Wealden hall house

The Wealden hall house is a type of vernacular medieval timber-framed hall house traditional in the south east of England. Typically built for a yeoman, it is most common in Kent (hence "Wealden" for the once densely forested Weald) and the east of Sussex but has also been built elsewhere. Kent has one of the highest concentrations of such surviving medieval timber framed buildings in Europe.

The original plan usually had four bays with the two central ones forming the main hall open to the roof with the hearth in the middle and two doors to the outside at one end forming a cross passage. The open hearth was later moved towards the cross passage and became a fireplace with chimney, sometimes the chimney pile even blocking the cross passage, which had soon been screened off the main hall. Beyond the cross passage the outer bay at the "screens end" or "lower end" of the hall, usually contained two rooms commonly called buttery and pantry, while the rooms in the bay at the other end, the "upper end", were called parlours. The end bays each had an upper floor containing solars, which did not communicate with each other, as the hall rose to the rafters between them. The upper stories on both ends typically extended beyond the lower outer wall being jettied on at least one side of the building. As the main hall had no upper floor the outer wall ran straight up without jettying, and thus the central bays appeared recessed. The early buildings had thatched roofs and walls of wattle and daub often whitewashed. Later buildings would have a brick infilling between timbers, sometimes leading to a complete replacement of the outer walls of the basement with solid stone walls.

Hall house

The hall house is a type of vernacular house traditional in many parts of England, Wales, and lowland Scotland, as well as northern Europe, during the Middle Ages, centring on a hall. Usually timber-framed, some high status examples were built in stone.

Unaltered hall houses are almost unknown. Where they have survived, they have almost always been significantly changed and extended by successive owners over the generations.

Origins

In Old English, a "hall" is simply a large room enclosed by a roof and walls, and in Anglo-Saxon England simple one-room buildings, with a single hearth in the middle of the floor for cooking and warmth, were the usual residence of a lord of the manor and his retainers. The whole community was used to eating and sleeping in the hall. This is the hall as Beowulf understood it. Over several centuries the hall developed into a building which provided more than one room, giving some privacy to its more important residents.

A significant house needs both public and private areas. The public area is the place for living: cooking, eating, meeting and playing, while private space is for withdrawing and for storing valuables. A source of heat is required, and in northern latitudes walls are also needed to keep the weather out and to keep in the heat. By about 1400, in lowland Britain, with changes in settlement patterns and agriculture, people were thinking of houses as permanent structures rather than temporary shelter. According to the locality, they built stone or timber-framed houses with wattle and daub or clay infill. The designs were copied by their neighbours and descendants in the tradition of vernacular architecture. They were sturdy and some have survived over five hundred years. Hall houses built after 1570 are rare.

Hall House

Hall House or Hall Farm may refer to:
(sorted by state, then city/town)

Hall House (Bethel, Maine)

The Hall House is a historic house at 10 Kilborn Street in Bethel, Maine. Built in 1910 by Dana and Alfaretta Hall, this house is a rare and distinctive local example of Craftsman style, especially in consideration of its setting in a small Maine town. Although it is predominantly Craftsman in style, it structurally harkens to the traditional connected farmsteads of rural New England. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

Description and history

Little is known about the Hall family and their reasons for building this house. Apparently it was built to serve as either a retirement home or as an "in-town" house for the Halls, who were known to farm elsewhere in the county. The house was built over a three-month period in the summer of 1910.

The house is a wood frame structure 1-1/2 stories in height, clad in shingles, with a hipped standing seam metal roof, and resting on a foundation of stone and stone-faced concrete. The main block of the house is connected to a similarly-styled carriage house via a single-story hyphen which is fronted by a porch, reminiscent of typical New England connected farmsteads. Its main (south-facing) facade is three bays wide, with a slightly-projecting tower-like section in the right bay, which has its own low-pitch pyramidal roof, The center section has a sash window, and the left bay has a recessed porch providing access to the entrance. A hip-roof dormer projects from the roof above the main facade. A porch on the east side wraps around to the north side of the house, separated from the tower projection by a fieldstone chimney. A rectangular projection intrudes on the porch, topped by a gable dormer.

Wealden

Coordinates: 50°59′56″N 0°12′43″E / 50.999°N 0.212°E / 50.999; 0.212

Wealden is a local government district in East Sussex, England: its name comes from the Weald, the remnant Sussex and Surrey forest which was once unbroken and occupies much of the centre and north of this area. The term is cognate with Wald, forest or wood in German.

History

Wealden District was formed on 1 April 1974, under the Local Government Act 1972, by the merger of the Hailsham and Uckfield Rural District Councils (RDCs), both set up under the Local Government Act 1894, which also revived the parish councils.

Governance

Wealden District Council is elected every 4 years, with the Conservative party having had a majority on the council since the first election in 1973, apart from a couple of years after 1995 when no party had a majority. As of the last election in 2011 the council is composed of the following councillors:-

The district is second-level in local government, responsible for town and country planning and domestic rubbish and recycling collections, for example. There are 55 members of the Council, representing 35 wards. The towns have more than one ward: Crowborough has five; Hailsham, three; Heathfield, two; Polegate, two; and Uckfield, four. The ward boundaries are regularly redrawn in an attempt to maintain a standard number of electors per councillor. They are at 2007:

Wealden (UK Parliament constituency)

Coordinates: 50°59′56″N 0°12′43″E / 50.999°N 0.212°E / 50.999; 0.212

Wealden is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2015 by Nus Ghani, a Conservative.

History

This seat was created in the third periodic review of constituencies in 1983, from a mixture of the previous Mid and Northern divisions of the county (also known as Lewes and East Grinstead).

The seat's history is that of a safe Conservative seat. The Liberal Democrats including their two predecessor parties have so far always presented the main opposition candidate. The best result for the Labour Party was in 2001, however was 29.5% below the share of the vote taken by the winner. Closest in percentage majority was the election of 1997 with a majority of 24% of the vote, still more than a marginal gap separated the two main local parties.

Locally born Charles Hendry served as a Minister of State in the Department of Energy and Climate Change from 2010-2012 following two years in the shadow role in opposition.