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. 

Because Director does not work on all 64 bit machines at present there is a WireFusion Java based version which will not require the director plugin here, although you do need to have Java installed (most computers already have it). A version with different fly-through navigation is available without textures here and with textures here. These sometimes seem to stall when loading in the first model, but it does work after about a minute.

With the wirefusion models I've noticed closing down the browser and reopening it seems to solve most problems. You may also need a pretty good computer as these models can be processor intensive.