Ramblings in praise of Antiquarianism – and the Internet!
Pamela Sambrook
It’s comforting sometimes to find that people talk behind your back
I’m sure most of us have been asked often enough why historical research grips us so. I’m sure, too, we’ve all had experiences like this which go a long way to explain the fix we get.
As many of you know I’m interested in oatcakes, therefore interested in bakestones, the flat rectangular stone, later iron, slabs on which they were cooked. The earliest documentary record I have from Staffordshire is from a probate inventory from Sheen, dated 1550.One day, I thought ‘I wonder what Minwel had to say about bakestones?’ Now Minwel Tibbott was a friend of mine, to my mind a brilliant oral historian who recorded the domestic life of Wales, working for the Welsh Folk Museum. Sadly she died young, in the 1970s, and after her death the Museum published a collection of her writings about Wales in her memory. So I was flicking through this book (which I reviewed in the ‘70s) and was astonished to see, it seems for the first time, the following: ‘The logical development from the primitive method of baking [hearthcakes] on a hot hearth or flagstone was the use of a thin slab built into and projecting from a wall, sufficiently high to allow for a fire on the ground below, as was found on the site of a Romano-British village in Staffordshire.’
Minwel’s reference was to an extract from a catalogue of an exhibition held in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff in 1913. I emailed the Library of the National Museum, explained my interest and asked if they could photocopy me a few pages from the catalogue. ‘I can do better than that’, emailed back the Librarian, ‘I have a cupboard full of them and was only recently thinking about throwing them out but thought, perhaps not, one day some eccentric antiquarian might want one of them– and here you are! By the way, I think you knew my father, who had a brewhouse in Shropshire which you recorded, and my grandmother who was Mistress of your college at Oxford’! (It’s comforting sometimes to find that people talk behind your back.)
Two days later the catalogue popped into my box. The reference reads: ‘The only actual example of a stone one [bakestone] known to the writer was found on the site of a Romano-British village in Staffordshire’ – alas no other information as to the site of the village in Staffordshire, or where the bakestone might be.
At a Guild meeting shortly after, I told Jim Sutton about this and a day or so later he rang me, saying: ‘I’ve found it – I typed ‘Romano-British village in Staffordshire’ into Google and it found it – the exact words’. Not only did Google give the reference but it gave the text – whole pages from a book by an archaeologist called John Ward published in 1911, in which he described an excavation carried out in the 1840s by Samuel Carrington at Borough Fields, Wetton. Ward took his account from Thomas Bateman’s book, Ten Years Diggings in Celtic and Saxon Grave Hills in the counties of Derby, Stafford and York from 1848 to 1858, which incorporated Samuel Carrington’s own account. I found that the William Salt had three copies of Bateman’s book, which incidentally costs £170 on the internet and even a paperback facsimile printed in the 1970s sells at £70. However, I now have a photocopy of Carrington’s first-hand account and a description of the bakestone
So my bakestone references have been pushed back to almost 1,800 years ago!
sufficiently detailed for me to produce a sketch of what it might have looked like. Nearby was a Roman coin dated AD 256-268 and the rest of the finds seem to confirm this sort of date. So my bakestone references have been pushed back to almost 1,800 years ago! I have no idea where the artefacts from Wetton have ended up but I have some ideas to follow, so my search continues.
Meanwhile, my luck had not run out. One Sunday morning I went up to Wetton to see the site. I had only a vague idea where it might be and walking round the village everyone I saw seemed to be either a rambler or a visitor staying in one of the many holiday cottages. I eventually saw a woman in a garden, cutting the last of her roses and simultaneously having a heated conversation with a man about a price for painting her fence. From the way she was cutting her roses I got the impression she was the sort of woman who would know about things! So, into a lull in their conversation, I said: ‘Excuse me, could you help me, I’m looking for a field near the village called Borough Field.’ ‘Oh, yes, you mean Sam Carrington’s and Tom Bateman’s place (as if they were good friends of hers). It’s just round the corner, go to the second barn and it’s beyond there – now, Charlie, what were you saying about my fence?’
Well, I found the site, not a lot to see, but I went home delighted. At the next Guild meeting, I mentioned the site to Tim Cockin, who knew all about it and, moreover, knew that Samuel Carrington’s grave was in Wetton churchyard. So, another Sunday morning off I set. Wetton churchyard still has its graves upright and as I closed the gate behind me I thought: ‘Gosh, this is going to take ages.’
But I can do better than that, I can show you his footprint!
But the door of the church was open and I heard a noise inside, so in I went, to see an elderly woman clearing up after the service: ‘Excuse me, could you help me, I’m looking for a grave, the grave of Samuel Carrington. Do you know where it is?’ ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘But I can do better than that, I can show you his footprint!’ There in Wetton church was a biography of Samuel Carrington who was the village schoolmaster, member of the village band etc. There was also a list of the Carboniferous fossils which are named after him and, bizarrely, an outline of his footprint cut into a sheet of lead, complete with name and date and the marks of the nails in the sole! It appears that when the church roof was repaired a few years ago, a whole collection of villagers’ footprints, cut into lead and dated, were found. These have been researched by shoe historians and are a valuable record of shoe fashions. You’ll find illustrations of them on the wall of the church. Carrington’s grave is a low but elegant coffer-shaped tomb decorated with fossil shells. Of course, the woman in the church turned out to be a member of Wetton historical society which has collected Samuel Carrington memorabilia. ‘Do you suppose the Staffordshire Record Office might like them?’ she asked, rather wistfully.
Modern archaeologists deplore the activities of people like Samuel Carrington and of course it is a shame that the Borough Field site was not excavated properly – it is perhaps a prime target for the Time Team! But am I alone in finding something totally beguiling about the enthusiasm of such men or thinking that our past would have been the poorer without people who followed their intellectual obsessions?