ABSTRACT
The carpenter was not simply concerned with the construction of the floors and roof of a building; he had also to provide the scaffolding that gave the other tradesmen access to their work, build the temporary timber centres on which the bricklayers or masons might build their arches, and frame the timber falsework for plasterers' work. Works showing decorative details might be for the joiner while the bricklayer and mason needed some understanding of geometry but it was the carpenter who needed the widest range of skills. The geometrical problem of the hipped rafter was exacerbated when the building was not rectangular and this was the problem that Richards and many of the later writers on carpentry considered. The British Palladio belongs among eighteenth century books of house plans rather than among carpenters' manuals. The well informed carpenter would presumably have had little need of the information on construction with which he would have been commonly dealing.
