One Day Mudlarking By The River Thames And Here's What We Found

[Music] london is an ancient city they've been people living working on this spot for 2 000 years since it was established by the romans and at its heart is the river thames it's its reason for being but today it's also its greatest source of archaeology there are things on these mud banks that can tell us about this city's past i'm going to meet an expert now and together we're going to do some mud locking [Music] hello there hey dan good to meet you good to meet you too the legend of the mud flat i don't know about that um this is great isn't it it's amazing isn't it beautiful day it's a beautiful day and you're dead so when the tide goes out you come down here why i come down here to find history uh the tides go out twice every 24 hours and then you get access to the riverbed and uh you can find uh lost and discarded history two thousand years worth of lost and discarded history we just climbed down some steps can anyone do this anyone can do it you need a permit i assume you've got your permit yes of course good good you need a permit from the port of london authority once you've got your permit anyone can come down here the the area that we're searching today we're not allowed to disturb anything we can only pick things up off the surface so why is there anything on the surface why doesn't it just get swept out to sea or picked up by mud lockers like you do you find stuff there's lots of reasons i mean the river what has been a major highway it's brought in trade things have been lost and dropped and dumped it was a big rubbish dump for as long as the city's been around and also rivers in their natural um in in their natural way are v-shaped and what they've done here is they've built them up to create a flat platform for barges to rest on and what they used to build them up was rubbish so what's happening now is it's eroding and you can see all these revetments these old wooden revetments these are victorian and georgian they're all starting to break up and the river's getting in it's returning it back into that v shape so what it's washing out is domestic waste and it's scattering it across the foreshore and we find different things on every tide sorry to ask the boring question but what's the most exciting thing you've ever found here oh gosh um most exciting thing on this particular spot this particular area um well my favorite favorite find all round is a child's leather shoe that dates back 500 years it's a tudor shoe i didn't find it here but it's absolutely perfect condition um i have found the ivory end of a sword scabbard uh that once belonged to a roman auxiliary soldier so that's probably my my favorite finding from rome yeah it's incredible the things you find well can i have a go of course right what are we looking for tell me huh well we're looking for areas where it's eroding we're looking for patches of sand we're looking for little patches where small metal objects are washing up the river sorts by size and weight so once you find an area where there's lots of small metal objects that's where you find the pins and the coins and the little little metal things and we're also just generally looking for anything that looks unusual and out of place straight lines and perfect circles okay um are you allowed to do do you take this home or or do you go to the museum of london what happens with these fines well under under the terms of your permit you have to report anything of um that's an old piece of sewer pipe sewer pipe yeah that's my first ever farm sewer you're not the first the things that people pick up first are welding rods and sewer pipes they always come to me with welding rods and sewer pipes don't tell me sewer pipe that's not a sewer pipe no yes there's a piece of stoneware um that could have some age to it actually um it's hard to tell it's not much of it but you can see it's partly glazed partly not basically i'd say that could be post medieval post medieval well i'm an 18th century so i'm happy that i yes that's the best thing about bang on then with that what a joy yeah and you get you learn to read the foreshore and you you watch the foreshore change and um and it can change overnight or it can stay the same for months so if you're coming down regularly you you just learn the places where it's good to go and and look so uh and there's a bit of pottery bit of pottery there there we go yeah that's glazed is that more modern do you think that's really hard because it's it's red wear and red where's quite common it was made right through from medieval times through to victorian times this is probably a couple of hundred years old maybe 18th century again wow i said actually that's mine that's my sweet spot [Music] so what what would be your perfect find today then my perfect fight i'm very i haven't got very high expectations i'd be very satisfied with an iron age uh ornate uh shield or or perhaps a a viking long sword okay we'll see what we can do what are the some of the more unusual finds coins um fairly unusual if you're searching by eye sometimes roman hair pins roman game counters beads are nice to find and of course the oldest things we find are fossils that date back you know hundreds of years sometimes you find work flints but i mean i'm not great at identifying them but sometimes they they just stand out amongst all these other flames that's obviously pre roam in fact stone age so you might find uh mesolithic neolithic yeah okay what a star what a slice through history it is i mean it goes back through you know 2 000 years okay here we go here we go this feels 19th century to me but i may be wrong yes blue china yeah yeah transfer aware blue china it could be part of the willow pattern from the from the outside that's the most common pattern that you find but it could be anything it's hard to tell but yeah victorian late victorian early early 20th century um i can see a little bit of clay pipe stems i've just seen it yeah should i get it up i mean that when you look they're actually everywhere there's another bit here there's a bit by your boot so um these are these are really common because so they're the cigarette buttons of the of the early modern period the medieval period well you know it's a bit of a bit of a fallacy actually that um that that people smoke them once and then threw them away um they didn't you know our ancestors weren't wasteful they'd smoke them they broke very easily and they'd smoke them until they got too short for a cool smoke and then they became nose warmers and then they probably got rid of them but you know there's so many because everybody smoked everybody was good and it was fashionable um it was the cool thing to do so they're everywhere so so far no breakthroughs that are helping us reinterpret the city's past it's a nice thing to do is that you're on the riverboat just even if you come away with nothing it's just a beautiful thing to do now is this a bone it is what's that mean well this isn't that probably an animal bone um you'll find them everywhere on the foreshore great piles of them because the river was a dump so people threw their domestic waste into the river this one's been smashed up maybe to get the marrow out of it um so it's just it's just domestic waste um a lot of people think it's it's human remains and it's not i mean there might be a few human bones mixed up with it but um mostly it's animal bones from you know the glue factory butchers and it's what the original mudlugs were looking for bones they collected bones to take to the glue factory they made money out of them the original mud locks yeah so that so the um today modern mudmarks we're people who we just do it for a hobby out of interest back in victorian times and before the mudlars really were the lowest of the low there were people scraping a living just one step away from the workhouses and they'd come down here and it was mainly women and old people and children who really couldn't do much else and they'd scrape around for anything they could collect to sell to to make a few pennies just to get by so they picked up bones and lumps of coal and if they were lucky they might find a copper nail or a tool that one of the shipbuilders had dropped and that's how they managed to make this pathetic living for themselves but they were the lowest of the low the very first time the maddox were mentioned uh written about was by a man called patrick calhoun and he was the man who established the river police uh at the end of the 18th century and um he wrote about the mud larks as well as all these other criminal gangs that were preying on the west india ships that were sitting at anchor out in the river waiting to unload sometimes for up to six months and while they sat there they their cargos of spices and rum and sugar were being prayed on by scuffle hunters and um river pirates and night horsemen and the muddarks were the ones that were poking around in the mud at the bottom and they received the packages of spices and the bladders of rum and took them to the taverns at rotherhithe and whopping to be conveyed on into the black market so night horsemen river pirates scuff what scuffle hunters they have great players names yes i know you're in a great tradition yes and then of course there were the toshas and they were the uh the mud locks that also went up into the sewers and they went into the network of sewers under london searching for anything that had dropped down there and got caught up between the bricks and they made a better living actually than the mudlarks they were usually men and there were quite healthy men mayhew wrote about them in quite a lot of detail and they they hunted in gangs because it was quite dangerous under there they could be overcome by fumes and attacked by rats and drown in the slurry um but they found some good stuff and they made a good living muslim drank it away though i think in the pubs but it's a pretty good immune system yes a very good immune system so this is a pretty good place to search here okay so you can see there's uh there's uh stones and they end and then it becomes um sand so this is a place where you might find something we can see a little bit of 20th century glass around which we're not super excited by oyster shells oyster shells now these oyster shells from oysters that lived here or the from oyster beds that used to be here or from people eating oranges and tossing them into this river they are all from um domestic waste people eating oysters yeah um the oysters don't live this far up they live out in the estuary and um the ashrae is very famous for its oysters but if you if you look at them they're mostly they're the native oysters the curly ones that you get in the um uh restaurants these days they were introduced in the 1920s after these have been killed off basically by pollution um and uh so so these are the flat native ones and these could date back two thousand years you know the romans we were we were famous here for our oysters and the romans would pack them into barrels with brine and send them off into the uh into the empire so you know the romans were eating them and obviously the victorians you could get free for a penny it was protein for the poor lovely idea of people here in the square mile eating the oysters and tossing it into the river and then we find it years later so exciting [Music] so the original models would have been looking for things like this um from newcastle coles from newcastle yeah down from the northeast probably on colliers captain cook cut his teeth on those collies yeah so that could have been off his ship it could have been yeah i mean the river would have been filled with them you know fueling the industrializing city and the mudlarks were looking for this there was a famous muddler called peggy jones who muddled up at blackfriars on this side of the river and um she was written about um going into the river up to her waist and feeling around for the coals with her feet and the collar would sometimes feel sorry for her and drop a lumbar two in and she she she'd gather up as much as she could she'd wash it uh take it up and sell it and and and by gin with it and then she was seen staggering around the streets half cut before she retired her miserable lodgings in chick lane and then one day pearl peggy jones just disappeared and nobody knows what happened to her maybe she was washed away and she's still in the river who knows hang on there's a bit of pipe pipe down here ah what's that oh look it's beautiful it's got little what do you call those little markings milling it's milled around the top it's beautiful isn't it yeah you date pipes by the size so the smaller they are the older they are the very smallest ones a day from around 1580. that's quite small quite small that's mid-1600s probably it would have been around during the great fire of london which of course raged through this path of london if we'd been standing here 300 years ago we'd have had our eyebrows singed burnt off yeah this could have been during the great fire thrown into the river who knows yeah that's right the great samuel peeps yes yeah that's the same age as people yeah yeah love that right what else we've got here just look so we have a good look around here this would be a good area to look in right so here we go um a button oh look a little flat little fly button so that would be uh late 19th century it's a fly or suspender button sometimes they've got the name of the tailor written and it and usually a friend they're from the east end so they're quite nice to research you can research them right back to whoever made the clothes they fell off um then if we okay right okay so we need to kneel down here oh so if we look very carefully around here i can see just here what is that how did you spot that what there's a handmade pin that is ridiculous you are superhuman so each one of those is made by hand and they date from between 1400 and about 1800 when the process was mechanized and they would have drawn the wire to gauge cut it to length wrapped another piece of wire around the top a couple of times and soldered it and then polished and sharpened each one by hand this is a good spot where you find one you usually find more is that one there yep yes there you go well done yeah i'm very pleased with myself that's very good and where the pins are that's where you find the other small metal objects you can see lots and lots of blobs of lead here so it's all washed together and there's a there's a lace aglet it's the hard bits on the end of the laces that help you to lace your shoes but when people were lacing themselves into bodices and lacing up their cod pieces and their jerkins as well as the pins they had laces and on the end of the laces were these handmade little tubes of metal that were either riveted in place or sewn onto the end of the uh of the laces do you ever find anything that you don't know what it is all the time yes i do you do find quite a lot of these so um you know i know what these are but yeah i'm always finding things i don't know what they are oh that's nice what's that something i don't know what it is but it's got a stamp with a crown on it this is exciting it could be part of a is it lead yeah it's yeah it's amazing yeah it's led so it's part of a probably a cloth seal so they would uh wool and cloth had to come up to certain standards and they had to pay taxes on it and so lead seals were attached to the bolts of woolen cloth with um the stamps of the dyers and the cloth makers and you do find them around here so that's quite a nice one that's fantastic that's one of my favorites so far okay we're in a good spot now so do you ever not find anything no i always come home with something even if it's just a few pins you know it's sort of you always come home with something i like it's a good day if i come home something i don't know what it is and then i've got got something to research when i get home [Music] okay so let's have an update what have you found okay so i picked this up just because i really like roof tiles i know that's a bit weird but this has got a hole in it for the wooden peg but it's burnt so what do you think hold on are we looking this is great of london action you never know you just don't know i mean it comes from before the great fire of london when after then they started to nail them on and the holes become smaller and it's burnt it's broken and it's burnt so far in london yeah it could be you know maybe they did throw some of the rubble over here and onto the foreshore and that could be parked uh what else we got in here right we have part of our face lovely so that's 16th or 17th century german stoneware bottle called the bellamy um and they have these beautiful beardy faces on there there's a nose and a bit of beard though and the beard would have come down over the belly of the these little stoneware pot belly bottles and uh they came from germany and um the the the beardy man is actually the wild man of folklore bit like the green man but um because he was said to look like a catholic cardinal called cardinal bellamani um and it was around during the time of religious turmoil it said that the protestants like the smash these bottles the seas facing pieces which is why there's lots of bits of them but i don't know that's probably an urban myth okay so i think we felt quite a lot today especially somebody's been on archaeological digs and the whole days go by the thing is this a normal day a good day it's pretty average days average days no wonder people like mud lacking you're guaranteed fines if you know whether if you know what you're looking for um x-ray vision like you a lot of it's practice i mean i've been doing it nearly 20 years 15-20 years and you know you get you get your eye in um so someone coming down on the off chance for the first time around probably wouldn't find this much stuff but once you've been doing it for a while you start to see things right let's let's head through these posts [Music] i just love being down here amidst these sort of skeletal outlines of of georgian and victorian peers i think they're amazing it is it's a magical place it really is especially on a day like this yeah ah what you got coin what don't be silly coin coin fine do you want to pick it up or should i pick it up well you found it you pick it up you're joking where is it that's a big coin it's a big one look at that one what is it oh my goodness it's george your second george but that's britannia isn't it yeah yeah with her shield yeah that is too exciting today georgius two is it two rex oh my goodness that is cool and there's it there he is with his wreath like his roman in his roman outfit somewhat bizarrely yes oh my god that's exciting your hero amazing that has just made my day made my day so oh [Music] i've walked these streets like millions of other people i've crossed this river a hundred times i've been on boats i've known this river i have never realized i was passing by a treasure trove of archaeological material so thank you very much you're very welcome and it's addictive i can guarantee [Music] you

Channel: History Hit

Views: 152,185

Keywords: london mudlark, clay pipes, metal detecting, beach combing, old coins, river hunters, mudlarking best finds, mudlarking locations, lara maiklem, mudlarking in london, river thames, best mudlarking finds, mudlarking videos, london mudlark lara maiklem, mudlarking the river thames, best mudlarking videos, london mudlarking, dan snow mudlarking, river thames mudlarking, river thames london, river thames history, river thames finds, history hit tv, history hit documentary

Id: O7hnl4ur_QY

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022