Carpentry baton

The carpentry club was discovered during excavations in 1992 in Szczecin’s Podzamcze, in the quarter spanning the Panieńska, Rybaki, Środowa and Rynek Warzywny streets, as part of a cultural layer dating back to the 12th century. The carpentry clubs – wooden tools cut from a single piece of wood with a clearly distinguishable handle – had a wide range of uses. They were used to build houses, boats, piers and fortifications. They allowed carpenters to drive wooden stakes, pegs and wedges of various sizes, which were used for splitting tree trunks into smaller pieces used for building streets and other wooden structures. They could also be used to make other tools – chisels and styluses. Depending on the type of work, carpentry clubs of various sizes were usually made of hard, damage-resistant oak or ash wood. The carpentry cudgel found in Szczecin has an oval-shaped handle and its working part. The surface still bears the marks of precise planing, left by a sharp knife, as well as small indentations along its length, which suggest that an iron chisel was used to make it.

Grzegorz Durdyń