Church doors are among the most numerous examples of the joiner’s craft to survive from the medieval period, so it is high time they were given the attention they deserve. Step forwards Warwick Rodwell, whose more-than-60-year career as an architectural historian and archaeologist has included excavations at the Church of St Botolph in Hadstock, Essex, and serving as Consultant Archaeologist at Westminster Abbey. Both buildings possess doors long recognised as being of considerable antiquity, but only with recent developments in dendrochronology (analysis of tree rings within their timbers) has it been possible to date them precisely.
In 2005, for example, it was revealed that the door in the vestibule leading to the chapter house at Westminster Abbey was made from timber felled after AD 1032. The door itself was constructed sometime in the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey’s founder, Edward the Confessor (r. 1042-1066), and Westminster Abbey itself was consecrated in December 1065.
At St Botolph’s Church in Hadstock, samples taken from the north door in 2003 were used to establish a felling date for the oak timber between 1034 and 1042. Tighter dating was not possible in this case due to the absence of the sapwood (or outermost) rings, which provide an anchor for the most recent five years of a tree’s growth, but a broad date in the 1060s and 1070s would be consistent with the architectural evidence provided by the Romanesque mouldings of the north doorway’s stone arch.
Excavating Wiltshire