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, probably 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 the 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 looking for 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, they would 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 over oak: the ambry will be about ⅔ the weight of an oak one, it will be far easier to carve and it will have a very attractive color/grain pattern that will enhance the visual interest.

Even so, I don’t have boards of adequate width (13” – 17”), so we are going to be gluing up narrower boards using hide glue.

I used cut nails for this project. Cut nails don’t appear until the end of the 18^th Century but are a reasonable substitute for hand-forged wrought nails. Which, when you can find them, run $3-$4 each and this project uses almost 100 nails, so you get cut nails @ about $20/lb.

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 clench nailing them as they would have done in period. There is no do-over in clench nailing and I feared that operation would crack the walnut right on the last step of the project if I wasn’t careful. From more than a foot away, you would be hard-pressed to notice the difference even if you were aware screws weren’t used like this until later.