Sussex Archaeological Collections: Relating to the history and antiquities of the counties of East and West Sussex
Sussex Archaeological Society, 2000. (updated 2022) https://doi.org/10.5284/1000334. How to cite using this DOI
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Resource identifiers
- ADS Collection: 285
- DOI:https://doi.org/10.5284/1000334
- How to cite using this DOI
An early fifteenth-century barn at Charlton Court, Steyning, West Sussex
by FRED ALDSWORTH
with a contribution from
Dan Miles
A programme of archaeological recording, historical research, and dendrochronological dating, undertaken during a programme of major repairs in 1993-94, demonstrated that the barn at Charlton Court, Steyning, was erected from trees that had mostly been felled in the winter of AD 1404-05, shortly after the manor had passed into private hands in 1403, and it is likely that the barn was prefabricated from green timbers during the summer of 1405 through to the spring of 1406.
Originally designed as a three-bay unaisled barn, with canopied porches to the central bay, it has a surviving roof frame comprising kingposts carrying a ridge plate, supported by heavy downswing braces which carry side purlins trenched into their upper edges.
It was never completed and used in its intended form, though the frame appears to have been erected and the rafters added, and it was altered and extended at either end, using timber from the original stock felled in the winter of AD 1404-05. The original roof design was maintained, but aisles were added in a form entirely typical of later medieval barns of south-east England, with large shoring braces passing between the arcade posts and soleplates, halved into spurs which tie the side wall plates into the main posts.
A number of subsequent alterations and repairs are discernible and at a date probably in the eighteenth century, masonry walls were inserted at the south end.
A series of dendrochronological samples, mostly with at least 150 growth rings and complete sapwood, provide a very accurate basis for dating, and these are fully discussed.
