An international organisation for all those interested in lesser traditional buildings

Bibliography and Databases

The VAG maintains a series of databases and other resources with information on Vernacular Architecture.


Vernacular Building Glossary - NEW!

This new online Glossary identifies terms used for vernacular buildings, in particular the components of timber-framed structures. They can be identified by name or from drawings. It is based on the Practical Handbook Recording Timber-Framed Buildings: an Illustrated Glossary by Nat Alcock, Maurice Barley, Philip Dixon and Bob Meeson, published by the Council for British Archaeology.


VAG Databases home page

This link gives access to the interactive map of the VAG databases which are hosted by the Archaeology Data Service and to the databases themselves (or you can use the individual links below).


Index to Friedrich Ostendorf, Die Geschichte des Dachwerks [History of Roof Structure] (1908)

Julian Munby has prepared an index to the illustrations in this famous study, examining roofs throughout western Europe including England. It contains several hundred drawings, numbers of which are of roofs that no longer survive. He has kindly made this index available as a downloadable pdf. Nat Alcock has extracted from this an index for the English buildings, ordered by illustration number, rather than by name, including the printed page, at Ostendorf_England_Illustrations_by_page.pdf.

The original Ostendorf text is available as a searchable and downloadable e-book, at http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ostendorf1908.


Tables of Tree-Ring Dated Buildings in England and Wales

A useful set of tables of tree-ring dating reports compiled mainly from entries published annually in Vernacular Architecture and available in two forms: national lists arranged mainly by half-century and county lists approximately in chronological order. These tables provide an additional resource to the Dendrochronology Database mentioned above, and build upon the data available there. They were prepared by Bob Meeson and are discussed in his paper, 'Structural trends in English medieval buildings: new insights from dendrochronology', Vernacular Architecture 43 (2013),58–75.

The tables were updated in September 2021.


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