Carpenters and other woodworkers were
an important part of every Medieval community.
People skilled in the working of wood were responsible for
producing:
Dishes: plates, cups, bowls, spoons, etc.
Kitchen utensils
Furniture
Houses/Buildings
Tool Handles
Farm tools (Everything from plows to pitchforks.
Religious items (Crosses, alters, beads, etc.)
Weaving and spinning tools
Boats/ships
Carts/Wagons
Barrels
Chests, Boxes and Crates
The Shaving Horse - Les is our main woodworker
and is skilled at working wood without modern power tools or high tech
adhesives and finishes. Many of Les' tools, including the shaving horse
he is working with above, are ones that he has built himself.
The Treadle Lathe
- Woodworkers learned their trade early. Boys as young as four or five
were apprenticed to their fathers or someone else working in the trade.
As apprentices and then hopefully journeymen, they would work long,
hard hours assisting their masters on whatever projects they were assigned.
This way they learned a way to earn a living and could contribute to
the community by the time they were teenagers.
Did you know? Metal was expensive in the days before the Industrial
Revolution. As a result, many clever ways of building furniture and
homes without expensive nails were invented: dovetailing being one of
them. Many people had houses that didn't use a single nail to hold them
together! Instead, the huge beams that supported them were cleverly
joined by skilled woodworkers!
Shakespeare's Globe Theater was one such structure. When Shakespeare's
lease ran out on the land the theater was built upon his landlord refused
to renew the lease and threatened to keep the building, Shakespeare
and a crew of workmen snuck out late one winter's night, dismantled
the theater, boated the wood across the Thames and had most of it reassembled
on the other side of the river by dawn using the marks the original
carpenters wrote on the beams as a guide - thus thwarting his former
landlord from selling the wood at a nice fat profit!
Woodworking also included carving beautiful things -
Which found their way into churches, castles, and the homes of the wealthy.
Here, Cedric is using a mallet and a variety of chisels to carve the face
of a wizard into the trunk of a tree.
A Hand-hewn Noggin from our shop - Noggins
were once large wooden bowls/cups, and not your head! Woodworkers produced
cups, bowls, plates, trenchers, kneading troughs, platters, carving boards,
rolling pins and many other kitchen tools for the cooks in the community.
The Delicate Touch - Not all woodworking was large. Les's father
(in back) produces delicate items such as crochet hooks and hair combs.
His wife (foreground) is showing us how to use one of her husband's
crochet hooks by using it to make a rag rug.
More delicate work - Tracy is working on
a chip carving - a technique using small chisels and knives to gouge patterns
in soft wood. If you look at the picture to your left, the cross her mother-in-law
is wearing is a finished sample of Tracy's chip carving.
So far we have finished the wheel portion of the trip
hammer. Click photo to see a short 1.4 mb .mpg movie of the wheel at
work! As an added bonus, renowned Springfield, MO area blacksmith, Kirk
Sullens is hard at work on the right hand side of the movie!
If you
think woodworking is that little whittling project you did at summer camp,
check out a slightly larger project. How about a water driven trip hammer?
A trip hammer was a valuable collaboration between a blacksmith
and a woodworker: The woodworker would have produced the wooden parts,
to be held together by the rivets, bolts and bars that the blacksmith
produced. The hammer with it's huge head and powerful, consistent blows
would have made the production of large pieces of metalwork such as armor
breastplates, shields and large cooking pots easier.
