Building record LWT 848 - Fifteenth Century Timber framed tithe barn at 34 Crown Street West , Lowestoft

Number 34 Crown Street West was originally the tithe barn of the Church of St Margaret, but is now amongst the Late Victorian urban spread of Lowestoft. The four bay aisled barn is a grade II Listed building, thought to date to the fifteenth century and is now part of Crown Garage. Internally there are plank-like arch braces between the posts and the tiebeams and aisle plates. Purlins with wind braces remain, however most of the rook above tiebeam level has been renewed, probably in the nineteenth or twentieth century,

Nine timbers were sampled from this building. The ring series derived from five of these timbers were found to cross-match and were combined to form a 101-year site master chronology. Two of the cross-matched samples retained complete sapwood which indicated that the timbers represented were derived from trees felled at the same time. The remaining three cross-matched samples all had the heartwood/sapwood boundary present and appear likely to have been felled at the same, or similar, time to those two with complete sapwood. The site master chronology, however, could not be conclusively dated by ring-width dendrochronology when compared to an extensive range of relevant reference chronologies. Radiocarbon dating was undertaken on six single-ring samples from two timbers in the site master chronology. Wiggle-matching of these results suggests that the final ring of this site master chronology formed in cal AD 1602–1620 (95% probability) or cal AD 1606–1616 (68% probability). This is compatible with the tentative dating produced for the site master chronology by ring-width dendrochronology, which suggests that it spans AD 1509–1609. The tentative tree-ring date can only be accepted because it is supported independently by the radiocarbon wiggle-matching, but together they suggest that the five timbers represented in site master chronology were felled in the winter of AD 1609/10DR (S1).