Architectural History: “I Built a Medieval House Using Primitive Techniques”

The Chronicler’s Tale – YouTube | BitChute | Facebook | Brighteon | Odysee | Twitter | RUMBLE

In the summer before last, I set out to construct an authentic Anglo-Saxon Pit House using the tools and techniques of the Early Anglo-Saxons.

Watch as I build wattle and daub walls, a thatched roof, a woven door, a hand-hewn plank bed and window shutters, and a clay oven to bake bread and cook food.

My axes and mattock are based on examples found at Anglo-Saxon sites, such as the Middle-Saxon settlement of Flixborough, and the Buckland Dover Anglo-Saxon Cemetery. The carved oak spade is based on images from Early Medieval manuscripts, alongside those wooden spades found in Viking Age sites such as the Oseberg ship burial.

I based the pit footprint and post holes of this house on an example from Lechlade-on-Thames, Oxfordshire; 14 foot long by 10 foot wide, with depth of around 1 and a half feet. The pit had a post hole at each end, a long shelf on the southern side, and an opening into the side of the pit, which I interpreted as an entrance way. I also built the house on the same orientation as the original – SW-NE.

All that usually remains of these pit-houses, is the pit itself, the post holes, and sometimes a burned hearth. To reconstruct this house, all I had to suggest its structure above ground was the size of the pit, and the location of the post-holes. Everything else had to be ‘archaeologically invisible’, meaning that the walls, roof and everything but the posts needed to use techniques that would not survive in the archaeology.