Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  Queenhithe, known as Aethelred’s Hythe in the ninth century, is the grande dame of the tidal Thames. It appears on the earliest of maps and illustrations of the river and is a useful orientator along a foreshore that has changed dramatically over two millennia. It is likely to have existed as a harbour in Roman times, where imported goods from the Empire were unloaded to meet the tastes of the cosmopolitan and growing city. Wine came from Italy, Gaul and Germany, and olives, olive oil and a rich salty sauce called garum, which was made from fermented fish, was imported from southern Spain in large clay storage jars called amphorae, which sometimes wash up on the foreshore reduced to coarse buff pottery shards.

  The dock itself was created by the Saxons when they refounded the city in the ninth century under the reign of Alfred the Great. It became the centre of Saxon London, one of two large docks created at this time, the other being Billingsgate, which was filled in and built over in the nineteenth century. The name ‘Queenhythe’ came from an old word for a landing place on the river (hythe) and Queen Matilda, wife of Henry I, who was granted duties on all the goods landed there in the early twelfth century. Much of London’s food was brought through Queenhithe, and it was particularly associated with the transport and trade of salt, wood, grain and fish. Ships would have lined the quayside and gathered at the mouth of the dock to wait their turn to load and unload. For a time Queenhithe also served as a port, taking people up and down the river and out to sea. It was one of London’s busiest docks until the fifteenth century when ships began to favour Billingsgate, partly because it was downstream from Old London Bridge and easier to access. It was still a busy place in the nineteenth century, when warehouses and barge beds were built near and around Queenhithe, though by the 1960s even these had ceased to be used and the warehouses were demolished in the 1970s.

  *

  Queenhithe was identified as an important and potentially vulnerable area in the 1970s and designated a Scheduled Monument to ensure that it was never developed or built on and to protect it from diggers and treasure hunters who were turning it over like an allotment. It now has the same level of protection as Stonehenge and the entire dock is out of bounds to all mudlarks, even society members. It is illegal to remove anything from the Queenhithe Dock.

  Often, of course, people visit the foreshore completely unaware of its historic importance. There are no signs along the river explaining it or the restrictions that are in place, and unless you’ve checked the PLA’s website there is no way you’d know anything about them. Sadly, there are also those who are well aware of the restrictions that cover the foreshore as a whole and yet choose to ignore them. There will always be rogue mudlarks who dig a little bit deeper than they should; take objects from protected areas; and ‘forget’ to report what they find.

  In the 1970s and 80s, professional treasure hunters dug up the foreshore and sold their spoils to dealers who stalked the river with fistfuls of cash, buying the objects straight from the ground. I’ve also been told how mudlarks kicked holes in the Victorian wooden revetments that protect the foreshore to let the river flow in and do their work for them. These days, online auction sites make it easier than ever to sell objects that are found on the foreshore, thus creating demand and tempting people to fill it. And it’s not illegal. I have seen the most beautiful objects offered for sale on eBay – as well as a load of old rubbish: stones, bones and a Victorian butter-knife handle claiming to be early medieval.

  Once an object is sold to the highest bidder though, it all too often loses its provenance and associated history, and while the Portable Antiquities Scheme has an agreement with eBay to monitor items that might be considered Treasure, there is still very little control over what is taken. Some people mudlark with carrier bags and buckets, taking as much as they can carry, whether they want it or not. I often wonder where it all ends up: forgotten in cupboards and drawers, dumped in the garden, or worse still, thrown out with the rubbish? Even ancient timbers that were still embedded in the foreshore have been dug up and removed, and I heard of one man who built a garden wall with the pieces of stone and masonry he collected. All of this is lost now, its connection with the river severed and forgotten.

  But the biggest threat to the foreshore is erosion. While we can legislate to protect the foreshore from human activity, it’s harder to protect it from the river itself. It is constantly building up and eroding, shingle covering sand and sand covering mud, scooping out hollows and gathering piles, drilling down through centuries of compacted mud and the city’s ancient rubbish. It naturally deposits higher up and erodes at the low-water mark, with the rate of erosion increasing in the winter and spring, but even slight changes or additions to the river or foreshore have significant effects. Over the past twenty years or so more damage has been caused by the wake of increasing river traffic, which continually crashes onto the foreshore and sucks the surface back out with it, scouring away the top layer and digging out ancient features. It has a more rapid effect where the foreshore has been dug into by mudlarks and the mud is softer and less stable.

  Along its entire length, the foreshore of the tidal Thames is a great moving mass. In the time it has taken me to write this book, it will have changed again. Subtle landmarks can wash away entirely, almost overnight, and the river moves surprisingly large objects at will, leaving much smaller and lighter things in the same place for months. For this reason, many mudlarks learn a relatively small patch, returning to it again and again, building up a mind map and watching as it transforms and rearranges over time.

  I only take away what the river delivers to me, what’s left on the surface, there on one tide and gone on the next. I choose not to scrape or dig to find what the river hasn’t yet offered up. I collect what would otherwise be washed away or destroyed by the currents and tides. I also mudlark with the knowledge that one day its bounty will run out, so I don’t take everything I find. Unless it’s something I collect, it’s unusual or an object I don’t already have, I leave it for someone else to discover or for the river to reclaim. Although they’re hard to resist, I stopped collecting ordinary shards of medieval pottery a long time ago because I have enough, and I recently returned a bagful of eighteenth-century clay pipes to where I found them. I think this pleases the river and maybe it improves my luck, but then again perhaps I’m wrong to leave so much stuff behind.

  Some people say mudlarks shouldn’t be helping themselves to the treasures of the foreshore at all. But the flip side is that unless someone takes the objects, they will eventually be carried off, broken down, worn away and dissolved. According to one foreshore archaeologist, the amount that is collected by mudlarks is fractional compared to the amount that is reclaimed by the river, and since the number of objects is finite, at some point in the future it will all be gone. So perhaps now is the time to save what we can.

  The river exacts a heavy toll on artefacts that are free of the mud, tumbling, turning, scratching, smoothing and battering them, before it takes them away or destroys them. Metal, bone, pottery and stone objects are quite resilient, but even they are eventually worried away by the river. Much of what I find is scarred and damaged, but if I’m lucky enough to catch something as soon as it emerges from the mud it can look as if it was lost yesterday. Thames mud is a magical preserver. It is anaerobic, which means it lacks oxygen, and this is the main reason it produces such exceptional finds. Cocooned in a wet, oxygen-free environment, materials that would ordinarily perish – wood, leather, iron and fabric – can emerge perfectly preserved, held in suspended animation, kept exactly as they were when they fell into the river. Once they are exposed, it is a race against time to save them, but it is impossible to save everything.

  I have watched willow hurdles laid down centuries ago to stabilise the mud, wooden barrels and what looked like the remains of a basket of elderberries slowly rise and wash away on the tides. The soft, waterlogged sticks of neatly woven wicker fish and eel traps, dating from between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries
, break down even more quickly, leaving just an outline like a drawing in the mud.

  If wood is left to dry naturally it splits and cracks. The ageing process of hundreds of years condenses into days or sometimes hours. I have experimented with a number of methods of drying ancient wood, but in the end, I’ve found the simplest solution to be the best. First I clean the object gently with water before wrapping it tightly in cling film and putting it at the bottom of my freezer for as many years as I can bear to leave it. This effects a crude form of semi-freeze-drying so that when I take it out and dry it slowly in a cool dark cupboard, wrapped in a plastic bag pierced with holes, the wood dries very well. Just like mudlarking itself, patience, time and simplicity are the key to preservation.

  If leather is left to dry naturally it curls and shrinks, and since I find quite a lot of it on the foreshore I’ve had plenty of opportunity to experiment with preserving it. I mostly find old shoes and shoe soles, although I recently found a leather hat which is at this moment sitting in a fridge in the conservation department of the Museum of London awaiting expert attention. But nobody seems to want the shoes and soles, which are left to me to try to preserve and I do this as well as I can because they are so special. Of all the objects I have found on the foreshore, leather shoes and shoe soles are among the most personal. Often the imprint of the last owner’s foot is still clearly visible, the shapes of toes and heels pressed into the leather as soft shadows. In more complete shoes, the angle of wear on the heel, repair work and creases across the top of the shoe are as individual as fingerprints.

  Old shoes are also a fascinating vehicle for social exploration, revealing snapshots of various times in history through their shapes, styles and the way they were made. Straight shoes, with soles that are neither left- nor right-footed, were common between 1500 and 1700, and long pointed soles come from shoes called poulaines that were fashionable in the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. Thick soles with lines of rusty iron studs are usually from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hobnailed boots. My favourite, though, are the distinctive wide-toed soles of Tudor duck-billed or cow-mouth shoes. According to sumptuary law, which kept ostentatious show among the lower ranks in check, only men of wealth could wear these shoes, which were often slashed to reveal the brightly coloured stockings they wore with them. I have successfully dried the soles of Tudor cow-mouth shoes between sheets of newspaper, weighted flat to stop them from curling and twisting, but more complete shoes have proved to be beyond my amateur conservation techniques. I have tried drying the pieces slowly, but they shrank and became brittle. I spent weeks rubbing lanolin into one ancient shoe upper, only to end up with a sticky shrunken mess. My most successful experiment so far has been with the same cream I use on my leather sofa, which kept the toe of a shoe soft and supple as it dried out. But when I finally found a complete child’s shoe, estimated to date from around the sixteenth century, I decided it needed to be dealt with properly.

  Only the toe of the shoe was peeping out of the mud when I found it. I am used to finding pieces of old shoes, but they are usually just the sole or a section or two of the upper. This time, as I carefully moved the mud away from around it, I realised with growing excitement that it was complete. The thick, waxed thread that would once have held it together had rotted away, but it had been kept in shape by the mud and slid out wonderfully intact. In my hands lay a small, flat slip-on that looked about the right size for a child nowadays of around five years old. It was made of thick dark peaty brown cowhide and reminded me of the shoes I had once seen people wearing and selling in Morocco; a simple workaday style that, like the wooden combs I find, has remained unchanged for centuries. When it was new, it was a popular style and many ordinary Londoners, adults and children, wore them. Perhaps it had been lost while someone was boarding a boat or was sucked off as he or she tried to walk through the thick mud. The owner had worn it right through at the big toe end, so maybe they had grown out of it or decided it was beyond repair. A podiatrist I showed it to suggested the hole was caused by a condition known as hammertoe, where toes are pushed down and the joint is forced up. To some, the hole might have been an imperfection, but to me it made it even more precious. The hole, the creases, the worn-out sole had been made by a forgotten child almost 600 years ago. I was enchanted.

  I took the brown sodden lump home wrapped in plastic, which kept it damp, and I put it under the stairs where it was cool and dark. This is where it stayed for the best part of two years before I managed to track down someone willing to help me conserve it. My quest began at the Museum of London, but shoes are not uncommon finds in London; the museum has a lot in its collection and sadly not enough money to conserve them all. So I racked my brains for more ideas. Then I remembered reading an article about some similar shoes that had been found on the wreck of Henry VIII’s warship, the Mary Rose. The Mary Rose sank in 1545 and was discovered in 1971 on the seabed near the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour. She was raised in 1982 and around 19,000 artefacts were recovered. Conservation is ongoing and their experience in waterlogged objects is second to none. I allowed myself cautious optimism.

  I contacted the Mary Rose Trust and arranged to take my shoe to David, their head of conservation. In a small dark room at the back of the museum, he carefully removed the shoe from its wet tea towel. I cringed slightly, expecting to be berated for the condition I had kept it in, but he continued in silent contemplation, turning it over and peering carefully inside it. I had done a fairly good job, he told me, but he was sorry, they couldn’t help. Funding, or the lack of it, had thwarted me once more. Still, there was a glimmer of hope. David had studied conservation at Cardiff University and he thought it might be worth contacting them to see if they could help.

  I wrapped the shoe in its wet tea towel again, surrounded it in a cloud of bubble wrap and posted it to Wales where it was cleaned, measured, weighed, documented and assessed, before I was asked if I would like to go to Cardiff and see how it was coming along. The cleaning stage had been time-consuming since brushes of varying strengths, and eventually a microscope and tweezers, were needed to remove all the mud. The shoe was at the water-displacement stage and soaking in a bath of glycerol when I got there. This would provide a physical bond to support the degraded collagen fibres and give the shoe a degree of flexibility. Next, it would be shaped using inert packing supports and then placed in an ordinary freezer to freeze any remaining water molecules. Within a vacuum, the freeze dryer would then turn the solid water molecules into gas, without passing them through a liquid stage that could damage the surface of the shoe. Once freeze-drying was complete, the shoe would be stitched back together under a microscope and packed to keep its shape. This, then, was how freeze-drying worked.

  Several months later a parcel arrived from Wales. The shoe was smaller than I remembered and, now that it had dried, the leather was a lighter brown, but the creases across the top, the worn-down heel and the hole in the toe were still there. I had worried that the process might remove some of the shoe’s character and dull the past, but as I held it in my hand it felt just as magical, as if it had slipped off a child’s foot yesterday. It has pride of place in my collection, in a display case of its own that keeps it free from dust and helps to regulate its environment – not too damp and not too dry.

  In many ways, mudlarking is a quest in two parts: the hunt for the object and the journey to identify it and learn more about it. Soon after my first foreshore foray, I began to take home mysterious objects and spent the following week researching them before returning to the river for more. My research opened up a world of escapees and obsessives. However obscure the object, there seemed to be an expert in it. I found people who specialised in lead bag seals, Dutch clay pipes, pre-1800 buttons, bricks, lead tokens, seventeenth-century trade beads, Victorian lead soldiers, Roman coins, fossils and medieval floor tiles. There is a man in Wisconsin who strives to make the perfect medieval lace aglet and a woman who earns her living from making
authentic Tudor clothing. Others immerse themselves completely and spend their weekends dressed up and reliving the past over and over again.

  There are devotees of specific objects on the foreshore too. Graham has been mudlarking for over twenty years and is obsessed with collecting pins. The first time I met him he was picking pins from the mud with a pair of tweezers. He wears three in the lapel of his muddy old suit jacket for luck. From counting out and weighing 1,000 of them, and then weighing his entire collection, he estimates that he has over 180,000 pins. Among them he has identified ninety-two different types. Johnny is another mudlark on a specific quest. He collects beads. It took him almost forty visits before he spied that first brightly coloured glass sphere lying in the gravel, and it sparked an obsession. Over the following two years he collected 598 beads in a rainbow of colours and a variety of shapes, sizes and materials, from tiny glass beads that may once have adorned the bodice of a dress to drilled semi-precious stones, someone’s prized possessions. His bead collection must be approaching 1,000 by now.

  I shudder to think of the treasures I have left behind simply because I didn’t know what they were. Many years ago, on the foreshore near Bankside, I found what I now know to be a pewter syringe for administering mercury. Mercury was thought to be a cure for syphilis (a night with Venus meant a lifetime with Mercury), though its toxic effects far outweighed any benefits. It was administered in heated vapours, applied as a cream and injected directly into the nether regions. When I found the syringe, it was badly crushed and I looked at it carefully before deciding to leave it where it was because ‘it didn’t look very nice’. I still kick myself for that error.