Picturesque English Cottages and Their Doorway Gardens 
CALLERUS ORATORY, DINGLE 
Many old cottages and farmsteads are 
combined with barns and cattle-sheds. ou 
enter them from the street of the village and 
have to bow your head, even although some 
of the yard-thick thatch has been cut away 
above the doorway. You then find yourseli 
in a dark, unflagged passage. On your left is 
an enclosure, partitioned off from the passage 
by a boarded screen between four or five feet 
high, intended for a calves' pen. Farther on 
the same side is another enclosure used as a 
henhouse. On the other side of the passage 
is a door leading to the living-room, with floor 
of clay, and cubicles or sleeping-boxes ar¬ 
ranged on two sides. I bis example of a 
cottage at Egton, Yorkshire, 3 is very similar 
to many other English farmhouses, which 
combine under the same roof dwelling-house, 
barn and stables. 1 be passage divides the 
living-room from the barn, and this was 
the threshing floor, 4 or threshold. 1 his ar- 
rangement has a Scandinavian origin. In 
Friesland and Saxony there are dwelling- 
houses and cow-sheds combined, and I have 
seen many such houses in Brittany and 
Normandy. 
In old deeds and documents the word 
3 “ Forty Years in a Moorland Parish,” by C. Atkinson, p. 19. 
4 Addey’s “ Evolution of the English House,” p. 60. 
“housebote” 
frequently oc¬ 
curs. It refers 
to the custorn- 
ary right of 
tenants to cut 
down timber in 
the woods for 
the repair of 
their houses. I 
have before me 
a q u i t-c 1 a i m 
granted by 
Geoffrey de 
Hurle to the 
Priory of Hur¬ 
ley relating to 
this right dated 
1320, and as 
far back as the 
thirteenth cen¬ 
tury “house¬ 
bote” was 
freely exercised. 1 hese timber-houses, inhab¬ 
ited by the higher class of yeomen, were 
built or rather framed together, the spaces 
between the timbers being lathed and plas- 
TYPE OF MUD-AND-STRAW HOUSE 
92 
