Later last year I had the good fortune to look at a tiny tumbledown cottage of c1815 at Cloatley End, Hankerton. You might wonder why I considered this a treat, as the front wall had fallen down after several years of being abandoned, and the roof had collapsed over it, necessitating a very cautious crawl into the interior with a hard hat on to see anything of the inside. The answer is simple: The occupants of this house were so poor that very little was ever done to improve it, with the consequence that it was rich in original detail, despite its dilapidation. The present owner hopes to restore it, and put back as much of the original fabric as possible – no mean feat since the bricks of the front wall, which are hand-made odd-shaped wasters from the then local kiln up the road, now lie scattered about the site. These bricks were used to line the inside of thin rubblestone skin, much like builders do today, except the brick has been exchanged for concrete block.
 

View of the cottage

Entrance was directly into a small, unheated room containing the planked stair to the upper floor, now no more.  The inner room still had its plain hearth, the surround now gone, and old plaster lined the walls. The original floor, partition wall and roof timbers were still there, rough-hewn out of the round.

This humble home appears to have originally been built on what was waste (i.e. uncultivated) land, in common with a number of other cottages which were strung out at intervals along the Cloatley road. On the Enclosure Map of 1809 the house site appears to be faintly marked, just outside the area included in the enclosure award. It was one of several cottages referred to as ‘allotments therefrom taken’ (i.e. taken from the waste land along the sides of the lane) ‘and herein before and after awarded to them’ (the occupiers). In other words, although the building of them was not strictly legal, a blind eye had been turned to these cottages, and their builders had been allowed to continue to live in them.

Between 1764 and 1775, a series of bad harvests had occurred, forcing up the price of basic foodstuffs, and while farmers benefited from this, the poor clearly did not. The wars with France exacerbated the shortages, and there was no compensatory increase in wages. In 1775, a law which had been passed in the reign of Elizabeth I, by which no cottage might legally be built unless 4 acres of land accompanied it, was finally repealed. Poor families would secretly erect a roadside shack on waste land during the night, for traditionally, if this could be accomplished by morning, with a fire burning in the hearth, any such squatter had the common right to stay there, on sufferance. If, after 60 years, the house was still there, a freehold was established. Such primitive dwellings could be made more sound, durable and habitable by the addition of better building materials over the years.

The squatter family living in the nameless cottage on the Cloately Road were probably the Blizards – agricultural labourers and paupers. The tithe map of 1840 records Isaac Blizard living there.  His wife Prudence died in 1826 and it is not difficult to imagine how hard life must have been for Isaac trying to bring up his three young children on his own while working as an agricultural labourer. At that time his two boys would have been 5 and 3 years old. It is evident from the Churchwardens’ Account Book that Isaac was having to rely on parish relief, perhaps to pay for some other village family to look after his children while he worked in the fields.  It is not so hard imagining how they lived in their small cottage today, unaltered as it is, when the past still lies heavy on its bricks.

Margaret Parrot and Dorothy Treasure

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