Butts Cottage, Kirdford: The Conversion of Trees to Timber in The Rural Sussex Weald

In 1972, VA published an account of Oliver Rackham's survey of a late medieval timber-framed house at Stanton, West Suffolk, in which he deduced from the surviving structure the amount of timber the original had required, its cost, and how many trees of varying ages and sizes had been used to build it. Following the example of Rackham's work, a similar survey of a typical sixteenth-century timber-framed house in the Sussex Weald was carried out, which has not only revealed striking differences between the two regions in the type of trees used and the way in which they were worked, but also valuable information about the early-modern Wealden landscape and contemporary utilisation of its resources.