Um.
I'd like a specific cite on this, dave.
I'm a connoisseur, and while bricks don't become Ford-standard till the
18thC, you've got bricks as far back as the 1550s.
Bricks simply made more *sense* than mud.
Unless you're talking wattle-and-daub, and USAmerica still builds them that
way today, though they call them timberboard.
(Not that any sensible UK building society would provide a mortgage on an
average American house -- we had the GF of L, all the USAmericans had was
the Great Chicago Earthquake of 1968.)
Oops, sorry, this is off-topic.
I mean, houses were falling down all over the shop when Crabbe was writing
in the early 19thC, but at least, they were *brick houses.
<g>
R%.
(Actually, three story bloody houses were falling down in *Rome in the 3rdC
AD -- there's an Edwin Morgan poem that turns on this.)
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2008 11:34 AM
Subject: Re: composing on horseback
> Push time a little onwards, last year I walked out Cobbett's
> description of Leicester in the early 1800's: mud huts, in the
> villages, that are now the middle-class suburbs, were what most people
> actually lived in, unless they were squires or vicars.
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