The Cottage Homes of England

By Stewart Dick and Helen Allingham

Set in unpolluted country, unshaken by motor traffic, Helen Allingham's are the cottages we should all like to own. She painted them in peaceful Edwardian days, in spring and summer, under cloudless skies. Although at this time she lived in London, she could not keep away from the country and particularly the Surrey she once knew and loved. It is significant that the only touches of autumn that appear in the sixty plus superb illustrations occur in the single London scene, a picture of Wyldes Farm near her Hampstead home. Chiefly, her subjects come from southern England - Kent, Surrey, and Sussex are favourite counties - but she did go as far afield as Alderley Edge in Cheshire, and it is in this picture we see the only blackened timbers in the book. Hers is a green world in which everything grows unchecked: trees dwarf the buildings, creepers reach the chimney tops, herbaceous borders flourish. The cottages sink into the landscape, and sometimes hardly a window shows behind the thick hedges. The artist is never without an excuse for colour: lilac, gorse, bluebells, sunflowers, hollyhocks, faded brick, worn tile, and silver stone. Her paint takes on the texture of thatch, plaster, moss, weathered oak, the cob-walls of Devon, and Cotswold limestone. – Print ed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Braunfell Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839748851

Book preview

CHAPTER II — THE EVOLUTION OF THE COTTAGE—THE EARLY STAGES

‘A hut is a palace to a poor man.’

OLD PROVERB.

I HAVE said that one real reason of the directness with which the cottage appeals to us is that, despite its antiquity, it is not too old. Not so old as to be out of touch with our daily life.

Could we see a dwelling of the early Britons absolutely as it was in their days, it would interest us in quite another fashion. We should look at it with the colder gaze of the archaeologist, but we should not love it as the home of our fathers, for to us it would hardly appear a home at all. In the world of emotion, which after all is the real world we live in, it would be as remote from us as Stonehenge. One feature of home, indeed, it had, which even now kindles a responsive glow in our hearts, the family hearth, around which English family life begins.

But the old cottage of today is not so old that we need bridge over such a gulf of manners and customs as this. In reality it belongs not to the old life of the Middle Ages, but to the new life which dawned with the coming of the Renaissance to England, and which was the beginning of the modern era. It came when the old institutions of feudalism were finally crumbling away, when the Church ceased to predominate in the civil world, and when the middle classes began for the first time to be a power in the land. The cottage was the home of the sturdy British yeoman. The wars and feuds of earlier times had ceased, trade was increasing, the horizon was expanding, the new world kept pouring treasure into the old, and rural England settled down to a time of peaceful development and prosperity. A calm, sweet, and healthy life, not free from hardships, but carrying with it simple comforts, which lasted unbroken until rudely shaken by the coming of machinery, the new era of steam. And this long period of quiet served England well, for in spite of wars beyond the seas, peace reigned at home save for the few years of the civil war. It was then that the English navy arose, the country waxed rich and prosperous, and our colonies formed outlets to our trades, so that when the new age came, it found us prepared and ready to lead the march of progress, while the rest of the world lagged fifty years at least behind.

One cannot turn back the hands on the dial, but little wonder if, amid the noise and turmoil of modern life, we yearn for the peaceful stillness of earlier days. It is this quiet atmosphere that still haunts the old cottage. It is the symbol of the simple life. Here, it seems to say, is ‘rest after toil,’ toil simple and healthy under the open sky. And such age as it possesses does not alienate us. It is rendered more venerable, but not less familiar. Doubtless it is an old house; generation after generation have been born there, have lived their lives there and passed quietly away. Many children have played about the little garden and climbed the gnarled apple-tree; many an old man has sat on the bench by the door, warming his thin blood in the sunshine, while his grandchildren wake the echoes with their childish laughter. But these were all just men and women like ourselves, thinking our thoughts, speaking our language, the language of the English Bible. If not quite of today they are no further off than yesterday.

The quaintness of their old-fashioned ways touches us more by its half-forgotten familiarity than by any strangeness. It seems to belong to the golden age of our childhood. It makes us feel young again somehow, and we cling to it as we cling to the old authorised version of the Bible, rather than the revised version of today. That was the product of the same times as these cottages. It is marked by the same homely strength and beauty, and with age its sanctity has been surrounded with tender associations, just as the grey lichens and green mosses have gathered on the old buildings. The new version is doubtless more correct and more scholarly; the new cottage, it is safe to say, is more sanitary. Yet we cannot build the old cottages now, and we cannot write the English of the old Bible, and so we love and cherish them both. But while the one will live as long as the English language lasts, the days of the other, alas, are numbered. Three hundred years is a long, long life for timber, even old English oak; three hundred years of sun and rain, frost and snow. The old beams feel very old now, and for the cottage in most cases there is only the choice between restoration and speedy decay.

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If the restoration is done with a tender hand, the old corner posts, which have rotted below and gradually settled down, carefully raised and underpinned, and the old bent framework to some extent straightened out, perhaps a new lease of life may be given. But the whole building is like an old man twisted with rheumatism; to straighten out the poor old back would be to break it. The most one can do is to prop him up with a couple of sticks to sit in the sun, and beam on us kindly for a few more