Originally a single room wide, this 3 storey 17th C onetime doss house is dwarfed by its neighbours.
This C17 timber-framed, stuccoed building has had many alterations over the years. The steeply pitched pantile roof reveals that this building was originally thatched and just one room wide when first created in the old market place some 400 years or more ago.
The first inhabitants would have traded from the ground floor room, probably with a drop-down shutter revealing their goods and lived in the rooms above it.
At some stage in its long history the building had been the Dog and Partridge Tap then briefly came The Royal Oak, a slightly iffy tavern. In 1839 it was only this building that was the pub whilst the building on the corner of Union street and the one to the left of that were shops. Within a few years, with doors linking all 3 premises, the lower section of this building became the ‘Tap’- off the premises alcohol sales. The upper floors were a rather seedy lodging house – only bed provided, no food, no privacy and no security for your few possessions.
The customers were a mix of local single men and women unable to afford a long term home anything better than this, and travellers that washed through the town.
Before the black death, the working man rarely left his own village, not until the Victorian Era did travel become affordable for all but even at the time this building was put up, working travellers were passing through the town.
A poor travelling woman was here delivered of a child which was here baptized the 16th day of January and called Ann. (Redenhall 1594)
Harleston had a particularly large transient population; not just the hawkers, the pot and pan repairers, knife grinders, the seasonal workers, the quack doctors and the homeless or feckless but tradesmen and their servants. Many of these tradesmen were associated with the 18th and 19th C cattle trade bringing beasts to the market from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In earlier years others would have been involved in the cloth trade or importing bulbs from the Low Countries.
Some came from even further afield - the first burial recorded at Redenhall in 1804 was of “an East Indian Black, Name unknown a travelling Pauper taken ill at Harleston & died in the workhouse aged between 40 and 50”.
A news report reveals that 60 years later, people were still dying anonymously –actually in this building, the low lodging house.
Sudden death – On the 28th September 1864, a man respectably dressed, between 50 and 60 years of age, stayed at the Oak Tap, a low lodging-house in this town, and went to bed apparently well. Not making his appearance on the Friday morning, the landlady went into his room and found him but just alive. Mr Candler was speedily with him, but he died without exhibiting any signs of consciousness within about an hour, from apoplexy, there was nothing on his person to give any clue as to what his name was or where he came from and on Saturday afternoon “the stranger” was interred in Redenhall Churchyard.
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