Tudor Tour

Chadd's Homestead

This cottage was built during the tudor era on the site now occupied by Grebe and Wyllyne cottages. It is a more modern method of construction than the medieval cruck cottages shown in some of the pictures of the tudor tour. This cottage is described as a brick-nogged, half-timbered cottage, meaning that a wooden frame was made and the spaces between the timbers were filled in with bricks. It is quite possible that some of these bricks were reused when the cottages were rebuilt by the Busby Trust in 1829, because they are much thinner than most C19th bricks.

We don't know exactly which of the people listed on the certificate of musters 1522 occupied the site, but it would have been one of the smaller farmers, such as Thomas Southwicke or Robert Brine.

However, documents dating from the 1600s, at the time of Dr Richard Busby, tell us that this cottage was known as Chadd's homestead. Thomas Chadd was a small tenant farmer in the village. He lived here with his wife Ffrances and had two children, Mary and Roger. Thomas couldn't write, but he was one of the people who made his mark (a rough T) on a petition to the Bishop of Lincoln asking that the medieval church could be demolished and replaced by a smart new one.

Thomas died in 1687, when Roger was only 5, but Ffrances must have kept the farm and made a success of it, because the Busby Trust records show that Roger was farming two farms in Willen at the time of his death in 1757. He specialized in dairy farming.

Picture from an 1822 survey of the village, courtesy of the Busby Trust