A wood turner’s workshop

Wood was the standard material for tableware such as cups, bowls and plates in early medieval (‘Anglo-Saxon’) England, as discussed in an earlier post. These items would have been made by turning, in which the wood being worked is rotated and a sharp-edged cutting tool used to cut the desired shape. This naturally produces circular items. Nowadays a power lathe is used, in which the wood is mounted on a spindle driven by an electric motor and rotated continuously. The early English also produced circular wooden items on a lathe, but not an electric one. How was it done?

Sizeable wooden items such as bowls were probably made using a machine called a pole lathe. Regia Anglorum’s site has a drawing of this ingenious machine (scroll down to the bottom of the page). A rope is wound around the lathe, and connected at its lower end to a foot treadle and at its upper end to a springy pole. The craftsman presses down on the foot treadle, causing the lathe and the object mounted on it to spin against the cutting tool, and bending the pole down. Then he lifts the tool clear, releases the treadle, and the elasticity of the pole causes it to spring back up. The pole pulls on the rope, the rope rotates the lathe backwards, and the work returns to its original position ready for another cutting stroke. Repeat, a great many times, until the object has been turned to the desired shape.

Because a pole lathe requires the object to be accelerated from rest to cutting speed and back again at every stroke, it is far less efficient in time and power than a continuously rotating lathe. However, it can be made from simple and readily available materials, and in skilled hands it can be surprisingly effective (see Robin Wood’s Battle of the Bowls video on his website). A pole lathe leaves characteristic discrete spiral tool marks on the item being made, and requires long-handled cutting tools (Leahy 2003). A fragment of a tool rest from a pole lathe was found at Coppergate (York), and long-handled hooked cutting tools consistent with use on a pole lathe have been found at Coppergate and in a pit dated to the ninth century at Portchester Castle, Hampshire (Leahy 2003).

Remarkably, the pole lathe used in Anglo-Saxon England remained in use until the early twentieth century. It was most commonly used by the “bodgers”, itinerant woodworkers who made small components such as chair legs in the beech forests of the Chiltern Hills for use in the furniture industry. But a few craftsmen still used it to make larger objects such as wooden bowls. One such was a man named George Laidley, who worked as a bowl turner using a pole lathe in a workshop on Bucklebury Common near Reading. In 1959, after his death the previous year, his lathe and workshop were acquired by the Museum of English Rural Life at nearby Reading University, and described in detail in a book by Philip Dixon (Dixon 1994).

George Laidley’s grandfather had built the workshop in 1826. The floor area was dug out to form a rectangular pit around three feet deep. Six stout timber posts formed the main structural elements of the walls, one in each corner and one in the middle of each of the long sides. Cladding of some type, probably split or sawn boards (later replaced with corrugated iron), was fixed between the posts to form the walls. The roof may have been thatched (later replaced by a tiled roof). Two pole lathes, one large and one small, were placed on the floor of the pit, so that the craftsman and any visitors stepped down to enter the workshop. The pit gradually filled up with a hundred years’ worth of wood shavings, to such an extent that part of one lathe rotted away among the shavings and had to be replaced.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because George Laidley’s workshop bears a remarkable resemblance to the sunken-featured buildings (SFBs, also known as sunken-floored buildings or in German Grubenhauser) identified in archaeological excavations of early English settlements. At first it was thought that people lived in the bottom of the pit, which would have been cramped, squalid and uncomfortable. For this reason alone I’ve always been sceptical that SFBs were used as routine living accommodation. People 1500 years ago were just as bright and inventive as today, even if they had access to less technology, and they would surely have made themselves as comfortable as circumstances allowed. This isn’t to say that no-one ever lived in a SFB. If SFBs were used mainly as workshops, they could still have been used as overflow accommodation or for low-status individuals, much as medieval servants slept in the kitchens or apprentices slept at the back of the workshop, and I daresay it wasn’t unheard of for a drunken husband reeling home after one too many to be banished to the shed by his annoyed wife. (At least the thick layer of wood shavings in the wood turner’s workshop might have provided reasonably comfortable padding and insulation).

If you want to imagine how an Anglo-Saxon SFB might have looked and how it might have been used, you could do much worse than look at George Laidley’s wood turning workshop.


References
Dixon PH. The Reading lathe. Cross Publishing, 1994. ISBN 1-873295-65-0.
Leahy K. Anglo-Saxon crafts. Tempus Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-7524-2904-3.

Wooden tableware in early England

Early English (‘Anglo-Saxon’) settlement sites usually contain only small amounts of pottery. This is a noticeable contrast with Roman-period sites, which seem to yield enough pieces of broken pottery for a Greek wedding.

Most of the Anglo-Saxon pottery that has been found and studied is from cemeteries (Arnold 1997), either cremation urns buried containing the ashes of the deceased or vessels buried along with inhumations and perhaps containing some sort of offering. Domestic pottery is not that common and is usually unexciting and rather lumpen (Pollington 2003). Particularly in the early period (roughly, fifth to mid-seventh century), it tends to be hand-made rather than produced on a potter’s wheel, and often fired rather poorly at a low temperature, and has been rather unkindly described as “…well below the standard to be expected of a first-year pottery class at a high school today” (Dixon 1994). All of which has no doubt contributed to the stereotype of the early English as ignorant barbarians incapable of making civilised tableware.

However, pottery is in some ways not the ideal material for a subsistence farming economy in which villages and even individual families expected to be largely self-sufficient. Not every site would have a deposit of good-quality potting clay, and clay is heavy stuff to transport if it has to be brought in from elsewhere. Firing to obtain a hard finish requires a high temperature, which in turn needs a specialist kiln and a large quantity of fuel, an investment that is best suited to making a large number of pots at once and may not be a sensible use of resources for a small self-sufficient community. Similarly, the number of pots used by a small community may not justify the time required to develop a high level of skill in making and using a potters’ wheel. And although pottery fragments can last almost indefinitely in the soil, a pottery vessel is fragile if dropped – as no doubt we have all discovered to our cost – and the pieces are no use to anyone except future archaeologists.

Wooden vessels offer several advantages over pottery (Pollington 2003). The skills and tools needed to shape wood into a bowl or cup are similar to those needed to shape wood into all the other useful domestic objects required by a farming village. Woodworking doesn’t require building and firing a kiln, and every village would have to have a ready supply of the raw material to hand as it was also needed for building and for fuel. Wooden vessels are less prone to breakage than pottery, and if an item does get damaged or broken beyond repair it can be usefully used as kindling for the fire.

Unfortunately, wood doesn’t survive well on archaeological sites, partly because it can so easily be re-used as fuel at the time and partly because wood, being organic, decays naturally in the soil. Sometimes the only indications of the presence of a wooden vessel are metal clips or staples used for repair or decoration. Wooden artefacts themselves tend to be found mainly on waterlogged sites where the absence of oxygen (anaerobic conditions) prevents or inhibits decay. A few examples illustrate the wealth of organic material that has probably been lost from other sites.

• A group of part-finished lathe-turned wooden bowls was found in a workshop at Feddersen Wierde, a waterlogged settlement site on the North Sea coast of Germany, north of the mouth of the River Weser (site abandoned during the fifth century AD) (Cole and Cole 1989). If you believe in the migration theory, you can imagine the wood-turner who owned the workshop moving with his skills across the sea and starting a new life somewhere in eastern or southern England….


• The Sutton Hoo ship burial (Mound 1) contained eight turned walnut wooden cups with decorative silver collars, and six turned wooden bottles made of maplewood (Leahy 2003). The reconstruction of one of the bottles shown in Pollington (2003) is a handsome vessel with a copper-alloy collar and decorative panels. Perhaps it functioned something like a modern decanter? The bottles were about 14 cm diameter and 14-16 cm high, and Leahy comments that turning them would have called for great skill (Leahy 2003).

Whoever was buried in Sutton Hoo Mound 1 (most probably Raedwald, King of the East Angles in the early seventh century), he was clearly an extremely wealthy and important person with access to expensive luxury goods. Given that he had turned wooden cups and bottles in his grave, perhaps ready to put on a magnificent feast in the afterlife, I think that’s a fair indication that wooden tableware could be just as high-status as the exotic imported silver dishes found in the same burial.

Wooden tableware didn’t go out of use when mass-produced wheel-thrown pottery reappeared in quantity in Britain after the eighth century. The Norse at Jorvik in the ninth and tenth centuries made large quantities of turned wooden tableware, as demonstrated by finds of workshop debris in the waterlogged deposits at the Coppergate (“Street of the cup makers”) site. Wooden vessels were the normal tableware of the period. Perhaps because wood was cheaper and more durable than pottery, perhaps because it was traditional, or perhaps simply because people liked it. A well-made wooden bowl or cup is a pleasing object, as shown by the bowl in the photograph (which was made on a modern power lathe). Even nowadays items such as wooden salad bowls and fruit bowls are still fashionable, and any cook will tell you that a wooden spoon is an indispensable kitchen utensil.

Wooden bowls in early England would have been turned using a pole lathe (Dixon 1994, Leahy 2003), making a perfectly concentric circular item as accurately and quickly as a modern power lathe (See the video on Robin Wood’s site if you don’t believe me). More on this ingenious machine in another post.

References
Arnold CJ. An archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Routledge, 1997. ISBN 978-0415-156-356. Extracts available on Google Books.
Cole, B, Cole J. People of the wetlands. Bogs, bodies and lake dwellers. Thames and Hudson, 1989. ISBN 0-500-02112-0.
Dixon PH. The Reading lathe. Cross Publishing, 1994. ISBN 1-873295-65-0.
Leahy K. Anglo-Saxon crafts. Tempus Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-7524-2904-3.
Pollington S. The mead-hall. Anglo-Saxon Books, 2003. ISBN 1-898281-30-0.