by Lara Maiklem
The river wall is part of the Tower of London, which was designated a Scheduled Monument in 1900. The foreshore, which is one of the most historically important stretches on the tidal Thames, is owned by the Crown Estate, which has its own rules to protect it. Nobody is permitted to mudlark in front of the Tower of London without rare permission, though archaeologists are given occasional access to keep track of erosion and to monitor the foreshore. Several years ago, wire-mesh bags filled with large cobbled flints were brought in to protect the wall foundations and a new revetment was constructed. But the river is a persistent beast and it has prodded, probed and felt its way around them, transferring its attention to the unprotected foundations further along, which are now also being exposed and undermined.
The White Tower, so called because in 1240 it was painted white on the orders of Henry III, is what gives the Tower of London its name. It is also the most ancient building and last remaining castle on the tidal Thames. The rectangular stone keep was built by William the Conqueror towards the end of the eleventh century. With ramparts fifteen feet thick at the base and ninety-foot-high walls, it loomed over the wooden huts of the native population below, leaving them in little doubt as to where the power now lay. Being at the easterly end of the city and on the river, it was also built to protect London from invaders sailing upstream from the sea. The location was carefully chosen, making use of the old Roman wall to protect the keep’s easterly and southerly walls. By 210, the Romans had enclosed an area of about 330 acres with a 2.2-mile-long wall thought to be twenty feet high in places and eight feet thick, and towards the end of the third century, they extended it along the riverfront. The Roman wall was still a feature of the city when the Normans arrived and it made perfect sense for them to use as much of it as they could.
The river brought people, troops, provisions and building materials to the Tower and provided water for those who lived and worked inside the enclosure. The river also filled the moat when it was connected to the Thames in the late thirteenth century. This added an impregnable ring around the complex, though over the years, as water levels in the Thames varied, it stopped draining properly and began to silt up, becoming little more than a disease-ridden, stinking bog. The moat was finally drained, cleared and filled with soil in the 1840s. I often wonder what they did with the silt they dredged out of it. It would have been packed with centuries of lost and discarded treasures. Did they dump it into the river in front of the castle, or was it taken somewhere else by barge or cart?
Over the centuries the Tower grew to a vast complex. It has been variously used as a royal residence, a prison, a menagerie, an armoury and a mint, and all of this is soaked into the foreshore in front of it. When I finally got to mudlark at Tower Beach and hold the objects that might have been made or used within the Tower, I could hear the trudge of soldiers marching in and out of the castle, and the orchestra of hammers, riveting mail and flattening discs of precious metals, that rose above the sounds of medieval London all around. The history I’d learned at school – a dusty stream of dates, battles, dead kings and queens – came to life.
One of the most direct links I found to the Tower on the foreshore were several small grey cups, shaped like shallow cones, which I later learned were called cupels and which may have been used at the Royal Mint to make coins. Cupels were made from finely ground bone ash, moistened with beer, water or egg, and pressed into a mould. They were used to extract precious metal at very high temperatures from samples of ore and to test the quality of scrap metal. Similar cupels were found during an archaeological dig in 1976 within the Tower complex at the site of a sixteenth-century furnace. Chemical analysis revealed they had been used to refine silver that was contaminated with copper. At the mint, once the metal had been extracted, it was cast into ingots, annealed (heat-treated) to soften it, and beaten or rolled into the thickness of a coin. Blank chips were cut from the flattened sheets of metal and were then placed between two engraved metal dies and struck with a hammer to produce a ‘hammered’ coin with a design on both sides.
Until 1662, when machines took over, every coin was produced by hand in this way. At the Tower, the mint workers were kept separate from other workers and guarded closely to make sure they didn’t succumb to temptation. They worked in hot, dark workshops where the air was filled with poisonous fumes from the furnaces. While one man placed the blank disc on the bottom die, the other lined up the top die and struck it with a hammer. A mistimed placing or extraction risked losing a finger. When I look over the hammered coins I’ve found on the foreshore they lack the uniformity of later machine-made coins. Some have been struck off-centre, others poorly struck and ill-defined. I think of the moment the hammer came down on each one, how they fell to the floor of the minting room in the dirt and noise and heat, and I wonder about the men who made them.
I have found coins bearing the faces of kings, queens and emperors stretching back to Roman times: tiny, wafer-thin medieval pennies with quirky, naive portraits of strange-looking men; Elizabeth, the Tudor queen, with her high forehead and elaborate ruffed collar; the moustachioed Charles I; classically posed Hanoverian kings; and a youthful Queen Victoria, a single ringlet falling from the loose bun at the back of her head. Each coin represents a distinct moment in history and conjures images in my head of mundane as well as major events. Had it been in the purse of a man who succumbed to the Black Death; taken on voyages to new worlds; or used to buy a pie from a costermonger on a foggy East End street?
Coins have the power to fascinate and for some, the hunt for coins becomes an obsession. They spend their tidal time plugged into metal detectors, hoping that the next beep will be a Tudor shilling or a Roman denarius, and not just another scrap of old lead. I can’t deny that the sight of these small metal discs emerging from the filth is exhilarating, but for me they can lack a certain mystery and uniqueness.
Assuming it is in good condition, a coin will willingly give up its secrets, instantly revealing what it is made of, the year it was struck and even where it was made. A coin is one of many, each one similar if not identical to the next. In most cases they don’t surprise, confuse or challenge. They are safe and straightforward, easy to collect and categorise. What draws me in are coins that have been marked or changed by someone. I found a George III copper halfpenny one wet Sunday afternoon on the foreshore at Rotherhithe a little further east from the Tower. It has a crude ‘X’ scratched deeply across the king’s face that might simply be an adaption to turn it into a tally token. It could also have been the work of a bored sailor or a symbolic act of an unemployed soldier, returned from the disastrous war in America and taking out his anger on the fat king’s portrait.
It is thought that Anglo-Saxons pierced Roman coins to wear them as decoration, and in later centuries, in the absence of banks, those who didn’t want to bury or hide their savings sewed coins into their clothes for safekeeping. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries holed sixpences and threepenny pieces were worn as jewellery. The small pierced silver threepenny piece I found sitting on the mud at Hammersmith dates from 1918, the year the First World War ended. Perhaps its original owner had lost a loved one or fiancé and this was her way of keeping him close to her. Or maybe it could tell a happier tale – a baby born into a peaceful world or a son or brother returned safely from France. I wear it on my own charm bracelet now, carrying the essence of the person who lost it and taking it further on its journey through time.
Larger coins, shillings and half-crowns, were hung on watch chains as decoration and presumably slipped their loops and fell into the river, but my silver seventeenth-century Charles I penny is too delicate and early for that. It’s a thin sliver of metal, no bigger than a fingernail, that I found stuck on the wooden post of a revetment, as shiny as the day it was lost. The hole has been drilled carefully, just above the king’s head, and it dates from the turbulent times when Parliament was demanding Charles denounce his God-given right to absolute rule. Had the hole been punched thr
ough the king’s face it would tell a different story, an act of subversion carried out by a supporter of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth, but the fact that it so carefully avoids disfiguring the monarch suggests it could have been a secret talisman for a supporter of the king. Tied around someone’s neck, he was worn close to someone’s heart until the string broke or it was discovered, torn off and thrown into the river.
The coins that most spark my imagination are the worn silver ones that have been bent into a crude ‘S’ shape. These crooked sixpences are thought to be love tokens, shaped to hold love in their curves, and are heavy with tales of desire, loss and broken hearts. They became fashionable around the end of the seventeenth century. The sixpence, or occasionally lower-value copper coin, was bent by the young man in front of his intended before he presented it to her as a symbol of his affection. If she liked him, she would keep it. If she didn’t, she would throw it away. Many must have been thrown into the river, because I have found a good handful of them on the foreshore.
Other love tokens lost or thrown into the Thames include engraved coins, which were popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pennies that were smoothed or worn down, and larger silver coins such as shillings and crowns, provided a perfect miniature canvas. Workmanship varies from the simplest scratching to beautiful engraving. Some coins were even set with semi-precious stones. Coins have been found with names, addresses, dates and short verses. Others, perhaps made by the less literate or more artistically inclined, are covered with patterns, flowers, leaves or simple drawings. The only engraved love token I’ve found on the Thames is a smooth copper penny with ‘J Tweedy, 19 April 1864’, scratched roughly into one side. I found it next to the river wall at Deptford, and as it sat in my hand, cold, wet and a little gritty from the foreshore, I wondered who J Tweedy was. Had the token been thrown into the water for luck or tossed away in despair?
I have only visited Tower Beach three times: once when I scrambled along the foreshore at low tide and twice on public open days. The open days began in 2001, to encourage public involvement and awareness of the foreshore, and ended soon after permit rules were enforced in 2016, since it was too difficult to check permits and control the number of people attending the event. I’m in two minds about this. Although the open foreshore days gave ordinary mudlarks like me a chance to search a stretch that was usually out of bounds, I only went twice because I didn’t enjoy it very much. It’s not my style of mudlarking. I like the foreshore when it’s quiet and I’m not motivated enough by the find to bother jostling with crowds of strangers for a piece of the pie.
On open foreshore days, the queue started well in advance of the unlocking of the gates. With just two and a half hours to search the shore at low tide before we had to leave again, there was no time to waste. I arrived early enough to be near the head of the crowd and stood among the other mudlarks. I recognised some of them, but even the ones I didn’t know were conspicuous by their muddy knee pads. Families with children carrying buckets and spades evoked the beach days of the 1930s. Some people were prepared with welly boots and plastic bags for their spoils. The ones in sandals and ‘good shoes’ obviously hadn’t a clue what they were getting themselves into, but they joined in anyway.
The line grew and we waited until the river had fallen to a safe level and a good amount of foreshore was exposed before a beefeater, one of the Tower’s ceremonial guards, arrived with a key to unlock the gate. A buzz of excitement rippled through the crowd. We filed carefully down the slippery stone steps to the foreshore, collecting protective blue latex gloves from a smiling volunteer on the way. At the bottom, people fanned out in all directions. I had heard that the most productive part of the foreshore was closest to the bridge and I wanted to get to it before it filled up, so I headed east quickly, to where the end of the foreshore had been roped off with striped tape. Beyond it were the mudlarks known to the organisers, who were guarding it from the crowd. I was one of the lucky ones. I said hello and ducked underneath the tape to an area that was fractionally calmer.
I looked back at a foreshore filled with bodies, heads down, frantically rushing from spot to spot. Already people were scraping at the gravel to look underneath it. It was far less busy where I was, but even so I found it hard to focus. My concentration drifts with lots of people around me. I start to look at what everyone else is doing instead of my own patch of foreshore; then I start worrying that someone might come and speak to me. But eventually I managed to block out the chaos around me and settled down to search.
I stayed until the foreshore behind me had started to clear of people and the tide began to brush away the piles and dips they’d made. I wished I could come back again the next day, without the crowds, when the mud had settled under a few tides and the objects that had been missed in the frenzy revealed themselves. I walked past the trestle tables, where exhausted sunburned experts were still identifying and explaining the heap of objects in front of them. It was mostly pottery, bricks, random pieces of metal, bones and shells, but there were sealed plastic bags in black trays that suggested more interesting objects had been found too. Perhaps they had some coins in there. They would be spirited away to the Museum of London to be recorded and examined more closely.
I was pleased with my own finds: two cupels; a little bone spoon, perhaps a nineteenth-century mustard spoon; the plain handle of a seventeenth-century pewter spoon; and the lock end of a broken seventeenth-century key, which I like to think might have once turned the heavy iron mechanism in a thick oak door at the Tower. I also had several tiny metal wire loops that I’d found trapped in the shingle and tangled up in patches of handmade pins. Some were linked together and most of them were closed by the tiniest of rivets. I knew what they were because I’d found them on other parts of the foreshore, but never as many as I found here. They are evidence of the medieval mail-makers who, like the coin-makers, toiled in dark workshops at the Tower in the Royal Armoury, where weapons and suits of plate armour were also made. They pulled wire to gauge, cut it to size and bent it into these neat rings, which they then looped together – four rings on every loop – and individually riveted. This created the metal mesh from which they made protective suits for knights, kings and soldiers.
Mail, not ‘chain mail’ as some mistakenly call it, was relatively easy to make, although time-consuming, and offered flexible protection from arrows, swords and spears. A knee-length mail shirt, known as a hauberk, was made up of 28,000–50,000 links, weighed up to thirty pounds and took around a hundred days to make. It was worn over quilted underclothes that would have absorbed the blows from weapons and protected the wearer from chafing, but it was expensive and most ordinary soldiers continued to go into battle in little more than padded leather jackets. Mail was worn throughout the medieval period; by the fourteenth century armour had developed into suits made from large plates of metal, with mail to cover the gaps. It offered good protection, but little resistance to projectiles fired from guns. From the sixteenth century, as firearms grew in popularity on the battlefield, mail and armour were shed and restricted to ceremonial use.
The mail links I have from Tower Beach are made of iron, but I also have links made of copper alloy. Both iron and copper alloy survive well in the mud, but once iron is free it quickly begins to rust and flake away. A tap of a hammer will remove the top loose layer of rust from large and solid iron objects, like padlocks and cannon balls. They can then sometimes be sanded down to sound metal and oiled to keep them rust-free. Some people use electrolysis and boil them for hours in wax to preserve them, but I’ve never tried that. With objects like chains and hand-forged nails, I clean as much of the rust off as I can and spray them with clear lacquer, which acts as a barrier against moisture. Iron mail is difficult to preserve, however, because it is so small and delicate. Once the rust takes hold it can crumble away to dust. To delay this, I soak the mail for several weeks in my pickle jar of WD40 oil and then store it in a ‘dry box’, a plastic food contain
er with a bag of silica gel to keep the air inside moisture-free. This seems to work, but rust is persistent and I’ve been told by professional conservators that even they haven’t found a failsafe way to stop it completely.
The Agas map of 1561 shows the castle with a full moat, the Queen’s Stairs and the entrance to Traitor’s Gate. And if you look very carefully you will see tiny cannons along the waterfront. It is not uncommon to find iron cannonballs embedded in the foreshore, particularly from the Tower eastwards and at Woolwich and Deptford, where Henry VIII established his naval dockyards. They were also used as ballast in ships, which may be why they are found on the foreshore at Rotherhithe where old ships were broken up and their ballast dumped. Cannon balls come in all sizes, according to the bore of the cannon they were made for, some far too heavy for me to move and others that are easy to pocket. Of those I’ve taken home, I’ve saved a few, but most have eventually burst open and peeled away in layers of rust.
Lead musket balls fare better. I’ve collected scores of them over the years and those I haven’t given away (children love them) I keep in a glass jar on top of my printer’s chest. I find them in the gravel and doming out of the mud. They are easy to find now, but it took me a few years to get my eye in for them and to spot the grey spheres disguised in the pebbles. If I’m in any doubt as to what they are when I spot them, the weight of the lead gives them away.