Monthly Archives: July 2015

The Craft Of Communication – via Parchment And Microsoft

July 24, 2015North Wingabbey

A lot of what we know about life in England between the Ninth century and the middle of the Sixteenth comes to us from the pens of monks (pens made of cane, reed, bird quill, or metal) as scratched on to – in the main – parchment. They were one of the very few groups in society who were completely literate; clerks in government and great houses were literate too, but otherwise literacy was almost unknown among the populace until very late in this period. It is possible that even the majority of English monarchs across these seven centuries were unable to read or write, or at least, had only the most basic abilities.

Most of what monks wrote was of course routine. They copied out scriptures and prayer books, psalters and gospels. All that was routine ‘data entry’ in modern parlance. They also compiled the monastic accounts and kept records of goods in and money out; rents received and any number of the other payments which maintained the monasteries’ wealth.

The personalities of the scribes appeared only rarely, in scribbled asides and notes – sometimes witty but usually complaining. One gospel includes the simple complaint, “I am very cold”, and another has the scribbled and very human plea, ““Now I’ve written the whole thing, for Christ’s sake, give me a drink”. The illuminators had more fun – they often left their human touches by adding multi-coloured doodles of their own invention, and – especially – drawing distinctive (and sometimes scatological) faces, figures, and fantastical animals to manuscripts and documents.

So far as personal thoughts and opinions are concerned, these can be found in topical contemporary annals. Most famous are the accounts of Danish raiders kept by Northumbrian monks, describing the terror of the seemingly-endless waves of invaders and their savagery and heathen plundering. The cowed monks were understandably bewildered by the raiders’ contempt for the religion they lived to revere, and their regard of holy treasures as only so much portable bullion. In a tiny note of mitigation it should be said that the natives were capable of equal acts of butchery, especially in revenge, as can be seen in the mass grave of decapitated Vikings recently discovered in Dorset, and the ethnic cleansing of Danes in England on Saint Brice’s Day 1002.

The Anglo Saxon chronicles are an anthology of monastic writings – partly historical, partly contemporary – which were written between 891 and the mid-Twelfth century. Most important is the fact that seven of the nine documents which make up the Chronicle were written in vernacular English rather than scholastic Latin.

The Chronicle’s accounts of day-to-day life are fascinating, and the writers’ opinions and thoughts are often very clear. They are not impartial journalists, not by a long way, and they very definitely only reflect their world as seen through their eyes. The Chronicles mix local news with national, and even, on occasion, international topics – but some concerns are timeless; high taxation, poor weather, and the lack of respect of younger people for their elders.

One area of great value is the monks’ records of the weather and the effect that had on agriculture – so important to both the country’s economy and the monasteries’ fortunes. In the years running up to the establishment of Combermere Abbey in 1133 we are told that there were terrible storms in 1103, 1105, 1109, and 1110, whereas the winter of 1111 was very long and many men and animals perished. The following years saw a good harvest but an outbreak in plague, and the year after that the water level in the River Thames was so low that Londoners could wade from side to side. Storms, poor harvest and famine continued throughout the first years of the century, and there were destructive earthquakes in 1119 and 1133. The whole of the Twelfth century seems to be the most miserable time to be alive in England.

Combermere did not have a reputation as a great seat of learning and erudition – it was a small Abbey in an undistinguished corner of the kingdom, known only as a bulwark against the Welsh – nor do we have any great documents written there. What we do have though is The Book of the Abbot of Combermere, which is a compendium of the Abbey’s business documents between 1289 and 1529.

These are leases and covenants between the Abbey and its tenants. The accounts cover assets owned over a large area of the north midlands and north west England, and includes precise details of the dealings with a huge number of people who had business dealings with the Abbey. In the main these were tenants and lease-holders, townspeople and countrymen alike – even widows holding their leases for a peppercorn rent in their penury. There are around two and a half thousands individuals listed and named, so it is not hard to see why an Abbey like Combermere needed literate and numerate clerks to keep comprehensive records.

In many cases we see the same surname repeated, with different members of that family doing business with the Abbey – at the same time or in different generations. Eight members of the Banaster family are noted, and there are six Bickerstaths, six Birches, nine Cokes, and ten members of the Hale family. The surnames in themselves are fascinating; Wasshynton, Wykedlegh, Stotfoldshagh, Twynteringe, Stablehervy, Quitstones, Mirewraa, Osmoundrelawe and Cappelanus. Many surnames have evolved, been simplified, and are still in use today – very many have disappeared from use completely. Even allowing for freefall medieval spelling, is anyone nowadays called Querndoun, Taldrestath or Warthebrek?

What we don’t have for the Abbey is the day-to-day accounts. After the Dissolution these would have held no interest or value and would probably have been destroyed either by those who seized the Abbey or those who acquired it. Similar accounts do exist for some monastic houses, and they are a fascinating insight into the monasteries everyday economy. Very full domestic accounts for Ely Abbey, Christ Church cathedral priory, Canterbury, and Bury Saint Edmunds still exist intact.

As almost all the monastic buildings at Combermere were demolished after the Dissolution, and what remained was stripped out and re-built, it is far more likely than not that no records survived. We have a similar dearth of documentation for the following centuries too. What there was between the Dissolution and 1919, during the ownership of the Cotton family, seems to have been lost at the later date when the estate was sold. We have a map but precious little else. There are external sources, of course, but even so there wasn’t a huge amount of information in total and there were some large and intriguing gaps.

This website was created over a twenty two month period between October 2013 and July 2015 to both record the restoration of the North Wing of the Abbey, and as a platform for the compiler’s research into key periods and events at Combermere over the centuries.

The restoration process has involved fascinating and highly-talented craftspeople, and talking about them is as important as describing their work. One recurring aspect is that the way that many of the crafts are undertaken in the Twenty-first century is very similar to how their Twelfth or Sixteenth century forbears would have gone about the same job, and with tools which – with the exception, obviously, of electric saws and hydraulic lifts – looked the same and would have felt similar in the hand. Our contemporary carpenters could have worked with a Tudor joiner’s chisels and hammers, and Thomas le Plumer in the Twelfth century would have been entirely happy with the modern lead worker’s tools. The only major difference would have been steel replacing iron.

There have been great similarities in the materials used as well. Granted, the new oak came from Normandy in northern France rather than from a couple of miles radius of the Abbey, but that is far from inappropriate – the conquering baron who founded the Abbey was of course a Norman, and Normandy and England – one a dukedom and one a kingdom, under a single overlord – formed part of the same state for hundreds of years.

So far as the history of the Abbey is concerned, many periods and stories stand out. This is the first time that the accounts of the waywardness of the abbots and monks have been brought together in a single narrative. Bankruptcy, theft, counterfeiting, violence – by them and against them – and more than one murder; surely no other monastery in England had such a charge sheet.

After the huge national upset of the Dissolution the Abbey saw the arrival of the nouveau riche Cotton family – self-made Tudor men. Their family was to hold Combermere for almost four hundred years, often precariously, it should be said. The men of the Cotton family were good at marrying wealthy wives but very bad at then managing that money, let alone hanging on to it. Those wives though, as we have seen, were very good at producing children – and both mothers and offspring survived, in contradiction of modern perceptions of historic mother and infant mortality.

This comfortable family – solid rural gentry through and through – joined the aristocracy thanks to the military exploits of the Cotton who became the first Viscount Combermere, and the visit of his commander and friend The Duke of Wellington was a high point of glory for the house. The full family tree of the family, by the by, from the mid-Thirteenth century and the birth of Hugh of Hodnet, father of the man who first took Coton as his surname, to the present day, has not to our knowledge been compiled before. It has been fascinating to marry those names to the crests and shields in The Library, put in place by the first Viscount.

We now know that there were armies on Combermere Abbey land on two occasions; firstly ahead of the Battle of Nantwich in 1643, during the English Civil War, and again in the late Seventeenth century when King William III stayed at the Abbey ahead of embarking for Ireland to fight what would become The Battle of the Boyne. Extensive research has taught us a huge amount about how the Civil War affected Combermere, just as it affected country houses in almost all parts of the country, and especially Cheshire.

Thanks to the discovery of an Eighteenth century map of the estate and the cleaning of the Tillemans panorama, we have been able to deduce a lot of new information about the house and its surroundings in the Eighteenth century, and these two, very striking, images – when taken together –have proved invaluable.

From there we go on the first Viscount’s glittering career and the Abbey’s heyday, but that was followed in the later years of the Nineteenth century and the first years of the Twentieth by gradual, genteel decline. There were highlights though in the form of the hugely wealthy individuals who were tenants at Combermere; the Empress of Austria, Sir Richard and Lady Constance Sutton, and the Dowager Duchess of Westminster. All of this was new information gained through extensive research.

These glittering guests were followed by sales of horses, attempts to sell the estate, and finally the huge disposal of fixtures and fittings at a three-day auction on the Abbey lawn.

Much more is known about the Crossley family, into whose hands Combermere Abbey passed in 1919 after the departure of the Cottons; the current owner of the estate, Sarah Callander Beckett, is the great granddaughter of Sir Kenneth Crossley, the gifted engineer and entrepreneur who bought it. Three generations of the family live on the estate nowadays, so much is known. What was required here was to add to the information in hand and take the story wider, looking constantly for new tit-bits to add more facts and humanity. Much more could yet be written about the story of the Crossley family and their tenure of Combermere.

There are no truly huge gaps in our knowledge of Combermere Abbey and its occupants since 1133, but detail in many areas would be most welcome. Why was the Abbey in such desperate financial trouble in the Middle Ages, and for so long? What sort of men were the Abbots who attacked the Archbishop of Canterbury (of all people!) and lead an assault on a sister abbey? How did the Cotton brothers, Richard and George, come from nowhere to gain influence and wealth at the court of Henry VIII? Where exactly was the young Robert Cotton during Parliamentary rule of England? What did the first Viscount and The Iron Duke talk about over the dining table at the Abbey? Were later Viscounts stupid with their money or did they think that generating income was beneath men of their rank? Was the beautiful Empress of Austria as generous with her favours while in Cheshire as the local ladies of quality claimed? And – a simple fact but one which cannot be found, no matter how hard I have tried – how much died Sir Kenneth pay for the estate in 1919.

Answers to some of these questions may turn up in the future, but certainly not to all. At least though we have gathered knowledge, presented it to the very best of our abilities, and greatly increased the understanding of this fascinating and (as the Empress herself said) romantic house.

Steven Myatt, His Boke (steven@stevenmyatt.com). July 2015

From Overseer To Project Manager

July 20, 2015Crafts and Tradesabbey

This illustration of the construction of a large medieval timber-framed building shows a mass of workers, but there is one figure of particular interest. He is placed right at the centre of the composition, and he is obviously better dressed than anyone else. He points up to the roof, issuing instructions to a labourer who is working there; there is no doubt about the fact that he is a figure of authority. He is in charge.

At every stage of the Abbey’s development there would have been an unsung hero – one who actually left no mark on the building, but without whom chaos would have reigned. He was the overseer; the man who had the plan of the building in his head, who knew at which point each craft and trade should be on site, who was doing what, and how much it should all be costing.

Nowadays, during the restoration of the North Wing, the overseer has the title of project manager, and he works with a laptop, spreadsheets and a cell phone. His name is Peter Beckett, and he is far from being a hired hand – Combermere Abbey is his home.

Peter’s office during the restoration is a cubby hole in a Portakabin to the north of the building. The walls are covered with plans and delivery notes, and his desk has disappeared under yet more paperwork. Perched on old office chairs and with tradesmen coming and going, I asked him about his role.

“It wasn’t my decision that I should be the project manager”, he said, “It was my wife, Sarah’s. We discussed it and as we were the main contractor it made sense that we had a constant presence on-site. We could keep an eye on what was happening, but most importantly we could make decisions as quickly as possible – so that suppliers, providers and trades weren’t ever held up”.

A fascinating early question was to which point in time the building would be restored. The Abbey has been added to and subtracted from many times over the centuries and its shape and outline plan has evolved considerably. There could have been an argument that the early-Nineteenth century gothicisation should have been stripped away completely, leaving the Tudor half-timbered structure – though so much else has changed that such a notion would never have been practical. “We thought about that for a nano-second”, Peter says, “It was clear though that the timber structure had been cut into and battered about so much during the gothicisation that it made it impossible – plus an extra floor had been created above the Tudor building.”

One replacement which was considered was the Wellington Wing to the north-east, built in something of a hurry for the visit of the first Viscount Combermere’s commander and friend, Lord Wellington in 1820. This would have added considerably to the Abbey’s ground area, and it would have stood parallel to the longer service wing on the south-west. This was soon discounted though on the grounds of cost.

One crucial aspect of the work is of course controlling the money. Every invoice which comes in is logged for approval, and at any point Peter can see immediately how the different sections of the project are looking so far as cost is concerned – and the overall total.

One early task was selecting the suppliers and tradesmen who would work on the restoration. The criteria, Peter says, were, “Reputation, previous experience with this type of work, a good reference – and tendering. The tendering process started with us putting together a specification and getting responses to that. There was no question of giving the work to the cheapest. What was needed was the best job and the best value for money. This is a building of great quality and the work had to be done up to the right standard.

It was useful, Peter added, to talk to as many people in the field as possible and learn from their experiences, good and bad. “We have ended up with the most fantastic team of people here. We came to a working agreement with Grosvenor Construction early on, and Will Mellor, the Director who is responsible for the firm’s work here at Combermere, lined up people to provide advice when we come to a sticky question and feel we are out of our depth.”

The very first port of call was the specialist heritage architects, Arrol Snell; we asked them who we thought we should appoint as the principle contractor (Combermere remains the ‘main contractor’ throughout), and we contacted a number of firms, and finally selected Grosvenor. At every step, no matter the size of the ‘parcels contract’, Peter has organised a ‘beauty parade’ and looked at a number of suppliers or contractors.

Scheduling is a very important factor; goods must arrive on a particular date (and indeed, often at a particular time) and the craftsmen need to be in place to receive those goods and begin to use them. It is not good practise to have too much in the way of building materials on site, and at the Abbey there is neither space nor dry storage for a mass of material anyway. These requirements change frequently, however; jobs take a longer or shorter time to complete, and other factors can come into play. The worst outcome is having workers sitting around waiting for a crucial delivery.

“The project manager’s job is to juggle”, Peter says, “You are juggling people, materials, and different suppliers. Most suppliers deliver on time, but others don’t – which you remember – and sometimes there is a consignment which is simply wrong.

“We can move people around in most cases if a delivery is late, but of course you can’t do everything all at once; some jobs have to be done before others.”

Interestingly, it tends not to be the larger contractors who occasionally let the side down, but the smaller ones – who perhaps have less in the way of resources, but who one would expect to be more conscientious because the work matters more to them. “The bigger they are, the more professional they tend to be, with professional systems in place. They also have greater resources so they can pull people off other, less time-sensitive work, to fulfil an order which is on deadline. On the other hand if a supplier tells us that there is a problem, or the possibility of a problem, and the timing isn’t crucial for us, we can drop that back in the schedule. There has to be some give and take.

“Recently we ordered some stainless steel mesh and it had to be delivered three times because there was, initially, a genuine misunderstanding, and that material was sent back, but the next delivery was galvanised steel – not stainless steel. The third time we got what we wanted, but the delay was frustrating.”

Looking at the North Wing and the ad hoc building site which is sitting temporarily around it, materials such as timber are in evidence – but there are other suppliers to bear in mind – more than one might think. A Tudor overseer didn’t have to factor in electricians or telephone contractors.

“Project management has the same modus operandi no what the project is. What matters is having foresight in terms of anticipating problems, having an overall plan and knowing what you want to achieve. You then break all that down into the constituent steps – and then make sure that you stay one or two steps ahead of your suppliers. You have to review progress on a regular basis, see where you are up to, decide what might need re-scheduling, and see where you stand according to the budget.

“No two projects are the same, but the experience you gain on any one transfers to subsequent projects. You do become more adept at dealing with situations and getting a good feel for all the different elements. The most important element in project management is flexibility. When a problem arises you can’t just freeze; you have to be able to work around it and re-deploy your assets. If it wasn’t something you had anticipated it may cost you more in terms of time or money. No matter how keenly you try to anticipate problems things will go wrong regardless. You can’t think of everything but you have to be able to cope with everything.

“As a Grade I listed building – and one which is on English Heritage’s ‘at risk’ register – we have had their support all the way through. We were sixteen years trying to set up the restoration, and over that time we have developed a very good relationship with their people. With the Combermere estate this is the sixth or seventh project which we have undertaken, so we have built up their trust and confidence in us. That level of respect means, I believe, that they have faith in us.

“Any areas of disagreement with English Heritage were resolved in the planning stages. Early on it was a question of getting their reactions to ideas which we had, discussing the issues, and coming to a decision. We are all looking for pragmatic decisions, using the right materials for the house for the long term – and being as faithful as possible in re-creating the look and feel of the building as it was.”

There is no question but that Peter is in his element in this role, and is enjoying himself; “It is very satisfying to see something being created out of a wreck, and as each week goes past I see visible progress. You could say that it’s like conducting an orchestra, and whether you are playing first violin or just the triangle, everything has to find its place and come in on time.

“It has also been terrific to see what this country can still produce in terms of craftsmanship and the materials we require. You do need to look for the craftsmen, and often if it says ‘restoration’ or ‘historic’ over the door it means they are expensive, but this country does have some very good people still.

“It’s going to be a good, solid building for another two hundred years at least. We are one of the blips in time so far as the history of this house is concerned, and as with every project which Sarah and I have undertaken on the estate over the last two decades, it is like putting pieces into a great big jigsaw puzzle. When each piece has been repaired or restored – or taken away, if that was appropriate – it has helped build the overall picture of a vibrant Combermere estate. This will be one of the big sections, put back in its rightful place.”

Interview on BBC Radio Shropshire

July 16, 2015Media, North Wingabbey

In late June 2015, radio broadcaster Sophie Hughes visited Combermere Abbey to view and discuss the North Wing restoration project with Sarah Callander Beckett.

The interview, recorded at Combermere, was transmitted on Eric Smith and Clare Ashford’s breakfast show on BBC Radio Shropshire on the 29th of June.

This recording is courtesy of BBC Radio Shropshire

Nick And Ben – The Latest In A Long Line of Woodworkers At The Abbey

July 8, 2015Crafts and Tradesabbey

Of all the craftsmen who have worked at Combermere Abbey over the past nine centuries, one of the very first to have gone on to the site in the early Twelfth century would have been the woodmen. We know from the Domesday Book that the land on the Cheshire/Shropshire border was a mix of oak woodland and either low scrub or heathland. Those ancient oaks would have offered perfect building materials – along with stone brought from further away – for not just the Abbey buildings but all the other ancillary and temporary structure which would have been needed.

Construction began only fifty years after the Norman’s vicious ‘harrying of the north’, when the land was ravaged in revenge for uprisings against Norman rule. The conquerors systematically destroyed everything of use or value; homes, farms, barns, crops, cattle, sheep – even poultry and dogs. Many Saxons were murdered by the Normans, and more yet starved to death. It is no wonder that in Cheshire and Shropshire – and on across northern England – Domesday describes the land as “waste” and of very small value. Even the valuable and strategically important city of Chester saw half its houses destroyed and lost a third of its value.

There was no human settlement at Combermere at this time; it was an isolated spot a few miles from both the small towns of Whitchurch and Audlem, and several tiny villages, so the harrying would have been less apparent. We can probably assume that the woodland was largely untouched; it would have been difficult to put to the torch unless the weather was very dry indeed. It is also safe to assume that, along with the good water supply, the timber was another reason why Combermere was chosen as the site for a monastery (felling and stripping trees for good timber usable in construction was labour-intensive, but was still far less expensive than moving timber – transporting it, usually on ox-drawn carts, was slow and difficult, and thus very expensive).

After the Dissolution and the grant of the Abbey to Sir George Cotton in 1539 it is likely that demolition work of the monastic church and the other ecclesiastical building was begun fairly quickly. Sir George did not have family wealth; he and his brother Richard had risen rapidly at the court of King Henry VIII despite coming from obscure origins in North Shropshire, so it is likely that he was not in a position to build a substantial country house immediately. He might well have been amassing the rents from the estate, and would have sold off the huge stock of building materials generated by the demolition. For the most part this was very valuable stone, a lot of which would have been expertly dressed, and the fact that it was four hundred years old was not at all detrimental (we can never know where it went, but it is fascinating to speculate; how many houses, farms, barns – or townhouses in Nantwich and Whitchurch – still have monastic stone from Combermere in their fabric?).

So what of the timbers? There are a lot of timbers in stone buildings, particularly in the roofs, let alone all the other buildings of lesser status which would have been predominantly built of wood. Worthwhile timbers would have been sold off too as there was surely more wood than would ever be needed, but was some stored for re-use? Or did Sir George know that it was going to be a while before he could build his new house, and think that storage of a material which would degrade in the moist conditions of Combermere was a bad idea? Was he perhaps budgeting for all-new timber on his new country house?

Whatever Sir George’s plans were they weren’t to be fulfilled in his lifetime; he died in 1545 at the age of forty. Combermere was inherited by his only son, (another) Richard Cotton (doubtless named after his uncle), who was about six years old. We don’t know when work began on the new house, but a date stone is inscribed 1563 (“Master Richard Cotton and his sons three, both for their pleasure and commoditie, this building did edifie, in fifteen hundred and sixty three”) – though was that laid at the beginning or the end of the work?

By way of an aside, there was something curious in that date of 1563. His first son, George, who was to inherit the house, was born in 1560, and his second – Arthur – was born in 1562. The next birth (by his first wife, Mary Mainwaring of Ightfield), in 1563, was a daughter – Mary Cotton. The third son, Andrew, wasn’t born until 1564, so the date stone was probably put in after the event, and therefore perhaps when building work was completed. (Richard fathered fourteen children in all, by three wives).

We can be sure though that during the 1560s there were joiners and carpenters back at Combermere Abbey, and in numbers not seen for four centuries. The construction must have been spread over a number of years, and it would have been a great source of work for craftsmen and labourers alike, plus a whole range of secondary suppliers such as blacksmiths, and those who supplied the workers with food, clothing, and other necessities. It is interesting to speculate how far the craftsmen travelled. There were probably not enough joiners, masons, lead workers and so on in the immediate vicinity, and some must have come from Whitchurch and Nantwich, which was the largest settlement within a ten mile radius by then. Presumably they were accommodated at the Abbey, returning home only on occasion (perhaps with much-needed cash). It seems logical that some of the more skilled craftsmen came from Chester and Shropshire, and perhaps even further afield.

For the past year or so there have been two Twenty-first carpenters on site at the Abbey, and they will be there until at least the end of this year (2015) and even on into the next.. They are father and son Nick and Ben Owens from Chirk, just across the River Dee in Wales. Nick’s father was a woodworker, and like the joiners of years gone, by he has followed in his father’s trade, just as Ben is now following in his. There have been several father-and-son teams working at the Abbey during the restoration of the North Wing, which is, in its way, rather satisfying: “I don’t think that I ever had a say in it”, Nick said, “I just followed my dad. It’s nice though that my son has followed me into the trade as well.”

Nick (right) and Ben Owens on site at the Abbey

In large part the problems with the Tudor timbers were all too evident in the north-facing side of the Abbey, where substantial amounts of material had fallen away, but even that did not tell the full story of the rot in the wood. When the ashlar outer surface was removed it could be seen that in many cases the vertical timbers no longer reached down to the base or other beams – and there was not a lot more than air and dust where once there was solid Cheshire oak.

New steelwork had been introduced to avoid further collapse, and Nick and Ben’s first job was to cut away the rotten wood in the main frame of the building and replace it with good wood. The new pieces were cut to the same width and depth as the original beams, and were, in many places, joined with wooden pegs as they would have been five hundred years ago.

The next step for the joiners was to construct a new interior wall to carry the roof, and once the roof was in place they could move on to repairing the framework on the outside face, which will be plastered in replication of the gothic ‘stonework’. Nick and Ben are some of the few craftsmen who will be on site from just about the start of the work right through to the finishing touches being applied inside ahead of the plasterers, and then will be adding the architraves, skirting boards and doors before the decorators go in.

“When we first turned up and looked at the job I thought “My god!”. I’ve worked on some buildings which were really far gone but this was the worst because of the amount of decay and rot”, Nick said. “My next thought was “Where do we start?”, but you start somewhere, of course, and you’re away. It has been a challenge but at least the worst is over now and from here on it’s straight forward. Not easy, but at least straight forward.

“Actually, the place we did start was on getting the building safe. The first job was to replace the timbers which had been replaced by the temporary steelwork so that we could get the house standing on its own legs again, and then the steel could be taken out. We started from the bottom and worked upwards and it was soon holding its own.

“Then all the big oak timbers which had rotted away had to come out and new wood had to go in, in their place. Where we could we spliced new wood to the old, but where the timber was of structural importance the only thing to do was to put all-new wood in; you do lose strength on the join where you splice.

“All the wood is ‘like for like’; oak is replaced by oak and softwood by softwood. The oak came from a timber merchant near Market Drayton, not far away, but it’s French in origin – from Normandy. You can’t get English or Welsh oak of the size we needed. To get a straight length of oak six metres long you need to start with a very tall oak tree.

“Those long pieces are 300mm by 400mm [twelve inches by sixteen inches] and at six metres length the oak is very heavy. Plus, you have to feed it in through the building, often through window gaps, feeding it gently into the building, so it’s not easy. We have got modern lifting equipment, but most of the time we are using chains and blocks, much as the original carpenters would have done. You can always do it, but you really have to think about it before you start.

“We have used wooden pegs for joining because it’s the traditional way, and I like doing that, but for speed and strength we’ve used bolts. Bolts pull the beams together in the way that pegs don’t and that helps the glue go off. To a large degree though I’ve done it the way it was, and future generations will be able to see our work and see that we’ve respected the building.

“I do look at the original work and wonder about the men who worked on it. I can tell you though, they were good joiners – their work really stands up. It is good to see the stuff that they have done, especially their high-end work, like in the roof above the library. It’s nice joinery, especially where they have spent some time on something.

“I do think though that to some degree they had time on their hands. I think we have deadlines that they didn’t have, and we’ve got to achieve everything by a certain date, come what may. Time would not have been an issue for them, but not so much as for us, I’d think.

“The Tudor joiners were accurate with their measurements. Their rulers or tapes wouldn’t have been as accurate as ours, but wherever I’ve measured up their work it has always been there or thereabouts. And they always worked in multiples; two foot, four foot, eight foot, sixteen foot.”

For a thousand years or more carpentry has been a well-regarded and relatively well-paid craft. In the Fourteenth century a carpenter earned around twenty pence a week, which was more than twice as much as a common labourer, and similar to the wages of a mason. In the same century – in 1333 – the Carpenters’ Company (in effect a guild) created a ‘Boke of Ordinances’, which set out the rules of the craft. Most related to the provision of help to members in need, and included a payment of twelve pennies a year to help those who became ill or were injured at work, which was paid for by a subscription to the Company. Members of the fraternity were also required to employ other members who were without work, in preference to non-Company carpenters. Company members, as with all other guilds, were expressly forbidden from revealing the secrets of their craft to outsiders.

Members were expected to attend mass twice a year (which I don’t believe Nick and Ben are) and go to the funerals of brothers (and sisters – widows) of the Company. Medieval carpenters were very proud of the religious association of the craft; Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph, having been a carpenter.

The Company was incorporated by Royal Charter as a City of London Livery Company in 1477 by King Edward IV. The charter defined the Carpenters’ Company as ‘a body Corporate and Politic by the name of the Master Wardens and Commonalty of the Mistery of Freemen of the Carpentry of the City of London’. The charter gave the company the power to receive bequests and gifts of property, to plead in any court, and to have a common seal.

Carpenters were often self-employed, but great houses, castles and cathedrals would often have carpenters among their full-time staff, responsible for repairs as well as new building – and for repairing all items made of wood, be it a wheelbarrow, a cart, or a stool.

The route to becoming a carpenter was via an apprentice; a system which emerged in the Twelfth century and was rapidly adopted. A boy would be bound to a craftsman as an apprentice from the age of fourteen for a term of between six and nine years. The master had to give an assurance that he would teach the youngster all the skills he would need, and was legally bound then to do so; there are examples of apprentices taking legal action if they were under-taught or abused.

From the Sixteenth century onwards the master was paid a fee by the parents of the apprentice. The apprentice lived with the master and was fed and housed by him and his family. In theory no salary was paid to the apprentice – the benefit being the learning of the trade – but in reality they were often given modest allowances for clothing and other essentials.

Guild members were expected to take on the sons of other guild members, especially where their fathers had died. As well as the use of wood and their tools, the apprentice was taught mathematics, which was a relatively rare skill. At the end of their term they became journeymen and could set up on their own, but many stayed and worked alongside their master. If the master had no sons of his own an ex-apprentice would often inherit their business. There were many instances of apprentices marrying into the master’s family. Many apprentice carpenters worked without a formal agreement for their own fathers or other family members in the trade. After 1601 the children of the poor could be placed in apprenticeships at the expense of the parish, which was an enlightened step. Apprenticeships weren’t a male-only role; girls were apprenticed to women as seamstresses or weavers, under exactly the same conditions.

These terms and conditions of being a carpenter might be obsolete now, but the levels of skill are as high or higher, and the pride in their work – as evidenced by Nick and Ben – are certainly no lower. Doubtless it will be exactly the same in a couple of hundred years or so when carpenters next need to work on the Abbey. Many other professions will have moved on massively, but maybe carpentry will be very much the same as it was in the Twelfth century, the Sixteenth century, and the Twenty-first.