Weald and Downland Open Air Museum
By Megan Claridge & Henry Scott – 20th June 2006
We stood outside a real Victorian classroom ready to meet every one and when we were all there a lady dressed as a teacher came out and took us into a Victorian playground and let us play. After that she gave us some drill before our Victorian lesson! We went inside and on slates we had handwriting practice! You weren’t allowed to write with your left hand in Victorian times, you had to use your right hand.
Next we had times tables and she drew a clock. The number that we were multiplying was in the middle. We had to do our times tables by rote. We were given a piece of writing and took it in turns to read a sentence each. At the beginning we were given different Victorian names. I was called May and Henry was called Henry!! Victorian schools were small, with stone floors, bench desks with ink wells and they had no pictures on the walls. Little children used sand trays to learn their letters and the older children used ink which you dipped your pen into. You didn’t stay at school as long then because the children were needed on the farms. Teachers were a lot stricter in those days. We liked the teachers being strict. Teachers today can’t control classes! To get to school the children would walk (sometimes miles) to get there. They used to put their wet clothes on the wood stove. They didn’t have computers, white-boards or lights.
After we had read, we had lunch. We sat by the pond and watched the fish. When we had finished we went into a building and looked and used different types of building materials. We made a Tudor house out of blocks, tiled a roof, and weighed different materials to see which were the heaviest and lightest. Lead was the heaviest weight there and soft wood was the lightest. We learned about mortice and tenon joints and also dovetail joints.
We learned how to sort rubble by sifting through varies sized mesh to separate the big stones, smaller stones and sand. We learned how to build a bridge and how all the pieces when they were placed meant you could take away the frame and it would be sturdy. The piece in the middle is called a keystone. We also saw how a cross-beam made a gable roof sturdy.
We looked at lots of different types of buildings. Some were 600 years old. If something was built in the 15th century it means that it was built in the 1400s. Many of the buildings were Tudor. We found out that if the house had a bit jutting out of the first floor it was called the eaves. Sometimes people would shelter under the eaves from the rain and listen to the people’s conversations inside. This is where the phrase “eavesdropping” comes from.
We looked at a mill. The water wheel outside turns by the strength of the water passing over it and is joined to a shaft which joins into cogs turning inside. These are connected to the millstones which grind the grain. The grains fall into the middle of the millstones and as they move outwards they get finer and finer until they make flour. The miller could make flour finer by a special lever that made the millstones go closer together. Upstairs there was a hopper which had the grain in it that went into the millstones and then out of a shoot into the sacks. Because the millstones weren’t allowed to touch each other in case they ground themselves there was a bell on the hopper. When the grain went down, the strap inside was spring up and the bell, a damsel (like damsel in distress?) would ring and let the miller know he had 2 minutes to fill the hopper back up.
We spent some time in a Hall House called Bayleaf. It would have belonged to someone well off. It had a buttery. A buttery is where they stored beer. The barrels that they stored the beer in were called butts. The walls in the Great Hall were made with wattle and daub and then coated in lime wash. We saw wattle when we did the building materials bit. It is made up of woven willow and the daub is made with dung, straw and mud/clay. A hall house has a very high ceiling because the fireplace in the centre of the room did not have a chimney and so the smoke went up high before going out the windows. It had a big table at one end with pewter crockery and cutlery, but the table down the side where the servants would have sat had wooden and leather crockery and cutlery made out of horns. They turned the tables upside down to become boards to sleep under and that is where we get the phrase “bed and board”.
The man who owned the house didn’t sleep under the table, he slept in a bed upstairs. It had a truckle-bed under it where a child would have slept. The main bed had a straw pallet that lay on flax ropes that were tightened at the head of the bed. This is where we get the phrase “night, night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite”.
There was a little door in the bedroom which had a toilet in it. The toilet was a hole in a wooden frame and the poo would drop through to the ground below onto ash and then have more ash put on top of it. When the ash pit was full up it was used as manure.
We saw many types of building at this museum. We saw a blacksmiths, shops, a market place, a railway workers cottage, and even a saw pit. The saw was vertical with a man above it and a man in the pit below it and they would pull it to and fro. Many accidents would happen in the saw pit, often with the sawn through piece of wood hitting the man below. We also saw a cottage garden where all the plants would have had a purpose either as food or medicine.
I (Henry) thought it was fun-dabi-dozi and Meg gave the day 9 out of 10.