Monday - September 19, 2011

1000 Oak Trees Later

Drew once again finds himself snared by the infinity of the internet. Looking around for UK stories to post, yesterday I ran across a ran across a link to the great explosion of the River Fleet in London. While that in itself was quite interesting - the Fleet (as in Fleet Street, which is right on top of it) was a short river that carried barge traffic a short distance to the mills back in Roman times, when the city was Londinium; it later became an area where the butchers and tanners worked and their waste quickly polluted the river, centuries went by and the stench became so awful that the river was covered over and then the city grew right over it, but it continued to be used as a sewer (Via Cloaca for all you Pratchett fans) and at some point in the 19th century the fumes really built up, somebody dropped a match by accident, and BOOM! The river is still there, underground, wrapped in a massive network of brick tunnels, and you can tour it if you are very brave: it’s still a tidal river, so twice a day the tunnels fill right up to the top. Don’t dawdle or you’ll drown! - I found a great bunch of photos on it at Planet Oddity and another photo essay somewhere else, but when I looked things up at Google I found myself over at a wonderful blog called The Web History of England.

Unloved, smelly, and in the way, the Fleet started to be covered over.  In 1733, the part from Fleet Bridge to Holborn Bridge was covered over, and in 1739, the stretch from Holborn to Ludgate Circus was covered over, and the Fleet Market and the Mansion House built over it.

When the Regent’s Canal was constructed in 1810 – 1815, the Fleet was buried northwards, to Camden Town, and by 1880 the whole river, apart from the few hundred yards from the source springs, was underground in pipes, conduits and the New Canal bed.

In 1846, a build up of sewage and associated gasses caused a massive explosion, and the pipes near King’s Cross blew up, sending a tidal wave of sewage through the streets, demolishing buildings, flooding houses, and ramming a boat on the Thames, near the mouth of the Fleet, into Blackfriars Bridge.

Talk about a shitstorm!

Interesting, neato, but not really much to blog about. So I took a look around tWHoE and I found myself hooked by a short post on a couple of old barns in Essex.  This is the barley barn and the wheat barn at Cressing Temple, just outside of Braintree in Essex:

By modern standards these are not huge buildings, but in their day they had to have been enormous. The barley barn is 118 feet long by 45 feet wide, and it looks to be at least 3 stories tall. It used to be somewhat bigger. The wheat barn is a bit larger, at 130 x 39. By American standards both these barns are beyond ancient. By English standards they are still “somewhat elderly”.

How elderly?

They were built by the Knights Templar. In the early to mid Middle Ages. From about 1000 oak trees.

Holy cow.

Toldja I was hooked. And it gets better. These are the two largest fully wooden old buildings in Europe, and the oldest wooden barns on earth. Not a nail, a screw, a bit of rebar or a squirt of glue in them anywhere. And they were pretty much hewn with axes; their construction in the years 1210 - 1270 predates the re-introduction of the saw in Western Europe. The 14,000 acres of land they are on was given to the Knights, who worked them as a commercial farm; profits from their farming funded the Crusades. These barns helped bring the war to islam.

Cressing Temple was given to the Templars in 1137 by Matilda [Matilda of Boulogne], wife of King Stephen, not the rival claimant to the throne, the Empress Matilda. Two great barns were built by the Templars at Cressing. The first is now called the Barley Barn, and is thought to have been built some time around 1210 A.D. The Wheat Barn was built in about 1260 to 1270 A.D. It is built directly on top of a Bronze Age settlement.

The Barley Barn is an immense structure built from oak, and was made from an estimated 480 oak trees. Tree science, dendrochronology, has dated the felling of these trees from between 1205 and 1235. The Barn was originally larger even than it is today, but it seems to have been repaired later and made smaller at that time. It now measures about 36 metres long by 13½ metres wide. Although it’s been repaired over the years, the original structure of the Barn still holds it up today. The arcade posts and main ties are the ones built by theTemplars. The Barley Barn at Cressing is the oldest timber framed barn still in existence in the world.

The Wheat Barn is larger, 40 metres long and 12½ metres wide. It was built from 472 different oak trees, and there are identical trusses with braces meeting at a scissor above the collars.

Cressing Temple is open to the public and is host to many conferences and events throughout the year.

Cressing was the largest and most important of the Templar Knights landholdings in Essex. Such an estate would have been in the charge of a preceptor accompanied by two or three resident knights or sergeant-at-arms, together with a chaplain, a bailiff and numerous household servants. The estate would have employed agricultural labourers and craftsmen and thus functioned as a large estate farmed for profit to help the Order pay for the war effort in the Holy Land.

We know relatively little about the Templar buildings on site as only the two great barns and the stone well survive. The inventory of 1313 gives the clearest picture of the buildings. This mentions a chapel, two chambers, a hall, a pantry, a buttery, a kitchen, a larder, a bakehouse, a brewhouse, a dairy, a granary and a smithy.

The barns appear large and dominating in the landscape when viewed externally but stepping inside is an awesome experience. The open space inside is huge and the roof and wall timbers are a magnificent sight.

Hooked me again! How huge? This huge:

How magnificent? There are tens of thousands of photographs all over the internet showing the wood working that supports the roofs of these two buildings. It isn’t fancy. They were just barns after all. But it’s all pretty amazing still, and to my delight ( and digital entrapment ) I learned that the two barns are an absolute treasure trove of knowledge for architects and other students of the arch and the wooden truss. Damn, hooked yet again; scissors, braces, corbels, cruck truss, king truss, queen truss, hammerbeam truss, and the one that took me the most time to learn, which was original to the barley barn but taken away during a roof rebuild some centuries later, the pass through truss.

All of this sent me down an endless corridor to learn all about various trusses and the challenges of post-Norman building. It was great. The older barn was built one way, but by the time a few decades had passed and the newer barn was built, the knowledge of how to build a sturdy roof has taken a nearly exponential step forward. Actually, the first barn was almost a Fail; it’s pass through truss design put too much lateral stress on the brick foundations, which started to fall over. A few quick buttresses saved the day, and it’s been standing ever since. SeeBuilder Bill’s site for a photo, and read all about the various trusses there as well.

I’m going to cut this post off here, though I’d be happy to write a ton more about trusses, walls, and ancient building methods. Instead I’ll give you a bunch of links, and leave off with a bit that will make Peiper happy if he ever reads this post: the hammerbeam truss, a design which holds up Westminster Hall and keeps the roof above Parliament’s heads, was a quantum leap forward in knowledge, and was not surpassed until the iron girder came about in the 19th century. The oldest example of a hammerbeam truss is in the Pilgrim’s Hall on Cheyney Court, a 1308 building mere feet from the Kingsgate in Winchester, and we all know that the King’s gate is underneath St. Swithun’s church, because Peiper wrote about it 2 years ago. I wonder if he knew about Pilgrim Hall? Winchester packs so darn much history into every square foot, it’s hard to tell. St. Swithun’s is just a few years younger than the Wheat Barn.

http://www.vag.org.uk/VAarticles/earlyaisledbuildings.htm (see all 3 parts)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Hammerbeam_Roof%2C_Stirling_Castle.jpg
http://www.medievalarchitecture.net/images/HampshireBuildings/CressingTemple/photos/previews/Cressing_Temple_Barns0034.jpg
http://www.medievalarchitecture.net/images/HampshireBuildings/CressingTemple/photos/previews/Cressing_Temple_Barns0019.jpg

http://www.destinations-uk.com/articles.php?link=articles&country=wales&id=374&articletitle=Cressing%20Temple,%20Essex
http://www.builderbill-diy-help.com/hammer-beam-truss.html
http://www.builderbill-diy-help.com/eltham-palace-roof.html
http://www.builderbill-diy-help.com/cruck-truss.html
http://www.brentwoodit.plus.com/cgb/otherbarns.htm

Posted by Drew458     on 09/19/2011 at 02:32 PM   
Filed Under: • Architecture • UK •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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