Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  Now the coin came to life. It was a living thing with a past and a story, a coin that had been carried to London in the purse of a soldier who had passed through Mediolanum on his way to the outer limits of the Empire. He may have used it to buy imported dates or wine to remind himself of home. Or perhaps he had thrown it into the water for luck and to honour the gods as he crossed the river on his way north to defend Hadrian’s Wall against the barbarians.

  I’m superstitious too. When I find a modern penny, I give it back to the river for luck and as payment for its treasures, though it is unlikely my offerings will survive as long. In 1992 the composition of 1p and 2p coins was changed from bronze to copper-plated steel, and 5p and 10p coins changed from cupronickel to nickel-plated steel in 2012. The modern coins I find are already bubbling and blistering with rust, anonymising the Queen and slowly dissolving in the river. Our generation’s numismatic legacy will be negligible.

  It was not just Roman artefacts that surfaced when Old London Bridge was being demolished. The accumulated silt had captured the treasures and sunken detritus of generations of Londoners, and among the objects most sought after by the Victorian collectors were the pewter medieval pilgrim badges that seemed to appear in some abundance on this particular part of the river.

  I completely see why these rather crude metal trinkets were, and still are, so sought after. For me, the heavy-headed, spindly-limbed figures depicted on them epitomise the medieval period, and there is something almost magical about them. Perhaps they have absorbed some of the religious essence they represented. They were bought by pilgrims at religious shrines who pinned them to their coats, hats and bags to prove they had completed their pilgrimage and to take some of the power of the shrine back home with them. They were cheap, easy to make, and sold in thousands. From the number that have been retrieved from the Thames and found on the foreshore it is thought they may also have been thrown into the river in thanks for a safe return. A good number have been found bent in half in a similar way to Bronze Age swords that were ritually bent before being offered to the river, which adds credence to this theory.

  The idea that there was some kind of shrine partway across the Roman bridge is pure speculation, since there is no historic record of one, but we do know there was a chapel in the middle of Old London Bridge, with stairs that led directly down to the river so that it could be easily accessed from the water. It was devoted to St Thomas Becket, the London-born archbishop who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Becket was declared a martyr and sanctified three years later and his shrine at Canterbury became a popular focus for pilgrimage. London pilgrims often began and ended their journey at the little chapel on the bridge. Some went as far as Jerusalem, which could take several years, but many travelled to Canterbury in the south or to Walsingham in Norfolk in the north in search of protection, cure or absolution from a past sin.

  Pilgrim badges still occasionally show up on the foreshore, almost exclusively in the London Bridge area, but they are a rare and lucky find and fifteen years on I am still searching for a complete one to add to my collection. It’s become a bit of an obsession. I’ve said that I’ll give up mudlarking once I find one, though I think that actually finding one might feed my obsession even more. Every time I visit London Bridge I go in the expectation that a Becket badge will be lying there waiting for me. One with a complex tableau of knights brandishing their swords at the unfortunate bishop would be nice.

  In the end it’s down to luck and I do at least have a treasured fragment of a fifteenth-century Our Lady of Willesden badge. The shrine in north-east London could be visited in a day, but it was quite an undertaking: the Willesden area was mainly woodland and bandit attacks were common. During the Reformation, in 1538, the Willesden image was dragged to Chelsea and burned on a great bonfire of other Catholic statues. Such idolatry was banned, and it was the beginning of the end of pilgrim badges.

  The small pewter badges that the pilgrims brought back from Willesden had an image of the Virgin Mary wearing a crown and sitting within the horns of a crescent moon or boat. On her left arm is the Christ Child and in her right is a sceptre. I found the top half of one. It was lying face down and looked like just another anonymous piece of lead when I found it. But something made me turn it over and there, looking serenely back at me, were the two gentle, sleepy faces of Mary and Jesus. It may be broken, but it was my first pilgrim badge and it made me more determined than ever to find another. About nine months later, I did. This one was a round pewter ‘mount’, about as big as my fingernail, which dates from the fourteenth century. It has the initials ‘iHc’ – representing the Latin for ‘Jesus the Saviour of Man’ – cast into it in Gothic-style script. It is a cheap, generic badge and there is no way of knowing where it was bought, but someone once wore it as a proud symbol of their devotion.

  Since finding the pilgrim mount, the only pilgrim-related objects I’ve found on the foreshore are the tiny pewter tokens that are thought by some to have been used as a form of currency to pay for food and lodgings along the pilgrim routes. It has also been suggested that they were ecclesiastic tokens, issued by the large and powerful monasteries that controlled much of life in London, and were redeemable for alms, the prayers of monks and as tokens for various services. They are surprisingly common – I’ve found eleven so far and mudlarks are always picking them off the foreshore. The earliest date from the thirteenth century, but most of mine come from the mid-fifteenth. They are like dark grey fish scales, so small that they balance perfectly on the end of my finger, and most are wafer-thin, which means they tend to stick to the surface of wet sand, making them easy to spot. One side is virtually the same on all of them, radiating lines around the edge and a cross in the centre with four dots between its arms. The other side varies. Some have initials, while others feature a variety of objects, including body parts, chalices, bells and keys.

  I also find all manner of modern religious objects in the river. At Rotherhithe, at the bottom of a set of river stairs, I found an Islamic prayer asking for help with unrequited love. It was written on paper, folded up and tied to a stone with black and white thread to weigh it down. I wrapped it up again and left it where I’d found it, in a patch of large pebbles. A few years later, a little further east on the same stretch of the foreshore, I found what looked like a jar wrapped in black plastic. I shook it and something thudded up and down inside. All sorts of hideous objects sprang to mind. What if it was a body part? I knew a human foot had been found fairly close by a couple of years ago and I hesitated before slowly and cautiously unwrapping it. Inside was a glass jar and inside that was an onion. It seemed odd that someone had gone to such unusual lengths, so I photographed it and posted it on my Facebook page and was inundated with suggestions, the most popular being that it was a Wiccan ‘spell jar’. This reminded me of what I had read about seventeenth-century Bellarmine jars, which were sometimes used to contain spells in a similar way and were often buried beneath the doorways of houses to protect those inside from bad spirits. In 1926, a mudlark searching the shore near Blackfriars Bridge found one of these ‘witch bottles’, although he didn’t realise at the time what it was. He took it home, removed the clay bung and emptied out its contents: a liquid – most likely urine – rusty iron nails, hair, brass pins and a scrap of tattered felt cut into the shape of a heart and pierced by pins. This must be most mudlarks’ dream find. It’s certainly mine.

  But by far the most common religious objects found in the river are Hindu. For the Hindu community, the Thames has become a substitute for the Ganges, representing vitality, purity, motherhood, fertility, life, forbearance, impermanence and a return to origins. The river is also an acceptable place to dispose of once-sacred objects that are worn, damaged or obsolete. I’ve found scores of statues and images of Hindu gods – Ganesh, Durga, Kali, Lakshmi and Shiva – caught between rocks, trapped in the mud and washed up on slipways with the plastic bottles and old footballs. I’ve found strings of prayer beads,
small flat metal yantras to ward off evil, and lots of coconuts. Sometimes the coconuts are bound by a sacred red-and-yellow thread called a nada-chhadi or wrapped in cloth with rice or lentils. Just this year, a friend found one that had been cracked open and filled with rice, into which was pressed a small statue of Ganesh made from 1.9 ounces of solid gold. I find more Hindu objects on the foreshore to the east of central London, where there is a larger Hindu community, and the ghee or oil lamps called diyas increase in number in the autumn during Diwali, the Festival of Light. Some are painted bright colours, but others are plain and simple, handmade in India from terracotta. Their timeless appearance has raised the hopes of many new, and not so new, mudlarks with their remarkable resemblance to Roman pottery. While plastic statues fuel great debate as to whether they should be left because of their sacred attachments or removed as polluting litter, the lamps will eventually break down and return to the mud, a little bit of red Indian soil mixed in with the grey English mud.

  That dark night at London Bridge, as the tide dropped lower and lower, my torch lit up treasures all around me: buttons, coins, buckles, and the fine shards of broken eighteenth-century tea bowls, many hand-painted with delicate flowers; thickets of pins, beads and tiny plain metal studs that would have decorated medieval leather belts and jerkins; more clay pipes than I had ever seen before. It was impossible not to step on them. I collected the longest and winced as others cracked and popped beneath my feet.

  Every time I stopped to scrutinise the foreshore there seemed to be something new and different to collect. I found a worn Georgian farthing stuck flat to an old river-slimed post and a blackened wafer-thin Elizabethan penny lying at the bottom of a shallow water-filled dip. My torch reflected off the face of a late sixteenth-century jetton – the thin copper alloy tokens that were imported in bulk from Germany and used as reckoning counters, together with a chequered board to keep accounts. (The government’s accounting department is still known as the exchequer, after these boards.) On one side was an imperial orb and on the other a circular design of crowns and fleur-de-lys with a rose in the middle, and the name of the maker Hans Krauwinckel around the edge. What I like best about jettons though are the words of doom and damnation that also run around the outside. Who could fail to be nudged into contemplation by ANFANG DENKS ENDT (At the Beginning Consider the End), or inspired to tighten the purse strings by reading HEVT RODT MORGEN TODIT (Today Red/Alive, Tomorrow Dead). This one, rather appropriately, read GOTES GABEN SOL MAN LOB (One Should Praise God’s Gifts).

  I had already emptied my finds bag into my rucksack twice and was fiddling with its zip when the beam of my torch ran over something interesting: an open-ended oblong box, slightly thinner than a cigarette packet, with two comma-shaped perforations on either side and a scalloped edge. It’s lucky I saw it – one more step in that direction and I would have crushed it. I bent down to pick it up. I could see it was carved from a single piece of what looked like bone or ivory, and something about it looked familiar. It was about the same shape and size as a scabbard chape – the protective fitting from the end of a sword sheath – but I’d only ever seen them in books and museums, and those had been made of metal, never ivory or bone.

  I wrapped it carefully in a plastic bag and put it in my rucksack. It was past two o’clock in the morning and the tide was about to turn. I stayed for another hour, by which time I was exhausted and the tide had advanced well up the foreshore. There didn’t seem much point in staying to search what I could easily get to in daylight hours and I reckoned the river had given just about all it was willing to give that night; it was time to catch a cab home.

  The next day I took the scabbard chape (I was pretty sure that’s what it was) out of its bag for a closer look. I cleaned it up and put it in a smaller bag, which I pricked all over with a pin so that it would dry out slowly and not crack. I put the bag on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard and there it stayed for several months. By the time my next visit to the Finds Liaison Officer at the Museum of London rolled around, the scabbard chape was completely dry, so I wrapped it up again to take to show her.

  It turned out my scabbard chape was Roman and dated from the late second to third century, when it would have been specially commissioned for the auxiliary army. It is one of only two complete examples found in the UK. (The other was found in Silchester in Hampshire.) Its original owner would have worn a simple mail or scale shirt over a tunic, leather or woollen trousers in cold weather, and a metal helmet. He would have carried an oval-shaped shield and a spear or long sword from which the chape had fallen. It is unlikely he was British. Auxiliary soldiers were usually stationed in provinces away from their homeland to make them easier to control. It reduced the chances of mutiny and hastened the process of Romanisation through marriage with local women.

  I imagined a homesick soldier. Perhaps he was from Turkey, serving his time in Britain and hoping for Roman citizenship as an acknowledgement for his services to the Empire. As his unit marched through London, his scabbard chape worked loose and fell off. Somehow it found its way into the river where it was preserved in the mud for almost 2,000 years. If it hadn’t been for such a low tide, if I hadn’t gone out in the darkness that night and if the beam of my head torch hadn’t pointed down in just the right place at just the right moment, I would never have found it.

  TOWER BEACH

  Education she has none, and she never had instruction worthy the name. All her knowledge is to know the time of low water, and the value of the wrecks and waifs which each recurring tide scatters all too scantily over her peculiar domain.

  Charles Manby Smith, ‘The Tide Waitress’, Curiosities of London Life or Phases, Physiological and Social of the Great Metropolis (1853)

  Some people refer to the foreshore in front of the Tower of London as a beach and it certainly looks like one. But it’s not easy to get to. It is the stretch of foreshore on the north side of the river just to the west of Tower Bridge that runs the entire length of the Tower complex. I walked to it once, a number of years ago, along the foreshore from Custom House, a little further west where there are easy river stairs. I wasn’t planning to mudlark, I just wanted to have a look. That was on a particularly low tide and involved a lot of clambering over slimy wooden posts and wading through deep mud under jetties and piers, which I don’t like doing if I can avoid it. I recall collecting quite a bit of small change as I scrambled through the muddy obstacle course, emerging onto a wide stretch of completely empty yellow sand just beyond it.

  I carried on towards Tower Bridge, past a wide stone staircase set into the river wall called Queen’s Stairs, which were last used by a queen, Queen Mary, in 1938. They would have been the easiest and safest way down onto the beach, but these days they are kept locked. There’s a tall gate halfway down that’s crowned by a row of spiked railings, which makes it impossible for anyone to scale. Lack of use has turned the lower steps, where the river covers them at high tide, dark emerald green with algae.

  From the foreshore you can see a wide bricked-in arch in the river wall with the words ‘ENTRY TO THE TRAITOR’S GATE’ stencilled above it in large white capital letters. The river entrance was bricked up in the middle of the nineteenth century and Traitor’s Gate itself is on the other side of the wall. It was originally known as the Water Gate and was built in the late thirteenth century on the orders of Edward I to provide a convenient means to reach the Tower by barge. It acquired its present name in the sixteenth century, as the Tower evolved into a place of imprisonment, torture and beheading. Most famously, two of Henry VIII’s wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, came this way by barge before meeting their fate at the Tower. Anne’s daughter, the future Elizabeth I, was luckier. She arrived at the Tower on Palm Sunday 1554, sick with fever, on the order of her half-sister, Queen Mary, who had accused her of plotting against her. Her barge had already shot the rapids under London Bridge on a low tide, which everyone knew was madness, and been grounded on a mudbank, before continuing to
the Tower where, it is said, the tide was still too low to land. Some accounts claim that, knowing the fate of her mother, the twenty-year-old princess refused to enter through the gate and eventually waded ashore in heavy rain to Queen’s Stairs. She remained in the Tower for two months before she was released for lack of evidence.

  The half-moon of soft yellow sand that forms a gentle hill in front of the river wall and peters out to shingle towards the river, is all that remains of ‘London’s Riviera’, 1,500 barge-loads of Essex sand that was spread over the foreshore to create a public beach in 1934. This was the vision of the Reverend Philip Thomas Byard Clayton (otherwise known as ‘Tubby’), the vicar of All Hallows by the Tower, who in the summer of 1931 came up with the idea of the foreshore as a city seaside, ‘a genuine delight to the poor families who frequented Tower Hill’. King George V assured local children that they ‘would have this tidal playground as their own for ever’, and on 23 July 1934 the beach was opened to the public. The Times reported: ‘the ladder was lowered, to the music of cheerful siren blasts from ships in the Thames’. Children swarmed onto the beach where unlimited lemonade and buns had been laid out on long trestle tables.

  The beach was a great success. The ladder was lowered for up to six hours a day between April and September, depending on the tides, and there was a beach guard posted for safety. In the summer of 1935, around 100,000 people came to ‘holiday’ beside the Thames. Dockers’ children, some of whom had never seen the sea despite living just forty miles away from it, built sandcastles and watched Punch & Judy shows. They paddled in the shallows, bought toffee apples, and hired rowing boats to go under the bridge and back again. The beach closed during the Second World War, but reopened afterwards and continued to be popular. Photographs from the 1950s show men in shirtsleeves and braces relaxing in striped deckchairs, children in knitted bathing suits splashing in the water, and young women in summer dresses sitting on the sand eating sandwiches. It looks, to all intents and purposes, exactly like a day at the seaside. In 1971, however, concerns over pollution and safety and the cost of running it forced it to close. Today, most of the sand has washed away and the promise of ‘free access for ever’ has been broken.