History Lottery Win

Lower Holt Street late 14th century two-bay hall with late 15th century cross-wing.

The photograph above is one of the handful that appear on the Earls Colne "Records of an English Village 1375-1854" site that I referred to a few posts ago - the one that took 27 years of scholarly effort to compile.  This building is now numbered 18 and 20 Lower Holt St., but was once known as Francis 104, 103, and 103a (Francis being the name of this piece of manorial land, as was the convention to name land, and the numbers being the plot numbers).  All very interesting, you say to yourselves, stifling yawns and wishing I would get on with it.  Well, my beloved relations, distant cousins, and interested parties visiting the blog, what would you say if I told you that half of this little cottage once belonged to our great-x's 9-grandparents, Adam and Rose Brewer?   It turns out that a piece of historical architecture still standing in Earls Colne (looking quite worse for wear in this 1980 photograph), belonged to our ancient relations.  Once again: what are the chances?  Man... it's days like this that fuel the addiction to genealogy.

[I just went to Google Street View, and it looks like it's in much better shape now.  And probably worth a ridiculous sum of money.]

More to come on our Earls Colne family, and a bit about the manorial system of copyhold tenure that led me to this discovery.



image credit: http://linux02.lib.cam.ac.uk/earlscolne/reference/images/house2.htm, from the Earls Colne "Records of an English Village" repository.