It’s Italian, adapted from a popular Greek design. It was buried under volcanic ash in the garden of the house of Ceii in Pompeii in AD 79. Beautiful design really is timeless, isn’t it?

And so there was this year. A nice little trestle-based gate-leg turned up at the Winter Show. It had a glorious rich patina, but had rectangular-sectioned gates (usually a minor negative) and a price tag of — wait for it — $11,000! It sold.

Just for comparison, also at the Winter Show, there was a New England example, larger and chunkier, both in form and price. Reading the tag carefully, and twice, I found an extra zero on it — $110,000.

Gate-leg from New England: $110,000

If you keep an eye on our website, you’ll know the prices that we sell trestle-based gate-legs for. But then we’re not at the Winter Show.

Gate-leg from England: $11,000

“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.

One of its later owners obviously realized how rare it was, for when it broke he had it mended with staples. In general, squat bottles were so common as to be not worth repairing, in fact, I’ve never seen one with a stapled repair. So this one is doubly rare – handled and stapled. Has “very rare” passed into “unique” here? Quite possibly. Have any of you seen one like it?

Not quite as rare, but still very desirable, is its small size: at 4-3/4” tall, it’s about half the size of a regular bottle. I have heard collectors referring to these small bottles as “half-squats,” but that sounds like something painful you do in the gym.

The bottle was sold for $2,925 in October, 2011, by the Connecticut auctioneer, Norman C. Heckler & Co., www.hecklerauction.com where it was described: “Black glass handled wine bottle, England, 1680-1730. Squat, cylindrical wine with heavy applied solid handle, deep yellow olive, sheared mouth with string rim – pontil scar, ht. 4 3/4 inches, greatest dia. 5 1/4 inches. Severely cracked with a wonderful stapled repair. Ex Rowland collection.” Norm commented, “I suspect it may have frozen and cracked, but that’s just speculation,” and he thought that if it had been in perfect condition it would have brought four or five times what it did.

I’m sure he’s right, but I prefer it with the staples. Sometimes it pays to be a market contrarian: I might have been able to pay $3,000 for it, but certainly not $12,000 – 15,000.

Thanks to Norman Heckler for the photo. The sale of the bottle is covered in the New England Antiques Journal, Feb, 2012.

Why is she looking so thoughtful, or lugubrious? She’s the queen from a wonderful set of twelfth-century chessmen on exhibition at the Cloisters Museum, New York. When the game began in the sixth century in India, the piece that we call the queen was the grand vizier, advisor to the king. When chess reached Europe, the vizier became the queen, but she retained his advisory function – hence she is portrayed as deep in thought.

In medieval chess, the piece we know as the rook or the castle was a foot soldier, called a “warder.” Here’s one biting his shield. No, the shield does not do double duty as a MRE (meal ready to eat.) One of the Norse sagas describes the soldiers of Odin “raging like dogs or wolves, biting their shields, and in strength equal to furious bulls or bears….This frenzy was known as Berserksganger.” Today, of course, we know it as “going berserk.” Biting the shield was a sign of wildness and ferocity.

Read John’s account of exhibition written for the New England Antiques Journal. Go to www.fiskeandfreeman.com and click beside the picture of the queen.

Clothes, fine or plain, were hard to keep clean in London. Every household burnt coal brought from Newcastle by sea in its fireplaces and cooking ranges. So did the brewers and dyers, the brickmakers up the Tottenham Court Road, the ubiquitous soap and salt boilers. The smoke from their chimneys made the air dark, covering every surface with sooty grime. There were days when a cloud of smoke half a mile high and twenty miles wide could be seen over the city from Epsom Downs. Londoners spat black. Wall hangings, pictures and clothes turned yellow and brown like leaves in autumn, and winter undervests, sewn on for the season against the cold, were the color of mud by the time spring arrived.

Hair was expected to look after itself; John Evelyn made a special note in his diary in August 1653 that he was going to experiment with an “annual hair wash.”

But every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek which everyone breathed.

The photo is of a 17th-century coal grate in the The George, a London pub — obviously renamed!

NB. The coal smoke tells us a lot about how early oak achieved its dark, rich patina. A bit of wax on top of that, and hey presto!

I love the way that the pre-modern mind turned the exotic into the familiar, blithely unconstrained by the (modern) dictates of realism. Their needleworkers happily put Old Testament figures into contemporary dress, and here the building of Noah’s Ark (there he is, in the center, directing operations) is rendered as building a timber framed house. Only the solidly planked walls hint that the structure was meant to float. (I have to hope that there were vents in the roof, what with all those animals in there….)
The Illumination is from the Bedford Hours, between 1414 and 1423, but the housewrights were using the same tools and techniques as seventeenth-century joiners. Workmen are adzing, drilling, planing, sawing, driving a peg into a joint, and nailing the roof (note his nail box cunningly hooked over the ridge.) The enlarged detail shows a band-saw, a mortise chisel, and a drill that is similar to the one that I used as a boy and called a “brace and bit.” The man with a plane is working on enormously wide boards – think of the size of the trees in those first-growth forests! The only thing a seventeenth-century joiner would not do, is drill the hole for the peg after the mortise and tenon had been assembled, for that would not allow him to use the peg to tighten the joint. (See Acorns Fall 2006 at www.fiskeandfreeman.com for an account of the “draw bore” technique.)
What a beautiful record of wood workers on the job!
PS. Didn’t workmen dress colorfully then! Or was it more important for the illumination to look bright and beautiful than to be realistic? Probably the latter, don’t you think?

According to the bestiaries, the elephant had no joints in its legs, so if it fell down, it was stuck and unable to rise. The poor animals had to sleep standing up, leaning against trees. A sneaky hunter sawed half-way through a tree which broke and deposited the huge animal helplessly on the ground. But then he had a problem – how to get the elephant up. First he tried with a single large elephant (symbolizing Hebrew Law) then with a team of twelve (the Prophets) but both failed. Then along came a smaller, unprepossessing elephant who wrapped his trunk around him and pulled him upright, just as Christ came to save mankind and raise him up again after the Fall.

What a great example of the medieval mind at work – finding the “reality” of a creature seen only in second- or third-hand illustrations, and then fitting it to a pre-existing story that embodied a far deeper and more universal reality.

Next time you’re in London and downing a pint or two in the Elephant and Castle pub, think of that, and be careful not to fall down stiff-legged on your way out.

The carving we show is on a 14th-century choir stall in Chester cathedral – but the elephant here has knees, in fact, he seems to have the legs of a horse. The Illumination (with properly stiff legs!) is from the Harley Manuscript, c. 1255.

The peacock carries little, if any, symbolic meaning, whereas the phoenix is loaded with it. The bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais describes the Phoenix like this:

“It wears on its head a crest like the peacock; its breast and its throat are resplendent with red, and it gleams like fine gold; towards its tail it is blue as the clear sky.”

According to the legend, there was only one phoenix alive at one time and it lived in India. When it reached the age of 500 years, it filled its wings with sweet smelling spices and flew to Egypt. There, a priest prepared an altar topped with kindling and dry wood. The phoenix lay on the pyre and ignited the kindling by striking its beak against a stone. It fanned the fire with its wings and was quickly reduced to ashes. Next day, a small wormlike creature emerged from the ashes and in two more days it had grown into another Phoenix. On this day, the third, it saluted the priest and flew back to India.

Obviously, the phoenix symbolized the resurrection of Christ. But it could also refer to the restoration of the monarchy, and thus be a sign of loyalty to the crown. In this vein, it might refer also to the hereditary nature of the monarchy – “The King is dead. Long live the King.”

Medieval bestiaries were concerned with symbolic meanings and exotic stories: not at all with anatomical exactitude. Sometimes the phoenix has a crest, sometimes not; sometimes it has a long tail, sometimes a short. Who cares – it was what it stood for that mattered. The man who carved these crest rails had never seen a phoenix, but he had seen peacocks. So this bird looks like a peacock but means like a phoenix.