An Early Medieval Tradition of Building in Britain

Abstract

STUDYING TIMBER BUILDINGSAlmost all domestic buildings in early medieval Britain were constructed of timber or earth sod. Hardly a single stone domestic building was constructed in the period between the fifth to the tenth century 1 . Indeed, masonry construction was not a well developed craft. Little quarrying took place and, if stone was required for the construction of churches, it had to be robbed from decaying Roman buildings, or in the case of upland Britain, gathered from the ground surface 2 . In areas of Scotland, particularly the Highlands where straight timbers were hard to obtain, earth sod was used instead of timber 3 . We cannot talk with any certainty about buildings of this period in Wales, because so few have been excavated. Wood was so important in most houses in England and southern Scotland that the Old English word timber served to refer to both the building and the material from which it was constructed.That choice of building material poses immense problems for the study of early medieval domestic architecture. There are no standing timber buildings of this period: the earliest structure -the timber church at Greenstead -dates only to the end of the eleventh century 4 . The only surviving timbers from early medieval buildings are fragments of structures which have survived in water-logged conditions, particularly those found in York and London. The most common type of evidence for the presence of early medieval buildings are the holes dug into the ground to hold timber posts. On suitable soils, and with careful excavation, it may be possible not merely to record the holes dug for the posts, but to identify traces of decayed timbers, which are marked by darker coloured soil and known as 'post-ghosts'. The study of architecture of this period has been therefore a problem of interpreting how the timber buildings might have looked largely from the below-ground remains of the structure. Much ingenuity has been devoted to understanding the appearance of buildings above ground from these fragmentary traces.The interpretation of early medieval buildings has drawn to varying degrees on four different approaches. The first of these might be described as retrogressive. It starts with the earliest surviving timber buildings and assumes that houses of an earlier date must have been built in a similar tradition, but perhaps in a slightly less sophisticated manner. There are seven standing domestic AbstractEarly medieval houses in Britain were largely constructed of timber. Various approaches have been adopted for interpreting the character of these buildings, since no standing structure survives. These include the study of water-logged timber, the reproduction of methods of working and the reconstruction of buildings, as well as the conventional analysis of the plans of excavations. The problems of identifying the ethnic affiliations of houses in Britain are particularly acute because the structural features which define the building traditions in England and Scotland have rarely been identified. Howeve...