House of Treasures

 

One morning at the end of June I was sitting at a desk in Canterbury Cathedral’s Archives reading room. This was my first time in the Library/Archives, despite having lived and worked within a few miles of the place since 1985; it had taken the kind invitation of historian and retired academic Dr David Shaw – mentioned in my previous post – to bring about a much overdue visit. In front of me were all three volumes of Isaac Newton’s seminal work on the mathematics that govern so much of the observable universe; a work which, quite literally, redefined the way we understand our the world. Rarely have I touched such valuable documents. However, this is a digression and I shall relegate it to a postscript below*. This post is primarily about glass: specifically, glassmaking in England at the time of the Tudors and Stuarts ...

David has participated in several of my u3a science sessions over recent years, including the extended series I lead on the science, technology and art of glass; he had evidently fully discerned the extent to which I am fascinated with glass as a material. In his role as a volunteer at the Archives and Library he had come across a Royal Proclamation which began life in the reign of Elizabeth I and was then re-issued by her successors, as and when required, at least through to Charles I, to whose reign this particular copy can be dated (1615). The order, printed on two sheets of paper, forbad the use of wood as a fuel in the manufacture of glass. Evidently, so much high quality timber was being used in glassmaking that ship-building was suffering, either directly because of a dearth of supply or by virtue of the price having been driven up; this was, in its turn, seen as a threat to national security. Moreover, it was forbidden to commission from any source glassware made or formed using wood as a fuel; the document goes on to forbid the import of glass or glassware and to even to outlaw the trade in glass drinking vessels. The delegated enforcement of such a proclamation fell to the local authorities across the country, there being no police force at the time remember. Thus, multiple copies of the proclamation would be printed for distribution across England and Wales.

This is the ‘Proclamation touching Glasses’ (reference CCA CC/A/P/P/1/PR/48) at the heart for my visit to the Cathedral Archives. Unusually, but rather wonderfully in my opinion, Canterbury Cathedral Archives also holds and manages the city archives of Canterbury: were that not the case I may never have had this rare opportunity. (Sadly, a set of records relating to the county, being the archive of the Diocese of Canterbury, was removed from the collection some ten years ago and is now held by Kent County Council in the County Town of Maidstone.) The images shown above were created for me by the Cathedral Archives and are used with the kind permission of the Chapter of Canterbury.

The Tudor rose and the thistles in this illustrated opening letter ‘I’ tie the origin of the proclamation firmly to its period.

You’ll notice in passing, even without even reading the proclamation, that it takes a lot of words to convey what is a relatively straightforward message: it will come as no surprise to you that the people who drafted such legal documents were, I understand, paid by the word. There was however a useful nugget of information offered (see extracted image above): “… there has been discovered and perfected a way and means to make glass with sea coal [and] pit coal … in as good perfection for beauty and use, as formerly was made by wood”. I have used modern spelling but otherwise kept the contemporary use of English. By pit coal, I suspect we’re mostly talking of open-cast mining; where seams met the coast it was possible to gather lumps of coal on the shoreline, hence sea coal. To the modern mind it seems perfectly reasonable for them to have switched to coal given the shortage of timber, but it’s important to remember that the bulk transportation of fuel would have been far from trivial at the time (i.e. before the canal system, let alone the railways). One consequence of the prohibition against using wood was therefore that glass making necessarily declined in wooded regions of the country, like the Weald of Kent and Sussex, and gravitated towards areas having easy access to coal – perhaps like Sunderland, which developed a well-deserved reputation for glassmaking.

All in all, I had a wonderful few hours in the Archives. The welcome I received was second to none and the ‘atmosphere’ in there came pretty close to defining my dream library environment. To sit at a desk surrounded by old wood with light filtering in through handmade glass, and to hear at one point the cathedral’s bells drifting through high ceilings was bliss.


My warmest thanks go to David Shaw for his thoughtful invitation, to the two Archives reading room staff who registered me and settled me in, to their Digitisation Officer for creating digital images of the proclamation and to the Archives and Library Manager who approved my request to show the images in this post and offered some valuable comments on an earlier draft.

* Postscript: Turning the pages of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, see here and here) was a very special treat for anyone with an interest in science, and particularly for a physicist like me. Isaac Newton laid the groundwork for so much of the physical sciences still taught in schools and colleges: an intellectual giant. The text of the Principia was written in Latin, which I cannot read, but Newton and I share a common second language: that of mathematics. I only had time on this visit to enjoy the first of the three-volume work, but that proved ideal in the sense that I could focus properly on the many pages Newton used to define his terms and establish key axioms and proofs. Thus, I could discern that he used ‘C’ for speed, ‘S’ for distance and ‘T’ for time and would write the classic relationship between them as C = S : T (c.f. the c = s/t form one would see today). Moving from there to acceleration, momentum etc. became possible on this basis. Noticeably, there is much space given to the use geometric proofs. There are other historic scientific documents held within the Archive and now that I have my reader’s photo-ID card I shall be able to book a slot for return visits.

P.p.s. One afternoon, back in 1985/6, together with a couple of colleagues who were similarly bored of the mandatory ‘induction course’ we’d been dispatched to by our employer, I got the chance to look through several historical documents in the library at Herstmonceux Castle – including a beautifully illustrated contemporary account of James Cook’s first expedition on the Endeavour. As a schoolboy I don’t believe I ever committed truancy – I loved learning, so why would I – but I have no regrets about skipping class on that occasion ;-)


Further reading
There are a great many books/articles on the history of glass. For those with an interest in the glassmaking of England during the period of history of most relevance to this blog post I can share a few of the online resources I have consulted:
On early-modern glass
For an extended article on the history of glassmaking in England – including the use of wood and switch to coal see here.
On the scientific analysis of medieval glass (a PhD thesis).
For Historic England’s archaeological guidelines see here and also here and here.

There are other, more generic, books sitting on my shelves such as:
‘5000 Years of Glass’ edited by H. Tait (The British Museum Press, 2012; ISBN 978-0-7141-5095-6)
‘A Short History of Glass’ by Cloe Zerwick (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1990; ISBN 0-87290-121-1)
‘The Glass Bathyscaphe’ by A. Macfarlane and G. Martin (Profile Books, 2003; ISBN 1-86197-394-2).

Lost, and found again: the Graveney boat and me.

 

By my reckoning, I was seventeen. Reverse the digits and you’ll arrive at my age on my next birthday. I was, in a great many respects, another person; a person who so easily might have chosen, or have stumbled through a doorway other than the one I actually took, ending up who-knows-where.

A model of the clinker-built late ninth century ‘Graveney Boat’ displayed within the Fleur de Lis museum in Faversham – almost on my doorstep, but only visited recently in the company of my teenage grandsons (who are ‘collecting’ the fifty or so small independent museums in our region … as one does.) When I saw this tiny model in its display case I couldn’t help but smile; read on to find out why.

I’ve mentioned serendipity – perhaps that ought to be providence – many times in my posts (e.g. in the first post of a short series reflecting on my career as a scientist, here) but a recent visit to the Fleur de Lis museum in Faversham provided a rather joyful reminder of its potential. Back in the day, I used to volunteer my weekends as a helper on local archaeological excavations. We’d be picked up early in the morning and driven to wherever there was a need for ‘emergency archaeology’, by which I mean the desire to uncover artefacts and learn as much as one could in the limited time before a developer’s bulldozers moved in. Some years would elapse before such sites/finds were afforded protection under law (see here and here) so it really did feel like a valuable and an exciting thing to do. Also, I was a seventeen year old with zero interest in sports – chronic asthma at a time when treatments were limited, two left feet and distinctly bookish tendencies coupled with a well-developed inferiority complex – but with the usual innate need to be doing ‘something’. Volunteering in this way fitted the bill perfectly: an inexhaustible excuse for reading, small groups of like-minded people and working outdoors in out-of-the-way locations. As a bonus, my dad was a bricklayer and so the instruction to bring your own pointing trowel was easy to follow. What’s not to love?

Pursuing archaeology as a career appealed to me a great deal. At this distance from the person I was back then I cannot begin reliably to reconstruct the thought processes that steered me towards studying physics and then beginning chemical physics research. The existence of radiocarbon dating techniques and the later introduction of geophysical probes like resistivity and magnetometry would only serve to heighten my interest, but by then archaeology had become an armchair hobby overshadowed by my fascination with the physical sciences. (The line became blurred a little during the final years of my professional career when I was able to use my chemical physics expertise to make a small contribution to heritage/conservation projects: see here, here and here.)

I only volunteered for one season in 1970 (maybe a little in 1969? – other priorities, like final school exams and university applications, squeezed it out thereafter) but the joy of taking part has stayed with me ever since. Having said that, you may be surprised when I admit that, somewhere along the line, I forgot the associated details. I could always have told you that our mentor in this voluntary work was enthusiastic archaeologist Mr. Jim Bradshaw (who died in 2001); he was a good person to learn from as I recall. I also remember that the two multi-weekend digs I took part in during this period were poles apart in their nature: well-drained flat farmland abutting an oil depot which was hiding a Romano-British residential/industrial site, and mud-up-to-the-armpits marshland which revealed a ninth century boat. In one case, the land would return to being farmed and the other was in the way of a major drainage channel.

The Romano-British site (see the 1990 aerial image below, with links) had apparently been known about for several decades, with bits of pottery being turned up by the plough now and again. More excavations were conducted nearby in the decades following my involvement and within a much better framework of legal protection than the one I was a part of. (These later digs were as a prelude to the deserted oil depot’s removal in favour of housing.) I remember exposing a hearth – a flat patch of hard reddened soil in essence – and being shown how to distinguish ‘random’ chunks of flint, found in abundance in the region, from the remains of an ancient drystone wall or a well-constructed path. However, the highlight was exposing a small but whole clay jar. I had Mr. Bradshaw and a few others clustered around me as I was talked through the safe way to excavate and lift it. The best guess at the time was that it had once contained perfume.

This aerial image of the location of the Wye Romano-British site was taken in 1990, before later development and the excavations that preceded it. Further information may be found in reports submitted by Mr. Bradshaw and by those making reference to his work: here from 1970 in Section II, here from 2016 from 2016 and here in paragraph 2.2 from a national archive.

As you’ll no doubt recall, what prompted this post in the first place, and the online research undertaken in order to write it, was the happy accident of finding mention of ‘The Graveney Boat’ during my extended exploration of Faversham’s Fleur de Lis museum. (The Graveney Marshes, I ought to explain, are sited between Faversham and the North Kent coast (UK); there is also a village of Graveney.) None of the images I could find do justice to the mud; nor do they convey the camaraderie that coping with it engendered. However, I’ve included one below along with a slew of links to associated news items and formal reports; this was, without doubt, a big deal. Whilst at the museum I had a brief conversation with someone working there during which I asked about the fate of the boat. She informed me that The National Maritime Museum, who had taken overall charge of the project and had all the recovered material sent to them at the time, still retained the excavated timbers. Apparently, it’s still being stored under water as there are no funds to conserve it further – let alone to repatriate it to the nearby Faversham museum. Having been involved in a small way with the conservation of Henry VIII’s famous warship ‘The Mary Rose’ (here) I must admit that I felt very sad that funds didn’t exist to allow the excellent marine conservation resources in Portsmouth to be brought into play. C’est la vie, I suppose.

The images above are both taken from a 1971 paper in a publication called ‘Antiquity’; there’s another paper, less easy to access, published the following year in ‘Studies in Conservation’. Perhaps the feel of the place and the excavation work required is better conveyed in this (pre-HD) video, available via the Fleur de Lis museum’s web site.

All-in-all, I’ve had a pleasant trip down Memory Lane and had great fun piecing back together again the details of my season in the field as a volunteer archaeologist – a career path never trodden.