The Masterpiece of the Middle Ages
What is the greatest medieval work of art? William Bryant Logan’s answer may surprise you, though if you’re an oak lover, as I am, it will delight you.
“The greatest work of art of the European Middle Ages is not a painting, not a sculpture, not a cathedral. It is 660 tons of oak, the timber-framed roof of Westminster Hall. Hugh Herland made it for Richard II between A.D. 1393 and 1397. No [previous] roof was as audacious, as beautiful, or as intelligent as the roof of Westminster Hall… No one had ever before spanned a distance of anything like sixty-eight feet without the use of intermediate posts. The proposed roof of Westminster Hall was almost twice as wide as its nearest rival.
For the six centuries since [Herland made it,] architects, scholars, engineers, and archaeologists have argued about how he did it. [They] did studies, crunched numbers, tested models and eventually ran computer programs. Still, no one is quite sure why the greatest timber roof in the world stands up.
But intuitively, everyone sees that it should. If you envision the forces of gravity and weather acting on one of the trusses, the whole elaborate structure comes to life. Force rolls down the great composite rafters….More force flows straight down from the roof peak into the king post, which in turn distributes its forces to the queen posts and they to the collar beam…Force flows off the building into the ground through the top of the wall and through wall posts and corbels.
The medieval carpenter did what today’s engineer might call “overbuilding.” The carpenter called it sound, sensible, right, proper. The carpenter’s knowledge came from what he put his hands on, and from materials that he knew both in the woodland and in his yard…He had a deep visual imagination of the way forces act…For the carpenter, prudence, not economy, was the first virtue. He made redundant systems intentionally, much as the oak tree does with its dormant buds and its hundreds of miles of roots. A failure of one piece will not bring the whole thing down…
No one thing holds up the roof of Westminster Hall. In this, it is like the oak of which it is made: No one thing makes it superior.”
William Bryant Logan, Oak, the Frame of Civilization, Norton, NY and London, 2005, pages 160-169.
