Roman, Medieval, Tudor Finds & a 17th Century Coin - Mudlarking with Nicola White &@Richard Hemery

good morning everyone it's 8 00 a.m in the morning and it's looking really beautiful down here and today i'm meeting up with Richard Hemery and i haven't seen richard for a while and he is a real pottery expert known as the Professor of Pottery and he knows pretty much everything there is to know about thames pottery and probably every other pottery the tides on the way out i think it's low tide at about 10 15 a.m so we've got a good couple of hours to see what the tide has thrown out for us and here he is Richard Hemery coming down the steps with his bag! Good morning Nic! how are you? good morning i'm very well thanks for meeting up with me richard it's been a little while hasn't it it's always a pleasure to come to the thames but this is the first time i've been to central london for nearly six months oh gosh is it is this your first time since the lockdown? I went out with Tobias a couple of weeks ago but this is the first time i've used public transport and come to central london for nearly six months so quite an expedition nice to be back and for those of you who don't know but i'm sure most of you do this is richard Hemery and richard is a mudlark and he's also very well versed in the knowledge of pottery let's say he's known as the professor of pottery and he can bring to life pottery by explaining where it came from or what might have been in it so this is just brilliant because there's a lot of pottery on the Thames for sure and it's something that i still am a little bit nervous about okay don't be afraid to ask the first thing i've spotted is hanging up over here what is it oh my goodness look it's a it looks like a possible candidate for the thames Tideline Art Thames lost toys orphanage isn't that strange i think it's got a little face underneath this um hair it looks deliberately placed there! yes you're right it does it looks like it's seen a a couple of tides a bit like the poor pirates that were hanging on the gibbets for the tides coming up and down it looks like a yeti or something yeah i'll tell you what we can do i'll leave it there and then maybe get it on the way back so richard's already picking up pieces of history what have you got there it's medieval surreyware whiteware buff colored clay from 1350 to 1500 1350? 1350 to 1500 and that's actually somebody's fingerprint that comes from the 14th century possibly yeah that's the potter's finger marks and sometimes you can get fingernail marks on the base you know where they've squeezed and that just helps the pot to be more stable on a sort of floor well well done you're off to a flying start thank you very much yes now i've just pulled this piece of pottery out of the mud it's got an interesting little rim at the base there i shall show that to richard see what he thinks i've got something to run by you here richard this here i just like the frilly oh that's a fantastic find is it yes oh it's a fantastic find!! :) it's a german stoneware drinking jug but it's 16th century the ones before the Bartmann face jugs it has the little frilled edges and if you um go into all the old paintings like the peasant wedding there's people using these sort of jugs in the 16th century and they found them on the mary rose as well goodness! so 16th century german stoneware drinking jug yeah from germany! well just look at that something 16th century I've spotted a coin here richard down here look oh hopefully it's not going to be so worn that we won't be able to see what it is. well i don't know oh hang on ! Is it a Victoria? No! That's William III - so fresh up that is william the third yeah which is what 1689 to 1702 i think but that's beautiful isnt it is it silver or is it copper? I dont know but look at that wonderful profile there now richard just filmed me extracting this little coin which is apparently william iii and i'm absolutely thrilled look at that stunning what have you got there richard um a little grey bit of clay yeah which from the shape of the rim being rounded i'm pretty sure is roman greyware maybe from alice holt or um hertfordshire somewhere like that so yeah just the rim of a humble storage pot but taking us back to roman london yeah which is a nice can you explain a little bit about why we get a significant amount of roman in this area um well the city of london the original square mile was the original roman settlement okay um so all the suburbs weren't settled by the romans so you do get a lot of Roman and also because they embanked the foreshore in victorian times yeah when they were digging out all the office buildings and all the basements they wouldn't do any archaeology they just dig out the soil dump it behind the revetments and now of course that's eroding and you do find a lot of roman pottery um in this part of the foreshore which i think probably comes from the victorian basements because it's not stratified right archaeologically okay super so all that history jumbled up all for sure absolutely what's this oh now what's that? now is that a tooth right so nick what do you think you've picked up there sharp eyed nick well i picked up this and initially i thought it was a boar tusk yes but now yeah look at it there it's very very sharp but now i'm wondering whether it could possibly be a bear claw i mean i'm kind of hoping that it is like a bear claw! there used to be um some bear baiting pits across the river and as you said earlier bears were killed for their grease weren't they so yeah that's right it's either a bear claw or a boar tusk. Yes, in Tudor times onwards it was good family entertainment baiting bears with dogs small but interesting small but perfectly formed uh that's a bit of roman hunt cup oh so it's colour coated and then they've trailed thick slip there that's the back of an animal probably a deer okay so they had these little drinking cups and they would have hunting dogs chasing round deer or hares around the the cup and they used to drink ale in this or wine that's right a little bit of medieval pottery hang on let's wait for that helicopter to go over there how dare it they know that we're busy filming inconsiderate oh my goodness what's going on okay right so a bit of medieval pottery you can tell by the fabric its' very thin and it's got that feathering pattern on - those rows of feathers going down a jug so it's probably a highly decorated jug which is a bit more older medieval so sort of 1250 to 1350 twelve fifty to thirteen fifty that's sort of age bracket so the whole surface of the jug would be covered in these little leaves or feathers and it would have made a very nice effect lovely so it might have been on the table of someone a little bit richer than your usual peasant yeah definitely a higher status thing so like um a tavern or as you say yes merchant's house yeah the lord or lady or the bishop someone like that to have his drinks served out of oh wonderful right we have found a piece of pottery that no self-respecting roman housewife would be without so it is mortarium oh that's a piece of mortarion yes with the little bits of flint yeah clear on one side um that's the outside face but on the inside it's got a coating of grits probably flint they've smoothed down with the you know hundreds of years rolling around in the river but they would have been proud of the surface and then you could use this vessel. It's got a thick rim that you could grip hold of and then you can grind your fish sauce your herbs and olive oil to make a lovely sauce or dish and then there's a spout on it to pour it out and serve it marvelous so another bit of roman london but very diagnostic so those are roman or parts of roman roof tiles yes and you do find a lot of these broken fragments on this part of the foreshore so these are tegelae so you have a tegula and a tegula and you put them together on your roof and then you have a curved tile which bridges the gap between the two and fits over the two rims there okay and imbrex and that makes your roman roof so you have layers of these going up Theyre very substantial tiles a complete roof is very heavy it weighs tons and tons yeah so you have to have quite a substantial building to hold them up um simpler buildings were just thatched okay so tegulae so two tegula is a tegulae yeah that's right yes your latin lesson for today so part of a roman roof we just need to find a couple of thousand more and then oh look at this this is a nice defined maker's mark on the spur of this pipe there's an r and a w or an m it's very nice i've just seen another coin down here as well but i have a feeling it's probably more of a modern one let's have a look it's here yeah it's uh 50 somethings i can't quite make that out but there's a nice bird on there now there's lots of 1700s pipe stems around here and a few bowls but i just found a little piece of slightly later pipe stem that'll be 19th probably mid-19th century and it's got part of a maker on it and we'll be able to see where they come from too so i'll have a closer look at that later i love i absolutely love pipe stems with makers on oh now that's nice that's pretty isn't it i'm going to ask richard about this that's lovely i've got a nice piece of pottery here richard oh that is beautiful that's metropolitan slipware from harlow in essex so that's really nice metropolitan slipware from harlow in essex 1630 to 1720. very nice yes it's got the beautiful trailed pattern on it so yeah that's a really nice find and it would that have come from a like a dish a serving dish i think it's an open form so a dish or a charger and it's obviously a floral pattern i think isn't it yeah that's right with leaves underneath it but yeah if you find a whole piece you're talking sothebys or christie's or well victoria and albert museum i'll keep looking yes but it's a beautiful bit of english slipware oh thank you so this large chunky piece of pottery with a sort of white remains of on the outside it's part of a post-medieval spanish or possibly portuguese olive oil jar olive oil jar my goodness like those huge ones on the ship wrecks, yeah that's right you find them on the sort of spanish armada shipwrecks and in the new world you know wherever the spanish went they took their olive oil with them so they're very large hand-thrown containers like the successors to the amphoreae for the roman period made of the same sort of clay in the same sort of area but instead of wine it's more likely to be olive oil they were transporting this time very nice such a variety of things isn't there!? i just picked up this little tiny round thing and i think that it could be bone um i don't know what it is in bone it's very small well i think it's bone it might not be i just need to do a little bit of an investigation to find out what it is now on the 13th of september in the afternoon i'm doing a little talk about mudlarking finds related to food and drink it's called a mudlark's feast bringing to life thames revelry and dining and richard has kindly brought along some pieces of pottery which relates to dining and the kitchen or people eating and there's so much pottery on the foreshore and it it's so linked to food and drink so richard has got some really nice bits here that he's just going to talk to us a little bit about and how they're related to the kitchen or the dining room yeah obviously pottery changes according to fashion but also according to people's dietary habits so the way people ate and what they ate and drank is reflected in the pottery and that's often a useful thing for dating it yeah so starting with the iron age i mean the iron age just simple cooking pots you know bucket shaped and that goes on for thousands of years just at the end of the iron age you start to get the elite the tribal leaders start to import things from the roman empire yeah they import amphorae with wine and they import the jugs and the little drinking cups to drink the wine out of but that was purely an elite function so you don't really get a lot of pottery evidence for food and drink until you get to the roman period right okay which is on my lap yeah let's see okay so that's roman yeah i didn't bring any amphorae shards with me because they're just too heavy and big but once you decant your wine you put it into a flagon so this is like a round neck with the handles coming off the neck and then quite a bulbous body and you pour your wine into your cups through that so roman flagon okay um tableware obviously everyone's heard if you've watched the time team you've heard samianware, they always get inordinately excited when they find some so um yes good slip coated fine bodied beautifully made tableware open forms like bowls and plates uh cups jugs, mortaria, that's a beautiful moulded bit it's got a an archer on it with a palm tree oh yes probably hunting lions i should think doubtlessly yeah and then uh like the bit we found earlier um a little hunt cup so this is a don't look like it but it's actually a hunting dog and he'll be chasing a hare because there's no rabbits in the roman empire until the normans introduce them so rabbits are not a Rpman thing, you get hares but not rabbits so he's chasing a hare or maybe a deer around this little drinking cup so you pour it from your flag and into your drinking cup okay and some of them have mottos on them in latin like drink or fine wine don't mix with water and keep it strong and then the more humble pottery cooking pots and storage vessels are still you know very simple round rimmed gray black wares for the kitchen and to put in the fire okay they often get sooty so i just loved thinking of it on the table of a family back in roman times and now here you are holding it yes it's a real buzz to pick up anything like that yeah but then after the romans left um you get probably about 800 years where you just get cooking pots simple pottery you put in the fire that's a medieval example it's got a bit of sooting around the rim and then it'd just be a saggy bottomed thing that you nestle into the ashes of the fire and cook a stew with so really in the medieval period you don't get individual plates you don't get individual cups you probably would eat off a bit of stale bread or if you're rich you might have something made of horn or wood turned wood um and jugs so you do get jugs obviously in the medieval period for serving liquids this is a bit of a highly decorated jug where they roll a stamped decoration onto it so this will be about 1270 to 1350 most of the medieval periods just get very simple jugs very simple cooking pots until right at the end of the medieval period you start to get a little bit more sophistication in eating and drinking so you get the bung hole system so this would be at the base of a large pot and it's for brewing so you'd brew hops to make beer okay and that really only comes in widespread in the 15th century so the 1400s and you start to get cooking pots with a rim seating so instead of a plain rim like that you'd get something with that shape that you can put a lid onto so you're getting a little bit more sophisticated you know you can use it like a slow cooker perhaps or to stew things and you start to get imported from germany in stoneware individual drinking jugs so this would be served from a big jug into your own individual jugs so you get that coming in in the 15th century from 1450 onwards and its got a frilled based there and this sort of heralds in the post-medieval period when you get a lot more sophistication and you start to get pewter metal cooking pots brass and iron much more frequently so you get far fewer ceramic cooking pots move forward into the post-medieval period then the classic cooking shape now becomes the pipkin so you've got this three-legged pipkin and there's two legs there would have been another leg there and a little hollow handle these would have had lids as well so the hollow handle helps it stay cool yeah when you pick it up off the fire but again they're just meant to be pushed into the ashes of the fire to cook stews and sauces so those are both from pipkins yes obviously different sizes which is why this is massive but you get them in red clay and white clay the borderware ones are closed off from the body the london ones the handle goes right through into them so the pipkin runs through from the 16th century to the early 18th century and you know absolutely every household would have a range of sizes for cooking stews and sauces and various other dishes right we've moved now because it was getting a little bit of a hustle and bustle outside the old tavern there wasn't it so we are back what um period of uh history are we on now um well we've talked about the post-medieval stuff so the pipkin being the classic cooking vessel of the early post-medieval period. the pipkin which we looked at earlier which is designed to sit actually in the ashes of the fire yeah and cook a stew a wet dish was supplanted about 1700 and through the 18th century people's dietary habits and cooking habits change so you move from a pipkin which is making a wet dish into baking dishes where you'd make a roast or a pie or something like that and you'd more often have an oven in your house than a fireplace for cooking and therefore you get the change and you get this wonderful staffordshire slipware pie dishes and baking dishes which often had crimped edges Now, going to drink wine was imported in these Bartmann jugs which are obviously famous for having the wide bellies and the little faces beardy faces and I've just noticed something. they were done by moulding a stamp which was carved in wood or plaster onto the clay and this has been pressed twice so this little gentleman's got four eyes yeah that's actually um very true it's pretty quite rare i think Anna Borzello found one with four eyes i saw that yes she did yeah so that must be quite unusual actually i think it probably is yes i'm quite happy with that so yeah Bartmann faces bearded faces were for importing wine storing wine serving wine you did have individual drinking jugs as well but these would more likely to be pottery in the early post-medieval period and blackware with these very ribbed throwing marks that probably helped you to grip it while you were a bit half drunk inebriated yeah exactly um and these would have had maybe two or even three handles coming off of them and they're called Tygs Thease Tygs, they're the classic drinking pots in the post medieval redware so late 16th to 18th century you find a lot of these in london marvelous you've got a youtube channel haven't you oh yes i have you can look me up just look up Richard Hemery yes i highly recommend watching richard's youtubes and they are full of very useful um information about not only pottery but lots of pottery and also you've got an instagram account haven't you i have it's Thames_Pottery Thames_Pottery, so quite easy to remember and also just tell me a little bit about your book and where people can get it oh yes well i mean i started knowing very little about pottery so i picked up things that looked old and i'd have no idea what they were so about 15 years of research later i'm now getting a little bit of a handle if you'll excuse the pun on identifying pottery and i started writing notes and putting photographs together and before i knew it i'd written a book as you do yes it's not in print yet but you can download a pdf copy check it out on ebay richard hemery pottery and it costs a mere 2.99 and all your pottery questions will be answered! That's an absolute bargain so get on there go onto ebay and download richard's pottery book i did i almost forgot to recuperate the little pink thing which is still hanging there on the chain and i can't bear to think of it being dunked in another high tide it's just not right so i'm going to find a little space for it whatever it is in the thames tideline art toy orphanage little drowned thing here we are a little run through the washing machine and you'll be as good as new come on richard the tide's coming up you've got to come back time to stop - Just one more bit of pottery!! hi everyone thank you very much for watching i'm out in an old fort at the moment i've been sheltering from the rain i'm out with david nolan we've been exploring a very muddy island and we're here in this very atmospheric absolutely beautiful fort as you can see nature has totally taken it over and it's kind of taken me over too because i'm looking a bit like the wild woman of borneo who's been dragged through a hedge backwards but anyway david has kindly agreed to be my photographer film cameraman so that i can do a quick round up after my outing with Richard Hemery the other day which was great i always love meeting up with richard he's so knowledgeable about pottery and so thank you very much for that richard now i found during that outing what i had hoped was a bear claw here it is for those of you who want to be reminded i almost convinced myself it was a bear claw but i have now consulted with the experts and it is a boar's tooth which is okay i'll take a boar's tooth and it's quite handy actually because i'm preparing my talk at the moment the Mudlark's feast bringing to life thames revelry and dining which i'm doing on the 13th of september on woods quay and i will be able to include boar wild boar and believe me henry viii ate a lot of wild boar and peacock and puffins and all sorts i've learned a great deal whilst i've been preparing for this talk on the subject of the talk i've also got a really amazing collection of replica pipes which Im going to be bringing along with me i shall put a photograph up on the screen now they've been made by david higgins who's a member of the society for clay piper research who also makes these incredible replica pipes and they're from well they're made to look like pipes from the 17th and the 18th century and if you are at the event you're going to have a chance to look at them hold them buy them and even if you so wish to smoke one because we're hoping to source some authentic tobacco that might have been smoked back during the 18th and 17th century i'll also have my collection of pipes that i found on the river thames and also we're hoping that another member of the society for clay pipe research will be there with his collection of thames pipes too so if you like clay pipes it should be a really good event they'll also be some food to taste as well the head chef at woods quay is going to make some little tasters of some examples of food that people would have eaten back in tudor times so a little bit of puffin a little bit of peacock anyone earlier on i mentioned that i had some replica clay pipes and here they are look aren't they amazing so this one is a 17th century clay pipe let's say early 17th century and this one is an 18th century pipe probably 1740 1750. so i'm going to offer one of these to david nolan who's here to see him smoke it it's going to be really good fun he's got his tobacco he's gonna pop it in the bowl and i'm going to film him smoking a clay pipe hmm and of course i haven't forgotten here is what turns out to be a one-eared rabbit. There's one ear here it doesn't have another ear a fluffy little rabbit and i don't think i have any other rabbits in the thames tideline art toy orphanage so this is our first and she has had or he has had a wash and a blow dry and it's looking rather fluffy i think you'll agree compared to the drowned state that he or she was in before and underneath all this fluff there are eyes two eyes and also a little nose which is just there so this is the new addition very happy in her new home with the tideline art orphans from the thames i think that's it the rain has stopped we're going to be making our way off soon back through the mud thanks again for watching and thank you for your feedback and your comments on my videos i appreciate them as always and i hope that you have a really good week ahead so take care and i look forward to seeing you again very soon bye-bye

Channel: nicola white mudlark - Tideline Art

Views: 97,739

Rating: 4.9526629 out of 5

Keywords: uk mudlark, mudlarking in london, london mudlark, londonmudlark, london mudlarking, mudlarking the thames, nicola white, nicola white mudlark, uk mudlarking, mudlarking, mudlark, london history, thames pottery, richard hemery, richard hemery pottery, identifying thames pottery, tudor pottery, roman pottery, medieval pottery, 17th century coin

Id: uWbms6J1ZIo

Length: 36min 1sec (2161 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020