Abbey Cottages — Evidence Emerging!

After my initial exploration of the area available to search in front of the barbed wire fence, I wanted to see if finds would continue beyond it because I thought that they must. And so I pushed the search coil through the fence and scanned the surface in all-metal mode. Sure enough, the ground was alive with iron signals.  However, I did not have permission to dig there! 

On the subject of iron, the ground that I had worked thus far had been laced with it to the point of saturation. Quite how I'd managed to retrieve anything worthwhile seemed astonishing, but I had. I then decided that I must set to work cleaning the soil of objects of iron that were masking better finds. Up from the ground came chunk after chunk of cast iron drainpipe. 

This may have been hard toil, but this iron junk was the clear evidence that once upon a time a house had stood there and what I'd dug up were objects lost and discarded in its gardens. Now the site had started to make some sense. No longer were these Georgian and Victorian objects just the random losses made by picnickers reclining idly beside a pretty pond, but were those periodic but continual losses of a family who had lived and most probably worked at this lake throughout the entirety of the 19th century. 

I imagined a game-keeper who had once served as an officer during the Napoleonic wars as master of this house. The musket balls alone seemed evidence of him and the military button too, but when I found the trigger guard of his flintlock musket, I really began to feel his presence. 

This trigger guard lacks any means for attachment for the shoulder strap

and therefore was probably not from a military 'Brown Bess' musket but

rather a wildfowling gun. (The barrel to your left — stock to your right)

Because I had yet to gain access to the cattle field, I soldiered on in the thicket for many weeks and in that time made many pleasant discoveries. I suppose the best thing was that items had lain in garden soil for over a century at the very least and for almost two centuries for the earliest finds. 

This soil was basically river gravel but with a great deal of added organic material that I imagined got there by way of manuring over a very long period of time. Whoever had lived there had certainly tended their gardens dutifully because the soil they'd created was friable, so rich that it was almost black in colour, and smelled so good that I swore that I could eat it! 

Because of these admirable qualities, it had preserved most copper alloy items beautifully. Almost everything made in copper or bronze or brass possessed the same smooth dark green patina and very little of it was corroded or encrusted. In fact, sometimes it was so very good that just a quick rub between the fingers would expose a completely clean find and I never really had to scrub clean anything back at home.

As for coinage, well, what I'd found of it had tied in with the artefacts very neatly indeed and ranged from George I till late in the reign of late Victoria. However, the earlier 18th-century coins were all very worn and so these were not proof of much. They could have been lost a century later than their striking, or even more. The latest coin found was a Victoria old-head penny of 1896 in quite worn condition and so this was an early 20th century loss — but not one single Edwardian coin had yet been discovered.

I could not imagine origins much earlier than the turn of the 19th Century even if some of the objects found suggested otherwise. The best of the coins dated the site rather well. A George III 1807 halfpenny (above) and farthing of the same date were in such lightly circulated condition that both must have been lost shortly after their strike date. And so I thought that these two coins were the earliest clear evidence for dating purposes and showed that the cottages certainly stood there by 1810-15.

However, digging up material evidence for dating a site is a nebulous thing. Who knows what has been missed? I thought gaining documentary evidence to be a more certain gambit, and I had the means ...

I had access to a full-scale (and perhaps original) copy of the immensely useful and informative, John Chapman & Peter Andre 1777 map of Essex, which was held in a large cabinet in Romford Library and from which I'd derived a great deal of information in the past about my previous 'best site' and its surroundings. 

I went to town and took a fresh look at the map. Abbey Cottages did not appear upon it and so I believed that they could not have existed prior to its creation. And so, with map evidence backing up my initial findings, I concluded that these cottages were indeed built at around the turn of the 19th Century.

Having established a number of things to my satisfaction I found that I now had a new mission to accomplish — for I had seen the clear evidence of the master of the house emerge from the ground, and, by way of a single tiny, tiny thimble, also one of his daughters — but I had yet to find any clear evidence of the matriarch. 

At that point, this was the most interesting thing ...

John Chapman & Peter André map of Essex, 1777