Silly cotes
Mirabel Cecil
The English Country Cottage R. J. Brown (Hale £6.50).
This book fairly rips the roses down from round cottage doors and tears up their crazy Paving paths. It is a history Of both the living conditions in, and the construction of, the English country cottage which has been on the receiving end of so much sentiment. Cottage life if you were an agricultural worker — as most country dwellers were before the present century — appears not to have been particularly cosy. R. J. Brown quotes from two acute observers, separated bY two centuries or more, who shared the same disgust at living conditions — Bishop Hall and William Cobbett.
God wot! a silly cote, Whose thatched sparres are furr'd with Sluttish soot, A whole inch thick, shining like blackmoor's brows. .
Wrote Hall about the interior of cottages in the early 17th century. In Cobbett's Rural Rides in 1830 he wrote, 'Look at these hovels, made of mud and straw . . . Enter them, and. . . look at the thing called a bed; and survey the rags on the backs of the wretched inhabitants', after visiting some miserable sheds' where farmworkers lived in Leicestershire, one of the richest agricultural counties. The only way the picturesque entered cottage life, as described by R. J. Brown, until this century was through the Picturesque movement which started at the end of the 18th century and resulted in fantastic buildings springing up in various parts of the Countryside with little spires and turrets as landowners read the latest book on architectural design or saw other landowners erecting Picturesque cottages on their estate. R. J. Brown hails originally from Croydon, presumably not from a cottage _ . ls earlier book is Windmills of England; he is a quantity surveyor with a passion for the buildings of our countryside which fills this book and tides one over his infelicity of style. He says, for instance, that 'the depression among the farmers caused them to lay off men' after the Napoleonic Wars, conjurmg up a picture of the farmers, their rubicund cheeks overcast by a collective Melancholy, dismissing their workers. Style, in fact, is not a hallmark of R.J. Brown's book; its special strength is the Myriad delicate pen-and-ink drawings he as done with meticulous care of cottages throughout the country. He is, as one would expect from a surveyor, particularly sound .n construction and there arc many drawlti gs.of details of roofs and brickwork in the second part of the book which is about the building of cottages. There is also a glossary of building terms which is handy for people like myself for whom a diaper does not usually signify 'an all-over pattern of diamond, square or lozenge shapes generally used in brickwork and farmed with bricks of two colours'.
The English Country Cottage is a useful handbook for those of us who are, like R.J. Brown, fascinated by the buildings of the British countryside and their development.
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