AIMS The project aims to raise awareness of the significance of Grange Barn in the history and development of Coggeshall with particular emphasis on its role in the cloth trade and on the construction of timber-framed buildings. This will be achieved by volunteer-led interpretation.
DELIVERABLES
The project will also preserve and collate a wood-carving and joinery tool collection and compile an oral history archive of those who worked with such tools. A guide to the barn, a tools catalogue and a schools' trail will also be produced. Volunteers will undertake training, including visiting similar sites to assess 'best practice' interpretation and attending a series of workshops in cataloguing, recording and research skills.
RESEARCH
Research into the origins of the barn and its relationship with the Cistercian Order began with visits to Cistercian abbeys in central and eastern France. The project is at an early stage and this page should be viewed as a snapshot of its position at the point when the LHI web pages were submitted to the National Archives.
Recent research indicates that Coggeshall Abbey, a 'middle-sized' foundation with 24 monks and 40 lay brothers, enjoyed a successful wool trade in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In 1202, it was sending raw wool by road to Ipswich, from where it was exported to Florence. By 1330, the abbey had 3,000 sheep and produced 15 sacks of wool for export. By comparison, Tilty managed 12 sacks, Sibton (near Saxmundham) 10 sacks and the larger foundation at Waldon in Bedfordshire 25. In 1336, however, King Edward III decreed that no further wool should be exported. The focus shifted to manufactured cloth, the town of Coggeshall really began to prosper and rich merchants started to flourish.
After 1349, when the Black Death struck, everything was different at the abbey. There were no lay brothers, trade suffered and the foundation fell into debt. There was a major financial crisis in 1370 and in 1381, the local peasantry invaded the abbey and destroyed its archives at the height of the Peasants' Revolt. However in 1427, the Abbot was awarded a mitre by Pope Martin V (a very rare honour) and a few decades later, the Abbot was appointed to serve on a nationwide reform committee for the Cistercian Order. Nevertheless, the decline continued and by 1538, when the abbey was dissolved, only six monks are recorded as having been pensioned off.
Throughout the four centuries from 1140 to 1538, there must have been a barn at the abbey. The present structure is not the original, since it dates from around 1230 and was rebuilt and altered one hundred years later. Many mysteries remain but subtle sleuthing is bound to yield results. At present, we are investigating other foundations where the documentary evidence is more complete.
