Roofers in Hatfield

The roofs of Hatfield

Hatfield's history starts long before any other town on this site. On 12 October 633 AD, King Edwin of Northumbria was killed here at the Battle of Hatfield Chase, one of the defining clashes of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and by the time of the 1086 Domesday Book the settlement was recorded as part of the Conisbrough estate, with a church already on the site. That depth is still visible in the roofs. The Grade I listed Manor House is a former Norman hunting lodge that still keeps an infilled 12th-century window, largely rebuilt in the 18th century in roughcast stone and brick under a hipped Welsh slate roof.

Around it, the ordinary High Street tells a different, equally documented story. It is a textbook medieval street village, a run of long, thin plots once linked at the rear by back lanes, whose shops began as timber-framed buildings before being encased in brick during the 18th century, the same rebuilding wave that gave the Manor House its current form. What went on top, though, was different: handmade brick under clay pantile, not slate, with agricultural buildings and modest houses originally fitted with Yorkshire horizontal sliding sash windows. The High Street became a conservation area in 1970, and a second, separate Manor Road conservation area followed in 1990. Across the parish's 32 listed buildings, that same split holds: red brick and pantile on the ordinary houses and farms, Welsh slate reserved for the grandest one.

Hatfield today is really several villages under one name, Dunscroft, Dunsville, Hatfield Woodhouse, Lindholme and West End among them, threaded through by the M18 and the start of the M180. It also gave its name to Hatfield Chase, the vast wetland Charles I sold for drainage in 1629, the same scheme this site covers in more depth on our Thorne page a few miles north. Two roofing traditions from the same century, on the same ground that was still being drained when the second one was built, is not a story we tell anywhere else on this site.