Lying at the centre of the Tudor enclosure of Withins, this was almost certainly the site of the farmhouse sold by Thomas Crawshaye in 1567. No trace of that building is evident today, since it appears to have been rebuilt in the middle to late seventeenth century. Its replacement had a simple rectangular groundplan enclosing a large housebody and a smaller, unheated parlour, entry being by a doorway at one side of the end gable wall.
A number of very similar farmhouses still survive locally, including Middle Deanfield (SD991376), just over a mile to the north, Near and Far Slippery Ford (SE002405 & 001403), 3 miles to the north-north-east, and Clough House, Oakworth, (SE031386), 3 miles to the north-east. Other examples, such as Lower Green Edge, Warley (SE035285) and Flailcroft, Todmorden (SD923248) can be found in the upper Calder Valley to the south. All have been stylistically dated between the middle and later seventeenth century, some having a datestone to confirm any closer dating.
At some later period, perhaps in the mid-eighteenth century, a single-storey extension was added to the cool, north end of the farmhouse. It incorporated a new front door and an entry passage into the farmhouse, as well as a poorly lit single room with a shallow window or wall cupboard along its western wall. Since the doorways are too narrow and awkward to admit cattle, it appears to have been built as a dairy-cum-larder used just like that up at Top Withins. The first-edition Ordnance Survey map shows a small lean-to extension at the southern end of the front wall, this perhaps being the outside toilet (see Pl. 7).
The barn, probably contemporary with the farmhouse, lay almost in line with it, a few yards to the north. Originally a single ridge-roofed building entered by a large door in the middle of its eastern wall, it was later extended to the east to increase its capacity, and then with small outbuildings to the north and south.
Having fallen out of use before c . 1910, when it was photographed with its windows either blocked or broken, Middle Withins and its barn were largely demolished, leaving only the ground floor of the farmhouse intact. Having discovered that the fine mullioned windows on the front wall were about to collapse, County Alderman J. J. Brigg of Kildwick Hall contacted J. Northwood, engineer to the Keighley Borough Waterworks who owned the site, and arranged for them to be repaired. Over April and May 1935 the main six-light window was rebuilt, the wall-top levelled and pointed, and all the fallen wallstones and roof slates removed to make the ruins safe and tidy for the countless visitors walking from Stanbury or Haworth up to Top Withins. They remained in this state up to the 1960s, after which they gradually crumbled to their present state, with the walls only a few courses high and the interior and frontage heaped with tumbled masonry.
John Crabtree, namesake of his great-grandfather who had rebuilt the farmhouse, died in 1723. As was customary at this period, an inventory of all his goods was prepared by three local men – Colin Redman, Edward Battersby and William Sunderland. It lists the contents of each room in the order taken by its appraisers, showing how they were furnished and used. By combining this information with the evidence of the actual building, it is possible to recreate an accurate tour around the Middle Withins farmstead in 1723 (see Pl. 8).
| 1723 John Crabtree of Withins | |
| Imprimis his purse and apparel | £5 |
| 1 bed and bedding and 2 chairs | £1 8s. |
| 1 clock in the housebody | £2 |
| 1 cupboard, dresser & pewter | £2 17s. 6d. |
| 1 table and long settle | £1 2s. |
| 1 table and coffers | £1 |
| In chairs and cushions | 10s. |
| 2 ranges and other iron things | £1 17s. |
| Bed and bedding in the chamber | £1 or £1 10s. |
| Wool and combs and other washing tools | £2 |
| 2 chests with meal and other things | £2 |
| 2 chests and 2 coffers | £1 |
| Looms | £1 |
| Worsted yarn | £2 |
| Corn sacks | £1 |
| 1 churn and other wood vessels | 11s. |
| Pans and other iron things | £1 6s. |
| Wheels and a reel | 7s. |
| Books | 4s. |
| Carts and wheels | £1 2s. |
| Peat and turves | £1 2s. 6d. |
| Old hays and poles | £1 4s. |
| 1 plough and harrow and other things belonging | £1 11s. 6d. |
| Grass at the upper house | £3 |
| Grass and corn at the lower house | £10 |
| Grass and corn at Stanbury | £8 |
| Sheep | £40 10s. 0d. |
| 1 horse and furniture belonging to him | £4 |
| 1 swine | 16s. |
| 1 bull, 1 ox and other beasts | £33 |
| Grand total | £142 8s. 6d. |
| Debts owing by the widow | 6s. |
| Appraisers Colin Redman, Edward Battersby & William Sunderland | |
| Transcribed by Michael Baumber from the original at the Borthwick Institute |
The front door was located to the right-hand end of the farmhouse, in a slightly later single-storey extension. It led into a long passageway, an ideal area for coats, hats and sticks before and after tending the stock and crops in the surrounding moors and enclosed fields. The first door on the right led into the dairy, where milk was left in the shallow ‘wood vessels’ for the cream to rise, then being skimmed off, poured into the tall wooden plunge-churn and converted into butter. There was a good local market for both skim-milk to drink or eat with porridge, and for butter, in the local weaving villages.
At the end of the passage the original external doorway to the left led into the housebody. This had its peat fire burning in an iron ‘range’ on a wide-open hearth, the smoke ascending into a large wattle-and-daub smoke hood supported by a strong oak lintel. To its left a wooden screen called a heck protected it from draughts from the door, while a narrow fire window to its right provided light for cooking. From a high-level bar or rannle-balk high inside the chimney, a number of adjustable pot-hooks called reckons would have been suspended to hold the cooking pots over the fire. These ‘pans and other iron things’ were valued at £1 6s . 0d . Excluding the hearth, the housebody was a large room, some 19 x 16 feet with a stone-flagged floor and a fine six-light mullioned front window. It was well furnished with:
| 1 table and long settle | £1 2s. |
| 1 table and coffers | £1 |
| In chairs and cushions | 10s. |
| 1 cupboard, dresser & pewter | £2 17s. 6d. |
| 1 clock in the housebody | £2 |
| Wheels and a reel | 7s. |
There is no direct evidence as to how these were arranged but, if it followed later practice, the main table for practical work was set under the window, with the dining table and its chairs towards the middle of the room. The long settle would have projected from the chimney corner opposite the window to provide a warm and comfortable social area, particularly in the long winter evenings. The clock, cupboard, coffers and dresser, with its display of highly polished pewter, would then have been distributed around the side and back walls.
A door in the wall opposite the fireplace led into the parlour where John Crabtree kept ‘his purse and apparel’ along with his ‘bed and bedding and 2 chairs’.
A staircase, probably rising along the back wall of the housebody from the passage door, led up to the first-floor chambers. These housed the usual range of chests for storing clothes and linens along with the oatmeal needed to make porridge and oatcake for everyday meals, and a second bed:
| 2 chests and 2 coffers | £1 |
| 2 chests with meal and other things | £2 |
| Bed and bedding in the chamber | £1 (or £1 10s.) |
Here too were the tools and equipment required for making worsteds, the fine, smooth-surfaced cloths that had recently started to be made in the South Pennine hills. The earlier woollen cloths of the region had used the shorter-fibred fleeces. These were prepared by dragging small locks between a pair of ‘cards’, implements resembling rectangular table-tennis bats with leather-covered faces covered in thousands of fine wire hooks. The resulting soft, fluffy ‘rollags’ were then spun into yarn and woven into woollen cloths, some thick and soft to make blankets. Others were hammered in urine in a fulling-mill to felt their fibres together, stretched and dried on tenter-frames, had their fibres raised with the natural hooks of teazle-heads, cropped to produce a very short even pile, and finally pressed. These cloths, ideal for coats, upholstery, billiard tables etc. continued to be made in the ‘White Cloth’ area between the Shipley–Leeds section of the Aire Valley and Brighouse–Wakefield section of the Calder Valley, and the ‘Coloured Cloth’ area stretching diagonally from Shipley to Wakefield.
In contrast, worsteds used the longest fibres of the finest fleeces, such as those of the Lincolnshire and Leicester sheep. These had to be arranged straight, even, silky-smooth and parallel in a process called wool-combing. To do this, the fleeces were first washed with soft soap to remove all dirt and natural grease, wrung out with the ‘washing tools’, dried and disentangled. Separate handfuls were then taken up, one end being held down under the heel of one hand on the edge of a bench, called a comb-stock, while the other was pulled down within the other hand to initially straighten the fibres, into a crude ‘sliver’. These were then laid out on the bench and sprinkled with olive oil – an essential lubricant for the actual combing process. 1
John Crabtree’s ‘pairs of combs’ were T-shaped and made of ash, their heads covered with a thick slab of horn to provide firm fixings for parallel rows of close-set, long, sharp-pointed iron teeth, each set around 60º to the handle. There were usually between three and five rows, the longest across the outer edge of the head, and the remainder progressively shorter. Since they had to be used hot, they would be accompanied by a comb-pot. This took the form of a cylindrical sheet-iron stove around 2 feet in diameter, its interior containing a charcoal or peat-burning grate. This supported an iron comb-pot plate with a raised rim, this enabling the teeth of the comb to be propped just above its surface to heat evenly without developing damaging hotspots. A heavy stone slab called a comb-pot top was set a few inches above this plate in order to prevent the combs from overbalancing and to contain the heat. It was also ideal for keeping mess-pots of porridge, stew or tea piping hot for the wool-combers, most drawings and later photographs showing these standing there ready for use. Such comb-pots were usually known as a ‘pot o’ one’, ‘pot o’ two’ etc. up to ‘pot o’ six’, depending on the number of men they were to serve (see Pl. 9).
Since the combs had to be kept hot, one was always being heated while the other was in use. To start combing, the handle of a hot comb was secured to a horizontal wooden bar called a ‘jenny’ that projected at about waist-height from a vertical wooden ‘pad-post’. Here, with the teeth pointing upward, the crude sliver of wool was lashed on to it with a downward sweeping action, a little at a time, until it had built up into a long fringe. The comb was then transferred to its ‘pad’, an iron bar fixed horizontally at chest height on the pad-post. This had a projecting ‘pad heel’ stud at its inner end to fit into an iron-sleeved socket in the end of the comb handle, and another at its tip called the pad neb to fit into a second socket through the side of the handle. These held the comb so that the teeth were horizontal, enabling the wool-comber to ‘jiggle’, swinging his second comb vertically through its fringe of wool, long teeth first, and then engaging the shorter teeth as the fibres were gradually combed straight and partially collected on the second comb. As jiggling progressed, the strokes became almost horizontal, the combs sometimes being changed round until each held a long fringe.
At this stage each comb was placed on the pad in turn, the wool pushed halfway up the teeth where there was more spring, and then gently drawn off using one hand after the other to form long continuous slivers. Having been broken up into shorter lengths, these were lashed on and jiggled a second time, called straightening, and drawn off through an oval hole cut through a disc of horn called a ‘diz’. This produced a long continuous sliver of equal thickness, but with its longer fibres at its bottom end. For this reason pairs of slivers were put side by side, their bottoms at opposite ends, and finally rolled up into a bundle called a ‘top’.
In 1723 the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle were still to be invented, and so one wool-comber still required twenty-five spinners to convert his tops into yarn, and 3½ weavers to turn that yarn into a piece of cloth. 2 Some of the tops would have been spun on his own ‘wheels and a reel’ but most would have been put out for spinning elsewhere, especially if, as might be expected, he had at least three or four wool-combers working full-time from a ‘pot o’ four’. In the 1760s his neighbour, Robert Heaton of Ponden Hall, was sending out his tops to be spun both locally and into the Craven dales and forest of Pendle up to some 20 miles to the north and west. 3 After collecting them, he had the yarn woven close to his home, and sold on to international merchants such as James Cousen of Bradford, J. Bramley of Halifax, Woolridge & Stansfield, Lloyds & Cataneo and Mr Guttee of Leeds, or Jones, Harvard & Jones of London. John Crabtree was probably operating on a similar scale in this pioneering period of the industrial revolution, partly manufacturing in his own home and partly acting as an entrepreneur, putting various stages of the processing out to others.
Unlike woollens, worsteds usually did not require any form of wet-finishing, each completed piece being cut directly from the loom, ‘burled’ to correct any weaving faults, neatly folded up and carried off to the cloth markets. The cash received was then used to buy fresh supplies of long-wool from the wool-staplers ready to be combed, sent out for spinning, and brought back for weaving into yet more pieces.