The House on Crutches Museum - Kitchen
The Kitchen
The House on Crutches Museum | Kitchen | Town Room | Agricultural Room | Parlour | Local Artists
When visiting the House on Crutches Museum, the first room you enter is the kitchen. Here you will find a replica cooking range and accessories and a display devoted to wash days. There are also replica items of period costume, and you can try some of them on! This room is also home for changing temporary displays or exhibits and items for sale exclusive to and representative of the House on Crutches and Bishop's Castle and district.
This entrance area of the museum may have been built as part of a newer structure or addition when the jetty was added in the 1600s. To the right of the present entrance is a flagged corrider which contains several large oak supports, traces of an older wall and a painted door frame. This corridor is possibly the remains of an old 'outshot' built to accommodate the original staircase to the upper floor.
Both here and upstairs there is a two-step difference in height between each pair of rooms which would seem to suggest that the lobby and the room above it were indeed additions.
The Large fireplace in this room is probably all that remains of an older kitchen and servants hall.
There is a story about this room being used as a cheese store around 1917, by Gaius Smith’s the grocers on The Square. The two young fellows responsible for carrying cheeses from shop to store, decided one bright morning that it would save time and energy if the cheeses were rolled down the cobbles to the store. The inevitable happened! Several cheeses ended up in pieces, several ended up continuing their journey down the hill, and the young fellows ended up sacked! Janet Preshous: Bishop's Castle Well Remembered, p29.
In
the Lobby there sits a long table with handles and small iron wheels.
This is a pig jib or pig crack. This particular example
has been adapted by the
addition of wheels and suggests that the user needed to move the
jib from
place to place on his own. The jib was used in the meticulous
cleaning of the pig carcase. The pig was an important animal in
most country households.
There were sties in most gardens, including those in towns. Pigs
are easily fed and managed - they eat anything, live in sties
at the bottom of the garden and
get fat. Pigs supplied the family with meat, bacon and ham, while
any surplus product could be sold at market.
The crack was also often used as a milking table if the householder was lucky enough to own a goat. The goat was placed and tethered onto the crack so that the animal was at a more convenient height.
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The ritual of the weekly wash - undertaken by women - was well established in most households by the 1850s. It was hard work, which took up most of the day, traditionally Monday. Cotton and linen fabrics were widely available and popular by the late 1700s and early 1800s because of importation of cheap raw cotton from America. They were soaked and boiled in the copper heated from below by coal or gas, then rubbed and washed by hand. Woollens such as jumpers, cardigans and socks were usually all hand knitted and had to be treated with great care to avoid shrinkage. |
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