THE WAGON ROOFS AT ST JAMES’S PRIORY, BRISTOL

Abstract

In most regions of England in the medieval period there was a strong overlap between the carpentry traditions employed in churches and domestic buildings. While some forms of assembly may be the exclusive preserve of either the ecclesiastical or secular spheres, certain technologies are common to both. In the south-west of England, extending into the southern Marches and South Wales, however, the two are entirely different — wagon or cradle roofs are found only in churches, never in vernacular domestic structures, which normally adopt a variant of cruck construction. Little systematic analysis has been done on church roofs, mainly because they are difficult to access. The chronological range of wagon roofs in the South-West has normally been placed in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The firm dating of the two wagon roofs of St James’s Priory, Bristol, has pushed the conventional range back to the mid-fourteenth century, and other examples in the region may be considerably earlier. This paper uses the Bristol roofs to speculate about the origins of the wagon roof type and the reasons why it remained an exclusively ecclesiastical form.