54 LITTLE HUCKLOW : LIS CUSTOMS AND OLD HOUSES. 



than the rest of that house, and were probably added because 

 bay 2, which was the portion allotted to a former co-parcener, 

 was insufficient for the accommodation of a family. Fortu- 

 nately, we know from written evidence that the practice was to 

 allot single bays to widows and others as their portions, and 

 as the bays were, in theory at all events, of uniform size, it 

 was easy to make fair apportionments or divisions. Thus it 

 appears from the marriage settlement in 1617 of Edmund 

 Waterhouse, of Bradtield, and Helen, his wife, that if the wife 

 survived the husband, and they were childless, she was to 

 have " one bay of housing, with the chimney, being the west 

 end of the fire -house (dwelling-house), with the chamber over 

 the same." If children were bom of the marriage, she was 

 to have the same bay and one-third of her husband's other 

 buildings and lands as her full dower.* Again, in 1682, it is 

 recorded that Thomas Jennings, senior, late of Sheffield, hard- 

 wareman, was in his lifetime seised in fee of a moiety or half 

 part of a house in Sheffield in which Abiel Rollinson then 

 dwelt, and also of the fourth part of a house in Sheffield 

 where Joshua Bayle then dwelt, together with two closes called 

 Channel Ings.t Here, then, we have a house divided into 

 four parts, and probably consisting of bays. Had the parts 

 been undivided shares we should have been told so. Somebody 

 — widow, perhaps, or child — had acquired a bay (bay 2) 

 without a fireplace in the original house at Little Hucklow, 

 which was separated from the next bay by a wooden partition 

 wall, and which had also a wooden wall at its north end. 

 Thus came the necessity for making a fireplace between the 

 " crucks " in the north gable, and substituting a stone wall for 

 the original wooden one. That this was done is made highly 

 probable by the fact that the " crucks " are a foot from the 

 north wall in the chamber over the fireplace, and by the fact 

 that a large piece has been cut out of one of them to 



* Abstract by J. D. Leader in the " Local Notes and Queries " of the 



Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 1876. 



t Sheffield Court Rolls. 



