Ambry

A Late 15^th Century English Ambry

By Duke Galmr Ingolfsson

A circa-1490 English Ambry that was auctioned off by Sotheby's in 2002 from the Clive Sherwood Collection of Early English Oak Furniture. This item was used as the basis for my project.

Summary:

The medieval ambry (or aumbry) was an early type of cabinet. Originally the term applied to a small niche in the wall of a church for storing sacraments, that later evolved into a small ornate hanging cabinet.

By the late 15^th Century, this term applied to a cabinet used to store food and dry goods in the kitchen area. This form was also known as a dole cupboard, in that use, it was usually placed outdoors where servants and the needy could get food (as in “being on the dole”).

In the 16^th Century, this form got smaller and was either hung on the wall or on legs in the bedroom area and called a livery cupboard. That was used to hold food and drink to be consumed overnight.

This project addresses the late 15^th Century version as depicted above where it was used for food storage in or near the kitchen.

Sources:

The lead photo is an ambry dated to around 1490 that was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2002 and was the model for this project. Obviously, without either access to the piece or several more photos, it would be impossible to make an accurate reproduction. I am going to make my best guess based on my knowledge of period techniques, the overall measurements, and this photo.

I consulted various sources to get a good idea of the common features, probable construction techniques, forms of decorative carving, etc. A list of references and a gallery of representative samples appear at the end of this article.

Characteristics of the Ambry:

The defining characteristics of the food storage ambry are a boxy shape, roughly 3 to 4 (width to height) proportions with a single or stacked central door, and the pierced gothic tracery that served for ventilation. The interior has 3 or 4 shelves and a simple nailed-on back (in most cases).

Being a piece of utilitarian furniture, the construction techniques that were employed are fairly basic. The surviving examples are fashioned in one of three ways:

1. Boarded – Boards butted and nailed together
2. Frame and Panel – Similar to the construction of chests
3. Clamped (or Bound) – Iron-bound boarded cabinet after the style of medieval iron-bound chests

Most of the examples I was able to find are of the boarded type and that is what is used in this project. See Appendix A for photos of other surviving ambries.

Fashioned as a squat cabinet, they are about 3’-4’ wide and 3’- 5’ tall, and 12”- 18” deep.  A 15^th Century ambry would not confuse an early 20^th Century cook who would know it as a pie safe.

Materials:

Almost all surviving examples are oak. Were they all oak? Probably not. However, oak was the fashionable choice for furniture into the 17^th Century and its insect and rot resistance make it a preferable choice given England’s climate and the use to which they were put.

The boards were nailed and at this point in time, they would use blacksmith-forged wrought nails. Also, there were hinges for the door, most of them are a simple H shaped style. Some ambries have a lock, again, blacksmith made. Others had a simple latch or hasp.

Tools:

Construction of these cabinets require a very modest selection of tools:

• A saw (to dimension the lumber)
• Bench planes (to smooth and dimension the boards)
• A chisel (to chop out the mortises)
• A bitstock (hand drill; to make the pilot holes)
• A hammer (for the nails)
• Files and/or chisels for the pierce work
• Measuring and marking tools

Considerations for this construction:

Since I am not intending to produce a reproduction as such, I am willing to make some compromises in the selection of materials and processes. They are:

1. The use of walnut instead of riven or quarter-sawn oak.
2. The use of Cut nails instead of hand-forged wrought nails
3. Opting for a latch instead of a hand forged lock

Lacking a trust fund, I cannot afford English brown oak. It is available in small quantities from specialty wood supplies in the US, but at prices that are eye-watering, in the range of $30-$40 bd ft. The traditional choice for replicating period English furniture in America is white oak. It is much paler than English oak, but otherwise extremely similar, so a little stain gets you as close as you will get without a few hundred years of grime and soot.

I choose Black Walnut for this project since I had recently acquired a stack of walnut boards and I did not have enough oak (of any type) on hand for something of this size.

Walnut has several virtues: the ambry will be about ⅔ the weight of an oak one, walnut is far easier to carve and it has a very attractive grain pattern that will enhance the visual interest. Even so, I don’t have boards of adequate width (13” – 17”), so I had to glue up narrower boards using hide glue.

I used cut nails for this project. Cut nails were not invented until the end of the 18th Century but they are a reasonable, visually similar, and far less expensive substitute for hand-forged wrought nails. When you can find them, hand-forged nails run $3-$4 each. This project uses almost 100 nails, so @ $20/lb (68 nails), cut nails were within my budget. Another period technique is to use ‘trenails’ (wooden nails made from carefully straight-grained stock). That is an experiment for another day.

The original has forged iron hinges and a lock. I was able to source hand-forged hinges of the correct size (Horton Brasses, $54), but not a lock that looked appropriate. Many other ambries had a simple wooden latch or knob, so I choose to use that for this project.

The hinges are attached with rustic looking screws rather than clenched nails which is the likely method used in these pieces (hard to be sure in most of these photos). Screws were used in furniture starting in the 15th Century but were not very common until the 18th Century (and the invention of efficient tools).

There is no do-over in clench nailing and I feared that the operation would crack the carved walnut panel right on the last step of the project. Not feeling super brave after 30 hours of carving, I opted to use screws. From more than a foot away, you would be hard-pressed to notice the difference even if you were aware screws were not common in furniture until later.

This Project:

This is the first piece of case furniture I have made in some time and I was slightly taken aback at the sheer quantity of wood it required compared to some of my more recent projects. For instance, the folding stools were made from my shop’s scrap pile. All together this project contains 38 board feet of lumber: 28 of walnut and 9.5 of pine. Not counting the wastage (described below) that adds maybe 30% to the total.

1. All the walnut and pine boards were milled to thickness and dimensioned with power tools. After that, the remainder of the work was done with hand tools.
   
   
2. Lacking boards of sufficient width, the first step after milling the stack of boards to uniform thickness is gluing up panels.
   
   

There is a bit of an art to doing a good job of making wide boards. You need to work around the defects in the wood (boards from yard trash walnut trees such as I had have many defects): the very white and softer sapwood, drying cracks on the boards, embedded bullets (seriously), etc. Plus, you want to match the grain pattern as best you can, or at least match the color. It’s also good to think ahead to the joinery phase and try to not have glue joints or knots where you need to work.

The boards I had were 6' to 6-1/2' long, 6" to 8" wide. It took some sorting of the boards to find parts that matched up. I trimmed the defects from the boards and played mix and match to find to good combination, then marked the boards so I could assemble them correctly during glue-up.

1. If they were not already close to the right length, I trimmed them. I leave them about an inch or two overlong for the glue-up to give me some wiggle room. Then, I assembled the boards in the order devised above and glued them with hide glue, and clamped them up. In theory, you are safe to unclamp in around two hours, I usually leave them overnight since my shop time comes in short bursts anyway. And cool temps can extend curing time.
   
   
2. Once all the panels are glued up, the next step is to clean up the surfaces. You need to remove the glue squeeze-out, level the joints if you did not get it quite right, and remove any machine marks or tear out from the planer. Resist the urge to cut everything to final length until you need to, just in case things don’t go exactly to plan.
   
   
3. Assembling the carcass starts with the sides. Cut them to their final length and width (14" x 42"), do the same with the three shelves (13 ½" x 35"). That ½" difference will allow the sideboards to hide the backboards when viewed from the side.
   
   
4. The three shelves sit in ¼" dados. You want to lay them out in exactly the same location on each of the side panels. I also used a white pencil to mark the orientation of each board. The best edge of the shelf should be the front as it will be seen.
   
   
5. Create the dados by sawing in the sidewalls down to ¼", then you bang across the board with a chisel (bevel down), hogging out most of the material, then clean up the floor with a router plane. This is when you start to enjoy the fact that this is walnut and not white oak.
   
   

Gallery of Extant Ambries

Gallery of Project Photos

Ambry Project References

Return to My Woodworking Project Index