Building record TDE 030 - Styles Piece, Little Green

A grade II-listed timber-framed house of exceptional historic interest. It was built in two phases during the 16th century and preserves a number of rare features such as a fine plank-and-muntin screen, painted brick noggin and moulded ceilings. The original structure of circa 1530 contained a hall and parlour with no obvious evidence of the service rooms found in most Tudor houses, and was highly ostentatious despite its small proportions. The hall was heated by a chimney against the back wall. At just 14 feet in width internally, and with a parlour of only 8 feet in length, the building’s scale was more appropriate for a modest smallholder, yet its finely carved and moulded jetty and oriel windows stood comparison with the best urban merchants’ houses. The structure also contained a narrow chamber above its cross-passage that may have formed a secure room similar to those found above contemporary porches and apparently reached only by a trap-door from the passage beneath. Its unusually compact layout, small scale and high status suggest, in combination with its close proximity to the parish church, that it may have been designed as a priest’s house – or possibly a dower residence. The building was somewhat normalised in the third quarter of the 16th century by the addition of a new parlour cross-wing with its own axial chimney and brick cellar at the ‘low’ end of the hall. This wing allowed the cross-passage to operate as a ‘lobby entrance’ between the hall and parlour, anticipating the fashion of the 17th century, and avoided the need to rebuild the old parlour – which was probably downgraded to a store room. By the 1840s the property had been divided into two tenements but was restored in the mid-20th century and now bears the 19th century name of the field to the rear (S1).