You can see the main timbers in a medieval shop here. This requires the free Adobe Macromedia Shockwave plugin. You can spin round the model by dragging the mouse.

Most early medieval shops had a single door, a long corridor to the living accommodation off which, near the front, would be a door to the shop area. This would have one or sometimes two unglazed windows facing the street. 

The living accommodation usually consisted of a single large hall stretching up to the roof with an open fire in the middle; there was usually a simple staircase up to the single bedroom above the shop.  Later houses often had more elaborate living accommodation, maybe consisting of three jettied floors.

Other 3d pictures, interactions and animations of timber frame buildings are available on request and some will soon be available in the public part of this site.

Many larger early medieval dwellings are called cruck timber houses. Crucks are pairs of timbers cut in one piece from the trunk of a large oak tree usually where it turns into a large branching limb. They rise from the ground or a raised stone base to meet at the apex of the roof; or, in larger buildings, were joined together with a collar beam.

If you find a cruck timber framed house and look carefully you can see that these pairs of curved wood were often cut from the same tree, which is why they are often so symmetrical.

The roof was mostly clad in straw thatch or tiles of fired clay, and sometimes a ready supply of slate made it the favourite roofing material for the richest houses. The walls were made of wattle and daub. This is made of thin flexible split wood woven round upright stays covered in a mixture of mud and dung, sometimes with straw and blood to help make it a little stronger. Later many houses replaced this with a brick filling in-between the timbers.

Quite a good model of the main timbers in a cruck timber house is available in Director or see the WireFusion models available here for example and an older one here. These do work in Vista U 64bit on IE7 and Firefox 3. By the looks of it you can only have one wirefusion model open at a time and I have had intermettent problems with them but not as many as with the Director models. For example, sometimes when they were opened on a 32 bit XP machine they would not spin.  

Director Instructions: You will need the free Director Shockwave plug-in to see it. You can spin the model round with the mouse. Pressing the shift or control keys lets you move in different ways. The freest movement can be achieved with the mouse and pressing the ctrl and shift keys together. You can also slowly zoom in and out with the up and down arrow keys and look left and right with the respective arrow keys.  To reset the interaction press the F5 key, or in some browsers the Ctrl+F5 keys together. 

Here is the frame of an open hall house showing the main timbers although I've taken out the stairs which would have been needed to reach the upper floors. Can you see where they would have gone? You can see the doorways on either side of the building and the fire in the middle of the house. This house also has one end jettied and is a bit like Bayleaf at the Weald and Downland Museum. Houses like this would have belonged to quite rich people. 

You can drag the model around or use the arrow keys to move in and out or left and right. Pressing Shift or Ctrl or both together when you drag the mouse moves the model in different ways. You can reset it in IE by pressing F5 or CTRL + F5 in some browsers.

Here is another model , just the same except this time with the stairs and a chimney. Use the up and down arrow keys to move in and out. The left and right keys rotate the model. If you drag the model and press the CTRL key or the Shift key you can spin the model over.

As soon as chimneys appeared in many open hall and cruck houses the owners were able to put in extra floors as they didn't need so much space to catch smoke and heat from the open fire. They could also keep warm cupboards next to the chimney breast. Some people preferred to keep the large hall because it was still very impressive and it saved a lot of building work. Which would you have done?

Many shops in medieval times were built roughly along the same pattern. They had a large front door and either one or two unglazed openings at the front. If instead of walking into the shop you walked down the long passage you usually came to a hall. This would often have had an open fire and a large table with some stools, maybe a cupboard or two and some other bits of simple wooden furniture.  

There would have been either a stair way or a ladder up to a bedroom. This, room would have had unglazed windows with shutters and sometimes there was an upper continuation of the hallway.

Many people were too poor to have candles and for many they were a comparative luxury. There were no paraffin wax candles which most of ours are, they were made of beeswax or tallow, a type of animal fat. Frequently people used spills instead because they were cheaper. Often if you have a fire you might not use even them. The firelight would frequently light the room sufficiently as most people did not need to be able to see well enough to read, although it was common for women to sew in poor light.

After cruck timber houses, open hall houses became popular. Like cruck houses these were not ordinary houses, but usually belonged to high status people such as lord of the manor or maybe a high ranking vassal. They were called open hall because they had a large two story high hall in the centre.  Most had a passageway with doors at either side of the house. This opened into a large hall where the owner or tenant could sit in some splendour. The open fire was right in the middle of the room. Cooking however was mostly done in a different cookhouse, separated from the main building by a gap. This was a wise precaution when there was a very good chance of fire destroying the place.

Mostly this type of house had 2 story living accommodation at each end of the main room.  The bedrooms were often quite impressive and in cold weather the beds could become places where people more or less lived. It wasn't uncommon to have business meetings in a bed! If you look carefully you can see two little beds under the large bed. These pulled out and could be pushed back under the main bed to save space. Who do you think slept in these?

This is a working file of an open hall house with a newly added chimney. The occupants haven't even had time to decide what to do with the large table. Eventually they will move the furniture around and think about doing something with all that space in the roof. It would be a good place to put another floor in, but how would you get to that room without moving the stairs?

You can see that this model needs a bit of work, It is quite large at about 5.5Mbm, the camera path needs changing as does the fire, but for a quick start and proof of concept it isn't bad. It also needs a camera looking at the living room as it changes, but for now you can compare it to the animation with a fire in the middle of the hall. Then the model needs putting into a web navigable form such with Shockwave,  Wirefusion or some such. If I get time I'll change the lighting and camera path in the next few days and re-render it. Here is another one with simple lighting and is a good example of something that needs fill lighting! Here is a slightly smaller one at 4.5mb. (This is the original one.) 

A short animation of the inside of a cruck timber house with the sun just rising is available here. This is a flash animation just under 2Mb. It should run on broadband although it may be jerky the first time round.

Worth mentioning that when people lived in this type of house spinning wheels were very uncommon as drop-spindles were easier to make and use.  The spinning wheel was introduced to Britain at the end of the medieval period although there are indications that they were in use at the end of the 13th century.

There is some historical information available at the company of the silver spindle

Another, different shop lighting animation is available here. This one needs some work especially near the fire and you don't need to look too hard to see a two sun effect. It tries to use many lights to simulate the kind of diffused light that was common in medieval buildings. Unfortunately rendering like this takes ages and I prefer the more dramatic evening scene.

There is an early version model of the shop available in DWF format here. Not many people have the software to view it but you can download the viewing plugin from Autodesk. It is presently called Autodesk Design Review. 

While there are a lot of good things about DWF files, such as far better lighting than you get with straight exports to director and greater control over the model, the result in this case is a large download, a little time spend rendering and then it moves a little slowly in the browser, also it is not as easy to navigate as it could be as the keys may not work the way you expect. Many people have come to expect the up and down arrows to move forward and backwards for example.

I was thinking of sharpening the model and adding some environment but, given the size at present, this could result in an unfeasibly large download.

DWF is a good choice for professional designers but I can’t see it catching on as a popular tool in the next year or so.

The Ancient Egyptians used rush lights, or torches, made from the pithy core of reeds soaked in molten tallow, the rush lights had no wick like a candle. The Romans added a wick to oil lamps and candles as it gave a better more controlled light and lasted longer.

Early candles were made of tallow, gathered from cattle or sheep suet. It was not until the Middle Ages when beeswax from honeycombs was introduced. These were much better than tallow candles as they were comparatively clean and did not produce a smoky flame or emit an acrid odour when burned. However, they were expensive, and only the wealthy could afford them.

Many people didn't have candles because they cost too much, but they would often have fires and in the long dark evenings their houses would have looked quite lovely lit by firelight.

Many older people will remember coal fires in their houses. (People still have them but they are much rarer now.) Before the invention of TV it was quite common just to sit with no lights on and look at the flames. Fires in medieval times were mostly built from wood, sometimes dried dung or straw, some places used peat which also burns well. Very occasionally people might have used coal, but many poor people would not have had such easy access to this as to wood. 

Here  are a few images placed into a flash movie of a fire in a cruck timber open hall house. It is rather  jumpy because there are only a few images and the very short animation is moving at less than 1 frame/second. 

The windows would usually have been shut late at night, but in the evening people would probably have waited until the very last moment there was any light until they pushed the wooden shutters across.

Here is a larger static image.

There is a rather clunky model of a cruck timber house in dwf format here. It is about 3.5Mb and takes a minute or so to load. It would be good to get time to build a better and more accurate model, but in the meantime this gives a reasonable impression although it is easy to spot some mistakes and some of the textures have suddenly become shiny and modern in appearance. I'm investigating, but at the time of writing I don't think that DWF viewer (now called Autodesk Design Review) work on 64 bit systems in ie 7 32 bit. That is, It works using Firefox but on a 64 bit Vista system using 32 bit IE 7 the model and viewer work locally (right click over the image or the link and select 'Save As'), but the model doesn't work when it is played in the browser. On a 32 bit XP system it works without any hassle.

The new Autodesk Design Review 2007 software has some good points and improves on the dwf viewer plugin, so if you can use this sort of model it is worth the rather large download (39MB) although Norton Antivirus describes the initial download as a low risk threat, presumably Autodesk are back to their old spyware tricks. (Discreet, part of Autodesk, previously used a type of spyware to track 3ds Max licences.) Casual users must remember that this plugin is a large download as it s is a professional architect and designer's tool.

Early medieval houses had a large open hall off a passage with doors on both sides of the house which is why they are called open hall houses.

We find it surprising nowadays but these houses had an open fire in the centre of the hall. They were surprisingly warm but the fires had to be very well managed. They had no chimney and the smoke drifted up towards the thatched roof where it was often dispersed by means of small holes at either end of the house right at the top. Here is a very quick impression of the main hall looking from the master's table.