I generally just have a makefile that for each page does `cat header.html page.html footer.html > out/page.html`. I realize this can be considered a "static site generator" but I think simple concatenation covers most of the painpoints of writing static sites manually, without introducing intermediate formats and complex processing.

Another option is PHP, which was practically made for the purpose of generating HTML. You can run it on your pages to generate static versions, and just use "include" directives with that.