“They sat him down at a rough-hewn table, and a servant brought wine.”

-Two against Tyre

Possibly built on his unusual use of hew and hewn in describing action and its aftermath, Howard employed this action-oriented, compound idiom to imbue even the interior of a shelter with a rough sense of the dynamic.

rough-hewn

adj

1. (Building) cut or hewn roughly, with an unfinished surface

2. shaped roughly or crudely