HISTORY

Great Coxwell Barn is a Medieval tithe barn at Great Coxwell, Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire), England. It is on the northern edge of the village of Great Coxwell, which is about 9 miles (14 km) northeast of Swindon in neighbouring Wiltshire.

The barn was built about 1292 for the Cistercian Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, which had held the manor of Great Coxwell since 1205. Since 1956 it has been in the care of the National Trust.

The Abbey seems to have had the barn built about 1292. Dendrochronology has established that some of the timbers in the roof of the barn were felled in the winter of 1291–92, and building with unseasoned timber was then common practice. Other timbers were felled earlier, from 1253 onwards.

The barn is built of Cotswold stone, with rubblestone walls and ashlar buttresses. The roof has a timber frame, borne on pairs of timber posts and surfaced with Stonesfield slate. In the main part of the barn are six pairs of posts, meaning that it has east and west aisles and seven bays. The west porch has one pair of timber posts and is of two bays. The architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner considered the interior to be the finest of any barn in England.

The barn is 152 feet (46 m) long, 43 feet (13 m) wide and its roof ridge is 48 feet (15 m) high. It is aligned almost north–south, with a large west porch and much smaller east porch. An internal wall partly separates the west porch from the main body of the barn. As originally built, each porch had a door large enough for wagons; the west porch had also a small south door and the main barn had small doors in its north and south walls. In the centre of the barn is a threshing floor on which grain was threshed by hand with flails, with the large east and west doors open for a through draught to separate the grain from the chaff.