one. Special places were normally natural ones: rivers, hills, woods. Indeed, their language had words for circles and curves, but expressing straight lines and right angles was difficult. The natural world therefore played a large role in building. Most churches, for instance, were not aligned by compass point to the east, but were laid out by sighting the sun at sunrise and sunset either on saints’ feast days, Easter, or on the spring or autumn equinoxes.7
Almost all secular buildings were built of timber; indeed, the Anglo-Saxon verb ‘to build’ is timbrian, and buildings were getimbro. Timber was not seen as a lower-status material than stone, nor was the skill to use it effectively lesser than that of the mason. Indeed, even in the early Saxon period, the achievements of leading English carpenters were considerable. That English building between the Romans and the Vikings was almost entirely of timber demonstrates that efficient woodland management must have continued after 410, albeit at a local level. This involved cyclically harvesting the underwood (coppicing) but allowing the oaks to grow in longer rotations (between twenty and seventy years). Coppicing provided fuel as well as all the non-structural building timber, including poles for scaffolding. Oaks were selected by carpenters, felled, their branches and bark removed, and then squared up and used for the structure of buildings. Oak was worked green (without being seasoned), the structure tightening up as the timber dried out. The most important woodworking tool was the axe used for cutting and smoothing, but hammers, adzes, boring-bits, chisels, gouges, planes and saws have been excavated from Anglo-Saxon sites. Nails were not used and fastening was by simple joints with timber pegs. The highest-status buildings might also include iron straps, hinges and catches, as ironworking and smithing continued after the Romans left.
Fig. 3 St Peter’s, Wearmouth, County Durham. The lowest stage of the tower was built in around 680 and was originally a single-storeyed porch; it was heightened c.700 and then again in the later Middle Ages. The remarkable porch, which never had doors, is flanked by cylindrical stone drums probably turned on a lathe like timber balusters. The Saxon nave lies behind the tower; the aisle to the left is 13th century.
Coppicing produced the wattles necessary for certain types of wall construction. Wattling involves a row of upright stakes, the spaces between which are filled by interweaving flexible branches, often rods of hazel, which are then covered with daub, either mud, clay or, in more sophisticated buildings, lime plaster. Roofs were not covered with slate, tile or stone, as was often the case in Roman times, but only with thatch or shingles. The best thatch was made of reed, but most often it was straw or even hay attached with string or hazel rods. Shingles were small, geometric slithers of oak pegged or nailed to the roof structure, more durable than thatch and less prone to catch fire.8
Stone building implied infrastructure and organisation. Quarrying, transport and construction require the mobilisation of significant expertise and labour. All this disappeared after 410, and by 600 there can have been few masons left in England. Masonry was re-introduced by Christian missionaries and relied entirely on robbing Roman buildings for a supply of cut stone. It was not only the expertise that was lacking to restart quarrying, but the motivation; the ruins of Rome were a plentiful quarry and most Saxon stone buildings were built close to or among the ruins of Roman sites.9 Where stone was used in a decorative fashion by the Saxons it was often carved as wood. The right-hand jamb of the archway at the base of the tower at St Peter’s, Wearmouth, County Durham, of c.680 is a perfect example of the woodcarvers’ art translated into stone (fig. 3).
Fundamental to the reintroduction of masonry building was the rediscovery of mortar; without this, stones could only be laid dry on top of each other at a very low height. Excavations at Wearmouth have revealed the earliest example of a post-Roman mortar mixer, a pit for mixing lime mortar with large, rotating paddles. The expertise for constructing this came from Gaul and required limestone to be burnt in a kiln before being mixed with water to form lime mortar.10
Where People Lived
In the years after the collapse of Roman rule power did not reside in fixed places – capitals, if you like; it resided with individuals moving from place to place. Leaders principally expressed their status through portable wealth, through personal adornment, through individual prowess and the ability to provide their entourage with great feasts. Places were occupied for short periods so that rulers could receive food-rents from surrounding farmers, feast with their households and move on. Yet the rulers who emerged in England wanted, as much as their Roman predecessors, to create monumental expressions of their power. In the Saxon poem Beowulf the heroic struggle between Beowulf and the monster Grendel is set in a spectacular timber banqueting hall, with doors bound with ironwork, and a carved and gilded roof strengthened by iron braces. Quite a number of these halls have now been identified, either by aerial archaeology or by excavation.11
Fig. 4 A reconstruction of the royal hall at Yeavering, Northumberland, based on excavations in the 1950s and 60s. Started by King Edwin in the 620s, this great hall and accompanying structures, including a grandstand looking like a Roman theatre, would have been used by the king when he visited the region to feast on food rents owed to him by his subjects.
The only one that can certainly be identified as being royal was the complex of the Northumbrian King Edwin at Yeavering, Northumberland, started in the 620s.12 There the excavators found a number of halls built in succession after a series of fires. The important point is the size and sophistication of these structures. The hall christened A2, for instance, was 82ft long and 36ft wide, had an entrance in the centre of each long wall, and two internal cross-walls making separate rooms at either end. The main hall was aisled and so was interrupted by supporting posts. The walls were made of planks sunk into a trench, then plastered inside and out. It is very likely that these were painted, and that beams and posts were elaborately carved (fig. 4). This was a building that required craftsmanship, engineering and organised labour, and it is likely that it was built in a tradition that was uninterrupted since the Romans. Roman villas had great halls or barns that are archaeologically almost indistinguishable from Saxon halls such as the one at Yeavering. In fact it is possible that some large Roman timber halls might have remained in use well into the period covered by this chapter. However, although the techniques necessary for their construction were probably essentially Romano-British, their decoration might have owed more to the traditions of their Anglo-Saxon owners.13
It was not only kings who built great halls. With royal grants of land, leading nobles also built places as estate centres and for feasting. It is likely that the remains found at Cowdery’s Down, Hampshire, are just such an aristocratic settlement dating from the 6th century. Fine timber halls, palisaded enclosures and more humble timber houses were found in a tight-knit plan, demonstrating that the building technology available to kings was also used by the richest landlords. Here, again, the halls and houses owed much to Romano-British building traditions, suggesting continuity of structural techniques.
The places that these individuals chose to make their base, whether as living kings or as corpses, were often ones that had been significant in the Iron Age or earlier. This is the start of a phenomenon that is very strong in England’s architectural history, the desire of the powerful to emphasise their legitimacy through references to the past. The locations of both the royal palace at Yeavering and the royal mausoleum at Sutton Hoo were influenced by pre-existing prehistoric settlements and barrows.14
This continuity of place seems to have affected lower-status settlements, too. Through the extraordinary upheavals and changes of the period Britain’s population had remained fairly static. From the late Roman period to about 700 most people
