Forgotten buildings: detached kitchens in Southeast England

Forgotten buildings: detached kitchens in Southeast England David Martin Few archaeologists study standing domestic buildings, but such investigation can yield novel insights into how people lived in their home environments, especially when it is coupled with documentary evidence. Recent research by a member of the UCL Field Archaeology Unit has led to the surprising conclusion that detached kitchens were, after houses and barns, the most com­ mon type of building during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Southeast England. Much of the new evidence comes from the assessment of listed buildings in the planning process and shows how commercial archaeology can serve academic research.

Few archaeologists study standing domestic buildings, but such investigation can yield novel insights into how people lived in their home environments, especially when it is coupled with documentary evidence. Recent research by a member of the UCL Field Archaeology Un it has led to the surprising conclusion that detached kitchens were, after houses and barns, the most com mon type of building during the fi fte enth and sixteenth centuries in Southeast England. Much of the new evidence comes fr om the assessment of listed buildings in the planning process and shows how commercial archaeology can serve academic research.
T oday very few detached kitch ens survive, and those that do mainly date from the period AD 1450-1550. They are surpris ingly large and complex, often with two storeys, and documentary evi dence suggests that, in addition to the kitchen itself, they sometimes contained such service rooms as bakehouses and dairies, and had upper chambers used fo r living accommodation and extra storage. However, the surviving kitchens probably represent the larger, more elaborate types, and many of those now lost may have been no more than single-room single-storey outhouses. Households with detached kitchens, of whatever type, evidently en joyed higher social status than those with out, a difference often obscured by the fact that the surviving houses are of similar size and layout.
The historical evidence It is normally assumed that detached kitchens were commonplace only on monastic and large manorial sites. How ever, re-appraisal of historical sources suggests that during the fifteenth and six teenth centuries many vernacular house holds in Southeast England included such a building. The abundance of detached kitchens is illustrated by a particularly detailed survey of Robertsbridge Manor, Sussex, made in 1567.1 This mentions a total of 123 houses within the small town ship of Robertsbridge and the surrounding rural parishes. Of these, 43 had detached kitchens, a ratio of over one in three. There is a noticeable difference between the fig ures for the Robertsbridge township and those for the rural parishes. Of the 48 houses within Robertsbridge only 8 (17 per cent) are mentioned as having kitch ens, whereas in the rural parishes 41 per cent ofthe houses had them. It was only on smallholdings of less than 6ha (15 acres) that kitchens were rare; they are men tioned on 48 per cent of holdings above that size. From these figures, it can be inferred that in the mid-sixteenth century, in this part of Sussex at least, detached kitchens were the most common type of building after houses and barns.
Evidence from the records of several local manors suggests that detached kitch ens experienced rapid destruction as they became redundant during the late six teenth century, presumably as a result of changes in living patterns. Such changes are reflected in the houses by the flooring over of open halls, the glazing of windows and improvements to privacy. Manorial records suggest that by 1567 the popular ity of the detached kitchen was already on the wane, and therefore the evidence from the Robertsbridge survey may not repre sent the peak of such buildings. This could explain the dearth of detached kitchens within the then wealthy township of Robertsbridge, where evidence from the buildings suggests that modernization was being carried out ahead of such change in its rural hinterland.

Surviving detached kitchens
Although the documents suggest that ver nacular detached kitchens were once com mon, very few of them appear to have survived. However, the total is gradually increasing as more buildings are recog nized for what they are. One example at Littlebrook (Crowborough, Sussex) exists today as a fr eestanding "shed" in front of the house (Fig. 1), but usually those that remain have either been incorporated into the expanded main house or have been demoted to agricultural use.
In all, 15 surviving detached kitchens have now been identified by the author in eastern Sussex alone, and others are sus pected. Judging from surviving monastic examples, one might expect such build ings to take the form of a single room, square in plan and open throughout its height. However, the Sussex examples typically measure between 8 m and 11.5 m (26-38 feet) long and 5.25-6.5 m (17-2 1 feet) wide. Only Littlebrook has a one room plan, and two others have only one Until recently it had been assumed that, except on a few high-status sites, the standard late-medieval English home stead comprised a house, a barn and perhaps one or two minor agricultural buildings. But, in Southeast England at least, this picture is now being challenged by information derived from fi eld studies. Buildings are increasingly being identi fied that, although house-like in their general size and appearance, and certainly serving domestic purposes, do not con form to the general layout and design of traditional domestic (vernacular) houses. More significant! y, most of these buildings are closely associated with a house of more standard design on the same holding. A re appraisal of the documentary evidence suggests that they should be identified with the medieval Latin term "coquina" or kitchen. It is becoming evident that, at least for the fifteenth and sixteenth centu ries in Southeast England, a whole class of building -the detached kitchen -has been overlooked. More surprising still, the former kitchens that survive appear to have been substantial multi-room two storey buildings only slightly smaller than the main house -a conclusion with major implications for the study of late-medieval vernacular households in England. ground-floor room with a small first-floor chamber built over one end. With the exception of Littlebrook, all have at least one, and usually two, upper chambers. Research suggests that a typical arrange ment was a building in which a two-bay "kitchen" room had one bay open to the roof, with a first-floor chamber over the second bay. In addition, there was a fu r ther ground-floor room (in some instances more than one) with a chamber above. In some buildings a gallery ran across the open bay linking the chambers (Fig. 2). Other variations occur. At Comphurst, (Wartling, Sussex) the cooking room is located at the end with only a narrow area, called a "smoke bay", open to the roof. Externally this example is particularly elaborate, with an overhanging upper storey, moulded beams and costly wall framing, although internally it is very plain (Figs 3, 4).
It is often the location of these struc tures, close to the rear of a main house of standard layout, that gives the first clue to their true function. For example, at ground-floor level, Comphurst is located just 2.5 m behind the house, and at Darwell Beech (Mountfield, Sussex) the kitchen is even closer (just over 2m from the house). In both cases the internal arrangement of the kitchen indicates very clearly its sub servience to the dwelling: both incorpo rated a wide passage leading through the service rooms of the kitchen to give easy access to the house (Figs 3, 5).
Given the superficial resemblance of detached kitchens to houses, it is always worth re-assessing existing records of standing buildings to check whether any kitchens have been wrongly classified as houses. Such an exercise in Sussex revealed two kitchens previously wrongly identified. Nor is the need for re-assess ment limited to standing buildings. A two room "building 3" found in 1952 during excavation of the deserted medieval vil lage of Hangleton, north of Brighton, was reconstructed at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum near Chichester as an example of a typical thirteenth-or four teenth-century village house. This struc ture was chosen for reconstruction at the museum because it was the best preserved, the remains being partially protected as a result of the platform having been cut into the hillside. The base of an oven incorpo rated into the northeastern corner of the structure was particularly significant. 2 The interpretation of this structure as a house appears never to have been chal lenged, but its location, cut into the bank immediately behind building 8 (the prob able house) seems far more consistent with it having been a detached kitchen.
Despite their wholesale destruction or conversion during the late sixteenth cen tury, some kitchens continued to be used until remarkably recently. Thus, at Gate House Farm (Ewhurst, Sussex) the detached kitchen mentioned in the 1567 Robertsbridge survey was rebuilt as a detached structure around 1600 and was not incorporated into the main body of the house until later in the seventeenth cen tury. Additional evidence comes fr om a 1727 map of Robertsbridge manor that shows domestic structures shaded pink and farm buildings grey.3 Two houses, both of which were described as having detached kitchens in 1567, are shown with a smaller pink-shaded structure to one end, suggesting that at that date the detached kitchens still survived and con tinued to fulfil their original fu nction. Similarly, a plan drawn in 1706 shows the large detached kitchen at the Old Rectory (Chiddingstone, Kent) still in use at that date (Fig. 6). It was not replaced until 1733 when a service wing was added to the house! Likewise, the house and kitchen at Darwell Beech, Mountfield (Fig. 5), were not joined to form a single structure until about 1730.

The use of detached kitchens
That the terms "kitchen" or "coquina" were used in contemporary documents to indicate a multi-room multi-function structure should be no surprise. The term "barn" or "horreum" was used regardless of whether it referred to a traditional single-room structure, used solely for the storage and processing of cereals and other crops, or to a multi-room multi-function farm building that incorporated as one of its several uses the storage and processing of crops. Likewise, manorial records com monly refer to the dwelling on a holding as the "hall" or "aula", although it is accepted that this referred not just to the hall but also to its attendant service rooms and chambers. Proof that the term "coquina" does indeed relate to multi room structures in which the "kitchen" was the most important room is to be found in a 1567 description of Great Worge (Brightling, Sussex). The fifteenth-century house upon this holding still survives and is accurately described room by room in the survey. Measurements given corre spond closely to those of the surviving house. Having completed the description of the house, the entry then describes a building that it calls a kitchen and which measured 9.15 x5.05 m (30ft long by 16.5 ft wide) and stood 4.25m (14ft) to the rear of the house. It was built of timber and covered with tile, and it contained three ground-floor rooms, all with further rooms or lofts above. The principal room was where carcasses were cut into joints, but it also contained an oven and an oast (i.e. a kiln) for drying malt. The other two ground-floor rooms were called a bake house and a milkhouse (i.e. a dairy).5 A second documentary reference to such a kitchen comes fr om Essex in 1356, when the abbot and convent of Westminster gave the vicar of Kelvedon "one hall ... with a solar and chamber at one end of the hall and with a buttery and cellar at the other. Also, one other house in three parts, namely a kitchen, with a convenient chamber in the end of the said house for guests, and a bakehouse".6 It is worth noting that in both of the above examples the additional ground-floor rooms are said to have fulfilled a service function. At Kelvedon the upper chamber served as a guest lodging, but at Great Worge how the upper rooms were used is not stated.  Although it can be demonstrated that these multi-room structures were, at the time oftheir construction and use, referred to as kitchens, the word is perhaps mis leading to us today. It conjures up the men tal image of fully prepared meals being carried from the detached kitchen to be consumed -probably lukewarm -within the house. This impression is likely to be inaccurate . These buildings are perhaps better referred to as detached service buildings where the dirty, smelly ele ments of food preparation were carried out. The description of the Great Worge example specifically mentioned the dress ing of meat (the cutting up of the carcass into its joints). In this room too the tasks of malting and baking were carried out.
Brewing was probably also undertaken there. These detached buildings are not unlike the rear service ranges that increas ingly formed part of larger vernacular houses from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. And it is surely no coincidence that the internal layouts of these attached service ranges are very similar and in some instances identical to those of their earlier detached cousins. In these attached ver sions there is usually no intercommuni cation between the first-floor chambers within the service range and those within the main house, and it is likely that they functioned as lodgings for the household servants. A similar function for these chambers also seems likely for the earlier detached versions.

Implications fo r studies of English vernacular houses
It has long been believed that a medieval or early to mid-sixteenth century house incorporating an attached kitchen was of superior social status to a similar structure without an attached kitchen. It is perhaps time we re-evaluated this conclusion. Although late sixteenth-century and later houses incorporating attached kitchens are often of high status, in earlier buildings the attached kitchen normally took the form of a single open room attached either to the end or rear of a house of standard medieval layout. Now that it is evident at least on the larger vernacular holdings that many detached kitchens were multi-room structures with upper chambers, it seems likely that a household with such a struc ture was markedly superior in social status to one that incorporated a single-room attached kitchen and not the reverse, as is usually assumed. There is a further point.

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Consider two houses of similar size and layout, one formerly serviced by a detached kitchen and the other lacking any form of kitchen. Today both would seem to represent households of equal size and status, whereas one would have pos sessed almost double the accommodation of the other -an observation with impor tant implications for the study of vernac ular buildings in many parts of England.