Medieval Woodworking Demonstration

Hello I'm Hugh Milton and I'm here to
talk to you about medieval woodworking for Hull and East Riding Museum's Festival of
Archaeology. I just like to talk initially about the kind of wood work
that you'd see in the medieval countryside and cities. To start with you
have the buildings, a lot of buildings were made with timber frames or a
roofing, you needed the work of the carpenter – people like me – but also you
had other specialists. You had shipbuilders who had their own
particular tools and skills to build the ships that have made Hull such a good
port.

There's also people with more down to earth jobs, something I'll be talking about a bit later the people who made the
furniture for the houses, so for example the food cupboards, small chests, more
decorative carved pieces for churches and that kind of thing and also sometimes, at its most simplest
level the tools the carpenters would use themselves so there's a ruler based on
one found on the Mary Rose, here's a work bench. If I talk initially about the
kind of work benches that you would have expected to have seen in medieval
workshops there's a couple here the first one I'll show you if I just move that…

This, a lot of people, you may hear a lot
of people talk about Roman workbenches it's a style of work bench which first
archeological evidence is shown in Pompeii in Italy where there are images
on a wall painting of a carpenter using a bench like this to hold his work while
he works beside it on a stool and if you've ever wondered why it's called a
work bench well the answer's here to show at its simplest, to hold the work I've
got a piece of carving held in tight you can see by pulling it I've brought it loose, piece of carving if I wanted to work on that I've got pegs and then tapered wedges and that holds the work and you just tap the wedges in place and it holds the work solid.

Now this style of bench although we know it was
certainly around in the Roman period was also still being used in the, in the
Middle Ages we know that because of images. We're very lucky as carpenters
looking back at the history because a lot of the images relate to the Bible and
the work of Jesus who was born to Joseph who was a carpenter so he's often shown
using the tools. Now the tools are normally those related to the period of
the person doing the stained-glass window or the carving so we can see the
progression of tools through history through their use in art. A more modern
style of wood bench and this is one based on a carving from around 1500 is
this one.

Now it had a whole lot of holes in which,
shown in the picture, which I thought that's a peg and wedges like that, what
I didn't know was why there were also holes going up the legs and that led me
on to learning about these. The technical term is a bench holdfast. There's another
one here and if I just put that in place on the piece of work, I've got a piece of
wood I'm carving at the moment here and I always tell people it's magic. Tap it
home and it's so strong a hold that you can lift the workbench with it. And using that you can work on the piece of work
that you want, you can put them in up the legs as well if you want to work on a
piece of work like that. So this is based on a carving from 1500 and so we know
that they were in use at that point now moving on a bit –
tools. Some of the tools you might be familiar with, these are shown in
medieval illustrations and also on carvings and stained-glass windows and
this still, this kind of saw was still being made in the 1950s.

This is one I
made myself based on medieval images but they carry on. Other saws look
sort of familiar, this is based on an image of 'The Building of the Ark'. The actual
painting shows not men building an ark but men building a timber framed
house but that's a copy made by a skilled person
for me. There's two kinds of tools that you see.

There's the ones in the workboxes and the ones that you'd more likely find used by journeymen, who would
be contractors sometimes hired for the day or 'jour' which is the French for day
and they'd of had sometimes more basic tools but just in the right hands of the
right people… This is an auger bit comes in two pieces, fits in a nice tool
bag and using that you can use it to drill holes.

It's quite simple but it
works. Here's a copy of a medieval axe again – nice, portable. You'll notice it
differs from modern axes just from how little metal is used. Nowadays we're a
bit profligate with our use of metal in those days it was worth not quite a
king's ransom but a lot of money so you don't see bigger axes unless you need a
big axe coming in, in the medieval era. They tend to come in later on as the
Industrial Revolution takes hold. So that's the kind of journeyman's tools. I'll
show you one other one used by a lot of countrymen. This is called a Twybil
because you wanted it portable, there's two tools in one here. There's the
hooking knife and a sharp bladed knife and that was made for, used for making
smaller mortice holes in pieces of work such as if you're making sheep hurdles.
So they're the tools that you'd more likely
see used by the journeyman. If you're doing carpentry, for example
carving you'd more likely find a tool chest in a workshop and you see some
lovely images of medieval workshops and here's some tools, for example there's finds of tools like this through archaeology.

This one was probably made in 1900 but
there's an almost identical one in a museum in Wales that is from the Roman
period. Others are copies of the kind of tools that you'd have seen medieval wood
carvers and carpenters using. If I just put them to one side, I'll talk about
measuring and marking. I showed you that earlier. So if I wanted to mark out a bit
of woodworking I could use not a pencil I could use lead or charcoal or maybe chalk.

Other marking
tools are the plumb bob, if I'm working in the buildings. And then you get tools
such as compasses. Now on here I've got a piece of carving marked out. Now if we
look closer, more closely at the piece of work that I have on the workbench you
can see it's a three panel carving that's the nearly finished state of the
carving. That's showing the carving just started and the marking out and here I
have a panel so I can show you how they'd have come to that design on this. I'll
just show you briefly. First you need to find the center point by using a rule
and a piece of charcoal or other marking equipment, measure them from the corners
and then you can either at the crudest level have a piece of string and a bit
of charcoal and measuring out that distance there from the previous piece
of work you can draw an arc and that will give
you that centerline there on that piece alternatively there's compasses.

These ones
probably date from around 1700 but they do last and you can take that
measurement there from the previous piece or if you know the center point if
you want to know the center point you can work it out from the ruler and then let's get this right, and then you can
scribe a line. Now it looks quite brutal but in a lot of buildings and furniture you
can still see the scribed lines, the little telltale marks which shows how
they marked out the work and that'll mean that eventually you can come to a
lovely piece of marking out. That then means I can start to carve the next
piece of this panel. Now the first bit I've already done is going down to the
base level there. So by just taking the chisel you can work round like that, as
I've done there, and then you just need to take out the depth that you're working to. Now, modern technology and the accuracy of measurement and the need for
precision we now have in a lot of parts of the world, people would get worried
that they all ended up exactly the same now the more experienced you get, the more
accurate you can become just by rule of thumb but you can see
variations if you look at original medieval furniture in museums and
places like that you can see that it's not precision engineering, it's
decorative and if it looks right, it is right.