Barley Hall: An experiment in archaeological interpretation

Abstract

The York Archaeological Trust is an educational charity in British law because of the clause in its Memorandum and Articles, enjoining the Trust to 'educate the public in archaeology'. The Trust, set up to excavate and record threatened archaeological sites in and around York, has always been mindful of its ultimate educational purpose. It has established a scholarly report series, The Archaeology of York, backed by a systematic archaeological archive to provide a comprehensive archaeological resource for scholars and specialists now and in the future. For more general audiences there are more popular cartographic (Ordnance Survey 1989a; 1989b), written (Ottaway 1993; Hall 1994; 1996; Hall & Ottaway 1999) and CD-ROM and web electronic publications. Excavations, where practical, are open to visits from the public, and individuals with a particular interest can support the Trust's work through the Friends of York Archaeological Trust and follow its progress in a quarterly bulletin (Interim 1973-present). Beyond this, however, the Trust has found that heritage tourism, specifically the four million annual visitors to York, gives it an opportunity to disseminate the results of archaeology more widely. In 1984 it established the Jorvik Viking Centre to provide a three-dimensional interpretation of the results of five and a half years of excavation in the heart of Viking-age York. Since then 12.5m people have visited Jorvik. In 1990 the Trust opened the ARC\(Archaeological Resource Centre) to provide a hands-on approach to demonstrating archaeological methods. Half a million visitors, mainly children, have been there. And in 1992 it opened Barley Hall, a third experiment in the popular presentation of the results of archaeology, financed partly by the operating surpluses from the Jorvik Viking Centre. Barley Hall was conceived as a way to make a readily-comprehensible statement about archaeological knowledge derived from the many hundreds of excavations in York which have encountered deposits deriving from ordinary life in late medieval York. Rather than simulate a late medieval building into which to introduce the archaeological data the Trust decided to acquire one of the many surviving city centre buildings of this period. Such buildings inevitably have structural additions of later date and the chosen building, 2 Coffee Yard,off Stonegate in the heart of York's heritage zone, was no exception. The Trust was aware of, and indeed a firm supporter of, the conventional philosophy for conservation of old buildings, as articulated, for example, by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). At 2 Coffee Yard, however, it decided on a radically different approach and attempted to return the building as near as possible to its condition in c. 1483. This involved removal of inserted 20thand 19th-century floors and replacement walls and windows; reversal of structural amendments made in the 17th century; the recording and careful disassembling of a sixbay, three-storey mid-14th century timber-framed range for repair and re-erection; the repair in situ of a 15thand early 16th-century hall range and the excavation of the whole site below and around the surviving buildings. The building was then reinstated, based on the evidence of the surviving architectural elements, the excavated archaeo-