Farmstead Types - National Overview by Jeremy Lake
Today the English, Pennine, upland farm buildings along with their stone walls and way of life are quickly disappearing under a cloud of glass and plastic conservatories and Gymkhana sheds. As the farm buildings are inhabited by new owner developers and new agricultural buildings are made of steel and concrete, the Pennine landscape now sprouts glistening strucures hiding behind steel CTV gates beneath ranks of massed wind turbines;
These farms, farmhouses and their simple, practical structures have always been a part of my art, as they have been to many English and European Landscape Painters. As a landscape painter, sat at my easil or sketch book the old farms would blend into the land as an almost inseparable unit to tree and branch. They are, it appears to the passing walker or artist as at home in the English landscape as anything made by nature, as any animal or flower.
Whilst drawing and painting the farms I have often mused on how they became to be designed in the way that they are. How they happened to be and what occurred. Lately I have been asked the same question by others who are interested in painting this disappearing subject matter. In a short time I found that the farms, I painted were not always with us, it was parliamentary laws which grew them to benefit the nation and same that seeks to make them decline. Turner and Constable et al captured the farms development as we today capture the farms decline.
I've cut and pasted here the appendix to an article by Jeremy Lake the archeologist and historian, that appears in Winchester Council Strategic planning Dept planning background papers website.. though their are no credits apart from the authors name. " An Introduction To English Agricultural History and Farm Buildings:- Their Development, Survival and Significance by Jeremy Lake" which is of interest in defining how the buildings developed. or at least the part that reflects linear style buildings more common in upland areas.
Farmsteads perform several basic functions: providing shelter for farmers and their families; the housing and processing of crops; the storage of vehicles, implements and fodder; the management and accommodation of livestock. Building functions can be usefully distinguished between crop processing and storage (barns, hay barns, cider houses, oast houses and farm maltings, granaries) and the accommodation of animals (cow houses and shelter sheds, ox houses, stables, pigsties) and birds (dovecots and poultry houses). These functions can either be accommodated within individual specialist structures or combined with others into multi-functional ranges.
The great diversity of farmstead plans (Figure 16) provides a very direct reflection of the degree to which these farm-based functions are located in specialist or combination structures and ranges. The resulting diversity of form and scale is the direct outcome of the significant variation in farming practice and size that occurs both over time and from place to place. Individual farm buildings, for example, could be:
• Small-scale and highly dispersed, as in the wood–pasture landscapes of the Kentish Weald and the Suffolk clays;
• Set out in strong linear groupings, especially in northern pastoral areas with little corn and longer winters and where there was an obvious advantage in having cattle and their fodder (primarily hay) under one roof;
• Arranged around yards, examples being the large aisled barn groupings of the southern English downlands and the large planned layouts built in accordance with ideas being spread through national literature and contacts.
A critical factor in farmstead planning is also the relationship of the farm buildings to the working areas within and around the farmstead and the farmhouse. The major working areas were trackways to surrounding fields and local markets, ponds and cart washes, the areas for the movement of vehicles and animals, the accommodation of animals and the platforms where hay and corn would be stacked, the latter prior to threshing in the barn. The size of the areas for stacking corn (known as rickyards in most of the country) varied according to local custom and the extent of arable crops kept on the farm.
Local tradition and status were the principal reasons for whether the house was accessed through the yard and buildings were attached, or whether the house looked toward or away from the yard. Internal access between dwelling house and farm buildings was a feature of farmyard architecture in much of Europe. However, in England from the 13th century it became much more common to have separate entrances, even where buildings and houses were joined. The role of women in the farmyard was commonly restricted to ‘milking cows, feeding pigs and calves, making butter and cheese, tending poultry, and occasionally tending with the hay and corn harvests’ (Whetham 1978, p.81), and hence led to the integration of processes such as brewing and dairying into the house and a formal separation of the house and gardens from the farmyard, especially in the case of post-1750 re-modellings and larger farms typically over 150 acres. In such instances, the house could face toward its own home close or garden.
The development of the farmhouse has been the subject of regional and national studies (Barley 1961, for example). Farmhouses can tell us much about the former prosperity and development of steadings, such as the major phases of rebuilding that affected parts of southern England in the 15th to early 17th centuries and the wealth introduced through cattle rearing in parts of northern England in the century or so after 1660. In summary, the most common farmhouse plan of the medieval period, traceable to the 12th century, has the main entrance in one side wall to an entrance passage (usually with a door opposite) that separated an open hall (to allow smoke from the fire to escape through the roof) from a lower end, which could house a kitchen, services and in some areas livestock. The hall served as the main living and eating room, status and space determining whether there would be an inner chamber (for sleeping or a private area) beyond. By the end of the 16th century, farmhouses in most areas of England (except in the extreme south west and the north) had been built or adapted into storeyed houses with chimneystacks. There was a strong degree of regional variation, for example in the positioning of the chimneystacks and their relationship to the main entrance. From the later 17th century, services in some areas were being accommodated in lean-tos (outshots) or rear wings, and from the mid-18th century houses that were more symmetrically designed (with central entrances, chimneystacks on the end walls and services placed to the rear of the front reception rooms) became standard across the country. As a general rule, farms over 70 acres needed to look beyond the family for additional labour, and so rooms for live-in farm labourers – usually in the attic or back wing of the house – became a feature of many farmhouses.
The predominant farmstead plan types, which are closely related to farm size, terrain and land use, are listed below. There are many variations on these themes, particularly in the manner in which fully evolved plan groups can, as a result of successive rebuilding, contain elements of more than one plan type.
Linear plans
This group comprises farmsteads with farm buildings attached to, and in line with, the house. It includes some of the earliest intact farmsteads in the country.
The earliest examples of linear plans are longhouses, which served as dwellings for farmers’ families and housing for cattle. Each longhouse had a common entrance for the farmer’s family (accommodated at the up-slope end of the building) and livestock, the cow house being marked usually by a central drain and a manure outlet at the lower gable end. Longhouses were often found grouped together and associated with strip farming of the surrounding fields. Documents and archaeological excavation indicate that they had a widespread distribution in the north and west of the British Isles in the medieval period, but that in much of lowland England they were either absent or being replaced by yard layouts with detached houses, barns and cow houses from the 14th century (see, for example, Gardiner, 2000 and Figure 17). Such re-buildings are commonly believed to be associated with the decline of smaller peasant farmers and the emergence of a wealthier peasant class. Longhouses, and their variant types with separate entrances for livestock and farmers, continued in use in parts of the South West, the Welsh borders and the northern uplands and vales into the 18th and 19th centuries. Those built in or before the 17th century were originally entered from a passage, which also served as the entrance to the house. However, during the 18th century social pressures led to the provision of a separate dividing wall and byre door, and to the demolition of some byres and the conversion or rebuilding of others to domestic or new agricultural use (barns, for example). The piecemeal rebuilding and conversion of both lower end and house-part that this permitted tended to discourage total reconstruction, inevitably limiting the ability to respond effectively to changing requirements. These later changes are clearly visible in the buildings, as is evidence about the size and layout of the original byres, and of the arrangement of the passage (against which the stack heating the main part of the house was positioned) that once formed the common entrance to these longhouses as a whole. The initial dominance of the longhouse in some areas is significant, since, as a house type capable of almost infinite adaptation, it exerted considerable influence on the subsequent evolution of farmsteads.
Linear layouts (including the laithe house of the Pennines) are now most strongly associated with the hill farms of northern England (North East, North West and Yorkshire and the Humber). A major reason for the persistence of the layout in this location was that it was suited to smaller farms (of 50 acres or less) needing fewer buildings – other than for the storage of subsistence levels of corn for the household and livestock, and the housing of some milk cattle, poultry and pigs. The close proximity of farmer and livestock during the winter months was another factor, cattle being stalled indoors from October to May. It was also a layout ideally suited to building along the contours of a hillside and so this farmstead plan remained in use in upland areas of England into the 19th century.
Linear plans have often evolved as a result of gradual development, for example in the rebuilding of a lower end for the cattle as service area for the house, and the addition of new cow houses, stabling and barns in line. Linear layouts will often be associated with loose scatters or even yard arrangements of other farm buildings.
www.winchester.gov.uk/Download.asp?.../HistoricFarmBuildings/...introtoengaghistoryandfarmbuildings...
http://art-landscape.blogspot.com/2010/01/landscape-art-timeline-in-art-history.html
This site gives an excellent prace of Landscape Painting and is well worth a visit.
These farms, farmhouses and their simple, practical structures have always been a part of my art, as they have been to many English and European Landscape Painters. As a landscape painter, sat at my easil or sketch book the old farms would blend into the land as an almost inseparable unit to tree and branch. They are, it appears to the passing walker or artist as at home in the English landscape as anything made by nature, as any animal or flower.
Whilst drawing and painting the farms I have often mused on how they became to be designed in the way that they are. How they happened to be and what occurred. Lately I have been asked the same question by others who are interested in painting this disappearing subject matter. In a short time I found that the farms, I painted were not always with us, it was parliamentary laws which grew them to benefit the nation and same that seeks to make them decline. Turner and Constable et al captured the farms development as we today capture the farms decline.
I've cut and pasted here the appendix to an article by Jeremy Lake the archeologist and historian, that appears in Winchester Council Strategic planning Dept planning background papers website.. though their are no credits apart from the authors name. " An Introduction To English Agricultural History and Farm Buildings:- Their Development, Survival and Significance by Jeremy Lake" which is of interest in defining how the buildings developed. or at least the part that reflects linear style buildings more common in upland areas.
Farmsteads perform several basic functions: providing shelter for farmers and their families; the housing and processing of crops; the storage of vehicles, implements and fodder; the management and accommodation of livestock. Building functions can be usefully distinguished between crop processing and storage (barns, hay barns, cider houses, oast houses and farm maltings, granaries) and the accommodation of animals (cow houses and shelter sheds, ox houses, stables, pigsties) and birds (dovecots and poultry houses). These functions can either be accommodated within individual specialist structures or combined with others into multi-functional ranges.
The great diversity of farmstead plans (Figure 16) provides a very direct reflection of the degree to which these farm-based functions are located in specialist or combination structures and ranges. The resulting diversity of form and scale is the direct outcome of the significant variation in farming practice and size that occurs both over time and from place to place. Individual farm buildings, for example, could be:
• Small-scale and highly dispersed, as in the wood–pasture landscapes of the Kentish Weald and the Suffolk clays;
• Set out in strong linear groupings, especially in northern pastoral areas with little corn and longer winters and where there was an obvious advantage in having cattle and their fodder (primarily hay) under one roof;
• Arranged around yards, examples being the large aisled barn groupings of the southern English downlands and the large planned layouts built in accordance with ideas being spread through national literature and contacts.
A critical factor in farmstead planning is also the relationship of the farm buildings to the working areas within and around the farmstead and the farmhouse. The major working areas were trackways to surrounding fields and local markets, ponds and cart washes, the areas for the movement of vehicles and animals, the accommodation of animals and the platforms where hay and corn would be stacked, the latter prior to threshing in the barn. The size of the areas for stacking corn (known as rickyards in most of the country) varied according to local custom and the extent of arable crops kept on the farm.
Local tradition and status were the principal reasons for whether the house was accessed through the yard and buildings were attached, or whether the house looked toward or away from the yard. Internal access between dwelling house and farm buildings was a feature of farmyard architecture in much of Europe. However, in England from the 13th century it became much more common to have separate entrances, even where buildings and houses were joined. The role of women in the farmyard was commonly restricted to ‘milking cows, feeding pigs and calves, making butter and cheese, tending poultry, and occasionally tending with the hay and corn harvests’ (Whetham 1978, p.81), and hence led to the integration of processes such as brewing and dairying into the house and a formal separation of the house and gardens from the farmyard, especially in the case of post-1750 re-modellings and larger farms typically over 150 acres. In such instances, the house could face toward its own home close or garden.
The development of the farmhouse has been the subject of regional and national studies (Barley 1961, for example). Farmhouses can tell us much about the former prosperity and development of steadings, such as the major phases of rebuilding that affected parts of southern England in the 15th to early 17th centuries and the wealth introduced through cattle rearing in parts of northern England in the century or so after 1660. In summary, the most common farmhouse plan of the medieval period, traceable to the 12th century, has the main entrance in one side wall to an entrance passage (usually with a door opposite) that separated an open hall (to allow smoke from the fire to escape through the roof) from a lower end, which could house a kitchen, services and in some areas livestock. The hall served as the main living and eating room, status and space determining whether there would be an inner chamber (for sleeping or a private area) beyond. By the end of the 16th century, farmhouses in most areas of England (except in the extreme south west and the north) had been built or adapted into storeyed houses with chimneystacks. There was a strong degree of regional variation, for example in the positioning of the chimneystacks and their relationship to the main entrance. From the later 17th century, services in some areas were being accommodated in lean-tos (outshots) or rear wings, and from the mid-18th century houses that were more symmetrically designed (with central entrances, chimneystacks on the end walls and services placed to the rear of the front reception rooms) became standard across the country. As a general rule, farms over 70 acres needed to look beyond the family for additional labour, and so rooms for live-in farm labourers – usually in the attic or back wing of the house – became a feature of many farmhouses.
The predominant farmstead plan types, which are closely related to farm size, terrain and land use, are listed below. There are many variations on these themes, particularly in the manner in which fully evolved plan groups can, as a result of successive rebuilding, contain elements of more than one plan type.
Linear plans
This group comprises farmsteads with farm buildings attached to, and in line with, the house. It includes some of the earliest intact farmsteads in the country.
The earliest examples of linear plans are longhouses, which served as dwellings for farmers’ families and housing for cattle. Each longhouse had a common entrance for the farmer’s family (accommodated at the up-slope end of the building) and livestock, the cow house being marked usually by a central drain and a manure outlet at the lower gable end. Longhouses were often found grouped together and associated with strip farming of the surrounding fields. Documents and archaeological excavation indicate that they had a widespread distribution in the north and west of the British Isles in the medieval period, but that in much of lowland England they were either absent or being replaced by yard layouts with detached houses, barns and cow houses from the 14th century (see, for example, Gardiner, 2000 and Figure 17). Such re-buildings are commonly believed to be associated with the decline of smaller peasant farmers and the emergence of a wealthier peasant class. Longhouses, and their variant types with separate entrances for livestock and farmers, continued in use in parts of the South West, the Welsh borders and the northern uplands and vales into the 18th and 19th centuries. Those built in or before the 17th century were originally entered from a passage, which also served as the entrance to the house. However, during the 18th century social pressures led to the provision of a separate dividing wall and byre door, and to the demolition of some byres and the conversion or rebuilding of others to domestic or new agricultural use (barns, for example). The piecemeal rebuilding and conversion of both lower end and house-part that this permitted tended to discourage total reconstruction, inevitably limiting the ability to respond effectively to changing requirements. These later changes are clearly visible in the buildings, as is evidence about the size and layout of the original byres, and of the arrangement of the passage (against which the stack heating the main part of the house was positioned) that once formed the common entrance to these longhouses as a whole. The initial dominance of the longhouse in some areas is significant, since, as a house type capable of almost infinite adaptation, it exerted considerable influence on the subsequent evolution of farmsteads.
Linear layouts (including the laithe house of the Pennines) are now most strongly associated with the hill farms of northern England (North East, North West and Yorkshire and the Humber). A major reason for the persistence of the layout in this location was that it was suited to smaller farms (of 50 acres or less) needing fewer buildings – other than for the storage of subsistence levels of corn for the household and livestock, and the housing of some milk cattle, poultry and pigs. The close proximity of farmer and livestock during the winter months was another factor, cattle being stalled indoors from October to May. It was also a layout ideally suited to building along the contours of a hillside and so this farmstead plan remained in use in upland areas of England into the 19th century.
Linear plans have often evolved as a result of gradual development, for example in the rebuilding of a lower end for the cattle as service area for the house, and the addition of new cow houses, stabling and barns in line. Linear layouts will often be associated with loose scatters or even yard arrangements of other farm buildings.
www.winchester.gov.uk/Download.asp?.../HistoricFarmBuildings/...introtoengaghistoryandfarmbuildings...
http://art-landscape.blogspot.com/2010/01/landscape-art-timeline-in-art-history.html
This site gives an excellent prace of Landscape Painting and is well worth a visit.
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