Date of upstairs Range in The Street, Milton Abbas – 1780 or 1820?

The range is intended for cooking and not just heating.

As far as we know this is the only surviving upstairs range in The Street. It would be great (no pun intended!) if this is an original installation with the building of c.1780. This would provide evidence that four families were intended to be housed in one house – two families upstairs and two down.

However it may be a later addition when we know that in the 1830’s an MP claimed there were 36 people in one house.

This nameplate of the foundry Crocker Fenner & Co, Dorchester.

Clive Barnes has researched this foundry and shown that the grate was manufactured at their iron foundry in Fordington, Dorchester, between 1875 and 1877 when Charles Fenner was a partner in the company.

If it was installed in those years, and not resited during later alterations, it would have been while the cottages were part of the Hambro estate. This would suggest that this cottage was then in multiple occupation, with a family living and cooking in the two upstairs rooms and another family in the two downstairs rooms, where there was either the original open fireplace or another range fitted. Many of the cottages had been lived in by labouring families in this way since at least 1800. However, by the
time of the 1891 census, which for the first time specified how many rooms each family occupied, nearly all the village families lived in the four rooms of a single cottage.

Mystery solved!