CONTEXT 178 : DECEMBER 2023 19 BUILDINGS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE ANTHEA JONES The meaning of tithe barns Tithes were certainly part of why monasteries built the often awe-inspiring medieval great barns, but the main clue is in the endowments of land which they received. A barn like Great Coxwell, Oxfordshire, or the Barley Barn and the Wheat Barn at Cressing Temple, Essex, bring us closer to medieval England than most old buildings. They are, as it were, unvarnished, without the extensions, alterations and embellishments that churches or houses tend to. This is not to say that the ‘great barns’ still standing are completely as built; over five centuries, and in some cases as many as eight centuries, they have had structural features modernised or renewed. Most are no longer in agricultural use, but in recent times some have been considered worthy of extensive repairs to preserve them and are open for a variety of public uses. Coggeshall Grange Barn was almost completely rebuilt. The great size of barns like these, and the intricacy and amount of timber supporting the roofs, are awe-inspiring. They are immediately recognisable in the landscape by the size and shape of the roofs, reaching down almost to head height. The roofs of the two great barns at Cressing together contain 160,000 tiles.1 The architect or carpenter of a great barn selected oak trees to give the height and width desired with the minimum of lengthwise sawing. The great barn at Widdington in Essex was built with some 400 oaks, and the largest barns used perhaps 500.² Making a single barn as large as possible was more cost-effective than building several. Coggeshall and Great Coxwell are aisled barns, a technique adopted to achieve greater width. Coggeshall measures 120 ft x 45 ft (36.6 m x 13.7 m), Great Coxwell 144 ft x 38 ft (43.9 m x 11.6 m). Aisled barns are more often found in the east and south-east of England, while a form of cruck construction was more common in the west and north. Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, for example, is a magnificent cruck-framed barn 168 ft x 30 ft (51 m x 9 m). Leigh Court, Worcestershire, 140 ft x 34 ft (42.7 m x 10.4 m), with 11 massive full crucks, is ‘quite probably the largest extant cruck building in the world’.³ The outer walls reflected the local availability of stone or timber. Such ‘great barns’ were simply functional spaces in which harvested crops were stored. Their pretensions were in their size rather than in decorative features, though Glastonbury, Somerset, stood at the edge of the monastic compound and was externally more than usually decorative. Sheaves of wheat and barley were stacked up within them, and gradually during the winter months the grain was threshed out. Oats and pease might be stored in different areas of the barn. Porches to keep the rain off were high enough to take a waiting loaded cart, which when unloaded could leave on the further side. The threshing floor was between the two doors; in the winter men would toss sheaves on to the floor, and beat the grain to free it from husks. The doors were left ajar to create a draught to blow the husks away. Coggeshall Abbey’s Grange barn in Essex may be the oldest surviving monastic barn in England, its timber having been dated to the twelfth century. It was substantially rebuilt in 1983–4 after years of neglect, thanks to a determined local society. The roof tiles are hand-made. (Photo: Jinx Newley) 1 Cressing Temple, a Templar and Hospitaller Manor, edited by Andrews, DD (Essex County Council 1993 and Essex Historic Buildings Group 2020). ² Historic England has details of many barn structures; Cressing Temple, a Templar and Hospitaller Manor. ³ Bond, James (2004) Monastic Landscapes, Stroud.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=