I’d been to Weobley, one of Herefordshire’s best ‘black and white’ villages, before, but I’d somehow managed to miss the street that contains both the Methodist chapel and this, the Old Grammar School. This was a major omission on my part, for this building alone. It was erected in 1659 to accommodate a grammar school for boys that was founded in the same year by William Crowther, who left in his will not only money to build the school, but enough for an annuity to pay the master’s salary.
The building would have had one large room on the ground floor, where the lessons took place. Upstairs was a dormitory in which the pupils slept (there were 25 of them in the early-18th century), plus rooms for the master. It’s well built, with the vertical timbers set close together (a design known as ‘close-studding’) and plenty of pleasant touches – carved brackets, a couple of decorative heads (see the photograph below), turned shafts in the openings on each side of the porch, and the founder’s coat of arms above the entrance. The quality of the work has led some to suggest the renowned Herefordshire carpenter John Abel as the builder, although this, so far as I know, is speculation.
The building had a long life in educational use, which only came to an end in 1888. At this point it was sold as a house, which it still seems to be. So no more schoolboys intoning Latin declensions, no more the noise of 20-odd pairs of feet making there way upstairs to bed or downstairs to the schoolroom, no longer the experience (novel to us) of lessons in the building made of wood, wattle and daub. Just another timber-framed house of which Weobley can be more than proud.
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