Early References To Crucks: Some New Evidence

The 28 documented royal grants of timber including crucks (furcae, postes torti) between 1220 and 1260 illuminate a technological stage just before the oldest surviving examples. True crucks and base-crucks are not distinguished; the corpus may well include both. Cruck-blades were usually made from individual (presumably small) trees, and were apparently elbow-bent rather than curved. Some royal forests may have produced crucks systematically; a ‘wood of forks’ near Bristol, recorded from 1200, was possibly so named for that reason. In royal gifts, crucks were often accompanied by purlins and wall-plates, but apparently not by ridge-pieces or walling material. The gifts concentrated in the Midlands and south-west, but several lay well to the east of the ‘cruck frontier’. These imply that at this date the cruck tradition gradually faded out eastwards, and that the eventual, dramatically hard, frontier was a product of later centuries. One further document, an account for building a cruck bakehouse at Harlech Castle in 1305–6, describes in unique detail the kind of structure implied by the thirteenth-century grants: a robust frame of a cruck-truss, wall-plates and purlins, but with walls made of lightweight ‘clamp-studs’. These ephemeral walls help to explain why so few cruck buildings survive from before the hybridisation of crucks with box-framing during the fourteenth century, though social attitudes may also have played a part.