Building cottages in seventeenth-century Wales: petitions, permissions and poetry

In early modern Wales, cottages were found on marginal land and roadsides in most parishes, housing labourers and craftsmen and their families, as well as the incapacitated and the elderly. A durable (but not necessarily permanent) dwelling could make the life-saving difference between manageable poverty and destitution. Eurwyn Wiliam in The Welsh Cottage (2010) has eloquently surveyed the building traditions of the rural poor from about 1750-1900. This article discusses an earlier generation of cottages for which the evidence is very largely documentary. It becomes increasingly clear from the seventeenth century documentary record that building a cottage regarded as legal was by no means straightforward. The successful cottage had to rest on social as well as structural foundations. Preparation for building involved local acts of persuasion and, if needs be, petitioning magistrates at the Quarter Sessions for 'habitation orders'. Persuasion extended to the process of cottage construction: building materials had to be patiently accumulated - begged, borrowed and sometimes stolen - and building craftsmen usually had to be paid for their services. This article presents the text and translation of a poem composed by Huw Morys (1622-1709) to persuade various craftsmen to give their services freely for building a cottage for an elderly couple in Llansilin parish, Denbighshire. The poem is an informed description of the processes of building, with wry depictions of the cottagers, as well as an amusing and flattering portrayal of the craftsmen involved. Cottages like this were at best semi-permanent and have only exceptionally survived. A gallery of images at the end of the article illustrates some of the features of the cottage-building tradition. �