Thriplow Farms Annual Report XLIV - 2017: Housen

David Short, who until recently was landlord at the Queen’s Head in next-door Newton, is a mine of local historical information. When he tells me that he knows what my family, who used to live in Newton Hall until 1971, got up to back then, there’s always a twinkle in his eye. So far he hasn’t told me any really scandalous stories but I am sure they are in there - certainly there must be something more juicy than where the guy lived who sold my parents their herbal remedies forty years ago. Another scrap he mentioned to me was how when he started working at the pub, one of the old timers, who had never left the village, used to use the old Anglo Saxon way of pluralising words, which was to add the suffix -en, rather than the -s we use nowadays. We still use a few words left over from those days - David’s example was “oxen” - but there’s also “children”, “men”, “women” and a handful more. Anyway, there is one word that David recalled him using a lot, and it’s how he would have described the reason why my eye has been off the farming ball for a lot of 2017: housen.Read the full report