A History of Woodworking ~ Raymond McInnis

Overview of the Origins and Evolution of Britain's Woodworking Tools -- Medieval to 17th-century

This is the second of several chapters in the Woodworkinghistory.com website dedicated to the history of woodworking in Britain

As a Topic of Investigation, the Early History of Woodworker's Hand-Tools -- Especially in the Medieval Period -- is Neglected.

First, what is the so-called "medieval" era?

In a real sense, "the past is a foreign country". Think of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims gathering on an April evening at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just across the polluted River Thames from the crowded and malodorous London, a city full of pestilence.

For the next several days, on foot they travel along rutted roads, through Kent, to the cathedral city of Canterbury, population 4,300. It's the 14th century. Except for the famous poem, "Canterbury Tales", today a historical memory of this event does not exist.

History, then, tells us what happens in the 1500s -- Henry VIII and the Protestant Revolution, Sir Walter Raleigh introduces the British to tobacco, it may even explain "why?". What history finds difficult is to take us back into a particular time, to reconstruct for us what it is actually like living in the times that helped create the social, political, and other events that history records.

In the medieval era, because the furniture is crude and very simple, plain benches and stools, tables, chests, and beds are perhaps the only furniture, even in the homes of the nobles. These are the days when:

Bathtubs are virtually unknown -- remember even soap has to wait until the 18th-century!



Floors are covered with rushes



All the scraps from a meal at the table are thrown to the dogs under the table.

In the peasants' homes -- really crude "huts" -- manners are even cruder and pieces of furniture fewer than in the homes of the aristocracy.

Early in the medieval era, when buildings are a smaller scale, while great skill and vision by the carpenter is required, the stakes are not as high as they become later. The stakes change, though, as buildings enlarge in scale -- from smaller barns and halls to palaces and cathedrals -- where structural failure can be catastrophic.

Preliminary Remarks The period from the 13th- to the 17th-century witnesses a continued refinement of hand tool woodworking as a craft. Skills become more sophisticated, results more efficient. Many of the principles that these tools embody are inherited from earlier cultures, including the Egyptians and Romans. Only with the Industrial Revolution, the result of mechanization -- which begins in the 19th-century -- do we witness real changes in the tools of woodworking. It is safe to say, I think, that one can claim the following truth: Working together, generation by generation, carpenters and blacksmiths do incorporate design changes into woodworking tools -- check out the changes in the two images below -- the upper from the 17th-century, the lower from the latter part of the 18th-century -- but these design changes do not revolutionize woodworking methods in quite the same way mechanization will in the 19th-century. Will this so-called revolution -- that is, mechanization -- notably improve furniture making? Most informed people will answer "No!", that mechanization results in a decline in quality standards. Instead, with considerable nostalgia, the 18th-century -- the century that leads up to mechanization -- is considered the zenith of quality standards achieved by hand tool methods.

The material for their study comes from examining

actual tools things made with the tools analyzing language used to describe tools in documents contemporary to the period looking for examples of sketches contemporary to the period

In conducting research, each area of investigation presents its problems.

Tool historian Philip Walker expresses doubt about the suggestion of some investigators: that experimentation might be useful, particularly because it is unlikely that the skill needed to reenact some techniques needed to effectively use any of these ancient tools can now be found. Moreover, if taken seriously, experimentation will need to contend with the thorny issue of a mind of the 21st century penetrating the mindset of the woodworker 1000 years earlier.

But while a historian who investigates the development of woodworking tools and techniques endeavors to present an account where "proof" is backed up by solid evidence, as Walker argues, a lack of actual examples of hand tools contemporary to the medieval era forces investigators to consider much on speculation. Over time, these tools have more or less disappeared. As a result, changes in the designs of woodworker's hand tools remain virtually impossible to study with any certainty. (But see comments by Walker, below on the right.) Moreover, rather than the tool itself, contemporary accounts primarily concern the objects shaped by the tool -- a building such as a surviving barn, a piece of furniture in a palace.

Source: Philip Walker, "Woodworking Tools before 1700", Eighteenth-Century Woodworking Tools Papers Presented at a Tool Symposium, May 19-22, 1994; Edited by James M. Gaynor Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1994, pages 3-8.

The tools in image on the left are from the wreck of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rose.

The key to these tools from the wreck of the Mary Rose is here:

The seventeen tools are: back row, from left to right -- two mallets, brace, and caulking mallet; left half of picture, from background to foreground -- double-sheaved block (i.e., for block and tackle), rabbet plane, molding plane, a 24-inch rule (calibrated in inches, but with the first and last six inches also calibrated in 1 in.), 12-inch rule (calibrated in inches, and 1 in.), and iron nail; right half of picture, from background to foreground -- ax handle, two auger handles, mortise gauge, whetstone holder (also containing a whetstone), and two whetstones.

Sources: Image on left comes from Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Arts of: Smithing, Carpentry, Joinery, Turning, Bricklayery, page 69 but appeared first in first in Andre Felibien's 1676. Click here for the 1703 text of Moxon's Mechanick Exercises: Smithing & Joinery 1703

Difficulties of Writing History of Medieval Woodworker's Hand Tools

In 1918, the British archeologist, W. M. F. Petrie concludes a brief article on "History in Tools" with a reminder that the history of this subject "has yet to be studied," lamenting especially the survival of so few precisely dated specimens. In studying the implements of the ancient world, Petrie finds discouraging the anonymity of the sources hand tools.

Sources: Image on left comes from Garrett Wade Company's Tools: A Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001, page 6. The tools are typical of those found in a cabinetmaker's toolbox in the early 1800s. About half of the tools are from Britain, the remaining half from the United States.

"The student of English planemaking faces certain difficulties. We have planes from the Mary Rose wreck that date from 1545, but we have no planes that we can date between then and the end of the seventeenth century." Similar comments can be made about every other medieval woodworker's hand tool.

Source

In a widely noted 1966 paper, Peter C. Welsh - a curator in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology in the last half of the 20th century -- argues about difficulties that you encounter with any attempt to write about the early history of woodworker's hand tools. Difficulties arise for a multitude of reasons. For one, if you attempt to write about the history of woodworking hand tools from the 17th century, you encounter the reality of a very gradual evolution of tools through generations of craftsmen. The early part of this period is an era before patents, before manufacturing at Sheffield, before transportation makes copying a relatively easy way to get improvements in tool design.

The 17th-century presents even greater difficulties. Primarily because of weathering, most likely the tools themselves have deterioriated - some beyond recognition - or have entirely disappeared. Given this, historians of hand woodworking tools such as William L Goodman are reduced to schematic reconstruction or using later example models.

A decade and a half later -- 1980 -- Philip Walker draws similar conclusions about the difficulty of a writing the history of woodworker's hand tools in the medieval era. Tentatively he claims, we can say that sometime in the 13th- or 14th-centuries important innovations in woodworking tools occur. These innovations include

the introduction of the brace, using the crank principle for rapid boring by continuous rotation; improved augers, which required little pressure to draw themselves into the wood



large and specialized axes, which greatly speeded up the rough shaping of timbers



(probably) the carpenter's twybill [a double-edged axe] that eased and speeded the cutting of joints in large timbers on a building sites. (In this connection, the twybill, Hugh Herland arranges for the cutting of the timbers for the roof of the Westminster Hall at a site near where the oak originates, thirty miles distant from the building site.)

After that time, concludes Walker, "little of importance was added to the woodworker's kit, apart from a few detail improvements based on screws and gears, until the advent of mechanical power".

These words by Welsh tell us much about the severity of the problem of a lack of information.

As Philip Walker argues, numerous reasons exist for the anonymity of the sources of medieval woodworker's hand tools. In the box on the right are four reasons for the anonymity of the sources of medieval woodworker's hand tools:

first, the tool is an object of daily use, subjected while in service to hard wear and, in some cases, ultimate destruction;



second, a tool's usefulness is apt to continue through many years and through the hands of several generations of craftsmen, with the result that its origins become lost;



third, the achievement of an implement of demonstrated proficiency dictated against radical, and therefore easily datable, changes in shape or style; and



fourth, dated survivals needed to establish a range of firm control specimens for the better identification of unknowns, particularly the wooden elements of tools—handles, moldings, and plane bodies—are frustratingly few in non-arid archeological sites.

Sources for the material and images above: William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Report of the Board of Regents, Smithsonian Institution. Board of Regents, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC: The Institution, 1920; Peter C. Welsh "Woodworking Tools, 1600-1900" Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1966 (Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology: Paper 51 Bibliography 227); Philip Walker, "The Tools Available to the Medieval Woodworker", in Woodworking Techniques Before A.D. 1500: Papers Presented to a Symposium at Greenwich in September, 1980 Seán McGrail, ed., Oxford, England: B.A.R. International Series 129, 1982, pages 349-356.

Medieval Metal Technology

Still under construction, for this section I am indebted to David Hey's chapter in Eighteenth-Century Woodworking Tools; James M. Gaynor, ed., Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1994, pages 9-22 and Philip Walker, "Woodworking Tools before 1700", Eighteenth-century Woodworking Tools, also edited by James M. Gaynor, Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997; and John D. Light Dictionary of Blacksmithing Terms 2007 .

Centered in the British cities, Sheffield and Birmingham, the British toolmaking industry expands in the late 18th-century and -- for it high quality -- becomes famous worldwide during the 19th-century. Most of the tools that survive today come from these periods.

But the tools of the medieval period prinicipally come to us from archaeological digs. In comparison with the 18th-century, or later, output in these earlier centuries is modest.

Again, as I note above, toolmaking's early history is only sketchily recorded, because the documentary evidence is scarce. Nonetheless, the surviving artifacts and/or other information shows that the metalworking districts in and around Birmingham and Sheffield have achieved a national reputation for some of their products by the 16th-century and that they had already captured the market for certain tools. During the 17th-century, toolmakers in these two metal centers are exporting some of these tools to America.

The ancient center of high-quality metalwares is London. By the latter part of the 17th-century, London is home to an estimated 10,000 metalworkers. London's metal craftsmen specialize in finishing goods in a wide range of metals, including gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, as well as such combinations of metals as brass, pewter, and steel. Except for goods made of iron and steel -- with these metal products they must compete with producers in Birmingham and in other metal crafts such as watch and clockmaking in Lancashire -- London dominates the British finished metal industries,

However, by 1650, the environs of Birmingham and Sheffield dominate the manufacture of edge tools for agriculture, of lower quality knives and nails. One well-known source for this information is John Leland.

In the late 1530s and early 1540s, John Leland tours England and Wales on behalf of King Henry VIII. When he comes to Sheffield, he notes that "Ther be many smiths and cutlers" and "veri good smithes for all cuttinge tooles." He makes similar comments about the Birmingham area.

The Source of the Quoted Material in the Box on the Right Below is The Itinerary Of John Leland In Or About The Years 1535-1543, Parts IV And V, With An Appendix Of Extracts From Leland's Collectanea; edited By Lucy Toulmin Smith. London: George Bell And Sons, 1908, pages 96 And 97

From page 96:



Northeton is a praty uplandyshe town in Warwikeshire, and there be some faire howsys in it of staplears, that use to by wolle. There is a faire churche and a goodly piramis of stone over the bell frame. There rennithe a litle brooke at the est t end of the towne.



Good plenty of wood and pasture and meatly good come betwixt Alchirch, and Northton. And lykewyse betwixt Northton and Bremischam that be distaunt from (each) I othar 5. miles.



I cam thoroughe a praty strete or evar I enteryd into Bremischam toune. This strete, as I remember, is caullyd Dyrtey, in it dwelle smithes and cuttelers, and there is a brooke that devydithe this strete from Bremisham. Dyrtey is but an hamlet or membre longynge to ... paroche therby and is clene seperated from Bremischam paroche. From page 97: This broke risethe, as some say, a 4. or 5. miles above Bremicham toward the Blake hills in orcestershire. This broke above Dyrtey brekethe into 2. armes that a litle benethe the bridge close agayne. The bewty of Bremischam, a good market towne in the extreme partes that way of Warwikeshire, is in one strete goynge up alonge almoste from the lefte ripe of the broke up a mene hille by the lengthe of a quartar of a mile. I saw Warwickbut one paroche churche in the towne. There be many smithes in the towne that use to make knives and all maner of cuttynge tooles, and many lorimars that make byts, and a greate many naylors. So that a great parte of the towne is mayntayned by smithes. The smithes there have yren out of Staffordshire and Warwikeshire and see coale out of Staffordshire.

18th-century back saw, chisels and other edge tools made in Birmingham.

By Leland's time, these two districts have a reputation for quality craftsmanship and pretty well dominate the industry throughout the British nation. To make a steel-faced tool, to weld steel onto iron and form an even cutting edge, demands higher skills, beyond those of the ordinary blacksmith. Indeed, such metal working skills -- hardening, tempering, grinding, and polishing -- are fine arts.

By the 1670s, the Sheffield district had at least six hundred smithies for the manufacture of knives, scissors, sickles, scythes, files, awl blades, nails, and other metal goods.

Daniel Defoe visited Sheffield about 1710-1712, where he finds that the town is

"very populous and large, the streets narrow, and the houses dark and black, occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges, which are always at work."

Once Sheffield and Birmingham acquire a tradition of skilled craftsmanship, they also acquire a definite supremacy in producing first-rate hand tools. More difficult to account for the reasons why metalworking crafts are established there. Evidently these skills are acquired by these two cities so far back in history that any documentary evidence has simply vanished.

Crucial to an emergence metalworking in the environs of Birmingham and Sheffield is the availability of both local iron and local coal. By the 16th-century, the local iron is considered of such a low quality that it is not suitable for making edge hand tools which need sharp cutting edges. Instead, in the third decade of the 16th-century, steel is imported from Bilbao, Spain. By the 17th-century, steel is imported down the Rhine from Germany, and near the end of the century, bar iron for making steel comes from Sweden.

What we ask, are the advantages that make it worthwhile and, indeed, commercially viable, to import raw materials over such long distances to Sheffield and Birmingham?

First, both districts had grinding facilities superior to those possessed by their rivals. In Sheffield, the local sandstones are at the time ideal for making grindstones, and the five nearby streams are dammed at frequent intervals. By 1660, Sheffield's rivers support forty-one water mills; by 1740, the number reaches ninety water mills. Powered by water, these mills can grind those cutting edges that give Sheffield's tools a reputation for quality."

Debate of the Carpenter's Tools

Anyone seeking more than simply a superficial consideration of the tools used by carpenters in the Middle Ages can read the 15th-century poem, "The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools". A curious work, in it the tools themselves are speaking, that is, in the poem, a range of carpenter's tools contemporary to the period discuss their master's character and prospects. Some accounts by these tools are not much more than laments about their master being a drunken fellow who will never thrive. Others strike a different posture, where they say exactly how they will work to make money for him.

The tools named are:— (1) shype ax, (2) belte, (3) twybylle, (4) wymbylle, (5) compas, (6) groping iren, (7) saw, (8) whetstone, (9) adys, (10) fyle, (11) chesyll, (12) lyne and chalke, (13) prykyng knyfe, (14) persore, (15) skantyllyon, (16) crow, (17) rewle, (18) pleyn, (19) brode ax, (20) twyvete, (21) polyff, (22) wyndas, (23) rewle stone, (24) gowge, (25) gabule rope, (26) squyre, and (27) draught nayle.

Sources: for text copies of the "Debate of the Carpenter's Tools" poem, check out E Wilson, "The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools" Review of English Studies 38, No. 152 November, 1987, pages 445-454+2+455-470 and Roy Underhill's The Woodwright's Work Book Chapfel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986, pages 241-243.

The Medieval Carpenter as Engineer

As noted in Chapter 1: Origins of the British Timber Roof, the medieval carpenter is a master at joining one piece of oak to another, in shapes and by means that would resist the worst that weight and weather can do. Between the 4th- and the 18th-centuries in the north of Europe, ninety-five percent of all buildings are made from oak, cut by hand and shaped into halls, houses, barns, and churches through the use of three principal joints—scarf, mortise-and-tenon, and lap-dozens of variations and combinations of each.

We know from earlier authorities such as Herbert Cescinsky -- at the close of the 14th-century, in constructing the large roof of Westminster Hall, Hugh Herland (ca 1360 -- ca 1412), King Richard II's master carpenter, employs most of the constructive methods which are known to the present-day joiner (using hand tools), and shows a knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of wood which demonstrates, clearly, that at Herland's date, the carpenters' craft is already far advanced. (The timber vault of Winchester College Chapel (1393\1434) -- a proto-fan (conoidal) vault -- clearly establishes Herland as a master builder who significantly contributes to the flourishing of carpentry on large projects in 14th-century Britain.)

More recent authorities on British medieval carpentry are L F Salzman in Building in England Down to 1540 and Cecil A Hewett, English Historic Carpentry Of the two, Salzman is the more discursive, presenting more details in writing rather than illustrations, and includes a chapter dedicated just to medieval carpenter's tools. Hewett is also discursive, but enriches his discussion with some photos of actual surviving examples of medieval carpentry, but -- equally useful -- numerous schematic renderings of buildings -- and their parts -- by medieval carpenters.

All of this work by carpenters using only what can justifiably called as "primitive" hand woodworking tools happens of course before engineers as we know them today are common place, before hand woodworking tools are mass produced, before a developed transportation system makes the interchange of ideas and/or the design of tools occur as a matter of course. The cabinetmaker that is renowned from the latter part of the 17th-century until today has his beginnings as the "Carpenter-Furniture Maker". But before we get to the British cabinetmaker -- around the succession of William and Mary in 1689 -- the craft must evolve from the medieval carpenter through the Renaissance joiner and then to the Restoration cabinetmaker, which in total is about 500 years of evolutionary development.

It is quite something to be a master carpenter in Britain, or throughout Europe itself. In the Great Halls of kings and/or upper ecclesiastics, the master carpenter sat as an equal among priests, rectors, and merchants. Just look at the achievements of Herland. Herland, the builder of Westminster Hall, built not only for King Richard but for the king's friend and adviser William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester. Herland often dined with the bishop at his own table, and the bishop had the carpenter's likeness put into the stained-glass windows at Winchester College Chapel.

Sources: Herbert Cescinsky and Ernest R. Gribble, "Westminster Hall and Its Roof", The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 40, No. 227 February 1922, pages 76-79+82-8; Herbert Cescinsky and Ernest R Gribble, Early English Furniture And Woodwork, Volume 1 London: Routledge, 1922. L F Salzman, Building in England Down to 1540: A Documentary History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1952; Cecil A Hewett, English Historic Carpentry London: Phillimore, 1980, Fresno, CA: Linden, 1997.

Tools and Techniques

We are so accustomed, at the present day, to lapstrake boats, to wainscottings of wood, to extending lengths of timbers by scarfing, to joining wood at angles with mortise and tenons that it is difficult to imagine the long and arduous process which is necessitated, in Britain's medieval period, with the primitive woodworking tools available and methods in vogue then, before the oak, logged with such difficulty from the forest can be turned into a covering for the walls of rooms in the houses of that period.

The first problem ancient carpenters encounter is what to do with the tree after it is felled. (Note: in both furniture and woodwork of the 13th-century, or earlier, timber is handled and worked in practically the same way as stone.) The tree had to be felled, barked, sawn or riven into planks. Each of these activities speak of hand tools that are designed to perform each task. But after these initial tasks are complete -- and timbers are dimensioned into smaller pieces, other hand tools naturally come into play.



As hand tool historian, Philip Walker, argues

Hand-tools, and mediaeval ones in particular, have been neglected. Material for their study can be found in

(1) actual tools

(2) things made with the tools

(3) language

(4) documents

(5) art

An introductory look at the sources that are available for information about earlier periods. These sources are, by their nature, indirect in the sense that even when tools are mentioned or illustrated, they were not intended to convey technical information. The reasons for this reticence on such an important subject are probably complex, but suffice it to point out that skilled craftsmen, at most times and in most places, enjoyed a relatively privileged economic and social position. This situation depended on the apprenticeship system being the sole route for passing on the secrets and the skills of the trades, and its beneficiaries had no reason to do anything that might encourage do-it-yourself activities by laymen. Conversely, the literary classes seem often to have felt that matters concerning manual work were beneath their dignity—or perhaps simply beyond their reach! Thus, in the absence of explicit written records, we must look for clues wherever we can find them. I have grouped the most profitable sources in the six categories that follow together with some examples of the insights that can be obtained.

For the spirit of medieval carpentry, but also the difficulties, and what, for some tasks, must have been sheer drudgery, look at the books by Roy Underhill, especially The Woodwright's Work Book: Further Explorations in Traditional Woodcraft 1986 and The Woodwright's Guide: Working With Wedge and Edge 2008. All six volumes are published by the University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill. Using both text, sketches, and photos to show early woodworkers design and build objects of both lasting value and remarkable beauty, Underhill demonstrates a remarkable command of the broad area of woodworking with hand and such other primitive tools as wagons, pulleys, and forges.

The Saw

The above image of saws and other carpenter's tools of the period is extracted from a larger plate of engravings in Joseph Moxon's 1677 edition of Mechanick Exercises. This same plate of engravings appears first in Andre Felibien's 1676 Des Principes de l'Architecture. It is part of Western European folklore that a Roman woodworker, Talos, visualizes the ability of a "saw" to cut wood by observing and copying the backbone of a fish or the jawbone of a serpent. Saws with teeth as we now know them are widely used in Roman culture, figure prominently at every level of woodworking, from the initial cutting and preparation of timber to fine veneering and jointing. The tool was employed in other industries as well. The quarrying of some soft stone, for example, was in part undertaken with special saws adapted for the purpose. 2007 Roger B. Ulrich, Roman Woodworking New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, page 45. The major authority on the history of Western woodworking hand tools, William L Goodman, argues that the invention of the saw does not date back to Neolithic times -- before the Bronze age -- but instead while examples of flint tools with serrated edges survive from that era -- these examples come from Palestine, Egypt, and Northwest Europe. Moreover, an informed consensus argues that these artifacts are more likely knives or a primitive form of scythe. ... the first real saws in the modern sense were developed in the Copper or Early Bronze Age 1964 W L Goodman, History of Woodworking Tools London: G Bell, page 111.

It is part of Western European folklore that a Roman woodworker, Talos, visualizes the ability of a "saw" to cut wood by observing and copying the backbone of a fish or the jawbone of a serpent. Saws with teeth as we now know them are widely used in Roman culture, figure

prominently at every level of woodworking, from the initial cutting and preparation of timber to fine veneering and jointing. The tool was employed in other industries as well. The quarrying of some soft stone, for example, was in part undertaken with special saws adapted for the purpose.(needs citation)

The major authority on the history of Western woodworking hand tools, William L Goodman, argues that the invention of the saw does not date back to Neolithic times -- before the Bronze age -- but instead while examples of flint tools with serrated edges survive from that era -- these examples come from Palestine, Egypt, and Northwest Europe -- an informed consensus argues that these artifacts are more likely knives or a primitive form of scythe.

... the first real saws in the modern sense were developed in the Copper or Early Bronze Age

The Early Iron Age and the Roman periods, where the use of iron instead of bronze brings with it improvements in the saw's design, although this improvement still gives weakness in the material where the craftsman still needs to retain the narrow blades -- and the pulling action used by his Bronze Age predecessors.

As the Age of the Romans emerges, their dominance includes their takeover of these simple hand-saws and primitive frame-saws. The Romans introduce improvements in the design of saws, including -- perhaps -- putting a "set" in their saw's teeth. Yes, questions exist about whether in fact the Romans did invent the concept of "set", at least literary evidence exists -- Pliny's Natural History -- of the practice of using set:

The green woods, with the exception of the robur [a kind of oak] and the box offer a more obstinate resistance, filling the intervals between the teeth with sawdust, and making its edge uniform and inert; it is for this reason that the teeth are often made to project right and left in turns, a method by which the sawdust is discharged.

Sources: Pliny, the Elder, The Natural History London, New York, G. Bell & Sons, 1856-1893, volume 3, pages 427-428; William L Goodman, The History of Woodworking Tools London: Bell and Sons, 1964, pages 110-159; Roger B. Ulrich, Roman Woodworking New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, pages 45-50.

Whereas some heavy structural timbers, such as piles for wharfs in harbor setting can be used in their original round state or in the half-round -- that is, split with a riving knife or pit saw -- other uses of timber -- such as timber roofs, furniture forms such as chests, doors, or ,basically, any object created from flat wooden boards wood require good saws. Thus, the saws used by Hugh Herland and other carpenters in Britain simply carry on traditions established during the Roman occupation. We know this from kerf marks visible on Roman timbers excavated in Britain. If you follow the link above, Herland, you'll find, is the designer of the hammer-beam timber roof of Westminster Hall. All the beams are cut and assembled at a remote location where the timber is logged, thirty miles distant from London, where Westminster Hall is located.

Sources include Jane Weeks "Roman Carpentry Joints: Adoption and Adaptation", in Woodworking Techniques Before AD 1500: papers presented to a symposium at Greenwich in September, 1980, 1982, page 157-168..

Pit-Saw

Historically, pit-sawing is a common way of dimensioning timber into rough boards. In the popular mind, in pit-sawing, the log is at ground level, with the bottom sawyer standing in a pit below. The lower image on the left is from page 25 of Charles H Hayward's English Period Furniture New York: Van Nostrand, 1959. In his Dictionary of Woodworking Tools page 426, R A Salaman argues that Moxon -- in his Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Arts of: Smithing, Carpentry, Joinery, Turning, Bricklayery -- is probably the first in the English language to use "pit" to describe saws in this use. In volume 2, pages 701ff -- "Construction, Action and Application of Cutting Tools" -- a two-volume set, Turning and Mechanical Manipulation Charles Hotzapffel's 1850 account of pit-saws features both text descriptions and sketches. In his 1922 Early English Furniture and Woodwork London: Routledge, Herbert Cescinsky shows a photograph of a re-enactment of a pit-saw in use. On pages 131-142 of his The History of Woodworking Tools London: Bell, 1964, W L Goodman gives us the longest account we have encountered of pit-saw use throughout ancient history to the 19th-century. Rather than take the pit-saw story of the popular mind as truth, Goodman applies some empirical research techniques and comes up with data that challenges the idea about the pit-saw, where "the log is at ground level, with the bottom sawyer standing in a pit below".

Upper image adapted from Chandler Jones: In the upper image -- a black-and-white extract from a larger Pieter Brueghel painting -- we see, most prominently, two men using a frame saw in the operation known as the "over and under" sawing system. Still other men do a variety of woodworking, with adzes, chisels, drills, etc. This scene shows saw horses, but pit-sawing is another common way of dimensioning timber into rough boards. In pit-sawing, the log is at ground level, with the bottom sawyer standing in a pit below. The lower image is from page 25 of Charles H Hayward's English Period Furniture New York: Van Nostrand, 1959.

Riving Knife

If oak is the wood, then the planks/boards are undoubtedly riven with wooden wedges and mallets; if, however, pine is made into "boards," the likelihood is that they are pit-sawn, according to the common practice in 17th-century Britain. Evidently, pitsawing, is universally practiced throughout the rest of Europe. Sawmills are believed to have been introduced into Germany as early as the 14th-century, certainly they are there in the 15th. Early in the 17th-century, sawmills are operating in Norway and Holland.



Image on left -- a 1922 example of a "riving-knife" in operation -- is adapted from Cescinksy, 1922.

Auger, Chisel, Gouge

A Medieval Breast Auger

The auger has been in use since at least Roman times for large, deep holes.28 The Roman "terebra" is really a small auger, in which the cutting edge – Mercer calls the edge the “knife” – revolves as it penetrates, and gradually deepens the hole.

With just the auger -- even with its crude handle -- the speed of drilling is slow. At some indeterminate time, however, in the Middle Ages, or in the Roman period, the speed, not only of these tools, but also of small augers, is some "genius" greatly increased drilling speed by attaching a brace to the auger bit, that is, initiates the "brace and bit" technique, a technique still used today.

Sources: Henry C Mercer, Ancient Carpenter's Tools, pages 202-204; Roger B. Ulrich, Roman Woodworking New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, pages 18ff.

Image Below: 1890s Wood Screw

Principles of the Screw

The Greek, Archimedes is said to have invented the screw in Syracuse, Sicily, around 235 BC. Basically an inclined surface wrapped around a central post or pillar, the screw is one of the six basic mechanical devices upon which virtually all machines and construction depend. Screws are the basis for our common, everyday wood screws, drill bits, threaded bolts, worm gears, screw augers, and so forth. In technical terms, just as moving the fulcrum on a lever allows a human to lift and manipulate heavy objects, the actions of screws multiply mechanical force. And it is this mechanical force that makes a screw a powerful and versatile workhorse. Ex: With blades eight feet in diameter, giant screw augers help extract metal from the earth by drilling their way down into mine shafts. Other applications of screws – the key to the operation of fine Swiss watches — are so tiny they cannot be seen without magnification.

In the online Middle English Dictionary, Auger. (a) A carpenter's tool for boring holes. The MED continues on "auger", saying that, as a noun, evidently it is "nauger". But can also be naugar, nager, maugere, navegor, navger & auger, augar, augour, augur, algor, aweger, angire.

In the medieval period, according to some surviving images, holes in wood are drilled with what appears to be a chisel with a concave blade, hence the reason of grouping "augers" with chisel and gouge. Evidence that demonstrates this quote comes from the author of the Dictionary of Woodworking Tools, R A Salaman, page 29:

The earliest known augers are of Roman date, with shell or spoon bits. Sometime in the medieval period, the nose bit is introduced -- Salaman adds some images to illustrate his point -- which is a half cylinder with an in-bent blade at the tip. Twist augers -- the precursors of what we know today as the twist drill -- became common from the late eighteenth century.

The head-and-sill timbers penetrate the ... walls ... as indicated by dotted lines in Fig. 21. ... The pegs are of the curious section illustrated at left and right of the drawing. The cutting of such holes suggests the use of three tools: (1) an auger, (2) a scribing gouge of the sides' curvature, and (3) a second scribing gouge to cut the rounded 'corners'. A close study of this work proves that these tools are of good steel, very sharp, and handled by a craftsman proficient in their use. Adapted from Cecil Alec Hewett, English Historic Carpentry, 1980, page 23. See also W L Goodman, History of Woodworking Tools, page165; and Salaman, Dictionary of Tools, page 31.

Chisel

In the online Middle English Dictionary, Chisel, is "Any of several cutting tools used by stone masons, sculptors, carpenters or metal workers; chisel, punch, etc.". Generally made with a steel blade of rectangular shape, its working end ground to a sharp edge, this hand tool comes with a wooden handle. Chisels for woodworking are in use since neolithic times. In the later Bronze Age the metal for both tanged and socketed types are cast in stone molds. With the Roman carpenters, refinements include differentiation between firmer chisels and mortise chisels. As an example of this differentiation, Salaman notes in the Dictionary of Woodworking Tools, in mortise chisels both the tanged and socketed forms of mortise chisels are virtually the same as today's mortise chisels.

Gouge

In the online Middle English Dictionary, a gouge is "A chisel with a concave blade, gouge; thixel ~, an adz with a concave blade". The images of the gouges come from Cescinsky's chapter on "The Early Woodworker: His Life, Tools, and Methods", in Early English Furniture and Woodwork London: Routledge, 1922, page 26.

Axe, including "Brode Ax" and "Shype Ax"

The axe -- the primary hand tool among medieval carpenters -- is used for felling the timber, and once felled, the timber is roughly squared with axes, and then likely dimensioned into smaller boards with axes and/or riving knives. In other words, In skilled hands the carpenter's axe is an tool, capable of almost anything.

The 'broad axe' -- in the "Debate" brode ax -- comes with a chisel-shaped cutting edge, beveled only on one side, which enables the axe's user to accurately follow a "string and chalk" line. Broad axes – today the good broad axes are still hand-forged – are designed for hewing logs into square timbers. Broad axes are beveled on the right side only, with the left side left completely flat. Broad axes can be forged in two ways: (1) with a slightly right angled poll and eye enabling the handle and your hands to be kept away from the log, or (2) with a slightly bent handle. These designs allow you to use the axes to hew the right side of the log with precision. When honed on a water-cooled sharpening stone, the broad axe's edges are razor sharp. The head's of broad axes vary in weight and size: larger ones around 3-1/4 lbs, with a cutting edge width of about 7-3/8" and handles approximately 23". On small broad axes, the head weight is around 2-1/2 lbs, a cutting edge width of 5-1/4" and 15-1/2" hickory handles.

In "The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools", the broad axe is matched with the hand plane, which suggests the anonymous author(s) of the this poem come to their subject with a command of background knowledge about tools, because we know that the plane's "iron" is honed only on one side, exactly the same as the broad axe. Unfortunately in this contemporary image on the left, such details are not readily detectable:

The brode ax seyde withouten mysse,

He seyd: the pleyn my brother is;

We two shall clence and make full pleyne.

The "shype ax" of "The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools" probably takes its name from being used by shipwrights and may be the same as the "chipax", which occurs in a 1408 list of tools.

According to James Orchard Halliwell -- a 19th-century Brisish collector of medieval poetry -- the Debate's first line -- "The shype ax seyd unto to wryght" -- is said to be evidence of a quarrel among carpenter's tools.

Source: Nugae Poeticae. Select Pieces of Old English Popular Poetry Illustrating the Manners and Arts of the Fifteeenth Century. London: John Russell Smith, 1844, page 13; also William Carew Hazlitt, Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, Collected and Edited, With Introductions and Notes London: J.R. Smith, 1864-1866.

The shype ax seyd unto the wryght,

"Mete and drynke I schall the plyght,

Clene hose and clene schone,

Gete them wer as ever thou kane;

Bot fore all that ever thou kane,

Thall (!) never be thryfty man,

Ne none that longes the craft unto,

Fore no thyng that thou kane do."

" Wherefore, seyd the belte,

" With grete strokes I schalle hym pelte;

My mayster schall full welle thene,

Both to clothe [and] fede his men."

" 3e, 3e," seyd the twybylle,

" Thou spekes ever ageyne skylle.

(2) Belte,

save for later -- evidence too difficult to find

(3) Twybill, Twybille

The twybill is a word with an interesting etymology: From the OED, we learn that "bill" is a weapon of war, mentioned in Old English poetry. And thus "twy-bill" is, literally, two "bills", but on an axe-like handle. For the OED, kind of axe, it has two cutting edges that are used for cutting mortises in timbers, especially those extra large mortises needed in the construction of timber roofs. Also in the OED, we find out that use of the twybill is recorded in written records that date back to 1000, and follows up until the end of the 19th-century. (Curiously, the tool is not mentioned by Moxon.)

This extraordinary mortising instrument consists of a very long iron bladed head mounted like the letter T, a deep socket upon its straight wooden handle. One end of the bladed head is sharpened on the plane of the handle and the other with a conspicuous basil, at right angles to it.

An early example of work by the twybill is the dovetail shaped into a medieval barn's loft structure in the image on the right. [check hewitt as source of image.]

Sources: Henry C. Mercer Ancient carpenters' tools: illustrated and explained, together with the implements of the lumberman, joiner, and cabinet-maker in use in the eighteenth century Mineola, N.Y. : Dover Publications, 2000, 1929.

(4) Wymbylle

Then comes the "wimble" -- or gimlet -- with a screw-point: