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The defensive landscape at Landguard Fort, near Harwich, Suffolk. From Meredith, Post-Med. Arch., Vol. 42, Pt 2, p. 235 (2008)
A composite plan, based on contemporary sources showing the main areas of activity at the Norman Cross (Peterborough) ‘Depot’, or prisoner-of-war camp
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.
Acknowledgements
FROM THE MOMENT I began this four-volume archaeological history of Britain I knew that, when I ventured outside my own field of expertise in later prehistory, I would have to rely on the cooperation and goodwill of many colleagues. But instead of encountering silence or, worse, resentment, I was astonished by the way medievalist scholars took me under their wing and made the task of writing Britainad and Britain in the Middle Ages such a pleasure. For the present work I have had to draw on the knowledge of many post-medievalists and yet I have still to detect any impatience with my ceaseless enquiries. Two people who have had to bear the brunt of my curiosity are Drs Marilyn Palmer and Audrey Horning, both colleagues of mine in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester. They gave me informal seminars, sometimes even without the benefit of lunch, which helped me turn my face in what I hope has proved the right direction. Thank you both: my gratitude knows no bounds.
Michael Douglas, series editor at Time Team, shares my interest in the archaeology of more recent periods and played a major part in arranging the excavation of the Risehill navvy camp, North Yorkshire, and the Norman Cross prisoner-of-war Depot, Peterborough. While in Yorkshire, Bill Bevan was a great source of references and advice. At Norman Cross, Ben Robinson, the Peterborough City Archaeologist, was as ever amiable and authoritative, and Dr Henry Chapman, the Time Team surveyor, helped me acquire plans of the Norman Cross Depot site in advance of the full publication, which was scheduled to appear after my own manuscript’s deadline. Dr Mike Nevell has been a splendid guide to the world of industrial archaeology. Neil (now Sir Neil) Cossons and David Crossley were a great help when I was first getting interested in industrial archaeology and we all sat on the Ancient Monuments Advisory Committee of English Heritage. Happy days! Another more than helpful friend, who goes back a long time with me, is David Cranstone. David started life as a prehistorian with me at Fengate and is now a leading authority on industrial archaeology in general and salt mines in particular. He kindly gave me several useful hints and references.
At HarperCollins I am grateful to Martin Redfern, who took on Richard Johnson’s mantle, and to Ben Buchan, whose editorial comments have greatly strengthened this book. I am also deeply indebted to Rex Nicholls who drew the line drawings and to the book’s designer. Special thanks too to Sophie Goulden, Ben Buchan, Richard Collins and Geraldine Beare.
I am also grateful to family members who provided me with unexpected information on various topics: Roderick Luis (Crimean War huts) and Nigel Smith (navvies in the North Pennines). Nigel, a bookseller by profession, found me articles and out-of-print books and his elder sister, my wife Maisie, organised my photographic expeditions and managed to sort out the mystery of the two Causey Arches – an example, incidentally, of how the internet can waste time and lead one astray. Heaven alone knows how she has put up with my moods during this four-book marathon. Finally, and despite the best efforts of all of the above, any errors that remain are mine alone.
Dates and Periods
* Strictly speaking this should refer to the Second Boer War. The First Boer War (1880-81) was more a skirmish, which the Boers won.
IntroductionArchaeology and Modern Times
BEFORE I GET involved with the ‘meat’ of the book I’d first like to say a few words on the nature of modern historical archaeology in Britain, which is probably the fastest growing branch of the subject. When I started my professional life my team worked with the Peterborough New Town Development Corporation clearing land for factory building. That was back in the early 1970s, long before television programmes like Time Team had managed to convince the public at large that there was such a thing as British archaeology. Too often we would arrive at a site and announce that we’d come to survey and excavate, only to be greeted with incredulous stares and humorous comments to the effect that surely we would be better employed in Egypt, Greece or Italy. Then, when I had shown the builders (and anyone else who happened to be hanging around on site) the air photographs with the ring-ditch evidence for Bronze Age barrows and explained that these were as old as Stonehenge – which in turn was much older than the Parthenon or King Tutankhamun – the scoffing would cease and most of my audience would become our enthusiastic supporters. Sometimes their enthusiasm was such that it was hard to get much work done.
But just suppose for one moment that we had arrived on site and announced that we were planning to survey and excavate the ramshackle nineteenth- and early twentieth-century farm buildings that were then such a common feature of the city’s eastern fringes. In actual fact, those buildings were rather important, as the Fens, which were drained in the seventeenth century, were once a major producer of food for Britain’s rapidly expanding urban populations. But I very much doubt whether we would have found it quite so straightforward to silence the scoffing, because even in the better-informed times we currently live in, many people suppose that the terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘modern’ are mutually exclusive.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that a fair amount of time needs to pass before archaeological research becomes possible, let alone desirable, or informative. But, actually, this view is wrong because archaeology is not just about excavation; it’s an approach to the past that can be equally relevant when applied to something as young as a month, or as old as a millennium. Just imagine, for example, that an entire townscape is bombed flat, as happened in Coventry or in large parts of east London. In those cases archaeology is almost the only way to resurrect in any meaningful way what enemy aeroplanes destroyed. Under such circumstances, old pictures and sketches can, of course, be useful, but accurate measurements, made then and there on the ground, will be needed if reconstruction is to be attempted. In postwar years town centre developers did as much damage to Britain’s historic towns and cities as Nazi aircraft, and almost as quickly. Today this would not happen, but in the fifties and sixties pre-development surveys rarely took place. So such peacetime destruction was often horribly complete.
The simple distinction between archaeology (dirt) and history (documents), although never so clear cut, begins to break down in post-medieval times when documents of every conceivable sort become near-ubiquitous: everything from newspapers to till-roll receipts. And much of this material can find its way into the archaeological record by way of local private archives that can survive for years in abandoned offices and dusty attics. Sometimes, however, archaeologists can reveal new documentary sources that the conventional wisdom believed had long been destroyed. It was the professional and amateur archaeologists working as part of the Council for British Archaeology’s Defence of Britain Project who discovered the paperwork drawn up in 1940 that ordered and duly paid for the building of the many concrete and brick pillboxes and other defences that can still be found in their thousands in unexpected nooks and crannies across Britain.
The Defence of Britain project shows how very important it is to keep archaeological research and survey up to date, because when it took place (1995–2002) huge numbers of Second World War defences were being destroyed as ‘eyesores’ – their historical importance notwithstanding. Some 20,000 records of military installations were made during those seven years and the most important of these were then given legal protection as Scheduled Ancient Monuments.
(#litres_trial_promo) Without that project it would have been impossible to have drawn up a list of sites worthy of such protection. The same has since been achieved for Cold War sites. Would that something similar had been done before Dr Beeching wielded the axe that amputated the limbs of a once great railway network, whose Victorian stations, bridges and signal boxes now stand mouldering, while local people, stuck in traffic jams, have cause to regret their passing. The past is no less important just because it is recent. The real danger is that we take it for granted, like those wartime structures, because then we won’t realise that it has gone until it’s too late.
Of course, it’s very easy to take things for granted. Everyone today, even the most rich and powerful people in the land, has to cope with repetition: the daily drive to work or the royal flight; the walk to and from the station; regular trips to the parents-in-law, etc, etc. Each time we take a familiar journey we inevitably attach less and less value to the buildings and places we pass by. Whether we like it or not, familiarity does indeed breed indifference, if not actual contempt. Most people would agree that it is impossible to retain one’s enthusiasm for a building at quite the same level as when one first encountered it. But it doesn’t always have to be like this. In my experience archaeology can help keep one’s surroundings fresh and lively, simply by seeking out the links that tie the different parts of a particular place together.
Let’s take the case of a provincial town or city where we have a railway station built in the late 1860s, followed by relatively humble housing developments nearby in the early 1870s. By the 1880s streets of somewhat grander, mostly middle-class, villas start to appear, at which point, too, a large red-brick mock-Gothic church was also constructed. In the mid-twentieth century the area became less fashionable as the middle classes moved to new suburbs on the fringes of town. The church was then converted to a sound-recording studio and a new mosque was built on land that had once been railway marshalling yards. I won’t go on, but it’s the tales of development, setback and change, only slightly hidden away in the layout of our towns and villages, that still have the power to excite me. But for how long will it be possible to reconstruct such stories from dry bricks and mortar? Increasingly the deep foundations of modern developments devour all before them, leaving nothing in their wake for future archaeologists to puzzle over, admire and enjoy.
So those of us with an eye for such things are already looking around at our surroundings, wondering what will come under threat next. And here we are faced with the dilemma that must confront anyone whose job is to predict such things, because almost by definition people in the future will decide that we got it wrong: that it was a mistake to Schedule
(#ulink_fff059cb-4e97-5243-bd8c-ad0ef8da5f8f) multi-storey car parks when it was shopping malls that were then rapidly redeveloped and promptly vanished.
So the answer is probably to cast the net wider and protect whole areas of towns or rural landscapes, rather than individual sites or buildings, if our attempts to second-guess posterity are to have any chance of success.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is already being done in the so-called Conservation Areas and Historic Cores of certain historically important towns and cities; furthermore, designated Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty can help to protect well-known tracts of rural landscape. But inevitably such designations must favour the chocolate-box view of landscape and townscape. I can’t see anyone choosing to put forward the flat, treeless landscape where I have chosen to live, even though I personally regard it as life-enhancing and profoundly beautiful. The same could be said for many suburbs or industrial conurbations, which may well be recognised as important in two hundred years’ time. The other problem, of course, is that such protection can then put a break (it’s often termed ‘planning blight’) on commercial redevelopment and the area then starts to slip into economic decline – a process that can also be ‘assisted’ by those with vested interests.
My approach to archaeology has always been based around the landscape and by that I mean the physical setting for a particular site or monument. So it makes no sense to try to understand the mysteries of Stonehenge without thinking about why it was placed on Salisbury Plain, and why it is surrounded by hundreds of burial mounds and other sacred places, some of which are actually much earlier than the famous Stones themselves. By the same token we can soon come to understand why Manchester and the towns of north-west England became an early centre of the textile trade when we know that this area had been producing woollen fabrics since the later Middle Ages, so was able to take advantage of, or ‘add value’ to, the rapidly developing trade in cotton between Liverpool and the southern United States. So if we are to understand the context of the nineteenth-century cotton industry in the North West, its economic setting should also include Louisiana and Georgia, and latterly the effects of the American Civil War on the supply of raw materials. Similarly, it would be impossible even to think about the hugely important ceramic industry of the area around Stoke-on-Trent without also considering where these millions of plates, mugs, teapots, cups and saucers were traded.
In prehistory stone axes and bronze implements could be traded over long distances – three to four hundred miles was not uncommon – but the amounts were still small. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, trade had become global and the quantities involved were huge: thus pottery exports were measured in tons and improvements in ship capacity meant that distance had almost become irrelevant. So archaeology and those who practise it have had to develop new techniques and approaches if they are to throw genuinely new light on the complexities of the historic past. There is close collaboration, for example, between American archaeologists working on colonial-era settlements in Virginia and New England, and their colleagues in the English Midlands, where many of the exported goods were manufactured. One might perhaps expect that the flow of information was entirely from east to west, but in actual fact the American sites have produced results that have caused considerable surprise in Britain. Archaeology has a wonderful ability to prove the best-based predictions wrong.
There is, of course, always a danger when considering the archaeology of the recent past to become overwhelmed with detail. As a prehistorian I routinely recover a large proportion of the surviving debris from, say, a Bronze Age settlement. That might amount to 5,000 pieces of flint, maybe 200 potsherds and 10,000 bone fragments – half of which could prove identifiable. But today the amount of rubbish being produced by even a small-sized town can rapidly fill huge landfill sites. In such instances the best one can hope to do is to sample what is being discarded and for several years a team of archaeologists in Arizona did just that: in the Garbage Project they sampled what the city of Tucson was discarding day by day.
(#litres_trial_promo) But, again, it’s all very well to sample, but what really matters are the problems you are trying to resolve when you come to analyse the samples. That is undoubtedly why today historical archaeologists have grown increasingly aware that the questions they are posing must be closely tied down and tightly defined. It is no longer regarded as sufficient simply to study, say, steam engines for their own sake, because such myopic attention to detail will only tell us more and more about less and less. Instead, a historical archaeologist might try to understand the social impact of steam power: why did it become so significant and what were the effects its adoption had on the lives of people, not just in the factories where the engines were built, but in the towns and villages where the new, mass-produced goods it helped to produce were sold?
It has been said many times that archaeology is a very broad church and this is particularly true for the post-medieval period.
(#litres_trial_promo) Some specialists have arrived in historical archaeology from their studies of the later Middle Ages; others, often excavators, have grown interested in those upper layers that in the past were given only passing attention on the way down to the supposedly more interesting ancient deposits closer to the bottom of the trench. Many have joined the ranks through more specialist research interests in, say, pottery, or churches. Some have come from outside archaeology altogether – and here I would include those many industrial archaeologists who have come to the subject through their concerns for old mines, factories, vehicles or machinery and the urgent need to protect and preserve them.
As time passes it would seem that the ‘glue’ that will bind these different strands together will be social. In other words, how did people in the past react to a particular stimulus, be it a new chapel, coal mine, crop rotation or steam engine? That, surely, is the key question. Because when all is said and done, chapels, mines, farming methods and machines are of little interest in themselves. Like, dare I say it, flint tools and Bronze Age weapons, they only come alive when they can be related to society and to people.
Earlier I mentioned the distinction between the sources of information drawn upon by archaeologists and historians, namely artefacts and documents. And here I must also admit that there has been a tendency among archaeologists to regard their information, perhaps because it is so very ‘bottom-up’ and derived from the ground, as somehow more reliable than written accounts, which we all know can be distorted in favour of a particular opinion. As a prehistorian I have the enormous luxury – actually it’s a responsibility, too – of working with data whose analysis cannot be challenged by documentary sources, simply because writing didn’t exist at the time. This makes it much harder to contest my conclusions, but that doesn’t make them more reliable. So I still think it important to emphasise that it is just as easy to be misled by a spread of coal and clinker in what might once have been an engine room, as by the letters written by an eighteenth-century ironmaster to his bankers. There is nothing in the ‘bottom-up’ nature of archaeological observations that makes them necessarily more truthful than conventional historical sources. Both are different, that’s all. It goes without saying that both, too, need to be treated with caution and care. I think one reason why historical archaeology is so exciting is the creative tension that appears at the moment, often late in the life of a project, when the written record is set against that from the ground. This is often when a new revelation suddenly becomes apparent.
One might suppose that the very abundant documentary records of the historical period mean that less attention need be paid, for example, to science. But in actual fact many written records don’t address what people thought obvious at the time. So a factory manager doesn’t describe all the details of a process when he purchases a new machine. He just goes ahead and orders one. This means that we must still employ some remarkably sophisticated techniques of scientific analysis if we are to understand what precisely was being manufactured and how it was done. Often, as we will see in Chapter 5 (when we examine the Moffat Upper Steam Forge, near Airdrie), this can be achieved through the careful analysis of material preserved on the floors of long-abandoned workshops. In my experience it’s not always a straightforward matter to distinguish between these industrial deposits and the floors themselves. Again, the scientists in the laboratory can suggest which was what.
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By far and away the most productive approach to the historical past is collaborative: thorough excavation and survey combined with detailed documentary research. Certainly when it comes to the study of topics such as the trade in pottery or, indeed, in slaves, bills of lading, receipts and invoices can throw much-needed light on the thousands of potsherds and clay pipe stems found around the excavated sites of the period. I would go so far as to say that excavation without documentary research would almost certainly prove useless – or, worse, it could do serious damage to an important site.
Many people have heard about industrial archaeology and I quite frequently get asked about it. Most want to know what it is and when it got going. In fact, it has not been around for very long at all. The first widely accepted textbook on the subject traces it back to an article in the Amateur Historian for 1955.
(#litres_trial_promo) The origins of industrial archaeology were diverse. They included a few academic historians and archaeologists with an interest in historical archaeology, but the majority were part-time enthusiasts, some of them active in, or recently retired from, engineering and industry, who were worried that so much evidence for the recent past was being needlessly destroyed by the rapid reconstruction of Britain in the early post-war decades. These enthusiasts covered a huge range of interests, ranging from railways to shipping, mining, road transport and heavy industry. In most instances their enthusiasm was centred on a particular site, usually, but not always, somewhere near where they lived or worked: towns like Coalbrookdale, even entire railways (such as the Great Western). Keen hard-working volunteers, often travelling long distances, helped to record and restore some of the most remote industrial monuments in Britain, such as the abandoned mines of Cornwall or Derbyshire. Inevitably, too, the emphasis tended to be on machines and mechanisms – where much of their expertise, often based on practical experience, lay. Far less attention was paid to the lives of the people who built, maintained and used these things. The machines also tended to be seen as objects in their own right, without, as we have seen, much attempt being made to reconstruct their social setting.
It’s worth noting here that even the best known of the abandoned monuments to Britain’s industrial past were slow to be protected under the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882. Even the great iron bridge of Ironbridge, Shropshire, was not given statutory protection by Scheduling until 1934 and was only taken into Guardianship (i.e. public ownership, display and administration) as late as 1975. The following year the iron-making furnace at Coalbrookdale was at last Scheduled, almost exactly two hundred years after its final major rebuilding by the great ironmaster Abraham Darby in 1777. In retrospect the archaeological establishment was extraordinarily slow to protect the remains of the Industrial Revolution, and this despite one of the greatest acts of official Philistinism in the twentieth century.
The great Doric portico, universally known as the Euston Arch, was demolished in 1962 by the Transport Commission who believed it stood in the way of commercial success. I can remember standing beneath its towering columns and staring up at the classical entablature (not that I knew the word, of course) high above my head. And I can remember wondering why there wasn’t a building directly behind it, as there was at, say, the British Museum. In my child’s mind I couldn’t grasp, any more than could the bureaucrats and politicians of the 1960s, that the great portico heralded the world’s first main line between major cities. It was more than a mere symbol: it was a metaphor for what was to follow. And we tore it down.
There was massive public outcry at what is still seen as an act of wilful destruction, and this despite letters to the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. The anger was not just that a fine building of 1835 was being unnecessarily destroyed, but it was a building that had come to symbolise the confidence of the Railway Age and ultimately Britain’s role in the Industrial Revolution.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was built by Philip Hardwick to be a triumphal entrance to the London to Birmingham railway and it was intended to impress – which undoubtedly it did.
The fight to prevent the powers that be from destroying the Euston Arch drew everyone involved in industrial archaeology together. Right across Britain, new societies were established involving academics, students, amateurs and professionals. As a result the support for this form of archaeology is probably more broadly based than any other branch of the subject. At first this diversity was seen by many in the academic world as a weakness. But today we generally view such things rather differently; indeed, industrial archaeology is becoming one of the more intellectually rigorous branches of the discipline, yet one which benefits greatly from the hands-on approach of its many part-time helpers. By now the bias in favour of machines over people has largely been addressed and quite soon the adjective ‘industrial’ will slip from general use.
Today industrial archaeology is seen as a branch of post-medieval archaeology which was the last of the major period societies to come into existence. The Prehistoric Society was the first (1935) and the Society for Medieval Archaeology appeared in the post-war years (1957). Just ten years after that (and five years after the destruction of the Euston Arch), in 1967, the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology was founded. Its journal, Post-Medieval Archaeology, is still the bible for anyone with a serious interest in the period.
My own enthusiasm for industrial archaeology goes back some time and owes much to some remarkable people. Ever since I was a child and enjoyed making things with Meccano kits I have admired engineers. I suppose like most boys I grew up almost worshipping men like Brunel and Telford and I can well remember my maternal grandmother, née Nora Parsons, telling me wonderful stories about our relative Sir Charles Parsons as he steered his Turbinia (built in 1897), the first steam-turbine-powered vessel and then by far and away the fastest ship afloat, through the great dreadnoughts at the famous display of British naval might at Spithead. I loved the way he cocked a snook at the naval establishment who were then obliged to commission a turbine-powered vessel from his yard.
One of the first real live engineers to cross my path was a remarkable and very eccentric gentleman who was a distant relative, an old friend of the family and my godfather. He was a lovely man, but a hopeless godfather, at least as far as God was concerned. His name was Julian Turnbull. I first came across him when I was about ten. At the time he worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company, where he specialised in putting out desert oil rig fires, with explosives. Today he would be described as partially sighted and wore glasses with extraordinarily thick lenses. Even then I remember thinking that these must have inhibited his work in the blowing sands of Arabia.
He and his wife Dorothy lived in a tiny bungalow in Barnet and I recall my first visit to the shed at the bottom of his garden as clearly as my first step into the great nave of Ely Cathedral. It was impeccably organised, with spanners arranged in order of size, their outlines painted in black against a white background, doubtless to help his failing sight return them to their correct position. But the most remarkable feature of this quite small (maybe 15 x 8 feet) shed was his collection of screwdrivers, which in those days were all wooden-handled. It was vast and must have included hundreds – no, thousands – of examples which ranged from something shovel-sized, used by marine engineers, to a series of minute watchmakers’ tools. The largest was about six foot long and next to it was one a bit smaller and a bit smaller, and so on and so on, until the hut walls had been encircled two or three times. I adored those screwdrivers.
In the middle of the hut was an old Atco lawnmower which Julian had converted to steam power, using the case of a wartime howitzer shell he had found in the desert as a boiler. All the pipes and pistons were lovingly lagged with carefully coiled string. I only saw it operate once on his tiny lawn. But once was more than enough. It belched prodigious quantities of coal smoke and sparks while its almost blind operator blundered around behind it, spending more time wrestling with its handlebars on the weed-choked flowerbeds than the lawn. After ten minutes of mayhem I asked him whether it gave a good cut. He said he had no idea about that, but the hot coals seemed to keep grass growth to a minimum for several weeks. So I suppose it did work after a fashion.
The second person was very different but no less inspiring. Today he is very well known as one of the founding fathers of industrial archaeology and has more recently spent time running the Science Museum and English Heritage. Sir Neil Cossons first crossed my path when he came to give a lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, some time in the early 1970s, when I was an assistant curator there. His talk was on the industrial archaeology of Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale, where he was director of the Museum and the Trust which ran it. I found it inspiring and the following year I couldn’t wait until I had taken all our students from our dig at Fengate, on the outskirts of Peterborough, right across England to see what he and his team had achieved.
As we walked around Ironbridge I realised for the first time just how much archaeology could appeal to the general public, but only if it was well displayed – a lesson I have never forgotten. Later I got to know Neil rather better when we sat on English Heritage’s Ancient Monuments Advisory Committee and I always made a point of seeking him out when we did field trips to industrial sites. This was because he had the rare gift of knowing where to find some obscure feature, nook or cranny which would bring the place vividly to life.
I’ve talked about Ironbridge, the Euston Arch and the origins of post-medieval archaeology and I suppose I ought to cover such major events in the history of industrial archaeology at some length in this book. But, on the other hand, this isn’t a textbook. I’m concerned here not with the history of industrial archaeology, but with current research and the direction in which it is heading. Having said that, I am also attempting to provide a balanced account of the period for the general reader.
I must also come clean and confess that many readers of my earlier books have laughed out loud when I suggested to them that I have been in search of balance. And their response: ‘Balance? You? You’re a born partisan and could no more achieve balance than fly.’ Which wasn’t quite the reply I had expected, but is possibly true, nonetheless. So in this instance I will drop such pretence and follow my instincts, which are to see what the current generation of scholars finds interesting and exciting. I make no apologies for this approach, which will generally concentrate on recent research, because that’s where the new developments are happening.
And while on the subject of bias, I should also add that I plan to pay more attention to those aspects of the period which have tended to be ignored. A classic case in point is the very start of what some historians have referred to as the Agricultural Revolution. For me this is when modern Britain really begins to emerge. I like to think I can identify with those independent farmers who, freed from old ties of feudalism, set about creating, possibly for the first time in British history, a true market-based economy. These were extraordinary times, in many respects far more interesting than the Open Field farms of the Middle Ages which are usually taught in preference at school. And while on the subject of revolutions, of course, what about the big one that everyone still talks about and takes thoroughly for granted?
When, in 1884, the great historian Arnold Toynbee published a book of his Oxford course under the title Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, he probably didn’t realise that the phrase would immediately stick and remain current into the twenty-first century; indeed, by that time television documentaries would proclaim it as proven fact. Some people were even able to tie it down with precision. One of the best post-war historical accounts, by Professor T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution,1760–1830, published by Oxford University Press in 1948, compresses the period into a truly revolutionary seventy years – or roughly three (short) generations.
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Anyone who has any experience of life outside academia will immediately realise that the idea of such a short period of revolutionary change is manifestly absurd. The world – and especially the world of work – simply doesn’t behave like that.
(#litres_trial_promo) All change requires time and things never happen with a single bang: there are always mistakes, false starts and heroic failures such as Brunel’s broad gauge for the Great Western Railway and John Logie Baird’s mechanically based system of television transmission of 1926. But the idea of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ has certainly fixed itself firmly in the popular imagination and I doubt whether it will ever go away completely.
I think there are at least three reasons for this. First and foremost it plays very well in Britain where most of the early innovations were developed, if not (like the blast furnace) actually invented. Second, for the revolution to have happened there had to be heroes to push it forward and, of course, everyone likes to admire a hero. One thinks of James Watt or Abraham Darby; it’s even better if these larger-than-life industrial pioneers were also highly enlightened men, like Robert Owen, Josiah Wedgwood or Titus Salt. Finally, the very idea of revolutionary change is exciting: we can gasp at the sheer pace of the events, wring our hands at the misery of the workforce and then thrill to the mastery of their monumental achievements, many of which are still out there in the landscape.
But for most of the post-war decades nobody working in the academic study of industrial archaeology has believed in a literal Industrial Revolution. Laying aside the impossible pace, revolutions are meant to sweep all before them, like so many aristocrats fleeing France at the onset of the Terror. Factories were supposed to have swept away small hand workshops, but in fact these persisted – and successfully – well into the twentieth century. We can also appreciate that the great heroes were actually ordinary individuals, many of whom didn’t so much invent from scratch as modify a pre-existing machine, like James Watt who adapted Newcomen’s engine to make the steam drive the piston in both directions, thereby more than doubling its power.
(#litres_trial_promo) Similarly, as we will see shortly, great ironmasters such as the various Abraham Darbys used their commercial and marketing expertise to develop good ideas often produced by others working in their foundries. When we examine industrial Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we see that it has many similarities with the contemporary world of the agricultural ‘Improvers’ such as Coke of Norfolk or Jethro Tull. Both history and the British propensity to admire heroes have been very kind to these men, many of whom were indeed great but probably less than heroic.
The final nail in the coffin of the rapid revolution idea has been the realisation that, far from starting in 1760, many of the industries of the period were already fully mature by then, with histories extending back over two centuries or even more, as we will see in Chapter 5 when we look at the early cutlery trade along the rivers of Sheffield, or the latest excavations in and around Ironbridge. In most instances, too, the pattern of trade and industry that developed in specific areas in early post-medieval times determined the shape of what was to happen in the era of massive expansion which began in the later eighteenth century. This was the time when infrastructure – canals, waggonways and roads – was improving rapidly. It also saw the introduction of new technologies such as coal-powered steam. Perhaps most important of all, social circumstances were changing in a way that first allowed and then actually facilitated the growth of industry. We must not forget that the era of industrial expansion was as much about social change as technology.
One might suppose that industrial archaeologists would strive to retain an idea with such popular appeal as the Industrial Revolution, but for many decades it has been only too clear that the process of industrialisation had been extended and in many instances can be traced back to the Middle Ages. One way round this dilemma has been to write of an extended or ‘long’ Industrial Revolution.
(#litres_trial_promo) Another has been to subdivide the extended Revolution into sub-Revolutions, such as a ‘chemical’ followed by an ‘extractive’ Revolution. In Chapter 6 I will discuss the merits of various ‘ceramic revolutions’. These were indeed fast, and revolutionary in their effects. But on the ceramic market alone. They never transformed people’s lives. My own feeling is that these sub-Revolutions are really clutching at straws and are helping to perpetuate the use of a term that ought to be dropped, for the simple reason that it is both inaccurate and misleading.
Students of industrial archaeology study the physical remains of early factories and workshops. They make extensive use of documents – if they are available – but perhaps most important of all they closely examine the archaeological evidence for contemporary housing, for both workers and management. Increasingly today industrial archaeologists are concerned with the long roots of industrialisation and its social consequences.
(#litres_trial_promo) The trend towards social perspectives has affected the scope of archaeologists who are now more concerned with the wider relationship between housing, factories and workshops; the effect has been to look at industries within the landscape: how and why they arose in a particular area and the influences they had on a given region’s population and economy.
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The concept of landscape is particularly significant within industrial archaeology, because it can be used to decide why certain sources of power were originally selected – coal and water are obvious examples. Landscapes can also help to explain why workers’ housing, for example, was located in certain areas, but social considerations always seem to have remained pre-eminent. For example, the switch from waterwheels to steam power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often necessitated twenty-four-hour shift working to cover the additional costs of coal. This in turn meant that housing had to be positioned close by the factory or mill, whether or not the terrain was actually suited to such a change. Sometimes underlying social motives could be less apparent. For example, many of the great mill owners aspired to emulate the landed gentry (which they often achieved with notable success) and to do this they built their new homes to resemble the great country houses of the nobility. Their houses were placed relatively nearby (to enable them to keep an eye on the shop), but the positioning carefully avoided any visual reminders of the mills and back-to-back housing that actually generated their wealth. But all rules have exceptions, as we will see when we come to look at where the great industrialists Robert Owen and his much-underrated father-in-law placed their houses in the model town they created at New Lanark.
I have always had an interest in what one might term modern archaeology and found I had more time for it after I had completed work on the report of my excavations at Flag Fen, a process that occupied me, night and day, for some five years in the mid-1990s. When that was finished I decided I really had to get out more, see the world and ‘get a life’. But I still had a deep and abiding interest in the past and the story behind the creation of modern Britain. So I found my attention was gradually shifting forwards in time. I was, however, completely astonished by the sheer diversity I encountered when I delved more deeply into the archaeology of modern times. It wasn’t just about the obvious themes: the growth of industry or agriculture and the development of towns. I also found that students and researchers were approaching even these topics from unexpected directions, often with surprising results. This was one of the other reasons I decided it was impossible to present a ‘balanced’ view of the archaeology of post-medieval times and have opted instead to examine projects and ideas that give one a new slant or perspective, if not a ‘sideways’ look at the period. Although there are a few excellent history books that cast their nets wider,
(#litres_trial_promo) too often such accounts approach early modern Britain from the viewpoint of the great and the good. Theirs is a story of major politicians, generals, bishops, kings, queens and princes. Mine, I hope, will be about everyone else.
Finally, I must say a few words about the way this book has been organised. Readers of the three other volumes of this four-part archaeological history of Britain will have grown used to a straightforward chronological layout. In fact, I’ll be quite honest and admit that, for the sake of consistency, I tried to organise this book in the same way. But sadly it just didn’t work. I found I was attempting an impossibly difficult juggling act with too many balls in the air at one time. Put another way, too much was happening too quickly across too many different areas of life to sustain a coherent narrative, especially when I switched themes, at which point, like a bad television documentary, I was forced to summarise or recapitulate ‘the story so far’. Anyhow, after a few weeks I abandoned the unequal struggle and decided instead to follow a series of general themes, chapter by chapter. These topics will, however, be approached chronologically. Of course an author is never a good judge of such things, but, fingers crossed, I think it works rather better than I once dared to hope.
(#ulink_9cc130ee-976b-55fe-8859-812ac11c8c4d) I use the terms Scheduled (for ancient sites) and Listed (for standing buildings) to denote that these places are protected by Act of Parliament.
Chapter One
Market Forces: Fields, Farming and the Rural Economy
SO FAR MY investigation of Britain’s archaeological past has taken me almost two millennia this side of prehistory, my own area of expertise. I am now deep within unknown territory, what medieval adventurers might have described as terra incognita. With this in mind I trust readers will forgive me if I follow an old excavator’s principle and work from the known to the unknown.
So I want to start our exploration of Britain in the post-medieval period in the farms and fields of the countryside. There, at least, I feel reasonably at home and not just because I was brought up in a small village, but because over the past thirty-odd years my wife Maisie and I have kept a small sheep farm which would regularly make a tiny profit, until, that is, 2001, when the market value of British livestock collapsed, rather like wheat prices after the Black Death. In our case the miscreants have been BSE/scrapie, foot-and-mouth (twice) and now the dreaded Bluetongue in all its grisly variants. More recently, and much to our surprise, things have picked up. This improvement followed directly on the bursting of the bankers’ bubble in 2008, when the collapse of cheap credit forced an international reassessment of what matters in life. At last people have recognised that the era of cheap food was always unsustainable. Anyhow, my interest in sheep-farming has given me insights into, and much sympathy for, historic and ancient farmers. So let’s start our journey where the food that nourishes human life originates: with farms, with farmers, and their families.
I would guess that over the years archaeologists have excavated hundreds, if not thousands, of prehistoric, Roman and medieval farms, farmyards and field systems. I myself have dug upwards of a dozen. But with one exception, which I will discuss shortly, I cannot think of a single post-medieval or modern farm that has been treated in this way.
(#ulink_bbbbb6bf-9a17-54e6-ba8f-173648b86cf0) This simple fact illustrates, if anything can, how different is the way that post-medieval archaeology is carried out. There are fewer excavations and instead far, far more effort goes into the accurate surveying of upstanding remains which are then painstakingly tied in with the documentary evidence. So that’s how things are done and to some extent it makes complete sense, because why dig when you can measure and survey at a fraction of the cost?
It is all perfectly rational, but nevertheless the digger/excavator deep down inside me feels a bit uneasy: surely without entirely new and unexpected information from the ground there is always a danger that observations derived from surveys can somehow be made to ‘fit’ the documentary evidence? True, these two strands of research can together combine to reveal fascinating stories, but, speaking entirely for myself, I sometimes enjoy seeing theories – even my own – being turned rudely upside down. The inevitable rethink that follows can be wonderfully invigorating and is far cheaper than a bottle of Champagne. That’s what makes the writing up of an excavation such fun: it becomes a prolonged process in which pennies drop with unexpected force, delight and frequency.
British archaeology has a distinguished history of long-term projects in which one or two slightly obsessive characters – and I’m happy to number myself among them – assemble a team of similarly slightly obsessive people who then work closely together, often lubricated with quantities of drink and coffee, to reveal the archaeological story of a particular place or region. In my various books on Britain’s archaeology I have had good reason to thank these people whose work I have ransacked for ideas. Often these long-term projects can produce fascinating tales that develop gradually over the years and become suffused with a life and vigour all of their own. One of the very best of them is about the archaeology of the small Somerset parish of Shapwick. We first visited this village on the edge of the marshy Somerset Levels in Britain in the Middle Ages.
(#litres_trial_promo) As I explained there, one of the slightly obsessive characters behind the Shapwick project is my old friend Professor Mick Aston, better known to millions of viewers today as the grey-haired archaeologist in the stripy jumper on Time Team.
Although not religious himself, Mick will go to great lengths to help a church in difficulties and when, in the summer of 2007, I read in our local paper that the magnificent building in Long Sutton needed urgent repairs to its roof, I thought of Mick, and together we organised a public lecture, which was to launch the vicar’s appeal for funds. The church is rather extraordinary. Like many around the Wash, it is very large and appears on the outside to be quite late – maybe fourteenth century – but when you enter be prepared for a surprise, because the interior is almost completely Norman, and Norman of a very high order. Mick got wildly excited and was convinced that the superb workmanship around us was Cluniac (a monastic order famous for its first-rate buildings). This book isn’t about the Middle Ages (and I’ll get to the point in a moment), but Mick’s presence drew a huge crowd and the church was thronged with people. There were stalls selling local books and magazines, and the nearby village hall supplied a stream of people contentedly munching their way through vast Fenland cow pies. I was forcibly struck by the scene and realised that the church had suddenly become what it was in medieval times: the centre of a bustling community and not the exalted, pious and remote place that so many country churches have become since the liturgical reforms of Victorian times.
The following morning Mick appeared clasping what had to be the thickest paperback book I have ever seen. He thudded it down on my desk. It was, or rather is, a staggering 1,047 pages long and includes a CD-ROM of many hundreds more. Having written one or two thickish tomes myself, I know just how much effort it must have taken Mick, and his long-term collaborator, Chris Gerrard, to write and assemble such a Goliath. And now, a few weeks later, I have more or less digested its main findings and it is indeed an astonishing work of great scholarship. It is the account of a survey that took place over a decade, from 1989 to 1999, and involved the methodical field-walking and selected excavation of most of the parish of Shapwick.
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Field-walking, incidentally, is the process whereby a group of archaeologists walk slowly over a field, carefully following a grid. As they walk they put any finds they can see on the surface into bags which are marked with a grid reference. Strange as it may seem, this can be very hard work: on wet days heavy clay sticks to your boots and soon your shoulders start to ache because your head is permanently inclined towards the ground; by this stage, too, the constant dipping down to pick up finds gets to the muscles in your back and calves.
You might think that field-walking would best be done in the warmth of summer, but in fact it doesn’t work like that. Obviously land put down to woodland, grass or permanent pasture can’t be fieldwalked, but neither can ground that has been freshly ploughed or harrowed. Ideally, cultivated land should be left to the mercies of wind, rain and frost for at least three weeks before it is walked. That way, finds are washed clean and can readily be spotted on the surface. After a day’s walking, the bags are taken somewhere dry where they are emptied, the finds washed and divided into various categories, such as bone, flint, tile, pottery, brick and clay tobacco pipe fragments (which are common on post-medieval sites of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries).
One reason why post-medieval archaeology is so important is that it allows us better to understand what archaeologists sometimes refer to as ‘formation processes’. In the past these tended to be assumed or were simply taken for granted, which was a shame, because in fact they are crucially important. So what are they? Perhaps the simplest way to think about them is to ponder the many possible ways that archaeological deposits were formed in the very first instance. Take an obvious example: when rubbish was swept under a reed mat or when coins slipped through holes in a tinker’s pockets to land in the mud of a garden path. Some could have been formed through deliberate dumping (what today we would call ‘fly-tipping’), or during religious offerings, sacrifices or perhaps in the course of a cataclysmic event, such as a fire, earthquake, hurricane, tsunami or the eruption of a great volcano.
Usually one can rule out certain options. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are generally infrequent in Britain, for example. But then it gets more complex. Dredging of the Thames to allow larger ships upstream in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revealed huge quantities of Bronze Age weapons and human skulls. At the time it was assumed that these had been washed into the river from settlements along the shoreline. Somewhat later people preferred to think that much of this material had been lost when ancient travellers had attempted to ford the river. Today we tend to regard most of these river finds as being the result of deliberate religious offerings to the waters. In fact, there is precious little by way of hard and fast evidence to support any of these suggestions. As a general rule such explanations tend to depend on which theories are currently fashionable in academic circles – and nowadays ideas centring around religion and ritual are much in favour.
So let’s suppose that we’ve emptied the contents of our field-walking bags onto a table. The first problem one has to address is simple: how did these hundreds (more usually thousands) of things find their way into, and onto, the ground? Now with very ancient prehistoric material it can be difficult to decide what surface finds actually represent. Soft, poorly fired pottery rarely survives attack by the humic acids in the ploughsoil, and bone succumbs quite quickly as well. So their absence does not mean that they were never there in the first place. As a result, all one is usually left with is flint. And it’s usually impossible or very difficult to decide whether a scattering of flints originated from a permanent village, a camp or a temporary squat, where a handful of hunters stopped to prepare a few new arrowheads after breakfast.
Such conundrums can be easier to unravel in Roman and medieval times when the appearance of bricks, roof tiles and mortar can signal the existence of demolished buildings. But again, although Roman pottery is harder and tends to survive rather better in the soil, bone can soon vanish and iron rapidly rusts away to nothing. Only in post-medieval times does material survive so well in the topsoil that it becomes possible to decide with some certainty how, and indeed why, it originally became incorporated into the earth. And strangely, as Shapwick has shown so clearly, the manner in which some of this material seems to have found its way into the topsoil could be unexpected.
Viewed from an historical perspective, the end of the Middle Ages was traumatic, what with the Reformation, the rise of the Tudors and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. But although these were indeed major events, we will see that their actual impact on the growth and development of Britain’s rural and urban landscapes was surprisingly small. Of course specific sites – and here I am thinking most particu-larly of rural and urban monastic estates – were dramatically affected, but the general run of the landscape was not. It is becoming increas-ingly clear that many of the processes that became self-evident in the mid-sixteenth century had roots very much earlier, usually in the mid-fourteenth; this was the period which witnessed the first impacts of the successive waves of plague we generally refer to as the Black Death. We can see this continuity particularly clearly in the distribution of surface finds at Shapwick.
FIG 1 Three maps of Shapwick, Somerset showing (1) the distribution of later medieval (twelfth–fifteenth centuries) and (2) post-medieval (sixteenth– eighteenth centuries) pottery; map 3 shows the distribution of unidentified brick and tile fragments. These maps clearly demonstrate that there was no break in settlement at the close of the Middle Ages.
I have described how the range and robustness of post-medieval topsoil finds often provide clues as to how they found their way into the ground. Take an obvious example: if surface scatters of brick, tile, cement and plaster are discovered in a field, one might reasonably suppose this was the site of a demolished or collapsed building. Similarly, quantities of pottery and animal bone might indicate the erstwhile presence of rubbish tips. But here we immediately encounter problems, because the idea of useless rubbish is essentially a modern concept, and one which is already, thankfully, on the way out. Even as late as the nineteenth century much rubbish, including human excrement, was actually recycled and spread on the land where it provided a valuable source of nitrogen and other minerals. ‘Night soil’, as the contents of London’s many millions of privies was called, was spread on the fields growing vegetables in Bedfordshire and Middlesex, especially on the lighter gravel soils around Heathrow.
The men given the unenviable task of filling the carts and then transporting and spreading the night soil would smoke a lethal dark shag tobacco in clay pipes, believing this would keep illness, as well as the stink, at bay. Today if you field-walk these fields you will be rewarded by the discovery of thousands of broken pipe fragments. So the discovery of pieces of pipe provides a good indication of how that particular soil might have originated. There are also other clues that allow us to make an informed guess about a deposit’s formation process.
At Shapwick the concentration of small, unidentified brick and tile fragments did show some correspondence with the pottery distribution, but there were also other concentrations further away from the village, some of which could be associated with known demolished post-medieval buildings. Others seemed to have been dumped, most probably after a tile roof had been renewed or repaired. This distribution suggests that brick and tile was finding its way into the ground through a variety of quite different processes. But what about the quite clear replication of the brick/tile distribution with that of the pottery, especially to the immediate east of the village, where both seem to form a concentration in a broad strip, running north–south? We know that this strip was in existence in later medieval times and it is probably best explained as the detritus left, following the spreading of manure.
Today farmers tend to keep their farmyard manure and domestic rubbish separate, but I can remember farms in my childhood where the edible contents of the kitchen pail was fed to pigs and chickens while the stalks and bones were chucked away on the muck heap. Now the muck heap was not the foetid mess that townspeople might suppose. Its purpose was to allow muck to break down – today we would rather primly refer to this process as ‘composting’ – and become manure. This maturation usually took a year or less to complete. It’s worth noting here that if muck is spread onto the fields too soon it has precisely the opposite effect to that intended: it breaks down in the arable ground and in the process removes nitrogen from the soil. And of course it is nitrogen that plants require if they are to grow vigorously.
In the past, household and other debris was placed on muck heaps, which archaeologists, for reasons best known to themselves, like to refer to as ‘middens’. Middens also accumulated burnt wood (for the potash it contains), from which thousands of nails found their way into the soil. In regions where the subsoil was heavy or acidic, farmers would add broken bricks and mortar to help drainage and increase alkalinity. Pottery and glass sherds also helped clay soils to drain, so they were thrown onto the midden along with everything else. Then the process of hand-forking the manure into and out of carts helped break down the pieces of pottery, glass, brick and tile, which would explain the small size of so many of the sherds from that strip immediately east of Shapwick village.
So the distribution of finds from later medieval and post-medieval Shapwick proves beyond much doubt that the villagers continued to live in very much the same place and spread their manure in much the same way from at least the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. After that time in Britain generally we see the gradual introduction of non-farmyard fertilisers, of which the best known is bird dung from the Peruvian coast, known as guano, but other soil improvers were also used, such as gypsum, chalk and lime.
It is now becoming clear that the farming and manuring pattern of later medieval times continued into the post-medieval period relatively unaltered, yet this was a period almost of turmoil in the world of local landowners. Glastonbury Abbey, always a prosperous foundation but possibly the richest monastic estate in England by this time, owned land and two manors at Shapwick which were taken over by private landlords after the abbey’s dissolution in November 1539. This led to the enlargement of the mansion at Shapwick House sometime around 1620–40 when a long gallery was added to the medieval building. All this was happening, and yet the basic management of the landscape continued much as before. It is not, however, until the later eighteenth century that we see the village decline in size as the park around Shapwick House was greatly enlarged, a process sometimes referred to as emparkation. We know, for example, that seven houses near the great house were demolished between 1782 and 1787.
(#litres_trial_promo) This process continued until the great park was completed in the 1850s, a process which even involved the relocation of the parish church!
At this point I should perhaps admit I’ve been a little unfair because I’ve started this chapter by jumping straight into the deep end of a pool of detail. I did that because I wanted to illustrate the complexities inherent in any attempt to understand how the rural landscape developed at this crucially important period at the very beginning of our story. But our tale is about to get more complicated. In many ways this reflects the reality of modern research into rural archaeology: many of the old certainties have had to be abandoned in the face of a growing mountain of evidence that what might once have been seen as clear national trends actually fail to apply at the local level. But this is nothing new, as we saw in the Middle Ages.
One of the great archaeological breakthroughs in the study of English medieval rural geography happened in the 1950s and 1960s with the recognition that many villages in the English Midlands had either been abandoned or had shrunk massively, usually from some time in the fourteenth century. When mapped out, these villages could be seen to form a Central Province which extended in a broadly continuous swathe from Somerset, through the Midlands, Lincolnshire, eastern Yorkshire and into County Durham and Northumberland.
(#litres_trial_promo) The landscapes in this area featured villages that had been reorganised, or ‘nucleated’, by drawing outlying farms into a more focused central village, a process that happened in the centuries on either side of the Norman Conquest. The work of nucleation was carried out by local people, often encouraged by landlords and by other authorities, such as the Church and great monastic houses (as happened at Shapwick).
