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It may look unremarkable, but this cottage in the village of Maple-durham
in Oxfordshire has a remarkable history. It is probably the oldest complete
medieval peasant’s house in Britain. Dan Miles, an independent dendrochronologist,
used the tree ring record to date the building to 1335, 15 years before
the Black Death.

The cottage was discovered during a survey, funded by the Lever-hulme
Trust, of 142 medieval houses. The researchers identified it as the most
unusual of a group of Oxfordshire houses dating from before 1350. Most medieval
houses in the Midlands and south of England are 15th century.

To date timbers, researchers take pencil-sized cores from the outside
to the centre of the timber and measure the widths of the rings, which vary
from year to year. These are compared with a ‘master sequence’ to give a
date for the outermost ring.

The master sequence is made by matching a long series of rings from
timbers – as many as 200 rings from each. Their age is deduced in turn by
working backwards from trees felled on known dates.

Using computer matching at the Nottingham Tree Ring Dating Laboratory,
the researchers compared timbers from the Mapledurham cottage with a master
sequence that runs from 1100 to the mid-eighteenth century and is precise
to within a year. The date – 1335 – is the date the trees used to make the
timbers were felled. Historians know from the way the peasant economy worked
that the timber would have been used immediately, without being stored or
seasoned.

Architectural historians can tell from the cottage’s construction that
it was not a manor house. For example, the roof is supported by two timbers
which form an upturned curved ‘V’ shape. Manor houses tended to have a more
sophisticated structure in which the two timbers were braced by a cross
beam to form an ‘A’ shape. The modest quality of the carpentry also betrays
the building’s lowly status.

Nat Alcock of the University of Warwick said it was probably size, rather
than quality of construction, that ensured the house’s survival. ‘Although
its construction was simple it was well enough built to survive 650 years
and fortunately was just large enough for conversion by the insertion of
upper rooms to be usable in a modern village.