Inside A Tudor House That's Been Lived In For 500 Years

At first glance you might think there isn't much Tudor about this house at all but look a little closer because hidden amongst the comforts of a modern home are the bones of a farmhouse built almost 500 years ago and once you know what you're looking for then history is everywhere. Hello and come to Through Lucy's Lens, videos where I go somewhere interesting and hopefully you'll find them interesting too. My name is Lucy and I'm a social historian and I'll be your guide on today's exploration and this one is absolutely perfect for all of you history detectives out there because rather than visiting a house which has been carefully furnished to recreate one particular moment in time, today we're going to look for the history ourselves. This is Wissam Hill in the village of Barton in Warwickshire just outside Bidford-on-Avon and with immense thanks I was invited to stay here for two nights and should you be looking for the perfect historical bolt hole you can too. So for once there are no velvet ropes, no closing time and no member of staff waiting patiently for me to leave because for two extraordinary days this building was my home and I think that's rather fitting because being a home is exactly what Wissam Hill has been for almost five centuries. So as we tour the house what you see might look quite modern but my words will help you imagine what was here in the past. The oldest parts of this house have been dated by dendrochronology, that's the study of tree rings and that has been dated to around 1530. The wood used to build this house was elm not oak as you might expect. So when the timbers of this house were being cut and assembled Henry VIII was still married to Catherine of Aragon. The Reformation hadn't yet transformed England, Elizabeth I hadn't been born and Shakespeare wouldn't arrive for another 34 years but when he did there's a potential he saw this house. There's a lovely Shakespeare connection here because the house is thought to have been built for a Thomas Bushall in 1530 and it was his grandson Edward Bushall who later sold the farm to the Payton family. Edward Bushall appears in one of the most famous surviving documents connected with William Shakespeare, a letter written to Shakespeare written by his friend Richard Quiney in 1598 asking Shakespeare for a loan of 30 pounds. In that letter it actually mentions Mr Bushall so although we can't claim that Shakespeare ever stood inside this house the family who built it certainly moved within his world and perhaps that connection shouldn't surprise us quite as much as it first appears because the house itself may tell us something about the family who built it. When Wisson Hill was constructed in 1530 many farmhouses of this type still followed a much older pattern of an open hall that would be where a fire burned in the heart of the hall and the smoke would make its way up into the roof and out of a hole but Wisson Hill did something more innovative. It appears to have been built with its first floor already in place rather than having one inserted at a later date as happened in many older houses. The smoke from the fire seems to have been channeled through a smoke bay before escaping into the roof space and you can see evidence today in heavily blackened timbers. This in 1530 was a forward looking way to build and historians studying the house have suggested that this may tell us something about its original owners. Not only that they had the money to build to a high standard but they may have been familiar with architectural ideas and fashions from beyond the immediate corner of Warwickshire where this house is. So perhaps the Bushell's family later connection with people such as William Shakespeare wasn't entirely out of character and the house didn't stop changing there. Later in the 16th century it seems to have been modernised again and one of the biggest clues is in its enormous four flue chimney. During restoration it was discovered that the chimney had actually been built around an earlier elm roof truss. So here you watch Tudor ideas about what made a comfortable home changing within the fabric of one house. The smoke blackened beams belong to one way of living and the four chimneys belong to another and here it still is not preserved as a Tudor museum but doing the job it was built to do, a home. Wills, rent books, tax records, court documents and maps may give us tiny snippets of information. Occasionally a name appears, disappears again or refuses to tell us quite what we want to know but slowly those fragments begin to put people back into this building and the house itself is a historical source and that's why I kept finding myself looking upwards because the timbers here aren't decorative pieces added to make a modern house look old, they're part of the structure itself. What's really lovely is for once I can not do a voiceover, a little bit of video without voiceover and actually show you some of the incredible things that they found during the restoration to this house. Some things in this collection are just my cup of tea, just the sort of things that you'd expect to find that have been used and tossed by somebody who lived here before so I'm going to show you a couple of my favourites. We have some wonderful clay pipes and I am particularly a fan of these because they're such a practical item. I can't help but think who held this in their hands before it was tossed aside, who was the last person to smoke tobacco from this pipe and these are really the equivalent of our historians in the future going to be digging around and finding cigarette butts that people have tossed aside for many years today and these are just such a practical beautiful thing, rubbish really at the time but people like me, I hold these in my hand and I think who smoked this last, who decided that it was no longer drawing correctly and threw it to one side and to hold something like this for somebody who loves social history is just, it sends tingles all the way through your body. Bones, bones and also shells and why are these important? Well they tell us what people ate. It's a farmhouse so people would have been eating animals that were raised on the farm, I think that's even potentially a tooth is it? And then oysters and mussels were a really important source of protein in the Tudor period and people think today they're quite a bougie food to eat, expensive but back then they were a really important source of protein for everybody and it's quite usual to find shells and I'm really glad that they're displayed here even in the middle of England where you wouldn't expect to be finding seafood. There they are, so these I believe are the samples that would have been sent to the dendrochronologist so they could evidence how old the timbers are in this building. There's also this shard of pottery which is potentially Tudor, maybe even a little earlier from the shape, some kind of bowl or vessel and again you think what was the last thing somebody ate out of this? Did somebody break it? Was it thrown away? Was it forgotten about? But again with something like this you're just holding history in your hands. Here is another piece of pottery, this is later potentially Victorian and it's an ear. Is it off the side of a once beloved dolly? This cabinet was just wonderful, right in front of your eyes, 500 years worth of artefacts that you can sit and spend time with and think about. This kind of thing for me is priceless. Discoveries like this are what makes restorations of a building like this so fascinating because you aren't only peeling back wallpaper or repairing plaster. Occasionally you're finding evidence of the people who were here before you and Wisson Hill spent centuries being adapted. Things were covered over, rooms changed their purpose, new materials arrived, modern services were threaded through old walls and ironically some of that covering up probably helped preserve what was underneath. So when Louise Chattock bought Wisson Hill in 1960 she was buying a rather dilapidated old farmhouse and she extended it and transformed it into a comfortable village home as it is today. Later owners have continued to live with and alter the building until its current owners arrived in 2006 and began the long process of researching and restoring it. And that's why I don't think the modern parts of Wisson Hill detract from its history, they're simply its newest layer. If every generation before us had refused to alter this house it probably wouldn't still be a house, it probably would have been knocked down or used for some other purpose. One of the best documented farming families connected with Wisson Hill is the Tipping family. By the 1840s William Tipping senior was farming here and later his son also William. By 1861 the younger William was recorded farming around 320 acres. Ten years later that had risen to some 500. So although we might hear the words tenant farmer and imagine someone living a fairly precarious existence that isn't necessarily the picture here. Families associated with the farm including the Tippings and the earlier Hursts appear in surviving wills, inventories and other records as established and respected members of the community. From this house they built a business, a livelihood and a home. Countless children grew up here, meals were eaten, work was organised, people became ill, celebrated, argued, slept and then eventually quietly disappeared from the records and somebody else took their place. In 1870 Wisson Hill was sold at auction. The new owner was Samuel Walker an industrialist from Birmingham with family connections to the area. The owner of the house changed but the Tipping family remained as the farmers here and I love these little details because although ownership changes on paper everyday life doesn't change. But towards the end of the 19th century changes much bigger than any one owner were beginning to affect places like this. British farming was increasingly competing with cheaper imported grain while mechanisation was transforming the way agricultural work was done. A farmhouse built for the rural world of 1530 had survived into the age of industry, railways and global trade. One of the most incredible things you notice as you move around the house is the sheer volume of marks, burns and etchings on the wooden structure. Some of these can look wonderfully mysterious and I know exactly where some of your minds are going. Witches marks. These are potentially marks to protect the inhabitants from evil spirits. However many marks found on the timber frames are actually carpenters assembly marks. A building like this was effectively created as an enormous wooden kit. Timbers were prepared and fitted together by carpenters before being raised into position and the marks helped identify which pieces belong together in a time before many labourers could read or write. There are burn marks however and these could have been a scorch mark from a long extinguished reed light or candle but some are in places where it wouldn't have been practical to place a light source or near places of vulnerability like fireplaces and doorways. These could have been placed to protect the house from harm, to remind the inhabitants of the danger of fire or to direct evil humours out of the house. One particularly intriguing example though and I would say this one has the most potential to be a witch's mark per se, is a faint daisy wheel or hexafoil discovered beneath the layers of black paint on a fireplace beam and thought to have been intended as a protective mark. We don't know if the owners asked for this to be put here, if they put it here themselves or if these marks were just habitually left by carpenters as a sign of the times but either way it's done its job protecting this house for 500 years so far. A farmhouse built for the rural world of 1530 had survived into the age of industry, railways and global trade and it would have to change again. By the 20th century Wisson Hill was no longer functioning quite as that self-contained farmstead of earlier generations. By the 1920s it had become part of a larger farming operation. The people that lived here might work on the land but might be employed connected with an estate also which included a fruit depot, a motor repair yard and even a pig farm. Quite the leap from the Tudor self-contained world we started in. A national property valuation tells us how the house was described in the 19th century. At that point it was described as partly stone and partly brick with a tiled roof. Inside was a dining room, a drawing room, a pantry, three bedrooms and a wash house. Outside stood agricultural buildings including a cow shed and a cart hovel. A working house still adapting itself to whatever the people living here needed it to be. After spending two nights here I think that's what I most liked about staying at Wisson Hill. It hasn't survived because somebody stopped the clock in 1530. It survived because nobody did. Nearly 500 years of people have repaired it, altered it, covered things up, uncovered them again and made it comfortable according to the modern idea at the time of what comfort means. But you can't argue that above you a timber's cut when Henry VIII was king and somehow I find that much more interesting than pretending the intervening five centuries never happened. The house is comfortable and cosy to our modern standards but you can live underneath the history. The extensive collection of books here meant that I didn't want to leave, just curl in a cosy corner reading Wolf Hall again and that's what I did. Wisson Hill isn't sitting in isolation. Just across the road is the River Avon and this whole part of the country is packed densely with history. Stratford upon Avon, famously the birthplace of William Shakespeare, is only a short distance away and the surviving records around Wisson Hill contain names connected with the wider Tudor and Stuart world of the Midlands. There's even a tantalising gunpowder plot connection in the history of local landholding. In 1600, rights connected with the tithes of Bidford, Barton and the surrounding area were leased for an optimistic term of 1,000 years to three men. One of them was Robert Winter. Five years later, Winter would become one of the principal conspirators in the gunpowder plot. Now to be clear that doesn't mean that Robert Winter lived at Wisson Hill or even visited but it does place this tiny Warwickshire community within the complicated network of land, money and families that made up the Midlands in which these events unfolded. And if you're here you really do not have to travel far to find more history. I spent some time exploring the surrounding area including the beautiful gardens at Hidcote and also the village of Chipping Camden isn't far where frankly you can point the camera in almost any direction and film something beautiful. But there was one nearby building in particular that I wanted to visit because after spending a few nights in a 16th century farmhouse which had survived by constantly adapting, I discovered another old farmhouse with a rather different second life and this is the Fleece Inn at Brett Thornton. And believe it or not it's actually older than Wisson Hill. Historic England dates its origins to probably the middle of the 15th century when this wasn't a pub at all it was also a farmhouse. Parts of that original timber frame building still survive although just like Wisson Hill what we're looking at today is the result of centuries of alterations. The house was substantially remodelled and enlarged during the 17th century and then in 1848 something happened which I suspect several of you will consider an extremely sensible use for a medieval building. It became a pub and what makes the Fleece particularly special is the remarkable continuity of the family associated with it. The final family owner was Lola Taplin who ran the pub until her death in 1977 and Lola did something really extraordinary she left this building to the National Trust. So a building which had begun life as a medieval farmhouse more than five centuries earlier was preserved not as a silent house but as a pub and it's still one today and they do the most incredible Sunday roast. On the day we visited there was also a wonderful reenactment group doing their thing and genuinely our afternoon here was one of the nicest I've had for a really long time. It was something I badly needed on that day and also hello to Zoe who was one of the reenactors who also watches the channel so that was that was awesome too. Anyway I think that's why visiting the Fleece made such a fitting end to my stay at Wisson Hill. Two very different places one is still a home one became a pub neither looks exactly as it did when its first timbers were raised and why would they? I think sometimes we're tempted to imagine that the best way to preserve an old building is to choose one moment in history and freeze it there forever but places like Wisson Hill show me that it's important not to do that. This house has survived the Tudors, the Stuarts, agricultural revolution, industrialisation, two world wars and almost 500 years of changing ideas about how we should live and through all of that people kept finding new ways to use it. Maybe the modern kitchen isn't hiding the history after all maybe it's evidence that the house is still alive and somewhere amongst all those modern comforts are marks left by carpenters who could never possibly have imagined someone standing here in 2026 filming their work for hopefully thousands of you to see and I think that's really lovely. So thank you for joining me on this trip to Wisson Hill and of course a huge thank you to Amanda the current owner for inviting me to stay and for sharing so much of the research and passion that has gone into understanding this remarkable house. There's endless further information on the Wisson Hill website that would have taken me hours to show you so I do urge you to go over there have a look and I'll pin that website address into the comments. You can also find out how you too can stay in this house. As always if you'd enjoyed exploring with me please consider subscribing for more history, more ordinary people and the extraordinary stories they leave behind. You're so welcome here and you make this happen. I'll see you all on the next one. Until then, goodbye.