Early modern english house forms: Eric Mercer’s English Vernacular Houses Revisited

Eric Mercer’s English Vernacular Houses remains a landmark publication in the field of vernacular architecture studies, alongside Peter Smith’s Houses of the Welsh Countryside and Henry Glassie’s Folk Housing in Middle Virginia. Fifty years on from their appearance in 1975, the Vernacular Architecture Group organised a conference to consider the legacy of Mercer’s and Smith’s work. Both books were commissioned to promote public understanding of why Britain’s built heritage deserves preservation. Mercer’s seminal study was at the interface of protection and interpretation. Utilising surveys of 500 buildings undertaken as a research-base for listing smaller rural houses, the result was a book that examined changes in English houses over time. This essay evaluates Mercer’s analysis of house space being arranged in particular ways in different regions by distinct social classes, which generated certain forms of house. The present essay raises questions Mercer did not think to ask—about the role of women, landlords and crafts people in shaping houses; about the relationship of rural housing to towns and ports and connections beyond England, including imperial settlement overseas. In the light of subsequent research and new perspectives, does Mercer’s account of housing change in England still stack up?