Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

BUCKDEN’S BUILDINGS 100 The Manor House. The nearer end was added as a barn in the 17thC. been allowed to season before it was completed with panels from wattles made from hedgerow material; these were daubed with a rough plaster mixed with cow dung and then coated with lime plaster. The earliest timber-framed building dating from the early fifteenth century is Bridge House 1 , Church Street; it has a crown post roof and a substantial timber frame which would have been exposed; the cross wing on the west side was built later in the seventeenth century when it was fashionable to plaster over the timber- frame completely. The Manor House also has two distinct periods of timber-framing, from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century. The earliest part of this building may have been a court house or guildhall that later became part of a complex of buildings associated with the manor and the manor farm. It has a double jetty, one to Church Street and the other to an inner courtyard. In the early seventeenth century a large wing was added to the west gable of the jettied building reducing it in length, and later in the same century a barn was added to the east gable parallel to the road. 2 The west wing of the Manor House has some very fine examples of early seventeenth-century carved wall panels, chimney pieces and an oak staircase with turned balusters. Thus both Bridge House and the Manor House demonstrate changing attitudes towards timber framing. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the timber in each building was carefully matched and meant to be seen; in the seventeenth century, however, fashion dictated that timber be hidden under plaster, not only in the exterior and interior walls of the newly-built wings, but in the existing facades as well. The plan of buildings also changed through the centuries, but in a traditional way. The cross passage between the front and rear entrance in the hall of all medieval buildings was generally chosen as the best position to build the chimneystack, which was not introduced until the late sixteenth century either in brick or timber frame, and became commonplace in the seventeenth century and later. The original front entrance, even in newly built houses and cottages, opened into a small lobby beside the chimney with a door or doors on either side leading into the main rooms. An example of this new plan can be seen in the White House, Mill Road, the doorway of which has a lobby entrance position in front of a fine seventeenth century red brick chimney stack with grouped shafts. (The shafts on the chimney stacks were called funnels in the seventeenth century.) Extensions such as a kitchen wing were often added to the rear of the main range forming a T-plan or an L-plan house, sometimes with an outshut. 3 This plan, modified, became the plan that was adopted for the early-eighteenth-century house, and for extensions to existing houses. Eighteenth Century Rebuilding Brick was fashionable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. New houses were built on larger plots on all the main streets in Buckden, reflecting the prosperity of the township and the latest in taste. Most of these buildings, however, show individual taste in plan and detail and most are of two storeys with attics and dormer windows. Many houses retain the flush framed window rather than the recessed window frame seen in the George and the Old Vicarage, with the brick parapet dictated by statute after the Fire of London for recessed timber details in towns. Older timber-framed buildings were updated at this time with new facades and with hung sash windows and fine entrance doorways. The street side jetty to the Manor House was underbuilt in brick at this time, and a small cottage in Luck’s Lane was cased in brick. The interiors of these houses may have been updated in a similar way to the newly-built houses with fine, painted joinery details, which in some cases were possibly purchased from London. The bricks for this rebuilding may have been imported from larger brickyards beside the river Ouse or may have been made locally: there are many eighteenth-century leases in the Huntingdonshire Archives which include permissions to dig for brick and tile; there were certainly pits to the west of what is now the A1. The quality of the eighteenth-century bricks in Buckden are good; the bricks are laid in a Flemish bond, which is where the bricks alternate as headers and stretchers in each course. The openings in the walls and corners have smaller bricks set like a margin, which can be a good guide to where alterations have been 1 See Chapter 6 2 The barn was still in use (as a milking-parlour) well into the twentieth century. 3 An outshut is an extension to a building, with a lean-to or catslide roof.