strong response to the needs of a growing rural population (as witnessed by the decennial census), and to the needs of an agricultural economy expanding in order to feed the rapidly rising population of industrialised England whose social composition was changing.

On two larger-than-average plots in the High Street two of the older properties were demolished and replaced with modern, two-storey ‘cottages’. The replacement for house 49 was Grafton Terrace which had a date stone of 1840 and comprised eight two-up/two-down tenements. A row of four tenements with gabled fronts and decorated bargeboards built in 1865, replaced house 50. They were all of limestone with slate roofs. In 1868, two adjacent High Street proper-ties purchased by the estate (houses 41 and 42) were demolished and on the combined plot, a pair of

semi-detached, two-storey, stone and slate houses were built. All these High Street tenements had much larger than average gardens, and their occupiers included school teachers, police officers and a nurse as well as estate employees.

Owners of freehold land and property were also capitalising on the demand for more housing. They owned double the number of properties owned by the estate, and rebuilt almost three times as many as the estate between 1825 and 1875 (Fig. 16). Ten new tenements were built in Culvers Close, and another was added within the curtilage of house 39. But the majority of the expansion involved intensification, replacing ageing, single-storey thatched buildings with more dwellings of superior construction on the same building plot. In Woods Lane three two-storey houses providing five dwellings replaced houses 61 and 62. All were of stone with slate roofs, described in 1910 as three-up/two-down, owned by non-villagers and occupied by artisans and labourers. But the greatest changes were in Blackwell End where around the middle of the century eight of the 1727 houses were rebuilt to provide 25 dwellings. With three exceptions, these were either one-up/one-down or two-up/two-down houses built of stone or brick with slate roofs. The majority were owned by outsiders and tenanted mainly by labourers of one sort or another, about half of whom were employed in agriculture.

1875–1925

When the sixth Duke died in 1882 the estate was, like many other English country estates, suffering from the effects of the Great Depression in farming. The seventh Duke inherited an estate with declining income and increasing costs. Rents were abated by 25% in 1888, followed by a further 10% five years later, in an attempt to ease the difficulties of tenant farmers and prevent flight from the land. As in other Grafton estate villages, the rural population, which peaked around 1870, began to fall and the supply of housing finally caught up with demand. Apart from two small cottages, there was one major purchase in this period. The three-storey, nine-bay corn mill (house 71), rebuilt in 1841 of stone with a slate roof, was bought at auc-tion in 1891 for £650. House building too was depre-ssed by the economic climate; house 73, purchased by the estate in 1808, was demolished and rebuilt around 1880 and sold two years later. Building by other owners was restricted to five tenements to the south of house 76, undertaken towards the end of the century.

CONCLUSIONS

At first sight, a 1727 map of Potterspury appears to be ‘just another estate map’ with 80 simple, naive

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drawings of the houses. However, a 2003 survey of the whole village which matched in detail approximately 20 surviving houses to the drawings, provided con-vincing evidence of the reliability of the map and thus provided the potential to reconstruct in full the 1727 villagescape. The resulting picture is one of a rural community living in houses constructed mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The houses were mostly small — 83% were of two or three bays of which two-thirds were of one storey or one-and-a-half sto-reys. They were built on small plots of land, often in rows of two or more tenements, constructed of coursed rubble limestone under thatched roofs. The largest houses were of five bays; two were farmhouses built c.1700 and three were inns on Watling Street.

The nature and characteristics of the houses that existed in 1727 having been established, it has been possible to address a number of questions relating to the subsequent attrition, survival, additions to and replacement of the housing stock of the village, through to the early twentieth century, using a wide range of documentary sources. Attrition, rather than being the result of a series of random causes, was shown instead to be the result of ‘waves’ of demolition in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in the middle of the nineteenth century and in the mid-twentieth century. In some cases it was possible to determine that houses that had become unacceptable in terms of age, space and fashion were replaced by two-storey houses. Des-pite the paucity of data that survives for the period, it appears that change before 1727 involved adaptation or encasement of medieval buildings in stone. After 1727, and particularly from the mid nineteenth cen-tury and into the twentieth century, demolition and total replacement, particularly of single-storey houses, was common practice. Only a single incidence of destruction by fire has been found for Potterspury.

The pattern of rebuilding over the years follows the pattern of demolition (Figs 14 and 16); the difference in scale signifies that replacement generally consisted of more dwellings on the same piece of land. All new estate houses were built of better materials and to a higher standard of construction than their predeces-sors, with the majority surviving to the present day. Most of the freehold replacements built after 1850 still exist today; few built before that date survive.

The Dukes of Grafton, the dominant landlord and lord of the manor, held eighteen (22%) of the 1727

houses. By 1910, this had increased to 93 (43%) of the village properties and included all the farms. This was achieved through rebuilding some of the original hous-ing stock, purchasing freehold property and building new houses on land already owned or recently purch-ased. The main driver for extra housing during the first half of the nineteenth century was the necessity to pro-vide homes for an increasing number of agricultural labourers needed to support the expanding farming economy. This resulted in the replacement of many of the single-storey houses. On the estate, single proper-ties were replaced by between two and eight tenements, providing a nineteenth-century precursor to what is known in the twenty-first century as ‘densification’.

Figure 17 summarises the estate’s purchases, show-ing peaks in the early nineteenth century when income increased dramatically through higher rents, and again in the 1860s when the estate was creating a surplus on profits from earlier investments. After this date, pur-chases and building decreased sharply as the fifth Duke concentrated on improvements to Wakefield Lodge, having recently received an award from the Crown in compensation for his loss of office as forest ranger. Between 1860 and 1880 his annual expenditure on the mansion and grounds, increased from £2,500 to £7,500.41

The relationship between house size and survival is summarised in Table 5. The vulnerability of single-storey and one-and-a-half storey houses is evident; only 7% of those standing in 1727 exist today.42 But houses of two storeys have fared much better, with 43% surviving. The significance of size is further emph-asised by the fact that 45% of all 1727 two-storey, four and five-bay houses still stand today. It can therefore be concluded that size is of paramount importance and that the larger houses have survived because they are more adaptable and are therefore less likely to be replaced.

APPENDIX 1

SOURCES

The Grafton estate records at Northamptonshire Record Office contain estate surveys of 1727, 1757, 1811 (farms only), 1823, 1830 (cottages only), 1875, 1901 (partial) and

Table 5. Number of houses surviving today as proportion of those in 1727

No. of storeys No. of bays Total %

1 2 3 4 5

1 & 1½ 1/6 4/40 1/10 0/3 4/59 72 0/1 2/12 9/16 1/3 4/5 14/37 43Total 1/7 14/78 5/11 20/96% 14 18 45

49 1727–1910

1920. Rentals from the 1740s to the 1830s detail occupiers of all farms and cottages, changes of occupiers, and often con-tain notes relating to properties. There is an enclosure award and map of 1776 and a related map of c.1800, the Tithe map of 1845 (partial), and Ordnance Survey maps of 1883 and 1900. In addition, there are manor court records from 1723 to 1801 (incomplete), estate payment books from the 1780s to the 1880s, deeds for many of the freehold properties together with wills, inventories and other surveys such as the

Hearth Tax and Land Tax assessments, all of which shed light on housing, ownership and change of ownership. Photo-graphs survive from the late nineteenth century onwards (mostly in private collections), and provide details of many of the village houses recorded in the 1910 Valuation survey. The value of such extensive documentation is that gaps in one record can be filled by information from other records. Also, that multiple references to houses and occupiers increase confidence in assumptions made.

APPENDIX 2

INVENTORIES

Key: Inv. = Inventory details, 1727 = 1727 map details, A = agreement, D = disagreement between inventory and map evidence

Date House Ref.

Occupier Occupation Value of Goods £

Inv. bays

1727 bays

Inv./1727 bays

Inv. hearths

1727 chimneys

Inv./1727 hearths

1681 68 Frances Tassel widow 2 1 3 D 1 1 A1664 20 Robert Toomes carpenter 4 2 3 D 1 1 A1727 7 William Bason labourer 4 1 2 D 1 1 A1728 24 Ann Nichols widow 4 2 2 A 1 1 A1732 35 pt1 Richard Walker mason 9 2 2 A 1 1 A1713 71 John Richardson miller 16 1 3 D 1 1 A1706 67 William Hilliar butcher 17 2 2 A 1 1 A1672 7 Christoper Bason victualler 22 2 2 A 1 1 A1717 35 pt2 James Saunders carpenter 26 2 2 A 1 1 A1684 50 Thomas Barrow gent 30 3 3 A 2 2 A1661 68 Michael Tassell ironmonger 32 3 3 A 1 1 A1717 32 Elizabeth Church tailor 32 1 2 D 1 1 A1685 44pt Richard Jones shepherd 39 2 2 A 1 1 A1661 14 Richard Addington victualler 40 3 3 A 1 1 A1717 33 William Kingston – 62 3 3 A 1 1 A1683 41 Joseph Newell baker 85 2 2 A 1 1 A1717 32 Richard Church tailor 91 2 2 A 1 1 A1665 65 Hercules Saul tallow chandler 99 3 3 A 1 2 D1663 48 Edward Dunn shepherd 109 2 2 A 1 1 A1682 27 Leonard Benton yeoman 113 4 4 A 1 2 D1724 60 Jane Bown widow 118 2 2 A 0 1 D1664 52 Richard Scrivener yeoman 214 3 3 A 1 2 D1681 14 Edward Addington victualler 284 2 3 D 2 1 D1714 60 William Brown yeoman 311 2 2 A 1 1 A1667 77 Richard Scrivener gent 334 3 ? – 2 1 D1723 40 Richard Scrivener gent 580 2 4 D 2 2 A1682 52 Thomas Scrivener yeoman 585 3 3 A 2 2 A1665 27 Leonard Benton potter 590 3 4 D 1 2 D

Agree 19 (70%) 21 (75%)Disagree 8 (30%) 7 (25%)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank English Heritage for providing financial support for part of the work and for the writing of this article. Colum Giles (English Heritage) and Paul Barnwell (formerly English Heritage; now University of Oxford) have been extremely supportive throughout the project, providing help and guidance on a range of issues. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Bridges, County Archivist, Juliette Baxter and the other staff of Northamp-tonshire Record Office for advice and support over so many years. Others who have contributed in various ways are Christine Addi-son, Sue Blake, Jack Clamp, Anne de Broise, Lady Deborah Hayter, Philip Riden (editor of the Northamptonshire VCH, volume 5), Iain Soden (Northamptonshire Archaeology) and Paul Woodfield.

Images from the Collier and Baker survey maps, are reproduced by permission of Northamptonshire Record Office.

REFERENCES

1 P. Riden (ed.), A History of the County of Northampton, 5, Cleley Hundred, Victoria County History (2002), Potterspury, 289–345.

2 T. Williamson and L. Bellamy, Property and Landscape, a Social History of Land Ownership and the English Countryside (London, 1987), chapter 8 for a discussion of open and closed villages. Northamptonshire Record Office (NRO) G1633 for Potterspury ownership.

50

3 NRO G3878.4 NRO G4183.5 Little is known about the surveyors Joseph Collier and William

Baker except that they also worked in London, Berkshire and Oxford in the first half of the eighteenth century.

6 NRO Map 4224/5 and 4224/6 (drafts), Map 358 (final). Related survey is NRO G1633.

7 P. Woodfield, R. Conlon and A. de Broise, Whittlewood Project: Historic Buildings Surveys. A copy of the report for Potterspury is held in the Northamptonshire County Council Sites and Monuments Record, Northampton. A full report on the main Whittlewood Project is in R. Jones and M. Page, Medieval Villages in an English Landscape (Macclesfield: Windgather Press, 2006).

8 The National Archive (TNA), Maps IR 126/5/500, IR 126/5/503, and Field Books IR58/59261–59264.

9 R. Jones and M. Page, Medieval Villages, 167–8.10 Throughout the paper the house numbers used are taken from

the Collier and Baker survey.11 NRO, Northamptonshire Wills, 5th Series, Book 7, f. 50,

Richard Scrivener senior of Potterspury, 1723.12 TNA E317/Northants./40, ff. 15–16, 1650 survey of the manor

of Potterspury; includes only estate properties.13 P. S. Barnwell and A.T. Adams, The House Within (London:

HMSO, 1994), 23–5.14 Missing from Table 2 is an estate farm (house 53), which held

only 3 acres of common land in 1727 (the same as in 1660). It is not listed in the earliest farm rental of 1737, and is noted as ‘house down’ in the 1757 survey. It is concluded that from as early as 1660 it was no longer a significant farm and was let as a dwelling only.

15 The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century estate accounts contain numerous entries for thatching using wheat straw, indicating that thatch was the dominant roofing material.

16 The possibility that all houses were rendered or of clay cob construction is unlikely as neither is common in the south of the county.

17 TNA E317/Northants./40. 18 Royal Commission of Historical Monuments England, County

of Northampton, VI, Architectural Monuments in North North-amptonshire (1984), liv.

19 The approach used was to follow family names and inheri-tances back in time from 1727 through wills and inventories, or ownership through contemporary deeds, and assume that the houses mentioned in the documents were those standing in 1727.

20 M. Spufford, ‘The limitations of the probate inventory’, in J. Chartres and D. Hey, English Rural Society, 1500–1800: essays in honour of Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1990). This highlights some of the disadvantages of using the value of household goods in inventories as a measure of a person’s wealth. In the present paper the value of the personal goods is used as a guide to wealth and not an absolute measure.

21 N. W. Alcock, People at Home. Living in a Warwickshire Village, 1500–1800 (Chichester, 1993).

22 Rooms containing goods of little or no value would not be listed by the appraisers; the deceased might have been living in only part of the house, as is often the case with widows; the

names used for rooms might vary from appraiser to appraiser, from region to region or through time; and the poor seldom made wills and are, therefore, under-represented and their houses ‘invisible’.

23 P. S. Barnwell and M. Airs, Houses and the Hearth Tax: the later Stuart house and society (CBA, 2006). Also, A. Crosby’s review of the same in VA 38 (2007), 143–4, provides a succinct summary of the current state of research using the Hearth Tax evidence for vernacular building studies.

24 D. Hayter, pers. comm.; Northamptonshire Hearth Tax volume in preparation.

25 C. R. J. Currie, ‘Time and chance: modelling the attrition of old houses’, VA 19 (1988), 1–9.

26 There are too few fires recorded for Grafton estate villages to derive a meaningful attrition rate from this cause. Currie’s survival rate of 0.9927533592 for a nucleated settlement has, therefore, been used to illustrate the potential effect of attrition.

27 Fires destroying a handful of properties in two other Grafton villages are noted in the accounts but only a single fire was recorded in Potterspury.

28 It is sometimes difficult to define an individual house from the 1900 OS mapping.

29 NRO G3963.30 NRO G3887 court minutes, G4454 payments book.31 T. Williamson, The Transformation of Rural England; Farming

and the Landscape 1700–1800 (University of Exeter Press, 2002), chapter 7.

32 R. Taylor, ‘Population explosions and housing, 1550–1850’, VA 23 (1992), 24–9.

33 Buckinghamshire Record Office G/5/1 Poor Law Union minutes 1840–1845. ‘1 October 1840. That our clerk write to Mr Gardener steward for the Duke of Grafton and acquaint him with the wretched state in which a house occupied by James Tapp is inhabited there [Potterspury] being no less than four or five distinct families residing in one house with but two sleeping rooms.’ The 1841 census confirms that it was four families, and the later nineteenth-century censuses record a total of four rooms for the property.

34 W. Pitt, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Northamptonshire (London: Board of Agriculture, 1809), 24–31.

35 Williamson, 2002, 43.36 NRO T163, Tithe award. 37 Riden, 2002, 332.38 Williamson, 2002, chapter 6.39 Riden, 2002, 312.40 Williamson, 2002, chapter 6; NRO G3891. Whilst such impro-

vements were not new, it was their adoption on a much larger scale that was significant.

41 NRO G9393 and G9394.42 In 1910 at least another ten houses survived from 1727 (Fig. 14).

All were condemned in the 1930s and all but one demolished before 1970 for new housing developments. Of c.130 extra tenements built between 1727 and 1910 (Fig. 16), 67 survive today (often as multiple dwellings amalgamated under one roof), 51 have been demolished for new housing and nine have been demolished for road improvements.

Rod Conlon is an independent buildings and gardens historianrodconlon@aol.com