The Age of the Carpenter Fred Dibnah's Building of Britain

As the turbulent and violent days of the Middle Ages ended in England,

the design of buildings began to change dramatically.

Defence was no longer the priority. Fortified houses and castles gave way to grand country houses

which were much more comfortable.

But the wealthy folk of Tudor England wouldn't have been able to take possession of such magnificent homes

if it hadn't been for the skills of one particular type of craftsman.

THIS was the age of the carpenter.

The changes that turned an Englishman's castle into his home

didn't happen overnight. The process began back in the Middle Ages.

Stokesay Castle, Shropshire, we see the first stages of these changes.

It's England's oldest moated and fortified manor house,

and it's hardly altered since it was built in the late 13th century.

It was built by a wealthy wool merchant called Lawrence of Ludlow.

What he desired was a comfortable mansion for his wife and children, and himself.

It also had to have a degree of fortification

The house he built took advantage of the newly-established peace on the Welsh border.

Its fortifications were a status symbol and wouldn't have been able to resist a real attack.

What they did was to provide the sort of security a wealthy family, like the Ludlows, would have needed

against burglars, or unruly mobs.

Their money had come from the wool trade,

and Lawrence of Ludlow became the wealthiest wool merchant in England.

Merchants like this were the new rich of the day.

This was reflected in the sort of house he was able to have built.

Until this time, merchants had lived in houses in town.

Only the landed gentry could have afforded something on this scale.

This is the house proper. Built out of local stone, with mud/stone inserts,

which have suffered a bit where it's all crumbling.

Over there, behind the flower beds, is the curtain wall,

which, of course, years ago, would have been a great deal higher.

Giving this courtyard a greater sense of security and enclosure.

The north tower is the oldest part of all the place.

Of course, you can see in these rooms, they're really built more for defence than comfort -

with the long, thin windows not found anywhere else in the whole manor.

The other parts have got nice, big windows.

They don't really do anything now, other than serve as a home for the swallows.

It's all very different on the second floor.

All the walls are timber framed and filled in with lath and plaster.

It must have been a very important room for the family.

Wonderful views of the countryside out through these lovely windows.

But I rather think, when this bit was stuck on top of here, they were more peaceful times.

These walls project out over the stone walls below.

It's a building technique known as jettying, and was developed during the 14th and 15th centuries.

This little drawing is to try and explain the principles of jettying out -

like, hanging over, or making the bedroom bigger.

This vertical, and this one, and that one, are the outside walls of the lower chamber.

When they put the floor joists on, there could be as much as two to three feet overhang.

Which in the case of both sides of a room, made the room six foot bigger. Which was quite a saving in a way.

To compensate for this overhang, they made these rather nice brackets

which, of course, helped support the floor above.

Jettying would become very common in timber framed buildings of the later Middle Ages.

But this north tower at Stokesay is a very early example of the technique,

where they built the wooden structure on top of the existing stone tower.

Up here, you can see what this jettying business is all about.

The actual horizontal ones, like this one, and that one there, are the actual floor joists

which are supported by these props and these bracing pieces that are pinned across with wooden pins.

These props are resting on these stone corbels...

which give it support,

but they also support these pieces at 45 degrees - all sorts of angles, actually.

In a way, it's a very clever way of pinching another room above

that's maybe as much as eight to nine feet bigger than the room below

where the stone walls are.

The timbers they used for this had to be pretty substantial.

And I followed their example when I built this.

I've always been interested in carpentry on a large scale.

I once had a friend who started life off as a joiner, and ended up as a fiddle player in the orchestra.

He was a bit like me - a frustrated steeplejack with a great interest in coal mining.

We promised ourselves, when we had a pint or two,

that we would build a wooden pithead gear.

They're ornate to me. I like it.

They had a bit of style - all these fancy ends on the woodwork.

Poor Kenneth didn't live long enough to see it finished. But I just kept making a bit here and there,

and bolted all the bits together -

very much the same way they would have done it back in the Middle Ages.

It's not everybody in a residential area who's got a pithead gear in their back garden.

To me it's rather a handsome piece of carpentry.

Stokesay is full of timber work on a grand scale,

especially in the great hall.

As you can imagine by its size, this room was the most important in the whole of the manor house.

The feeling of space...brought on by the massive roof and the trusses

which at the time, would have been leading-edged timber technology.

Everybody was striving to span the greatest distances with arches made of wood.

The cruck beam was the answer - and Stokesay has a very early example of a cruck roof.

This little drawing I've done, shows the basic principles of the cruck beam roof construction.

Basically, it's two bent trees.

Must have had a man going round all day looking for bent trees.

That is roughly the shape of one of these beams.

They just lean one on the other, and they had very few basic joints.

Of course, plenty of oak pegs to hold it all together.

Then, of course, this collar...

or horizontal beam across the top

would give it even more stability and stop it collapsing inwardly,

and that would be braced by rather small internal bracing pieces.

And various bits shoved in anywhere that'd give it a bit of support.

We can see how a roof like this is made,

because all the woodwork in this 14th century barn at Pilton, near Glastonbury, was destroyed by fire.

And a new cruck beam roof is being made for it.

It's all being done at a workshop where they specialise in historically accurate timber frame constructions.

I came to find out how you construct a roof from the owner Peter McCurdy.

Back in these times, would it all have been done on a floor like this?

They certainly would have done it on a floor or in a framing yard.

There are references to the term framing yard.

It would've been done as we're doing it - as a prefabricated operation.

But it's quite an operation getting timbers as big as this together.

Although we've got the forklift, most of it is done with a big wooden mallet,

just as they would have done back in, well...1280.

The holes are for pegs that hold the joints together.

Each one has got to be cut from a log like this, and shaped by hand.

For a roof this size, they have to make around 1,000 of them.

-Would you like a go?

-Now that I know you want an octagonal shape, and not round, I'll be all right.

-This little bit...

-That little metal bit...

-..it's getting a bit goosed.

The timber has to be really clean for a lot of these hand/tool operations.

The softer the wood, the easier the job.

Then they let them dry out and harden for about three or four weeks.

These are the main collars, and these are the upper cruck -

second tier of crucks.

In between them, we've got these intermediate principals.

We're now marking and jointing in the purlins.

Just to lift something as big as this from the horizontal to the vertical must have been a rare feat,

and must have had a lot of men, a lot of rope, and a lot of swearing.

The technique was used throughout the later Middle Ages,

and could be seen in houses large and small,

like this cottage.

Jettying wasn't just for the rich.

Here at Wakeup, the village is led by weaving. When the wide looms were introduced in the 15th century,

many had houses built with jettyed out rooms to accommodate their new machines.

It was the age of the carpenter - a time when the craft of working in wood reached its peak.

Master carpenters began to develop specialised jointing techniques

and make advances in the mechanics of how timber building was put together.

By the time of the Tudors, they had found ways of spanning wide spaces with massive timber roof trusses.

Timber was the main construction material.

Carpenters who built these places were the great engineers of the day.

Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire, is one of the finest examples of timber framed architecture in England.

It's typical of the early Tudor age.

It wasn't designed to keep out the enemy - more to impress neighbours.

Built over a period of 120 years, in the 15th and 16th centuries,

by three generations of the Moreton family...

who had been powerful, local landlords since the 13th century.

The main building materials, about this time, were still timber, especially in the north of England.

They set off with a plinth of stone or brick

and made these frames that weren't big - they only did one storey,

and stuck them up on the edge of the stonework,

and interlaced them with bracing pieces, as you can see.

Considering the amount of acreage that the Moretons owned,

they mustn't have been short of a few oak trees when they started building.

The timber would arrive and would be split with iron wedges and cleaned up.

Then the mortises and the tenons worked on the ends of each piece,

and then, of course, the beginnings of the erection with the pegs and the holes.

I've made this small model to try and portray how they went about building half-timber houses in Tudor times.

One of the first pieces would be a corner post stuck in the mortise hole -

it'd possibly hold itself up with pegs in.

So we've got the corner post up, like so...

then the cross members. It's all been marked so we know where it fits.

When you look at half-timber buildings, the vertical ones are never very long - 10 or 12 feet.

Two or three lads of reasonable fitness and strength

could get one like this and manhandle it up,

and shove it together like I've done.

And then, of course, more pegs in the holes to hold it all together,

and then, finally, the top rail, which would be dragged up on ropes,

tied to a couple of pieces of fir pole sticking up.

Then they'd get that tenon in,

and this tenon in the next one...

And, of course, more pegs...in the holes.

To fill in the spaces in between the framing, the first ideas they came up with were lath and plaster -

which is really just chopped sticks nailed in to a sort of rebate.

And then, they plastered it with a mixture of cow dung, sand and lime. They refer to it as wattle and daub.

They did it both sides, so it held an air cavity in between which made good insulation.

But you see examples of a crack round the edge where everything shrunk.

And I suppose the draught howls in, in the winter.

The big weakness of our buildings is the ends of the vertical framing.

Where they touched the stone work - there were no fancy damp courses, the rot set in at the bottom.

Some must have gone rotten quicker than others.

That's why the thing goes downhill, and all the horizontals end up higgledy-piggledy, like this lot.

It looks as though it could all come tumbling down at any time.

Here's rather a grand example...

that shows why the buildings settled down.

THIS vertical post once stood on the top of this knee-length stone,

and now, of course, it's gone a bit haywire, and it's obviously suffering from pressure from above.

Over the years, as it developed, it became sort of a hotchpotch of buildings all around this courtyard.

The oldest parts are the great hall and the east wing over here,

which have changed very little since modernisation in the 16th century,

when these wonderful bay windows were added.

The man who did the job, Rycharde Dale left his mark on this frame.

It says, "Rycharde Dale carpenter made this window...

"by the grace of God."

Early advertising for window frame-making.

One of the secrets of the carpenter's trade

was the variety of joints he'd use in a building to hold it together.

The mortise and tenon joints is the main joint in a half-timber building.

All these cross-members have a tenon on each end.

This is the tenon, that is the mortise hole.

Knock the wedges in and it opens up the tenon to get a really good grip,

which will be used on the corners, as you might say.

The other joint is like an open-ended mortise and tenon joint

which you can do lots of things with.

You can make octagonal structures. And it goes together in any way.

No trouble getting it together.

It was also handy for extending the length of a beam.

But it wouldn't be good under compression - it'd just snap.

And the simplest one of all is just a half-lap joint.

It could be used like the other mortise and tenon joint on corners, like, up here.

They were all clever lads with these fancy joints.

One thing that makes Little Moreton stand out

is the fact that there's all this lovely stuff in between the framing, which is all made of wood.

The beautiful four-leafed clovers are called quatrefoils, and are sawn out of one solid, lump of wood...

to that shape.

The more fancy work you had on your house, the richer your worth.

So the Moretons must have been quite well-to-do.

We don't know how much time Rycharde Dale spent on this work, or how many men he had working for him,

but it must have taken a lot of hours to do woodwork as elaborate as this.

What we do know is that he became a good friend of William Moreton,

and they spent a lot of time working together on plans for the house.

It wasn't until the 1570s, when the Moretons had already been at it round the back for 100 years,

that they decided to build this new and splendid frontage.

About that time, long galleries became all the rage.

Any house that was worth anything had to have a long gallery.

You'd got to show the one-upmanship thing.

A long gallery is, basically, a long, thin room built on top of the house,

purposely put there to engage your neighbours in entertainment and exercise -

like a health studio on top of your whole house.

It never had a lot of furniture - it was for recreation.

When it was raining, the Elizabethan ladies would walk from one end to the other all afternoon chatting.

So the Moreton family decided they'd have to have one.

They had the idea after the building work on the south range had begun.

They stuck this long gallery on top without putting proper support in.

The result was a bit of a disaster.

There's nothing really wrong with a timber frame construction.

They're very strong, almost earthquake proof if it's done right and not messed about with -

people cutting holes in where there shouldn't be.

THIS was never right from the beginning.

What's underneath the floor is not very hot. It's all gone higgledy-piggledy.

Through the excessive weight on the roof of these stone flag slates,

the windows and the framing have started to go outwards.

In the past, there's been an attempt to stop this by fixing up about eight by five blocks of oak,

which are anchored to the wall plates in an attempt to stop it going out.

And then, at a later date, iron rods have been inserted to help again.

The National Trust have done important engineering

to make sure the long gallery doesn't go any more out of shape.

Jeremy Milln's one of the team who's partially responsible

for the construction of this great, iron frame,

-and he's going to tell us all about it. Isn't that right?

-Perfectly true.

The Trust, about 10 years ago, was faced with an alarming report.

We were not allowed to take more than 10 people up, or the thing might have collapsed into the moat.

The prescription was to introduce a steel lattice system

underneath this triangular-shaped element of roof,

underneath the windows of the long gallery.

They support the posts of the long gallery itself

which have this tendency to buckle under the weight of the roof.

I don't think anybody's tried to measure the weight of the roof,

but the gritstone slabs equate to about 10 double-decker buses.

People don't realise how heavy those slates are.

They're very heavy.

And the amazing thing is, the whole weight of the structure -

the roof, the timber framing, and the floors, is all resting on the masonry at the bottom.

The many repairs done over centuries to the timber at the bottom - not one iron dowel has been found.

It's just resting there like a dolls house. Bang.

-What

-I

-like about it is the way that all that timber work is on show.

But why don't we have more half-timber buildings like this?

Well, they might be good to look at, but you talk to anyone who's tried to live in one through a British winter,

and they'll tell you that they're cold and draughty.

By the end of Elizabeth's reign, more houses were being built of brick.

It was warmer, drier, more comfortable to live in.

So if you'd got money, and you lived in a medieval timber framed house,

you'd either build a new house, or modernise your existing one by encasing the timber frame in brick.

Harvington Hall is a good example of this.

Inside it doesn't look a lot different than Little Moreton Hall -

it's a great timber frame.

But there's one difference -

instead of wattle and daub in between the framing, there's bricks.

You'd think the whole thing was a brick building.

But it isn't. It's a non-load bearing skin on the outside.

The weight is still taken by the frames

and all these wonderful iron plates to stop it all spreading out.

So whether it was built with brick, or lath and plaster infill,

the timber frame was still the main method of construction.

The Elizabethan rebuilding of Harvington, that gives it its present appearance,

was carried out in the 1580s by Humphrey Pakington.

Pakington was a leading Catholic at a time when practising the Catholic faith was against the law.

In the late 1500s and early 1600s, it was high treason for a Catholic priest to be in England.

Keeping one undercover was punishable by death by public torture.

Hideaways had to be cunningly hidden amongst the joinery, and the staircase, in this instance.

You had to be able to get in pretty fast

and get comfortable in this wonderful hideaway.

I'll have a go at getting in quick.

They're coming! HE LAUGHS

Once in here, and the authorities were still halfway down the drive, this is like a double hideaway.

There was actually another frame here with bricks in - and the hinges and the catch are still in place.

The room behind me is quite large - it's a six foot cube, actually.

An hour or two wouldn't have been so bad,

but when the powers that be were playing real hide-and-seek, with a serious ending if they got you,

with maybe a week searching round your house -

it would get a bit claustrophobic.

Harvington Hall contains the finest series of priest-holes to be found anywhere in the country,

and four of them are situated round this very staircase, and show the trademarks of a Nicholas Owen.

Nicholas Owen trained as a carpenter and a mason,

and he was one of the best builders of hiding places in all of history.

His trademark was the layers you had to get through to find the hide.

Where's the hide in here?

This platform used to be a book cupboard with panelling, but look...

I don't think they had as much Guinness as I have, in them days.

Oh, eck!

THIS is actually a triple-hideaway.

Before you could come through that slot, you've got to move the doors off the cupboard, shift a few books,

then shift the oak panelling, and, eventually, you'd come to this beam - swing that open and you were in.

Very claustrophobic in here. I rather think that mead wasn't quite as fattening as Guinness.

Owen was eventually captured. And he died under torture in the tower.

But no priest was ever found hiding here. And that's why the priest-holes have remained intact -

another tribute to the skills of the carpenter.