This lavishly illustrated volume represents the culmination of an ambitious Leverhulme-funded project initiated in 1988 as ‘The Cruck Dating Project’, the results of which have long been eagerly awaited by students of vernacular architecture. This work is of relevance to an audience far wider than specialists of historical dwellings in the project area: the four central midland counties of Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. There is much that is pertinent not only to architectural students who concentrate on other regions but also to other disciplines, for instance, social history and the interpretation of below-ground remains. Most of the 117 buildings included within the study are cruck-framed; this, unlike box-framed construction, has until now been difficult to date with any precision using typological criteria. The dating by tree-ring analysis of eighty of the buildings selected for study provides, for the first time, the opportunity to overcome, at least partially, this obstacle. Furthermore, it has permitted surviving houses to be linked with confidence to medieval documentary sources relating to these properties, allowing the social status of those who built and lived in them to be assessed. The dated buildings confirm that cruck construction was primarily confined to the medieval period and had all but died out in favour of box-framed techniques by 1600. Nonetheless, the examples used in the study cover a wide period, extending from 1205 through to the 1550s, though only a handful date from before the Black Death and the vast majority belong to the fifteenth century. Care has been taken to ensure that the sample is sufficiently large to be representative of the surviving cruck houses within the study area. They represent just under a quarter of the known survival from the four counties.

The volume is structured into two parts: a 156-page analysis of the sample buildings, followed by more detailed accounts of selected buildings and their documentary contexts. Also included is a Cd-Rom containing individual reports on all the houses sampled, together with further reports which concentrate on documentary analysis. These detailed sections provide a supplement to the analysis, allowing the main body of the text to be kept succinct. Excluding introduction and conclusions, the analysis is logically divided into five well-crafted thematic chapters covering the sampling and dating methods adopted, household planning and organisation, structural design details, carpentry techniques and documentary evidence. The latter chapter not only presents case studies of key villages which retain concentrations of cruck houses, but also includes an invaluable up-to-date overview by Chris Dyer into the documents and historical significance of medieval peasant buildings during the period 1250 to 1550.

There is insufficient space here to do justice to the overall importance of this volume, which undoubtedly demonstrates the way forward for regional vernacular studies. There is so much that is of significance within this one volume that all those interested in the subject will be compelled to read the analysis chapters several times. It will undoubtedly be adopted as a key reference work. For this reviewer two aspects of the study stand out above all others. The first is the revelation that in the central Midlands a number of halls were visually divided into two parts by low beams crossing the open truss and that at least one of these halls incorporated two smoke louvres, one serving each part of the room. The interpretation offered for these houses is that the two halves may have been segregated when necessary by a curtain or movable screen and that the part of the hall towards the centre of the house served as the general living area, whilst the end part was utilised for cooking and general storage. Worryingly, divisions of this type would leave no below-ground archaeological evidence. This has important implications for the interpretation of medieval houses known only through excavation. The second point of importance is that this large sample of dated houses, linked to documentary backgrounds, seems to confirm what an increasing number of researchers have of late been suspecting: surviving vernacular houses represent the homes of a far wider spectrum of peasant society than was once thought.