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Abstract
Early-modern timber framing and associated finish vary significantly among the countless places settled by Europeans and Africans in the age of exploration. Most of these dots on maps of the western hemisphere remain essentially unstudied, as evidence for their vernacular architecture slips away. This is of more than local interest because the material offers opportunities to investigate how related populations share and alter cultural traits, and how the traits evolve in response to degrees of immigration, value of labour, environmental conditions and trade. This paper focuses on one of the dots, presenting new evidence for frame construction on the small British island of Bermuda, and addresses its role in the population’s economic evolution.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For generous help with this paper, I thank N. W. Alcock, Cary Carson, Martin Cherry, Brent Fortenberry, Willie Graham, Edward C. Harris, Thomas James, Jeffrey Klee, Margie Lloyd, Carl Lounsbury, R. A. Meeson, Lawrence Mills, Virginia Price and Mathew Webster. Investigation of the Princess Cottage was made possible by a fieldwork grant from the Vernacular Architecture Forum, as well as by the Bermuda National Trust and National Museum of Bermuda.
Notes
Notes
1 Moore, “Putting Anthropology Back Together”; Shannan, Genes, Memes, and Human History, 84–5.
2 Mercer, English Vernacular Houses; Upton, “Architectural Change.
3 In the words of Eric Mercer, they achieve “a position where for the first time their houses come into the architectural record.” Mercer, “The Unfulfilled Wider Implications, 9.
4 Graham et al., “Adaptation and Innovation.”
5 Chesapeake scholars interpret early American frames with earthfast posts as derived from secondary English practice, in spite of builders’ more visible shift to frames elevated on masonry foundations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Interestingly, some English vernacular architecture scholars disagree, citing the paucity of contemporary findings. Roger Leech has suggested Native American practice as a more compelling source, and earliest English settlers recorded use of Native mats as lining. That c. 1607–10 Jamestown buildings had light earth-set frames and earth walls, and the church erected in 1608 was a large building with oversized earthfast posts as well as the wide distribution of ground-set frames early in settlement of other mainland colonies, nevertheless argues for primarily English framing antecedents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Upton, “Traditional Timber Framing”; Carson et al., “Impermanent Architecture”; Carson et al., “New World, Real World”; Kelso, Jamestown: The Truth Revealed, 79–83, 92–101, 168–70. J. T. Smith identified interrupted sills with origins in use of earthfast posts as characteristic of northern English framing, and a handful of subsequent scholars have shown that earthfast posts remained a minority construction method throughout England from the fourteenth century into the nineteenth. Smith, “Timber-Framed Building in England”; Meeson and Welsh, “Earthfast Posts”; Charles, “Post-Construction and the Rafter Roof,” 9–10; Ryder, “Timber-Framing Traditions in North Yorkshire”; Grenville, “Variation in Timber-Framing”; Alcock and R. Harris, “Earth-Fast Posts,” 52; Martin Cherry to author, questioning English practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 20 July 2018. Leech, “Impermanent Architecture in English Colonies.” On mud and stud building at Jamestown and Lincolnshire, see Deetz, “Architecture of Early Virginia”; Cousins, Lincolnshire Buildings.
6 It is notable that only two substantially intact Chesapeake buildings that began life with earthfast pasts are known to survive, 1703–4 Sotterley and 1702 Cedar Park, both in Maryland, in a broad region where archaeology has demonstrated that such buildings remained the overwhelming majority for over a century. In Virginia, the closest parallel appears to be the Matthew Jones House, built with frame walls replaced with brick in 1729. Graham, “Timber Framing.” For documentary references to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English structures framed with ground-set posts, see Bettey, “Seventeenth-Century Squatters’ Dwellings,” 30; Alcock, “An Essex Account for Building in 1743,”; Zimmermann, “The ‘Helm’ in England,” 38–40; Roberts, “The Persistence of Archaic Framing.”
7 Lefroy, ed., Memorials of Discovery, 102–3.
8 Masonry walls were an element in improvement that governments sought to impose on colonial capitals near the turn of the century. By 1703, leases required construction of stone-walled houses to retain newly granted lots in the town of St George’s. Wilkinson, Bermuda in the Old Empire, 323–4.
9 Control was taken from the Bermuda Company, and Bermuda was made a crown colony in 1684. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade; Dunn, “Downfall of the Bermuda Company.”
10 For a general study of primarily stone-walled early Bermuda houses, see Chappell, “The Bermuda House.”
11 The five are Princess Cottage and Captain Lusher House (destroyed) in Southampton, the Lodge in Warwick (still standing), as well as Seven Gables and the Old Rectory both extant and located in St George’s. Primarily wall plates and tiebeams survive at Winterhaven in Smith’s, Cotswold Minor in Warwick and two-storey Bridge House in St George’s. The Chimneys in Paget shows evidence of exterior wall framing, and segments of wall plates with stud mortises were recycled at Kirkdale Farm in Warwick.
12 Darrell, reminiscences.
13 Trigger, History of Archaeological Thought, 410; Steward, Theory of Cultural Change; Binford, “Archaeology as Anthropology,” 217–25, for Binford and Steward’s contested concept of optimal adjustment to ecological change.
14 Meeson and Welch, “Earthfast Posts,” 14–15.
15 Harris, Discovering Timber-Framed Buildings, 13; Harris, “The Grammar of Carpentry,” 1.
16 Chesapeake frames generally omitted dovetail-lapped tiebeams except were needed for summerbeams or principal rafters. Buchanan, “Eighteenth-Century Frame Houses,” 60–8.
17 Full dovetail lap joints appear most common in early Massachusetts Bay, but tiebeams with half-dovetail joints were used in some buildings there, including the c. 1687 Boardman House in Saugus. Cummings, Massachusetts Bay, 80 and 112. They remained a common detail in Jamaican framing into the nineteenth century.
18 Hewett, The Development of Carpentry, 189–94; Cummings, Massachusetts Bay, 58, 85 and 87.
19 Harris, “Grammar of Carpentry.”
20 Deeds, Bonds, Bills, and Protests, 3, pt 2, 181, Bermuda Archives.
21 See crossed summers at 1665 Bacon’s Castle in Virginia, and in the c. 1665 hall at the Gedney House in Salem and the pre-1683 parlour added to the Whipple House in Ipswich, both in Massachusetts. Cummings, Massachusetts Bay, 27, 53 and 81–3.
22 The term outlet for minor peripheral rooms covered by shed roofs is much favoured over English terms outshut and outshot in Bermuda probate inventories.
23 Old Bermuda builders usually call these rafter feet or false rafter feet, but Bermudian Llewelyn Simmons (born 1934) learned the term sprockets when apprenticed to two Englishmen working in Hamilton. Simmons and Lawrence Mills, August 13, 2018.
24 Upton, “Traditional Timber Framing,” 65.
25 Legend has it that the roof frame was salvaged from the 1619 wooden church, but the plates show no evidence of lower wall framing.
26 The cheaper Bermuda approach contrasts with the method of two lath applications seen in some English houses. Brunskill, Handbook of Vernacular Architecture, 65.
27 Smith, review of Gailey’s Rural Houses of the North of Ireland, VA 18 (1987): 62.
28 Most, if not all sawing, in Bermuda was done by hand well into the nineteenth century, more so even than in the proportionately greater slaveholding Chesapeake, where some timber was cut by water-driven vertical saws. There are no streams capable of powering sash saws on the island.
29 Norwood, Pembroke Parish.
30 Smith, Houses of the Welsh Countryside, 271, 504–6; Fox and Raglan, Monmouthshire Houses 3, 21–2, 25, 27, 30–1, 33–4, 37–8, 45–6, 59–62, 74, 85–6, 110, pls 4, 16 and 29; Suggett, Houses and History, 138, 215, 218.
31 Cox, Lords of the Marshes, 37.
32 Upton, “Vernacular Domestic Architecture”; Wenger, “Town House & Country House.”
33 Hallett, Civil Records, 3, 521; W4:32 1708/09; DBBP14: 22.
34 Bermuda Inventory #142, Book of Wills, vol. 2.2, 76–82.
35 Wiliam, Welsh Cottage; Bebb, “Theatre of Welsh Farmer’s Life.”
36 Hall, “Yeoman or Gentleman?,” 13.
37 Enslaved males were more commonly involved in skilled non-domestic, non-agricultural work, and therefore somewhat less likely to occupy housing so immediately beneath or behind the owners’ rooms. Chappell, “Accommodating Slavery in Bermuda.” On the nature of enslaved Bermudians’ work, see Jarvis, Eye of All Trade.
38 Fortenberry, “Excavations at Princess Cottage.”
39 Currie, “Time and Chance.”
40 Jarvis, Eye of All Trade. The buildings’ survival rates and the limits of c. 1725–83 improvement accord better with Jack P. Green’s much less detailed view of economic stasis in Bermuda, though he overlooks the c. 1685–1725 expansion in Green, Pursuits of Happiness, 152–4.
41 Rainbird, The Archaeology of Islands.
42 Metz, “Wealth in Bermuda.”
43 On population movements’ influence on buildings and consumer goods, see Carson, Face Value.
44 Chappell, “Housing a Nation.”
45 Johnson, “Vernacular Architecture: Loss of Innocence,” 17. Johnson refers to Chris Brooks and J. Barry, Jr, eds, Middling Sort in Early Modern England.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Edward A. Chappell
Edward Chappell, Independent Researcher