![]() In this construction posts made up the frame for walls and supported rafters for the roof. By the fourteenth century trees large enough to serve as crucks were rare, so an alternative, the truss, was also used. As the crucks were assembled they were raised in order, starting at one end. The two pieces were put together to form an arch, the branch portion providing the roof frame and wall portions and the other wooden parts all were constructed on the ground and then the whole cruck was raised into place. A venerable tree, usually an oak, was cut and the trunk and the lowest branch split in half and shaped or, possibly, two smaller trees were used. The cruck was a marvelous structure requiring considerable skill to make. ![]() The cruck type was perhaps the older of the two. But it was so scarce by the fourteenth century that it was only used as a frame and the walls were filled in with turf in Devon and similar areas, cob in clayland, and wattle and daub through most of England. wood was the preferred building material. A typical modern barn would be an upgrade, even without aluminum siding, fiberglass insulation, or electric lighting. ![]() You lived with the smell, and spent a lot of time outside. Note that having livestock in your house was something to aspire to - they were stores of wealth, produced goods and services like wool, milk, or traction, and helped keep the house warm. Although a house was formally just one room, flimsy wattle-and-daub, wood, or stone partitions existed to separate animals, the cooking area, and sleeping areas. These were almost always a single level, but could have a loft for extra storage or sleeping space, referred to as a "solar" - rather different from a manor house's solar. Long-houses varied in size from buildings little larger than cottages to the more normal forty-nine feet in length some were as long as eighty-two to ninety-eight feet.Īn accompanying illustration shows larger houses as 15' across, so roughly 200 to 1,500 square feet, or 18 to 135 square meters. An internal passageway between the two parts of a long-house permitted access to either side, so that it had the appearance from the outside of being a long, low, continuous structure. The byre housed farm animals or other agricultural goods such as grain or farming, brewing, or dairying equipment. At one end was a byre that was usually separated from the living part by a cross-passage. ![]() The typical half-virgater or virgater had a long-house. These were either one-room houses of about sixteen by twelve feet or possibly larger two-room houses of thirty-three by thirteen feet. Regarding the size of houses, on pages 32-33:Īt the lower end of the social scale was the hut of the cottar, the cottage. Her book focuses on the farming serfs who made up the bulk of the population the date range is the 13th to 15th centuries. I found this topic to be well-described in The Ties That Bind: Peasant Families in Medieval England, by Barbara Hanawalt. ![]()
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