These cloth seals are simple lead tags that were attached to pieces of cloth to prove their quality and provenance. The seals may have accidentally fallen off individual pieces of cloth that were being rinsed after dyeing in riverside mills, or they may have been thrown away as litter when they were no longer needed. Gary has found 290 of them so far.
Cloth seals were part of a sophisticated control process similar to a kitemark, or the sales tag on a new piece of clothing today. They allowed purchasers to confirm the origin of the fabric, its quality and size, and whether the correct tax had been paid on it. Some carried the marks of weavers (who spun the wool and weaved it into cloth), fullers (who processed the freshly woven wool cloth to get the grease out and knit the fibres together), dyers (who coloured the cloth) and clothiers (who bought and sold the finished cloth).
Most seals were originally made with two or four lead alloy discs connected by a thin strip that would be fixed together over the edge of the cloth, and then stamped with relevant information about the fabric. Some seals have been stamped with letters indicating that the cloth has been woven narrower than the stipulated width, and others have the legend, ‘too shorte’.
Cloth-making and trading textiles have been incredibly important since medieval times. In the 16th and 17th centuries Britain was famed for its wool, and port towns sent thousands of tonnes of unfinished wool and woven cloth across Europe. Continental textiles were also imported – cloth was a global commodity. Despite periods of political and religious instability at home, this was a time of imperial expansion, exploration of the new worlds and complex agreements that privileged trade with our neighbours. Under the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, cloth accounted for around 90% of British exports.
Gary’s 290 seals come from cloth traded around Britain and from the continent. Durham had a fulling mill, so some of the cloth might have come to the city to be finished, dyed and sold on. Some of the seals come from Norwich, showing the three-towered castle that was the mark of the city, others are from the Low Countries, like Holland. Once the cloth had arrived in Durham and been sold, buyers would presumably rip off the seals and chuck them away, or they would have come off while the cloth was being processed. Gary’s scuba searches clearly confirm the old saying that ‘archaeology is rubbish’. Our ancestors’ littering is sometimes to the historian’s benefit.
See also:
Rosemarkie Trade Weights
Holy Island Mason Hoard
Holderness Cross
Anglo-Saxon treasure in a farmer’s sideboard
Date: 620–660AD, Anglo-Saxon, Early Medieval
Where, when and how found: Holderness, East Riding of Yorkshire; Found around 1968, but only identified in 1998
Finder: Ronald Wray
Where is it now? Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
www.ashmolean.org
Also visit: All Hallow’s Church, Goodmanham, East Riding of Yorkshire
Bede’s World historic site, Wearmouth-Jarrow, Northumbria
www.bedesworld.co.uk
This lovely garnet and gold cross was found in 1968 in the mud of a Yorkshire pig farm as Ron Wray was walking through one of his fields. There were no other items, and Ron assumed that the pigs must have rooted it up from the soil, perhaps where it had been dropped by its original owner some time in the past. He took it back home, washed the mud off, and slipped it into the drawer of his kitchen sideboard.
It sat there for three decades, undisturbed. On a whim in March 1998, Ron’s daughter suggested they take it down to a local finds identification day at Hull Museum. The Wrays were astounded to discover that their little cross was almost 1,400 years old and made of solid gold and precious stones.
Before the Treasure Act 1996, a precious metal object had to be buried with the intention of recovery in order to be legally considered ‘Treasure Trove’. That meant that if an object had been lost or buried accidentally or was from an ancient grave, it belonged to the finder. Nowadays, however a precious item was initially deposited, it’s still potential Treasure and needs to be properly reported.
When the Holderness Cross resurfaced in 1998, it needed to be assessed against the legislation that had been legal at the time it was first found, to determine whether it was or wasn’t Treasure Trove. A Coroner’s Court deliberated upon the find, decided that it hadn’t been buried with intention of recovery, and was therefore not Treasure Trove. They thought it had been deliberately put into the ground as part of a burial.
“We know of just three other pectoral crosses from the same period – these are incredibly rare pieces”
The Holderness Cross is known as a ‘pectoral cross’, meaning that it would have been worn in the centre of the chest, over the heart, normally hanging from a cord around the neck. These large, square crosses are now only usually worn by priests and other clergymen, but in the early medieval period lay people would have worn them as well.
The Holderness Cross is about 5cm square, making it quite large compared with others from the 600s AD. It’s made from 77% gold and 22% silver and was originally inlaid with 95 garnets. The quality of the gold and jewels indicates that this was no ordinary lay person’s cross. If it didn’t belong to a wealthy priest, it belonged to a high-status, secular leader instead. We know of just three other pectoral crosses from the same period – these are incredibly rare pieces.
One slightly later cross, known as St Cuthbert’s Cross, was discovered inside the saint’s coffin, and two others (from Ixworth and Trumpington) were buried with women. We therefore don’t know if the person who owned the Holderness Cross was a man or a woman, and the bones in the grave have since rotted away, so there is no way of knowing. What is certain, is that they were an elite Anglo-Saxon follower of the new Christian faith.
The new faith
Missionaries were sent by Pope Gregory in the late 590s, to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons who had lived in Britain since the collapse of Roman rule in around 410AD.
The first missionary to arrive was St Augustine, in 597AD in Kent. The new faith spread north, and eventually all the major English kingdoms converted. Many old shrines and temple sites were destroyed and churches were built in their place. One significant event near to the findspot at Holderness is mentioned by the medieval historian and monk, Bede.
Bede describes that when King Edwin of the kingdom of Northumbria converted to Christianity around 627AD, the pagan High Priest Coifi rode to a pagan shrine in the village now known as Goodmanham, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Coifi addressed the gathered crowd, scorning the old religion: ‘there is nothing in this religion that we have professed . . . the more I sought the truth of it the less I found . . . I advise that . . . we set fire to those temples and altars which we have consecrated!’
Coifi took a war horse and a spear (both traditionally forbidden to him as a priest) and galloped towards the inner sanctuary of the temple. He lifted his spear, and threw it into the sacred place, desecrating the temple and shaming the gods. The crowd waited to see what would happen to him . . . and when they saw that Coifi was unharmed, they followed their priest’s lead and burned the rest of the sacred enclosure and the temple to the ground. A church was built on the pagan site, and a later Norman church, surrounded by ancient ditch and earthworks, still stands on the site in Goodmanham today.
We won’t ever know enough about the context that the Holderness Cross was buried in to link it more closely to Coifi’s dramatic act and the conversion of the north kingdom, but certainly the dating places the cross firmly in these tumultuous decades of religious upheaval, decades that laid the foundations of Christian faith in this country.
See also:
North West Essex Ring
Staffordshire Hoard
Cautopates Roman Figurine
A man who brings darkness to a mysterious Roman cult
Date: Around 43–313AD, Roman
Where, when and how found: Newton Kyme, North Yorkshire; 2007; metal detecting
Fin
der: Anonymous
Where is it now? Privately owned
Visit: Remains of Temples of Mithras are exposed at Walbrook, in the City of London, and at Carrawburgh, Northumberland, on Hadrian’s Wall
This compelling, cloaked figure was found by a metal detectorist searching cultivated land in November 2007 in the Selby district of North Yorkshire. It is a copper-alloy figurine of Cautopates, a torch-bearer and servant of the Roman god, Mithras, and is at least 1,700 years old.
Cautopates is dressed in Persian (Ancient Iranian) clothes, and on his head he’s wearing what is known as a Phrygian cap. In his right hand he’s holding a flaming torch upside down. His legendary companion, Cautes, is always depicted holding a flaming torch the right way up. Cautes represents sunrise, light and new life. Cautopates represents sunset, darkness and death – the extinguishing of light.
The copper-alloy figurine doesn’t stand up on its own, but there’s no clear evidence that it was ever attached to a base or a bracket. We don’t know quite how this item was used, but it would have been very important to worshippers of Mithras. Theirs was a Roman ‘mystery religion’ that kept all the details of their faith and rituals secret to outsiders.
Because of this secrecy, and because there are few surviving written accounts of the religion, we don’t entirely understand the way Mithras and the other gods in the cult were worshipped. Based on surviving stone carvings, the central features of Mithras’ story appear to be that he was born out of a rock, he made water magically appear from a stone he shot with an arrow, he slayed a sacred bull, and he dined with Sol, the Sun god, in a cave before ascending to Heaven in a chariot.
“A number of the mysterious underground temples survive, including one in London and a number along Hadrian’s Wall”
Cult members built temples underground to replicate Mithras’ cave. There were seven grades of initiation which worshippers had to undergo before they were full members. The initiations involved trials of heat, cold and danger, and some surviving temples have an ‘ordeal pit’ in the centre of the floor. Rituals included feasting and animal sacrifice.
The cult of Mithras was very popular with Roman soldiers in the 1st to 4th centuries AD, and members used a special handshake to identify themselves; women were forbidden from worshipping Mithras.
A number of the mysterious underground temples survive, including one in London and a number along Hadrian’s Wall. A particularly good example is in Carrawburgh, in Northumberland.
The cult of Mithras died out in the early 300s, when the new cult of Christianity began to spread across the Roman Empire from around 313AD onwards. The Cautopates figurine was found less than 1km from the site of a Roman fort, but the find site hasn’t revealed any further archaeological context that could explain why the figurine was where it was. It’s certainly possible that it was used by Roman soldiers, but whether it was lost, deposited or thrown away when the new religion arrived, we will never know.
See also:
Crosby Garrett Helmet (another Roman figure wearing a Phrygian Cap)
Syston Knife Handle
Carlton Knight
Kellington Dental Block
A denture device from the turn of the century
Date: Around 1890–1930, Modern
Where, when and how found: Kellington, North Yorkshire; 2011; metal detecting
Finder: Alan Mort
Where is it now? Returned to finder
Also visit: Dental Museum, London
www.bda.org/museum
Beamish Living Museum of the North, Co Durham
www.beamish.org.uk
Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums
Other medical museums listed at www.medicalmuseums.org
This odd treasure is a dental swaging block (pronounced sway-jing) – a solid copper-alloy form that would have enabled a dentist to make a bespoke set of dentures. It dates from the late 1800s or early 1900s, and was discovered in a field in Kellington, North Yorkshire, by a local metal detectorist.
Nowadays a dentist will use a special rubbery dental putty to take an impression of your gums and teeth, and that impression will then be filled with Plaster of Paris, so that a model of your mouth is achieved. The process is repeated again, making the model more accurate. Dentists then use special dental wax to establish the way your bottom and top teeth bite together, and dental laboratory technicians will position shape-matched and colour-matched porcelain, acrylic or metal teeth into a shaded pink plastic so that the denture looks as natural as possible and feels comfortable and well-fitting.
Although the process is infinitely more refined now, the basic principle wasn’t so different 100-odd years ago. The dentist who used this swaging block would have used softened beeswax to take an initial impression from the patient’s mouth, an interim substance to make a mould, and then molten copper-alloy to make this solid block in the shape of the patient’s mouth. Once cooled and hardened, the block would have been used as the form over which to make the dentures themselves. The swaging block would be fixed down and a dental plate ‘blank’ would be forced over the block under high pressure, so it took on the exact shape of the patient’s mouth. Metal blanks, celluloid and the hard rubber, Vulcanite, which had been developed by the Goodyear tyre company in the 1840s and first used for dentures in 1851, were all used to make affordable and better-fitting, lightweight dentures.
Full sets of upper dentures now stay in place because of suction created between the well-fitting dental plate and the roof of your mouth. Previously people struggled to keep their false teeth in place, and had to put up with the effects on their speech, eating, and comfort – some false teeth were in fact intended to be removed when you ate, and worn only to look nice in public. Sets of upper and lower teeth were sometimes jointed together and held apart by little springs at the back of the mouth – probably both uncomfortable and comical.
“Porcelain or gold teeth were considered the best, but were expensive and not available to most people”
In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, it was common to use carved bone, ivory or wood as the tooth inserts, but because the ‘teeth’ were organic but didn’t have enamel, they’d soon begin to rot and cause as many problems as the teeth they’d replaced. An improvement (in some ways) was to use either animal teeth, find a desperately poor person who was willing to sell their living teeth, or acquire fresh teeth from a dead body. There is evidence that graves were robbed for teeth, but more common in the 19th century was to use dead soldiers’ teeth sent back from the European battlefields. The teeth would be extracted from the mouths of the dead men, packed into barrels and sold in London and other cities to the new and fashionable dentistry professionals. Porcelain or gold teeth were considered the best, but were expensive and not available to most people.
The rise of the dentist
The Dental Hospital of London was established in 1858, and the National Dental Hospital the following year. Before that there was no official training or control of dentists, and trainees would have learned the trade through apprenticeship. For centuries, tooth extractions had been performed by blacksmiths, apothecaries and barber-surgeons, or roving ‘toothdrawers’ who plied their trade at fairs and markets. Many people suffered at the hands of ill-trained and negligent ‘dentists’ – some people even lost their lives.
By the mid-19th century, there was increasing pressure to professionalise, and The Dentists’ Act of 1878 required that anyone who wanted to call themselves a dentist needed to complete official training. The impact was that unqualified practitioners simply didn’t use the label ‘dentist’, and carried on regardless. It was only in 1921 that laws were introduced to restrict practising any dentistry to qualified people only.
Perhaps the person who made and used this swaging block was a qualified dentist, perhaps not. It seems surprising that it was lost or dumped, rather than melted down so that the copper-alloy could be reused to make a different model.
The
block is a model of an upper set of teeth from an adult who was missing the right canine, and left lateral and central incisors. It has been dated to between 1890 and 1930, which means that the patient might have benefitted from laughing gas, ether or cocaine for pain relief, and cutting-edge treatment with a pedal drill (much quicker and less painful than hand-drilling). Improved techniques for swaging dental plates and slightly more comfortable materials were available. Although early dentures were hard to clean and often made your mouth sore, they were much more affordable than everything that had come before. Middle-class people could afford well-fitting and functional false teeth for the first time in history.
See also:
Beddingham Nose
Daventry Visard Mask
Pegsdon Mirror
THE BIRTH OF ENGLAND
In the mid-9th century, there were four main kingdoms in Britain – Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and the West Saxon kingdom, Wessex. Viking leaders first conquered the East Anglians, then forced them to support Viking attacks on York (866AD) and southern Northumbria (867AD). The warrior Hálfdan conquered the Kingdom of Mercia in 874AD, and some of Wessex in 878AD, supposedly forcing King Alfred – later Alfred the Great – to hide in a Somerset marsh to save his own life.
Rural Anglian populations in the conquered lands weren’t necessarily brutalised or killed, although the Viking immigrants may well have reallocated land and resources to themselves and their favourites, forcing people to relocate and pay tribute and tax.
Modern English words that have a Scandinavian origin are quite telling – many are everyday words – egg, sister, husband, skin, sky, knife and cake, for example. It indicates that local people adopted Viking ways and speech into their everyday lives, and that it wasn’t just the language of a high-class elite, or the language only used to govern or police the country. The Vikings weren’t invaders, but colonists.
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