always curves its trunk away from the prevailing winds. But what makes this building so fascinating is the fact that the original medieval cruck beams had been numbered by the carpenters who erected them. Maurice quickly spotted this and was able to deduce that the eastern bay had been demolished when the building of the new conversion began.
So our anonymous Nottinghamshire farmer – who knows? Possibly an early yeoman – had spotted the Glapton barn as being ripe for conversion. The original building was of three bays and he still required half of it (i.e. 1½ bays) as a barn, for storage. He converted the remaining half-bay into a small farmhouse which he extended well beyond the old barn, mostly to the east – just as one sees so often today when Victorian barns are converted into houses, or second homes. The new timber-framed house was laid out in a way that was not strictly speaking medieval, but would nonetheless have been familiar to someone from the Middle Ages: there was a hall and parlour facing each other on either side of a cross-passage which led to service rooms (dairy, kitchen and buttery) behind the parlour. The house continued to be modified in various small ways for the rest of its long, but sadly finite, life.
If, as the Glapton barn/house showed, physical evidence for the rise of the first yeoman farmer families can be hard to track down, the success of their descendants has left a distinctive mark on the landscape, in the form of some fine seventeenth-century houses. These houses indeed proclaim the message ‘We have done well in life’, but without the over-the-top ostentation and tasteless vulgarity of the much later ‘financial crisis’ profiteers. The latter eyesores are aggressive and lack any charm whatsoever, whereas their seventeenth-century antecedents reflect the fact that their builders were still rooted in the real world of cattle and sheep, ploughs and ploughmen. I suppose in the final analysis the surviving yeoman farmhouses of Britain can justify their prominent place in the countryside, because they were based on genuine risk and on real, non-paper products that actually fed the rapidly growing population.
The century after 1720 witnessed the rise of a new type of carefully laid out and planned farm whose architecture reflected the classical ideals of the great landowners of the time. These buildings are often Italianate in style, reflecting Palladian grace just as much as the need to house cattle or store turnips. What a great shame it is that modern farmers have completely abandoned any attempt to give their crudely functional buildings any architectural merit at all. It’s as if they felt obliged to proclaim that their structures were erected to do the job cheaply and efficiently and to hell with the look of the landscape. They could learn much from later eighteenth-century architects such as Daniel Garrett or Samuel Wyatt whose elegant Italianate farm buildings still function as they were originally intended. Some of his best-known creations can be seen around the estate of ‘Coke of Norfolk’, at Holkham Hall.45
Many of the elegant Italianate buildings of eighteenth-century model farms were still successfully in use during the next major phase of British farming, sometimes known as Victorian high farming, which began around 1830 and lasted until the great agricultural depression of the 1870s. This was a period of unparalleled prosperity which saw the construction not just of well-planned and laid-out new farms, but of farms which, even by today’s standards, would be regarded as industrial. Designs for farms of this sort can be seen in contemporary pages of the sort of journals that progressive landowners read, such as that of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, where the range of buildings by J. B. Denton, illustrated here, first appeared.46 Today nearly every medium-sized farm in Britain can probably boast a few buildings of this era, but those belonging to large estates where capital-rich landowners were able to choose competent tenants and together form mutually beneficial partnerships, are particularly well endowed and have left us a rich legacy of fine farm buildings. I shall have more to say about the development of farms and farming on large rural estates in the next chapter.
FIG 4 The prosperous era known as Victorian high farming lasted for much of the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1870. It saw an increasing number of close partnerships between landlords and tenants, where the latter acted as efficient managers and the former provided capital. The resulting farms could sometimes resemble large factories. The farm buildings shown here are from a design by J. B. Denton of 1879, and were erected at Thornington, near Kilham, Northumberland, around 1880.
In lowland England, if not in Wales and Scotland, it is probably true to say that the big and medium-sized farms of the nineteenth century have had a disproportionately large influence on the shape of the modern landscape. Recently archaeologists have quite rightly focused attention on these places, which for some reason were largely ignored in the 1970s and 1980s. However, there is also a much older tradition of recording so-called ‘vernacular architecture’ which I will define for present purposes as buildings built by people rather than trained architects often using traditional designs and materials. I say ‘often’, because sometimes buildings that are vernacular in spirit can be fashioned from mass-produced components, such as some converted barracks in Shropshire or the ‘Tin Tabernacle’ in Northamptonshire, which I discuss in Chapter 7.47 There used to be hot debate about what buildings were truly vernacular and which were not. But it was a fruitless debate and today we are less concerned about what is or isn’t ‘truly’ vernacular and now include many threatened nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings, such as prefabricated temporary school buildings and cinemas.48
Much of the earlier surviving post-medieval rural architecture of Scotland and Wales is vernacular and a surprising amount survives in England, despite, or in some instances because of, the era of high farming.49 Many farming families are quite conservative and were reluctant to demolish earlier buildings, which they often ‘improved’ by adding huge and usually unsympathetic new wings and ranges. My own great-grandfather more than doubled the size of his modest Queen Anne house in Hertfordshire, a few windows of which now appear to squint out from behind a massive red-brick late Victorian pile. Indoors, and with sufficient time to spare, you can just work out the shape of the earlier building.
The post-medieval centuries witnessed the creation of the diverse rural landscapes that we all inhabit. True, there is evidence within those landscapes of much earlier times, but this is often hidden away, as humps and bumps, or sinuous field boundaries. Most of the ‘furniture’ of the countryside, the fences, gates and the drystone walls that surround our fields, were erected in the past two centuries – and if not, you can be certain that they have been extensively repaired in that time. Similarly, although there are indeed a few surviving ancient hedges (although sadly we no longer believe that these can be aged simply by counting their component species50) these will have been laid, interplanted and today trimmed back by mechanised flail-cutters countless times in the last hundred years.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the British countryside will be aware that the eastern side of the country has a drier climate, which is why the landscape here is given over to arable and mixed livestock and arable farming. To the west the more moist, Atlantic climate tends to favour pasture. This broad distinction was first mapped by the farm economist James Caird in 1852 and it applies with even greater force today, when grazing livestock are almost completely absent across huge areas of east Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and East Anglia.51 If livestock are absent I also fear for the knowledge and traditions that were once a part of animal husbandry. The much-parodied grasping ‘barley baron’ whose eyes are only focused on the ‘bottom line’ and whose vision requires him to grub up all trees and hedgerows to create vast prairie-like fields, was, until very recently, not a complete figure of fun. Although most farmers used the availability of EEC grants responsibly, such men indeed existed and their depredations can still be seen, especially in parts
