ESSEX BRICKS
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medieval bricks; they both seem to have been made by what I may
call the "pastry" method, and I wonder whether the technique
was perhaps retained in Essex, but dormant, between the fifth and
twelfth centuries. We are beginning to find that the Saxons were
competent to produce much more advanced pottery (including
glazes) than would have been supposed even ten years ago, and
although, as I have said, there is no direct evidence of Saxon or
early Norman bricks, I see no reason to exclude the technique of
brickmaking from their cognisance. It was, I suggest, that timber
structures and thatched or stone roofs were traditional and pre-
ferred for several reasons, that bricks as such, were not required of
their ceramic artisans; there was also much Roman material to
hand in many places.
Plate 18 shows detail of the very early brickwork of Little
Coggeshall Abbey Farm. The divided scale on this photograph is
nine inches long, with alternate black and white inch divisions, each
further divided by a line into half-inches.
The next brick-built structure in East Anglia, which we can
date with confidence to 1260, is Little Wenham Hall or Castle,
some three miles over the county border in Suffolk, north-east of
Colchester. The bricks of this building are moulded, of the true
Flemish type, creamy-yellow, greenish, or pink in colour and 9in. x
41/2in. x 2in. in size, much like the sample exhibited, which, how-
ever, is not so old and is Dutch. These bricks may have been im-
ported from Flanders, but it is at least as likely that they were
made locally, perhaps from Stour mud, which would have been
familiar material to the Flemish settlers who, it is surmised,
brought their technique from the banks of the Scheldt during the
thirteenth and following two centuries.
I have calculated roughly the number of bricks which were used
to build Little Wenham Hall: 800,000 at least; and I cannot be-
lieve that this 2000-2500 tons of bricks could have been imported
at reasonable cost or in reasonable time in the very small trading
vessels of the thirteenth century, called "cogs", of twenty to thirty
tons burthen.
This sudden change in the first half of the thirteenth century,
from flat thin bricks to the form substantially as we know it today,
is a remarkable break in the history of brickmaking.
I can describe briefly the subsequent changes in size by saying
that the length remained about nine inches from the fourteenth
century to the mid-eighteenth century, although the range of
variation was considerably greater in pre-Tudor days than
towards the end of the period.
The width started off at about 41/2in., went down in mid-four-
teenth century to 4in., and was back again to 41/2in. from Eliza-
beth's reign to mid-eighteenth century.