Building record SBN 105 - Malting Cottage, Scotland Street

Malting Cottage is a grade II-listed timber-framed and rendered structure on the southern side of Scotland Street immediately opposite Scotland Place Farm. It now stands back from the highway and is screened by a front garden, but formerly adjoined a broad medieval green of which a small fragment still remains on the northern side of the road. The Stoke by Nayland enclosure map of 1817 shows the property with its present rectangular outline alongside a large eponymous maltings, most of which was demolished in the mid-19th century. Listed as ‘17th/18th century’ the house in fact dates from the late-14th or early-15th century and is of exceptional historic interest. Much of its framing is concealed by later plaster, hampering detailed analysis, but it appears to have been built as the three-bay parlour cross-wing of a high-status house which possessed an open hall on the right (west) and probably a second cross-wing beyond. The ceiling of the large two-bay parlour at the front of the surviving wing is largely hidden but retains an impressive pair of large brackets with a fine, heavily braced plain crown-post in the chamber above (now visible from the roof-space). The rear bay was a small open hall that formed a rare medieval kitchen, originally open to its roof and heated by a bonfire-like open hearth but now with an inserted 17th century ceiling of re-used timber. The internal wall of this kitchen is remarkably well preserved in the roof-space, retaining an almost complete gable of wattle-and-daub with carefully incised linear patterns that represent rare interior decoration – all heavily encrusted with medieval soot. The present fireplace at the back of the parlour contains a hollow-moulded early-16th century lintel and may have been inserted before the rest of the house was demolished, but the upper part of its chimney was rebuilt in the 19th century. A second ground-floor fireplace was subsequently added to the back of this chimney, intruding into the former kitchen. The present staircase is an addition of the late-19th century, but the rest of the internal partitions do not appear to pre-date the 20th century. The house was sub-divided into a pair of tenements between 1884 and 1902 (according to the Ordnance Survey), but had returned to a single dwelling by 1970. Other medieval features such as arched doors, wall paintings, window mullions and additional sooted wattle-and-daub may survive behind the later plaster of the original walls (S1).