Explore "An Old English Home" by Sabine Baring-Gould on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The type of the old English cottage was -- one room below for kitchen and every other purpose by day, and one room upstairs for repose at night for the entire family, and this reached by a stair like a ladder. Very poor quarters as we now consider, but relatively not poor when compared with the farms and manor-houses at the time when they were built.
And a vast number of our labourers' cottages date from two, three, and four hundred years ago; especially where built of stone or "cob. " The latter is kneaded clay with straw in it. This makes a warm and excellent wall, and one that will endure for ever if only the top be kept dry. Brick cottages are later. Timber and plaster belong to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The oak turns hard as iron and is perhaps more enduring than iron, for the latter is eaten through in time with rust.