Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  But it wasn’t until I went down to the foreshore for a night tide that I realised just how important light is and exactly where my eyes go when I’m mudlarking. Early on, I learned that the bright white glare and restricted circle created by a head torch doesn’t suit my style of searching, but several years ago, with night tides lower than many mudlarks could remember, that didn’t seem to matter. There was no way I was missing them.

  For three nights in a row I caught the last train into London Bridge and waited under a street light for the water to recede. On the night it was due to fall to its lowest point, I found I wasn’t alone. As I lurked in the shadows, others began to arrive; some I recognised, most I didn’t. They came from all directions, one by one, gathering at the top of the river stairs until a handful of us were milling around, fiddling with head torches and strapping flashlights to metal detectors. We spoke in hushed tones, respectful of the unique moment we had been afforded. It’s hard to explain the excitement of an exceptionally low tide: imagine Christmas Eve when you were about seven and you’re almost there. It’s a tummy-churning, heart-pounding, light-headed euphoria and an explosive happiness that’s hard to contain.

  I walked east along the water’s edge to an area that had been particularly productive in recent weeks and began my search. Without the noise of the day to mask it, the river was surprisingly noisy. The gently lapping water carried with it the sounds of its bounty – shards of pottery and glass knocked together and clay pipe stems played a soft tune as the river pulled back and forth over them. My head torch cast a bright beam, illuminating a circle about three feet wide and concentrating my search. The darkness pressed in around me, blocking out the present and blanketing me in the city’s history. The ghosts of the foreshore were all around.

  I thought of the Great Fire of 1666 and how the flames would have danced on the water and lit the foreshore with an eerie orange glow. From where I was standing, I would have been able to see the houses along the old bridge burning and heard the panic as people crowded around the top of the river stairs, shouting and fighting, the wherrymen grinning as they hiked up their fares to take advantage of the situation. I recalled Pepys’s description of the chaos that I’d read only a few days before: ‘Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another.’ He described the river as ‘full of lighters and boats taking in goods, and goods swimming in the water’. I looked out over the dark and imagined chests, boxes and furniture bobbing about between the heavily laden craft. How much had been dropped in the chaos and lay lost in the mud, waiting to wash up from the bottom of the river? Had any of my treasures once belonged to a terrified Londoner fleeing the flames?

  That first night of the fire, Pepys stood and watched it from a boat on the river, close to where I was standing, before retiring to a pub on Bankside, opposite Three Cranes Wharf, to watch the city burn. As the fire spread along the waterfront, west from London Bridge, it reached the wharfside warehouses that were packed with hay, wood, tar, tallow and brandy. Had I been standing here just over 350 years ago, apart from losing my eyebrows, I would have seen pools of burning tallow floating on the water, fragments of burning buildings passing by on the tide, clouds of steam rising into the air where the burning tar met the water’s edge, and a sky filled with thick black smoke and ash that fell like snow. There is a black layer in the foreshore that some say is cinders from the Great Fire. On occasion I’ve found blackened roof tiles and bricks at London Bridge. They might be rubble from the Fire, dumped into the river in the aftermath. Or they could just as easily be from one of the many other smaller fires that occurred over the centuries. There is no real way of knowing.

  The Romans built the first known crossing over the Thames almost 2,000 years ago, around twenty yards downstream from where London Bridge is today. Many rickety wooden crossings followed. Some simply collapsed, fire and floods destroyed others, and invading Danes pulled down another. In the thirteenth century, a narrow stone bridge finally replaced the wooden constructions. It took thirty years to complete and lasted, in one form or another, for 600 years, becoming one of the wonders of the medieval world and the most famous bridge in history. Over the centuries it changed and evolved to suit the needs and demands of the city. At one point it had a wooden drawbridge to allow tall ships access upstream and stone gateways at either end that were locked to secure the city at night.

  The old bridge was built with nineteen arches of varying widths and wide piers that sat on boat-shaped starlings, which created a virtual barrier across the river, impeding its flow and trapping the tide. Water wheels between the arches harnessed the river’s power to pump water to nearby houses and grind corn. The bridge also created a lethal obstacle for the wherries passing underneath it, particularly in the hands of inexperienced or drunken wherrymen. Known as ‘shooting the rapids’, taken at the wrong angle a boat could easily turn and capsize or be dashed against the stone piers, and once in the water people had little chance of survival. Their heavy clothes dragged them down and the churning water quickly claimed their bodies and possessions, adding them to the river’s rich trove.

  The piers slowed the water to such an extent that in extreme winters, the river upstream from the bridge froze completely, sometimes for as long as two months. In the seventeenth century it froze twelve times and the first frost fair was held in the winter of 1607/8 between Westminster and London Bridge. With their livelihoods suspended, the wily and ever-resourceful watermen fitted wheels to their wherries so they could glide over the ice, hired out their boats as stages for entertainment and charged people for access to the frozen river. There were swings, bowling, bear- and bull-baiting, puppet shows, dances, ox roasts, horse-and-carriage races, and at the last frost fair in 1814 an elephant was led across the ice at Blackfriars Bridge. Booths were erected on the ice selling food, drinks and souvenirs. Imagine the objects that were dropped in pursuit of this revelry: coins, trifles and trinkets that fell into the slushy muck and drifted down to the riverbed when the ice finally melted. Rare bone skates have been pulled from the foreshore along this stretch: bovine shin bones, shaped and smoothed to slide over the ice, which Londoners strapped to their feet, propelling themselves along the frozen river with long spiked poles.

  Until recently, I dreaded the descent to the river at the north end of London Bridge. Cutting out of the crowds, I’d take a final breath of fresh air before going into an enclosed concrete staircase in the bowels of the bridge where the stench of stale urine mixed with the chemical tang of industrial disinfectant to create an overpowering olfactory soup. It was a grimy, unpleasant and forbidding space that pricked my primitive sense of fear and sent me scuttling as fast as I could to the last turn where the river slapped up against the river wall. I’m very thankful for the new curvaceous stainless-steel staircase, which is bolted on to the outside of the bridge and has revolutionised my descent to the river path. I walk west along the path, passing under Cannon Street Bridge, until I get to the metal river stairs just the other side of it. Once on the foreshore, I walk back east towards London Bridge.

  I begin by looking through the rubble that has washed up against the river wall. Many people forget to search the top part of the foreshore and concentrate instead on the water’s edge, but I’ve found some good stuff here so I always give it a once-over before I move on. I peer between the bricks and stones, looking around them as much as I can without moving them: I’m in a protected area and I mustn’t disturb as much as a pebble in my search. Kneeling down helps. It’s a worm’s-eye view that means I can look more closely into dips and crevices and underneath overhanging bits of rubble. I can also look across patches of sand for subtle contours that suggest something might be hidden just below the surface. This close up, the gravel is not just a grey-brown textured mass – every
stone is different – and I scan it for anything that doesn’t fit. If I hadn’t been this close to the gravel several years ago, I would never have noticed the dark purple and white oval Roman ring intaglio lying in it. It is made of glass, designed to look like a special variety of two-layered onyx called nicolo, and carved with the figure of Bonus Eventus (‘Good Outcome’). Nor would I have seen the edge of the blue-ridged Roman melon bead hidden in the same patch of stones.

  Although the Roman quayside was much further inland, the most likely place to find Roman artefacts on the Thames foreshore still correlates with the location of the ancient city. The Romans’ main settlement was on the north side of the river on two small hills – Ludgate Hill and Cornhill – with the Walbrook River running between them. The Walbrook brought clean water into the city and took away the waste, but over time it silted up and by the mid-fifteenth century parts of it had already been built over. The buildings sealed a waterlogged time capsule that is occasionally pierced during construction work, revealing Roman life perfectly preserved in minute detail: leather, wood, leaves, grass, seeds and even a small bird with its feathers still intact have all been found. But all that’s left of the Walbrook now is an innocuous hole in the river wall covered by a heavy steel flap just west of Cannon Street Bridge. Water barely seeps out from around the edges and the shingle piled halfway up against it suggests it hasn’t been fully active for some time.

  Hundreds of Roman artefacts were brought up from the riverbed when the medieval bridge was dismantled in 1831 and centuries of accumulated silt were dredged to deepen and widen the channel. The ballast heavers and dredgermen hauled thousands of coins up in their buckets, as well as iron spearheads, tools, rings, brooches and pottery. They also found metal statuettes of Roman deities – Apollo, Jupiter and Ganymede – some of which appeared to have been deliberately mutilated. Small finds continued to appear for years from the dredged gravel that was taken upriver to the Old Surrey Canal where it was used to make a towpath between Hammersmith and Barnes, and at Putney.

  Among the most impressive finds dredged up from London Bridge was a pair of castration clamps, beautifully decorated with the busts of deities and the heads of animals, and dedicated to the mother goddess Cybele. Roman London was filled with soldiers and merchants from all over the Empire, who had brought their own beliefs and religions with them. From the East came Mithras, the Persian god of light, to whom a huge temple was built on the bank of the Walbrook, and from Egypt and Asia came Isis and Cybele. One version of the story goes that Cybele fell in love with a beautiful youth called Attis, but he was unfaithful to her. Crazed with fury, she drove him insane as punishment and in his madness Attis cut off his own genitals and died. In honour of this, worship of Cybele was accompanied by wild orgies and castration. The eunuch priests perfumed their hair, dressed in women’s clothes, and celebrated the mother goddess with frenzied dancing and acts of debauchery. The clamps found at London Bridge would have been used to help remove testicles by staunching the flow of blood. Perhaps the ceremony involved visiting the river, where the clamps were thrown in as an offering or were accidentally dropped. It is also possible they were disposed of by early Christians wanting to break from the Empire’s more heathen ways.

  My Roman finds might not quite compare with the castration clamps, but I’ve found a good selection of ordinary Roman life along the stretch of river between the Walbrook and London Bridge. Over the years I’ve collected many pieces of roof tile, mosaic flooring, pottery, coins, game counters, beads and hairpins. Some of the objects I’ve found may have been washed into the river down drains or along the Walbrook; they could have been dropped from boats or off the Roman bridge; or they might have arrived there in spoil brought from building works further inland to build up the foreshore in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  In total, I currently have nineteen pieces of Roman hairpins, all made of bone. Some have delicate bobble finials at one end and I have the sharpened ends of others, but I haven’t found a complete one yet. They are not easy to find. When they are wet, they look like dark brown sticks, only straighter and more regular in shape and size. Sometimes the only way to tell if they are hairpins or twigs is to push a fingernail into them. Wood is usually soft and gives, while bone, although almost 2,000 years old, is still very hard. As they dry, they turn to a warm honeyed brown and the subtle facets and lines made by the craftsman’s tools become visible. Each slender pin would have been turned on a bow lathe and many must have broken in the process. Perhaps my finds are simply manufacturing spoil, but I like to entertain more romantic notions: a Roman lady, dressing quickly after a morning at the baths and cursing softly under her breath as she looks for her missing hairpin, which has dropped into the drain at her feet.

  Early on in my mudlarking career I found a perfect white cube in the gravel close to London Bridge. It was a bright day and the sun picked it out, glancing off the squared edge that made it so obviously not natural. Since finding one, I have got my eye in for them and I now have quite a collection of what I learned are Roman tesserae from the floors of Londinium’s baths, public buildings and grander houses. They would have been set in mortar, sometimes in intricate patterns, polished smooth with rough stones and finished with beeswax. I also have an actual piece of a Roman floor: ten small squares of grey marble set in a chunk of rough, gritty mortar. The tesserae are satisfyingly smooth, worn by thousands of passing footsteps.

  Roman game counters – bone discs about the size of a penny – are another lucky gravel find from the London Bridge area. They are impossible to miss if they are flat on, but trickier to see if they are embedded in the mud on their side. If this is the case it’s just a matter of luck whether you find them or not, since you need to be looking in just the right place as the light catches the thin edge. Most of the counters I’ve found were lying face up. One of my favourites has two distinct wear points on the underside from the many times it had been put down and picked up; a hungry Roman rat has left toothy scrape marks all around the edge of another. But one of the plainest is the most interesting. It hides a secret on the underside, a faint Roman numeral X that someone scratched into it. I’ve seen similar Roman counters from the foreshore with numerals on the back and have been told that they may have been illegal gambling chips. Gambling was considered harmful to the moral structure of the Empire and laws were enacted to restrict it. Betting on games of skill, such as chariot racing, was allowed, but gambling on games of chance, such as dice, was forbidden – perhaps my counter was disposed of before the owner was caught with it.

  So many Roman artefacts have been found that some have suggested there was a shrine halfway across the bridge where people threw in coins and offerings for luck or safe passage. I found my first Roman coin on the foreshore here and have found every one since in the same small area. Coins can often emerge from the mud side on, like the game counters. They also stick to the bottom of posts and to the flat sides of rocks and rubble, which makes them hard to spot. Sometimes they are so tarnished and covered with cemented mud it is impossible to see they are coins at all, though the disc-like shape, size and flatness of them usually gives them away. If they have worked free of the mud and wash in on a wave or are left behind by the tide, they often stick to the surface of wet sand or lurk just below it, only visible to the well-practised eye as a small circle of raised sand.

  My first Roman coin was a silver siliqua, minted under Honorius (393–423) in Mediolanum (modern-day Milan). I found it as I searched the water’s edge, following the waves as they pulled back and forth over a wide patch of slick wet sand. As the wake from a boat sucked the water further out, the light caught on a low circle standing proud of the flat sand. I moved quickly, before the next wave crashed back in over it, gently brushing away barely a millimetre of sand with my finger and pulling out a nondescript disc, covered with centuries of thick black tarnish. Thick tarnish is a good sign, it means the coin has been protected from the smoothing, battering actions of the riv
er.

  At home I connected the coin to my home-made electrolysis kit – a mobile phone charger with two alligator clips wired onto the end, an old stainless-steel spoon and a bowl of bicarbonate of soda dissolved in water. Electrolysis is the most effective way I’ve found to remove heavy tarnish from silver, or rust and concreted mud on other metals, but it needs to be done with care. Too much ‘zapping’ and a delicate coin can dissolve away to nothing. I only use electrolysis where an object is solid and stable and so obscured it is impossible to see any distinguishing marks. Where coins or objects are delicate, or I’m not sure if they’re silver, I use the spit-and-foil method – spitting on the object then wrapping it in foil and pressing it together. The spit acts as a medium for the foil to react with the silver; if the object is silver the reaction gives off a distinct smell of rotten eggs and in the process removes any light tarnish. Since I knew my Roman coin was silver, and it was quite substantial and heavily tarnished, I decided to risk electrolysis.

  I dissolved some bicarbonate of soda in a bowl of warm water and attached one of the alligator clips to the coin and the other to the spoon. Then I immersed both in the bicarbonate solution and switched it on. The coin fizzed gently and gave off a pungent smell of rotten eggs – hydrogen sulphide, which is poisonous and flammable. I opened the door so that I didn’t poison myself and watched as the years began to fall away, turning the water cloudy and black. Within minutes the coin was free of tarnish, but now it looked too bright and new. There was no contrast and the details were hard to see, so I set about artificially ageing it by holding it high over the flame of a candle so that it blackened with soot. This is called ‘smoking’. According to one mudlark I know, the best candles for smoking are the old tallow candles that are sometimes found in the mud, but I make do with an IKEA tea light. When the coin was completely obscured and velvety black with soot, I rubbed it with lanolin, which replicated generations of greasy hands and fixed the soot into the tiny bumps and lines of the design, revealing Honorius in all his glorious detail.