The late Jack Ravensdale, well-known landscape historian, especially of Landbeach [4], visited the garden, the house, and its attics, and also thought it could be a hall-house of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries (c. 14851510), a yeoman farmer's dwelling with good oak timbers, though no original blackened-with-smoke ones were left as evidence in the central roof area over where an open hearth would have stood. He thought the main brick chimney stack and a floor over the hall could have been inserted about 15601640, to create a three-cell unit on two storeys, the upper or north end downstairs being the parlour with solar over (now our living room and my study); and the service or south end being the buttery and pantry and possibly kitchen too (now Jeremy's study and a 'glory hole'), with bedroom over. Kitchens were, however, often separate buildings because of the fire risk.
Although no sooty timbers could be found as 'hard evidence', there is one interesting clue to support this hall-house theory: there is a change of level upstairs between what could have been the central area and the bedroom over the service area. At the moment, the front door aligns with a rear door leading to the garden and this could possibly have been the site of a screens passage separating the open hall with its central hearth from the service area. The hall space without the huge chimney stack and up to this suggested screens passage would have been about fifteen feet square, but halls were quite often small. The earliest examples of jetties projections on an upper floor date back to the thirteenth century, which tells us precisely nothing. A rather exciting recent find, though (in addition to various pots and bottles), by the builder constructing our conservatory, is the remains of a bread oven in an appropriate spot in the service area's possible pantry, which is, according to Chambers' Twentieth Century Dictionary (1983), 'a room or closet for provisions and table furnishings or where plate, knives, etc. are cleaned', from French paneterie and Latin panitaria - Latin panis = bread.