3-4 West Street, New Romney

This building was surveyed in the spring of 1991. It is set 0.44m below present pavement level, and was given as the clearest evidence for the survival in New Romney of several houses buried by the 1287 storm and therefore pre-dating it by E.W. Parkin in his article of 1973 (Arch. Cant. LXXXVIII. pp.117-128). While the building is a largely intact medieval single-aisled hall house broadly of that period, the evidence of the pyramidal stop-chamfer fireplace and the adjacent ogee arched aumbry in the first floor chamber, point to a date c.1300. Most of Parkin' s other examples are of a century or two later.

Furthermore, excavation inside· and outside the house at the rear revealed that the ground level difference is entirely due to the gradual build-up of occupation debris, and not a single event. Moreover, the building is directly placed on c.1m of sand, which contains a few non-horizontal fragments of C13th pottery. This, which lies over shingle continuing down below the present water table, is consistent with the rapid formation of a sand dune, and, in view of the dating the house, was possibly associated with the late C13th storms.

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The 3-D cutaway reconstruction drawing shows the original c1300 plan, with a single-aisled hall accessed off a cross-passage, and with chambers at either end. The northern, or furthermost, bay leads off the upper end of the ha 11 and comprises a ground floor room giving access to a heated private solar above. At the southern end the surviving external window evidence points clearly to a single two-storey space. In the absence of an undercroft (found in the contemporary stone house at the Assembly Rooms, Church Approach) this may have functioned as a mercantile store; this certainly would be consistent with the status of the building and the still thriving port of this time. The single space was modified in about 1500 to the more traditional arrangement of solar over service rooms.

Roland Harris