Old Houses in Kent and Sussex 
sex was formerly covered with timber, the 
natural building material for the less impor¬ 
tant houses was wood,—only the larger being 
of brick or stone. These timber houses con¬ 
stitute a class by themselves; and the earlier 
of them show pretty clearly the arrangement 
of a yeoman’s house in the sixteenth century. 
In the most usual plan the common room was 
in the middle, with other rooms at either 
end forming, often in the second story only, 
slightly projecting wings. This arrangement 
may be seen in the Six Bells Inn at Holling- 
bourne. Such a plan was the usual one of the 
Middle Ages. It prevailed throughout Eng¬ 
land and was the origin of the E and H shaped 
plans so frequent in the times of Elizabeth 
and James I. Gradually the plan became 
enlarged, or altered; until in the eighteenth 
century, it lost its distinctive character, though 
for many years it remained the type of the 
English country house. T his Inn shows 
clearly the simple manner of framing with 
heavy uprights and great curved corner posts, 
hewn from the butt of a tree and placed root 
upwards, the top part curving diagonally out¬ 
wards to carry the angle post of the upper 
story. For the most part the timbering was 
very simple,—often of pieces eight or nine 
inches square with very narrow plaster panels 
between them,—as at Swaylands. The house 
in its first stage was a mere timber skeleton ; 
and until the framing was well advanced it had 
to be propped and stayed from the outside. 
The slots to receive these stays are still to be 
seen in the larger timbers on the ground floor of 
many of the houses. The spaces between the 
uprights were ordinarily filled by plastering, 
though there are examples of the use of brick, 
and sometimes they were even filled with oak 
planking, as in the delightfully quaint house 
in the churchyard at Penshurst. They thus 
bore but little resemblance to the elaborately 
curved and often less pleasing timber-work 
of Shropshire and Lancashire. But as time 
went on, the whole framing of the houses 
underwent a change. 1'he timbers were 
IN THE CHURCHYARD, PENSHURST 
AT TONBRIDGE 
