Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 98

Among the voluminous mass of misinformation I absorbed as a small boy at Great Oakley (C of E Controlled) village school, the allegedly miserable and shiftless life of the Anglo-Saxon peasant featured prominently. Our teacher, the otherwise admirable Miss Bowring, a maiden lady of Scots extraction, took a rather jaundiced view of Hengist and Horsa’s henchmen whom she portrayed as bloodthirsty villains bent on rape and pillage and destructive of all that lay in their path. They lived, she explained, in dank and fetid houses of wattle and daub, shivering by their open fires and muttering murderously into their mugs of mead. That such people should live in huts of wattle and daub should have come as no surprise; this was a barbarous building material employed by a barbarous people!

For the inimitable Ms Sunshine, though, wattle and daub is the very reverse. As she emphasizes in this valuable addition to the wholly excellent Shire series, wattle and daub is strong, flexible, and of high insulating value, besides being of foremost importance in the conservation of timber-framed buildings. In forty lavishly-illustrated pages she writes of the role of green coppiced hazel in wattle making, of mortise and tenon work in traditional building, of the distinction between wattle and daub and lath and plaster and concludes with a consideration of the decline of wood and wattle building as brick became more affordable and timber increasingly scarce in the eighteenth century. During the course of the journey Ms Sunshine discourses on the techniques of building timber-framed structures and for good measure offers an explanation of the origins of ‘knocking a square peg into a round hole’.

As she laments the destruction of so many traditional buildings in the mid-twentieth century and the spoiling of others as decaying wattle and daub was replaced with inflexible cement and gypsum, she suggests that the older technology might with benefit be used in modern timber-framed structures. And to prove it she includes a detailed section on the construction of wattle and the manufacture of daub from clay, straw and pebbles. This is accompanied by rather fetching pictures of Ms Sunshine as she puddles daub in her Wellingtons and dons her rubber gloves to apply the stuff to hazel wattles. Readers of the Review will be pleased to learn that while ‘treading can be exhausting work’, the craft of wattle and daub walling can offer a satisfying and rewarding experience. It is, moreover, an exercise in applied sustainability and as such deserves the attention of us all.