Knocking Down the Shed. Probably the last part.

Redacted Reader,

Sadly, the shed is still gone, and several things as well as several other things have already been blogged about. How about some more curious things then, from more recent times?

I had access to far too many Victorian tips as a child, and spent far too long wandering around them picking up odd things. With my grandparents living in an 18th century farm house, there were also always things appearing in their flowerbeds. There were plenty of other places too that I found the most unexpected things, here we go:

We’ll start with the oldest bits – this is part of a late sixteenth/early seventeenth century Bellarmine jug – an upstart cardinal who attempted to get all of western Europe excommunicated following the Protestant reformations. He wasn’t liked very much, so was caricatured as a demonic bearded face on wine and beer jugs for some fifty years.

This slightly later piece must have been a beach find, it was loose among several bags from Pembrokeshire. It’s probably from a late 17th century salt glazed jug

These are just two large sherds that came out of a box of pieces of the same vessel from Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s probably 17th century ish, and a wonderful example of imported majolica ware that would have graced only the finest of fine tables.

There was a lot of blue and white china. An awful lot. These weren’t even the largest pieces.

A very masonic clay pipe bowl!

As a kid I had an obsession with collecting clay pipe and taking apart the shed uncovered my collection, some two and a half thousand pieces of stems and bowls of varyingly complete pipes, a few of them dating back into the 17th century. The novelty bowls were the best, and there were plenty of interesting ones including animals, faces, and even one celebrating the opening of Crystal Palace.

There were plenty of bottles – some hundred or so – including a lot of ink pots, like this one still sporting its glass stopper.

Some bottles were familiar, this bottle of Gordon’s Gin is about a hundred years old.

Others were from father afield, like this one that I had found in a local Victorian tip, but had been brought over from Queensland

And then some bottles were just fascinating local examples – this one was produced in my village when phones were so scarce that your number could simply be Danbury 129

Another local find was this musket ball, which came from the common in Danbury where that fool Hillary had set up his ill-conceived army camp

Military finds seeming to be a theme, these bullet casings came from my old primary school, where there had been a WW2 training camp

And that is it! The shed is clear, and I managed to stop myself from hoarding away too much of it again. These few things that I’ve featured here, though, along with several boxes of Roman, Medieval, and more modern things I will now have to try and find a place for, or rehome…

Adieu, happy Reader!

 

Knocking Down the Shed. Part Three.

Forthcoming Reader,

As you are hopefully now very aware on this integral subject, the shed is gone, and I’ve already blogged about some old stuff. Let’s continue (with the medieval bits).

My main area of historical interest, especially as a kid, was the middle ages – castles, knights, battles – all the sorts of things that the sensationalised parts of history encourage in the imagination of young children. So the shed just might have been full of a lot of stuff from then.

This long bit of metal was something I had really hoped I’d find – it’s a window catch, but the site this one’s from dates it to c1500

This wonderful knife blade is also late medieval, but very battered – it was recovered from a spoil heap put together by a JCB so was probably damaged by the digger.

Ironwork is a tricky thing to look after – it degrades quickly in the wrong conditions (similar to decayed glass) and what state it might be in was a bit of a worry, but I was very happy and impressed that the metal had actually lasted perfectly where it had been sat for the last ten years.

There was a surprising amount of building stone as well as brick and floortiles in the shed, this is a rather nice medieval window mullion

Good quality building materials are often scarce especially on medieval Essex sites, where a lack of stone means that pretty much everything that could be taken away and reused was. Bicknacre Priory for example, after that burned down at the start of the 19th century, was almost completely pulled down over the subsequent twenty years and used to build roads.

On one site we dug on the owner of the medieval house that stood nearby came and asked if anyone would need the bricks when the dig was over. There were so many bags of them that we’d just weigh them and put that in the report, so after that they went off and were used to repair his house!

These are two floor tiles, likely discarded having been broken when they were removed from the floor when whichever building they were in was being demolished. The one on the right still has traces of its green glaze

A close up of a nicely decorated medieval floor tile fragment

Danbury was of course a famous centre of tilemaking in the Medieval period, and since these tiles were found locally they may well have been made not far from my back garden where they now (or at least did until now) reside.

There was a lot of window glass. This medieval piece still had painted hatchings across it from whatever design it once had

This little thing comes from a monastic site – I didn’t know what it was when I first found it, but was later told it’s a stylus and could either have been used for markings on wax, or for drawing out template lines in a scriptorium

I suppose I should close this with something nice, and of all the pieces of pot this is a particularly nice one. It’s just the base of a pot, probably a storage jar or something mundane, but someone had clearly attempted to pick it up before it was fired, and left their mark!

Adieu, Happy Reader!

A One-Eyed French Egyptian Omelette

Trusty Reader,

I mentioned the other day to a friend about needing to cook up my hangover cure, apparently they hadn’t heard me mention it before, so it’s unlikely I’ve blogged about it either. I’ll do that now then.

I am a tad hungover right now, and one of these has just given the strength to tap together this post.

Enjoy.

What you’ll need

Ingredients

• 2 Large or 3 Medium Eggs
• Sliced Bread, there’s no point spending time slicing bread when you’re hung over
• Cooking Oil
• I guess some salt and pepper if you really have time for seasoning

Kitchen things

• Frying Pan
• Pretty big bowl
• Spatula
• Fork or Whisk

What you need to do

1. Give this recipe to someone less hungover
2. Break one egg into the bowl and beat it
3. Cut a hole in the middle of one slice of bread
4. Soak one side of the slice in the egg
5. Heat up some oil in the frying pan
6. Once hot, drop the bread egg-side down into the pan
7. Immediately break the second egg over the top of the slice in the pan, with the yolk in the hole
8. Let it fry for sixty seconds or so, then flip it carefully over and briefly fry the egg.
9. Soak one side of the second slice of bread in the egg
10. Flip the bread in the pan again so the side with the fried egg is back on top, and lay the second slice of bread (eggy side up) on top.
11. The pan probably needs a bit more oil in it by this point
12. Now flip the sandwich over and fry the raw egg side for a minute or so.
13. Break the third egg into the bowl and whisk it, then pour it over the top of the sandwich and cook it into a omelette around it, you may need to flip the sandwich again to cook the omeletted top.
14. Put on a plate, add ketchup.

Also cures pretty much anything else that could be wrong with you.

Adieu, Dear Reader!

Knocking Down the Shed. Part Two.

Paradoxical Reader,

If you weren’t aware, the shed is now knocked down.

I figured I’d do three further small posts on what I found, starting with the very old stuff.

A rooftile, from a very old roof.

I’ll start with this rooftile – it’s classic L-shape and rather imperfect matrix are immediately recognisable as Roman, and in fact this could well be my first ever Roman find. I picked it up when I was about eight and for a long time was the pride of my shelf-of-very-old-things when I was a kid. It comes from Colchester, that noble capital of Cymbeline’s, and turned up in a playground that I happened to be at. (This piece was found on the same day that I picked up a beautiful piece of a coat of arms off of a Belarmine jar, which I have not seen in about fifteen years and had hoped, in vain, would appear from the shed.)

Then, from out of a plastic bag not far away, appeared these wonderful little shaped stones – several still with the white mortar adhering to one side – Tesserae. These would have once been a part of a very fine Roman mosaic since they were very small, very well cut, and made from stone rather than broken up tile or brick.

These will have been from one of my childhood trips to Caerwent, where there are more Roman finds laying on the ground than flowers.

The fine-ness of the previous Tesserae was all the clearer when a second bag revealed these pieces, much cruder and therefore probably from a much cheaper mosaic.

There was a lot of old pot in the shed. A real lot. These two above pieces were a particularly nice find, though, being probably 1st or 2nd century and fitting together.

I am definitely giving the impression that my archaeological collections here started with the Romans – of course that’s not true, there are plenty of older things than the odd bit of Roman pot. (I’ve already blogged about that.) The above pieces are two lovely flints, probably Mesolithic or Neolithic, which came off of a spoil heap from some building works that I happened to do some climbing over as a kid.

Some things were even older – and I did spend a few years when I was really young hunting for fossils. The above is one of my favourites and I actually thought I’d got it stored somewhere safer than down the bottom of the garden. It’s a fish head, and one of the finds that when I was about nine I was encouraged to send to a local museum along with some other things to get identified. I got a note back simply confirming that I had sent them a rock – apparently they weren’t particularly knowledgeable on fossils.

And it wouldn’t be a post on fossils if an ammonite or two didn’t make an appearance, somewhere I’ve got a few fools gold ammonites that I picked up. Not in the shed though, so no photos of them here.

I suppose I’ll do a post on the medieval things I found next.

Adieu, happy Reader!

Knocking Down the Shed. Part one.

Igneous Reader,

Like your own constitution, the fiery nature of the summer has taken my time away from my keyboard and away from this blog. At least I claim this, but I am redesigning my personal website so that may also have kept me busy. Although – happy Reader – let me blog a upon a little (now vanished) shed.

This year marks a whole 15 others since I joined my first ever archaeology club, aged 9, and it’s been over 20 years now since I started surprising relatives by digging toddler sized holes in their back gardens.

This summer was, however, the last summer for a little shed that has been sat at the bottom of our garden since me and my brother got it as a birthday present back in 1998. It started life as just a place to play in, but quickly had shelves added where odd finds appeared on display – and by the time I was ten it was basically my own museum.

When I moved bedrooms at about 14 I turfed a lot more odd finds out of my old room and into the shed, and since then it has sat pretty much undisturbed at the bottom of the garden. I moved out for university, came back, and left again – and the shed slowly began to fall down; this summer was time for the ruinous thing to go, and at last nearly two decades worth of pot, nails, tiles, bottles, and more to be sorted through.

There was a lot. Hence the title part one.

This cheeky little face was one of the first things I saw as we took off the roof and front wall of the shed – fallen off a collapsed shelf, it was an almost complete turn-of-the-century egg cup

Collapsed shelves were the first problem to be worked out before finds could be sorted through. Ivy had pushed through the back of the shed and forced a whole load of shelves over, miraculously with nothing breaking – probably because everything had fallen off slowly together.

A hole in the roof had also let in leaves and water, so a season’s worth of dead leaves needed clearing off of things. I won’t go into the re-homing of a decade’s worth of spiders.

Some things were still carefully boxed and tissue wrapped as I’d left them when they were found – this wealth of medieval window lead comes from a spoil heap or two at the first site I dug on.

How did I come by all these things? Well, a lot were scavenged from gardens of friends or relatives (I had one friend as a child whose garden was full of Roman pot, and we never found out why). Other bits come from beach trips, there’s some from just along local footpaths, and more bottles than I can count from a local 19th century tip. But the real wealth of things came from spoil heaps, which my child-self was allowed to climb over and keep whatever was found since it was out of context. This was at least until on one site I found part of a Norman font dropped onto the spoil by a digger – I did report that to the dig director and for some reason he didn’t want me to keep it.

There were plenty of boxes of pottery; from prehistoric through to modern, and certainly a healthy few boxes of medieval.

I was very careful from a very young age to label every single thing that I found as to where it came from – hence each box or in some cases even individual finds were accompanied by little labels, and my far too precise memory of my childhood adventures filled in any unclear gaps.

This medieval window glass comes from Beeleigh Abbey, and is the spoil-heap-recovered part of a small mountain of fragments that were found discarded in the remains of the guest wing, having been stripped of their valuable lead at the dissolution.

The happy Reader can kindly learn that I intend to post a few more of these little snapshots of the shed and its peculiar contents, and the little highlights – many of which I certainly had not expected to find.

Adieu, dear Reader!