Back in the 15th and 16th centuries, when a family had made its money or was simply spending that made for it by antecedents, a few overt demonstrations of wealth were desirable.

A fine house, preferably with a large estate and embellished gateways, was de rigeur but it could be topped off by that working accessory with scope for largesse, the Great Barn.

A great barns was a dark and airy place with ventilation slits or brick honeycomb instead of windows, the king posts and queen posts and hammer beams of its massive thatched roof barely visible in the gloom.

It was also the estate's corn store and the place where corn was threshed during autumn and winter. Wide double doors in the flanks would open onto a hard thrashing floor; loaded carts would enter through one side, unload the sheaves, and exit through the other. When threshing, done by labourers using hand flails, was finished, all doors would be opened and the wind would blow away the chaff.

Threshing has long been replaced by combine harvesters but a few barns remain around the country, their longevity a witness both to the original quality of construction and the wealth of their creators.

There are a handful of outstanding examples in Norfolk, a county which, along with the rest of East Anglia, had made its money originally from wool.

One of the early ones, and possibly the oldest brick barn in England, sits on the edge of Hales green, off the Norwich-Beccles road - forming the southern side of the walled courtyard of the former Hales Hall. Both Hall and barn were built by Sir James Hobart, Henry VII's attorney general, in 1480, and while only parts of the main house remain, the barn survives in all its statuesque glory.

Its brick walls, two and a half feet thick, are punctuated by decorative ventilation slits with two large doorways in the northern flank and three in the southern under a fourteen bay roof, eleven of the bays having tie-beams, queen-posts and collar trusses and three with king posts above queen posts.

The barn was rethatched in 1996 with funding by English Heritage, the ward winning restoration being something of an improvement on the corrugated iron which had clad the rafters for many years. Today, it is used by the garden centre which occupies part of the courtyard area.

To the west and close to the A140 south of Norwich on the Shotesham Park estate, Dairy Farm Barn built about 1500 remains within a working farmyard. This part weather-board, part rendered structure on a brick plinth is smaller than Hales barn and is more closely related to some Suffolk barns. Its northern and southern flank walls have one door opening each under a five bay queen post roof.

But up on Norfolk's north-east coast, there are two more in the Hales mould which were partly the products of social competition between two leading 16th century north Norfolk families, the Pastons of the village which bears their name, and the Woodhouses of Waxham.

The Woodhouses made their way in life through military endeavour and public office. Sir Thomas Woodhouse was High Sheriff in 1553 and his brother, William, had been knighted in 1544. Both Sir William and his son, Sir Henry were Vice Admirals of the Fleet, and during the 1580s, under the threat of the Spanish Armada, Sir Henry patrolled this section of coast. On the Armada map of 1588, Waxham was identified as a stronghold.

There had once been two villages - Waxham Magna and Waxham Parva - but the latter was washed away in the 13th Century and the modern day hamlet of Waxham with the barn and the remaining fragments of the Elizabethan manor now sit behind the fragile marram dunes.

But Waxham Great Barn, built around 1570 as a display of Woodhouse wealth, was meant to last and, at 180 feet long, is the biggest in Norfolk. Its roof includes tie beams and hammer beams while its walls of coursed flint decorated with diamond patterned brickwork have limestone buttresses taken from three local dissolved and disintegrating priories which were bought by the Woodhouses after the Dissolution in the 1530s. Such recycling was a necessity. There is little building stone found naturally in East Anglia and redundant ecclesiastical buildings were by then the main source of supply, religious institutions having previously been among the few ever rich enough to import it from Northamptonshire or even Normandy..

Various 18th and 19th century wings and courtyards were added but in 1987, with the barn already in poor repair, the great gale removed part of the roof. The wreck was acquired in 1989 by Norfolk County Council and repaired with joint funding from the County Council and English Heritage.

The Pastons who lived a few miles along the coast are known mainly for their letters chronicling life in those times. Originally of humble origins, they had farmed in Paston from the 13th century, the family fortune having begun to accumulate under Clement Paston, a careful farmer who married well. When he died in 1419, his son, William, continued the line, practicing law, becoming rich, marrying well and accumulating land by all three means.

Nothing remains of Paston Hall but the barn, built in 1581, is intact. It bows to the slightly earlier Woodhouse effort in that it is 24 feet shorter but its roof originally was of higher quality and its walls, mainly of flint with brick dressing, also incorporate ex-ecclesiastical limestone dressings.

In 1996, it was bought by North Norfolk Historic Building Trust from the receiver of a scientific instrument company that once intended to convert it, incongruously perhaps, to its corporate HQ. The thatch was renewed during the 1999/2000 winter when the summer resident bat colony was away at its, still unlocated, winter hibernation site. Hopefully the bats approved of the refurbishment on their return.

Further information: Historic Buildings Team, 01603 222706

Reproduced by kind permission of John Worrall © 2002