What is timber framing?

Timber framing is the way most of England was built for centuries: not with load-bearing walls, but with a jointed wooden skeleton of oak that carries the whole building, with the walls and roof hung on it. The frame is cut as a kit of posts and beams, joined almost entirely by carpentry - mortice and tenon - and locked with tapered oak pegs rather than nails, then raised into place. It is the construction behind the black-and-white Tudor house, the medieval barn and the jettied town front, and a great deal of it is still standing after five or six hundred years. The archive has not yet documented a framing yard or a raising; this entry explains the craft until it has.

The defining idea is the frame: the building’s strength is in a skeleton of jointed timber, and the walls between the timbers are only infill, carrying no load. That is the opposite of a brick or stone house, where the wall is the structure. English timber framing comes in two great traditions. The box frame builds walls of vertical posts and horizontal beams, forming a box that is then roofed - the dominant lowland tradition, and the one behind most surviving timber houses. The cruck frame uses pairs of great curved blades, crucks, often a single tree split down the middle and opened like an A, rising from near the ground to the ridge to carry roof and walls together - an older and more western and northern tradition.

So timber framing is not joinery or general carpentry; it is structural carpentry at building scale. And it is distinct from a modern timber-frame house, which uses sawn softwood studwork and nails: traditional framing means jointed, pegged, usually green oak, designed to be a frame you could in principle take apart and re-raise.

The main uprights are posts, often with a widened jowl at the top to take two beams at once. Wall plates run along the top of the walls; tie beams span across to stop the walls spreading; studs are the lighter vertical timbers between posts; braces are the angled timbers that keep the frame square. Joints are mostly mortice and tenon, pinned with tapered oak pegs (treenails) driven into slightly offset holes to draw the joint tight - a technique called draw-boring. A jetty is an upper floor cantilevered out beyond the one below. Each timber is marked with a carpenter’s mark so the frame can be assembled in the right order.

The carpenter works the frame flat in the yard, not up on the building. Each timber is cut to size and its joints are cut and fitted - traditionally by scribing, laying timbers together and marking each joint to its exact, irregular partner, so green and bent oak can be made to fit. The whole frame is test-assembled on the ground, the joints marked, and pegs holes bored. Then the frame is taken apart, carted to the site, and raised - the wall frames stood up, pegged together, and the roof framed on top - in the communal event that gives the American phrase "barn raising" its origin.

Only once the oak skeleton stands are the panels between the timbers filled, with wattle and daub, brick or lath and lime plaster, and the roof covered. The green oak then seasons in place over years, hardening like iron and moving as it dries - which is why old frames lean and wave, and why the draw-bored pegged joints, which tighten rather than loosen as the wood shrinks, were the right way to build.

The archive has not yet documented timber framing being cut and raised - the scribing in the yard, the pegs driven, the frame going up. It is a strong candidate, not least because it sits at the centre of a cluster of crafts the archive is already tracking: the wattle and daub and lime that fill and finish the frame, and the building conservation that now keeps the historic frames standing. When the archive documents a framing yard, this page will carry it.

Traditional oak-frame carpentry is, unusually for the crafts in this glossary, in fairly robust health. Two things keep it alive: a steady demand for the conservation and repair of England’s very large stock of historic timber buildings, which needs carpenters who can cut and splice oak in the old way; and a genuine revival of new oak-frame building - barns, houses, halls - for owners who want a frame raised the traditional way. There are working framing yards, training routes, and a body of skilled green-oak carpenters. The pressure points are at the conservation end, where matching old work demands rare experience, and in keeping the hand skills from being wholly replaced by machine-cut frames.

It is learned through carpentry training, the framing yards, and conservation bodies such as the SPAB. The archive’s Learn a Craft directory points to where it is taught.

What is the difference between a box frame and a cruck frame?
A box frame builds walls of vertical posts and horizontal beams that carry the roof on top - a box that is then roofed. A cruck frame uses pairs of large curved blades (crucks), often a single tree split in two, that rise from near the ground to the ridge and carry both the roof and the walls. They are two distinct traditions of timber building.

Are timber-framed buildings really built without nails?
Largely, yes. The frame is held together by carpentry joints - mainly mortice and tenon - pinned with tapered oak pegs (treenails) driven into drilled holes. The joints and pegs do the structural work; iron nails are avoided in the frame because they rust and split the oak.

What wood is used for timber framing?
Oak, overwhelmingly, and usually green (unseasoned) oak, which is far easier to work and then hardens in place over years. Oak is strong, durable and full of tannin that resists decay, which is why so many medieval oak frames still stand.