Reading the Regency

Property - The Cottage

Cottages should be no more than twelve feet wide. Anything wider than twelve feet would be "approaching the size of a house for a superior tradesman". Rooms of ten feet square were common, although some writers thought that was too small. A larger cottage wouldn't necessarily provide more space for a family; instead, it would likely have been occupied by more people.

A genuine cottage, suitable for a working-class family, would rarely contain more than six rooms: three bedrooms, a kitchen, a parlour and a third small room sharing space with the staircase that could be used for storage or as a workroom. This might sound like a lot of space, but families with eight or ten children weren't unusual at the beginning of the 19th century.

It was recommended that every cottage should have a piece of ground, proportionate to its size, and with access to fresh water, either by a spring or a well. A garden offered many benefits. It gave them something to do when they were not at work, so they were less inclined to sit idle, or waste their wages at the pub. It also provided land to grow food that they could eat or sell at market and keep a cow or a pig.

Generating additional income from the garden often made the difference between a family prospering and one that struggled to keep a roof over their heads:

"It frequently happens that a labourer lives in a house at twenty or thirty shillings a year rent, which he is unable to pay, to which, if a garden of a rood was added, for which he would have to pay five or ten shillings a year more, that he would be enabled, by the profit he would derive from the garden, to pay the rent of the house &c, with great advantage to himself."
[Cottage Pictures, or the Poor, by Mr. Pratt, pub 1803]

A Rood was a measurement of area, with one rood being equal to 10,890 square feet. (1,012 sq. metres)

The multiple occupancy cottage

"But as to that Cottage, I can assure you Sir that it is in fact—(inspite of its spruce air at this distance—) as indifferent a double Tenement as any in the Parish, and that my Shepherd lives at one end, and three old women at the other."
[Sandition, by Jane Austen]

Not all cottages were detached, or standing separate from their neighbours. Some cottages were built specifically to house more than one family under one roof. The rooms in one half of the house would be mirrored in the other half, and they would share a party wall in the middle. This type of double cottage allowed the landowner to fit more houses into a limited amount of space.

A row of cottages could be a line of four or five houses, joined at either side. They would only have windows to the front and back, and each house would have the same number of rooms. A series of cottages in a row would also save on building costs compared to a detached cottage, but wouldn't allow each cottage much land for a garden.

Local Construction

The traditional idea of a stone or whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof would not have been common throughout the whole country. The materials used to build a cottage would have been sourced locally, depending on what was easily accessible.

Walls could have been built of stone, brick, flint or timber beams filled with cob, (lump clay) turf or brick. The finished walls could be covered in stucco, (plaster) or whitewash. Roofs were made of slate, tile, thatch, turf or other local plant based materials.

This regional variation of materials was beautifully described in "The English Peasant", by Richard Heath, pub. 1893:

"In the north, their architecture is in keeping with the stern form Nature present among the Cumbrian hills; while in the south, covered with ivy and hidden amongst gardens and orchards, each little cot appears a poem in itself. This harmony is partly due to the fact that the same soil which produces the natural scenery produces the material of which the cottages are built. In the north wood is scarce, stone plentiful: hence the stone villages of Lancashire and Yorkshire. In the pottery districts and the midland counties clay is abundant; here, therefore, brick cottages are the rule. In Westmoreland the red sandstone is used; in Kent the ragstone, in Lincolnshire the Ancaster stone, in Cornwall granite, in Essex and Herts flints from the chalk hills, in Hampshire mud mixed with pebbles, in Norfolk and Suffolk lumps of clay mixed with straw."