Wilmcote, Warwickshire

 

Whose farm is it anyway?

Many decades ago, when I was in my early teens and starting to study Shakespeare seriously, my father took me on a visit to all the Shakespeare-related buildings in and near Stratford. As well as the poet’s birthplace, Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, and Hall’s Croft (the house of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna and her husband John Hall), we visited the farmhouse at Wilmcote then known as Mary Arden’s House. Mary Arden was Shakespeare’s mother and her parents were farmers, and the house sits next to a cluster of farm buildings.

The building in my photograph is the house we visited. What a glorious building it is – a mixture of a close-studded timber frame and a diagonally strutted section at the right-hand end, its wooden structure charmingly warped in places, in spite of the fact that it sits on a substantial stone plinth. As far as I can recall, the house was filled with period furniture and the ceilings, especially upstairs, were very low. Back then, the outbuildings housed a large collection of old (pre-20th century) farm machinery ranging from carts to seed drills. This collection, nothing to do with Shakespeare, engaged us for some time. I don’t think the exhibits could have been labelled, because I remember that we had a good time working out what some of them were.

If the farm machinery had little to do with Shakespeare, neither, it turns out, did the house. Later research has revealed that the young Mary Arden and her parents actually lived in the house next door, a less impressive looking building, although it incorporates a timber frame that has been dendrochronologically dated to the early-16th century. These days the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which owns both properties, calls the whole site, both the houses and the farm buildings behind them, Mary Arden’s Farm.* Currently, it’s not open to the public, but is used as a site that primary school children can visit and learn about Shakespeare and the life of country people during his period. So now children still younger than I was all those years ago get to enjoy this lovely house and learn from it and, much as I’d have liked it to be open to adults too, that has to be a good thing.

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* Separately, the house where Mary actually lived is known as Glebe Farm, while the house in my photograph is referred to as Palmer’s Farm.

Pirton, Worcestershire

Art of oak

This is the unusual church tower I mentioned in the previous post. There are not many timber-framed church towers around, but Worcestershire, one of those western counties where timber-framed buildings are quite common, has a few. Even so, encountering this one a real surprise, not least because the church is way outside its village, so the black and white tower rears up in contrast to a background of russet trees and green and brown fields.

The wooden frame of St Peter’s, Pirton, has a profusion of uprights or studs – what timber-frame specialists refer to as ‘close-studding’. This is a form of framework most common in southeast England, but it is used in the West Midlands for high-status buildings (put up by people who could afford the oak and the skilled labour) and where the structure warrants it. It suits a tall building, giving it plenty of strength when combined with the flanking structures, almost like miniature aisles, with their sloping crucks that brace the building. These putative aisles are also unusual, although Pevsner points out that there are similar structures flanking church towers in Essex.

How old is it? This can be a difficult question with timber-framed buildings, where there is often little of the stylistic evidence that helps us to date stone buildings. The details of carpentry that can sometimes help date wooden buildings haven’t helped here, and estimates range from the 14th to the 16th century.