During the exhaustive investigations of the site and structure in Coffee Yard, it became clear that any restoration of the property to its medieval origins would involve a great deal of reconstruction. After up to 600 years in place, most of the timbers were just no longer safe to use. In the end, after reconstruction was complete, only about 30% of the timber framing used original wood. However, the medieval remains allowed modern craftsmen to make authentic replicas of the originals and the medieval timber framework was remade and re-erected using as far as possible the tools and techniques familiar to medieval craftsmen.

The Reconstruction

The building is in two distinct halves - the Great Hall range dating from the early 15th century and the Chamber range dating from 1360. The former was in far better condition and it was possible to do the rebuilding and reconstruction on site. The Great Hall range was rebuilt by a local firm, Houghton's of Dunnington. In contrast, the older Chamber range was essentially built again from scratch offsite, as indeed would have been the case with the original medieval structure, which would have been shaped and assembled in the forest where the timbers were felled before being taken apart and brought to the city for reassembly. This work was done in Berkshire by timber-framing expert Peter McCurdy, whose company later went on to reconstruct the Globe Theatre in Southwark, London.

Just as their medieval counterparts would have done, as the McCurdy team constructed the Chamber range off site in Berkshire, each timber was marked to show which part joined where. Then the whole structure was disassembled and brought to York, in early 1992. If you know York, you'll appreciate that getting these huge timbers all the way into Coffee Yard was a challenge in itself, and in fact it was only possible to bring them in by night to avoid bringing the city centre to a standstill! Then, a special crane had to be brought from Italy that could cope with hoisting the timbers into place in the narrow confines of the Coffee Yard. However, once everything was ready the reconstruction went remarkably quickly.

The roof areas of Barley Hall are covered with authentically made replica medieval tiles made by the potter John Hudson. John also made all the floor tiles in the Great Hall. The discovery of the mortared remains of a tiled floor in the Great Hall area of Barley Hall was a real find for the archaeologists, and the broken scraps of tile were used by John to recreate the originals. The reconstructed floor exactly follows the pattern of the original as far as the laying of the tiles go, with the colour pattern taken from contemporary illustrations. The central hearth is in fact a medieval original, which was discovered during a rescue dig at Rawcliffe, near York and is strikingly similar to the hearth found in Barley Hall's Great Hall. The original mortared floor and hearth remain in place over a foot below the current floor level.