Fifty years ago, I received a life-changing letter. David Peacock, my tutor at Southampton University, offered me a doctoral scholarship to study the imported Frankish pottery from Hamwic, the 7th- to 9th-century emporium at Southampton. The newly formed Southampton Archaeological Research Committee (SARC) had released the funds in order to make sense of these enigmatic potsherds. David, one of life’s great gentlemen (and a fine scholar), memorably told me: ‘with pots you travel’. Roman amphorae had taken him all over Europe and North Africa. He was spot on: studying these sherds was to lead me to France and Spain; then, the Low Countries, West Germany (as it was then), Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. I motored from each museum or archaeological project to the next in a 1962 green- and cream-liveried Austin A40. Along the way, I camped in a small blue single-pole tent and rustled up dinner on a single gas burner. I broke down on the Spanish plain, in the Rhineland, and Frisia. Always, the Automobile Association came to my rescue. Most of all, along my travels I met a galaxy of archaeologists and curators, every one of them as kind to me as David had been. It was an odyssey at a time when medieval archaeology in much of western Europe was far behind the swinging digging days of the ’60s and early ’70s in England.
Hamwic and its issues were relatively new to me. It was a world away from the city’s university in the leafy Highfield suburb. Bombed-out sites still existed in the St Mary’s district of Southampton; the city had taken the full brunt of the Luftwaffe’s ire in 1941-1944. The only upside was the unexpected discovery in post-war excavations of one of Anglo-Saxon England’s earliest towns. The post-built houses and rubbish pits of Hamwic lay largely undisturbed 2 or 3ft (60-90cm) below the ground, left to posterity when the town – which covered 40ha – was abandoned in the Viking age and superseded by medieval Southampton to the west. To be quite honest, digging in Hamwic was thankless in comparison to the blissful places I had experienced in my teens. The brickearth natural was bare and as unforgiving as the desolate rows of post-war housing. On the positive side, when I excavated at Melbourne Street with the effervescent David Hill and his thoughtful deputy, the kindly Jane Hassall (Carr), the camaraderie was as magical as the piles of objects and bones in the deep Middle Saxon cess pits. In the 19th century, Southampton’s starving poor had mined these very pits to boil up the bones, a millennium old. I have no recollection of finding anything exceptional, but I instinctively knew that Hamwic was a premier-division place, and its story told properly would change Anglo-Saxon and early-medieval history.
Above: Excavations under way of Hamwic in Clifford Street during the early 1970s. The results of such work revolutionised knowledge of early medieval Southampton. Sherds of Tating Ware were among the finds, including the fragment shown here (below).
From Frisian Ware to Tating Ware and back
David Peacock, a glint in his eye, urged me to focus as I embarked on my research. ‘Cherry-pick,’ he advised. ‘Start with Tating Ware. Look at those volcanic inclusions,’ he said with a winning smile. My eye was not adjusted to his, trained in geology. Instead, I saw the bleached traces of an adhesive on the fine black sherd. Tin lozenges and an apotropaic cross had once been affixed to its burnished black surface and then been lost. Applied after firing, these tight rows of triangles and strips cut out of tin foil had once been polished to reflect light like a mirror. It was quite unlike anything else found at Hamwic. Picking up his magnifying glass, David added, ‘My bet is it was made in the Rhineland.’
