The conditions under which a roof brick has to stand are considered and possible means of improving refractories in common use suggested. A brief mention is made of the possibility of utilizing other available refractories.

The main doors of medieval buildings or building complexes such as cathedrals or palaces are substantial structures, often weighing as much as one tonne per leaf. A survey of medieval English doors shows several distinct structural types whose different structural actions will be considered. All must develop some form of in plane action through the interaction of their components to transmit their weight back to their supports. However their complexity often allows several different modes of action, each of which will be differently affected by moisture movement within the timber, so that more than one mode of action will often need to be considered. The recent need to repair the early sixteenth century main doors of Trinity College, Cambridge involved the detailed analysis of one of these types whose structure comprised a dense grid of relatively slender muntins and ledges set within a much more substantial frame, carrying decorated boarding and mouldings on the outside face. The intention was that by understanding this structure we would be able to restore the original structural action of the door. In this case earlier interventions and permissions, and the extent of deterioration at the lower hinges, made this impossible. However, the exercise suggests an approach that might be valuable in the restoration of other doors of this type.

The presbytery vault at St Albans is one of only two thirteenth-century wooden vaults over a main span to survive in England. A programme of cleaning and conservation carried out between 1997 and 2002, coupled with an analysis of the source and date of the timber used in its construction, significantly advanced our understanding of both the late thirteenth-century presbytery campaign at St Albans and thirteenth-century timber vault construction generally. As the inevitable density and restricted circulation of the final report on that work has hindered its wider reception, the following paper offers a summary, drawing attention to two features that may have wider implications for an appreciation of vaulting in timber. The first is that, although the general form adopted at St Albans is one associated with masonry vaulting, the wooden boards used for the vault webbing required a junction between the wall and the ridge rib, meaning that shallow liernes were originally deployed to run parallel to the central ridge. It is difficult to see this as imitative of vaulting in stone; rather it is likely to be the result of carpenters developing their own solutions to the constraints imposed by timber. Secondly, the late medieval remodelling of the vault replaced these liernes with false tiercerons, and rather nicely illustrates the ease with which timber vaulting could be modified. The dendrochronology gives a date range of 1273–93, and a date of around 1285 is suggested for the primary build. The major late medieval alterations are here associated with the second abbacy of John of Wheathampstead (1452–65).

This paper presents somc observations that were made during a series of tests on round downdraft kilns fired with a single stoker, and shows the economies that can be expected with this method of firing and the disadvantages that must be overcome.