Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  Most people’s idea of treasure is gold and I’m always asked if I’ve found any. The short answer is yes, but not very much. Even the smallest piece of gold is easy to spot, as gold doesn’t tarnish and it shines in the mud. You simply can’t miss it. In all the years I’ve been mudlarking, though, all I’ve found is a broken tiepin, a modern wedding band, the butterfly from the back of an earring, a gold pen nib, a few chain links, tiny flakes and scraps of gold, three small plain gold beads and the most beautiful sixteenth-century Tudor lace end or aglet, which would once have decorated the shirt or jacket of a gentleman. It was my second piece of treasure trove and one I donated to the Museum of London. Despite being crushed almost flat, it is an inch of perfection, beautifully preserved and crafted with circles of twisted gold wire and a small filigree looped cage at one end with what is thought to be the remains of once vibrantly coloured enamel, which is now faded to the colour of the river. As soon as I saw it, the rich, soft butteriness of the gold told me it was old and pure while the craftsmanship suggested it was a high-status object. It dates from a time when only gentlemen were allowed to wear gold or silver decoration on their clothing, so it must have belonged to someone of great wealth and importance.

  Hundreds of other tiny pieces of gold have been found where I found my lace aglet, including filigree beads, other lace ends and tiny shreds of intricate decoration from larger pieces of jewellery. One woman I’ve met spends most of her mudlarking time searching for it, picking through the sand quite literally grain by grain. When I last saw her, she had found almost 100 tiny pieces of gold, a diamond and a ruby. Every piece of the miniature hoard is remarkable and rare, exquisitely crafted, but incomplete or broken. This does not limit their possibilities though, quite the opposite, their condition and rarity makes them all the more interesting to me, and the stories behind them limited only by imagination. They might be pieces of scrap gold that were lost by a goldsmith. Perhaps he slipped on the wet planks as he scuttled down a wooden jetty to his waiting wherry and fell heavily, dropping the little leather bag of gold into the river as he landed. I imagine he plunged his hands into the cold murky water in his panic, but to no avail. No amount of desperate searching was going to help, the gold was gone.

  But all that glitters on the foreshore is not necessarily gold. The gilding on one buckle I found had my heart racing until I picked it up. Even the smallest piece of real gold has a weighty feel to it and this did not have that. I have also been duped by what is known as ‘nature’s gilding’: a chemical reaction that affects alloy metal containing tin and creates a gold-coloured layer. Fool’s gold, iron pyrite, occurs naturally in London clay and sparkles through the mud in the sun. Other minerals can also be found at low tide, raw carnelian amethyst and quartz, which may have arrived in London as ballast in trade ships.

  Precious and semi-precious stones, fallen from brooches, rings, earrings and necklaces, wash up on rare occasions as well and these don’t have to be declared as Treasure if they are found on their own. A fellow mudlark found a large uncut emerald and I know others who have found diamonds. In my time on the foreshore I have found a huge 8.2 carat Sri Lankan cut garnet, an amethyst cabochon, a smoky quartz and a large aquamarine. I have beads of pearl, jet, coral, crystal and amber, but the most mysterious are the raw uncut garnets that I have so far found in four locations along the Thames. They are the shape and colour of ripe pomegranate seeds, which is how garnets got their name. In Early French the fruit was called pomme grenate, meaning ‘seedy apple’. Grenate came to mean ‘red like a pomegranate’ and was used by the French to refer to the red stones. When it was borrowed into English it became garnet. At one spot in particular, there are so many that they glow deep ruby red in the mud on sunny days.

  The exact location of the garnets is a closely guarded secret and tales are told among mudlarks about how they got there. One chap spends hours on his knees collecting the stones with a pair of tweezers. He has amassed thousands, though he thinks that only 10 per cent of them are of jewellery quality (despite this, I know other mudlarks who have had them set into rings), and claims to have evidence that a sack of garnets fell off an East India ship in 1810, but there are plenty of other theories to rival it. Perhaps the small stones were in the floor sweepings of a jewellery shop that were dumped on the foreshore, rejects from a larger bag that would explain why so many are of such poor quality. They may have been washed down a drain and out into the river, or maybe someone stole a bag of them and dumped it in the Thames rather than risk getting caught with it. They could be older than nineteenth century, or, owing to their hardness, some think they may have been used more recently as an abrasive for industrial cleaning. I’ve also heard stories of sailors getting a commission for bringing garnets back from overseas. It is said they made holes in the sacks to let some of the stones trickle down onto the foreshore and returned on the low tide to collect their spoils from the mud. In truth, only the river knows how the glowing red seeds became embedded in its skin.

  But my favourite kinds of treasures are pins, because there is nothing more ordinary than a pin. When I pick up a pin, I think of the hands that touched it, the pincushion it was pulled from the morning it was lost, the clothes it held together and the conversations that were had while it was being worn. So many lives have touched each pin: the pin-maker and his family who drew the wire to gauge, wound another piece around the top three times to make a tiny head, then polished and sharpened it on a piece of bone with grooves to hold it still; the Elizabethan haberdasher who sold it; and the ordinary person who bought and used it. Pins are not like precious jewels, they weren’t loved or looked after, they were just part of everyday life.

  Handmade pins date from around 1400 to the early nineteenth century, when pin-making was mechanised. They litter the foreshore in such great numbers because everyone used them, both men and women, from cradle to grave. They held swaddling in place and were used to make clothes and lace. They secured hats, veils, jewellery and ribbons; hundreds could be used in the complex folding and gathering of Elizabethan neck ruffs; they held clothes in place and in death secured shrouds around corpses. A warrant relating to Robert Careles, Elizabeth I’s ‘Pynner’, shows that in 1565 he supplied 16,000 great farthingale pins at six shillings per thousand, 20,000 middle farthingale pins at four shillings per thousand, 20,000 great velvet pins at two shillings eight pence per thousand and 58,000 small velvet and head pins at twenty pence per thousand. Pins were not cheap, and the money allocated to ordinary women by their families or husbands to buy pins was not the trifling amount we now associate with the phrase ‘pin money’. They looked after their pins carefully, having them sharpened to prolong their lives. But despite this it seems people still left a scattering of pins wherever they went.

  I stick my best pins into velvet pincushions and have several hundred more in the printer’s chest where I keep my river finds. Some are sturdy with large round heads, for pushing through thick woollen fabric; others are long and spindly, possibly for securing veils and headdresses. There are pins with decorated heads, very early medieval pins with a distinct collar under the head, and pins as fine as baby hair that may once have been used to secure delicate silk or for lace-making. I have pins that have been bent, either purposefully to fashion them into a hook or by accident on fabric that was too thick.

  It took me a year or so to find my first one, but now I’ve got my eye in for them I see them everywhere. They often accumulate near old river stairs, like at Trig Lane, or where there was once a jetty or causeway, washing together in tangled metallic nests. In some areas the mud bristles with them and I search gingerly to avoid being pricked. If I find a good patch, I can lose myself for an hour or more, picking them out of the sand or mud, my mind completely occupied by the simple task of collecting.

  But where pins lie in piles and are easy to find, handmade needles are rare. In all the time I have been mudlarking I have found just eight. They are made of brass and would have been kept in a needle hol
der, similar to the sixteenth-century one that was left for me by the tide near Trig Lane several years ago. The small pewter tube is around two inches long and decorated with delicate curling vines and leaves. The loops either side would have been for suspending it from a cord or ribbon and it would once have had a lid, which is missing. At some point it has been crushed flat at one end, perhaps trodden on after the ribbon broke and it fell to the ground.

  I have found a few more thimbles than needles, enough for each of my fingers. Several have suffered the same fate as my needle holder, either crushed underfoot or flattened over the centuries by the weight of mud pressing down on them. Thimbles are an oddly sensual find. Spotting the pitted surface, picking it from the mud, cleaning it out and then slipping it on, being the first person to wear it since its original owner lost it, induces a heady mix of awe and excitement. For a second, time stands perfectly still, then the years tumble backwards and a brief window onto the past opens up, a glimpse of forgotten lives.

  My Thames thimbles are plain, brass and utilitarian. Of those that haven’t been squashed out of shape all but two fit me perfectly. The dimples of some have been punched by hand and are vaguely irregular, small and close together, suggesting they were used for ordinary needlework. Others have larger dimples and may have been owned by sail-makers, since sewing sails required larger needles and correspondingly larger dimples. Thimbles were very personal possessions and sometimes given as love tokens. I once found a perfectly preserved sixteenth-century one, probably made in Nuremberg in Germany, caught between two large pieces of broken masonry. I’d had it for some time before I noticed a small heart scratched into its base. Instantly it became more than just a sewing aid, it had a personal attachment and was now a token of affection, a prized belonging, a symbol of one person’s love for another.

  I spend the last half-hour of the tide at Trig Lane collecting more pins. As I crawl along on my hands and knees picking them from the mud, I spy a small silver disc caught in a hollow. It’s completely smooth on one side, but there’s a shadow of a monarch’s bust on the other, with enough of an inscription to identify it as late seventeenth century, William III. I’ve found silver sixpences from the same era before and I know what size they are, yet this is larger and must be a shilling. That’s it, that’s the last good find I was waiting for; I can call it a day. It’s been almost six hours since I began at London Bridge and my back won’t bend any longer.

  I climb Trig Lane Stairs with stiff legs, holding on to the steep steps as I go. Above me the most recently built Thames crossing, the Millennium Bridge, spans the river like the giant silver backbone of a whale. It is filled with people and some of them stop to watch me climb off the foreshore. On quieter parts of the river I can spin my daydreams out beyond the foreshore, but here it’s a rude awakening. I push up through the gap in the wall and instantly crash back into the twenty-first century. I’m among the crowds, dodging bicycles and crossing busy roads, the sound of traffic and sirens smothering the voices of the past and jerking me back into reality.

  BANKSIDE

  If we are afraid to give way to our imagination, the river’s treasures must inevitably remain dull and lifeless, for it is only in our minds that they can be transported from soulless museum cases back to their original settings.

  Ivor Noël Hume, Treasure in the Thames (1956)

  Before I leave the riverside at Trig Lane I look over to the south side of the river and assess the tide. The foreshore opposite is wider and shallower, so even if the water is quite high on the north side there’s usually still time to carry on searching over there. I always try to fit in a quick recce at Bankside, convinced that the day I don’t will be the day I miss the find of a lifetime. I climb another set of steep stairs, off the river path towards St Paul’s Cathedral, and turn south, joining crowds of City workers and tourists on the Millennium Bridge.

  I get a lot of funny looks as I walk along the bridge, and I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m still wearing my dirty wellingtons, knee pads, blue latex gloves and a full suit of waterproofs smeared with mud: they haven’t been washed in a while because I’m worried they’ll lose their waterproofing. So yes, I do make an odd sight and I wonder if people look at me just as they used to stop and stare at Peggy Jones, a ‘mud-lark’ who worked the river just below me. Her story was published in 1820 in a magazine called Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum; or Magazine of Remarkable Characters. Her ‘constant resort’ was Blackfriars, where ‘she was always to be seen, even before the tide was down, wading into the water, nearly up to the middle, and scraping together from the bottom, the coals which she felt with her feet’. She was ‘apparently about forty years of age [a little younger than me], with red hair’. She wore short ragged petticoats, without shoes or stockings, and a heavy-duty apron folded up like a bag around her waist. A larger version of my waist bag, I suppose. The article reports that people passing over the bridge ‘often stopped to contemplate with astonishment a female engaged in an occupation, apparently so painful and disagreeable’. Is that what people think when they see me?

  Peggy sold her coals for eight pence a load, which she spent mostly on gin. I like gin, and I’m not averse to a tipple after a cold day on the foreshore, but poor old Peggy ‘indulged to such a degree, that she would tumble about the streets with her load, to the no small amusement of mischievous boys and others’. The coal heavers took pity on her though, occasionally kicking a large piece of coal off the barges for her to collect, gruffly telling her to go away, and in February 1805 they were the ones who noticed when she suddenly disappeared. Nobody knows what became of Peggy Jones. Perhaps she went out too far and was taken by the currents or perhaps she simply passed away in her wretched lodging at Chick Lane, but I often think about her when I’m on her patch, and at least she hasn’t completely vanished from history. If, like the people crossing Blackfriars Bridge over 200 years ago, you want to stop and stare at poor Peggy Jones, take a moment to turn to the back of this book and you’ll find her there.

  There is no wall obscuring the river at Bankside, just a row of metal railings with a wooden bar along the top. Cleverly hidden in the railings, in front of Tate Modern, is an invisible gate that opens onto a wide set of concrete steps leading down to the foreshore. It is far more open here than it is on the north shore and is one of the easiest places to get down to the river. People mill around here, admiring the view – one of the river’s most spectacular – skimming stones, sunbathing, chatting in pairs and idly picking up bits and pieces that catch their eye, but few venture much further east or west.

  Because I’m usually here towards the end of the tide, I restrict myself to three spots. First I head west, under Blackfriars Bridge to Gabriel’s Wharf. Then I double back, past the stairs I just came down near the Millennium Bridge, and head east towards Southwark Bridge, stopping at the bottom of the second set of stairs along this stretch. These are even wider than the first lot and descend gently from the low river wall in front of the Globe Theatre. There is a big drop onto the foreshore at the bottom, which is getting increasingly difficult to negotiate as the foreshore erodes away and leaves the stairs behind. The eastern stretch is a cul-de-sac that terminates at London Bridge and it can easily trap the unwary, so I have to work out if I have enough time to walk down to the bridge and back before the water cuts me off from my exit point. Piles of rubble from successive renovations and rebuilding make progress slow and uncomfortable, and the tangled legs of the Clipper jetty are a brown, slimy obstacle course. This is also a pinch point on the returning tide. Further along, an area of asperous volcanic-like rock stabs the soft soles of my boots and slashes my ankles. If I decide to go as far as London Bridge, even nature takes a turn at blocking my way, with drifts of shingle and large cobbles that crunch, slip and shift underfoot.

  I go in the hope that where the rubble gives way or the stones have parted, the river will have scoured down to reveal its treasures, but in truth my efforts are rarely rewarded. In recent
years these patches have become few and far between and even mudlarks seldom bother wandering this way, making this an oddly quiet stretch for such a central location. The feeling of isolation is compounded by the bridges that darken the foreshore and push the riverside path inland. But on my own down here and away from the crowds it is easier to imagine what it was like on this side of the Thames before the river was embanked and the city fingered its way south. In my mind, it once looked like the marshes at Erith. If I half close my eyes, I can picture a muted landscape of low scattered shrubs and scrubby grass, dotted with reed beds and stagnant boggy pools.

  The Romans chose one of the small islands that dotted the river along this stretch for the south side of their bridge, which connected to their main settlement on the north shore. But it wasn’t until the thirteenth century that the river here was embanked with a causeway to prevent it from flooding, which led roughly from Old London Bridge westwards. Over the centuries, the causeway grew into a solid bank along which houses and landing stages for boats were built, but unlike the north side, where land was reclaimed from the river by the ever expanding city, the riverside on the south shore stayed pretty much where it was and the south side of the river remained a virtually uninhabited marsh for centuries.

  Until Westminster Bridge opened further upstream in 1750, only one bridge, London Bridge, linked the south shore with the City of London. This kept Bankside relatively remote and out of the jurisdiction of the City. Instead, it fell under the authority of the Bishops of Winchester whose London residence, Winchester Palace, was located close to the southern approach to Old London Bridge. The bishops tacitly permitted activities that were forbidden in the City and a string of inns and brothels grew up along the riverside road. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Bankside was where Londoners went to get drunk, enjoy a little cockfighting, bull- or bear-baiting and visit the ladies who worked in the ‘stews’. There is still a thin alleyway on the north shore close to Queenhithe called Stew Lane, which leads down to the river in the direction of Bankside. Perhaps that was a known route for men crossing to the brothels. As they were rowed across the river, those who could read would have seen the names of the inns – the Beares Heade, the Gunne, the Crane and the Cardinals Hatte – painted on the whitewashed walls of the timber-framed buildings along the riverfront.