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Cottage Facts
By peace | December 10, 2006
Outside the Cottage By Arthur Strachan
A cottage is a small, single-storied house, or a small vacation house especially in the country.
In modern usage, a cottage is a dwelling, typically in a non-urban location (although there are cottage-style dwellings in cities). In most settings, the term cottage denotes a small, often cozy dwelling, and small size is integral to the description, but in some places, such as Canada, the term exists with no connotation of size at all (cf. vicarage or hermitage). In Canada, the term cottage usually refers to a vacation/summer home, often located near a body of water (although this is more commonly called a cabin in Western Canada and a chalet in Quebec).
Cottage Garden By Arthur Strachan
Origin Of The Term
Originally -in the Middle-Ages- cottages housed agricultural workers and their families. The term cottage denoted the dwelling of a cotter. Thus, cottages were smaller peasant units (larger peasant units being called “messuages”). In that early period, a documentary reference to a cottage would most often mean, not a small stand-alone dwelling as today, but a complete farmhouse and yard (albeit a small one). Thus in the Middle-Ages, the word cottage (Lat. “cotagium”) seems to have meant not just a dwelling, but have included at least a dwelling (domus) and a barn (grangia), as well as, usually, a fenced yard or piece of land enclosed by a gate (portum)
Examples of this may be found in 15th Century manor court rolls. The house of the cottage bore the Latin name: “domum dicti cotagii”, while the barn of the cottage was termed “grangia dicti cotagii”.
Later on, a cottage might also have denoted a smallholding comprising houses, outbuildings, and supporting farmland or woods. A cottage, in this sense, would typically include just a few acres of tilled land.
Much later (from around the 18th Century onwards), the development of industry led to the development of weavers’ cottages and miners’ cottages.
