Ambry
A Late 15th Century English Ambry
By Duke Galmr Ingolfsson
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 15th 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 16th 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 15th 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:
- Boarded – Boards butted and nailed together
- Frame and Panel – Similar to the construction of chests
- 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 15th Century ambry would not confuse an early 20th 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 17th 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:
- The use of walnut instead of riven or quarter-sawn oak.
- The use of Cut nails instead of hand-forged wrought nails
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Test fit all three shelves, trimming them as you go. They should fit snugly but not super tightly in the dados. You should mark them as well for location and orientation. Assemble the carcass by gluing and nailing the shelves into the dados with 6d (2" long) nails.
Cut (or wrought) nails require a proper pilot hole if you do not want to crack the wood. If you aren’t sure what size hole you need, try it out on scrap wood first (I did and I was glad as the first guess on pilot hole size was a wee bit too small). You will also want to be careful to orient the nails along the grain of the top board, not across the grain to avoid splitting it.
I used 3 nails evenly spaced for each shelf. I found using dividers handy to work out the spacing, so the nails were even and consistent. Wrought or rosehead cut nails (as I used) are not sunk below the surface of the wood - the head stays flush. You must take care to hit them square and not to mar the boards. The English call denting the wood with the hammer "Frenching", I can’t imagine what the French must call it…
If you worked carefully, the carcass should come out square or close to it. Mine ended up within 1/16" across the diagonals, which I consider a win.
- The next step is to attach the backboards. This gives the carcass the needed strength to resist racking and help pull it (and keep it) square if necessary.
The backs on period furniture usually looks like crap stolen from the firewood pile. This is true well into the 19th Century even on high-end pieces. Several techniques were used for backboards. By far the most common (and seen on many of the photos of extant ambries I found) is to simply butt boards together and nail them on. Other variations are frame and panel (one example noted), ship laps, or tongue and groove.
A few photos of ambries show gappy backboards probably butted together and nailed on. Gaps will appear when the wood dries and shrinks. Not wanting my piece to end up in this very historical fashion, I cut ½" shiplap on my backboards and nailed them on with a ¼" overlap. That should handle any shrinking without leaving unsightly gaps. These were just nailed on to the back of the shelves and a cleat that runs across the very top with 4d (1½") cut nails.
- At this point the carcass was pretty sturdy and I added the top. The top overhangs the front and sides, about 2” and is usually a plain board. In a couple of examples there is a supporting molding to make the transition, but not on this piece. Adding in for the overhand, the top is 17" x 40". That is a big board, and it is hard to find something like that. Luckily, I had a nice 2” thick walnut board about 9” wide, so I resawed that in half and glued it up to give a nice book matched grain pattern for the top.
I have no idea how the original’s top is attached, there are almost no photos of the top of an ambry with enough angle to determine. Just nailing it on was not something I was keen to do, as I would be nailing into end grain. That is usually not a strong method, prone to pulling out under stress. Since the easiest way to move this sucker is to lift the top, I would likely pull the top off eventually. So, I added ¾" x ¾" x 13" oak cleats at the top of each side panel so I’d have face grain to connect the top.
- All that is left now is the front. All the ambries that I have found feature two wide stiles and a central door, sometimes two doors, one above the other.
This battered specimen has one door, and it does not go all the way down. My guess is that it used to but that the bottom portion was either damaged or they just wanted to expose the lower shelf while leaving the upper ones locked.
This guess is based on the staining on the left style and the door that looks like wing-type hinges. Iron will stain oak because of the tannic acid in the wood. There are 3 left halves on the stile and two right halves on the short door. If you assume the lower rail is a replacement to support the lower shelf, then the spacing on the hinges looks right for a single full-length door.
There might also have been either a different lock or some iron hasp closure given the markings on the right-hand side of the door.
Given all of that, I decided to build mine following this current version. It’s going to look less blocky and imposing with the open space below and since it’s going to sit in my living room, looks are important.
The upper rail is almost certainly mortise and tenoned into the stiles as that’s the typical joining technique for period furniture in such situations, so that’s what I did. The lower rail appears to be a later addition and it is not clear how that is attached. To increase the strength of the face frame, I also mortise and tenoned the lower rail into the stiles. These stiles are 12" wide and as high as the sides (42").
IMPORTANT: Do not assemble anything yet!
- Many ambries have what the English call a cock-bead along the long edges of the face frame components and the door(s). They vary a bit in width and distance from the edge, but all are pretty similar.
I do have that type of (19th Century) molding plane, but it is nowhere near as large as these appear to be in scale. Fortunately, all moldings are really combinations of 3 shapes: flats, convex curves, and concave curves. Therefore, if you have a rabbet or a plow plane and some hollow (concave) and round (convex) planes, you can make any molding profile you need.
This shape has two flats to establish the grounding and then the center area is rounded over to give the profile. Sizing it to what I had, I used a 1/16" blade in my router plane to establish the grounding. This kind of sucked, to be honest, a plow plane is the right tool here, unfortunately, I do not have one of those (yet).
I then used a #5 hollow plane to round over the center area. Hollows and rounds cut ⅙ of a given radius circle, the larger the size, the larger the radius. I have an article on my website that explains the system in detail if you care. This plane is about ½” wide and has a radius that is larger than what we need, but that’s OK, you make multiple overlapping passes and bring out the profile you want.
Like the example, I made this profile on both edges of the stiles and the door and the lower edge of the upper rail. I suppose I could have added it to the bottom rail if we wanted to pretend that configuration was planned, but I did not.
- I took this time to layout and cut out the "legs" on the stiles. I kind of eyeballed this on one stile and then transferred what I did to the other one and cut them out with a saw. Then I cleaned them up and faired out the curves with some rasps.
- Now the fun part, the piercing. A little Photoshop magic and a printer and I have patterns to follow which I spray glued to the wood. Then I drilled a hole in each open space to get the saw in there and cut out the profile. After that, I cleaned up the openings with rasps working vertically as shown in my photo. This made it easy to get clean square openings. This took forever, about 2 hours per piece.
- The actual carving takes longer. I got faster as I learned carving. I had done very little 3-dimensional carving outside a ball-and-claw carving class, so this was very definitely a learning experience.
To get an even bevel I set a marking gauge to 3/16” and scribed a line on the inside of the openings. Working between the line on the paper and the scribe line with a ½” chisel bevel down accomplished 90% of the carving. Other than that chisel, I used a couple of wide shallow gouges to set in the arcing lines of the corner chip carving looking areas in the corner of each design.
I was really surprised I didn’t need my large collection of mostly unused carving chisels. Despite the seeming complexity of the pattern, it became clear that the medieval craftsman could execute these carvings with just a handful of tools.
My carving skill probably went from a D to maybe a C+ over the 25 or 30 hours I spent on these things, so I needed to clean things up with a little sanding. The later ones needed less and less sanding. It became clear that an experienced carver would be able to turn in work straight from the chisel looking great. I am not there yet.
- Once the 4 patterns in the two stiles are complete, I could assemble the face frame. I gave all the pieces a final cleaning up after having rattled around the shop for a week. Then applied glue to the mortises and tenons and clamped the whole thing up. Check for square quickly before the glue sets. If the shoulders of the tenons are square and the same distance apart on both rails it should come out fine and mine was.
- To attach the face frame, I laid the carcass on its back and positioned the face frame on it. The original looks like it is nailed to the edges of the sides and to the top shelf and the bottom shelf, so that is what I did with mine. That takes 16 more 6d nails, do not forget the pilot holes!
- I attached the door with some (purchased) handmade H hinges and made up a wooden latch. A lock just was not practical. I could not find one that looked right for this and those that were even close were quite expensive. Since half the ambries I looked at had some sort of wooden handle or latch, so I when with that as a reasonable substitute. I just do not do metalworking; I do not have enough space as it is just for woodworking.
- The finish is boiled linseed oil, the traditional finish. There is an old saying governing the application of it: Once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a year forever after that. Thanks to the pandemic, I could get two coats in some days by using light coats and keeping the shop warm.
Outcomes:
Everything except the carving is pretty basic woodworking and went quite quickly. The carving, not so much. After sinking more than 20 hours into the stiles, I was too sore and did not have enough time to finish the door. So, this is very much a work in progress.
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