A Home for All Seasons (eBook)

Gavin Plumley (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
336 Seiten
Atlantic Books (Verlag)
978-1-83895-479-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Gavin Plumley considered himself a distinctly urban being...until he met his rural husband, Alastair. Together, they bought Stepps House - a three-storey building in Pembridge, Herefordshire - on love at first sight. But then came the inevitable question from an insurance salesman: 'How old is it?' With ancient beams crossing the ceiling, the date they'd been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he saw the picture of a past emerge that resonates powerfully with our present. A hybrid work of domestic history and European art, of memoir and landscape, A Home for All Seasons is both grand in its sweep and intimate in its account of life on the edge of England.

Gavin Plumley is a cultural historian. He appears frequently on BBC radio, has written for newspapers and magazines worldwide and gives talks at leading museums and galleries. He grew up in Wales, before moving to London, and studied music at Keble College, Oxford. He lives in Herefordshire.

Textauszug

II.

The Unanswered Question

 

A FEW DAYS LATER, OUR offer on Stepps House was accepted and everything was put in train. But after the initial hurry came the tedium of phone calls to mortgage companies, as well as providing proof of income and engaging solicitors. Spring came and spring went; weeks went by. It blinded you to the potential joy of the situation and the thrill of new discoveries, to say nothing of the realization that we were getting much more than we had ever bargained for. Choosing Stepps House, I had followed my feelings – and persuaded Alastair to do likewise – but we really hadn’t thought about what the property meant: a house in the middle of a village that, as in that view from the Malverns, looked like it had come straight out of a medieval or Renaissance painting.

Quickly, however, we had to start grappling with that history, even before we had completed the purchase and could call the property our own. We were asked the question by our insurance company. The solicitor reminded me that the responsibility for insuring the building was ours from the day that we exchanged contracts. I’d just finished giving a history of art talk to a group of pensioners in a village hall in Oxfordshire when the message arrived. The voice on the other end told me that all the outstanding issues with the purchase were resolved and exchange had taken place. Sitting in a stuffy car outside a pub, I had to phone the insurers.

‘What’s the number or name of the property?’

‘Stepps House. Two p’s.’

‘And how many bedrooms does the property have, sir?’ ‘Three.’

‘Is the roof made of tile or slate?’

‘Tile.’

‘Walls. Brick or stone?’

‘Both,’ I said, ‘though it’s also partly timber-framed.’

‘Tim-ber fray-m-ed,’ I heard, as my answers were typed into the database.

‘Partly,’ I added.

‘And what is the age of the house?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘OK. Could you have a guess?’

‘Well, it’s old! I know that. I’ve asked the estate agent for more detail, because I was curious, and they’ve now checked with the current owner. Supposedly, it’s 1800, but that can’t be right, given the timber frame.’

‘OK . . .’ the response came, with a further pause. ‘What we could do, sir, is take the 1800 date now and when you’ve got a more accurate answer, come back to us. As soon as possible, preferably.’

I concurred, but felt uncertain – and I feared uninsured, when push came to shove. Suddenly, I was regretting that we hadn’t established any of the specifics before agreeing the purchase. I’d also turned down the mortgage company’s offer of a full structural survey. But I was certainly excited by the prospect of having to find the right date. I knew that there must be records, of course, something in the house itself, but had no idea what or where. As it was, we had little choice but to return to the challenge of dating Stepps House when we collected the keys, though completion was still weeks away and my curiosity now fully piqued.

I could see that there were more contradictions than clues. The building was piecemeal – the source of our confusion and memory lapses after the initial and only viewing – with elements of what might be Tudor, even older, like many other properties in Pembridge, attached to 19th-century bits, with less impressive, less well-built sections from more recent decades thrown in for good measure. From the Market Square, it almost looked like two houses, one on two storeys and the other on three.

It was faced with brick and the whole edifice was mounted on a kind of stone plinth, roughly hewn. To the left of the house was the garden, stretching down to the main road, and to the right were the steps that rose from the square to a large churchyard. Partway up that public stairway was a door, though it must have been superseded by the entrance from the Market Square at some point in time. The old front door was set into the timber-framed section, the entire structure of which was clearly visible from the churchyard. From there, slightly raised above the rest of the village, it was also possible to view other, obviously more impressive buildings and I had already learned that their provenance was pretty well documented. Unable to access the house, I could at least begin to look for information elsewhere.

Pembridge forms part of a trail of black-and-white villages in the north-west corner of Herefordshire, including places like Dilwyn, Eardisland, Eardisley, Kingsland, Lyonshall, Weobley, Wigmore and Yarpole. Timber-framed houses fill each of these villages. Limewash or paint covers the former – or, in some cases, still extant – wattle and daub panels, while tar or linseed oil has, more often than not, been applied to the exposed oak beams, thereby turning them black. Many examples of the style, however, are neither white nor black, including a delightful pink and brown structure on the edge of Pembridge – just one of many houses in the area I’d come to covet. Such was the concentration of these buildings that the county was a natural point of focus for the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England during the early part of the 20th century. Having begun a comprehensive study in Hertfordshire in 1910, the commission made its way to Buckinghamshire, Essex, London and Huntingdonshire, before arriving in Herefordshire in the early 1930s.

Reviewing what was standing, the survey prompted three volumes filled with the finest and most important buildings in the county, though the inventory did not include our home-to-be. In any event, although finely published, with charming maps of the villages and their glories, the commission’s findings had since proved inaccurate. It made the bold claim that most of the buildings in the black-and-white villages, specifically those with cruck trusses – an overarching timber structure visible at the ends of the houses – dated from the 14th century. This proved overly generous, however, when, later in the 20th century, huge advances in dendrochronological science, focusing on the signature patterns of the tree rings in the beams, made it possible to establish a more accurate time of felling for the timbers used in the construction. Once that database was established, it confirmed that there were, in fact, very few extant buildings in Herefordshire that contained wood from anything before the 15th century.

Instead, Pembridge’s Market Hall, just outside our new home, was from the early 16th century. Beyond it, with more recent tiling advertising BUTTER EGGS OATMEAL, was The Old Stores, with a 19th-century front concealing elements of the 17th and even 15th centuries behind. And then there was The New Inn, announcing itself as 14th-century on the signage on the outskirts of the village, but more likely to be from the beginning of the 17th century (perhaps embracing or, at least, replacing parts of an earlier structure, which may or may not have been a farmhouse).

The square was – and had long been – the village’s hub, yet Pembridge can trace its history much further back than any of these construction dates. Built at a crossing on the River Arrow (which rises in Powys and flows into the Lugg and, eventually, the Wye), the village, once considered more of a town, was listed in the Domesday Book, the invading Normans’ catalogue of land and property ownership, and had begun to thrive following Henry III’s granting of a weekly market and annual fair to Henry de Pembrugge (Pembridge) in 1239. The village’s heyday lasted well into the 16th century, the time the current Market Hall was constructed (on two storeys), though its subsequent survival as a one-storey edifice is as much a narrative of failure and disinterest in costly demolition or reconstruction as it was of earlier success.

Come the 17th century, the rot had really set in. Pembridge adopted a staunchly royalist stance during the Civil War and supposedly entered the fray as a town of two thousand souls. The place was then overrun by Cromwell’s troops, who pillaged property, destroyed monuments and medieval glass in the church and left the marks of their musket balls in its west door. Many farm lads were killed and families who had previously dominated the village’s history were wiped out or forced to flee. While the county records cite only one badly wounded villager, David Prosser, who was granted a pension of £1 6s at the Herefordshire Quarter Sessions in 1673, other injuries and losses simply weren’t logged. The parish records had been abandoned at the outbreak of hostilities and were only properly resumed in 1649. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that village life changed, never to recover.

The Industrial Revolution only added insult to injury. The advent of the railway to the north of the village, complete with a small station, resulted in the centre being bypassed by livestock, formerly taken to market by the drovers, who had been frequent visitors in these parts. And the immediate access of the Welsh coal seams took away those villagers without permanent employment in the fields, which proved problematic come harvest time, with a lack of seasonal workers. After further losses during the two world wars, as well as a steady stream of rural to urban migration...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.6.2022
• Zusatzinfo: B&W throughout
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Architektur
• Schlagworte: Art History • Auden • Bruegel • Constable • countryside • Elgar • European Art • farming • Herefordshire • housman • Pembridge • rural history • Shepheardes Calender • Shepherd's Calendar • Wales • William Morris • Woodcuts
• ISBN-10: 1-83895-479-1 / 1838954791
• ISBN-13: 978-1-83895-479-6 / 9781838954796