Welcome, dear listeners, to another fascinating episode of
the London History Podcast, where we dive into the vibrant
and diverse past of this great city.
I am your host, Hazel Baker, a qualified London tour guide and
founder of London guidedwalks.co.uk.
Whether you're a born and bred Londoner or a curious listener,
join us on a journey through time as we explore the city
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Today we are delighted to welcome back Anna Borzello, an
experienced mudlaka whose fascinating discoveries along
the banks of the Thames have unearthed a treasure trove of
artefacts and should be sharing some from the Stuart period.
Anna's particulars work provides us with a glimpse into the daily
lives and material culture of 17th century London, and that
offers us a direct and personal connection to the path which is
both rare and invaluable. The Stuart period was a time of
significant social, political and cultural transformation, a
captivating backdrop for Anna's findings.
Today. These objects, ranging from
personal belongings to remnants of trade and domestic life, not
only illustrate the economic and social dynamics of the era, but
also reveal the personal narratives and experiences of
the people who once owned them. Each artifact, with its own
unique history, provides A tangible link to those
individuals living through such tumultuous times.
This is Stuart monarchy, so the English Civil War, the Plague
and the Great Fire of London. These finds allow us to piece
together everyday experiences from 17th century Londoners,
offering insights into their habits, preferences and the
challenges they faced. And once you've listened to
this, and you haven't listened to Anna's previous episode, then
get on to episode 112. Mudlarking finds Georgian London
to welcome Anna. Hello thank you so much for
asking me back. I'm really excited because when
you ask me back it means I can revisit my finds and re research
them, which was very invigorating.
Excellent. And it might be worth just
introducing people to the world of mudlarking and the
requirement for permits. Oh yes, it's very important.
So mudlarking in the Victorian era, mudlarks were scavengers of
the foreshore. They were just looking for
little lumps of coal or bits of rope that they could sell to
survive. They were on the verges of the
kind of criminal underclass these days.
Mudlarks. So down to the River Thames when
the tide is out and we scavenge not for items to sell.
In fact, it's illegal to sell the items we find but for items
that tell us stories about London's history.
And that's because the Thames is at the heart of London.
If it wasn't for the Thames, there would be no London, the
Romans wouldn't have settled here, and over the last 2000
years everybody's dumped their rubbish in there.
And what's rubbish to people other people has treasured to
us. And actually occasionally they
drop in the odd wanted treasure item too.
And if you're lucky enough, you might find that so the tide goes
in and out twice a day and mudlocks time their lives.
Basically, someone like me literally times my day around
when I can go down to the foreshore at low tide and hunt
around in the mud and see what I can find.
And not anybody can do it, can they?
Anyone can do it in the sense that it doesn't require a
specialist skill really and you learn on the job, but actually
you do need a permit to to search on the Thames and about a
year and a half ago the Port of London Authority who issued
those permits suspended them. So at the moment only those
people who have permits can search the foreshore.
Well, I think the PLA is reviewing the situation because
there was a great uptake in the number of people mud locking
particularly over lockdown. So I think they're just seeing
how to best manage the numbers and then we'll see what happens
next. So at the moment you can only
mud lock if you have a license, although you can go down if you
join groups. They're groups like the Thames
Discovery programme and the Thames Explorer Trust run really
excellent excursions down to the foreshore.
They're affordable and they're interesting, so I'd recommend
that to anybody who wants to try their hand at Mudlucky and see
what it's like. Now you mentioned about learning
on the job and only you've got you're nine years in and today
we're going to be focusing on finds that you have found that
were made or used in the 17th century, which is a big century
in London historic terms. Yeah, it's really exciting.
Century so much goes on in this century.
It's crazy. Not only does the population
double, there's a growth of the middle class, but right at the
heart of the century, you've got the great fire of London.
London falls down, then it's rebuilt again.
It rises from the ashes. There's the plague years.
There's the fighting between the Protestants and the Catholics,
which continues. The tensions continue.
There's the kind of great attempt at building a Republic
by the middle of the century as well.
And then also there's wonderful magical things, like the great
frost fare of a 1683 to 4 when the Thames froze over in the
Little Ice Age and basically the whole of London decamped to the
ice. They had affairs on the ice.
It was even meant to be an elephant on the ice.
And a lot of these events have left their mark on the Thames
and on the object that we find, if we're lucky enough when we're
not blocking on the Thames. Fantastic.
So I think it's worth starting with our first find of the day
and what have you got for us? OK, so the first one of the day
is something that maybe helps us imagine the mental life of
people in the 17th century, which was a time when there were
a lot of witches, witch hunts, superstitions.
So I'm holding a little bit of pottery and it's stoneware and
it's brown and it was made in Germany and it's something that
all mudlucks hope to find and often do find because they're
not uncommon. And it's a little face I'm going
to hold up so you can see Hazel, but I'll describe it for anyone
who has to listen. It's the neck of a the neck of a
jar and it's got a face imprinted on it.
It's rather a grumpy looking man with a downtown downturned
mouth. He has a bushy beard, thin nose
and eyes. Actually, his eyes, he's got
double eyes on top of each other.
And I really liked that when I found it, because when I was a
child I had a double vision, but it was a vertical double vision.
So when I pulled this out of the mud, I thought, Oh my gosh, I
found something from 400 years ago made by a Potter who maybe
had the same eye condition that I had as a child or maybe his
mould slipped, I don't know. So these are called Artman Jugs,
Bearded Man Jugs. They were made in Rhineland,
Germany, and they began being imported into England, actually,
in the Tudor period. But they were everywhere all
throughout the 17th century and they were multi purpose.
They've got this kind of slender neck that billows out into this
massive fat belly which sometimes has a coat of arms on
it. And they were used because
they're stoneware, they're not porous.
So they were used for carrying water and wine.
You might fetch wine from the Tavern or ale from the Tavern in
it and you often find them smashed on the Thames because
there was commonplace. They were not just known as
Batman or Beardeman Drugs, they were also known as Bellamine.
That's the word I know. Yeah, is it?
OK, so that's after apparently, Roberto Bellamine, who was a
Catholic cardinal. He became a cardinal, I think,
in about 1599. He's Italian and apparently he
was known. These were known in England as
Bellamine Jugs to mock him. Now I don't know where exactly
the mockery lies. I had a look at a picture of him
to see if he was maybe extraordinarily fat because he
do have big fat bellies and he wasn't, but he was bearded so
maybe it was just because he looked like that he was anti
Protestant. So maybe that's why people
wanted to mock him and it said that he was particularly anti
drinking, so they could have been some sort of finger up to
him by putting your ale or wine in here.
I don't know if that's just a folk tale or if it's true, but
it's along those lines that the people of the 17th century
decided to call these Bellamine Jugs.
So it's a little bit of entry into their humour, which I quite
like. It makes people come alive when
you can connect to their humour and there's something else about
these drugs which is interesting.
Oh, go on. That's probably going to be my
question anyway, So go for it. Do.
You want to ask what it is? I was going to say now, what's
the connection between the Bellamine Jugs and the name?
Witch bottles. Oh, exactly.
That is exactly what I was going to say.
So these are often used as witches bottles.
So what they are, you find them mainly not on the river.
You'll find them in houses buried near doors or near
fireplaces. That's because that's where bad
spirits can enter through those openings and they're complete.
And inside them is commonly found something sharp, like pins
or nails, and something that belongs to a particular person,
like their nail clippings or hair clippings.
And often then it was soaked in urine and then sealed up with
cork or wax and then it was buried.
And the idea was it was a protective Talisman really, that
if someone was going to send a spell your way, that the spell
would get a bit confused because there's a bit of you in the
bottle essentially, and it would go towards the bottle and then
get trapped on the pin or the needle kind of poked and secured
there. So it was just people had that
in their house to protect themselves.
Now I have only heard ever of one being found in the Thames, a
witch's bottle complete with those items inside.
And that was in the 1950s. I don't know if any have been
found subsequently. I think that's because the ones
that we find in the Thames are probably rubbish that was dumped
from people's everyday use of these items and then they got
rid of them and that's the reason why.
But they did have this wonderful double life.
So these bottles, these ordinary bottles that had they were
sources of humour and they were sources of protection as well as
having an extremely practical use.
So I really love them and that sort of furniture of everyday
17th century life I'm holding in my hand now.
That's why I love them. Fantastic.
And do we know why he's got double eyes?
No, I answered. There was.
Unfortunately, it's very recently closed the Bellamy
Museum and I did ask the gentleman who runs it.
He hadn't seen one actually with double eyes.
I've subsequently I've seen someone on Instagram who has
found one, which makes me wonder if it was deliberate rather than
a slip. It's what's incredible about
this, like people, you know how sometimes you think, isn't it
amazing that we're all basically the same and yet we all look
different? How did anyone manage?
It's incredible. And it's the same with these
faces. They've got the same basic
features and yet everybody is every single one is slightly
different. Grumpy or happy or cheeky or
stupid or in this case, double eyed.
I like to think, as I said, that it was intentional and he had
maybe poor eyesight as opposed to it being a slip of the mould.
And I suppose one thing against it being a sip of the mould is
that it's only the eyes that are affected on the rest of the.
Face. Interesting, isn't it?
Maybe that could have been a potential Maker's Mark or
something. That was their thing.
The double eyes. Yeah, that's very true.
Fantastic. So I'm glad that you showed that
one because it does show that human connection, isn't it?
It makes sense that the Witch's bottles of Bellamine Jugs that
are there to protect a house or on land, it's very similar to
what they were still doing at that time of putting faces
outside the windows and the architecture.
And you can still see some of those in Buckingham Street or
maybe a Great Queen's Gate. So the spirits who would could
potentially enter the the window would see these scary faces on
the outside, very similar to gargoyles oils but on a domestic
house and decide not not to bother going in.
I mean if you think we've got dream catchers now, haven't we?
We used to put cats in between the walls to protect the house
bodies of cats, not necessarily dead when they went in, and also
children's shoes above the stairwell so the fairies would
take the children's shoes rather than going up the stairs to take
the children. So that whole idea of fairies
and changing children and all the rest of it was very much
real for them in their lives. I'm going to tell you something
that's not relevant to London history, but it's relevant to
this, which is when I was working in Uganda, I went to
this extraordinary conference once in northern Uganda.
There was a war at the time, and it was a conference of priests
and nuns, and they were being taught by witch doctors their
tricks so that they could see through them.
So these were people who converted to Christianity and
then revealed all their chicks, and the whole thing was
absolutely brilliant. But one of them confessed, and
he confessed that he had on occasion murdered children and
buried their bodies under the front of the doorway as a
protection. What if I'm most extraordinary
about this, was somehow in the act of confessing?
He was then protected from any form of prosecution.
Somehow by being a Christian that wiped away that sin.
But I I suppose the reason that's an extreme example, but I
did often find it helpful. A lot of my friends in Uganda
were using some form of traditional medicine or
different sorts of spirituality to make sense of their life.
And I've, on that experience today, very helpful in
connecting with the past as well that are these things still
happen in other parts of the world.
People still think this way. Just because we think a
different way doesn't mean that everybody does.
No, no exactly. Still, when during the play
gears, like you mentioned, people would pay both the grizz
for spells and you'd have a piece of paper with like
abracadabra written on a triangle and roll that up, seal
that and have that round your neck and have that carry that
with you as a Talisman to protect you.
But again, the plague and all those sides of things, it was
all very real then, and it's still very real for some people.
Now, I wish you hadn't mentioned that spell around someone's
neck, because now I'm just going to be desperate to find
something like that, and that would be a dream.
Mudlarking. Find a piece of paper like that.
That really is a dream. I'd love.
Can find something like that, Yeah.
So I'm going to search for it from now on.
Well, there you go. You're going to have to keep
your eyes open for a little bottle.
If you did find something like that, you know.
And the the obvious answer to this question is how would you
know what's inside? But would you really?
Would you open it or would you ask someone else to do it?
Like Museum of London or something?
There might not be anything in, but if it's all properly sealed
with wax and everything, then isn't that just?
You've got to know what's inside, don't you?
I don't. People are always opening things
that they find on the Thames, and you get modern offerings all
the times as well, and modern spells all the time as well.
And I've ripped in a plastic bag and all sorts of weird things
have come out of it, little coins and beans and things like
that. I think if I found something
that beautifully sealed though with wax, I definitely would ask
the Museum of London for help. I think that everyone would be
aware that there's some items, you know, it'd be better to get
expert help, otherwise you're going to just ruin them.
At the moment, what we have to do as Mudlux is we have to
report items that are over 300 years old or a treasure and take
them to the Museum of London and make sure that they're recorded
if they're important. So I think something like that
would be off straight away, but it would be tempting to know
what's inside. Oh, that was a great
introduction to that one, Anna. So what else have you got for
us? So this is a different sort of
find. It's also pottery, so I'm
they're really great on pottery in the 17th century.
So in the Tudor times, I've got Tudor pottery and it's a little
bit, I hate to say it's a little bit samey, but there's a lot of
red and green and Browns and it's quite sort of utilitarian.
It's not particularly decorated, so it's nice to find it and it's
exciting, but it's not as magically colourful or
interesting, I find as the pottery in the 17th century.
So I'm holding here one of my favorite finds.
In fact, this sort of find is so beloved for me that I actually
sometimes buy tiles like this whole from auctions and things
like that because I really love them.
So this is a section of a Delft tile from around 1640, and on
this section, so it's about half a centimetre thick, a grey
biscuity base. And then on top there's a a
white glaze. It's it's quite thick really and
it's got a sort of blue tone to it.
And then there's a little man on it.
The man is sitting under a bent tree.
He's leaning forward with his arms outstretched.
It's a perfect little picture and it's it's slightly rushed
off, like it's a cartoon, which I really love about this style.
It's got such an energy to it. Now the amazing thing about
these tiles is that through the magic of Instagram I connected
with a collect a proper collector of these in Poland and
I can send him these little pictures, little snippets and he
tells me what the hole was. So apparently.
These Delft tiles were they were very common to have biblical
themes on them. So this I've got to remember.
I think it's Elijah being fed by the Ravens.
I think I've got a check that I've got the right.
I wrote it down actually because I is it Elijah?
I think somebody will definitely correct me if I've got that
wrong. But he's being fed by the Ravens
in the desert anyway, and I just find that amazing.
I've got other little fragments, often find feathers, and there's
actually a man who's on a horse with a feathered cap, but the
first time who showed like a little feather.
Anyway, some man on a horse with a feathered cap, little feet.
She seems to know what they are. I've got this wonderful little
slightly later one which is a collection.
It's manganese, that's purple little collection of feet in the
corner of a tile. And he managed to tell me what
that was as well. It's rather brilliant.
These are beautiful tiles. They appear in London in the
17th century and they originally come from Delft in the
Netherlands, which is why they're called Delft tiles.
You also get wonderful ones like this, which is was imported from
Holland. Can you see how beautiful that
is? It's called polychrome Delft and
it's like a riot of beautiful colors.
It would have been a small floral.
Isn't it amazing? Again, that would have been on
somebody's wall. It could have been in a
fireplace, it could have been in a kitchen.
Some of them are floor tiles, so you can see that suddenly in
this world, if you could afford it, you were having all these
beautiful tiles and colour in your life.
And also, just to mention quickly, the Dutch ones.
They really go for little cartoons of everyday life.
So there's I've even seen one. I've got one here, which is a
whole one. It's which I bought, which is a
man holding a child. But I've also got sad little
cat. And then you get this, someone
showed me one recently of someone defecating on the
ground, and then there's children playing and there's
lovers walking along. So there is incredible snapshot
of life in this period in Europe.
So that's why everybody loves them.
If you'd said when you show me that tile and said what, what do
you think it would have been? Delftware wouldn't have come as
one of my options because it's multi coloured.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
I have blue, blue and white in my head of a Delftware so that
is that's amazing to think. We've got the multi coloured
tile in the home as well for Delftware.
Yeah, it's called Polychrome Delft actually because it's
multi coloured, but it's basically the same as Delft.
It's a tin glaze, that's what, this colour.
Now there is something about these, something wonderful about
these tiles which I had never thought about.
Apparently from the late medieval period in Europe,
people became obsessed with Chinese and Japanese porcelain.
They saw it for the first time and they just thought, Oh my
gosh, I've just mentioned that Tudor stuff is lovely, but it's
not the most refined of pottery. And suddenly you're seeing this
beautiful, nearly translucent pottery with these beautiful
blue and white designs. It's like magic and it's white,
this purity of white. How do they get this?
In fact, the quest for getting it settled in people's head and
it was basically considered white gold, sort of ALCO.
It was like alchemy. How do you make white gold?
Now? The amazing thing is that tin
glaze, which is what Delve did, is that icing, like covering on
top of the biscuit face, is the closest anyone had got up to
that point of creating white, which is why it became so
popular. Because you could then afford it
if you were in the middle in classes, you had an
approximation of white, and if you had white with cobalt blue,
which as you've pointed out, most of them are white and blue,
you've got an approximation of that Chinese feel and that
Chinese style. So it's one reason why it just
seized everybody's imagination so very quickly.
In London you have Potteries springing up along the Thames.
There are very many of them actually.
And at the beginning they have, there's a very distinctive
London Delft and they're quite high end and colourful and
beautiful. As the century goes on and into
the next century, they become much more utilitarian and
they're just ordinary little pots.
And they you look at the material, it's very kind of
yellowy biscuity and the glaze seems to be chipping off quickly
and it's not so high end. The thing what happens in the
18th century is in I think it's in Germany at the very beginning
of the 1700s. Somebody works out how to make
really nice porcelain style China it and then that begins to
take precedence. And then at the end of the 1700s
you have the invention of bone China.
And that's basically Delft's death now, because now you've
got, you've got white, you don't, you don't need Delft
anymore. You've got this much better
pottery available. And then you have the whole
chance. World War in Victorian times.
And what I find amazing about this is that nowadays.
So before white was the dream, this dream from China and Japan,
the quest for white, the chasing after white gold.
And now it's like the lowest common denominator of plate.
You go into IKEA. If you just shorten imagination
you'll get a white plate. And actually if you're on the
foreshore by a pub, sometimes you get a whole white plate
smashed on the ground because they really don't mean anything
at all. And I find that really
interesting that it has so much value, this and rarity, and then
it becomes available to everybody and eventually it you
loses its charm. It makes you really hammers home
how value isn't inherent in a thing offered, it's just
associated with rarity and how easy it is to get hold of it,
and how quickly people get bored of things and they're readily
available. In terms of the designs on those
tiles that you were mentioning about man holding a child,
etcetera, they're very domestic, aren't they?
So are these for homes that are not to be seen by anybody that
needs to be impressed? That's a very, that's a very
good question. First of all, I don't know.
I always get the impression that those domestic scenes are from
Holland. I don't know if those domestic
scenes are made in England. Actually, I just, I get the
impression that they're not. That is a really good question
and I don't know the answer to it.
And I am now going to try and find out that answer because it
makes yes, it's a really interesting question.
I'm. I'm more like to think of people
thinking I'm going to get a picture of a guy squatting down
doing a poo and put him in my house.
That's funny. I know that bemuses me.
But you're absolutely right. Would if would the visiting
Alderman have thought it was funny?
Maybe not. Yeah, very.
That was a very good question. Thank you very much.
I'm full of them. Sure, just give me a.
Time. That's your job.
So what? That's fantastic.
So what item third item have we got on the list that you want to
share? Anna.
OK, so this is something very specific to a time and a place.
These are coins. Now, I'm not one of those people
who really loves coins. The people who go out and all
they want is coins, absolutely love them often.
I think the coins is amazing when you find them, but a little
bit, say me, but these are really special.
These are. I found my first one right after
Brexit and I was a bit perplexed.
Didn't have a King's head on it. On one side there was a shield
and on the other side there were two interlocking Shields.
And I just couldn't make sense of it.
And so I went and asked someone and it turns out that these were
issued in a very short period of England's history and they are
Commonwealth coins. So the King has been beheaded
and the coins remove his head as well.
So for the first time, our coinage doesn't have the King or
Queen's head on it. Instead, there's a shield that
represents St. George, it's represents England
and it's got a Laurel and a palm on it which represent
Parliament's victory. And on the other side, I think
it's England and Ireland on the Shields Co joined.
So on some of the bigger coins there's actually writing as
well, which just like King's head's not on it.
There's also this writing is no longer in Latin, it's in
English. A bit of the Puritan Etho.
You want to be able to access things.
You don't need the obscurity of Latin to get there.
And they say the Commonwealth of England on one side, and on the
other side it says God with us. So which the time would say the
Commonwealth is on the other side to God, like they're
opposing. I think that was quite funny.
And also there were a lot of jokes about how the two crossed
over Shields looked like a little bit like a bum, like a
rump, like the rump bum jokes going on there as well.
But I just find it absolutely fascinating, partly because
there's not much trace really of the Commonwealth.
It was such a short period, you don't find much trace on the
foreshore, maybe musket balls further, very much further
upstream. But generally the battles
weren't fought on the Thames, so there's not much direct
evidence. This is one of the few things
that we have. And I believe that when Cromwell
formed the Protectorate, he was put on some coins as an attempt
to start back to the notion of the old ways to give him power
because he was losing power. But I've never found one of
those. It's just these Commonwealth
coins and they just reflect just such a intriguing bit of English
history. The one the I've got two, as I
said one of them is pierced. I don't know why that is so it
could be there's a number of reasons.
Apparently sometimes people pierced coins so that they could
string them if they had a few and they could hide them in
their clothes because it was easy to carry was you might lose
them. It's much more likely that this
was possibly strung by someone who wanted to work to show their
support, but much more likely it was pierced to destroy it when
Charles the Second became king because they removed about 2/3
of these coins from circulation. And I think it was only the very
low denomination coins at the ones I found that sort of
remained knocking about. But they might still have been
pierced, even though they weren't removed, to show that
they were just no, they had no merit, No worth.
And also it could be an expression of anger.
Someone might have thought that was a pretty grim 11 years I'm
going to stab that coin. But anyway, I for that, for
those reasons, I find it fascinating.
The other thing is just personal.
I'm not AI. When Brexit happened, I was
rather glum. I'm not a supporter of, I wasn't
a supporter of the Leave campaign.
And I was feeling glum when I picked this up.
And I just thought, oh, there we go.
Look, there's this huge experiment, political
experiment, 300 and nearly 400 years ago.
And life goes on and everything changes.
And just because Brexit happen doesn't mean it'll always stay
this way. Maybe it'll roll on and change
again. It suddenly gave me a longer
view when you realize that something dramatic happened in
the past and yet time moved on and events changed.
So it gave me some solace for some reason finding this coin.
And just to fill listeners in as well, if you're not too sure
about that, the rump Parliament and that.
But basically when 1649 Charles the 1st is beheaded in January
and the Parliamentarians are now ruling, so you've got not so
King Oliver Cromwell, our great Lord Protector.
And during this time it had all been a political farce really,
in order to gain control by the Parliamentarians.
And when we're talking about the Rump, this was something that
you also saw on the streets, so the Rump Parliament.
And we had also butchers, shops and people burning rumps on the
street corners around London. And and that is wonderfully
depicted in a picture called Burning the Rumps at Temple Bar
by William Hogarth. And it's a row of London butcher
shops. And they were all on fire.
But this political body that was replaced much of the previous,
the old government during the English Civil War and this
protesting historical event was in 1659 and they just burnt
these beef rumps just on the street.
There was like political effigies and so when Anna's
mentioning about the two Shields looking like little buttocks as
well, and this is all relating into that.
So I'll try and find an image of the Hogarth one for you to have
a look at if you wanted to access that in the show notes as
well. Thank you for that what I have.
I say that I've learned about bits of London's history through
these finds, and it's true that I have learned about bits of
London history, but often it's just a little door you've
punched through to see a very partial view.
And I'm putting together a patchwork, but they're huge
gaps. So thank you for filling out a
bit more for me. OK, Anna, then what's up next?
#4 to come OK, I'm racing through these OK though, so this
one, a small white pot, it's actually dealt.
It's tin glaze, as we were talking about before, but
English made so rather than imported and it's complete.
I found it on a really low tide, an unexpected low tide.
And when I saw it I was so thrilled because it's very
uncommon to find complete pottery like this.
Apparently only 70 or 80 years ago they were commonly found.
And there is a famous Thames mudlock, the type of mudlock
called Ivan or Hugh, and he thought there were so many
because people threw them away. They were that common, but
they're not anymore, so I was thrilled.
So this is actually an apothecary pot and it's the kind
of pot that if you went to the apothecary and said I need a
medicine for the my sore arm, excuse me, they would have put
their concoction into a little pot like this and sealed it the
material and string and given it to you.
Now apothecaries are basically pharmacists.
They live, they're not the sort of high status as doctors.
Doctors have university educations and they run the posh
and they're above the sort of in the kind of ranking.
They're above the traditional healers or the cunning men and
women, as they were called, the people who did expel and also
use traditional medicine. They sit between the two.
They had a Guild, so they were taken very seriously in that
way. And they had at least seven
years training and would take on an apprenticeship to have that
training and you'd go along and they would make up these
concoctions. So it's a wonderful bit of
England's medical history in the 17th century.
But what I love about this, I was thinking, I wonder what they
put in this, this, I mean, what kind of ingredients would they
use? I had a little Google.
So there's the sort of standard herbs, minerals, your gemstone,
but then they also like quite exotic ingredients like bear fat
or Sparrow brain or lion fat. But my favorite ingredient,
which again opens up a an opens up an idea of how people in this
century viewed the world is mumia, which I'm sure you've
heard of Mumia. Mumia is what it sounds like.
It is mummy. It is Egyptian mummy.
So basically powdered Egyptian mummy.
And you think what? I know it sounds really naive,
but I hadn't really thought about people in the 17th century
even having a notion of ancient Egypt.
Someone I got stuck with the images of the Victorians and the
Edwardians discovering these tombs.
It hadn't really occurred to me that people had a much more
cosmopolitan view of the world, so they were getting these, this
Mummia. And apparently Mumia came to
European attention during the Crusades.
They heard of this amazing substance that came from
Egyptian mummies. And the idea is, along the way
they confuse the notion of a kind of bitumen that's used in
the process of mummifying with the actual body itself.
So, So the people who were talking about the amazing
qualities of Mummia, we're not talking about the same things as
the Europeans understood, which is actually crumbled body.
As a result of this hearing about the qualities of Mumia,
people started buying mummies from Egypt or raiding tombs.
In fact, Egypt got incredibly annoyed about it in about the
1500s because they were just being raided the whole time so
that apothecaries in England could have this magical
ingredient. Now what's interesting is about
the time in about the 1600s, Mumia began to get a really bad
Rep because people knew it was running out.
Something called Force Mumia came on the market and false
Mummia is rather unfortunately if you have an executed body, of
which there were many at this time, or even a desiccated rat
or some other kind of dead body, you could pass that off in
pounded form to your apothecary if you were selling to them, and
then the unwitting apothecary would be passing it on to their
to their consumers. So around the 1600s Mummia
begins to go out of fashion, although it continues to be used
into the 18th century. But that's just fascinating for
so many ways. How people unders, how people
relate and understand other cultures, This idea of a
cosmopolitan understanding of the world, the idea of
international trade, the idea of people raiding mummy, the idea
of tricksters. I just it just completely
altered the way I thought about people's mentality in the 17th
century. OK, what else have you got for
us? Well, can I just say that the, I
haven't got any particular story associated with this.
There's things I want to research about it, but it's just
such a wonderful find. I just, I picked up this, Can
you see it? It is the weeniest little glass
bottle from the middle of the 17th century.
And I'm showing it to you because I picked it up only
about a month ago on a again on a very low tide.
It's absolutely perfect. I thought it was an apothecary
vial. It might have been.
It could have also been on a ladies dressing table for some
kind of perfume. I just want to I apparently
there's not much research on it because I did ask a bottle
person about it. That's research what these were
precisely used for. But then oh, I have to really
describe it. It's a very small about an inch
high beautiful green bottle with a fat.
I don't know how to say it it it's a fat body and then goes up
into briefly into a slender neck and then it's got a very flat
top and it really is perfect. And I found it sideways on the
edge of a tide and it was actually encased in like it had
been concreted in over time. So it dropped in and then been
concreted in and the tide was coming in and I couldn't get it
out. And there's some parts of the
northern shore that you're only allowed to search by eye, you're
not allowed to use a trout, you're not allowed to dig.
Only a few people have a license to do that and luckily there was
a gentleman there who does have that license.
I called him over, he's called Guy.
So I shouted out Guy and people thought I was shouting at Guy,
so there was a bit of a trample over to see what I was doing.
I was like he thought I was calling everyone over and he
very kindly used the end of his Stroud to get it out and we had
the water lapping at our feet and he eventually extracted it
from me and it was a really thrilling 17th century find.
I don't know why it's in the water, but I'm very glad I got
it out. It's not usual to find these and
it was a treat. So I say that tell you about the
17th century, but to tell you that there are delightful finds
from the 17th century, and this particular one gave me great
pleasure. It really is quite beautiful,
isn't it? It's amazing.
Oh yeah, it really is very beautiful.
Oh gosh, I'm holding up to the light now.
I'm still very excited by. I'm still getting a buzz.
So I'm going to move on to a different sort of fine now, if
that's OK. So actually this is an 18th
century, fine, but it relates to the 17th century.
So I picked this little button up a few years ago.
I only discovered yesterday it was silver.
It was tarnished and I thought it was some.
I don't know what that is. It never occurred to me it was
actually silver, but I rubbed it with a bit of tin foil and if
it's silver, it gives off a very strong whiff of sulphur.
And that is exactly what happened.
So it's a silver button and it says on it, Phoenix, I think
it's Phoenix Fire Office or yeah, Phoenix Fire Service.
So this is, and it's got as an image, Phoenix rising from the
ashes. So this is a button that would
have been on the uniform of one of the private fire insurance
companies operated in London from the 17th century right up
until Victorian times. Now the reason that's relevant
is because these companies formed as a direct result of the
Great Fire of London. So London was 3/4 burned to the
ground and some tanny businessmen thought there's an
opportunity to make money here. Apparently the idea had been
knocking around for a couple of decades before they thought why
don't we start a fire insurance company?
So the first one was started by a gentleman.
I've actually had to write down his name because it's so
brilliant he was born. With.
The name. Let me just see if I can find it
here. Oh, here we go.
He was born with the name. Hath Christ not died for thee?
Thou wouldn't be damned. Bare bone, bare bone being his
last name, but he later changed his name to Nicholas Barben for
obvious reasons. What brilliant name is that?
He had a very fiery father apparently, who was in the
parliament and he started the first fire insurance company in
1680, which was called the Fire Office.
Now I actually thought that this Phoenix Fire badge related to
that originally because he's it became the Phoenix Company and
he had this emblem and that seems to be the general view.
But I got down a rabbit hole of fire insurance documents and
ended up reading that in fact his company had collapsed.
And this company had started about 80 years later in Georgian
times. But there were a whole load of
fire insurance companies that started.
There's some fire insurance company.
I think there's a friend's. Is it the friend's office, the
fire office, some fire alliance hand in hand.
They had little tin signs that they put on their wall to show
that the buildings were covered by that particular fire
insurance company. And they didn't just pay out
money, they actually had little private firefighters.
So and each insurance company had their group of firefighters
who would wear a little uniform. Their uniforms were distinct,
beautifully buttoned, which is why this I have such a beautiful
button here, marked out in red and with lovely piping.
And what's interesting is that they were actually recruited
largely from Thames Waterman, which I hadn't known till
recently. And that's partly because Thames
Waterman could zip up and down the river, and it was the most
effective way of getting around if there was a fire, rather than
trying to move around London's busy streets.
And the great advantage for the Thames Waterman was because of
an act of Parliament at the end of the 17th century, if you
signed up to be a firefighter in this one, one of these insurance
companies, you were exempt from being press gagged into joining
the Navy. So that was a real incentive to
join anyway. These fire insurance companies
continued throughout the 18th century.
There's a myth that if someone from the Sun Alliance company
saw somebody from the hand in hand company saw a property from
hand in hand company burning, they wouldn't put that fire out.
But actually that wasn't the case because obviously if the
hand in hand company had a building burning and it was next
to a Sun one, everyone's going to be affected.
So they were very quickly cooperating, working out deals
between each other, and eventually that corporation
ended up with a big metropolitan fire company being started in
Victorian times in London. But the origins of that were
from the Great Fire of London, and this badge is one of the
steps along the way that show how we ended up with a fire
service. And if our listeners are
anywhere near Magnus and Martyr Church at any point, then have a
little look in, because there is a strange contraption which is
one of the earliest fire engines that we have in London.
And I'll put a link to a blog post that we have as well.
And there's one other fire related object I found.
I just, it's not it doesn't look very interesting.
But this when I found, I mean, I don't know what's wrong with me
sometimes I picked this up and I thought, oh, it's a bit of
leather with a lot of studs in and my mind, for example.
My mind, I don't know why my mind did this.
It went immediately to some sort of nefarious use.
I thought it was some sort of sex toy, a sort of awful strap.
Of course it's not. It's used to secure a leather
bucket. That you would you.
There's an example in the fire and there used to be an example
of London. So they did have that that was a
kind of tool they'd use a fire bucket like this.
They had quite basic tool. They used basically a poles to
bring down buildings to stop them burning.
But yes, that fire, that fire engine is in that wonderful
church along with that amazing model of the of London Bridge,
which is just like you can stand there dreaming for ages as you
watch all these little tiny figures on the old London
Bridge, living their life if you make good life.
All right, so we have had the witch bottle, we've had the
delve tile, the beautiful coin, the complete pottery, and a
silver button. Have you got anything else for
us? I have another coin, but it's a
very special actually. The Commonwealth coin was quite
special, but these are really magic because they connect you
not with a king or with a period of history, but with an actual
person. So I'm holding it up so you can
see Hazel, it's a a little round disk, like any coin.
It's actually very thin. It's copper alloy.
It looks like it's gold, but that's deceiving.
That's Thames Gilding, because when the certain materials go in
the Thames, they get this, They come out with this.
Wonderful golden colour that can really trick you.
The first few times you see it very excited and that you found
gold, but it's still nonetheless absolutely magical.
Find beautiful. It is beautiful.
On one side of this coin, there at the centre, there's it has
PHE written in a triangle, the letters and around it says at Ye
Whit Horse Tavern. And on the reverse, there's an
image in the centre of a running horse and around it it says in
Friday Street with an E on the end.
Now this is a traders token. Now basically for years people
struggled with the fact that there was no small change
because our coins were silver and gold and if you want to get
an egg and you've only got a silver coin, you're going to be
a bit stuffed if you want to get changed.
So people found all sorts of ways to get around that.
They cut the coin into half or into quarters.
You can't cut it into an eighth to get your egg.
You're going to lose it. These coins are tiny, so for
centuries people have been using these lead tokens.
So if you were a business, you might have these crude lead
tokens, maybe with a little cross on it, or a picture of a
very roughly cast picture of a wine glass.
And someone would come in to buy their AL with their coin and you
might give them a load of tokens back.
And because they lived locally, they could keep using those
tokens when they came in, on the understanding that at some point
they could actually, if they wanted to, trade all the tokens
in and get their coin back. So that was how it worked for
ages. It was a sort of unofficial
economy that was necessary because the Royal Mint wasn't
giving people any other options. Now after Charles the First was
executed, Parliament said, do you know what folks, you can
mint your own traders, tokens, They can't be made out of silver
or gold, they have to be made out of a base metal.
But you can knock yourself out, go and make yourself really high
quality tokens. And people did.
They did it from 9/16/49 right up to about 1673.
So there's a quite a short period of flourishing of about
4000 coins. And these coins were issued by
individuals and individual businesses.
So for example, I've described this coin to you and I can tell
you that PE is actually Henry Petty or Petit and his wife
Elizabeth, and they lived on Friday St. in the late 1650s,
early 1660s. He was a wine merchant, A
vintner operating out of White Horse Tavern.
I don't know if he owned the White Horse Tavern or he
operated out of it, I'm not sure, but certainly he was
involved in wine, worked there, and by 1663 he had at least two
children. He was a local boy.
He was born in the same parish, the parish of Saint Margaret
Moses, in the city. The church was at the end of the
street. Unfortunately for him, the
church, the street, everything was burned down in the Great
Fire because he lived just a stone's throw from Pudding Lane
where the Great Fire started. So you get quite a lot of these
on the foreshore and I expect a lot of them fell out of people's
pockets as they were running for towards the foreshore to try and
get boats across the river. During the Grapevine, people
headed out of the city on horses and carts with their belongings.
Other people crushed down towards the river and items fell
out of their pocket and you find quite a lot of these.
I imagine that they also lost their value after 1673 because
they were no longer you were no longer allowed to use as the the
government of the time instead started issuing cop coins and
tried to solve the problem of lack of change themselves.
Anyway, it's remarkable that on this coin I've pulled Henry and
his wife out of obscurity. So I've literally dragged them
back into living memory. Like raising Lazarus is
extraordinary. And I think that's why people
love these traders tokens. I've got a few of them.
I've got another one. I've got a John Fielder who was
married to Anna. He had six kids.
He lived in Kingston upon Thames and I'm not sure what he did for
a job because the symbol on the coin is a bit confusing.
It looks like maybe it was something to do with wheat, I'm
not sure. But his father was a candle
maker and he was a Quaker and he I found out because of that he
was fined for his beliefs. He refused to take a oath of
allegiance and he was fined. And then the Quakers record what
happens to their membership in The Sufferings of the Quakers.
So I also know that he was imprisoned in 1667 for refusing
to swear an oath. So I know that about this.
Otherwise for all I know, unremarkable man, an ordinary
person, has been revived just by finding these coins.
And of course they historically, they're really interesting as
well because you suddenly have really detailed information
about 4000 businesses and a lot of the coins linked to London
and particularly the City of London.
And one of the things I find really interesting is that women
in general tend to be invisible men.
It's as if the world is populated only by men because
they are the only ones who appear in the record doing
anything. But actually women were working
too and huge numbers of women in the 17th century weren't married
and had to make their own way anyway.
And about 3%, which is about 140 of these coins relate to women.
They are women owned businesses, In fact some of the coins say on
them his halfpenny, but you get the odd few that say her
halfpenny, which is wonderful. And these women were Tavern
owners for example, or Taylors and you can suddenly they come
out of the shadows, these women, and you realise that they were
there, They were doing things that they were probably working
alongside their husbands and the apothecaries.
They knew just as much as their husband did, but they weren't
being given official status and so they weren't being entered
into records. So I think information like that
you can glean from this coin is just really important, not just
for making sure that women are acknowledged in history, but
just because it gives you a fuller picture of individuals
and what life was in my mental image of that period.
Suddenly I popped back in all these women.
I put back in the women running the pubs and the women next and
the apothecaries, they are there when formally they're invisible.
So these are, these are like, they're like magic beans.
These trade these token. And as I said, they were stopped
in 1673. The people weren't allowed to
use them anymore. And that's when the government
said, OK, we're just, we're going to mint copper coins,
we're going to stop doing just silver and gold, we're going to
value coins and stamp the King's head on it.
And so tokens eventually kind of fall out of favour, but it's
just really intriguing. It's it's intriguing on a number
of levels because also we're talking about a local currency.
You can use them to create basically a directory of
businesses where you wouldn't have had the Yellow Pages.
So this is helping us put together.
Last year I read an interesting book actually about tokens
during the time of Samuel Peeps. It was written by George Berry
as in Lack Berry Taverns and Tokens of Peeps's London, and I
thought that was very interesting and he explains how
they were used. I don't know if you know
anything about the White Hart on Friday St.
Should I tell you a little bit about it?
Do you know about the White Hart?
Yes. I really like your pubs, pubs,
but also called the streets. On London it's called Friday St.
because that's where you would go on Friday to buy your fish
because you weren't allowed to eat meat.
So this is a very smelly, fishy St.
We've also got Fish St. Hill as well, but the White
Horse on Friday St. destroyed during the great fight.
It was rebuilt and it was added on, etcetera all the way to and
it actually eventually closed until about 1931 when it was
then later demolished. How amazing.
I've got another one, actually, from the oh, I haven't got the I
can't. I haven't got my glasses, so I
can't read the location. I'm going to send it to you
afterwards. But it's a cock, A hoop.
A cock and a hoop. And it's a Tavern, but it's not
the one on Fleet Street. It seems to be adjacent to it
and I just can't find any details of it, so I'm going to
send you what I do have a. Maybe in your magical mind
you'll be able to give me more information, because I was very
thrilled by this traders token as well.
Oh, it's fantastic, isn't it? Because it just gives you a
little bit of a insight into how businesses were having to do
everything themselves, having to produce their own Disney money.
Yeah. If we think about individual
business owners like myself now, and you think we've got to be
your own, your accountant and your own marketer and your own
admin and this, that and the other, but at least I don't have
to print my own money. Printing your own money would be
pretty fun, actually. I think they've done a really
good job. These trade tokens are really
attractive. I love the little horse running
out and these little sheaves and I don't know, I think I'd feel
really chuffed if I have my own coin.
I know exactly what I'd how I'd look if I put myself on a coin.
Hold on a second just for a number.
How about that? You look very regal.
It's got a very chewed air to it.
Fantastic. That's what I thought as well.
It's, listen, it's I thought I treated myself at Christmas and
I bought myself a little headband that looks like a
French hood during Amberlin's time.
Yes, OK, bells and all. Very impressive.
Oh, I actually, yes. I think I'd.
I think I don't want to. Go on and on.
I think that those are. I hope those finds give you some
idea of why I find 16th century objects on the foreshore so
exciting, and what a revelation they are when it comes to
understanding the period. And I have other finds.
They're all I have. These little Agilets, for
example, which are lace shapes. In the 17th century, everybody
loved having these. They used them to seal the
whenever they had like dangling bits of lace or ties, they put
these on the end to help them thread.
And you find these. All the times I'm into the pins
and I've got a seal matrix with a dove and a holding a olive
branch in his beak that I always imagined that this was dropped
by someone escaping the great fire of London.
That seems the kind of thing you'd slip into your pocket and
you know fall out quite easily. And buckles that would have been
on knee breeches, maybe. They also, as people climbed
into boats and then of course the ubiquitous rose Farthing,
which are these tiny little copper coins with the brass
insert, stop counterfeiting that a lot of us think, well, maybe
used for welfares because they're so very common.
They were private attitude before the tokens actually, but
they were commonly used. But I have quite a lot of finds.
But the ones I've talked about, I think are the ones that are
most exciting. Or there's one last thing I can
show you actually, if you don't mind.
No, of course not. Actually, it's actually visual,
which is annoying. But when we talked last time, we
were talking about clay pipes and how we came to England in
the 1580s. And this is a period, The 1600
is when tobacco is spreading and clay pipes are becoming more and
more popular. People are smoking the whole
time. I was thinking what a good story
it would have been for me if the great fire started with a
dropped clay pipe rather than a bakery.
Would have been such a good narrative when you're talking
about clay pipes. But that isn't what happened.
But this I have with me a little tiny clay pipe that I just
picked up the other day. Now it's so tiny.
That would have been made around and 1610, I think.
I don't know how big that is. It's about a third of the size
of the bigger ones in the Jordan period.
And this is because, as we talked about before, tobacco is
really expensive at this time. What I hadn't realized is I
thought that the price of tobacco came down only because
of the slaves. But actually before the slaves
in the 1600s, there were a lot of indentured servants.
So there are a lot of people going out from England
voluntarily with this weird contract where they basically
worked out servitude for a certain number of years.
They were given passage and then they were and free and those
were the people that were providing the tobacco before the
slaves were introduced. But anyway, with me, that little
tiny clay pipe, which is evidence of just as people were
beginning to smoke on the streets of London, they had
little weeny clay pipes. This is when tobacco was still a
novelty. And you do find very many 17th
century clay pipes on the foreshore.
Just the other day there was a very low tide and I think I
picked up just in an hour about fifteen 17th century clay pipes.
So so they really were everywhere.
People were smoking them. So when you think about them in
the 17th century, you also have to think about them smoking.
Yes, Yeah, we forget that, don't we?
Yeah. So if anybody wants to listen to
the earlier episode that Anna kindly did, it is episode #112,
and I will put a link to that in the show notes as well.
And you will learn plenty more about clay pipes.
But also you'll get to know why Anna has so many pins in her
house. You know, because I'm a little
bit obsessive, so that's why I have so many as opposed to why
they're on the foreshore, yeah. I was I.
Was guilty, I think. Who am I?
Who have I become? Why am IA middle-aged woman
picking pimps out of mud? There we go.
Often you get that sort of existential doubt on the
foreshore. What am I doing here?
Why am I here? And yet I come back because I
love it. I think all mud logs come back
because they love it. And I think it's absolutely
fascinating how all those things that you've just highlighted
today, the artefacts themselves, but also then the connection to
the stories of the people that would have used them and would
have been there every day kind of thing.
It highlights to us how life would have been so similar, and
also how different as well, with certain aspects as well, and how
much even over the centuries, humans really, we haven't
changed that much. That is absolutely true.
Very true indeed. I'm so glad that through mud
locking I've been able to regain a sense of people's humanity in
the past. Because before I mud locked, I
the past just seemed rigid and black and white, not filled with
real people, not people with hearts or feelings, just stiff
figures moving around a page. And these everyday items just to
have repeopled my imagination and repeopled the past for me.
And actually I think as more people learn about mud locking
and hear these sort of stories, I think it has.
I think it captures people imagine imagination for that
very reason. I think it's helped lots of
people understand, gosh, these people were pinned together,
they were smoking pipes, they were drinking out of these jugs.
Helps with your imagination. It makes you really look closely
actually at historical paintings now, which I never used to do,
but when I go to galleries now, always peering and I think, oh,
there's a pipe and there's an aglet.
And look over there, she's got a choral bead like I've got at
home. So yeah, that's really
gratifying too. Makes it all very much more
real, doesn't it? Brilliant.
Anna, thank you so much. That has been amazing.
Thank you. I've really enjoyed it.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to relearn about my
own objects. And if anybody wants to follow
Anna on Twitter, for example, then I'll put all the details in
the show notes as well so you can follow and you can learn as
Anna does as well while she's woodlocking.
That's all for now. Don't forget you can hear Anna's
previous episode about woodlocking finds from George
and London episode 112. Until next time.