The original Lavender Cottage seems, he thinks, to have been a development of the 'Wealden' type of open-hall house in which the end sections were two-storeyed and jettied, but were not true cross-wings (Thatcher's Hall at Hundon is an example). This development was known as a 'long-wall jetty house', built not with an open hall, but with a two-storey one instead. This early building would have had, in addition to parlour and solar at the upper end, buttery and pantry at the lower or service end and there may also have been a shop (more clothier 'evidence'!). The later extension wing may have been used as a dairy. A key reason for our building a new conservatory is that practically none of the windows faces the garden the house builder was very preoccupied with its status on the street. Philip Aitkens thinks Lavender Cottage was given an appropriately refined appearance with the elegant front door, the sash windows and the shutters, in about 1820.
Whatever the history of the fabric or the dates of building and rebuilding, several people apart from Jeremy and me, have commented on the happy atmosphere of the house. It may be ascribed to the apotropaic ('turning aside evil') marks scratched on the beams of the dining room (a runic 'butterfly'), or the MAs or AMs (Mary, Ave Maria) of the living room certainly the latter was designed to ward off witches coming down the chimney to create havoc.
But Eileen Power has this to say, in her book, The Paycockes of Coggeshall (Methuen, 1920): 'A house is like a pipe: it needs to be seasoned... if it seems to have just stopped speaking to you when you wake, if sunlight and twilight and firelight seem equally the best light for all its panels, its corners, its great beams then it is a seasoned house. Years of humanity have wrought it to that pitch of sympathy. For a house is not like a landscape or a cathedral, beautiful in itself and eternally right... A house is only beautiful and right in use; to be good to live in is an intrinsic part of its beauty.'