Barley Hall

 

The site changed hands about midway through our restoration of the Hall Range.

YAT’s Director, Peter Addyman, could see enough by then to suggest an alternative future for our intended offices- as an interpretation centre for the medieval life of the city.

He had helped set up the Jorvik Viking Centre and a similar opportunity to explain the realities of life in medieval York to visitors was too good to miss.

We had no difficulty in appreciating the economic advantages of his proposition for our home city or working with a client that is equally interested in scholarly exactitude.

From then onwards we directed our Coffee Yard Project towards the new aim of creating Barley Hall in respectful memory of YAT’s then Chairman and mentor, Professor Maurice Barley.

 

This is the restored Hall.

Its early 15th.c framing is of a better quality than the earlier monastic North Range and may have been a secular enlargement of a smaller original. We know from documentary research that a Lord Mayor of York was living here, a goldsmith by trade. We also found traces of the earlier and lower monastic range preserved behind the later crossframe at this upper end of the Hall.

 

 

 

The Hall Range was better preserved than the North Range, with about 60% of its primary fabric in tact. But a crucial pair of arch braces that had once supported its roof were missing, threatening the stability of the whole.

It took a long time for us to find an oak tree with exactly the right natural curvature of grain to fit the archaeological imperatives precisely, and to avoid anything going wrong here is Russell in the carpenter’s yard, taking responsibility for setting out the critical top tenon so that it would slot exactly into the surviving tie beam mortice. He has always been hands-on.