Bareback to Brighton

Fred Saunders’s​ wheelwright shop in the village of Sherborne, Gloucestershire, stood not far from the forge and next to the paint shop, where his finished waggons were painted in colours declaring their high Cotswold origins. Fred kept the oak spokes of his wheels narrow and light because the waggons were destined for use in the elevated fields, unlike those made in the Severn Valley, which needed to be fat to resist the riverside mud. Fred turned the hubs out of great lumps of elm, one of the few woods tough enough to withstand the stress of use in the fields. A circle of interconnected ash felloes capped the spokes, forming the circumference of the wheel. The final component was the tyre, made of a loop of iron, half an inch thick. It was placed in the fire until sufficiently expanded, then lifted out with great tongs called tyre-dogs and dropped over the outside of the wheel. Wheel and tyre would then be doused with cold water so that the metal shrank back to its original size, squeezed tightly about the wheel, never to be rattled free by stone or pothole. Fred made haywains, muck-carts and drays, as well as the everyday wooden items required by his neighbours – and their coffins when they died.

Fred lived from 1907 to 1984. He learned his trade as an apprentice and passed it on to his son, Graham, by the same method, continuing a tradition that had existed before the industrial revolution, before mass-production, when objects were closely aligned with the people and processes by which they were made. He possessed the kind of embodied knowledge common to crafters down the centuries, described by Pamela H. Smith in From Lived Experience to the Written Word as acquired through ‘observation and repetitive bodily experience’. Smith’s study encompasses the period from 1400 to 1800, when practitioners increasingly sought to put their trades into words, composing and publishing craft manuals, guides, treatises, recipe books, tip sheets and diagrams. They were articulating something implicit in their objects: as Smith puts it, ‘the residue of an enormous number of exchanges among individuals, as well as their belief systems, organised practices, networks and accumulated knowledge’. These texts, she argues, enrich our understanding of the theoretical world of European makers, the development of technical writing and, by extension, the birth of modern science.

In his 1650 treatise on tailoring, Giovanne Pennacchini claimed that the best geometer in town was the tailor. In fact, the tailor was more than a geometer: he was both a natural and a moral philosopher, able to measure, design and understand colours in the context of the humours, the elements, metals, virtues and more. In his 1703 edition of Mechanick Exercises (first published in 1683), Joseph Moxon asks: ‘What purpose would a subject like Geometry serve without its application? And where would Astronomy be without the handmade instruments by which it is practised?’ He urges the reader to acknowledge the debt that philosophical disciplines owe to the trades and to consider how much they might benefit if all trade secrets were laid bare. At the same time, he acknowledges, ‘the Trades themselves might, by a philosopher, be improv’d.’ Moxon was, among other things, hydrographer to Charles II, a maker of globes and mathematical instruments, and a printer. He became the first tradesman to be elected a member of the Royal Society – part of a wider shake-up of hierarchies. By the 15th and 16th centuries, the cities and courts of Europe were home to scholars who dabbled in the arts, and masons and carpenters who identified themselves as architects and engineers, asserting the status of their work.

The traditional distinction between disciplines of the mind and disciplines of the body had been codified in the medieval education system. Moxon’s geometry and astronomy were counted among the seven liberal arts. They belonged to the quadrivium, the more advanced arts that followed the trivium. But the separation of spheres wasn’t without its detractors. As Anya Burgon has suggested, Alan of Lille, a scholar at Chartres in the 12th century, employed a vivid allegory in his Anticlaudianus to endorse an older, apprenticeship-style education system, as opposed to the professionalisation of disciplines he witnessed at the new universities. Alan imagines the liberal arts personified as mechanics, undertaking the very practical process of building a chariot for Wisdom to prepare her for immortality. First come the sisters of the trivium: Grammar, who makes the wooden axle beam; Logic, who makes the iron axle; and Rhetoric, who enhances the natural materials of the axle by adorning it with precious gems, causing it to flash and glitter as it spins. They work with great exertion, bending the raw materials to their will. Then, the sisters of the quadrivium (Arithmetic and Music, alongside Geometry and Astronomy) make the wheels. For these more advanced personifications, the process is less arduous. When their work is complete, Wisdom ascends and five horses representing sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch draw the chariot to the very edge of the firmament. But here they can go no further. To proceed, Wisdom is compelled to cast her chariot aside and continue to heaven alone.

The manuals Smith considers are heirs to medieval thought; they rehearsed old debates around craft as well as being full of classical lore, alchemy and Christian superstitions. Lizards, cast from life for the grottos of the elite in 16th-century France, bore connotations of regeneration: not only were they thought to be able to regrow their limbs, they were believed to be born spontaneously of putrefying matter. Metal, when worked, was held to emit mercurial vapours, which the artist had to guard against with materials that were its humoral opposite: cold and dry versus hot and wet. A list of recipes for pigment-makers and dyers in the early 15th-century Strasbourg Manuscript includes instructions for carving rock crystal:

Take a two or three-year-old goat and bind its feet together and cut a hole between its breast and stomach, in the place where the heart is, and put the crystal in there, so that it lies in its blood until hot. At once take it out and engrave whatever you want on it, while this heat lasts. When it begins to cool and become hard, put it back in the goat’s blood, take it out again when it is hot, and engrave it. Keep on until you finish the carving.

The belief that the blood of a goat could soften or even dissolve crystal or diamond appears in popular medieval compendia of the natural world and derives from Pliny’s Natural History. The 15th-century mariner Michael of Rhodes, who wrote a treatise on shipbuilding as part of an ambitious composition documenting navigation, mathematics and astronomy, urges his reader not to begin anything on ‘the first Monday of April, because on this day Cain killed his brother, Abel, and this was the first blood shed in the world’.

The juxtaposition of trade taxonomies and the supernatural had its roots in earlier works. The Luttrell Psalter, made in England around 1330, contains a sequence of marginal illustrations showing agricultural activities through the year. These images surround and even gloss the words of Psalm 96, among them: ‘Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them.’ They draw on the Labours of the Months, a pictorial cycle found in manuscripts, sculpture and wall paintings from across medieval Europe, that connects the work of humans in the fields with the passing of the seasons and the movement of the stars. Placing human invention and activity in relation to nature, they lead the viewer towards the divine.

The psalter also offers readers an image of a quintessential medieval feast. The manuscript’s patrons, Geoffrey Luttrell, his wife Agnes Sutton and his daughter-in-law Beatrice Scrope, sit with their fellow diners, their hands placed on a long tabletop that rests on decorative, braced trestles (this suggests the top of the table might be lifted off, presumably to make room for dancing). On the facing page is an image of the kitchen, where servants are preparing food and drink, transferring it to dishes and mazers and carrying it across the page gutter to the nobility. Because the kitchen tables are lowly fixtures, and likely to rest on an uneven floor, they are three-legged and simply built: you can see where the top of one leg, the kind rounded off in a lathe or on a shave-horse, pokes through the tabletop.

A similar level of technical observation can be found in the psalter’s depiction of a royal carriage and, a few pages earlier, a laden haywain being pulled along by peasants and horses. Whereas the wheels of the carriage are finely finished and painted, the wheels of the haywain are reinforced with deep metal treads, with a hefty wooden peg pushed through the axle where it emerges from the hub. Here, the Luttrell artists illustrate the divinely ordained social hierarchies of the medieval world – and by extension the whole cosmological order – by means of careful technological description, albeit in images rather than text. As Paul Binski put it in Gothic Sculpture, to the medieval mind both ‘natural and crafted things’ were ‘fashioned from primary matter, the matter of the cosmos’. God is the master crafter, who, in the frontispiece of 13th-century Bibles moralisées, such as those held in Paris and Westminster, is shown with one hand cradling the world like a bowling ball and the other describing its circumference with a great pair of compasses.

Smith’s study begins later, when early printed books had largely replaced manuscripts. Broadcasting craft lore in print could offer the tradesman-author many opportunities, including elite patronage and elevation of social status, but it was, of course, not a medium available to the majority of tradespeople. The period covered by From Lived Experience to the Written Word, as well as its broad geographical scope, makes it hard to generalise about the motivations and relative status of the authors it discusses. This is compounded by the variety of forms their texts take, not to mention their frequent impenetrability to modern readers. Bringing them into modern laboratories can help to find some answers.

Smith gives examples of work now being undertaken to reconstruct craft practice using historical books of art, recipes, tip sheets and treatises. She herself, partaking in a revival of interest in craft practice across the humanities, has collaborated with practitioners and museum scholars to explore the life casting techniques described in a late 16th-century collection of texts about the making of art objects. Conducting practical studies from the treatise and accompanying sketches transformed her understanding of the manuscript. Smith came to see it as the written manifestation of the repetitious, tireless, real life experiments of the maker. Her findings and those of the other projects she cites shed light on ‘the dynamics of collaborative practice’, artistic intention – a concept not usually applied to crafters in this period – and on the limitations of the written word in articulating practical knowledge. Her title may seem at first to prioritise language, but in the end her book demonstrates its inadequacy. She admits that we must accept ‘approximating concepts and terms’: ‘skill’, ‘Kunst’, ‘cunning’, ‘working knowledge’ and ‘artisanal epistemology’.

The field of medieval studies offers a few useful terms. One is ‘orthopraxis’ (practice according to a rule or tradition, in the sense of ‘making straight’), thought to have been coined by Raimon Pannikar and used by Paul Gehl and Mary Carruthers in their studies of monasticism. In her book The Craft of Thought (1998), Carruthers writes: ‘Any craft develops an orthopraxis, a craft “knowledge” which is learned, and indeed can only be learned, by the painstaking practical imitation and complete familiarisation of exemplary masters’ techniques and experience. Most of this knowledge cannot be set down in words; it must be learned by practising, over and over again.’ Binski enlists the classics: ‘When it comes to making something, the matter to hand is always shaped by hard knowledge (‘episteme’, Latin ‘scientia’), talent (‘empeiria’) and method (‘techne’ or ‘ars’).’ The most subtle of these, scientia, he defines as knowledge of the ‘whys’ of method, a more complex form of comprehension than the ‘hows’.

Fred Saunders’s son Graham learned the wheelwright’s trade at a time when tractors and metal trailers were becoming affordable to British farmers. In his lifetime, the forge, wheelwright’s shop and paint shop all closed down. By the time he was middle-aged, Sherborne had become the property of the National Trust. In later life, Graham used his knowledge to work on the waggon collections held by stately homes and museums, like the one at the Old Prison in Northleach. I met him at his stand at Frampton-on-Severn Country Fair a decade ago. Not long afterwards, he showed me how to make the undercarriage (never a chassis) of a traditional waggon, using draw-knives and axes, chisels, saws and froes to make the frame, then scraping the surface to a sheen with shards of broken glass. It was 18-foot-long and fashioned from green oak and poplar, complete with a decoratively chamfered turntable fixed to the front axle. Graham told me that it was smooth enough ‘to ride bareback to Brighton’ – or so his father would have said.