The words for the work
Every craft carries its own vocabulary, and most of it never leaves the workshop. A letter-cutter talks about the V-cut and the spine; a thatcher about yealms and liggers; a Sheffield scissor-maker about putting-together. This is the archive’s plain-English reference to those words and the crafts behind them - what each one is, how the thing is actually done, and who in England still does it. Where the archive has stood and watched the work, the entry says so and links the people; where it has not yet, it says that too.
Woodland & green wood
Crafts worked from living and freshly cut wood, in and around the coppice.
Besom-making
A besom is the round broom of birch twigs bound to a handle of hazel or ash; besom-making is the craft of binding them, once a staple woodland trade and still the witch’s-broom shape everyone pictures.
Bodging
Bodging is the woodland craft of turning green (unseasoned) wood on a pole lathe to make chair legs and stretchers, traditionally worked on the spot in the beech woods of the Chilterns.
Charcoal burning
Charcoal burning is the slow, controlled smouldering of stacked wood under a cover of earth or in a steel kiln, with the air starved so the wood chars to charcoal rather than burning away to ash.
Clog-making
Clog-making is the craft of carving wooden soles - usually from alder, sycamore or beech - and fitting them with leather uppers to make clogs, the hard-wearing footwear of mills, farms and northern industry.
Coppicing
Coppicing is the woodland management of cutting trees such as hazel, sweet chestnut and ash down to a stool on a rotation, so they throw up many straight new stems - a renewable crop of poles that has shaped English woods for millennia.
Hurdle-making
Hurdle-making is the building of portable fence panels from coppiced wood: wattle hurdles woven from split hazel, and gate (or cleft) hurdles built as a light barred frame. They were the moveable fencing of the sheep-farming countryside.
Pollarding
Pollarding is coppicing done higher up the tree, cutting back to a permanent trunk above the reach of grazing animals so the regrowth is not eaten - the reason for the swollen-headed old pollards on commons and in wood pasture.
Spoon carving & treen
Spoon carving is the green-wood craft of cutting eating and cooking spoons from a single billet with axe and knife; treen is the old collective word for the small turned and carved domestic woodware - bowls, cups, spoons - that filled a household before pottery and metal.
Wood, furniture & turning
Bench and lathe trades that work seasoned timber into objects and furniture.
Chair caning & rushing
Caning and rushing are the seat-weaving crafts: caning threads split rattan cane through holes in a chair frame in hexagonal patterns, while rushing twists and weaves natural rush over the rails to make a soft seat.
Coopering
Coopering is the making of barrels and casks from shaped oak staves bound by hoops, with no glue or nails - the staves held watertight by their own spring and precise jointing. A wet cooper makes casks for liquid; a dry cooper for dry goods.
Marquetry
Marquetry is the decoration of furniture with pictures and patterns built up from thin shaped pieces of veneer - different woods, sometimes shell or metal - laid into a surface; parquetry is the same craft worked in geometric pattern.
Stick-making
Stick-making is the craft of making walking sticks, crooks and thumbsticks, either from a single grown shank or by setting a shaped horn or wood handle onto a shank - a strong tradition in the sheep country of the north and the Welsh borders.
Wheelwrighting
Wheelwrighting is the craft of building wooden wheels - the hub (nave), the spokes, and the curved rim segments (felloes) - then shrinking a hot iron tyre onto the rim so it binds the whole wheel under compression as it cools.
Windsor chair-making
A Windsor chair is a wooden chair whose legs and back sticks are socketed into a solid sculpted seat rather than built into a frame; making one combines turning, steam-bending and seat-shaping, a tradition centred on the Chilterns and High Wycombe.
Metalwork & edge tools
The forge, the grinding wheel, and the Sheffield cutlery and edge-tool trades.
Blacksmithing
Blacksmithing is the shaping of iron and steel by heating it in a forge until it is soft enough to hammer and form on an anvil - the root metalworking trade behind tools, ironwork, fittings and architectural smithing.
Chasing & repoussé
Chasing and repoussé are paired metal-decorating techniques: repoussé pushes a design out from the back of the metal in relief, and chasing refines and defines it from the front, both worked with punches against a yielding pitch backing.
Cutlery (knife-making)
Cutlery, in the Sheffield sense, is the making of knives and bladed implements by hand - forging or grinding the blade, hardening it, and fitting the handle scales - a trade once organised among the city’s independent "Little Mesters".
Die-sinking & die-engraving
Die-sinking, or die-engraving, is the cutting by hand of the hardened steel dies used to stamp coins, medals, cutlery marks and decorative metal - a reverse, intaglio engraving, so the struck piece comes out in relief.
Farriery
Farriery is the specialist craft of trimming horses’ hooves and making and fitting their shoes; a farrier shoes horses, where a blacksmith forges iron generally, and in Britain farriery is a legally regulated trade.
File-making
File-making is the cutting of the rows of teeth into a steel blank to make a file, historically chiselled by hand one tooth at a time on a bed of lead - a Sheffield trade and one of the most endangered of the edge-tool crafts.
Pewtering
Pewtering is the working of pewter, a soft tin-based alloy, by casting it in moulds or spinning and forming it into tankards, plates and domestic ware - the everyday tableware of England before china.
Saw-making
Saw-making is the craft of making hand saws - smithing, hammering and tensioning the steel plate so it runs true, then toothing and setting it - centred, like the rest of the edge trades, on Sheffield.
Scissor-making
Hand scissor-making forges, grinds, and "puts together" each blade individually - a Sheffield trade in which the putter-togetherer files and sets the two halves so they cut along their whole length.
Silversmithing
Silversmithing is the forming of objects from sheet and wire silver - raising a bowl from a flat disc, then seaming, soldering and planishing - as distinct from the jeweller’s smaller work. The trade survives at Hart’s in Chipping Campden, the last of Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft.
Whitesmithing
A whitesmith works metal cold and bright - filing, polishing and finishing, and working tin and light metals - as opposed to the blacksmith’s hot, black ironwork. The two trades shade into each other at the edges.
Clocks, instruments & precision
The precision trades - timekeeping, scientific and navigational instruments.
Globe-making
Globe-making is the building of terrestrial and celestial globes by hand: a sphere is formed and then covered with printed map segments called gores, cut to taper and pasted down so the flat map wraps the ball without distortion.
Horology (clock & watch making)
Horology is the craft and science of measuring time - making and repairing clocks and watches, from the wheelwork and escapement to the case and dial. England led the field in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the hand skills survive in a small profession.
Stone, brick & building
The crafts that raise and weatherproof a traditional English building.
Cob building
Cob is an earth-building method that raises walls from a stiff mix of subsoil, straw and water, built up in lifts and pared back as it dries - the thick, soft-cornered walls of the South West’s old cottages, traditionally kept dry by "a good hat and a good pair of boots".
Combed wheat reed thatching
Combed wheat reed (or Devon reed) is wheat straw run through a comber so all the butt ends face one way, then dressed tight - giving a closer, more sculpted surface than longstraw. It is the dominant thatch of the West Country.
Dry stone walling
Dry stone walling is the building of walls from stone alone, with no mortar - each stone chosen and placed so the wall holds itself together by weight, friction and careful coursing, finished with a line of upright coping stones on top.
Flint knapping & flushwork
Flint knapping is the shaping of flint by striking it to a flat, squared face; in East Anglian building it is set in patterns with dressed stone, a decorative technique called flushwork seen across the region’s great wool churches.
Handmade brickmaking
Handmade brickmaking forms each brick by throwing a clot of prepared clay into a sanded wooden mould by hand, before drying and firing - giving the soft colour variation and folded texture that machine-pressed bricks cannot match, and that conservation work needs.
Leadwork (roofing)
Leadwork is the roofing and weatherproofing craft of working sheet lead - bossing, welting and lead-welding it - into roofs, gutters, flashings, spires and rainwater goods, the traditional covering of churches and great houses.
Lime mortar & limewash
Lime mortar, lime plaster and limewash are the traditional lime-based materials of old buildings. Softer and more breathable than cement, they let damp move and dry out, which is why conservation work on historic walls uses lime, not modern cement.
Longstraw thatching
Longstraw thatching is the English roofing method that uses long wheat straw drawn into yealms and dressed flat on the roof, giving the soft, poured-over look with a hazel-rod border.
Pargeting
Pargeting is the decorative working of external lime plaster into raised or incised patterns - foliage, figures, dates and panels - across the front of a timber-framed building. It is a speciality of Suffolk, Essex and the wider East Anglian tradition.
Stained glass
Stained glass is coloured glass cut to a design and joined with strips of lead (cames) into a window, with detail painted on and fired in. It is the craft of building a picture out of coloured light, and of conserving the medieval windows that survive.
Stonemasonry
Stonemasonry is the cutting and building of stone for buildings and monuments. A banker mason works stone at the bench to shape it; a fixer mason sets it in the building; carvers and letter-cutters are specialist branches of the same trade.
Timber framing
Timber framing builds a structure from a jointed frame of (usually green oak) posts and beams, cut with mortise-and-tenon joints and locked with oak pegs - no nails - so the whole building is a wooden skeleton that the walls and roof are hung on.
Water reed thatching
Water reed thatching, often called Norfolk reed, roofs a building with the stiff stems of the common reed, packed butt-end outward and dressed hard. It gives the crispest, most angular and longest-lasting of the English thatched finishes.
Wattle and daub
Wattle and daub is the infill of a timber-framed wall: a woven lattice of split wood (the wattle) packed and rendered with a sticky mix of earth, dung, straw and lime (the daub). It filled the panels between the oak studs of medieval buildings.
Textiles, fibre & dress
Spinning, weaving, knitting, stitching and the clothing trades.
Bespoke tailoring
Bespoke tailoring cuts and hand-builds a garment to one person from an individually drafted pattern, with a canvas chest-piece padded and shaped by hand - the Savile Row tradition, distinct from made-to-measure and off-the-peg.
Bobbin lace
Bobbin lace is made by braiding and twisting many threads, each wound on its own bobbin, over a pricked pattern pinned to a pillow. England has strong regional traditions, notably Honiton in Devon and the East Midlands lace counties.
Felt-making
Felt-making turns loose wool into cloth without spinning or weaving: heat, moisture and agitation lock the fibres together into a dense mat. It is probably the oldest way of making textile, and the basis of traditional hat-making.
Gansey knitting
A gansey is the tightly knitted woollen jumper of the English and Scottish fishing communities, worked in the round in fine navy wool with patterns that vary port by port. Gansey knitting is the hand craft of making them.
Glove-making
Glove-making cuts soft leather to a precise pattern and stitches it into fitted gloves, a skilled hand trade centred historically on towns such as Worcester and Yeovil and now held by very few makers.
Goldwork embroidery
Goldwork is hand embroidery using metal threads - gold, silver and gilt - couched and shaped onto a ground for ceremonial, ecclesiastical and military work. It is among the most demanding and longest-trained of the needlework crafts.
Hand spinning
Hand spinning draws and twists prepared fibre - wool, flax, others - into a continuous yarn, on a drop spindle or a spinning wheel. It is the foundational textile craft: no yarn, no cloth.
Handloom weaving
Handloom weaving makes cloth by interlacing warp and weft threads on a hand-operated loom, the weaver controlling the shed, the beat and the pattern - the craft behind everything from fine cloth to rugs before the power loom industrialised it.
Knitwear (British-made)
Knitwear design and manufacture is the making of knitted garments on hand- and power-frames; a small British industry still designs and knits in this country, holding skills - and a supply chain - that mass offshore production has otherwise stripped out.
Natural dyeing
Natural dyeing colours fibre and cloth with dyes from plants, minerals and insects - woad and indigo for blue, madder for red, weld for yellow - usually fixed with a mordant. It is the colour tradition behind every textile before synthetic dyes.
Basketry, straw & rush
Weaving baskets, seats and figures from willow, rush, oak and straw.
Basket-making
Basket-making weaves baskets from prepared rods - most often willow, but also hazel and other coppice woods - worked green or soaked, around a staked base and up the sides. The archive documents it through the hazel basket maker Lewis Goldwater.
Corn dolly making
A corn dolly is a figure or shape plaited from straw, made from the last of the harvest and kept until the next - a survival of harvest custom. Corn dolly making, or straw work, is the craft of plaiting them.
Oak swill basket
An oak swill (or spelk) basket is the Lake District basket woven from thin, boiled and riven oak laths around a hazel rim - tough, flexible, and once the standard work basket of farms, mills and mines in the north-west.
Rush seating & rushwork
Rushwork twists and weaves freshwater rush into chair seats, mats and baskets. For a rush-seated chair the worker twists the rush into a continuous cord and weaves it over the seat rails in a four-cornered coil.
Trug-making
A Sussex trug is a shallow garden basket built from thin boards of cleft sweet chestnut nailed across a steam-bent frame of cleft ash or willow, like a small clinker-built boat. Trug-making is the craft of building them, a Herstmonceux tradition.
Boats, water & fishing
River and inshore craft, and the trades of working the water.
Clinker boatbuilding
Clinker (or lapstrake) boatbuilding builds a wooden hull from overlapping planks fastened edge to edge, the shell formed first and the frames fitted after - the northern European tradition, as against carvel building with flush planks over a frame. The archive documents it at Dennett Boat Builders.
Coracle-making
A coracle is a small, single-person river boat made from a lattice of split laths covered in a waterproof skin, built to a pattern that varies river by river across Wales and the Welsh Marches.
Norfolk wherry
The Norfolk wherry is the black-sailed cargo sailing boat of the Broads, built shallow and broad to carry goods along the rivers and dykes under a single huge gaff sail. Only a handful survive, kept by trusts.
Punt-building
A punt is the flat-bottomed, square-ended river boat pushed along with a pole, built from long planks with no keel for shallow, slow water. Punt-building is the joinery of making them, a Thames-valley tradition.
Sail-making
Traditional sail-making cuts cloth to a three-dimensional shape and hand-sews it into a sail, with roped edges, hand-worked eyelets and reinforced corners - the loft craft behind every working sailing boat.
Withy eel trap making
A withy eel trap (or eel grig) is a long, funnel-mouthed basket woven from willow (withies) that lets an eel swim in but not out - the fishing gear of the Somerset Levels and other fen and river country, woven by very few makers now.
Hedgerow, field & land
The stewardship crafts that keep the worked English landscape going.
Cider orcharding
Cider orcharding is the growing and tending of standard cider-apple trees in traditional orchards, and the making of cider from them - a West Country and Marches tradition that holds rare apple varieties and the wildlife of old orchard grassland.
Eel fishing & elvering
Traditional eel fishing takes eels with nets, traps and putcheons on rivers and estuaries; elvering nets the young glass eels (elvers) as they run up rivers in spring - a Severn and fenland tradition now tightly restricted as eel numbers have collapsed.
Hedge-laying
Hedge-laying rejuvenates a hedge by part-cutting each stem (the pleacher) and bending it over at an angle so it keeps growing while forming a thick, stock-proof living barrier. England has many regional styles - Midland, Devon, Welsh border and others.
Peat cutting
Peat cutting is the hand-digging of peat from a bog or moss as fuel, lifted in blocks with a special spade and stacked to dry - a right of turbary in many commons, now largely ended for conservation reasons but surviving as tradition in a few places.
Reed cutting
Reed cutting is the winter harvesting of common reed from managed reedbeds for thatching - cut, cleaned and bundled into bunches - a marshland trade tied to the survival of both reed-thatch and the wildlife of the reedbed.
Shepherding & hefting
A hefted flock is one that has learned, over generations, to keep to its own stretch of open hill without fences, the knowledge passed from ewe to lamb. Shepherding such a flock is the stewardship craft of the unenclosed uplands.
Water-meadow drowning
Drowning is the controlled flooding of a water meadow through a built system of channels and hatches, run by a skilled "drowner", to warm the ground and bring on an early bite of grass. It is among the most intricate of England’s land-management crafts.
Customs, calendar & ceremony
The seasonal customs and ceremonies carried by communities through the year.
Abbots Bromley Horn Dance
The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is an annual custom in that Staffordshire village in which dancers carry ancient reindeer antlers through the parish for a full day. The antlers have been carbon-dated to around the eleventh century, making it one of England’s oldest living customs.
Beating the bounds
Beating the bounds is the parish custom of walking the boundary of a community on Rogation days and striking the boundary markers, fixing the line of the parish in living memory.
Bonfire societies
The Sussex bonfire societies stage the county’s torchlit November processions, fire and effigy-burning, most famously at Lewes, where several societies parade in costume - a tradition rooted in commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot and local Protestant martyrs.
Cheese rolling
Cheese rolling is the custom of chasing a rolling cheese down a steep hill, the first to the bottom winning it. The famous one is held at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire, on a slope steep enough to make the chase genuinely dangerous.
Hobby horse ('Obby 'Oss)
A hobby horse custom centres on a costumed figure - a person inside a hooped or framed "horse" - paraded through a town on its day. The best known are the Padstow ’Obby ’Oss on May Day and the Minehead Hobby Horse, both Cornish and West Country survivals.
Maypole & May Day customs
May Day customs mark the start of summer: dancing round a ribboned maypole, crowning a May Queen, greenery and garlands, and dawn ceremonies such as the singing from Magdalen Tower in Oxford. They are among the most widespread of the calendar customs.
Morris dancing
Morris dancing is the English ritual dance tradition, danced in sets to music, in several distinct regional forms: Cotswold (with handkerchiefs and bells), Border (blacked or disguised, with sticks), North West (clogged and processional) and molly.
Mummers' play
A mummers’ play is a short, stylised folk drama performed by costumed players at Christmas or other festivals, almost always built around a hero, a combat, a death and a comic doctor who revives the fallen - a death-and-resurrection pattern carried for centuries.
Rapper & longsword dancing
Rapper and longsword are English sword-dance traditions in which a team dances linked by flexible (rapper, from the North East) or rigid (longsword, from Yorkshire) swords, weaving figures and locking the blades into a star at the end.
Swan upping
Swan upping is the annual census and marking of mute swans on the River Thames, carried out in skiffs over five days by the Crown’s Swan Marker with the Vintners’ and Dyers’ companies - a ceremony of ownership that doubles as a wildlife survey.
Wassailing
Wassailing is the midwinter custom of blessing the cider orchards - singing to the trees, making noise to drive off harm, and toasting the harvest to come - kept in the cider counties of the West Country and the Marches around Twelfth Night.
Well dressing
Well dressing is the Derbyshire and Peak District custom of decorating wells and springs each summer with large pictures pressed petal by petal into beds of wet clay - a thanksgiving for water that draws whole villages into weeks of work.
Lettering, paper & print
The crafts of the written, drawn, gilded and printed word.
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is the art of fine handwriting with a broad-edged pen or brush, the letterforms built from the natural thick-and-thin of the held nib. The modern English revival begins with Edward Johnston, whose teaching also shaped letter-cutting and type.
Gilding
Gilding is the laying of gold leaf onto a surface. Water gilding, on a prepared gesso and bole ground, can be burnished to a mirror; oil gilding is laid on a size for durable outdoor work on signs, frames and lettering.
Hand bookbinding
Hand bookbinding sews the folded sections of a book together and binds them into boards covered in leather, cloth or paper, finished with hand tooling. It covers fine binding, conservation rebinding, and the repair of historic books.
Letter-cutting
Letter-cutting is the craft of cutting letters into stone by hand with a hammer and chisel, designing the inscription as it is cut rather than tracing a printed font.
Letterpress & hot-metal typesetting
Letterpress prints from a raised, inked surface pressed onto paper. In hot-metal setting the type is cast from molten metal as it is composed; the craft, and its physical type, were made largely obsolete by phototypesetting and digital composition within two generations.
Paper marbling
Paper marbling floats inks or paints on a tray of thickened water (a size), draws them into patterns with combs and rakes, and lifts the pattern onto a sheet of paper - the swirled endpapers of old books and a craft in its own right.
Sign-writing
Sign-writing is the hand-painting of lettering and signs directly onto a surface with a brush, spacing and forming each letter by eye - the traditional craft behind shop fascias, pub signs and narrowboat lettering, distinct from cut or printed signage.
Wood engraving
Wood engraving cuts an image into the hard end-grain of a block with fine tools, printing the lines left standing - a relief technique, capable of great detail, revived as an English fine-art tradition in the twentieth century.
Churches, bells & conservation
The crafts and roles that keep England's buildings and institutions standing.
Bell founding
Bell founding is the casting and tuning of church and tower bells from bronze, the bell shaped by moulds and then tuned by turning metal from the inside until the partial tones come true - an ancient trade now held by very few foundries.
Building conservation
Building conservation is the repair and care of historic buildings using compatible traditional materials and minimal intervention - the "conservative repair" approach argued by William Morris and the SPAB, which keeps the old fabric rather than replacing it.
Change ringing
Change ringing is the English method of ringing church bells in continually changing mathematical sequences rather than tunes, each bell swung full-circle by a ringer pulling a rope. It is a team craft, a tradition, and a body of method unique to these islands.
Organ building
Organ building is the making, voicing and restoring of pipe organs - the casework, the windchests, the action, and the hundreds or thousands of pipes, each voiced by hand so the instrument speaks evenly across a building.
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How to read these
These are not dictionary stubs. Every definition is written to be accurate and specific, drawing on standard references and, wherever the archive has documented the craft, on what it actually saw - cross-linked to the archive’s own makers and keepers and to the crafts it is documenting next. The terms marked “Documented in the archive” have been witnessed first-hand; the rest are defined honestly from the record and are being written up into full pages over time. If you spot an error, tell us - it gets corrected, with the change on the record.