The Cottage Dan Cruickshank: At Home with the British

In this series,

I'm uncovering the history of the ordinary British home.

I want to explore the homes that most of us live in

and that most of us take for granted -

from Tudor cottages and Victorian terraces

to post-war high-rise flats.

I want to reveal how these often ordinary-looking homes

are, in fact, extraordinary.

Pull!

'In each episode, I'll search out the stories

'of how and why our homes were built

'and I'll explore the evidence

'of centuries of design and redesign.'

Since I've got you here, I can explore your plumbing in detail.

Our homes offer an intimate portrait of our public

and our private selves.

From the glass in our windows to the gadgets in our kitchens,

they lay bare how healthy, how wealthy,

even how happy we are.

-She kissed the boss.

-We have a lot in common.

I'm always kissing architects. So, she loves her terraced house.

'I'll uncover the architectural details

'which have shaped our social history

'and transformed our daily lives.'

TOILET FLUSHES

I want to go beyond masonry and mortar

and come face-to-face with residents past and present.

I want to understand how they lived

and how they transformed buildings into homes.

The cottage is the dream home most of us aspire to,

yet behind its seemingly timeless facade

lurks an eventful history, because the cottage was the scene

of our most dramatic domestic revolution.

Stoneleigh in Warwickshire lies in the heart of England

on the edge of the ancient Forest of Arden.

The village can trace its history back

as least as far as the Domesday Book.

In 1086, it was home to 68 villagers, four smallholders,

two slaves and two priests.

Through the story of the cottages in this archetypal English village,

I want to tell the story of our nation's cottages.

What's drawn me to Stoneleigh are its wonderful historical records,

which reveal every last detail

of villagers' lives over five centuries.

By sifting through the documents

and by exploring Stoneleigh's remarkable collection

of timber-framed cottages,

I want to piece together the reality of life in these homes.

This map of Stoneleigh Village dates from 1597.

It's a remarkable and indeed beautiful document

and helps me to step back in time.

I can see this location, then, the village green,

that's where I'm standing, and there are the almshouses,

which survive over there. They were new when the map was made.

They're dated 1594.

There were 45 houses in the village in 1597

and, remarkably, a third of those still survive.

This one in front of me on the corner

was occupied by Thomas Messenger.

We can tell a few things from his home.

It is small, of course - charming, picturesque,

but very small and, behind it,

there's only a fifth of an acre - a small garden, really -

so we can conclude from his home

that he must have been a man of very humble means.

The map tells us that, in 1597,

this house was occupied by Elizabeth Jenkyn.

Now, to judge by the size of her house,

she was a little bit better off than her neighbour,

Thomas Messenger, and she had half an acre of land to the rear,

but the house is still relatively humble

and that's the extraordinary thing about Stoneleigh -

the survival of such a large number of early ordinary cottages.

Tudor palaces, manor houses and merchant houses,

they're all about the lives of the rich and powerful.

These tell us how the other half lived.

Some of the village's oldest surviving cottages

were built long before this map was made.

Skep Cottage is one of Stoneleigh's most ancient.

It dates back to the middle of the 15th century.

When Thomas Messenger lived here, he almost certainly farmed the land.

Today, it's home to Ian, who works in renewable energy,

and his wife, Marilyn.

I'm on the hunt for clues about how their cottage evolved

from the simplest shelter into a home we all recognise today.

Ooh! A tight squeeze.

Gosh, what a wonderful little hairy world I'm in of thatch.

Ah! Oh, how fascinating! Ow!

In my excitement, I'm going to tumble down, but this is... Ow!

Well, this is good. This is very good, this is excellent.

Soot blackening - it almost comes off in my hand.

Soot, dark, stain - why this is so exciting

is that it's conclusive evidence that the space

I'm in now was once part of an open hall -

a hall open from the ground floor below me

into the roof space here - one volume.

Like every modest medieval home, Skep Cottage had no upper storey.

The stairs and first floor rooms were improvements

that weren't made for at least another 100 years.

Originally,

this house was little more than a roof over its inhabitants' heads.

It had just two rooms - a chamber for sleeping,

which was probably unheated, and a hall, the main living space,

at the centre of which was an open hearth.

Smoke from this fire drifted up to the roof timbers above.

Incredible, this, isn't it? So intriguing.

Over there, one would expect on some of those timbers

to see hooks or nails,

from which hunks of meat would have been hooked or dangled.

Curing in the smoke of the fire, hanging here would have

preserved the meat itself from vermin running all around.

Such a tremendously stark contrast with the world below.

Here is a memory of once a rough and ready life,

living in the smoky room beneath this thatch

and now, of course, when I exit through this hatch,

I leave the medieval world and back to the modern world.

By contrast, it's clean, tidy, neat, hygienic.

I know which I prefer, but never mind. I have to go back now, Oops!

The open hall was the centrepiece of almost all medieval homes -

from the smallest cottages to the most imposing castles.

Even in a tiny cottage like this,

the hall would have been an evocation in miniature

of the great hall of a castle, of a grand manor house

and this double-height space,

as it was originally, would have had an inheritant grandeur, I suppose.

If you imagine sitting here with a view up into the roof timbers,

it would have felt big.

The chair here, probably the only one in the hall,

was reserved for the sole use of the head of the household.

The family sitting round would no doubt be seated

on more uncomfortable benches so this chair,

when occupied by the head of the household,

was like the throne occupied by the lord of the manor in his great hall.

Yes, I feel the power.

For most medieval cottages, the basic design - a timber frame,

usually filled with wattle and daub and topped with a thatched roof -

scarcely changed from the time of the Norman Conquest.

So, for centuries, one of the most highly prized building materials

remained the same - wood.

Stoneleigh's cottages were built with timber

taken from the nearby Forest of Arden -

an ancient woodland dating back to the end of the last ice age.

We're in the Forest of Arden. It has a wonderful romantic ring to it.

This is Shakespeare's forest.

It goes right up, doesn't it, to Stratford-upon-Avon.

Yeah, if you think of Warwickshire

as sort of split into two halves by the River Avon,

which kind of runs diagonally through the county,

the area north and west of the Avon

was dominated by the Forest of Arden.

-Right.

-Hundreds of square miles.

-Hundreds of square miles!

It is, of course, incredible that this is the landscape -

the woodscape, I suppose, one should say -

the medieval occupiers of Stoneleigh would have known.

This is about as close as you can get in Warwickshire

to a typical bit of managed woodland in medieval times.

Tell me about the sort of trees that would have been grown.

Right, well, what we have here

-is we have coppice with standards.

-Standards?

-Sorry, standards are the big trees?

-They're the big trees.

They could be allowed to grow for 150 years or so for building timber.

-And this is a standard.

-This is a standard, yep.

So, again, just thinking back,

so the estate owner who owned the tree or indeed a carpenter

who was involved in house construction would have stood here

and looked at this particular tree and said, "Hmm, that's a good one.

"That's of an age and shape to use."

Everything would have been scheduled

and sometimes you might have to wait a long time

for the bit of wood that you need.

It would have controlled the number of timber-framed cottages

that could be built at any one time.

So, the ancient wild wood of popular imagination

was far from wild, really.

-It was controlled and managed.

-Very much so, yeah.

I mean, every wood had a boundary by the medieval times

and you could get into a lot of trouble

if you sneaked into a wood and took wood out without permission.

Chopping down a standard without permission

would land you with a hefty fine.

But villagers did have the right to coppice smaller trees

from their local wood,

taking branches for firewood and house repairs.

Poor defenceless little ones! I pick on the small guys.

Now, this is a handy piece.

This I can use in my cottage in Stoneleigh

for repairing the outhouse.

HE SNIFFS Oh!

You can begin to understand why medieval woodland

was so carefully managed and so strictly guarded.

The demand for wood must have been insatiable -

used for heating the home, for cooking food,

for making charcoal, for doing some small repairs to the home

and to build even a three-room house needed 110 trees.

Stoneleigh's oldest cottages

were built using an ingenious method of construction.

Ah, here is a pair of the main structural load-bearing timbers

used in the construction of this cottage.

You can see they are wonderfully wobbly and are set on the diagonal.

They are, however, made of very solid oak.

These are called cruck blades, this one and that one,

and cruck construction is typical

of the medieval cottages of Stoneleigh.

Now, although wobbly,

the cruck blades are wobbly in a very symmetrical manner

cos each is cut from the same tree trunk.

This was a very simple, but strong form of construction.

The cruck blades were joined at the apex

and tied together by a collar beam,

creating a simple tent-like frame.

In small cottages,

each pair of crucks usually defines the boundary of a different room.

So, to build the average three-room cottage

required four sets of cruck blades.

Crucks were the dominant form of medieval construction

in the Midlands and the west of England

and were also found in Wales and Scotland.

Throughout Britain,

over 4,000 of these cruck frames are still standing.

The Oak Frame Training Forum near Bristol

teaches traditional cruck carpentry.

I'm actually making square pegs at the moment - what we call billets -

and I'm just splitting them up out of solid, quite wet green oak.

Right. It looks frightfully easy, what you're doing.

I bet if I asked to have a go, I'd reveal how difficult it is,

-but I wouldn't mind.

-It is incredibly easy.

I presume one cuts with the grain as far as possible.

Yes, try to keep the volumes the same on either side

so they always break in half

so if you, say, go for there, that's a good point there.

OK, how many fingers do you still have?

That's it, lovely.

Yeah, OK. So, that's our basic building component, in a sense.

Yep, so the next thing is to put them onto a shave horse.

I usually put the big end underneath here

-and you use your feet to hold it.

-Oh, yes, OK.

So, you can see there, that peg is a finished peg

and that's going to take one and a half tonnes of shear in a joint -

it's incredibly strong.

Again, you make it look very easy, but obviously, for one thing,

it's wrist action controlling this tool

and also you've got to coordinate your hands and your feet.

So, I cut myself in half at this point.

It's a good reminder of just how skilled it was in the past

to make a timber-framed house.

A farmer couldn't just go into the forest,

cut down an oak tree and make a barn.

He needed carpenters, guys who were professional.

It is unlikely that the average farmer would build their own house.

Village houses would be built in a yard.

The crucial thing in a yard is you've got a flat surface

to work on and having a nice flat floor is really incredibly useful.

It's a nightmare building on a hillside.

'Building a timber frame

'was much like assembling Ikea flat-pack furniture -

'in theory, at least,

'a simple matter of slotting together all the component parts.'

Here we've got the mortise, which is the hole in the cruck blade,

and what slides into it is this thing, the tenon.

This is the classic carpentry joint of the timber framing world.

And here we see one of the other great characteristics

of timber-frame construction -

the carpenter's mark. Look, there's number two.

Number two, showing these two timbers... Well, they go together.

That's right, but it's quite important

when you have a complex frame that everything's numbered

-because it's been prefabricated off-site.

-Yes.

And when it's transported,

you won't know where anything goes unless there's a number.

Let's have a go, see how heavy this is. I mean, it's a bit of oak.

Not very long, this collar, but it's thick.

-Ooh!

-No, no, no. This is a team effort.

Yeah, I think we need to call some people in to help get this together.

Yeah, yeah. OK, well, I'll get back astride my piece of oak.

And we slide it... It is... Ah, OK.

You can see how making a timber-frame building

was a community effort.

I understand why we shaped them the way we did.

The tapering clearly is part of putting it together

and the point that helps you to navigate into the...

Ah, there we go.

So, there's a big mallet and you can whack those pegs in now.

Traditional activity, OK.

OK.

Very nice. That's pulling it together nicely.

-You can see it - every hit, it gets tighter.

-Superb!

Last bit.

Pull!

Pull!

Pull!

Pull!

Pull!

Whoa! Steady on!

Well, it's handsome and it looks strong,

but here, of course, the curve becomes the great ornament.

We must have pleased the carpenter and the landowner to actually

use up their curvy wood, which normally wouldn't get used.

I suppose also you could say they are a reflection of the liking...

the Anglo-Saxon love for the curvaceous, the sinuous,

the feminine, of course, really.

You know, the world of the great goddess and all that.

Feminine power!

It was something you could show off to your neighbours,

and they're usually always in visible places in the halls.

They're an aesthetic statement that's quite bling, yeah,

a bit of medieval bling.

And also this kind of wonderful, you know...

The way they express their construction methods.

I love these pegs kind of poking right through

with their kind of battered and scraggly ends

where they've been beaten into the earth.

-Yeah, that shouldn't be like that.

-Oh!

-I blame you.

Medieval England was a nation of tenants.

From the greatest lord to the lowliest serf,

almost everyone paid rent.

Aside from God and the King,

a medieval landlord was the most powerful figure in a tenant's life.

Around a third of the land in medieval England,

including the Stoneleigh Estate, was owned by monasteries.

The abbey at Stoneleigh was founded in 1155

after Henry II granted the estate to the Cistercians,

making them landlords of the village.

This splendid space was the abbey's undercroft.

Above was a dormitory and this incredible survival

tells us so much about the Cistercians.

They believed in a simple, austere, monastic life

and that belief is reflected very directly in their architecture -

also simple, austere, powerful, almost abstract.

There is no sort of superfluous or imposed decoration -

no carved heads, no mouldings.

The Cistercians were suspicious of ornamentation,

of carving, cos they believed that such things could distract monks

from the contemplation of the pure wonder of God.

But don't be fooled by the Cistercians' spiritual devotion.

These monks were also hard-headed landlords

whose control extended to every detail of village life.

In Stoneleigh, as in all medieval villages,

the lord of the manor held regular manor court sessions,

where local justice was meted out.

Aside from cracking down on breaches of the peace,

the monks of Stoneleigh were keen to squeeze a healthy profit

from their tenants, as the village's manor court rolls reveal.

So, what can these rolls tell us

about the daily life of tenants in Stoneleigh?

This is a record of 1478 and so what this is telling us

-is a man called Ralph Wynford...

-Oh, there he is.

Ralph Wynford is taking on a cottage with six acres of land.

In order to seal the bargain of him becoming a tenant,

-he has to pay an entry fine.

-Oh, I see.

And it's an entry fine in kind, not in cash, and it's 12 capons.

-Capons - chickens?

-Fat hens, that's right.

-Fat hens?

12 fat hens, which the monks want to devour, of course.

So, that's a one-off payment for entry into the agreement.

Are there other things, as well?

Well, the other one is the heriot, which is the death duty,

which will be an ox or a horse - a valuable animal of that kind.

A woman loses her husband and then she has to also lose her best ox!

It's tough! Life is tough.

Yes, right, so the ox might be better-loved than the husband.

But what is unusual about this particular record

is the detail it goes into on the question of repair and maintenance.

It tells us that he's agreed to repair, maintain and sustain

the said cottage and it's said that he will do this at his own expense.

It's his responsibility, he has to pay and it says that

if he fails to do it, then it will be forfeit and it actually uses

the word "forfeiture" as the penalty

if he breaks the terms of the tenancy.

On top of paying ground rent,

tenants also paid to build their cottages and to repair them.

And if they failed to properly maintain the homes

they'd invested so much in,

they risked losing them to their landlord.

Stoneleigh's records show that one poor harvest

was sometimes all that separated the house-proud from the homeless.

This one here, for example,

William Reeve has ruinous and unrepaired buildings.

We're told that he left the ville and, as a pauper,

is wandering from village to village,

seeking alms, so he's become a sort of beggar and vagabond.

This has a desperate quality, doesn't it,

of the lives of the four families. Also the estate is in some dismay.

People at the time talked about the wheel of fortune

and that you could be happy and healthy

and wealthy at one stage of your life

and, within a very short time,

you could find yourself at the bottom in poverty and misery

and this clearly suggests that that really did happen.

For many of Stoneleigh's 15th- and 16th-century residents,

a house was far more than just a home.

Alongside regular domestic life,

the cottage was often also a workplace,

which tenants depended on for their livelihoods.

The current owner of Phoenix Cottage is John,

a retired financial consultant.

His 16th-century forebears were John and Elizabeth Jenkins.

The pair were brewers,

and they turned their home into an informal village pub.

This is very, very exciting.

We are doing in this cottage - indeed in this very room -

what Mr and Mrs Jenkins did here 500 years ago. We are brewing ale.

So, we've got hot water and then we have malted barley

so what we need to do now is we need to take some of our water

and add it to our malt to make a mash.

We know that making humble ale was not below the interest

of the law of the land

because the Jenkinses here got into trouble over their ale

at the assizes, so there was some issue about what they were doing.

Yeah, the assizes control quality.

They set the price that you can sell your ale for based on the malt.

You have a chap called an ale conner or an ale taster

and his job was to go around when people advertise the new brew

and he would sample it, make sure it was up to speed and not ropey,

-smoky, stale, all these...

-By drinking it?

-By drinking it.

-That's a job I'd like.

-Nice job!

So, Mrs Jenkins made the mash in the morning,

after lunch one can carry on with making the ale.

So what is the next stage?

Very simply... Just separate the two.

That's the last bits of goodness out.

-The liquid has gone through.

-Yeah.

And most of the sugar should have come out the barley.

-This is the liquid here?

-That is called the wort, that's what you brew with.

And that's the heart and soul of a good ale, of course?

It is indeed, yes.

So, now, what is the magic ingredient that transforms

this "wort", you call - I call it nectar - into good, strong alcohol?

-We need barm, yeast, or God's good.

-God's good.

Three names for the same thing.

-Put some in.

-OK.

-And then it will start to work.

-It's wonderful.

And I know it needs to go on fermenting for maybe four or

-five days from now, but can I have a quick taste?

-Of course you can.

-It's not going to kill me, I'm sure.

-A little dip in that one there.

OK, so, this in my tummy will turn to alcohol,

I suppose, gradually.

Cheers!

Absolutely delicious, isn't it? Good heavens.

Right. Some more of that! Join me.

-I will join you.

-You could market that, I tell you.

What shall we call it?

DAN LAUGHS I don't know - Cruickshank's!

HE LAUGHS

That is rather good.

When the brewing process was complete,

the Jenkins would let the villagers know the house

was open for business by erecting the ale stake.

Here is the ale stake.

It is a rather cunning device. Up it goes.

The leaves were cut when the ale was ready to drink, so it was

possible to judge the age of the ale from the freshness of the leaves.

Therefore, seasoned drinkers could tell

when it was a good time to pop inside for the perfect pint.

In the multipurpose hall, all life revolved around the open fire -

working, eating and cooking happened on the same smoky room,

where ideas of comfort and privacy were very different from our own.

The most intimate details of life in Stoneleigh's cottages are revealed

by the village's fascinating collection of probate inventories.

These were compiled when an individual died,

and they list all their worldly goods.

They are a unique portrait of some of Stoneleigh's most humble homes.

This is the inventory of John Allett, weaver, of Stoneleigh.

-1537.

-Right.

This one, of course, is completely unreadable, for me!

It is in English, not Latin. But, I mean, what does it say?

-It's very phonetically spelt.

-Yes, yes.

-And in a sort of Midlands dialect.

-My goodness. Right.

But there are bits that are easy for us to read.

It is divided into rooms, and that is the key thing for us.

-"In the hall."

-"In the hall."

-"In the chamber."

So we can see not only which goods he had,

but actually where he had them in the house.

What does it say? "In the hall..."

-"A hanging of painting cloths.

-There is a value there, presumably.

Yes, eightpence. So not very much!

So, a small table and two forms.

The forms, or benches, on one side of the table, perhaps,

then we've also got here a cupboard and two stools.

And what about cushions?

The equivalent of the easy chair of the modern home.

There's certainly nothing like that, no.

You're not sitting around in here

and relaxing and putting your feet up.

You're in here for a particular purpose,

and probably that purpose is dining.

This obviously is the more public part of the house, the hall.

Things to display to the neighbours.

-Now we go into the more private parts. The chambers.

-Yes.

In here, "In the chamber," here we've got the two bedsteads.

And then on top of that we've got one feather bed,

so obviously one of them is better furnished than the other one,

and we've got two bolsters.

We've got three mattresses,

and we've got five pillows,

and this is worth much more - we've got five shillings on there.

I see, OK. This is the notion of the bed and its fittings being

the great status symbol, the sort of sports car image of furniture.

It's the big show-off thing, isn't it, the bed?

I've never thought of it quite like that.

But, yes, it's certainly where all these things come together.

This is a level of,

a kind of comfort that is much closer to what we are familiar with,

-so it's a comfort around cosy soft furnishings.

-Yes.

An entire world of these people are documented on these slivers.

Yes, that's right.

All his goods go from here to here.

And that's a lot of goods.

This is not a short list because he has nothing.

It just shows us how very important every single thing on this was.

A modern house, of course, my house, if I wrote

all the things it would fill this box, the junk I've got, you know!

THEY LAUGH

For almost 400 years, the monks of Stoneleigh had run the village.

But between 1532 and 1534,

the established order was turned on its head

as Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church

and soon afterwards began the dissolution of the monasteries.

Across the country, monastic estates were seized by the Crown

and tenants who for generations had owed their rent and their allegiance

to the same lord of the manor found themselves with new masters.

For Stoneleigh's villagers, the Church's waning power

was replaced by the rising influence of trade and commerce.

In 1561, Sir Thomas Leigh bought the entire estate.

He was purchasing not just land, but a new status as lord of the manor.

Leigh was a fabulously wealthy London merchant who was

Lord Mayor in 1558, and was four times master of the city's

most important delivery company, the Mercers.

This wonderful cup is the most treasured possession

of the ancient and honourable Mercers' Company.

It's also one of their most valuable objects.

It's worth a small fortune.

Leigh gave this cup to the Mercers' Company just a few years after

he'd bought the Stoneleigh Abbey estate.

There's a coat of arms of the Merchant Adventurers

and a coat of arms of the Merchant Of The Staple.

This is to do with the wool trade.

Wool was the greatest, I suppose, moneymaking industry in Britain at this time.

That's how he made his fortune.

And here, his name's emblazoned upon the cup.

Every year at the feast to celebrate the election of the new

Master of the Mercer's Company, the cup is used.

It's filled with champagne, and a toast is offered,

and in that gesture, of course, Thomas Leigh has achieved his aims.

He has achieved immortality.

The arrival of the new lord of the manor

spelled the end of Stoneleigh's rough and ready medieval existence.

Leigh had no intention of living like his Cistercian predecessors,

and he exchanged the austerity of their monastic buildings

for a home designed to a new standard of comfort.

The abbey church stood here.

Over there at the east end was a chancel and high altar.

Here was the nave.

The church was in ruins when Leigh acquired the abbey site,

and what survived he soon swept away,

with the exception of the south aisle, which still survives.

And the aisle survives because Leigh made it into the north entrance hall of his new house.

The house Thomas Leigh created for himself is pleasant,

but, I think one has to admit, not exceptional.

More exciting and more dramatic was the transformation taking place

at roughly the same time down the road in Stoneleigh Village.

There, the rebuilding and alteration of medieval cottages was part of

a nationwide revolution that was to lead to the making of the modern home.

In medieval Stoneleigh,

just keeping a roof over your head was a challenge.

But from the second half of the 16th century,

cottages built for shelter and survival were radically redesigned

into the homes we all live in today.

The addition of windows, the building of chimneys,

and the creation of separate rooms for separate uses

totally transformed Stoneleigh's and the nation's cottages.

In 1577, William Harrison produced his Description Of England,

Here it is. It offers a...

a wonderful sort of survey of life at the time, and also contains

a very telling description of the late Tudor building boom.

He says, for example, here, "For every man almost is a builder,

"and he that hath bought any small parcel of ground, be it never so little,

"would not be quiet till he has pulled down the old house

"and set up a new after his own device."

The most striking development of all was the nation's skyline.

Harrison wrote that there were old men yet living in his village

who in their lifetimes had seen, as Harrison writes it,

"the multitude of chimneys lately erected,

"whereas in their young days not above two or three."

So, rather like the satellite dishes of today, or CCTV cameras,

in the 1570s the chimney was the emblem of the modern home.

As the country enjoyed a period of relative peace and rising prosperity,

even those of modest means had some money to spend on the most

dramatic home improvements in the nation's history.

This house on the edge of the parish of Stoneleigh was one of those

that was completely rebuilt.

460 years ago, Thomas Tutor, a farmer,

and his family lived in a medieval cottage on this site.

Their 21st-century successors are Mary, a company secretary,

and her partner Johnny, an engineer.

This is the main living room now of the house.

And very comfortable it is.

What can you say about the date?

It looks, I suppose, 17th-century.

-But was the house on site before the late 17th century?

-Indeed.

We can follow it through from 1555.

It belonged then to the Blacksmiths' Guild of Coventry.

-In fact, here is a copy of the lease.

-Oh, yes.

They leased it to somebody called Thomas Tutor within the parish of Stoneleigh.

But it had a very unusual condition on it.

He had to make and set up, within the said house, a chimney of timber

and stone and also to make a chamber floor over a parlour.

Now what we are seeing here is the characteristic

modernisation of houses.

In their basic medieval house,

the ten members of the Tutor family had just three rooms.

A bedroom, a kitchen and a multipurpose hall.

It wasn't until the 17th century,

when the house was completely rebuilt, that an upper storey

allowed for more living space and the luxury of separate bedrooms.

Instead of an open hearth, the new house had a chimney stack.

In the old medieval house, probably only the hall was heated.

But now, each room could have its own fireplace.

At the end of the 17th century, the property was rented

to Richard Cammell, whose inventory from 1694 reveals how dramatically

life in the house had changed in a century and a half.

And this is the chamber over the kitchen

and we have got in the inventory here, two bedsteads and two feather

beds and bolsters and those would have been for the two children, Mary

and Holloway, the daughter and the son of Richard and Elizabeth Cammell.

So they were living in here.

Across the other side of the stair, we have got Richard

and his wife's own bedchamber, which is really quite smart.

The inventory reveals a new level of comfort, doesn't it?

Separate discrete rooms, comfortable,

heated with their own fireplaces.

And private.

The house earlier, three basic rooms, single-storey,

double height, full of smoke with ten people crowded into them.

That's like going to the moon, isn't it? Is a different world.

It is the contrast between medieval living

at the end of the medieval period in the 1550s,

and what we really recognise as modern living,

by the time you get to Richard Cammell in 1694.

It's a modern home.

Step by step, medieval cottages were adapted to meet new

standards of domestic comfort.

In the modern cottage, glass windows replaced what had been no more than

holes in the wall.

From the mid-16th century,

domestic production of glass expanded to meet rising demand.

And by the 1630s, English glass-makers were

making around one million square feet of glass a year.

Want to come round here, Dan, start to blow it out?

Just a small blow, is it? In short puffs?

Carry on, just keep blowing, I'll stop.

Steady.

Hold it there.

-Too much?

-I'll do it again, a final blow and it should be OK.

-OK.

-Should be all right.

I'll leave the final blow to you, then.

I didn't mess it up, did I?

So what is the temperature in this miniature sun?

Probably round about 1,200, 1,250, something like that.

How traditional is this process?

I guess this is how glass was made in the 16th century

or 400 or 500 years ago?

This is the same technique, all the skills are getting lost now.

We are the last people.

-You are the last?

-We are the last.

We are the only firm in the country.

-OK, Dan.

-OK, this is like, obviously make-or-break moment.

-Yes.

-I guess I could mess it all up now?

-Yes.

I go clockwise.

A bit faster. Yes.

Now you can see it's opening up, is coming out.

What am I trying to do exactly? What are we trying to do?

I'm going to loose... Spin hard.

-That's it.

-That right? I'm trying to keep it...

obviously this bar horizontal and spin it.

That's all right. Slowing down, but keep doing it.

-Yes.

-Am I...? What am I doing wrong?

-Nothing.

-Oh, good.

-Really?

-It's ready to go in the oven.

DAN LAUGHS It's done!

OK.

OK.

Didn't mess it up. I can't believe it.

Glazed windows had long graced the homes of royalty and aristocracy.

But it wasn't until the end of the 16th century

that glass became affordable for ordinary mortals.

-Ah. Now, you call this bullion glass, don't you?

-Yes.

Years ago, there would be huge bullions -

you know, five, six foot in diameter.

So I wonder, how many panes of glass would you get from a disc like this?

-Maybe four or five.

-Four or five?

-Yes.

So you just score it, first.

SCRATCHING

And then you can start just tapping it.

-On the score? On the mark?

-And hopefully...

-It breaks along the mark.

-It breaks along the mark.

Rather than somewhere else. How do you break the glass?

-Then just snap it off.

-Is it supposed to...?

Oh, right!

Broken beautifully. Very sharp. Very crisp.

I'd love to have a go at cutting. You make it look so easy.

There's an element of jeopardy - I'm bound to make a mess of it.

Because nothing is as easy as it looks.

-That's it.

-That's the sound, isn't it?

SCRATCHING

Let me get my specs - I can't actually see the score line.

Oh, there it is. HE TAPS IT

-Oh, my God, that doesn't sound good.

-It's starting to veer off a bit, I think.

-Is it?

-Yes.

-I'm in trouble.

I'm in trouble. Oh, yes.

Oh. Oh, well. It righted itself in the end.

Sort of, yes.

I'll cover it up.

-OK!

-Not a complete disgrace and disaster. Almost.

And that one.

That's how it should be done.

Now, this is the perfect piece of glass for a Tudor window.

It's beautiful, this one, isn't it?

Because you've got the concentric marks which makes it very lively.

You can spot a house that has got proper windows in.

They will have a bit of a ripple to them.

A bit of life in them.

And of course even the most distorted bit of the disc,

the bull's-eye in the middle, which is thick and rather troubling,

I suppose, in a sense because it's so distorted,

even that would be used, wouldn't it?

That would be the cheaper part of the glass.

So if you couldn't afford the nice, thin, flat pieces of glass,

they would have the piece, the roundel bit in the middle,

for their windows.

But of course now is the complete reverse, where we

do bullions for the centrepiece.

These are feature windows now.

-The antique-y look.

-Yes. Absolutely.

By the start of the 17th century,

glazed windows began to be spotted around Stoneleigh.

They were reserved for the most important rooms,

and were often only added to the front of a house where

they would be sure to catch the eye of envious neighbours.

Thomas Hill lived at what is now 11 and 12 Coventry Road, Stoneleigh.

He was a yeoman farmer, a man of some means and, we know,

the proud possessor of two glass windows.

The windows are mentioned in the inventory of his household goods,

attached to his will of 1631.

Along with other high-value items of luxury such as beds

and tables and chairs, the windows are mentioned as movables.

That is, when you left your home,

you took your windows with you.

By the end of the 17th century, the cottage,

which had started life as the most basic of homes,

had proved the most adaptable of architectural templates.

Within the same simple structure,

new rooms were created for new uses

and new improvements, like glass windows and chimneys, added.

This revolution produced a whole new home.

Although Stoneleigh's cottages had experienced a remarkable transformation

into modern homes, much of village life remained virtually medieval.

In the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution changed

Britain beyond all recognition, the Leigh family carried on regardless.

They kept running their village along feudal lines.

From the almshouses to the village school, the family founded

and financed every institution that saw their tenants

through from cradle to grave.

In 1850, William Henry Leigh became the new lord of the manor.

He asserted the same hold over his tenants' lives

as the monks Stoneleigh Abbey had done 500 years earlier.

William has great concern for the lives and the welfare of his tenants.

That concern is recorded in this extraordinary collection of notebooks belonging to him.

From 1853, for over 40 years,

he conducted an annual estate survey,

going from cottage to cottage, recording the condition of the building,

and also notes about the lives of the tenants inside those cottages.

Now, here we go - let's have a look.

1895/96, here.

Charles Allingham.

Three bedrooms.

He's paying £4, ten shillings per annum.

Good cottage, but painting required.

Chimney mending

and a step missing. Incredible - meticulous, tiny detail

about the fabric of the cottages.

This one here. Here we go. Mr Mills.

His cottage has three bedrooms.

Eight children at home, he notes. Mm.

It's a good cottage, though - but plastering required

in a bedroom. Do I detect some sort of dismay here, or disturbance,

about eight children at home? Perhaps he's worried

that the cottage is overcrowded

or the children are too old to be living at home.

I suppose, you know, William is a good landlord,

and concerned about his tenants,

but one senses some element of moral policing going on here.

In their vast Georgian pile,

at the heart of the largest estate in Warwickshire,

the Leighs' position seemed unassailable.

But behind the scenes, income from the estate had scarcely risen in a century.

And as debts mounted, Lord Leigh flatly refused to confront the problem.

Throughout the countryside, the old model of cottages

owned by landlord and occupied by his dutiful tenants

no longer seems sustainable.

But as Britain's population shifted decisively

from predominantly rural to overwhelmingly urban,

the cottage was reinvented for a new age.

Amidst the grit and grime of the Victorian city,

the nostalgic appeal of the quaint country cottage proved irresistible.

Picturesque views of idyllic cottages captured,

the popular imagination, and even Stoneleigh's homes

graced a Victorian postcard.

In Britain's expanding cities,

this infatuation would fuel a new building boom.

Beginning at the end of the 19th century

and gathering pace in the 20th century, a mania for mock Tudor

took the new suburbs by storm.

Let's go for a nice walk.

Walk? In these London streets? Petrol, oil, fumes?

Oh, my dear, don't get ratty.

I'm so sorry, darling. Honestly, I don't mean it,

but I'm tired of these surroundings.

We're cooped up in this London flat all the days of our lives.

Well, then let's go out into the country.

The country, where?

There are awfully nice houses at Purley Oaks, charming.

Purley Oaks.

And they went.

Moving swiftly along the wide avenues,

we notice particularly how well situated are these homes.

The semi was just the latest evolution of the cottage,

offering the rustic pleasures of the countryside with all mod cons.

A-ha! They are pulling up in one of the furnished show houses.

From early Arts and Crafts models to modern Barratt homes,

semis were so successful that around 20 million of us now live in one.

This is the tiled bathroom,

replete with all that goes to make the daily ablutions pleasurable.

There are three bedrooms on the first floor

and they all overlook the rolling countryside.

Suburban semis, most of which were owned and not rented,

weren't just an escape from overcrowded towns and cities,

but from overbearing landlords.

Yet in Stoneleigh, the Leighs continued to treat the village

as their private fiefdom.

The Leighs were generous to their tenants, but surely William Leigh

did Stoneleigh a disservice when he closed the local pub.

The reason for this bizarre action

was that he was outraged when a bunch of visiting cyclists

sitting outside the pub drinking whistled at his daughter

in a lascivious manner,

so he closed the pub and refused to have any other pubs in the village.

Locals who rather liked to gather for a convivial pint

were slightly puzzled what to do,

so the solution was a good one.

They started a village club which was really little more

than a private drinking establishment.

It flourishes still to this day

and is really the heart and soul of the village.

We are in what is now the village club.

What role did it used to play in the life of the village?

It was a men-only club, actually.

-Was it?

-Yes. They used to collect the rent here

at a trestle table and Lord Leigh's agent would be there.

People used to come in and just pay.

That's very merciful. You'd pay your rent in the club

so you would have a pint of Guinness, perhaps.

It was probably morning when they did it.

-They start drinking early here.

-They'd pay their money -

mostly cash, of course, because people got it in cash then.

My father didn't have a bank account and used to keep his money in a tin

in a box of sand with the carrots over winter.

This is the receipt that my father had for the cottage.

Here you are, £8, 19 shillings and eight pence

for half a year's rent for this cottage.

The address is below it. Number 12 Coventry Road.

-Yes.

-I bet at this point most of Stoneleigh was occupied by tenants

of the Leigh family.

-Yes.

-How did people then regard him?

He was a gentleman. He was just a very good...Lord.

-And landlord, presumably.

-And landlord, yes, of course.

Presumably the tenants felt secure

and the rents were fairly fixed, stable.

Yes, and my father was old school and I can remember that

he doffed his cap to him to say, "Good morning, Your Lordship."

I stood back a little, I thought, "Ooh..."

To me, that was rather strange, but obviously he was still living

in the old times when you honoured the Lord Leigh.

The devotion of his tenants would do little to ease the financial woes

Rupert Leigh had inherited from his father and his grandfather.

In 1946, he resorted to desperate measures

to bring in some extra cash.

-Good afternoon, Lord Leigh.

-Good afternoon.

Tell me one thing, do you ever feel like something out of the zoo

with all these people wandering around your lovely house?

I imagine that if they get a glimpse of you it rather makes their day for them, doesn't it?

Well, I don't know about that.

The Abbey was one of the first stately homes in the country

to open its doors to the public.

Is there anything in particular that the public usually want to see in the house?

Oh, yes. There's a beautiful double chair

which is known as the sweetheart chair or courting chair

in the silk drawing-room.

What's interested you most in this lovely old house?

That big drawing-room with all the red plush furniture

and the gilt and the candelabra in the middle, you know?

Would you like to live in a room like that, then?

I don't think so,

because the dog's hairs would show up on the red plush.

# Our little dream castle

# With every dream gone... #

For more than four centuries, the Leighs had done very well

out of their position as lords of the manor,

but the bond between landlord and tenants was finally broken in 1989.

# A cottage for sale... #

Rupert Leigh's son Piers followed the lead of hard-up landowners

around the country and put the estate and all the cottages on the market.

# Our little dream garden

# Has withered away. #

The tenants who had lived in these cottages for generations

simply couldn't afford to buy them,

but there were plenty of newcomers ready to pay serious money

for their very own rural idylls.

And the perfectly manicured homes of Stoneleigh's new owner-occupiers

are proof of our enduring affection for the cottage.

I thought it was amazing when I walked in,

it just had such a lovely feel.

The log fire was burning on the day we walked in -

just what we wanted, really.

It's nice it had all the old features of the cottage,

like the fireplace, which dates back to a very early stage of the house,

gives it a lot of character.

I think the history is very important.

We feel a definite sense of being the custodians of a real piece of history.

It actually feels like quite a responsibility and an honour

to be looking after it for a while.

I love living here. We're both very happy here, it's gorgeous.

Throughout Britain, the cottage has undergone a remarkable reinvention.

From the humblest of medieval homes,

it has become one of the most sought-after pieces of real estate.

It's more than just nostalgia that's made cottage living into something of a national obsession.

These timbers speak of 500 years of redesign and rebuilding.

It's that remarkable history that is the secret

to why the cottage is still going strong.

Next time, I'm exploring the terrace.

The home designed to take the strain

in booming Victorian towns and cities.

I'll discover why the terrace became the home of choice

for a house-proud nation.

Ten minutes later, I'll still be doing this.

And how its extraordinary staying power has ensured it

a new lease of life.

-I imagine you'll be here for some years.

-For ever.

I plan for ever, Dan.