Building record LMD 321 - Teal Cottage, The Green

Teal Cottage is a late-15th century timber-framed house. It differs rom the usual layout of medieval houses and appears to have been designed as an artisan's residence or perhaps as a bake-house and brew-house. It contained a floored parlour and hall that was initially open to its crown-post rood and heated by an open hearth, but it lacked the storge rooms found in houses of higher status. Small medieval tenements of this kind are known elsewhere, but this example, unusually, was aligned with its hipped hall gable and cross-passage towards the green and possessed a tall, unglazed window in the same façade. Two similar windows occupied the normal positions in both side walls to create an exceptionally well-it and well-ventilated interior. Other anomalies included a lack of arch-braces to the tie-beam which spanned the hall roof, and differences in the height and width of the side windows, but precise analysis is hampered bu the subsequent rebuilding of its northern wall and eastern gable and by the loss of its roof to fire in the 1990s. It is possible that the cottage was designed as the detached kitchen or bake-house of an adjacent property, but if so was quickly converted into a domestic dwellin by adding a lean-to service room to its western gable and is depicted as an independent property on a map of 1613. The present building, with the insertion od a hall ceiling and brick chimney (replacing an earlier timber-framed exampe), has changed very little sincle the mid-17th century (S1).