Plan of Pendean showing the original layout of c1609 and the alterations made in the mid-17th century.

Actually matching an inventory to a standing building is difficult. No probate inventory survives for Richard Clare. However, we are fortunate in having a probate inventory for Nicholas Austen dated 1697 which seems to match what we know of the layout of Pendean in the late 17th century. The inventory (which is damaged down the right hand side, preventing a complete transcription) describes a total of nine rooms, six downstairs and three upstairs. Downstairs there was a kitchen, with a fireplace, used for cooking, a brew house (self explanatory but possibly also used for dairying), a cellar (for the storage of liquid, probably ale and cider), a milk house (for dairying), a hall with a fireplace for sitting, eating and storage and a bake house for food preparation and baking. Upstairs the inventory records a hall chamber with a fireplace, used solely for sleeping, a little chamber and a kitchen chamber, both used for sleeping and storage.

Austen’s inventory confirms that the Museum’s interpretation of room usage within Pendean is substantially correct. We know that the room on the east side of the chimney stack was the kitchen because of the size of the fireplace and evidence for the earlier existence of an oven. The central room with a slightly smaller fireplace would therefore have been the hall and the smallest, unheated, room at the west end was probably the milk house. The internal oven, which we know was removed in the later 17th century, must have been replaced by a new oven in one of the two additional outshuts, becoming the bake house. The hall chamber with the fireplace was evidently the main bedchamber as the Museum has interpreted it; its status is reflected in the fact that it was the only one of the three chambers not used for storage.