The location of the Museum’s cottage suggests an isolated building, set away from its neighbours and without any associated agricultural buildings.  In fact the cottage would have formed part of a nucleated village (see Map ) in a pattern of settlement found in other medieval rural communities.  A typical medieval nucleated village plan consisted of a street with peasant holdings or ‘tofts’ arranged on either side.  The regularity of some medieval settlements with each house occupying the same sized piece of land along a street or a green suggests that they were the result of a deliberate planning or re-planning by the lord.   Other settlements were ‘polyfocal’; that is, small groupings of holdings in close proximity to each other, representing a more organic development.  The plan of Hangleton uncovered during excavation, although incomplete, indicates that the village fell in the latter category. 

The typical toft would include a separate living house, a building for animals (e.g. a byre or sheepcote) and a barn or granary for crop storage grouped around a yard.  A living house might be divided into one, two, three or more rooms separated by screens and walls.  The hall was the main social space in a house and might serve numerous functions, including eating and sleeping.  Chambers were used primarily for sleeping but might also be used for storage.  The number of people accommodated within these small buildings can only be guessed at: the average peasant family size was approximately five but actual family size would have varied enormously depending on wealth (wealthier households tended to have a larger number of children), survival and position within the life cycle (e.g. young, old): the poor widow in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale lived in her ‘narwe’ (i.e. small) two-roomed cottage with her two daughters.  Kitchens were usually freestanding buildings or, as in Hangleton, outshuts attached to living houses. 

The medieval church of St Helen’s, Hangleton,
parts of which date back to the 11th century