11 December 2021
On visiting timber-framed public houses the story that the building’s timbers were re-used from a ship will frequently crop up. Such claims are made at the White Horse, Sibton (Suffolk) and the Green Man, Hurst (Berkshire). At the Ship Inn, Southfleet (Kent) the building is reputed to be constructed from a vessel that ran aground on the nearby River Fleet. A similar tale is told of the Cooperage, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where a mediaeval Dutch merchant ship was apparently reclaimed to build the structure.
A mind-boggling number of pubs claim to be built from timbers reclaimed from ships involved in the attempted invasion of England, in 1588, by the Spanish Armada. These include buildings in coastal counties such as the Abergavenny Arms, Rodmell (East Sussex) and the Minerva Inn, Plymouth (Devon). However, an overwhelming number which make the claim are in landlocked counties such as the Olde Gate Inne, Brassington (Derbyshire), the Dun Cow, Shrewsbury (Shropshire) and the Old White Bear Inn, Norwood Green (West Yorkshire).
Ships involved in the battle of Cape Trafalgar (1805) are also commonly cited as the origin for timbers in pubs – the Old Ship Inn, Worksop (Nottinghamshire), Pen and Parchment, Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire) and Ye Olde Kings Head Chester (Cheshire). The claim is even made that the White Horse, Shere (Surrey) was specifically built from timbers taken from Horatio Nelson’s own flagship – HMS Victory.
It is not just pubs either – Dial House, Halton (West Yorkshire), St John’s Hospital, Lichfield (Staffordshire), and Graiseley Old Hall (West Midlands) are all rumoured to be built from ship timbers. There is even a house called Ships Timbers at Braughing (Hertfordshire).
Is there ever any truth to the tales of timbers taken from sunken vessels which were then repurposed in pubs and houses? Over the course of the last 15 months, I’ve written many blogs which investigate commonly held beliefs about mediaeval buildings. In them I tend to test the theory to destruction and then offer alternative perspectives based on history and archaeology. In this article, I will freely admit that there genuinely are some buildings which really do contain genuine ship timbers.
However, it should be acknowledged from the outset just how rare these examples truly are…
Maritime Misconceptions
None of the cited examples above can be verified. They are just stories. Those tales were perhaps concocted to lure in customers hungry for romantic, rose-tinted and misty-eyed nostalgia. Most people are not expert in understanding historic buildings and, as the stories are on the surface quite harmless, they are often believed and stick in the memory.
When communicating the basis for believing that timbers from ships have been reused in buildings, certain features will often be pointed out. Empty mortises (sockets which once housed the pegged tenon joints of other timbers) are frequently cited as evidence that the timber was reclaimed from a ship. Elsewhere, the curved braces or the great cruck blades, found in many timber-framed structures in western England, are identified as originating from the hulls of ships. Finally, it is assumed that, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Britain had been largely denuded of good quality building timber as a result of house construction, ship building and charcoal burning. The proposed solution to this lack of timber was the need to reclaim building materials second-hand from decommissioned ships.
Unfortunately, these three statements are based on false premises.
In reality, the presence of empty mortises is an indicator of the reuse or remodelling of a structure, but it is not necessarily the case that a ship has to be the source. Recycled or remodelled timbers are a common feature in historic buildings. For example, I have recorded examples at Knole (Kent), the Queen’s House at the Tower of London and Hungerford Park (Berkshire) (Sorapure & Wright 2013; Wright & Karim 2015; Wright 2012).
The re-use of timber is frequently referred to in historic building accounts. A defended agricultural enclosure at Clipstone Peel in Sherwood Forest was decommissioned by Edward III in 1328 and a number of buildings were moved wholesale to his palace three miles away (Crook 1976, 41). In 1434-35, wages were paid to carpenters and labourers to dismantle buildings at Revesby Abbey and carters were hired to transport the timber for re-use at Tattershall Castle (Lincolnshire) (Simpson 1960, 50). The Theatre, an open-air playhouse in Shoreditch, was disassembled during the winter of 1598-99 and elements of it were then used to construct The Globe on Bankside (Shapiro 2005, 7, 123-25). All of these projects would have left empty mortises visible as a tangible sign of remodelling. It is these features which we can see so frequently in surviving timber-framed buildings – be they a pub, playhouse or palace. However, identifying them as being indicative of origin in a ship is a misreading of the evidence.
The archaeologist, Dr Damian Goodburn has made a detailed study of historic carpentry and boat-building. He has pointed out that the timbers of mediaeval ships were not elements that could easily be incorporated into rectilinear terrestrial buildings and there has been a tendency to misidentify curved timbers, such as braces and cruck blades, as deriving from nautical vessels. He goes on to conclude that: ‘There is a common assumption that the re-use of ‘old ships timbers’ in buildings was a common occurrence in medieval England. However, no well-substantiated archaeological example of such a practice in a standing medieval structure is known.’ (Goodburn 2000, 2, 89).
The landscape historian, Oliver Rackham, has queried the belief that British woodlands were worked out by the early modern period. He notes that the documented outrages at programmes of tree-felling elicited more memorable comment than the steady schemes of replanting which led to cyclical regrowth after clear-felling. Rackham went on to explain that house building never really suffered from a lack of resources and although the navy were sometimes short of timber, this was usually a result of the mismanagement of the royal forests coupled to inefficiency and embezzlement in the running of its dockyards. By all accounts, private shipyards continued in labour, throughout the early modern period, without any reported timber shortages (Rackham 1986, 24, 90-91).
Practicalities
The claim that English buildings could be constructed using timbers from vessels sunk during naval battles – such as the Spanish Armada – must be treated with some caution. The vast majority of the Spanish ships lost in 1588 were wrecked on the shores of Scotland and Ireland – entirely separate political states that were often engaged in open hostilities with England. How the supposed timbers were trafficked has yet to be explained, but just acquiring the wreck-wood in the first place would have been mightily difficult. The loss of Henry VIII’s flagship, Mary Rose, in July 1545 immediately led to a failed attempt at salvaging the ship which lay only 12 metres below the surface of the Solent and just a mile offshore in home waters (Rule 1983, 39-47). Attempting a similar project off the hostile Atlantic seaboard seems a suggestion too far and we must conclude that most of the stories which allege the use of ship timbers in landlocked regions may not be based on hard evidence.
Finally, if the proposed timbers were reclaimed from decommissioned vessels, that were dismantled in ship-breaking yards, we must consider the practicalities of moving what were, frankly, enormous timbers inland. This would have been very daunting in a pre-modern age when the roads were difficult to traverse even as a pedestrian or equestrian. Journeying on horseback in the 1690s, the journals of voracious traveller Celia Fiennes are full of descriptions of the terrible state of England’s roads. Her greatest criticism was levelled at Herefordshire and Worcestershire: ‘the roads which are all lanes full of stones and up hills and down soe steep that with the raines the waters stood or else ran down the hills, which made it exceeding bad for travelling’ (Morris 1984, 189). A carter in charge of a heavy load of lengthy ship timbers would have faced extreme practical difficulties which were exacerbated by distance, bulky cargo and the cost of labour. Beyond the maritime hinterland it is extremely unlikely that ship timber would be available for re-use.
Criteria for Identification
Once again, it is important to emphasise just how vanishingly rare the identification of ship timbers in historic buildings really is. In a career as a buildings archaeologist, that has so far stretched over two decades, I have only ever laid my eyes on one example. That was a very sizable cylindrical timber – potentially a ship’s mast – that was covered in tar and rope marks and had been inserted to replace a tie beam at Waxham Great Barn (Norfolk) (Moir 2003, 7). The building dates to the 1580s and all of its other tie beams are square in section, so this one timber really stands out.
It is possible that the Waxham timber was reclaimed following the extratropical cyclone which laid waste to much of lowland England between 26-29 November 1703. When the storm hit, over 500 vessels were known to have been off the East Anglian coast and around half of them were lost (Brayne 2002, 100-03, 105, 108, 201). This would potentially have led to a large quantity of ship timber eventually washing up on the shoreline. Twenty-four years later Daniel Defoe noted that on the stretch of coastline between Winterton and Cromer ‘the farmers, and country people had scarce a barn, or a shed, or a stable; nay not the pales of their yards, and gardens not a hogstye, not a necessary-house, but what was built of old planks, beams, wales and timbers &c. the wrecks of ships, and ruins of mariners and merchants’ fortunes’ (Cole 1927, 71). The Waxham ship timber claim does seem to be based on reality.
The identification of the timber at Waxham relies on the combination of archaeological and contextual documentary evidence. This is key, as without either factor it is not possible to verify the many claims for the use of ship timbers. Archaeologically, ship timbers can be identified through the tendency of shipwrights toward very large dimensions coupled with more numerous and sizable pegs than those favoured by terrestrial carpenters (Atkinson 2007, 11). For example, archaeological survey and archival research has demonstrated that the Wheelwright’s Shop at Chatham Dockyard (Kent), originally built c 1786 and substantially remodelled in 1836, included around a quarter of the frame of HMS Namur.
The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a period when there was genuine deforestation in England. It was partly driven by the increased demand for merchant shipping but was largely a result of the vast consumption of oak bark in the newly industrialised tanning industry (Rackham 1986, 91-92). This was mostly compensated for by a wholesale increase in imported timber from the Baltic regions (Brunskill 1985, 28), but there also does seem to have been a very small uptick in ship timbers incorporated into buildings.
When considering archival evidence from this period in Norfolk, Robin Lucas identified salvaged timbers put to use in humble structures such as dovecotes, stables, barns, granaries and estate fencing. In this point he backs up Defoe’s eyewitness observations noted above. Specific examples include: ‘Shipwreck Posts and Knee Braces for building the New Cart-house’ at Snettisham (Norfolk) in 1767 or the ‘Wreck Plank’ which was employed in the construction of the Aylsham Navigation (Norfolk) in 1792 (Lucas 1994, 1-2). More well-known is the Chesapeake Mill, Wickham (Hampshire) – a four-storey flour mill built in 1820 from timbers obtained at the Royal Dockyard Portsmouth after the United States frigate Chesapeake (captured during the War of 1812) was broken up and sold (Atkinson 2007, 17).
Although it is unlikely that the majority of the public houses mentioned previously have a claim to include timbers from naval battles, Burrow Lodge, Plymouth (Devon) does include some elements taken from the Trafalgar veteran HMS Bellerophon. After she was decommissioned and broken up in 1832, her former surgeon, George Bellamy, acquired some of the fabric to use in the construction of his house three years later. Just occasionally a pub can be found which genuinely includes ships timbers. In 2005, the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Maritime Archaeology Society confirmed that six timbers from the Tyringham Arms at Lelant (Cornwall), removed during renovations in the 1990s, were part of a copper-bottomed ship of the mid-late eighteenth century. Ironically, the timbers are no longer in situ!
In the early twentieth century it became somewhat fashionable for architects to include ship timbers within their commissions. Liberty’s, a timber-framed Tudor-revival style department store in London, incorporated elements of HMS Hindustan and HMS Impregnable. Also, during the 1920s, the Yorkshire architects Jackson and Fox included timbers from HMS Donegal and HMS Newcastle within the Prince of Wales at Brighouse and the Royal Oak at Halifax respectively (Cant 2004, 42). Meanwhile, Agatha Christie and Noël Coward’s favoured Devon haunt, the Burgh Island Hotel, still features the entire captain’s cabin from HMS Ganges within an otherwise Art Deco structure.
Conclusions
Whilst it seems that the majority of claims for ship timbers in buildings cannot be verified, and are in most cases outright unlikely, we must make allowance for the slim number of cases when the stories are found to be true. What binds all of these truthful cases together is that they are always to be found in coastal or inter-tidal locations and the fabric has been confirmed by experienced specialists. Overwhelmingly, the buildings date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – a period when British building timber was genuinely becoming scarce.
When analysing structures from the mediaeval and early modern periods, the verified examples of ship timbers are vanishingly small. Instead, the stories seem to develop out of a mistaken assumption that timber was hard to come by, coupled with a misreading of the physical fabric so that the perfectly regular remodelling and re-use of terrestrial timbers are assumed to relate to ship-breaking.
The propensity for historic pubs to be associated with such tales probably speaks to the heart of the British social identity that prizes a good yarn over a pint. However, there may also be an element of English nationalism at play here. We have already noted, in a previous blog, how the presence of supposed arrow-sharpening stones in parish churches are an attempt to link major international battles to the local environment. It could be that the repeated story of ship timbers from vessels involved in battles with the Spanish Armada or at Trafalgar may also be related to this trend in folklore.
References
Atkinson, D., 2007, Shipbuilding and Timber Management in the Royal Dockyards 1750-1850: An Archaeological Investigation of Timber Marks. University of St Andrews. Unpublished doctoral thesis.
Brunskill, R. W., 1985 (2007 edition), Timber Building in Britain. Yales University Press. New Haven and London.
Cant, D., 2004, Yorkshire Buildings Vol. 32. Yorkshire Vernacular Buildings Study Group.
Cole, G. D. H. (ed.), 1927, A Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe. Peter Davies. London.
Crook, D., 1976, ‘Clipstone Park and Peel’ in Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire Vol. 80. Nottingham.
Goodburn, D., 2000, An Archaeology of Early English Boatbuilding Practice c 900-1600 A.D. University College London. Unpublished doctoral thesis.
Lucas, R., 1994, ‘Ships‘ Timbers: Some Historical Evidence from Norfolk for Their Use’ in Vernacular Architecture Vol. 25.
Moir, A, 2003, Tree-ring Analysis of Timbers from Waxham Great Barn, Sea Palling, Norfolk. Unpublished dendrochronology report. Tree-ring Services.
Morris, C., 1984, The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes c.1682-c1712. Macdonald. London and Sydney.
Rackham. O., 1986 (1997 edition), The History of the Countryside. Phoenix Giant. London.
Shapiro, J., 2005, 1599 – A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Faber and Faber. London.
Simpson, W. D., 1960, The Building Accounts of Tattershall Castle: 1434-1472. The Lincoln Record Society Vol. 55. Lincoln.
Sorapure, D. & Wright, J., 2013, Knole – East Range façade and roofs: An interpretive historic buildings survey. Museum of London Archaeology. Unpublished archaeological report.
Wright, J. & Karim, A., 2016, Queen’s House and Bell Tower – a Level 2 and 3 standing building survey. MOLA. Unpublished archaeological report.
Wright, J., 2012, Hungerford Park Well House – Standing building survey report. Museum of London Archaeology Unpublished archaeological report.
About the author
James Wright (Triskele Heritage) is an award-winning buildings archaeologist who frequently writes and lectures on the subject of mediaeval building myths. He has two decades professional experience of ferreting around in people’s cellars, hunting through their attics and digging up their gardens. He hopes to find meaningful truths about how ordinary and extraordinary folk lived their lives in the mediaeval period.
He welcomes contact through Twitter or email.
The Mediaeval Mythbusting Blog blog is the basis of a forthcoming book – Historic Building Mythbusting – Uncovering Folklore, History and Archaeology which will be released via The History Press on 6 June 2024. More information can be found here:
