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Medieval town buildings8/30/2023 ![]() Put briefly, the issue is whether the buildings which survive are representative of all those which were once constructed. The first is the question of the nature of the evidence. There are two in particular which seem to be particularly urgent and which are to some degree interrelated. It may have gained a few extra square feet of space on the jettied floors and space may have been at a premium in towns, but why was it also employed in rural buildings?īuilding history has tended to avoid some very significant problems which need to be addressed before we can begin to provide a persuasive account of the development of houses. It hardly explains the medieval enthusiasm for jettying (the projection of the first or upper floors out beyond the width of the ground or lower floors). But only a few moments of reflection show that this approach provides a very partial perspective. Viewed in this way, buildings were simply functional structures constructed to perform various domestic, agricultural or commercial roles. A version of building history can be written which describes it in terms of the developments in carpentry, such as the types of joints used and the means of ensuring the rigidity of the roof. An alternative approach has been to use buildings as a guide to the history of technology. (1) Buildings were objects to be set in the context of the social and economic history of the middle ages, and provided another way of telling a familiar story. This was the approach adopted by Colin Platt in an earlier book published by Yale. The task of the buildings expert is to provide a date and, ideally, to link the surviving structures with the owner or builder. According to that view, buildings are there to provide a little colour and fill in the gaps in the written record. One approach is to treat the study of buildings as an adjunct to the central task of social history. ![]() There remain some very substantial problems about how we should go about writing building history. The consequence is that there are a limited number of people undertaking the recording of buildings, but very few who are thinking their development and interpretation. Building history remains very largely the preserve of the enthusiastic amateur and a small number of professionals who undertake contract recording work required as a condition of planning permission. But the drive for efficiency has not encouraged the continued pursuit of such reflective work. The former Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England, now absorbed into English Heritage, was one of the few bodies which employed staff who were encouraged to study buildings, not merely record them. ![]() The study of building history remains a minority interest and, although the subject is taught in a few universities, most practitioners have learnt their craft by examining buildings and meeting with others. It is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable, that much of this interest has passed by those working on the history of buildings. ![]() The aims of people in the past, their perceptions and their social intentions are now all more central preoccupations for archaeology than are typologies and dates of flints and pottery. During the course of the past decade archaeologists have taken a renewed interest in finding ways to insert people back into their studies of artefacts. It is general to all archaeological studies, and building history is effectively archaeology with more than usually big artefacts. That problem, of course, is not particular to building history. The difficulty is that it is necessary to infer intent and function from objects which cannot speak and for which there is little written evidence. A ghost town, for example, is not a historical feature if it is still visible.How do you write the history of buildings? This is not merely a rhetorical question, but a very real problem for anyone whose primary source material is timber or stone structures. The term makes no reference to the age, use, or any other aspect of the feature. Examples: a dried up lake, a destroyed building, a hill leveled by mining. Historical Features are physical or cultural features that are no longer visible on the landscape. Additions and/or corrections to the database are encouraged! Simple Add/Edit Procedure.
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