ABSTRACT
Every local historian should study all the buildings of his chosen territory closely. Even in the most unpromising village, apparently ruined by industrialism in the nineteenth century, he will probably find that there are houses of four or five different centuries, dating from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries onwards; but he will not know this until he has made a thorough exploration of all the houses, both inside and out. A great deal of the antiquity of the house is hidden from the outside view: above all it lies in the interior of the roof.
