[11] The Charm of the English Village, pp. 50-7.

[Illustration:  Gothic Corner-post.  The Half Moon Inn, Ipswich]

Surrey is a county of good cottages and farm-houses, and these have had their chroniclers in Miss Gertrude Jekyll’s delightful Old West Surrey and in the more technical work of Mr. Ralph Nevill, F.S.A.  The numerous works on cottage and farm-house building published by Mr. Batsford illustrate the variety of styles that prevailed in different counties, and which are mainly attributable to the variety in the local materials in the counties.  Thus in the Cotswolds, Northamptonshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Westmorland, Somersetshire, and elsewhere there is good building-stone; and there we find charming examples of stone-built cottages and farm-houses, altogether satisfying.  In several counties where there is little stone and large forests of timber we find the timber-framed dwelling flourishing in all its native beauty.  In Surrey there are several materials for building, hence there is a charming diversity of domiciles.  Even the same building sometimes shows walls of stone and brick, half-timber and plaster, half-timber and tile-hanging, half-timber with panels filled with red brick, and roofs of thatch or tiles, or stone slates which the Horsham quarries supplied.

[Illustration:  Timber-built House, Shrewsbury]

[Illustration]

These Surrey cottages have changed with age.  Originally they were built with timber frames, the panels being filled in with wattle and daub, but the storms of many winters have had their effect upon the structure.  Rain drove through the walls, especially when the ends of the wattle rotted a little, and draughts were strong enough to blow out the rushlights and to make the house very uncomfortable.  Oak timbers often shrink.  Hence the joints came apart, and being exposed to the weather became decayed.  In consequence of this the buildings settled, and new methods had to be devised to make them weather-proof.  The villages therefore adopted two or three means in order to attain this end.  They plastered the whole surface of the walls on the outside, or they hung them with deal boarding or covered them with tiles.  In Surrey tile-hung houses are more common than in any other part of the country.  This use of weather-tiles is not very ancient, probably not earlier than 1750, and much of this work was done in that century or early in the nineteenth.  Many of these tile-hung houses are the old sixteenth-century timber-framed structures in a new shell.  Weather-tiles are generally flatter and thinner than those used for roofing, and when bedded in mortar make a thoroughly weather-proof wall.  Sometimes they are nailed to boarding, but the former plan makes the work more durable, though the courses are not so regular.  These tiles have various shapes, of which the commonest is semicircular, resembling a fish-scale.  The same form with a small square shoulder is very generally used, but there is a great variety, and sometimes those with ornamental ends are blended with plain ones.  Age imparts a very beautiful colour to old tiles, and when covered with lichen they assume a charming appearance which artists love to depict.