If you own an old cottage, you may be thrilled to have an original stone-flagged, brick or boarded cottage floor. Perhaps you discovered it under layers of grimy, broken lino or several coats of paint. What a gem! And now you proudly want to display it in all its naked glory. Taste has indeed come a long way from the days when a brick or stone floor was seen as too dull and boring for words.

Daubing it with coloured paints is unlikely to figure in your plans for your beautiful original cottage floor. Yet this is exactly what many modest families would have done back in the cottage's heyday - had they been able to afford the paint.

Cottage floors lacked decoration

We know from contemporary writing that the "old custom" of strewing the floor with straw or rushes and sweet-smelling herbs was, by 1800, a thing of the past. Before the advent of a mechanised textile industry, carpets were luxury items available only to the rich (and even then often hung on walls or placed over benches, rather than on the floor) but small mats could be home-made from linen scraps and the like. Coloured fabrics, being expensive, were in short supply and therefore a colourful rag rug was a prized possession.

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