Building record 1270800000 - FAGNALL FARMHOUSE, FAGNALL LANE

Grade II. C17. Two storeys. Timber frame, brick ground floor and infill to first floor, 3 casements. Old tile roof (B1).
The house is of two builds, the two southern bays of the north-south range being the earlier. This is shown by the fact that the wall plate of the northern part rests on the tie-beam of truss B-B. Moreover the string courses projecting from the southern stack, which can only be decorative, show that the stack was external when built. The stack has vertical pitches between the string courses, suggesting a date towards the middle of the seventeenth century. This has to be reconciled with the fact that one shaft of the stack in the later, northern range is typologically earlier than the southern one. It has sloping shoulders and is built of much thinner bricks. This range is framed with rather poor timber. The original entrance can be seen on the north side. The western ground floor room has no access from the rest of the house; it is still referred to as the dairy, and probably that is what it has been from the start. The position of the entrance to the southern range cannot be recovered, as the whole of the ground floor framing has been replaced by brick.
The clue to the structural history problem is to be found in the farm's first appearance in the record: in 1572 Richard and Katherine Bovingdon bought a
small property in Coleshill, which can be identified as Fagnell by unbroken descent, and which then had two houses on it. Katherine, dying a widow in 1600, left it to her son Thomas, who was probably already living in one of the houses. Thomas was at least 31 when he married c. 1590, and he died in 1611, with all his children under age. The farm was left to his wife Eleanor for 21 years. The eldest boy, Henry, died at 14, and it was the second son,
Joseph, who ultimately inherited. Three of Thomas's five sons died young, and one of his four daughters.
It is possible to make sense of the structural relationships of the house if it is supposed that Joseph rebuilt one of the two houses, the southern one, not long after coming into his inheritance in 1632, leaving the other for his mother as her dower house. On Eleanor's death (which is unrecorded, and so probably took place during the years after 1643, when the Amersham parish register was slackly kept), Joseph rebuilt the northern house also, leaving the earlier stack and adding another shaft to it, and at the same time joined the two structures into one (the northern range is of one build with
the bay joining the two ranges). He paid tax on four hearths in 1662. Two were in the southern stack; in the northern range the older, eastern shaft served a ground-floor fireplace, the other a first-floor one. The roof-space was not originally floored, though there will have been a time, before
Joseph's four sons reached maturity, when servants would have been necessary. Probably they were accommodated in the northern house. [Further details, plans and sections](B2).