(Continued)
As we are, in Little Thurlow, on the edge of various cloth-manufacturing areas ­ Haverhill dealing in fustians then light worsteds by 1622, Clare in says (a fine cloth, like serge) and broadcloth between 1450 and 1530, Bury and Long Melford producing other kinds of cloth in the fifteenth century, I wonder whether Lavender Cottage could have been the house of a clothier ­ one who bought wool, organised its processing and marketed the product. I have no evidence, except for the fact that the house was obviously built and inhabited by people of some wealth. David Dymond[5] in correspondence has said that he would be surprised if Little Thurlow did not have the occasional weaver or clothier, as we are so near Haverhill and the Stour (water is important in cloth manufacture), but the main occupation, borne out by my list above, was (and is) clearly farming. Justin Brooke was a farmer who purchased land in Wickhambrook in 1928. In his and his wife Edith's book, Suffolk Prospect (Faber, 1963), he describes how the first foreman he had was born in Thurlow and at the age of twelve found a job in Haverhill. He used to walk to work every day and he told JB that 'as he walked down the village street he used to hear the sound of the handlooms' ­ so the village has been associated with weaving at least. In the solar (my study), there may be a clue to this activity in the earlier period: one of the structural timbers has a series of holes or sockets, which may have housed frames and pegs on which the warp was wound ­ clothiers did sometimes have weavers working in their homes.

Sylvia Colman [6] did a tour of the house in 1986, but did not visit the attics. She thought there was very little evidence to go on, but that LC was built in the late sixteenth century. She dated the small-paned sash windows (shuttered) to the early nineteenth century and found traces upstairs of several original mullioned windows. She also found some slight evidence for the central room downstairs being a hall with a screens passage, though it was possible that the main entry might have been where the chimney stack now is, with the stairs at the other end of the stack (the present staircase is a nineteenth-century insertion). She did not, however, think the hall was ever open to the roof. The small wing at the rear was probably added as a kitchen in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, when the house was refronted. Adrian Taylor has an agreeable memory of his father holding a harvest supper or, in Suffolk, 'horkey' for all the parishioners of Little Bradley in this building before it was subdivided into hall and bathroom. Below this extension there is a blocked-up cellar, and it had two wells, one on each side (the builder has just uncovered the second storage well), with a pump in the kitchen. The house's gables were thatched until at least the fifties.