The Barns of the Abbey of Beaulieu: At Its Granges of Great Coxwell

By Walter Horn and Ernest Born

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520347991

Book preview

THE BARNS OF THE ABBEY OF BEAULIEU AT ITS GRANGES OF GREAT COXWELL AND BEAULIEU-ST. LEONARDS

THE BARNS OF THE ABBEY OF

BEAULIEU AT ITS GRANGES of

GREAT COXWELL

&

BEAULIEU

ST. LEONARDS

BY WALTER HORN AND ERNEST BORN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

London, England

©1965 by Walter Horn and Ernest Born

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 64-19011

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEDICATED TO ALBERTA HORN AND ESTHER BORN, OUR WIVES,

WHO GAVE THEIR WARM SUPPORT THROUGH

THE MANY YEARS CONSUMED IN PURSUANCE OF THIS PROJECT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MY FIRST acquaintance with the two buildings which form the subject of this study dates from a visit to England made in the summer of 1957. I took then a first incomplete set of measurements of the Barn of Great Coxwell, but shortage of time prevented me from surveying the ruins of the Barn of Beaulieu-St. Leonard’s.

Three years later, in the summer of 1960, in the course of a comprehensive study of aisled mediaeval halls, churches, and barns in timber which was undertaken with the aid of two Guggenheim fellowships, Ernest Born and I completely remeasured Great Coxwell, and surveyed for the first time the ruins of Beaulieu-St. Leonard’s. It was then that we noticed the imprint of the terminal truss on the eastern gable wall, a discovery that had exciting implications for the reconstruction of the lost timberwork.

In the course of that summer we surveyed, photographed, analyzed, and reconstructed, to the extent possible in the available time, four churches, nine castle, palace, and manor halls, one hospital, fifteen monastic barns, nine market halls, and one episcopal kitchen. This could never have been accomplished without the assistance of Carl Bertil Lund, the project draftsman, and James W. Roberts, a free-lance photographer. It was Bert Lund who made it possible for us to maintain our tight time schedule. His devotion to the project was surpassed only by his ability to draft in total disregard for the normal cycles of day and night. To James W. Roberts, whose work was supported by a grant from the Research Committee of the University of California at Berkeley, we owe the bulk of our documentary photography.

Ernest Born is responsible not only for all the architectural drawings published in this book, but also for its layout and design. While I take responsibility for the text, neither this study nor any of the previous studies published in connection with this project would have been possible without his co-work. Since the end of the last century the ways of the architect and the architectural historian have parted—to the disadvantage of both professions. The art historian in need of recording buildings in drawings as well as in words, finds himself lost without the necessary training or resources. For me to be able to draw on Ernest Born’s vast professional experience and his superior draftsmanship is a privilege the benefits of which are plainly visible in every facet of our joint venture. We are both grateful to the University of California Press for having given us a free hand in this experiment.

In all of our field work we have encountered the most cordial reception by the owners and tenants of the buildings with which we were concerned. We are grateful to Mr. A. B. Williams and Monsieur Lucien Dendooven for their friendly accueil at Great Coxwell and at Ter Doest, and to Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for having given us such free access to the grounds of Beaulieu-St. Leonard’s. We are indebted to Sir Dawson Bates for the detailed account of his restoration of Great Coxwell, undertaken for the National Trust, in 1960-1962. To Mrs. Pearl Pleydell-Bouverie, the wife of the late Lord Montagu, and to Captain H. E. R. Widnell, the present manager of the estates of Beaulieu, we owe some important local information.

Lastly, I cannot refrain from expressing my thanks to that unknown passerby who interrupted his walk across the sunny countryside of South Hampshire to help me, during my stay in England in the summer of 1962, in the excavation of the foundation of one of the roof-supporting timbers of the barn of St. Leonard’s, but who departed so unobtrusively that I had no chance to ask his name nor to thank him.

W. H.

CITY OF WESTMINSTER, VIEW FROM THE THAMES

Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar, signed and dated British Museum, London. To the left: the House of Parliament. To the right: Westminster Abbey. In the center: Westminster Hall built by William Rufus, between 1097 and 1099, the largest aisled hall known to have been constructed.

Today Westminster Hall is covered by a roof of single span, a masterpiece of hammer-beam construction, which King Richard II raised at the end of the fourteenth century. Prior to the invention of the arch-braced hammer beam a hall of this enormous width could not have been spanned in single trusses. For that reason there is general agreement amongst English archaeologists that when this hall was built by William Rufus in the eleventh century, its roof must have been supported by two rows of free-standing inner timbers which divided the hall lengthwise into a nave and two aisles. A plan of the hall reconstructing its original condition is shown on p. 67, and further commentary on the hall will be found on p. 68. For the engraving of Wenceslaus Hollar see Arthur M. Hind, Wenceslaus Hollar (London, 1922), p. 74.

PREFACE

EARLY in our work on timbered mediæval halls, churches, and barns, we observed that visual reproduction of this type of construction presented difficulties of an unusual nature. The photographic camera—competent in the rendering of exteriors and architectural details—failed us in the most important task we asked of it, that of conveying in the illustrative body of our work an impression of the intrinsic spatial quality of the interiors of the buildings. Photography can show with some success the nature and function of the structural members of a frame of roof-supporting timbers, but because of its monolenticular limitations, its limited angle and its fixed position, it fails to capture the sense of the space in which these timbers stand. We have tried to overcome this failing by drawings made at the site, which attempt to convey some of the spatial vastness of these large sheltering structures (see pl. ii), and by perspectives drawn on the basis of actual measurements (figs. n and 41).

Even in the making of the more conventional types of architectural drawings, such as plans and transverse and longitudinal sections, we were confronted with a special problem not encountered in the rendering of masonry architecture, where the bulk of the roof- or vault-supporting masses is in a more balanced relationship to the size of the enveloped spaces. In timber construction the extraordinary compressive and tensile strength of the material reduces the mass of the roof-supporting members to a minimum. To display the structural beauty of this medium as well as its spatial function calls for the most careful consideration of the scale of reproduction. It is perfectly possible to reduce a plan, a section, or an elevation of a frame of timber to a relatively small format without loss in clarity of definition, but to contract them to the size dictated by a normal printed page destroys the aesthetic effect of the structure and gives it the spindly quality of a matchstick composition.

Our previously published studies of timbered buildings of this type have made it clear that the dimensional requirements of reproduction require some careful experimentation. Since the final publication of our present research will be illustrated with hundreds of drawings of this construction type, we believe there is value in testing our working procedure by the publication of a pilot study such as this. The buildings we have selected for this purpose are worthy of being singled out. Great Coxwell is the finest of the surviving mediæval barns of England, and Beaulieu-St. Leonard’s was the largest: the latter, moreover, presents a fascinating problem of reconstruction. It might be well to point out, however, that the larger project of which this study forms a part is not primarily a treatise on the mediæval barn, but rather it will be the history of the aisled all-purpose house in timber, which in one of its many functional variations performs the role of a barn.

The development and dissemination of this structural type is one of the most extraordinary events in architectural history. It began in the seventh century B.C. in Holland and northwest Germany, and today—twenty- six centuries later—has not reached its point of termination. It