At Home - Bill Bryson [30]
In Britain, it is lucky that so much was built from oak because that is the only British tree that provides clear, usable evidence. But even the best woods present problems. No two trees will ever have quite the same pattern. One may have narrower rings than another because it grew in shade or had more competition at ground level or a poorer water supply. In practice you need a huge supply of tree-ring sequences to provide a reliable database, and you must make many ingenious statistical adjustments to get an accurate reading—and for this you need the magical theorem of the Reverend Thomas Bayes, mentioned in Chapter I.
By taking a sample of wood about the thickness of a pencil and applying all the aforementioned tests, scientists worked out that the door at Westminster Abbey was made from the wood of a tree that was felled between 1032 and 1064, just before the Norman conquest, so at the very end of the Anglo-Saxon period. And that solitary door is very nearly all that has survived.*
With so little to go on, there is plenty of room for argument. Jane Grenville, in her scholarly and definitive work Medieval Housing, provides an arresting pair of illustrations showing how two archaeological teams, using the same information, envisioned the appearance of a longhouse at Wharram Percy, a lost medieval village in Yorkshire. One illustration shows a strikingly plain, basic dwelling, with walls made of mud or clunch (a composite of mud and dung) and a roof of grass or sod. The other shows a much sturdier and more sophisticated cruck-framed construction in which hefty beams have been fitted together with skill and care. The simple fact is that archaeological evidence shows mostly how buildings met the ground, not how they looked.
For a very long time it was believed that medieval peasant houses were little more than primitive huts—the kind of frail, twiggy structures that get blown down by wolves in fairy tales. The feeling was that they were unlikely to have lasted more than a single generation. Grenville quotes one scholar who felt confident enough to assert that the houses of common people were “of uniformly poor quality throughout the whole of England” right up to the time of the Tudors—quite a sweeping statement, and a wrong one, it appears. The evidence now increasingly indicates that common people of the Middle Ages, and probably long before, could have good houses if they wanted them. One clue is the growth in the late Middle Ages of specialized trades, such as thatching, carpentry, and daubing. Doors increasingly had locks, too—a clear indication that buildings and their contents were valued. Above all, cottages were evolving into a multiplicity of types—“full Wealden,” “half Wealden,” “double pile,” “rear outshut,” “H-shape,” “open hall,” “cross-passage with cow house,” “cross-passage without cow house,” and so on. The differences may seem trivial, but for the people who lived in them, they are what gave their houses character and distinction.
One thing that did not escape notice in medieval times was that nearly all the space above head height was unusable because it was so generally filled with smoke. An open hearth had certain clear advantages—it radiated heat in all directions and allowed people to sit around it on all four sides—but it was also like having a permanent bonfire in the middle of one’s living room. Smoke went wherever passing drafts directed it—and with many people coming and going, and all the windows glassless, every