15, Grange Hill

House. Dating to the late 14th century, it has been altered in the 19th and 20th centuries. The building is timber framed and plastered, with a roof of handmade red plain tiles. It has three bays facing west, with a 20th-century internal stack at the right end. A rear wing was added in 1978 and is weatherboarded. The house has two storeys. The ground floor has two early 19th-century sash windows of 16 lights each. The first floor has three late 19th-century sash windows of 4 lights each. A central 20th-century six-panel door has a small hood supported by profiled brackets. Inside, the bays feature chamfered binding beams with step stops, plain horizontal section joists tenoned to them with low-central tenons. The structure has widely spaced studs with curved tension braces trenched to the outside. A former studded partition between the left bay and the rest of the house has been removed. A wide gap between mortices at the front of the ground floor, and a square rebate, indicate that a door once led into a parlour in the left bay. The rear post is chamfered with step stops on the lower storey, and rebated on both sides of the upper storey, apparently to accommodate a door leading to a solar in the left bay. Most posts are unjowled, except those in the open truss between the middle and right bays, which are also chamfered, with two plain braces 0.12 metres wide to the cambered tiebeam; mortices are visible for missing braces to the binding beam. A tenoned and splayed scarf is present in the front wall plate. The roof is a crownpost construction with thick axial braces; straight down-braces trenched into the right sides of the studs in the closed truss, and curved down-braces in the open truss. A collar purlin is missing in the right bay. Most of the rafters have been renewed. This unusual building appears unique. Its location on the corner of Grange Hill and Abbey Lane suggests it never extended further west or south. Three unglazed windows in the rear wall, one containing three original diamond mullions with a renewed sill and a groove for a sliding shutter, suggest the absence of an attached hall or service bay to the east. Its structural features indicate an early date, when a fully floored and unjettied house was uncommon. The building’s location between Grange Farm and Coggeshall Abbey, along with the high quality of the timber and carpentry, suggests a monastic origin. The frame is illustrated and described by D.F. Stenning and M.C. Wadhams in Historic Building Studies No. 1, Essex County Council, 1986, pages 28-30. Renovation work occurred in 1977-8, with the rear wing designed by James Blackie.