Devon houses have walls of granite or cob and massive timber doors and roofs. See Peter Smith, Houses of the Welsh Countryside (1975). In Wales and the Welsh Borders, by contrast, plentiful supplies of oak enabled carpenters to erect houses of good quality. The absence of suitable timber over much of the east midlands helps to explain why so little peasant housing survives there. In part, the survival rate for medieval peasant houses depends on the materials used in building. Numbers of surviving peasant houses increase with each succeeding century after 1350. The poorer farmers and cottagers lived in humbler dwellings which have long since disappeared. The families for whom these houses were built cannot usually be identified, but they include franklins and yeomen, and the owners of small manors. Within each region, there are also marked differences between the various pays indeed, standards of building vary even in the same village, depending on the social status of the original owner. Their present distribution reflects the contrasting wealth of the various regions in the two centuries following the Black Death. They are found in their thousands, however, in the south‐east, particularly in Suffolk and Kent.
Few if any such houses survive in Ireland, Scotland, west Wales, Cornwall, the northern counties of England except Yorkshire, or the east midlands. The regional variation in the quality and survival of medieval peasant housing is striking. See Stuart Wrathmell, ‘Peasant Houses, Farmsteads and Villages in North‐East England’, in Mick Aston, David Austin, and Christopher Dyer (eds), The Rural Settlements of Medieval England: Studies Dedicated to Maurice Beresford and John Hurst (1989).
The new view has emerged from dendrochronology, documentary research, and a reinterpretation of the archaeological evidence at excavated sites such as Wharram Percy (Yorkshire). In fact, a remarkable number of late medieval houses belonging to people below the level of the nobility survive in various parts of England and Wales. It used to be thought that peasant houses of the 14th and 15th centuries were ‘impermanent’ structures that were built to last for decades rather than centuries, and that the techniques used in their construction were inferior to those employed in the early modern period.
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