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Some Welsh Houses*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Iorwerth C. Peate
Iorwerth C. Peate*
Affiliation:
National Museum of Wales
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Extract

The interaction between man and his environment, which is the basic principle of the science of Geography, is well-illustrated in a study of house-types in Wales. A detailed survey of Welsh house-types is being carried out by the Department of Folk Culture of the National Museum of Wales. It is felt that a study of the traditional types will not only throw much light on the history of culture but will also clarify some issues in the anthropological and archaeological field. This paper may be considered as a brief interim report of part of the survey, supplemented by some material already recorded.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 10 , Issue 40 , December 1936 , pp. 448 - 459
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1936

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Footnotes

*

A paper read (in part) before Section H of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Blackpool, 1936. Acknowledgment is made of a small grant from the University of Wales Board of Celtic Studies towards the survey of the Radnorshire houses made in July-August 1936.

References

1 I am indebted for descriptions and photographs of the Carmarthenshire examples to the report of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales (1896), pp. 690 ff., and to the Commission’s Secretary, Sir D. Lleufer Thomas, who has placed in the National Museum of Wales a number of plans and photographs prepared for that report but which did not appear in it. But for his foresight this valuable evidence would have been lost.

* For this type see Innocent, C.F.: The Development of English Building Construction, pp. 23–61.Google Scholar

2 P.R.O. MS. Wales 4–141–3. Reference given by Prof. E. A. Lewis of Aberystwyth. Acknowledgment is made to Miss Amy Foster, the Central Library, Cardiff, for transcribing this manuscript.

3 In Béaloideas, 1935, p. 68.Google Scholar

4 [Dickinson, W.]: Cumbriana, 1875, p. 197.Google Scholar

5 I am indebted to Principal Rees, J.F., University College, Cardiff, for this reference.Google Scholar

6 Roussell, Aage, Norse Building Customs in the Scottish Isles, 1934.Google Scholar

7 Stenberger, Mårten: ‘Remnants of Iron Age Houses on öland’ in Acta Archaeologica, 1931, 2, 93–104.Google Scholar

8 This word tyle was translated by Lady Guest as ‘couch’. Its gender in Breuddwyd Rhonabwy is feminine, whereas generally it is masculine. Over a large area of Wales its one meaning is ‘hill, raised ground, mound’. With this, cf. Irish tulach, ‘hill’, which seems to be related (for -ach=-e, cf. imbdrach-bore). Lewis’s tyle=Irish tolg ‘bed’ must be rejected. Irish colg, bolg correspond with col, coly, and bol, boly not with ∗ cyle and ∗ byle. But tolg-+lie i.e. ‘the place of a bed’ would not only give the form tyle but also account for the gender of the noun in this tale, since lie used to be feminine. Sofie, lit. ‘place to stand’ and tyle ‘place to lie’ would then be antithetical nouns. In Ancient Laws, i, 454, reference is made to a sow ar y thyle and ii, 77, ‘partus suis dum sit ar e thele’ with the explanation ‘[in suili]’. It is noteworthy that the sty is always raised above the sty-yard in the same way that the ‘raised platform’ of the house is above the byre. I am confident therefore that the tyle of medieval times when used in relation to buildings referred to a raised platform in house and pigsty alike on which straw was, generally laid to form a bed. It may be that tyle ‘hill’ (masculine) and tyle ‘raised platform’ (feminine) are two different words derived, as suggested, from different sources : but this is a problem for the philologists to whom I leave it.

I am indebted to DrWilliams, Ifor, University College, Bangor Google Scholar, for exhaustive references to and notes on this word, and for many suggestions. This note owes its origin to the information he has given me, but he is not of course responsible for the conclusions which I have reached.

9 Seebohm, F., The English Village Community, 1883, pp. 239–41.Google Scholar

10 Richmond, I.A.: ‘Irish Analogies for the Romano-British Barn Dwellings’, Journal of Roman Studies, 22, 96–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 op. cit., p. 66.

* cf. also Nant-y-ffîn, Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire (FIG. I).