Recommended Reading

An excellent volume on the history and design of wooden bowls from the Middle Ages into the modern era.  Mr. Wood is a modern bowl turner who uses period tools and techniques to produce historic reproductions of bowls and other products.  He is a recognized authority on the subject, working with the Mary Rose Trust on the analysis and documentation of turned objects from the wreck of the Tudor Warship, The Mary Rose.  Nicely illustrated with color photographs of historic artifacts and modern reproductions.

Victor Chinnery
Antique Collectors' Club Ltd, Suffolk, England, 1979.
ISBN 1-85149-013-2

Perhaps the most useful single volume on historical furniture. While Chinnery's focus is on 17th century and later English furniture, he includes valuable background information on medieval and early modern furniture, trades, and the guild system. This book includes both academic information (such as the historical context of furniture and woodworking) as well as the practical (such as how period joints were constructed). Profusely illustrated, the book includes a photo index for quick reference. While this is an expensive volume, it is easily more valuable to the historical woodworker than any four other books I can think of (with one possible exception...).

The Woodwright's Shop
The Woodwright's Companion
The Woodwright's Eclectic Workbook
The Woodwright's Apprentice
New! The Woodwright's Guide: Working Wood with Wedge and Edge

Roy Underhill
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

This series of books, based on Underhill's long-running public television series "The Woodwright's Shop," is invalulable to anyone who wants to learn to use period hand tools and techniques. A former master housewright in colonial Williamsburg, Underhill combines historical research with "experimental archaeology." While his focus is pre-industrial 18th and 19th century America, Underhill occasionally ventures back to the Middle Ages and Rennaisance and much of his later work is directly applicable to earlier periods. Particularly for those who do not have the benefit of personal instruction from a knowledgable teacher, Underhill's books and television shows are a valuable source of basic skills.

An outstanding guide to wooden artifacts recovered in York, England. Particular emphasis on turned items (such as bowls and cups) and stave-built items (buckets and barrels). Extensive analyis of wood types. Invaluable to anyone doing serious study of medieval turning or coopering.

An excellent overview of early carved, coopered, and turned articles from across Britain and Ireland. Out of print, but often available through used booksellers.

Recently reprinted, this book provides a comprehensive description (with illustrations) of an 11th century tool chest that was plowed up in Gotland. While containing mostly iron-working tools, the chest also included a number of woodworking tools, including saws, shell bits, and chisels (not to mention the chest itself). Given the small number of surviving pre-16th century tools, this book is an important resource for anyone studying medieval woodworking.

Though it may be a long and somewhat dry read, this book contains a wealth of information on the documented practices of woodworking trades in the Middle Ages. Based largely on period contracts, wills, and inventories, there are documentary references to faux-marble painting, using sharkskin as sandpaper, contractual requirements for seasoned wood, and other very useful tidbits. The essay on nails and ironwork, all 32 pages of it, provides valuable evidence that iron was, while somewhat expensive, not at all uncommon in everyday woodwork. There's even information on plumbing and privy construction.

A catalog from the holding of the V&A, this book includes numerous excellent black-and-white photographs of period woodcarving and artifacts. While limited in its breadth of furniture types (heavy on decorative carving and chests), the quality of the photography provides more detail than is typical of furniture books.

Long considered the most authoritative survey of carpenter's tools, this book has become somewhat dated but still includes valuable information and examples. Mercer's focus was on pre-industrial American tools, but includes examples of Roman and medieval finds. Now in reprint from Dover books. If it whets your appetite, you can visit the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, PA, where Mercer's considerable collection is housed.

One of the most comprehensive general surveys of medieval furniture, Eames is an excellent source for general information on various furniture types and documentary references. Archtypes are illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings and 72 black and white plates of surviving artifacts.

I do, however, have reservations with some of Eames' conclusions. Unlike Chinnery, she focuses on upper class items, holding that "The furniture historian's first task must be to analyse furniture in its most sophisticated context; from his finding here, some knowledge of the more slowly evolving styles of the poor may eventually accrue." I find this approach ignores many of the social and economic influences on furniture design and construction.

I find that Eames writes from an art historian's point of view, which tends to be more emphatic than an archaeologist would allow. For example, assertions such as "among native woods oak was at all times the first choice" (emphasis hers) is of course not literally true, or there would be no furniture of ash, beech, or other native species. And regardless, generalizations such as "at all times" are unproveable. Similarly, Eames' hypothesis that footed chests were exclusively for domestic use is not well supported by archaeological finds where footed chests are found clearly out of domestic contexts (e.g., the Mastermyr chest, the Mary Rose). It would seem Eames' focus on seigneurial households (and their mobility) may not account for the actual practices of the great majority that were less wealthy, less mobile, and more in touch with the practical. Eames also tends to rely on dating that has more recently come into questions, such as the "Hereford Chair," which she accepts as 12th/13th century, but more recently has been attributed as late as the 16th century.

For someone writing about medieval furniture, Mercer seems to have a strange bias against the medieval craftsman. For example, he states "Besides being scanty and ill-esteemed, early furniture was crude as well." He finds the practice of clenching nails "coarse" and "unfinished." However, this volume contains many valuable photographs of period artifacts.

Not a scholarly work, this is basically a sketch book of medieval furniture designs based on period illustrations. A useful survey of furniture types.