Mudlarking Read online

  I walk back and forth along the waterline, dropping further down the foreshore as the tide falls and the bricks turn to shingle then sand. To the east, through London Bridge, I can see Tower Bridge in the distance and to the west of me is Cannon Street Railway Bridge. I spend plenty of time covering all my lucky spots and casting an eye over as much of the foreshore as I can. There’s usually pottery to be found and sometimes the waves leave coins stuck to the sand as they retreat, but not today. I pick up a thick piece of terracotta and turn it in my hands. One side is roughly patterned with a series of grooves that look as if they were scraped or pressed into the clay when it was wet. There are patches of white mortar caught in the pattern and the other side is rough and plain. I know what it is because I’ve found them before and I have quite a collection of different patterns – straight lines, curved lines, parallel and crossed lines. It’s a piece of hypocaust or box flue from a Roman central heating system.

  England was supposed to be experiencing a warm phase at the time of the Romans, but anyone arriving from southern Europe would still have found our damp little island in the northern bounds of the Empire miserably cold, so those who could afford it built hypocaust systems into their homes to keep themselves warm. It was a clever and fairly simple solution: the ground floor was raised on little pillars that allowed hot air from a furnace to circulate and heat the room above. Sections of short open-ended square or rectangular pipes (box flues) were set into the walls and drew the hot air upwards and out of the roof, thus heating the rooms as it went. They were plastered over for aesthetic reasons, and the patterns on their outer surfaces provided a key for the wall plaster to adhere to. Even though they were never meant to be seen, designs were finger-drawn, combed or relief-patterned using a special roller, and were so varied and unique that it has been suggested they may have been the tile-maker’s way of ‘signing’ or personalising his work.

  I pocket the piece of hypocaust to add to my collection and turn to scan the river. The water is beginning to turn. If I’m going to do this stretch justice I need to start heading west now. Just before Cannon Street Bridge I pass over an area that’s been filled in with shingle and hardcore and reinforced with huge nylon nets of stones, to stop the river from undermining the wall. When I first came here, I could walk across on the old surface, but over the years, the wake of passing boats that ate away at the foreshore where the revetments in front of it had collapsed and it had been softened and destabilised by mudlarks digging in the 1980s and 90s. The mudlarks left just a handful of hard compacted columns where they hadn’t dug, but without support these crumbled too and all that remained, until it was filled in this year, was a curved bay of rubble with a small sandy beach.

  It was sad to see, but I have to admit the finds were great. As the foreshore disappeared, it revealed the treasures it had been hiding for centuries: an old wooden drain made from a hollowed-out trunk of elm, prized for its resistance to rot and still in use beneath the streets of London well into the twentieth century; a silver shilling from the short reign (1553–58) of Mary Tudor; a round bone token for an eighteenth-century pleasure garden called Lambeth Wells; and a seventeenth-century pewter bodkin with the initials ‘SE’ scratched onto it. It is a flat, blunt needle, around seven inches long, with a large rectangular eye topped by a tiny spoon at the wider end. The little spoons had a multitude of uses, including extracting perfume from small glass bottles and even cleaning out boils. Like the tube of my little silver cosmetic set, it is bent and crushed, but the fact that there are initials scratched into it makes it special: it was someone’s prized possession and it is a direct link to that individual. SE would have used her bodkin daily to lace her bodice together and even pin up her hair. She may have cleaned out her ears with it and used the earwax as a convenient and inexpensive alternative to beeswax, for drawing together fibres and lubricating thread. I have run my fingers over her initials many times and wondered who she was and how she came to lose her bodkin.

  Under the bridge the foreshore is solid and flat, packed down hard with a kind of dark grey volcanic-looking rock, but even this is being nibbled at the edges. Where the Victorian revetments are broken and boards are missing, the river is starting to carve out hollows, revealing tantalising glimpses of what lies beneath, a sheer wall of spoil in which is embedded pottery shards, broken clay pipe stems, animal bones and oyster shells, the remains of countless ancient meals shovelled up and dumped onto the foreshore. There is a smell of rotten food and fermenting bins here, from the rusting rubbish barges that sit on a soft bed of white chalk on the other side of the bridge. I hold my breath as I walk past quickly, and then I’m at Three Cranes Wharf, named after the medieval wharf, which in turn had been named for the three large wooden treadmill cranes that hung over the water in front of it. They can be seen in miniature on the Agas map, but it’s all gone now. Just one crane operates here today, accompanied by an irritating alarm as it lifts containers of smelly compressed waste over the riverside walk and into the barges behind me.

  In front of me and as far as Queenhithe Dock the foreshore bristles with old scaffolding poles, wooden posts, car tyres and half-submerged traffic cones, which mark where members of the Society of Mudlarks have dug deep into the foreshore. I survey the battle-scarred terrain and see that they’ve been at work again recently. There’s a low hump of grey mud, the remains of a spoil heap, standing just proud of the sand around it. It’s been smoothed by several tides and is spotted with pebbles and pieces of pottery. Next to it is a shallow water-filled dip where the mud has settled in the hole they dug. All of this is worth searching for the smaller things they missed.

  My best spoil heap find was from here: a chevron bead smaller than a pea that because of its rarity and collectability is worth more than its weight in gold. But I’m not interested in its value. I’d waited for years to find one and I’d never sell it. It is a miniature work of art, with alternating white, red and blue layers that were fused together and shaped with a special twelve-point star mould to give it a distinctive striped-star cross-section pattern. The technique was invented by the Venetians around 1500 and is still used today. The very earliest chevron beads have seven layers, which I realised with growing excitement was what mine had, as I counted them under a magnifying glass at home. But for all its beauty, I knew it was probably made for more sinister purposes. Many chevron beads were produced for trade with West Africa. They were a cheap and efficient means of exploiting resources and were exchanged for gold, ivory, palm oil and slaves.

  Today I pick a plain, flat, late eighteenth- or nineteenth-century button out of the mud. I find a lot of these, they’re fairly generic, and probably came from waistcoats or jackets, washed down drains or pulled off the clothes of river workers. I pocket a couple of complete eighteenth-century pipe bowls – I’ll wash the compacted mud out of them when I get home. The few pottery shards I pull from the mud are neither decorated nor particularly unusual, so I leave them where they are and move on to Tile Hill, which is under Southwark Bridge. Years of demolition and destruction has turned the foreshore orange in places, and beside the bridge the river has washed a mass of roof and floor tiles into a great mound of terracotta, delicately skirted by a drift of old animal bones. The dry bones are a lovely soft buff colour and they clatter beneath my feet as I walk over them, checking for knife handles and anything carved, decorated or out of the ordinary. Even discarded offcuts from bone working are interesting: pieces of flat bone, possibly a pig or sheep scapula, with a neat line of circles or semicircles where beads and buttons had been cut out of it.

  I have spent many happy hours above the bones on Tile Hill, turning the tiles over one by one and searching for pieces of fourteenth-century floor tiles, called ‘Penn’ tiles after the village in Buckinghamshire where they were made. They would have covered the floors of churches and grand houses and are decorated with subtle white scrolls, geometric designs, flowers and fleur-de-lys; if you’re lucky you might find the suggestion of a lion,
a figure or a bird.

  Roman and medieval roof tiles sometimes have a grey core due to lack of oxidisation in the clay during the firing process. Roman tiles are thick and distinguishable by their shape – flat tegula ones with turned-up edges and curved imbrex ones that fitted over them to make roofs watertight some 2,000 years ago. Medieval roof tiles were hung with wooden pegs and the round peg holes of old tiles are larger and more carefully executed than later ones, which are more roughly stabbed. After the Great Fire of 1666 the holes in tiles became smaller and were triangular, square or diamond in shape to accommodate metal nails instead. But the holy grail of Tile Hill is the rare pieces that have captured a moment in time, ordinary everyday events that were pressed into the soft clay of a freshly made tile. I have one with the perfect impression of woven cloth, perhaps the tile-maker’s sleeve, and several with the prints of dogs and cats.

  But I need to get a move on if I am to make it past the pinch point near Queenhithe Dock. The tide is coming in fast. It’s already begun to fill one side of the tunnel that leads under the river path and I start to inch myself carefully along the sloping concrete on the side closest to the river wall. It’s lethally slippery and I’ve seen a few people come a cropper here, so I walk sideways with my toes pointing up the incline and take it slowly. There’s old rope and plastic bags caught in a multicoloured tangle on the metal posts inside the tunnel, water drips down from the roof and the advancing river splashes against the concrete lower down. I pop back out into the sunshine and jump down onto an old carpet that’s been here, growing fuzzy with algae, for years; it’s part of the foreshore now.

  I walk slowly along this part, my eyes darting from one spot to another, looking for clean slivers of white silver, purity in the black mud. I spot one and bend down to pull it free, then wash it in a small pool of stranded river water nearby. It’s a perfect piece of mother-of-pearl, almost as large as the palm of my hand, clean grey with a rainbow hue. But this is not a native river species. This is abalone, a marine creature found mostly in New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, North America and Japan. I had puzzled for years about how abalone had got here before eventually it came up in conversation with Mike. He told me about a shell warehouse that once stood on the quayside here where abalone, destined for furniture inlay, jewellery, buckles and buttons, was bought, sold and stored. Further research turned up some old photographs of the quayside taken in 1896. Suited men in bowler hats and straw boaters wander among numbered bins and boxes filled with shells as large as dinner plates. I imagine the rejects and floor sweepings ended up in the river, which is how they came to embellish the mud. They appeal to the magpie in me and I collect them, so I slip the shiny piece into my finds bag to take home.

  I make it past the pinch point with a few feet of tide to spare and head towards Trig Lane. I could walk further west, as far as Blackfriars Bridge where, on very low tides, you can get right up to the large metal cover in the wall that’s all that’s left of London’s famous buried river, the Fleet, but I rarely go that far. It’s habit and routine that stays my journey at Trig Lane, and what little time I have left I’d rather spend searching here because it’s often been lucky for me. This is probably because it’s always been such a busy part of the river. Since medieval times Trig Lane was one of the frequent ‘watergates’, a landing place where people could board and alight from wherries and where they could wash, water their horses, do their laundry, collect water and use the public latrines. It’s just the kind of place I look for on old maps because I know there will be treasure there – small items that were dropped and lost, ordinary objects that belonged to ordinary people going about their daily business: a simple brass shoe buckle, shaped like a small pair of spectacles, caught between the planks of a boat and torn off, and the decorated metal tag, or chape, from the end of a woman’s thin leather girdle, finally broken free from thinning leather.

  Most of what I have found at Trig Lane falls into this ordinary treasure category, but a few years ago I found a simple silver ring that qualified as real treasure trove. Under UK law, certain ownerless objects are defined as ‘Treasure’ and as such have to be reported to the local coroner since they belong not to the finder but the Crown, or other franchises such as the City of London. In order to qualify as Treasure a find needs to be over 300 years old and made of at least 10 per cent precious metal by weight; a group of two or more base metal coins over 300 years old; two or more base metal prehistoric objects from the same spot; prehistoric objects containing any amount of precious metal; and any material found alongside objects that qualify as Treasure (this would include bags, boxes, pots and loose gemstones). Local and national museums are given the chance to express an interest in buying the object, but if nobody wants it the Crown disclaims its interest and it is returned to the finder. If a museum wants to purchase the object there is an official inquiry to declare the item Treasure and its value is determined by an independent Treasure Valuation Committee. This is paid as a reward to the finder and the landowner (in the case of the Thames this is the PLA) who split it 50/50. The finder can also opt to donate it to the museum that wants it.

  I was wading about in the shallows, having one last look at the end of a day’s larking, when I found the ring. I’ve made some of my best finds just as I’m about to leave the foreshore, so I always put in a little bit of extra effort in the last few minutes, just in case. This time, a boat passed and I stepped back as the waves from its wake flooded the foreshore. As the river raked back over the shingle and prepared to send another wave crashing down onto the mud, I saw a small dark ring caught against the side of the Victorian revetment timbers. I had a second to act before it was washed away, so I nipped forward, snatched it up and leapt back up the foreshore, sustaining a welly full of water in the process. I could tell it was silver even though it was black with tarnish, but other than that it didn’t look like anything special, and slightly disappointed I began to wonder whether it had been worth the cold, squelching walk home that lay ahead of me.

  That week and the following one were busy, so it was some time before I got round to sorting and cleaning what I’d found that day, and it wasn’t until I’d taken everything out of my finds bag that I remembered the little black ring, which was caught in a gritty seam at the bottom. I turned it in my fingers and held it up to the light. With my glasses on I could see more clearly and, on the inside, I could make out some letters. The style of the engraving made me think the ring could be quite old after all. I felt a twinge of excitement and grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil. Some letters were completely tarnished over, but I wrote down the ones I could read: ‘H–PE X I –IV– IN’. It was like solving an anagram, with missing letters, which wasn’t easy, but slowly I worked out what was missing and rearranged the words so that they made sense: ‘I LIVE IN HOPE X’. A posy ring!

  A posy ring is a ring inscribed with a short sentimental expression, or ‘posy’, from the Middle English word for poetry. They became popular around the fourteenth century and were given by either partner at any stage of the relationship and the inscriptions, both French and English, were usually concerning love, friendship and loyalty: ‘God Made Us Two One’; ‘In Thy Breast My Heart Doth Rest’; ‘Love Never Dies Where Virtue Lies’; ‘My Gift is Myself’. Wearing the hidden motto next to the skin emphasised the intimacy of these messages. I slipped the ring onto my finger and instantly it felt too intimate, so I took it off again. Who had it belonged to? It was large enough to be a man’s ring. Perhaps it had slipped from the finger of a sailor or waterman. Or maybe it had been dashed into the water in a fit of fury and passion, the sailor returned from his travels to find his intended in the arms of another, the hope he had lived for all the time he was away now lost along with the ring.

  Knowing there was a chance the ring qualified as Treasure, I emailed the Finds Liaison Officer (FLO) at the Museum of London and made an appointment to take it in to show her. I take regular batches of foreshore finds to be recorded on the Portab
le Antiquities Scheme’s database, a brilliant project that is not just a unique insight into our historical lost and found objects, but also a valuable resource to identify finds. I use the database all the time to help identify what I find and I’m a firm believer in contributing to it. In 2014, they recorded their millionth object, which shows just how much is being found in Britain’s fields, coastlines and rivers.

  Treasure can take several years to process, but I was lucky: the ring took just over a year and none of the museums wanted it. The British Museum already had one very similar in their collection, and it was this that the FLO used to date mine. English posy rings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries usually had their inscriptions written in French and on the outside of the ring. Mine had its inscription written in English on the inside, while the style of writing suggested it was from the sixteenth century, a time when the fashion for such love tokens was at its peak. It is one of my most treasured finds and, although it still feels strange wearing something that was once so personal to someone else, I sometimes wear it on a silver chain around my neck.