Little Hyde Farm Cottages

LITTLE HYDE FARM COTTAGES

A house, now divided into two cottages. The building dates from the early 15th century, with extensions added in the late 16th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is timber-framed with roughcast render and roofed in handmade red clay tiles.

The structure comprises a hall range facing east with a late 16th-century stack in its right bay against the front wall and a 19th-century stack beside it. To the left is a two-bay parlour or solar cross-wing with an 18th-century stack at the front left corner and a 19th-century single-storey lean-to extension. A late 16th-century two-bay cross-wing to the right replaces the original service bay. Twentieth-century single-storey lean-to extensions have been added to the rear of the cross-wings and hall range.

The hall range is one storey with an attic; the left cross-wing is two storeys; the right cross-wing is also two storeys with an occupied attic. No. 2 cottage contains the 16th-century stack, the rear portion of the hall, and everything to the left. No. 1 contains the remainder.

Externally, No. 1 has a 20th-century square bay with a hipped roof and a 20th-century half-glazed door with a flat canopy on the right side. A gabled dormer containing a 20th-century casement sits in the left bay of the hall. No. 2 has a plain boarded door with a flat canopy and adjacent window, also 20th-century casements. A weatherboarded dado runs across the front, with plain bargeboards.

The interior of the left cross-wing is jettied to the front, with two original plain brackets and exposed joists of horizontal section. In the hall, the studding and display bracing at the high end are exposed and complete, showing large-diameter peg-holes for a former fixed bench and a mortice for a former draught screen beside the original doorway to the solar, though the doorhead is missing. A floor was inserted in the hall in 1565, documented in the Essex Record Office, featuring a chamfered axial beam with step stops cut back at the corners, and joists plastered to their soffits. The large wood-burning hearth, originally about 3 metres wide with 0.33-metre jambs, has a chamfered mantel beam with one plain stop and one convex stop; the interior was reduced with 20th-century brickwork. The room above is wholly plastered to the collars except the wallplates, which show no evidence of original window or shuttering arrangements.

The left cross-wing has a chamfered binding beam and middle storey posts with mitred stops, two solid braces 0.11 metres wide, and heavy plain joists jointed to the binding beam with unrefined central tenons. A 20th-century grate sits in the corner stack. The room above is plastered except for two chamfered arched braces, 0.09 metres wide, to the central tie-beam. The roof is difficult to access but is reported to retain the original crownpost structure.

The right cross-wing has jowled posts and exposed plain joists (some of reused timber) of horizontal section in the rear bay, with a 20th-century grate. Most surfaces are plastered with no visible evidence of whether there was originally a jetty. Each wallplate has a simple tenoned and splayed scarf, an unusual type in Essex but common elsewhere. The roof is a clasped purlin roof with wind-bracing of reversed curvature, rare in Essex but familiar in the East Midlands.

The house is well documented in the Petre archives as Campers, with a holding of ten acres. While the 1556 survey page relating to it is missing, it is mentioned repeatedly in court rolls from 1561 to 1582. In 1565 the tenant Thomas Springfield, a carpenter, was ordered to build a loft or floor in the hall with joists and boards, and in 1575 and 1580 he was ordered to repair the house. The reuse of timber for joists and the use of unfamiliar scarf joints and wind-bracing probably indicate that the right cross-wing was built during his tenancy from 1565 to about 1601, suggesting he was a carpenter trained in another part of England. The Walker map of 1601 shows the house much as it remains today—a hall range with the door at the end and a brick stack immediately to the left of it, a window near the left end, and two-storey cross-wings, all with tiled roofs. The stack was clearly inserted to the left of the cross-entry with the hearth facing left; the cross-entry was not blocked until a second stack was built against it during conversion to cottages in the 19th century. The upper part of the hall, though floored in 1565, was not lit by a dormer until after 1601; the upper section of the window would have provided some light at floor level.

Although much of the structure is concealed by plaster, the building appears to have remained structurally unaltered since the end of the 16th century, having escaped the destructive alterations characteristic of the Georgian period. It deserves careful treatment in any future renovation.