Dating The Englefield Houses

 

The positions of the houses in Englefield can be identified on a succession of old maps so that gives us a guide to approximately when a house was first built on a site. However, it does not guarantee that the present house on that site is the original one and some of the present houses are known to have been rebuilt in the 19th century on the same site as an older one, such as Pound Cottage, Chantry Cottage and Wimbleton's Cottages. Census returns can also be a guide to the appearance of new dwellings, although it can be difficult to identify exact locations.

 

The new village houses along what is now Englefield Street and elsewhere around the greater estate, begun by Richard Benyon de Beauvoir at the very beginning of the 19th century and continued by his successor until the end of that century, were an entirely local product. The bricks were made in the brick yard at Daintylands, from clay dug nearby if the several pits in that area are a guide. The lime for the mortar was made from chalk from the chalkpit and burnt in a kiln there. Both the brick and lime kilns remained into the second half of the 20th century, though long disused by then. Timber came from the estate woods, sawn at the sawmill in the Timber Yard and made into windows and doors there by the estate carpenters.

 

In the absence of any records, the dating of small domestic dwellings is an imprecise art. Some guidance may be obtained from the type of bricks used, the way they were laid and the type of mortar used. Medieval houses were usually of timber and did not last long but by the late 17th century even peasants' houses were of brick with a chimney. Early houses were usually a single storey reaching up to the underside of the roof (the true definition of a "cottage") and most had an upper floor interposed later, which gives the traditional low ceilings downstairs and sloping ones with dormer windows upstairs and the stairs accommodated in an "outshut".

 

The earliest brick houses are made from soft, red, hand-made bricks of irregular sizes and varying colours. Some bricks were over-burnt in the kiln, giving them a blue tint ranging from deep purple to slate and some were burnt so much that the surface became vitrified. Burning was done deliberately in Tudor times to enable patterns to be incorporated into brickwork and a similar thing can be seen in some later houses in and around Englefield. In the earlier houses, though, it probably happened accidentally for the burnt bricks are not uniform in colour and are used randomly. These early bricks were laid with thick and irregular lime mortar courses, in order to maintain a level with the differing sizes of the bricks and the bricklayer's art seems to have been more akin to that of the drystone waller, with varying sizes of brick chosen to fit as required. This irregular bond means there are many times when there is little or no overlap of bricks in successive courses, as there always is with a later recognised bond. This can be seen in the wall shown to the right, in this case from a house in Ufton, almost certainly a very early one and probably originally a single storey, as most were.

 

Once bricks became a standard size, they could be laid in a regular pattern or bond. The earliest example is English Bond, which has alternating complete courses of "stretchers" and "headers" and had replaced irregular bond by the end of the 16th century. Flemish Bond, in which each course of brickwork has alternate headers and stretchers, was introduced in the 17th century and had largely superseded English Bond by the early 18th.  Header Bond, where all the bricks are laid as headers, was popular during the 18th century but used so many bricks that it was generally only used for high quality buildings. These designs all gave a solid wall nine inches thick, ie the length of a header and were prone to damp penetration through the wall to the inside. Cavity walls, where the wall consists of two "leafs" of stretchers with an air gap between, prevent this damp penetration and were known from 1804 but not generally in use until late Victorian times. This design precluded the use of headers, which would have spanned the air gap, and the common bond in modern use since the 1920s is Stretcher Bond in which all the bricks are laid as stretchers. In fact most early examples of cavity walls give the appearance of Flemish Bond from the use of false or "snapped" headers (half a brick), which maintains the cavity while introducing more variety to the appearance. Other variations are also sometimes seen, including Sussex Bond with three stretchers to one header in each course, which was popular in that county and neighbouring Hampshire but also makes an appearance in Englefield on the gable end of the upper story added to the old schoolroom.

 

Examples of all these styles can be seen in Englefield, sometimes more than one on the same building, but dating solely in this way is unreliable. For example, the inside of the vestry under the church tower (known to date from 1868) is built in English bond and the Workmen's Club (built 1884-94) appears to be in header bond with burnt bricks, the same as the much earlier houses in this part of the village, when other houses built before it were in stretcher bond. Several of the later 19th century houses in the village and around the wider estate appear to be built in Flemish bond with burnt headers, including number 9, although these are probably using snapped headers. This must be the case with the last houses to be built (Partridge Gardens) for when they were built at the very end of the 20th century, a cavity wall would have been compulsory.

 

Lime mortar first began to be replaced by an early form of Portland cement from 1824 and generally ceased to be used after 1845 when the modern form was developed. Unfortunately this too can be unreliable as a dating guide since in many cases the re-pointing of early lime mortar has been done with Portland cement.

 

The Village