A fence, panel, screen, or wall, made of withes interlaced with stakes.
A very common device in
Europe; not so usual here See hurdle.
Diodorus Siculus describes the houses of the Britons as being made of stakes wattled like hurdles, and thatched with reeds or straw.
Strabo says the fashion was round, with a conical roof;
Caesar, that they resembled the houses of the Gauls, and were only lighted by the door.
The Antonine Column, engraved in “Montfaucon's supplement,” III.
v. 2, c. 8, and “British Monachism,” page 274, shows them cylindrical, with domeshaped or truncated conical roofs, with a central hole at the apex for a chimney.
Round houses of stone, with thatched roofs bound with straw ropes, are yet used in the
Scilly Isles, the outlying lands of the
Cornwall peninsula, the rough corner where the cymric autochthenes were allowed to exist when the storm of
Saxon massacre swept over the land.
See
Woodley's “Scilly,” page 165.
The wattled huts of the Britons were grouped in forests or on the banks of rivers, clustered around the residence of the chief, and protected by a ditch and rampart of earth.
See
Strutt, “Chronicles of
England,” I. 254; Fosbroke's “Encyclopedia of Antiquities,” II., plate opposite pape 543.
For Roman camps, see
lb., opposite page 556.
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Waved wheel. |
“The walls of the church [First Abbey Church of Glastenbury.
England], according to
Malmesbury, were made of twigs, winded and twisted together, after the antient custome, that
King's palaces were used to be built.
So the
King of
Wales, by name Heolus Wha, in the year of our Lord 940, built a house of white twigs, to retire into when he came a hunting into
South Wales; therefore it was called
Ty Gwyn, that is, the
White house. For to the end that it might be distinguished from vulgar buildings, he caused the twigs (according to his princely quality) to be barkt; nay castles themselves, in those daies, were framed of the same materials and weaved together; for thus writes Giraldus Cambrensis, of
Pembroke castle, (saith he) ‘
Arnulphus de Montgomery in the daies of King Henry the first built that small castle of twigs and slight turf.’
” — Sammes.
Wattled chimneys still occur in
Wales; the stick chimneys, so common in the early log-cabins of our country, are very similar.
The doors of the
British houses were of wattled twigs and clay.
Some wattled houses yet remain in
Montgomeryshire, Wales; reed houses are yet found in
Ireland.
Dartmoor, England, has numerous remains of circular stone foundations of these ancient houses of turf or wattles:—
Junctoe cortice virgae. — Ovid.
These circles have doorways facing the south, and have diameters from 12 to 30 feet. See Fosbroke's “Encyclopedia,”
ut supra, Vol.
I. pages 99-101.
