Houses and history in the March of Wales
Radnorshire 1400-1800

Nannerth-ganol, a stone-built long house developed out of a cruck-framed hall dated to 1556

Richard Suggett, Houses and history in the March of Wales; Radnorshire 1400-1800 (RCAHMW, 2005); pp. 342, illus., colour. ISBN 1-871184-23-1. £30.

The Royal Commission has been the focus of the study of the vernacular architecture of Wales — the country's traditions of domestic building by local craftsmen, using locally available materials. The different regional traditions in Wales of stone and timber, and the stylistic differences that have much to do with the timing of the appearance in the countryside of “permanent” houses, have much to do with the contrasting characters of the various Welsh landscapes.
   Exactly how these traditions should be studied and documented has proved problematic. In particular, how best can one integrate the typological interests of the architectural specialist — interested in plan-form, materials and structural features — with the needs of the historian who wants to know how the way people lived was influenced by social, economic and political change over time. There has always been the perception that a regionally-focused study of the history of vernacular housing should be more than a catalogue of types and features, but equally there has been an uncertainty about how this should — or can — be meshed with the social history of houses and farmsteads, families and communities.
   Notwithstanding this uncertainty (in itself partly a function of the Royal Commission's obsession with the county inventory as a form of publication) there have been some remarkable books. Peter Smith's Houses of the Welsh countryside twenty years ago documented the range and chronology of building types across Wales as a whole, mapping the regional traditions of plan and construction for the first time. Two of the Glamorgan Inventories enabled the stone-building tradition in that historic county to be charted from the 15th century until it was superseded by houses influenced by national pattern books in the later 18th century. The approach in each of these was essentially typological, although there was a sterling attempt, partly by the present reviewer, to bolt on to the front of the Glamorgan Lesser houses a contextual study of the society and economy that would enable the chronology of phases of rebuilding (from 1500 on in the Vale, post Restoration, by and large, in the uplands) to be set in context.
   Suggett's study of Radnorshire also emerges from the Commission. It is the most important study of Welsh vernacular housing to date, albeit that it derives from a long tradition begun by Peate and Fox and continued by Peter Smith and Harry Brooksby. Brooksby and Suggett worked together in the earlier stages of the Commission's investigation of Radnorshire. Shorn of the typological and completist ambitions of the county inventories — surely rendered obsolete by databases and the Internet — historical and architectural concerns have been effectively integrated for the first time, aided and abetted by new techniques such as reliable dendrological dating. It is, of course, also the product of an heroic effort to record many threatened structures before they could be lost or mangled out of all recognition. It is a multi-disciplinary effort given shape and purpose by the perspective of a social historian who gets his hands and boots dirty.

Crychell: reconstruction drawing of gentry hall-house showing central cruck and dais partition

Unlike the approach taken in the Glamorgan inventory, with its acres of illustrations but sparse analysis, Suggett focuses on a specific objective which enables him to set several centuries of building in context. His primary purpose is to document and explain the emergence and survival of a late-medieval building tradition in the context of the upland pastoral economy of the region, dating and defining forms of medieval homestead and examining their development and adaptation over succeeding centuries. In contrast to other parts of Wales, upland Radnorshire had a timber-building tradition, shared with the much of the March. The use of timber implied a potential for internal and external display, not least in the framing of buildings and in the decoration of the cruck-trusses that were characteristic of construction techniques.
   Having established a social framework, the discussion proceeds chronologically, documenting the great halls of lordship status that survive from the first half of the fifteenth century, to be emulated by durable gentry and peasant houses in the century up to 1550. Suggett then tackles the ways in which these hall-houses were subsequently adapted or replaced between 1550 and 1800 — with timber supplanted or masked by stone. At the same time as stone replaced timber, the hall-house tradition was succeeded by storeyed houses with quite different internal arrangements, the most prestgious room, the great chamber, migrating upstairs. Meanwhile, many of the old upland halls turned into house and byre long-houses.

Pen-castle — a derelict upland farmhouse of medieval origin

    Archaeological and architectural discussion of individual examples is closely tied to what can be said about the owners of each house and the evolution of estates and farm-steads within the pastoral economy and its dispersed settlement pattern. Where possible, discussions of individual properties are linked to the documentary evidence of poetry, genealogy, probate records and deeds. Photographs, and the marvellous reconstruction drawings of the Commission's illustrators interlace the text. Visually, this is a marvellous volume.
   This approach is therefore distinctive, allowing a meticulous study of architectural and construction features, plan-form and detail to be integrated with a perceptive account of changing domestic and economic needs needs in terms of hospitality, household organisation and room-function. It is informed by a detailed understanding of changes in the rural economy and its markets and secular changes in the profitability of upland farms.
   Out of this fresh approach a new history has has emerged which in particular throws light on rural society in the aftermath of the destructive and catalytic revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr. With the decline of aristocratic lordship and direct exploitation of the lord's demesne, settlement was typified by the homesteads of a long-enduring class of small freehold farmers, some of whom (and not always the best off) laid claim to gentle status justified by descent from the older Welsh nobility and princely houses. With land cheap and low fixed rents, and ready access to extensive common grazings, profitability for these stock rearers was high; this was something of a golden age for the Radnorshire cattle man, now uncovered through painstaking and imaginative research, in the field (sic) and in the library.