CONSTRUCTION
The framework of panelling is morticed and tenoned together, and pinned with oak pins. Seasoned wood was required or else, as Shakespeare notices, the panel would warp:
­ "This fellow will but join you together as they join wainscot ; Then one of you will prove a shrunk panel and like green timber, warp, warp."
Mouldings were at first cut in the solid in early examples ; and the mason's mitre is used, that is, the rails abut squarely on to the stiles, and the mouldings are returned and mitred in stone-masons' method. Woodworkers' technique appears, however, in the form of the stepped moulding, in which the mouldings of both vertical and horizontal framing are stepped before the point of junction, as in the hall screen in Haddon Hall. Early in the sixteenth century, however, as in the Waltham Abbey panelling (circ. 1520) now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the mouldings of the stiles die out before reaching the rails, thus allowing either a vertical or horizontal framing to be moulded in one piece. Later, instead of stopping the moulding, this was carried on to intersect with the moulding, meeting it at right angles, thus forming a mitre ; and mitred mouldings, which appear in the panels from Beckingham Hall, dated z 54.6, were almost universally in use by the close of the sixteenth century. There is a chamfer or splayed edge at the bottom of each panel.
The framework mouldings of the wainscot of the old Palace, Bromley-by-Bow, 1606, which are worked in the solid, project slightly above the surface, and are continued all round the panel, not splayed at the bottom of each panel as in earlier wainscot. Applied mouldings in which a separate moulding is planted on and glued to the panel was a labour-saving contrivance that allowed scope for the mitred panels of the later half of the seventeenth century. Wainscot was usually coloured until the middle of the seventeenth century. The framework of the panels was frequently painted red, and the panels themselves decorated with designs in various colours. At Bramshill payment was made in 1618 for painting two chambers with "walnut culler," t but survivals of the original graining, marbling, or other colour schemes are rare.
WOODS OAK, WALNUT, PINE AND FIR OAK
For wainscoting and interior work, the use of oak is universal, all other woods (in Harrison's words) being neglected, " nothing but oak any whit regarded." Oak is a wood of a fine brown colour varying in shade, and shrinking considerably in seasoning. The young wood of English oak is very tough and does not combine well with glue, whereas foreign oak and that of old trees is more brittle and workable! As it is invariably framed up and pinned together by oak pegs, there is no decomposition, as in modern work, owing to the use of iron nails which are corroded by the acid secreted by the wood.' It will be found, on examining the back of old panels, that the wood has been rent, and as oak can only be cloven on the line of the medullary rays, this method shows better figure or silver grain than when sawn on the quarter. In many examples, as in the wainscoted room at the old Palace, Bromley-by-Bow, the silver grain is dark brown and raised above the surface of the wood. These richly figured panels were, as Evelyn writes, in request until the importation of the finer­grained Norway oak' after the Restoration, and it will be noticed that these curiously veined woods are much in evidence in the panels, where they show to the best advantage That the word wainscot' was applied to oak, rather than to panelling as we now use it, is evident from Harrison's description of England, in which he mentions the importation of wood from Denmark. This use of the word lingered until the early nineteenth century, when Jane Austen speaks of the old pews in the chapel of Sotherton (before mahogany pews were substituted) as " only wainscot."
WALNUT
The English walnut was only planted in the late years of the sixteenth century, while the black walnuts was not introduced until about 1656, when it is mentioned among the list of plants grown in the younger Tradescant's garden." Walnut wood, therefore, must have been imported -probably from Southern and Central France ­for cabinet work, and its use for wainscot, as in the fine rooms formerly at Rotherwas, in Herefordshire, is exceptional.
PINE AND FIR
These soft white woods appear by records to have been employed, not as in the eighteenth century as painted wall-linings, but in their natural surface as a rarity. A parlour at Chatsworth is recorded to have been "fayre waynscotted with white wood" in an inventory of the "building" Countess of Shrewsbury ; and in an inventory taken some time between 1596 and 1609 (or very shortly afterwards), the study in the great chamber of Brooke House, Hackney, is noted as wainscoted with deal.' Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, ambassador to Sweden during the Commonwealth, on his return to England in 1654 brought with him a cargo of deal boards, which he mentions in his journal to have been used at Fawley Court for new flooring his hall and for wainscoting it.
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Michael Jourdain is a man known in his field. This article teaches all you need to know from Wainscotting to standard wall panelling. http://wallpanelling.co.uk/
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