The Buildings of England: Derbyshire

devotes three pages to lesser houses and vernacular buildings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and goes on to discuss eighteenthand nineteenth-century workers’ housing. Derbyshire played an important part in the evolution of the study of vernacular architecture with the Sheffield-based architect C. F. Innocent using many examples from the county in his Development of English Building Construction (1916), as did S. O. addy in his Evolution of the English House (1898). it is good to see the work of both writers highlighted in the introduction. Vernacular specialists reading a Pevsner need to bear in mind that the Buildings of England is not intended to be an all-inclusive catalogue. it is selective and, inevitably, it cannot include more than a proportion of vernacular buildings, be they houses or field barns. Having said that, there are far more vernacular structures included in this edition than in its predecessors. looking through my rather foxed and dog-eared copy of the first edition, it is apparent that its coverage generally remained above the vernacular threshold, although it included many lesser houses of sixteenthto eighteenth-century date, and did occasionally note some smaller buildings — in new Mills ‘a group of characteristic seventeenthto eighteenth-century cottages, gone slummy’. But the small size of the volume gave little scope for more detailed accounts. By contrast, the third edition has entries such as that for Lowerstreet Farm, Doveridge, ‘a good example of sixteenth-century close studding, with offset door and big chimneystack as evidence of the standard tripartite plan’, considerably more revealing than the ‘sixteenth century, timber-framed’ of its predecessor. an example of the extent to which coverage has increased is afforded by Brassington, where the previous edition describes tudor house and goes on to state that ‘Brassington is rich in good eighteenth-century vernacular-style houses with square-sectioned mullioned windows e.g. West end Manor, 1793, a very late dated example’. the new edition, besides tudor house and West end Manor, also mentions Sundial cottage, Brassington hall, the Gate inn and red lion house as examples of seventeenthand eighteenth-century vernacular buildings. increasing use of dendrochronological evidence has enabled more confident statements about the development of building construction to be made in the introduction. hartwell indicates that the dating of cruck framing to 1535 in a threshing barn at Barlow Woodseats, together with other examples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, points to its continued use into the seventeenth century, confirming a pattern revealed by dendrochronology in other counties. there is also inclusion of much small-scale rural industry for the first time, an example being at Birley Hay, ridgeway, where the existence of ‘cottages, millpond and a dam (with traces of a water-powered scythe and sickle forge)’ is noted, and at nearby Commonside Farm where ‘a former scythe workshop survives’. indeed, as will be expected, given the central role of Derbyshire in the industrial revolution, industrial buildings feature strongly Kohnert describes medieval houses in the altstadt of Bamberg, where the earliest houses (1150–1200) are of sandstone, mostly surviving only as fragments. Somewhat later, these were succeeded by buildings in brick, one group of which appear to be for storage, since they lack fireplaces or large windows. For Switzerland, a short paper (Bourgarel) reports research in Fribourg, where 69 houses have thirteenth-century masonry, in contrast to the previous view that timber buildings dominated the town until the fifteenth century. Another paper (Furrer) presents an overview of rural timber buildings from 1250 to 1350. notably, the earliest buildings, of the 1200–1300s, use horizontal planks (squared) or logs (rounded). as well as these buildings with timbers interlocking at the corners, others are described with vertical corner posts, slotted to hold horizontal planks (Ständerbohlen Bauten; cf. the Danish Bul construction technique), including one of 1315d, incorporated into a larger house in 1470. As a whole, the significance of the book in relation to vernacular architecture in Britain is particularly for the wider european context, even though the building traditions are generally very different. it is surprising that the earliest stone houses in england seem to have little in common with their near contemporaries in cluny and elsewhere in France. Similarly, the dramatic early brick façades of the Hanseatic towns find only the faintest of echoes here. the access the volume provides to tree-ring dating results is particularly valuable. the information on such aspects as the absence of surviving timber-framed buildings in Germany before 1260 raises questions for Britain, where the european parallels may well be instructive.