Meanings of Timber and Stone in Anglo–Saxon Building Practice (original) (raw)
2013, M. D. J. Bintley and M. G. Shapland (eds), Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World, 21-44. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
It has long been recognized that timber was the standard building material of the Anglo-Saxon world. Surveys of Anglo-Saxon buildings have been dominated by timber halls with usually little more than a brief mention made of the slender archaeological and documentary evidence that exists for stone domestic structures. The implicit assumption is that this paucity of evidence is simply a gap in our knowledge which future excavation will fill. This may indeed be the case, but until that happens it is worth discussing why it is that there is so very little evidence for masonry domestic buildings in a society so rich in stone churches. After all, the durability of stone might lead us to expect such buildings to be over-represented in the archaeological record. It is therefore first worth briefly examining the present archaeological and documentary evidence for Anglo-Saxon stone domestic buildings, divided into settlement sites, lordly buildings, and urban defences. Then an attempt will be made to explain why timber seems to have typified the secular buildings, with stone being confined to the religious buildings of Anglo-Saxon society.
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