and are resistant to easy categorisation. Yet a) cruck; b) box frame and c) post and truss construction are the most common categories found in the Middle Ages in England.
Alternatively, walls could be constructed with a box frame. Simple upright beams were jointed into a sole plate and capped by a top plate on which the roof trusses rested – this method was more common in the east and south (fig. 75c). A more sophisticated variation of this was the post-and-truss construction, essentially a timber-framed grid upon which the roof trusses rested, found in the west and south (fig. 75b). In all these cases the gaps were filled with wattle and daub – to make walls impervious to the elements – and the roof covered with thatch. Windows were small, glassless and furnished with shutters. Chimney stacks were rare, and fires would be lit in grates or boxes on the beaten-earth floors.
Most of these constructional systems resulted in framed units of about 15ft, making most houses either 30ft or 45ft by 15ft wide. So although peasant houses were dark and smoky, they were not smaller than workers’ housing in Victorian cities.19 They were also more private than might be imagined. Although the whole basis of village life was communal, especially where common-field systems predominated, the tofts – with their hedges and banks, which often rose to head height – and cottages with stout, locked doors, gave peasant families individuality and privacy. At Steventon, Berkshire, there are a number of cruck-built cottages of about 1270 to 1280 associated with a medieval causeway, but surviving peasant houses of this date are rare and most of our knowledge comes from archaeology.20
These cottages could not have been built by unskilled labour. It was necessary to employ a carpenter and have access to properly cut timber showing that by the 13th century there were thousands of carpenters working in villages as well as for the aristocracy, Crown and the Church. Nor did a house come cheap. It is likely that a straightforward cottage would have cost a peasant a year’s income, a sum that was probably borrowed and paid off like a modern mortgage.21
Fig. 76 The Psalter of which this is a page was commissioned by Geoffrey Luttrell, lord of the manor at Irnham in Lincolnshire in 1320–40. Uniquely, it shows scenes of everyday rural life, including this image of a typical 14th-century water mill. (from The Luttrell Psalter, c.1325–35, British Library. Shelfmark: Add. 42130, f.181)
Fig. 77 An early 14th century stone frieze from the infirmary hall at Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire. A contemporary windmill is shown with steps up to the door and a pivot for the whole building to move to catch the wind.
Fig. 78 Temple Cressing, Essex: a longitudinal section of the wheat barn of the 1290s. The barn is remarkably unaltered, and would have originally had wooden boarded walls.
The aristocracy gained about 60 per cent of their income from rents and fees but they were much more interested in agriculture than their continental counterparts; between 1184 and 1214 almost all took their demesne land into direct management. This they did with some success, refining crop rotation and exploiting existing sources of income more efficiently. One of the most important of these was milling, which, as we have seen, was very profitable. After 1100 landlords were busy building new mills and refurbishing old ones, doubling their number to perhaps 12,000 by 1300. In this there was one really important invention: the windmill. It is likely that the first one was built in East Anglia not long before 1185, but they took some time to perfect and construction only boomed in the east in the 1240s, followed by other parts of the country where fast-running water was scarce. A new windmill cost about £10 but they tended to have greater repair costs than watermills, which were cheaper to run though expensive to build. The water engineering alone could cost £15 or more. Watermills were of the type shown in the Luttrell Psalter (fig. 76); the mill building was like any normal timber-framed building and had a thatched roof. The windmill was much more specialised as it had to turn and face the wind. This meant that it had to pivot on a central mast, which had to be sturdy enough to resist the huge stresses of wind drag (fig. 77).22
Technological advances in milling were matched by advances in the quality and construction of other agricultural buildings. Barns were pre-eminent in the farmyard, crucial for the safe and dry storage of crops. At Temple Cressing, Essex, are two barns that were once part of the large estate of the Knights Templar. The earlier is the barley barn, erected in the 1230s; the wheat barn is later, built in the 1290s (figs 78 and 79). The wheat barn shows some significant technical improvements even though it was built only 60 years later than the barley barn. In timber building, structural capabilities are determined by the carpenter’s ability to make strong joints. In early timber structures these were simple lap joints (one timber resting on another), but the Cressing barns show that during the late 13th century these simple joints were largely superseded by mortise-and-tenons and stronger types of lap joint. Moreover, the timbers were squared and more regular, and the structure was much better integrated, with all the elements soundly jointed together. These advances made possible the construction of very large barns for 1,000-acre estates such as Temple Cressing.23
Fig. 79 Temple Cressing, Essex, The Wheat Barn, interior. Squared timbers made more regular and integrated structures by the end of the thirteenth century.
Towns
Between 1100 and 1300 the percentage of the English population that lived in towns doubled to 20 per cent. In 1086 there were about 100 boroughs, almost all founded by royal will. By 1300 there were more than 500, many founded by the Church and the aristocracy. Towns were profitable business; rents from the burgesses were good, but landlords could also profit from market tolls and the borough court. The example of King’s (originally Bishop’s) Lynn, Norfolk, demonstrates this nicely. In 1090 Herbert de Losinga, Bishop of Thetford, established a priory and market in the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lynn. His intention was to capture a slice of the trade that would flow through the Wash and down the Great Ouse. The settlement was a success, and in about 1150 Bishop Turbe built an extension to the town, with a colossal new marketplace and a huge church. This was under the direct lordship of the bishop and was highly lucrative, so much so that the bishop bought back his rights over the original town and obtained a royal charter for the unified settlement in 1204 (fig. 80). A charter meant that the bishop could govern the town and collect taxes in exchange for a fixed fee paid to the Crown.24 The excavation of early medieval timber houses in Lynn, London and several other towns corroborates what the great barns at Cressing Temple tell us, which is that in the late 12th century timbers became squarer, cut by saw, mortise-and-tenon joints start to become common, frames were more stoutly constructed, with regularly spaced studding, and earth-fast posts were replaced by timber sole plates, often on foundations. This was all part of a process that led to fully self-supporting frames for domestic dwellings. The impetus for structural and technical advances, and the reasons for them, were not simple. On the one hand, they were driven by the need to solve intensely practical problems. For instance, the making of timber revetments that formed the London riverfront led to innovations in timber framing, their constructors having to battle against the intense forces of the tidal Thames. On the other hand, high-level patronage
