We never look at domestic chimneys, but they are amazing. Sometimes you might look up and look at chimney pots and  fireplaces, but do you ever look at the chimney itself? 

If you live in a house with chimneys you probably look at the alcoves at the side of the fire. Maybe yours are filled with shelves? Before TV a lot of people used to watch the fire and before electricity read by its light so when television came out they put the sets next to the fireplace in the alcove.  Nowadays most of us in the UK don't have open fires so  chimneys usually stick out into the middle of the room and take up a lot of space and sometimes you wonder why they are there.

If you have ever tried to undertake large scale building work or make structural changes to an old house you may have found out what a pain a disused chimney can be and how having it there can make the work much more expensive. If you take away the bottom part there is a danger that the top of the stack might collapse downwards and cause huge damage. To take away the top of the stack can cause problems because you might have to undertake extensive work on the roof before you start in the rooms below. If your chimney forms part of an adjoining wall, removing it might cause insurmountable problems unless you are willing to carry your building work through to your neighbour's house. 

If they cause so many problems why would anyone think they were an amazing invention?  Read on...

It is really difficult for us to imagine life without electricity, gas, petrol, phones, public transport, TVs and the like. We take these for granted.

Go camping! 

The easiest way of seeing what life was like in the middle ages may be to go into a field with an axe, a saw, a spade and not much else and try to build yourself some shelter, get warm, find something to eat and drink and make sure you don't wear any man-made fibres or take any power tools. You can't light your fire with any matches or lighters; you have to find another way. Of course you aren't going to be able to do that, whoever owns the field may get a bit upset! (That would happen in the middle ages too.) But you can go camping. Life in a tent isn't so different especially if you don't take a torch or anything to cook on.

But not on a camp site 

Not having any electricity or gas means not having any house or street lighting, so when there was no moon, towns would be very dark. The only heating would come from fires which required someone to fetch something for them to burn. If you were rich you could send someone. If not, you went yourself. Of course you can't just pop outside and get some wood. There isn't much nearby because for hundreds of years before you wanted to light a fire people had been burning anything they could find. You might have a long walk.

You also have a bit of a walk to get water. Not nice clean warm water, or water from a bottle but water from a stream or a well. The same goes when you want to use the loo. Very few houses had toilets; people used potties and in the morning would throw the contents out of the window except for the rich who might have a garderobe which was a hole in the floor from a top room jutting out over a drop so everything fell outside the house. Getting clean was another problem. Imagine no nice warm baths or showers. If you were very rich you could pay someone to heat up water for you and pour it into something large enough to sit in. If you were poor you would probably only bath in the local stream or lake.

And go in winter 

There wasn't any central heating so people got used to being cold if they stepped away from the fire. Most houses didn't have glass so any wind would blow through your house. Most windows were blocked with a panel of wood.
Luckily people were very religious so in cold weather they would often congregate in churches, or rich people's houses which, because some were made of stone and had glass in the windows, were presumably warmer than their own houses in mid-winter.

After cruck timber houses, open hall houses became popular. Like cruck houses these were not ordinary houses, but usually belonged to high status people such as lord of the manor or maybe a high ranking vassal. They were called open hall because they had a large two story high hall in the centre.  Most had a passageway with doors at either side of the house. This opened into a large hall where the owner or tenant could sit in some splendour. The open fire was right in the middle of the room. Cooking however was mostly done in a different cookhouse, separated from the main building by a gap. This was a wise precaution when there was a very good chance of fire destroying the place.

Mostly this type of house had 2 story living accommodation at each end of the main room.  The bedrooms were often quite impressive and in cold weather the beds could become places where people more or less lived. It wasn't uncommon to have business meetings in a bed! If you look carefully you can see two little beds under the large bed. These pulled out and could be pushed back under the main bed to save space. Who do you think slept in these?

Many larger early medieval dwellings are called cruck timber houses. Crucks are pairs of timbers cut in one piece from the trunk of a large oak tree usually where it turns into a large branching limb. They rise from the ground or a raised stone base to meet at the apex of the roof; or, in larger buildings, were joined together with a collar beam.

If you find a cruck timber framed house and look carefully you can see that these pairs of curved wood were often cut from the same tree, which is why they are often so symmetrical.

The roof was mostly clad in straw thatch or tiles of fired clay, and sometimes a ready supply of slate made it the favourite roofing material for the richest houses. The walls were made of wattle and daub. This is made of thin flexible split wood woven round upright stays covered in a mixture of mud and dung, sometimes with straw and blood to help make it a little stronger. Later many houses replaced this with a brick filling in-between the timbers.

Quite a good model of the main timbers in a cruck timber house is available in Director or see the WireFusion models available here for example and an older one here. These do work in Vista U 64bit on IE7 and Firefox 3. By the looks of it you can only have one wirefusion model open at a time and I have had intermettent problems with them but not as many as with the Director models. For example, sometimes when they were opened on a 32 bit XP machine they would not spin.  

Director Instructions: You will need the free Director Shockwave plug-in to see it. You can spin the model round with the mouse. Pressing the shift or control keys lets you move in different ways. The freest movement can be achieved with the mouse and pressing the ctrl and shift keys together. You can also slowly zoom in and out with the up and down arrow keys and look left and right with the respective arrow keys.  To reset the interaction press the F5 key, or in some browsers the Ctrl+F5 keys together.