The Story of Joe the Quilter's Cottage

His quilts with country femme were crowned, so neatly stitched and all aground. Adorned with flowers figured round, clever Joe the Quilter. Joe the Quilter's soulless saint, he lies slumbering in his grave. Cursed the monster so depraved that murdered Joe the Quilter. This isolated lane, north of Hexham in Northumberland, now looks like a fairly innocent patch of nettles by a narrow road. But in 1826, it was the site of a cottage that witnessed a brutal murder. The victim's name was Joseph Headley, better known as Joe the Quilter. Joe was an impoverished craftsman, a widower in his mid-seventies, who lived alone in his isolated cottage with his cat and his chickens. He was well known locally and his quilts were alleged to be of excellent quality. He even had a quilting pattern named after him, the eponymous Old Joe's Chain. On the fateful evening of the 3rd January 1826, Joe was dragged from his cottage and viciously murdered. Such was the outrage at the brutality of the murder and Joe's defenselessness that the story made national news. The Home Secretary at the time, Robert Peel, acting on behalf of the King, announced a gigantic reward of 100 guineas for information leading to the murderer's capture. All this was in vain. Despite several deathbed confessions later in the 19th century, the murderers were never caught. There had been rumours circulating at the time that Joe had some great hidden wealth. These seemed like they were largely untrue as by the end of his life, Joe was living in extreme poverty. But it may have been these rumours that led to his murder. The press coverage at the time included a ballad composed to commemorate Joe, as well as graphic descriptions of the scene of the murder, a reconstruction of what might have happened and an unscaled plan and drawing of the cottage. The Beamish Museum collections hold a quilt that we know was made by Joe and this, alongside the plan of the cottage, is what first suggested the idea of investigating and recreating Joe's home. Beamish wanted to build the house of someone who lived in relative poverty to contrast with the wealthy inhabitants of Pockley Old Hall. Drawings of small cottages like Joe's are extremely rare from the early 1800s, so with a fantastic accompanying story, it seemed like a great building to replicate. But unfortunately, the plan of Joe's omits some vital measurements, so it is in the pursuit of this information that we were led to this isolated Northumbrian lane in 2015. Here we've got the site of Joe Lecourte's cottage and what we did when we first came to this site was we worked out where it was by looking at the first edition OS map, which showed an outline of Homer's house, what it was called, and that's in 1865-ish. And what we did was we paced the distance from the corner where the road was at the time and the corner where the road is now and got around about this area and in the wall we found lots of bricks, which is quite rare to have in a rural area like this. It suggests there's been some kind of human activity. To clear back all the nettles and stones with a digger and we found there was a mortar spread underneath that. We came back this year and we started to dig it by hand to excavate it to find out what was underneath that mortar spread and we managed to find all sorts of exciting things. We've actually got the outline of the walls, so I'll wander around and I'll show you where they are. Now I'm standing on the wall, so we've got one corner here, the back corner of Joe's house. So this is the gable end, running this way, along there and then running up along to where the guys are sieving and digging up at that top end we've got the rest of the wall in there. As we come up further into Joe's room, we can see here we've got some flagstones, which is fantastic. We're really excited about getting these. We hoped they would be here. We hoped we'd be able to lift them and take them back to the museum and that's what we've got. We've got at least five or six flagstones there, they're quite broken. We don't know if this was the full extent to them or whether these ones were left in the ground because they were broken and when the cottage was demolished, they picked up the other ones and moved them. A line, a very curvy line, but a line of bricks there, which is part of the chimney breast effectively. So I'm standing in the alcove to the right-hand side, my right, of the end of the building. Right in here is the back of the chimney breast and the fireplace and then we've got these stones. You can see these guys starting to come down, so there's a big stone there with some mortar and that carries on there. We haven't found the other side of this, it may be because it's underneath that wall. That would give it the right kind of measurements and we'd have five foot on this side, five foot half and then five foot on the other side, which would bring it just in front of where the current road is, which is exactly the kind of location that we're looking at it being. So down at my feet here, you've got the north gable end. So you're standing just inside the building and I'm standing just outside the building. So the ghostly wall is between the two of us, but as we go further north here, we get the garden. So this garden, we know there was a wall along the front of it. This is probably where Joe was doing most of his gardening work. And so what we find in archaeological sites is that lots of pottery comes out of the garden. People tend not to leave broken pots inside their house. They tend to pick it up and throw it in the garden with all their kitchen waste, that kind of thing, and then dig it over and it helps things to grow better. The site yielded more than three and a half kilograms of pottery, hundreds of iron nails, a handful of personal items such as buttons and loads more interesting stuff besides. We found a brass plate with the name Reverend R. Clarke inscribed on it. Records show that he was a local clergyman who had fought through a snowstorm to save Joe from starvation in 1823, just three years before Joe was tragically murdered. We also got a silver coin, a four pence piece, it's also called a groat, that's found in the fireplace. This dates from the 1690s and it was issued as Maundy money by King William and Queen Mary. The site also showed evidence for the partition wall between the two rooms of the house. The northern end with its flagged floor where Joe would have spent most of his time and the southern end with a packed earth floor where his chickens lived. We even found some burnt wood and a little bit of what we think was wattle and daub that shows how this partition was made. Since the excavation we've been drawing up the plans from the archaeological and documentary evidence and thinking about how to recreate the living heather thatch roof of the cottage which will be located here along a rural lane within our Georgian landscape. The next phase of the project will involve working with local communities to construct a test frame for the heather thatch roof and wattle and daub walls before work on the main cottage begins. Throughout the course of the project we all feel like we've built quite a connection to Joe and it's going to be really exciting to see his house rebuilt and opened up for our visitors to join in with that connection to the past.