St Osyth's Priory: West Barn and Baliffs Cottage (EHER 25673)

Medieval stone and red brick cottage.

The Bailiffs cottage was refurbished in 2006 <1> This involved the renewal of the roof covering and removal of the plasterboard ceiling, revealed a timber scissor-braced roof structure which exhibited 13th century characteristics. The roof comprises 22 scissor brace couplings set at 14-15 inch intervals. The north end of the roof is well preserved although some trusses have failed at the southern end. The oak timbers are relatively slight scantling (4-5 inch sq.) and are mostly quarter trees with waney edges and sapwood. The collars are mortised to the rafters but the braces have notched lap joints at their lower ends and a bare face dovetail at the upper. The rafters are halved. They are smoke blackened but not to the extent one would see with an open hearth. The roof is largely single phase although there has been some localised reworking. The end truss against the higher building to the south comprises timbers of an uncertain date and the penultimate truss is made of re-used scissor braces, both suggesting that the building originally extended further to the south, but was cut back when the existing building was constructed. Scissor brace roofs broadly date to the 13th century and are related to the passing brace roofs of aisled halls and barns. It confirms that the building belongs with the Monastic phase of the site and that it may have functioned as an ancillary kitchen, brewhouse or bakehouse <1> This roof of 22 trusses is scissor-braced with notched lap joints and shows many features characteristic of thirteenth-century roofs, in particular with those at Gloucester Blackfriars. Eleven timbers dated, of which two were found to have been cut from the same tree. The empirically derived likely date range for the felling of the group of timbers used for construction of the roof is AD 1277–1309. A Bayesian derived combined felling date range for all eleven timbers is AD 1284–92 (95% probability). It is most likely that the trees were used very soon after felling in this relatively humble building. This dates the probable construction of the roof some decades later than the similarly-styled Gloucester Blackfriars roof <3>.