What is a medieval house made of?

Answer 1

There were different sorts of houses. Of course there were fine manor houses, and simpler houses for poor people, but there were also cottages for families, and larger buildings with larger numbers of people in them, including longhouses, which were commonly used in northern Germanic areas. Small cottages might have included only a single room. A longhouse could have housed a farmer's family, a large group of people who worked on the farm and in the house, storage for food, storage for animal fodder, and space for the animals themselves. The interior of such a house could be partitioned in a variety of ways.

Most medieval houses had a timber frame. Panels that did not carry loads were filled with wattle and daub. Wattle was made by weaving twigs in and out of uprights. Hazel twigs were the most popular with Medieval builders. After the wattle had been made it was daubed with a mixture of clay, straw, cow dung and mutton fat. When it had dried, a mixture of lime plaster and cow hair was used to cover the surface and to seal the cracks. An alternate way to fill in the walls was with rubble, chinked with daub, or with brick.

Poor people sometimes had houses made of unshaped field stones pile up and chinked with daub. The shaping of stone was difficult and expensive. Shaped stones were therefore used sparingly, if at all. Squared stones were sometimes placed at the corners of buildings and around windows and door openings. Bricks were also very costly and in the Middle Ages they were only used to build houses for the very rich.

In cold parts of Europe, log cabins were used. They were very like many log cabins are today.

In the early Middle Ages most roofs were thatched. Fires were a constant problem and in 1221 a law was passed prohibiting the use of thatch in London. This new law stated that the roofs of new buildings had to be covered with wooden shingles, stone slabs or clay tiles. Shingles were cut by hand from local oak trees, or, where it was readily available, made from slate. Craftsmen travelled throughout Sussex making tiles from local clay. Shingles and tiles were fixed to oak or elm timbers by wooden pegs and were overlapped to prevent water getting into the buildings.

Houses of poor country people were one story and had dirt floors, or possibly floors covered with flat stone, if it was easily available. Poor town folk often lived in buildings that had more than one floor. Wealthy people had houses of more than one floor, and the floors would be wood, stone, or tile.

Chimneys were invented in the 11th or 12th century, and were only for wealthy people for a long time after that. This meant that most medieval people never saw a modern fireplace with a chimney. If the floor was dirt, a fire could be built on it, or a stone hearth could be built. Otherwise, a brazier had to be used, and these were expensive. The smoke went to the roof, and out through a hole, either in the roof, or right under the peaks of the roof in the walls. Sometimes the smoke was guided by what is called a hanging chimney or smoke canopy, a very light structure hung on the wall or roof.

I don't know, but I would guess that poor townsfolk might not have had heat of their own. There is archaeological evidence of a lack of kitchen utensils being used by townsfolk, and so there is an assumption that they might not have had fires in their rooms at all. A typical multistory tenement building had a fire on the ground floor on a hearth in the middle of a large room that had the roof for a ceiling. Residents would get the benefit of the heat in the smoke as it rose past their rooms. It must have been pretty bad for their lungs.

There are links below to pictures of medieval houses.

Answer 2

Medieval roofing varied significantly by region.

In many colder and wetter regions wooden shingles were used.

In Ireland some houses were built with soil and turf roofs.

In wealthy areas tiles were sometimes used, especially around the medeteranian.

Finally reeds or straw thatch was common in lowland temperate areas such as southern England and France.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

Medieval homes ranged from huts to palaces, and they varied according to place and climate.

Since medieval people came from widely varying traditions, the designs of houses were less unified than they are today, so even a very humble cottage could be very different in different places. In places where there were a lot of small field stones, cottages were often built of these, and chinked with mud. In places where there was a fair amount of sticks that were small enough to weave loosely, cottages were framed with timber, and the walls were filled with woven sticks and covered with mud. Log cabins were made in the North. Nomads used mobile homes, similarly to how Plains Indians and Mongols did theirs; in the Middle East and parts of Africa, these were tents.

More expensive housing also varied. Even something as specific as an English manor house could be a building people today would consider rustic, almost a cottage, on the one hand, or elaborately built of dressed stone, very like a castle, on the other.

There is a link below to another question, which has more details and links to a number of pictures.

Answer 5

Most medieval houses started with a frame of timber. The gaps in the frame needed to be filled, and one way to fill the holes was to weave mats called wattle from sticks, put them in place, and plaster them with a mud mixture called daub. Another way to fill them was to use rubble or bricks with some sort of mortar. And another was to hand wood siding on them.

Another way to build a house was to built it of stone. The houses of poor farmers were sometimes just small stones piled up to form low walls, chinked together with daub. The stone houses of wealthier people could be dressed stone, and some manor houses built in this way were fortified and looked very much like castles. In places where there was little stone, expensive houses could be made of brick.

In colder parts of Europe, log cabins were used, and they were not very different that those we see today. Open cracks between logs were chinked with daub.

Roofs were made of whatever materials were at hand, which could be thatched reeds or straw, slate shingles, or wood shingles. Thatched roofs were sometimes covered with plaster. Slate shingles could be very thick, to the point of being more like stone slabs.

The floors of poor country people were dirt. People who lived on upper floors in town and wealthy people had wood, stone, or tile floors.

Most medieval houses did not have modern chimneys because they were invented in the 11th or 12th century and were too expensive for poor people for a long time. The houses with dirt floors had hearths built on the floor. Finer houses had braziers for fires. The smoke in a house without a chimney was vented through a hole in the roof or high on the walls. A smoke canopy could guide smoke toward the vent hole.

Windows for poor people were unglazed, and so tended to be small to avoid excessive drafts. Wealthy people often had large windows with many panes of glass in them, sometimes covering most of a wall.

There are links below to related questions. These, in turn, have links to articles and pictures.
The most general answer is that they were made with the most easily available resource of the area. For example, in the barren plains of Britain, they were made of stone which was readily available, whereas in Germany, they were made of wood because it was easily available.

Answer 6

literally in the desert they were made of animal mierda and others in mud bricks but in more colder areas they were made of bricks, wood and a lot of other substances

Answer 7

some of the larger houses are called manners and more peasant like house are called cottages with names like Lucie bradford!

Answer 8

They were made of wattle (tree branches twisted up) and daub (mud mixed with animal feces, clay, sand and straw) plastered onto the wattle so there are no cracks. The roof was made of hay.

Answer 9

Wattle and daub. Same as tudors- mostly.