The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings. Simon Thurley
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Название: The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings

Автор: Simon Thurley

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Архитектура

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isbn: 9780007527908

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СКАЧАТЬ priory, by Judhael of Brittany, a commander in the Conqueror’s south-west campaign. The timber palisades on top of the exceptionally large motte were rebuilt by his successors in around 1200. The arrangement of the domestic buildings inside cannot now be discerned, but at Restormel in Cornwall the whole plan can be read in a single visit. It is most impressive (fig. 72). The kitchen, hall, lord’s chambers and guest rooms are all arranged inside the perfectly circular outer walls, with only the gatehouse and the chapel projecting outside the circuit. In the 12th century castles were never ordinary residences. Holding a castle proved that the owner was in royal favour with delegated authority to govern and dispense justice. The crown’s ability to take and hold castles, to raise them and demolish them, to grant them out and to take them back was central to the exercise of power. Constructing a new castle required royal permission, and if the king were ever to need it he had the right to requisition it at will. From the 1150s to the 1210s the balance of castle power shifted markedly towards the Crown. At the end of the chaotic reign of Stephen there had been 225 baronial and 49 royal castles. By 1214 there were only 179 baronial castles and the number of royal castles had risen to 93; a shift in ratio from 5:1 to 2:1.

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      Getting About

      From the 12th century oxen began to replace horses for pulling ploughs and, soon, for pulling carts. Horses could be much faster than oxen but required better roads. By 1066 the Saxon kings had done much to improve the road system and build bridges (pp 25 and 40), but during the 13th century many hundreds of new bridges were built; indeed, of the rivers that were bridged before 1750 almost all had been crossed by 1250. This was certainly a transport revolution but also an engineering one. The technology to build stone bridges was developed by the architects of the great cathedrals, abbeys and castles. Before 1100 most bridges were of timber, such as the impressive bridge excavated over the river Trent in 1993, but during the following century techniques were developed for building foundations underwater, resulting in some impressive feats of engineering. An early surviving bridge, although now tragically marooned in a roundabout, is in Exeter (fig. 73). It was completed by about 1200 and originally had 17 spans of round-headed and pointed arches. The arches were built on wooden piles driven into the bed of the River Exe and protected by triangular cutwaters jutting into the stream. Exeter is typical of a lowland bridge; upland bridges had to withstand flash floods and fast-running waters, and thus had much higher and wider spans. The main arches of Elvet Bridge in Durham, which span over 30ft, were erected in 1228. The bridge, which originally had 14 arches, was commissioned by the bishop and built by his masons. It incorporated chapels at either end (fig. 74).16

      It was the location of bridges that determined the course of roads and stimulated their growth. During the 13th century there was a change from the idea of a road that simply went to the local market to the idea of a network serving the whole kingdom. This was stimulated by increasing trade, new ports and the economic activities of castles, cathedrals and monasteries. However, most importantly, towns could not grow without bridges and roads. Horse transport and a road and bridge network supported the rapid growth of towns such as London and Norwich that needed vast quantities of food, drink and firewood to survive. As a rough guide, a town of 3,000 people would need the produce of ten villages or over three square miles to support it, and all this had to be brought to town every day.17 Finally, the growth of an effective road network made it easier to transport building materials. The reliance on cheap but slow water transport decreased as faster horse-drawn wagons took over as the principal means of moving material round the countryside.18

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      The Countryside

      The Norman invaders came to exploit the English countryside. While they did not introduce a new system of social obligation on the population (Saxon lords had received all sorts of service from their dependants), the Conquest did result in the tightening and redefinition of the bonds of lordship. Norman landlords of the first generation were interested in labour obligations from their tenants, but later generations were more interested in cash from rents and fees, made possible by the fact that many tenants were generating a healthy cash surplus from agriculture by 1100. Villages were occupied by what we call peasants. The term is unfortunate as it gives the impression of poverty-stricken and down-trodden illiterates eking out a living from the soil. Villagers, who made up 80 per cent of the population, were in fact smallholders farming anything between 5 and 40 acres. Half held their land in villeinage; that is to say they owed their landlord payment, labour services and required permission to marry. The rest were freemen, who often had smaller landholdings. Villeins and freemen alike cooperated in the common-field system, where it existed (p. 54), but were also engaged in market activities: buying, selling and making money. By the 1180s the economic stability of the richer peasants started having an impact on the places in which they lived. This impact varied hugely across the country and even between adjacent villages. Dwellings were normally set in a banked or hedged toft of about a quarter acre within this (fig. 26). In some parts of the country – particularly the south-west – a single building or long house contained space at one end for people and at the other for animals. This arrangement was becoming less common by the 13th century; by then most tofts in the midlands and the south-east had a principal cottage grouped with a barn or granary and sometimes a byre. Richer peasants might also have a separate kitchen, a freestanding bake-house and even a dovecot or cart-house.

      The crucial development in the period between about 1180 and 1320 was the introduction of various types of foundation, either for the full length of a building or just for its principal posts. The abandonment of earth-fast building (posts sunk in the ground) over most of England opened up the possibility for a variety of superstructures that in some parts of the country saw stone walls up to the eaves but more commonly saw a variety of timber structures resting on low or buried stone foundations. In the midlands, the west and north, most of these were crucks. A cruck is essentially an A-shaped truss made of large, slightly curving, timbers. A number of these could be erected on a timber base (or sole) plate and then be joined together at the top (ridge) and along their sloping side with beams called purlins (fig. 75a).

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