On this day in 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and forever changed our understanding of the early life of Romans and Greeks. The eruption caused a staggering loss of life, but it also preserved a snapshot in time at sites surrounding the volcano.
We have learned a lot about early woodworking because of the eruption, and my book “Ingenious Mechanicks” explores the early workbenches preserved in paintings at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
But my favorite Roman workbench from this era was preserved by water – not fire. Far north of Pompeii, the Roman fort at Saalburg (now Germany) has what I think is the oldest extant workbench, which was found in a well. I got to examine and measure it. And I reproduced it for the book.
To commemorate this important day, I am giving away the chapter on how to build the Saalburg bench.
Many people have dismissed my love of the low workbenches, but I use mine all the time in the shop and find it practical for many operations (particularly in chairmaking).
More than a decade ago, Christopher Schwarz built the “Skansen Bench” as an “I Can Do That” project for Popular Woodworking Magazine; this link will take you to it on the PW site. Skansen, located in Stockholm on the island Djurgården, was the first open-air museum in Sweden. The bench itself is modeled after one from the Älvros Farmstead (a group of buildings from the 16th and 17th centuries that are now part of the museum); Chris saw it in the book “Making Swedish Country Furniture & Household Things” (1990, Hartley & Marks)
The Skansen Bench is a sitting bench, and for years was alongside the dining room wall in Chris and Lucy’s former house. I remember dropping my purse on it just about every visit. Upstairs here, it served as a sort of hall table for a while, then as seating.
But since 2010, he’s built quite a few more low benches specifically as workbenches, including the Saalburg bench and Herculaneum bench that are included in “Ingenious Mechanicks.” So you’d think that when he needed a low bench to demonstrate working on them for Colonial Williamsburg’s Working Wood in the 18th Century conference, he’d have one handy.
But no.
So, Chris combined workholding from both of the low benches from “Ingenious Mechanicks” on the Skansen bench. I’m betting he keeps the new-model Skansen in the shop; he’s been using it a lot to shave chair spindles while sitting (that’s what the stepped block insert is for – the one most people in the conference were asking about).
So now you know the sources behind the Swedish Roman low workbench. (If you decide to make one, do check with your home’s other occupants before summarily cutting into a seating bench and liberating it to your shop. We cannot be responsible for the consequences.)
The following is from “Ingenious Mechanicks,” by Christopher Schwarz – this excerpt from Chapter IV, by Suzanne Ellison.
Tracing the history of workbenches takes one into the realm of Greek myth, along ancient trade routes, through the harshness of secular and religious empire-building and the glories of golden ages in arts, science and literature. There are many frustrations in the great gaps in the records, and regret over the loss of civilizations, languages and traditions. But the one thing that never disappoints, and alleviates the frustration and regret, is the wonder of human ingenuity.
The research for this topic began in 2014 when Christopher Schwarz asked me to translate an 18th-century description of the fresco from Herculaneum. I picked up the Herculaneum trail again in 2016 to search for contemporary accounts of the excavations and also 19th-century accounts of the condition of the fresco. Here and there, in other research, a low Roman workbench would turn up, but the majority of the images Chris uses in this book, and the workbenches discussed in this chapter, were found in June through September of 2017.
I primarily used publicly available image and text databases maintained by museums, universities, photographic archives, auction houses, academic journals and papers, and used search terms in seven languages. Occasionally, I contacted an archivist or academic researcher, and (with few exceptions) they were more than willing to offer assistance. A conservative estimate of the number of images viewed last summer is 8,000 to 10,000, with images from the Spanish Colonial era contributing about a third of the total.
Verifying the geographic origins of the artwork was the starting point to connecting commonalities in history and development of workbenches with distinctive features.
In the last couple years more public and private museums and universities have collaborated to put collections and other resources online. As we get more access there will be many more discoveries to be made, and I expect the gaps in our timeline will be filled. You may find, as Chris did, a missing piece in the puzzle is in a museum near you.
The Earliest Discoveries: 1st-15th Centuries As Chris and I unearthed examples of the low Roman-style workbenches, there was an emphasis on dating the benches and thinking in terms of a timeline, especially a timeline of innovations. Thanks to my father’s brilliant idea of handing me a map to track our family trips, and to keep me quiet on those trips, I started thinking in terms of maps. I had a workbench-discovery map developing in my head. Date, and place, would become important in solving some of the questions about the technology and the quirky features we found.
Low and higher workbenches and shaving horses are seen in flat outline in Roman funerary iconography, but for our purposes we start with four benches depicted in more dimension and detail. The first four low benches date up to the Roman Empire in the second century. Three are from the heart of the Empire: an engraving of a fresco from Herculaneum; a fresco depicting the myth of Daedalus and Queen Pasiphae from Pompeii; and a piece of decorated Roman glass found in catacombs. The fourth find, and the only extant benches, are the two from Saalburg, the frontier fort on the Limes Germanicus in the Roman province of Raetia. The Saalburg benches had the added interest of puzzling notches, a mystery that was solved, we think, by a Spanish painting executed more than 1,500 years later.
After a gap of six centuries in our record I found an 8th-century fresco of a carpenter working while sitting astride a low bench. The fresco was in an Umayyad bath house in the desert at Qusayr Amra (present-day Jordan), in a region once part of the Roman Empire. The bath house follows a Roman plan and the fresco is one of several “portraits” of the craftsmen who built the structure. After another six-century gap, five benches show up in 14th-century Spain and Italy. The Spanish bench is from Teruel Cathedral in the Aragon province of Zaragoza. Two decades before Qusayr Amra was built, the Umayyad led the Muslim invasion of Spain. In Teruel, Mudejar craftsmen (Muslims who remained in Spain after the Reconquista) built the cathedral and are depicted in portraits similar to those in Qusayr Amra. The Mudejar woodworkers were using low Roman workbenches. Of the Italian benches, one is from a Sephardic manuscript and three are scenes from the construction of Noah’s ark.
In the 15th century, low benches are depicted in Flemish and French paintings of the Holy Family, and in two books from southwest Germany and central Italy. Karl Schreyner, a woodworker in Nürnberg from about 1425, is one of the woodworkers in “The Mendel and Landauer Hausbücher.” In 1485, a woodworker and his bench are on the cover of a novella published in Florence. Both are notable because they are not religious images.
Each time there is a large gap in the image record, huge societal shifts were at work. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the Roman Empire was weakened by plague outbreaks that caused troop shortages and disrupted food production. During the 3rd century, there was a 50-year-long crisis that saw the Empire split into three warring parts. The devastation of wars and plague led to population shifts and, despite a reunification late in the century, there were cities in the western part of Europe that never recovered. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Empire struggled to keep control over its vast territories. And by the conclusion of the 5th century, the Roman Empire in Western Europe and the age of Classical Antiquity was at an end.
With the advent of the Early Middle Ages, Western Europe splintered into small kingdoms and city states. In the East, the surviving portion of the Roman Empire attempted to retake Italy and other areas lost to invading tribes. It was, to say the least, a time of great social and economic upheaval, and not every invading or land-grabbing group put record-keeping at the forefront. Artwork from the time does include scenes of woodworking, usually of a Biblical theme, rendered in manuscripts, frescoes, tapestries and mosaics. Representations of the construction of Noah’s ark have yielded a few low workbenches. To Chris’s delight, a series of benches in an early 14th-century Northern Italian manuscript have full face vises.
Two things to consider concerning the lack of image records from the last centuries of the Roman Empire and through the Middle Ages are: Who commissioned the art and who controlled what could be made? In other words: Who had the money and who had the power? The answer: wealthy landowners and the Catholic Church. For the wealthy, a nice selection of art might include portraits to exhibit the richness of your garments and jewels, illuminations for your Book of Hours and tapestries illustrating scenes from the Bible (and to keep out the cold). The Church commissioned frescoes to teach illiterate parishioners lessons from the Bible and the life of Christ. The civic authorities of a city state might commission artwork illustrating themes of good government and portraits of city luminaries. Artwork featuring woodworkers and other craftsmen, all of the low end of the social and economic scales, was not desirable.
How the artwork was made also figures into what survived. Manuscripts and paintings were easy to move to safety, or be looted then saved. Frescoes can be incredibly durable, but given the great age of any work created in this time period they are, nevertheless, fragile. Add in questionable conservation methods and the countless wars and conflicts extending well into the 20th century, and it is remarkable we have anything left to ponder and appreciate.
Here’s the problem: I gave my low, eight-legged workbench (based on a fresco at Herculaneum) to Brendan Gaffney. That bench is (I think) somewhere in New York state. Then I loaned the low bench I built that’s based on the world’s earliest extant workbench at Saalburg, Germany, to Dan Raber at the Artisans Guild in Millersburg, Ohio.
Then, while dishing out our family supper on my Loffelholz workbench in our dining room (which is too high for the Colonial Williamsburg demonstrations) I barked my shins against something. A Swedish sitting bench I’d built in 2010 for Popular Woodworking Magazine. The bench is from the Älvros Farmstead, a group of buildings from the 16th and 17th centuries that were moved to Skansen, Sweden, which is a living history museum.
The Skansen bench’s top is 11” wide, more than 2-1/2” thick and 72” long. The bench’s seat is about 19” off the floor.
Hmm. I guess I do have a Roman workbench here.
Today I started to add workholding to the bench. First up: A twin-screw vise based on 14th-century French benches. I made a couple screws from maple and threaded them with my 28mm threadbox from Dieter Schmid. The tool works brilliantly, is expensive and never gets loaned out. The threads are about 7” long, and have a 1”-diameter x 5”-long tenon on the other end.
I drilled a couple quick holes on 22” centers in the side of the Skansen bench to receive the tenons. This spacing allows me to hold and shape a chair seat. The vise chop is made from 2” x 4” x 30” red oak. The chamfers reduce the weight of the chop without reducing its grip (thanks vector forces). The vise nuts are maple.
To make the vise grip better, I looked around for coarse leather to glue to the bench and the chop. I am presently bovine-free. So I took a tip from the late Jennie Alexander and lined the vise with Safety Walk anti-slip tape. You can buy it at any good hardware store. It’s designed to stick on ladders and such to improve your footing. I use it on handscrews and the like. It’s not period-correct (the French used sturgeon swimbladders to line their vise jaws, JK), but I just forgave myself for the lapse.
All the parts are finished with linseed oil and beeswax.
Tomorrow I’ll add an adjustable planing stop, a “palm” and a chairmaker’s shaving stop.
Finally, I’ll chain this Roman workbench to a heavy object in the library so it doesn’t escape.
— Christopher Schwarz
If you are wondering what the hell I’m talking about in this post with low workbenches and “palms” and swimbladders, you haven’t read my book “Ingenious Mechanicks.” It’s all about early ways to work wood without a complex bench.
Workbenches that are powered by wedges, friction and stops have been fascinating to me since I first started looking into Roman workbenches. My interest and research into these benches eventually became “Ingenious Mechanicks.”
And now an old Norwegian Sloid (Sloyd/Slojd) manual has shed some new light (for me, at least) on these wedge-based benches – thanks to some drawings and text.
Eivind Reed of Breim, Norway, sent along these drawings plus a translation he made from the first Norwegian textbooks on school Sloid, “Sløidlære for skole og hjem” (Craftsmanship for School and Home), which were written by H.K. Kjennerud and Karl Løvdal. Here is the translation:
No. 244. Wedgebench. Pine in the benchtop, birch in the front vise, the board at the front end, planing stop and wedges. The bench can be made larger or smaller according to the intended use. By the drawings you see that the planing stop will sit slightly within the edge of the front board. The fit in the mortise must be so tight that it stays without slipping down. To avoid having to remove the planing stop when using the birdsmouth, we make two recesses for the teeth, so that it can be flush with the benchtop.
The bench can be put on a box, kitchen counter or similar. It will of course not measure up to a regular workbench, but when you get used to it, it does good service. To plane the face of a board, put it on the benchtop, thrust it into the planing stop so that the teeth sink in and it rests toward the front board. The teeth stop the board from moving backward when withdrawing the plane. To plane the edge of a board, we put it in the front vise [a crochet]. If it will not stand securely, we use the wedge. If the board is narrower than the thickness of the benchtop, we drive down the planing stop and put the piece in the birdsmouth. To shoot the ends of the board, we wedge it in the front vise, back vise or we use the front board as a shooting board. To rip boards, we use the front or rear vise as we see fit. To crosscut, we lay the piece on the bench as usual. To avoid losing the wedges, and to keep them always at hand, we hang them by string on eye hooks on a fitting place on the bench.
No. 245. Wedgebench to attach to the wall. See No. 139. The bench is attached with hinges and can be put up when not in use.
There are some clever aspects to both of these benches that are not covered by the text.
Both benches are on the small size, like the Milkman’s Workbench. The sizes are in metric. (My mind defaulted to American customary units when I first looked at the drawings. I saw a benchtop that was 6” x 20” x 80”. Dumb American.) The second wedgebench (No. 245) is longer, but that’s mostly to make room so your handplanes don’t poke you a new window in your wall.
One of the bits of cleverness are the rotating toggles below the benchtop that allow you to hold work on edge. I’ve seen sliding bars, but not toggles. These are much simpler to make and install.
The best stuff is the wedges. The opening in the benchtop has one straight side and one angled side. The angled side is 6° off vertical. The wedges shown below the notch both have faces that are angled at 6°. One wedge for small work; one for larger. The angles on the vise and the wedges keep the clamping pressure square to the workpiece.
In investigating early benches, all the notches that I recall encountering had square-sided notches (the dovetailed notches in the Saalburg bench are one exception). Clamping work in those proved less-than-spectacular until I tried using softwood wedges with almost no slope on them. The softwood compressed when struck and then held the work like crazy. These angled notches are another excellent solution to the problem.
The crochet is called out in the text, and it’s nice that this one also comes with a complementary wedge. Both the crochet opening and the wedge are at about 11.3°.
Also interesting is the “front board” – basically a full-time wide planing stop. It’s only about 3/8” thick (9mm). Combining that with the toothed planing stop is pretty clever.
When I first looked at figure No. 244, I assumed the holes in the benchtop were for holdfasts. That is, of course, silly for many reasons. It’s likely because of the way they are drawn that they are the way you fasten the benchtop to a table or box.
If I make another Roman bench, I will definitely incorporate the angled notches and wedges into the design. Thanks so much to Eivind for the image and the translation.