Building in wood

We tend to think of medieval buildings as stone, and indeed that was the most common material for castles and churches, at least from the eleventh century onward.  I've blogged earlier about building in stone.  But medieval people also built in wood.  It's just that wood hasn't held up nearly as well over the intervening centuries, for obvious reasons.

Houses in towns and villages were usually wooden before the late Middle Ages.  Wood is cheaper than stone and much easier to work, as anyone who has ever tried to build a stone wall will tell you.  On some early medieval manors, part of a peasant's rent might be paid in wooden shingles (such was the case with the peasant Bodo, who has been made perhaps unduly famous as a "typical" peasant).

The danger of course is that wood will burn.  Tightly packed medieval cities could be devastated by fire, and wooden shingles are especially a problem, as flying sparks land right on them.  (Wooden shingles are forbidden in parts of the US today for that reason.)  Medieval cities tried to mandate slate or tiles for roofs, even if the houses were wattle and daub, that is made of small pieces of wood with mud plaster in between.

The small pieces of wood are the clue for why late medieval villages and towns increasingly started being built in stone, in spite of the expense.  Wood was becoming increasingly scarce, and large pieces of wood, such as one might need to build a house, were becoming increasingly expensive as a result.  Wood after all was used for all sorts of purposes, primarily fuel as well as building, and as the population grew and with it the appetite for wood, trees were not given much of a chance to grow very big.  It didn't help that an increased population meant a greater need for food, which meant clearing new fields for crops.

But even buildings constructed primarily of stone needed wood.  A house with a slate or tile roof (much less a thatched roof or one with wooden shingles) needed beams to support the roofing.  A castle would generally have wooden floors, supported by corbels in the stone walls.  Both castles and churches needed large, heavy pieces of wood for their doors.

 

A stone church with a lead roof needed roofing beams just as much as did a barn or simple house.  The beams for Notre Dame of Paris were made from tall oaks, gathered over a number of years in the twelfth century and stored in the Seine until they had enough.  When the church burned in April of 2019, the dry, 850 year old oak went up like tinder.  It's taken several years, but those rebuilding Notre Dame, trying to make it as much like what it was before the fire as possible, have managed to find enough tall oaks to reproduce the rafters.  Many had thought it impossible, but eastern Europe had more big oaks than originally thought.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval buildings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.