Abbey Cottages — Over the Wire!

One sunny August morning I'd arrived on-site, leant my bike against the barbed wire fence, and then started detecting in the thicket.

Just as soon as I had, an ancient Land Rover turned up and out jumped an equally ancient, but sprightly and vivacious woman ...

Dressed in ragged skirts and apron, woolly jumpers, a tattered and torn waxed-jacket with a blue headscarf (that may indeed have been a tea towel!) tied by a kneck knot around her head, and for footwear, sporting wellington boots with the tops turned down ... she was the absolute spit of a Van Gogh peasant.

Quite a picture she was!

Opening the gate to the cattle field, she drove into ...

Was this the Queen of England? Or was she my landowner?! 

I thought that, she must be the latter, and that I'd better introduce myself sharpish while I had the chance, explain what I was up to and then ask outright for permission to use my detector in the ground across the now hated barbed-wire fence ...

I called out to her in my best voice just as if she were the Queen of England, said my hello's, and then we started talking — and to my satisfaction — once I was convinced that she was indeed queen of this land and a generous one too, and I'd convinced her that I was indeed a madman but only a harmless one, she said that she'd give permission readily if only I would do her one small, tiny, tiny, incy, wincy little favour ...

I agreed! Without knowing quite what kind of favour it was that I was agreeing to ...

She beckoned me into the field, opened the tailgate of the old jaloppy, told me to get in the back, sit atop the pile of mangelwurzels there and pitch one out every five seconds as she drove around the bumpy hoof-pocked field.

I did as I was told!

And when we were done, the cattle, who had been absent all the while, began ambling back from an out-of-sight field down by the river and proceeded to chomp down on their breakfasts.

Having secured my permission, and with the cattle well away from the house site, I ambled back to the bike only to find that it was gone. I'd left my gear in the thicket but discovered, thankfully, that it was still where I'd left it. And so my new permission had cost me dearly — and to the tune of a sore backside, a mountain bike and a long walk back home! 

I had not lost my precious C-Scope 770D (with radical modifications!) which had stood me in such good stead over the past few years, and so I took this all in good humour and set back to work. 

 Hair ornaments?  Silver-plated copper-alloy. 59mm x 44mm.

I found that the soil in this new patch of mine had been somewhat modified by the hooves, the urine and the droppings of the cattle and to my initial dismay that copper-alloy items were often found broken, distorted, or in a corroded state. However, it was to prove worthwhile. Not everything was damaged but the chances were much higher than I had experienced previously when most everything had come out the ground in superb condition.

The womenfolk of the house had been noticeably absent from the finds record in the thicket and on the ramp, but as the days and weeks passed I began to find the evidence of them in the form of costume jewellery and other small trinkets. Two identical copper-alloy items, that I think are probably a pair of hair ornaments, were found nearby to each other but on separate occasions. They were in very different states of preservation (as you can see above) where one example is quite corroded whilst the second example is not at all and retains traces of silvering.

The rings on my left pinky. These are rings are small.

There were also three small finger rings of gilt-brass, two of which were broken and one complete and in good shape but missing its stone. These were as feminine a find that I could have made because they were certainly not made for men or boys.

Of course, I was to find more thimbles but thimbles were not necessarily the sole property of women, were they? I also found lots more buttons (I would eventually amass a collection of 40 specimens) which comprised of dandy buttons, military and service buttons but also small closed-back jacket buttons that did appear to be feminine.

One morning I discovered an item that at the time I hoped might eventually lead me to the name of the man of the house. This was a rectangular brass from a leather horse harness, and better, it was engraved with the owners initials and later I also found a circular martingale brass but this was a straightforward fretted example in the form of the sun or a star.

Thereafter, I called my man of the house, 'Bill Cobb'!

I thought that to be a name suiting such a country gentleman as him. 

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

Abbey Cottages — Discovery!

It is my intention to write an account here of my discovery and subsequent exploration of a single period site located in Rainham, Essex, which dated from probably the early 19th-century and which terminated at some time in the early 20th century.  I will also endeavour to picture and catalogue all the finds made on the site over the time that I spent there because I hope that this will be a valuable resource for those interested in rural working class domestic life during the 19th Century. 

The site was capped during landscaping work later on in the 1990's and now lays beneath a great deal of extra imported soil. This protects it, but at the time this meant that no further work could take place and so I did not manage to retrieve much in the way of pottery. Nevertheless, what I did discover in the way of metallic objects tells a story that I think is necessary to record. 

Abbey Cottages once stood at Abbey Wood by Berwick Pond and were built upon a low gravel hillock set in marshy land close to the River Ingrebourne. When I stumbled upon the plot one day in 1993 the cottages had been long demolished. There was nothing visible to suggest that they had ever existed and only by following a trail of finds along the trackway which once led to them did I discover the evidence of them.

I was out on my bike prospecting for a new site to work on. I came to what I knew was a very old lake, thought that it looked a good place to search, and so I asked the fishery bailiff if I might and he gave permission. There were a few small fields to go at, but firstly, I tried detecting on the wide grass verge of the trackway that led from the main road along which anglers parked their cars. To my surprise, I did not locate lead fishing weights as I had expected to, but immediately made finds of late 18th and 19th-century date and these were mostly thimbles and 'dandy' buttons.

The trail of these finds petered out in the eastward direction but strengthened in the westward, and so I continued to follow it in that direction and eventually arrived at what appeared to be a gravel vehicle ramp ... 

To the left of this 'ramp' was a dense thicket of thorn bushes and to the right-hand side was a steep drop-off with a small field that was full of cattle about five or six feet below. It terminated at a roughly made barbed-wire fence beyond which I beheld a positively lunar landscape.  The ground had been churned up everywhere by the hooves of the cattle who clearly had free access to the area, and here and there were sorry looking spindly bushes nibbled to near extinction. 

I concentrated upon the ramp for the remainder of the afternoon continuing to find buttons — but they were not at all easy to dig. The ground was highly compacted and it was a lot of effort recovering anything. It was time well spent, though. For their age, they were all preserved in truly excellent condition and when an 18th-century Sheffield plate military button came along I was best pleased.

Officer's tunic button of the Essex Light Dragoons, 1794.
(See references at bottom of page)

At home, I pondered these novel discoveries and decided to return to the ramp the very next day. The recovery of finds dropped off fairly quickly, of course, and so I was forced into the thicket where I spent the rest of the morning struggling through it. However, the finds rate rose considerably when I found myself digging musket ball after musket ball and all spread across one small area.  I must have found ten before I found anything else (eventually amassing a collection of at least fifty of them) but I thought it to be well worth all the effort expended.  

I remember having to really struggle with one signal which was gotten at arm's length through a particularly prickly bramble bush. Finally, I got my trowel in, dug around through the thick leaf mould and managed to recover it from the topsoil. I expected yet another musket ball to be hiding inside the clod of hard-won soil clenched safely in my left hand but was surprised to see a truly lovely object fall into the palm of the right ...

Here was a find to get the heart racing — a Georgian fob seal! It was in such lovely condition, with traces of gilding in every recess and where the gilt had rubbed through to brass, the most gorgeous, lush dark-green patina. And it was complete, too! It still held its white stone intaglio, which was carved with a little crouched rabbit or hare. I thought to myself, that without any inscription that would give away the name of the erstwhile owner, that this animal must be a hare after all, and the loser — a Mr or Mrs Hare ... 

O'Hare, even! 

I pocketed this find and continued on, only to be arrested in my tracks a short while later by the worrying sight of a pair of approaching police officers. I really thought that I was about to be chucked off-site. Fortunately, it turned out that they had had other business to attend to which had led them nowhere fast and now they'd found an interest in what I was up to. We talked for some time about the finds that I had made, and curiously one seemed to know something (if not much!) about them.

I could not work this out for some time; bemused to be in conversation at such a level of understanding with a member of the constabulary — but what I had failed to apprehend until an introduction was made, was that this knowledgeable officer was a detectorist too and was also a member of my local detecting club. We'd already met in civvies!

People can look so utterly 'other' when in uniform, can't they?

References;

1. Dixon Noonan Webb

Raised in March 1794 by Montague Burgoyne, of Harlow, the Essex Light Dragoons saw service in Ireland at the time of the French invasion in 1798. It was disembodied sometime in 1799 and, to mark the occasion each officer and man who had served throughout the regiment’s existence was presented with a medal by their Commanding Officer. 

2. History of the Essex Yeomanry
In 1794, six Troops of the ‘Loyal Essex Regiment of Fencible Cavalry’ were formed from the Harlow area, to be later renamed ‘The Essex Light Dragoons’, against threats of a French invasion with landings on the Essex Coast. In 1797 the 1st Essex Yeomanry Cavalry Troop was raised, in Coopersale, followed by the Chelmsford Hundred Yeomanry: by 1798 there were fifteen such Yeomanry Cavalry Troops throughout Essex named, in many cases, after the village, district or landowner where they raised