... I love that alliteration!
London is a very special town for a wide range of reasons, but one of them is it's age and it's location on the river
Thames. London first grew massively in Roman times and every civilization then and since has thrown their rubbish into the river. This is not unusual, the unusual part is that the Thames is tidal within the city area (i.e. the water levels rise and fall with the tides) and the bed of the Thames naturally is covered in silt that is likely to bury anything thrown into the river. However the tides keep moving the silt, so now you have oxygen-poor surroundings that softly wrap around anything you throw in and that keep getting re-layered - uncovering other items every time.
This amazing feature means that an item dropped into the Thames may emerge the next day or maybe two millenia later. This includes things like slaugherhouse-bones and broken bottles, but it also includes things like roman coins or medieval belt buckles. In general, if you look a the Thames foreshore at low tide, it seems there are now more human-caused solid items buried in the silt than stones.
It's the promis of treasure or maybe just free coal that started the tradition of
mudlarking. Mudlarks used the low tides to walk across the foreshore and pick up anything they could use or sell.
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| Mudlarks in Victorian England, image taken from Wikipedia |
The tradition has lasted on and up until 2016 you could spontaneously go and mudlark as long as you adhered to a set of very reasonable rules (here only very loosely phrased, don't take my word but look them up)
- don't go to spots that are of historic relevance (there's a list of banned areas),
- don't take anything of historic or monetary value - if you're not sure go to the Museum of London and let them decide,
- don't dig or use metal detectors,
- don't get yourself drowned
However Mudlarking has become so popular that you now need a
permit from the Thames Mudlark Society and the restrictions on areas and showing the Museum of London have become stricter too. As mentioned before: please check up rules on
official sites before going out for a lark.
When I lived in the UK (pre 2016) I went mudlarking several times. I never really was interested in finding anything valuable, I was interested in finding things that were interesting. This was made vastly easier by having two befriended archeologists that I would go mudlarking with and regularly hand fists full of shards and fragments and ask what they were and how they knew. I was much more interested in figuring out how an animal had been slaughtered from a tiny bone shard than finding an intact vessel. So the things I brought back usually had value to me, but no historical or financial value at all.
For years these lived in a little box, but I wanted them (and many other things) out and visible, so I have now started working on a little museum.
Using a black box frame similar to
this one from Ikea I covered the back in fabric and started sorting my finds. I figured that non-fragile items with stable surfaces like pipe-stems, teeth, bone, glass and ceramics could be hot-glued on, while fragile items like ancient leather, or items with a fragile surface like corroded iron needed to be stitched to the cloth.
With some playing around I reached an arrangement that I was happy with and attached all items. Sadly my bottle neck is a little to deep for the box frame, so it doesn't close entirely, but it closes well enough to hang so that's fine with me.
Now describing the items and their stories can literally fill books (such as
London in Fragments, which I highly recommend), so I'll try to be brief in my descriptions - maybe a more detail guided tour at some other point.
- Top left: group of four teeth. These teeth are herbivore teeth, the larger two presumably cow, the smaller two sheep or goat. Due to the place I picked these up at, the previous owners of these teeth may well have been slaughtered and sold at the Borough Market, a food market in central London dating back to the twelfth century. Based on that, these teeth may well have been thrown into the river any time between the twelfth and the nineteenth century
- Top middle: three ceramic shards. These are quite different, two being handpainted blue and one being terracotta-red with attached slag. I don't know any context to the terracotta-red one at all but was very much intrigued by the slag. Maybe it had been in a building fire. The blue hand-painted ones (especially the dark one) looks like Delftware and would probably be from the 17th to 18th century
- Top right: group of pipe stems and fragment of a head. Pipe stems are often one of the first things you develope an eye for when mudlarking. Initially you don't see them at all, but once you've started to see them you see them everywhere. There must be millions of the things in the Thames. I have found intact heads, but I have gifted them to other people... as mentioned before I didn't keep anything remotely valuable. Pipe stems are from the 17th to 19th century and though the stems themselves can be dated, it's easiest to date a pipe from it's bowl.
- Bottom left: leather shoe sole: this is the front half of a leather shoe sole that was nailed in rows. It could date from late middle ages to after the first world war, but I like to fancy it was part of the hob-nailed boot of a soldier from the first world war. Hell knows, I didn't really bother to try and date this
- Bottom left: red clay handle. Of a pot or something
- Bottom left-ish: translucent red glass. 'Gold Ruby' glass was lost to the ages between Roman-times and the 17th century. In the middle ages red glass was common, but always opaque, and even now translucent red is somewhat tricky. It's rediscovery was made in the 17th century near to Potsdam, about 10km from my current home, so that makes it double special. This shard is probably 19th century Victorian, because then 'Gold Ruby' glass was very fashionable in the UK.
- Middle: iron fragments. These are very difficult to date, so I focussed on their use. The longest fragment is quite finely made, rectangular in cross section and twisted decoratively. It may habe been used as the handle of a metal cooking pot. There are also two nails with large hand-forged heads. The lower of the two is quite straight with a sharp bend, which makes it probable that it was used to rivet something together, probably the planks of a ship. The upper nail is oddly bent and looks as though it may have been pulled out of it's original position before being dumped (while the riveted one may have been part of a sunk vessel). Finally there is a key which might be quite new but it's fancy nevertheless
- Bottom middle: brown ceramic shard. Unremarkable except that it has a wide range of tooling marks from being a hand-turned vessel
- Bottom right: green glass bottle neck. Quite uneven, obviously hand-blown. I haven't put much effort into dating it
Phew, enough talking, if I continue then I have written for longer than it has taken me to make this.
This is the beginning of my museum
Formalities
- Materials: box-frame, Glue, Fabric, items, hot-glue, thread
- Tools: hot glue gun, needle
- Time: About 1h (plus another hour writing this)
