The Variety of ‘Cottage’ Housing in Durham and Norfolk, 1600-1800

"Cottagers occupied an awkward space in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Seventeenth-century treatises on tenure found the cottager a problematic category. Even the material definition of a cottage was ambiguous to seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century commentators, since cottages were not easily distinguished from hovels. Though the sense that the cottage was a small house, with a household that ought to maintain itself above the threshold of real poverty, endured to form the basis of a more positive attitude towards the cottage from the later eighteenth century. Cottage was also applied as a term for industrial housing, particularly in semi-rural contexts, such as coal and lead mining, and in rural manufacturing districts. The erosion of customary tenure and common rights, alongside the spread of wage-labour, deprived the ‘cottager’ of access to land, and arguably turned the cottage into the housing of a rural proletariat. This, however, was an uneven process and cottages on commons and small-holdings remained through to 1800, with some vestige of peasant living traditions. This paper explores the varieties and continuities in the material evidence for ‘cottage’ living arrangements – focusing particularly on arrangements within the house, in terms of both the use of space and ‘household stuff’ (furnishings, utensils, decorative items and so forth). These findings arise from my current research into the documentary and archaeological evidence for poorer housing in the contrasting regions of Durham and Norfolk. Industrial ‘cottage’ housing in the coal mining and lead mining communities of County Durham will be compared with the surviving evidence for more rural households in Norfolk. In addition to archaeological evidence for the variety of cottage housing, use will be made in particular of hearth tax records, pauper and probate inventories, and parish overseer and churchwarden accounts."