August 2021

Have you ever seen a stone doorstep outside an old house, worn to a hollow in the centre? Have you gone for a country walk, and followed a path which has been made by the feet of people and animals taking the easiest route through the grass between two points? Did you notice that the bare earth was lower than the grass on either side? How about the area under your children’s swing? Unless you have laid a special surface, I bet there is a neat little groove in the ground under the seat where they scuff their feet. If you visit a prehistoric stone circle, you may not notice the same effect in action, but it is there all the same.

I took part in an interesting piece of archaeology when I was working in Nottinghamshire. There was a small stone circle, like a miniature Stonehenge, on a hillside in the Peak District some way from Nottingham. It was on a piece of land to which the public had access. Walkers, picnickers and ad-hoc campers wandered around the stones and lit the odd fire in the centre. Every year, the man for whom I was working was paid to come up and monitor the monument. Using a surveyor’s level, he had to lay out a grid inside and around the circle of stones and measure the height above sea level of the ground at the same points on that grid each year. My exciting job was to hold the measuring staff on the various points while he took the readings. (This was of course before GPS.) And every year, the ground level had been worn down over most of the area by one or two centimetres. The damage was imperceptible to the naked eye, but in ten years, that prehistoric monument would have been worn away by ten to twenty centimetres, just by people walking on it.

And that is why we are not allowed to walk around inside the stone circle at Stonehenge or the Ring of Brodgar, all thousands and thousands of us tourists who visit them every year.

St Albans, the small town where I spent most of my working life, was dominated during the medieval period by a Benedictine monastery. The surviving abbey church, now a cathedral, is well worth a visit. The monastery was home to a number of interesting monks, such as the 13^th century historian Matthew Paris, but my favourite is Abbot John de Cella, who was abbot from 1195 until his death in 1214.

He came from a modest family living near Wallingford, and was sometimes known as John of Wallingford. The future abbot studied in Paris with a community of masters and students attached to the Notre Dame cathedral school, which was recognised as a university by the king of France in 1200. Paris was the second oldest university in Europe, after Bologna in Italy, Oxford in England being the third oldest. Boys usually began their studies at the age of 13-14 years and continued for up to 12 years. They studied the seven liberal arts: the “trivium” (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the “quadrivium” (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) before going on to more specialised studies such as law, theology and medicine. John was an excellent student and was accepted as a teacher there. Apparently he had an amazing memory – he could recite the whole of the psalter backwards, verse by verse.

He took vows as a Benedictine monk and entered Wallingford priory, where he was elected prior in 1191. The priory was a dependent cell of St Albans abbey, which was how he came to be known as “John de Cella” when he was elected abbot of St Albans four years later. His reputation was of a scholarly and religious man, but he wasn’t really suited to the top job. He spent an unusual amount of time in prayer and contemplation and tended to leave the administration of the abbey and the discipline of the community to his prior and cellarer. The number of monks  increased dramatically and the abbey needed to expand its buildings, both the living quarters and the abbey church which housed the relics of the saint. John recognised this but was unwise in his choice of contractors and this led to the work overrunning on both time and costs. His extension of the nave of the abbey church and the rebuilding of the west front were not finished until after his death.

John de Cella lived through some interesting times. He was abbot of St Albans during the time of the 13th century papal interdict. Bad King John’s resistance to the power of the Church resulted in England being placed under an interdict by the pope between 1208 and 1213, when the only religious services available to non-clerics were baptism and absolution for the dying. King John himself was personally excommunicated in 1209. The price of reconciliation with the church was not only a lot of money but the English monarch became a feudal subject of the papacy. John de Cella was still abbot, although he was probably quite old by then, in the summer of 1213, when barons and clergy led by the Archbishop of Canterbury met at St Albans abbey to discuss their grievances with King John, two years before the Magna Carta agreement. I have been unable to find the date of Abbot John's birth, but it was probably before or during the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), who inherited and acquired the vast Angevin Empire. At the time when John de Cella was studying in Paris, the French king ruled a far smaller part of what is now modern France than the English king. By the time king John, Henry II's younger son, died in 1216 he had lost most of the English lands in France.

Perhaps Abbot John would have made a better infirmerer, the monk in charge of the monastic infirmary (hospital), as he had excelled at his medical studies in Paris. In medieval times medical treatment had an interesting basis. Manuscripts of the period often include images of doctors holding glass urine bottles up to the light as this was a recognised method of diagnosing illness. The colour and other things were supposed to show the state of the bodily “humours”. The balance of these four totally imaginary humours was believed to be responsible for health and happiness. These manuscripts also included comparison charts available showing 21 colours of urine and the conditions they indicated.

Matthew Paris described John de Cella in his ‘Gesta Abbatum’ (vol.i page 246) as ‘an incomparable judge of urine’ after he accurately predicted from the appearance of his own urine that his death would occur in three days’ time. He had to get a colleague to describe it for him, as by that time his eyesight was very poor. He did indeed die three days later, in 1214. He had been abbot for nineteen years.

Sorting old personal paperwork can be a tedious, even depressing job. Old bank statements that should have been shredded years ago, records of political campaigns that would certainly have prevented The Mess We Are In Today if they had succeeded, letters from long-dead friends… But just occasionally you get a vivid reminder of a joyful moment that is still producing happiness decades later.

Among the yellowing heaps of documents I have been going through recently I came on some very old cuttings from a local newspaper, reporting a hunt for ‘medieval treasure'.  In the town of St Albans, where I spent my teenaged years, there is a medieval street with timber-framed houses, called “French Row”. Although they have been converted into shops, they are still very good examples of their type. If you are in the area, you might want to visit. And in the 1960s, that street did not back onto a shopping mall as it does today, it backed onto a sloping area of waste ground known as Gentle’s Yard. Which is where my life as an archaeologist began.

In 1966 there was no legal requirement for landowners to fund excavations if they wanted to build on land of suspected archaeological interest, and very little provision for  investigating threatened sites.  Paid posts for trained professional archaeologists were few and far between. ‘Rescue archaeology’ was largely carried out by amateurs, using whatever funds and equipment they could beg, borrow or otherwise scrounge. In St Albans that meant St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society. In 1966 they ran a training excavation on Gentles Yard, the training being given by society members who had served an apprenticeship over the years by working on other sites. The trainees were mostly young people from local schools. They were led by the museum’s conservation officer. There was not an archaeology degree among us.

My first day in my future learned profession came as something of a shock. It was spent hacking down the nettles which covered the waste ground with a sickle, while the experienced people surveyed the site and laid out the trench with wooden pegs and string. The next morning I was so stiff I could hardly move and the nettle stings were still prickling all over me but I staggered personfully back to the job, thereby sealing my fate in life.

The dim black and white photo of the dig in progress shows a long narrow trench somewhat crowded with people. This is hardly surprising, as it was five feet (slightly under 2m) wide, and divided into five foot sections. Every digger had a five foot square, the experienced ones alternating with the beginners. It was extremely difficult to work in such a small space without committing the cardinal sin of trampling on the bit you had just excavated. We were all instructed from day one that each different layer of soil, recognizable by its colour and texture, must be excavated separately and carefully recorded before we started on the next one. The sides of the trench (sections) were sacred: they must always be kept vertical and were never to be kicked, poked at or have things pulled out of them, because they were the vertical record of these soil layers and would be carefully drawn at the end of the dig. I never could learn to recognize the different soil layers reliably, which is why I ended up as a finds specialist. But that dig was where I learned the most basic things, like not trampling on the loose earth you had just excavated, not treading on the area you had just cleaned for photography, keeping all the finds from each layer in their own properly labelled bag. I loved every minute of it.

I also learned how to shift earth. The photo shows some people kneeling and scraping with trowels but a lot of the initial work was done with a pickaxe and shovel. Today in 2021, when Barbie Dolls and high-heeled shoes alternate with promotion of ‘strong women’ (usually unpleasant CEOs and politicians that no-one should take as a role model), I remember with great satisfaction that the girls were expected to shift earth with the boys and empty their own buckets and wheelbarrows as a matter of course. We were all taught how to do it without injuring ourselves: I can still remember the director’s voice saying “Let the pick do the work, dear”. Throughout the years when I worked in the field, women were not admired by their male colleagues for being physically incompetent and the only concession to weaker female muscles was in those tasks where sheer brute force was required, such as lifting millstones and sections of the site hut. When you consider the many cultures worldwide where women are the ones who cultivate the fields and fetch the water, this should be considered perfectly logical.

These were the days before computers, satellites, drones and the internet, so the equipment which is now standard on most archaeological sites did not exist. All records were made on paper, and the handwriting had to be legible and the records waterproof. Heights above sea level were measured with a thing called a Dumpy level, referring back to bench marks which were found all over the British Isles carved into church doorways, war memorials and other relatively permanent landmarks by the Ordnance Survey. Horizontal measurements for recording things like plans and individual finds were done by tape triangulation from the site grid, itself laid out with tapes and the largest-scale Ordnance Survey map available. Good thing that the only part of O-level maths I was any good at was geometry and trigonometry. As for photography, one of the images engraved in my mind from those days was that of the museum photographer, a rather large man, balanced precariously on top of a long stepladder. I can't imagine why he never fell off.

We spent the winter processing the finds and in theory, writing up the site records for publication, although that never happened (alas, a common problem in those dim and distant days). Two more press cuttings show the society members seated round a large table marked in squares, sorting pottery, and myself and two other youngsters displaying a 16^th century pipkin to the Town Clerk. My memories of the next two years, as I studied for my A-levels (school-leaving exams) are of frantically trying to get all my homework done on weekday evenings so I could spend the weekends digging and working on the finds. I loved it all, and the Roman cemetery, the Roman road, the Saxon coin hoard and the Iron Age chieftain burial seem so much more important than the Twist, the mini-skirt, the Beatles or the dreaded ‘teenage parties’ of the 1960s.

We found no ‘treasure’ on that excavation. But although most of the finds were 18^th century or later, there was sufficient evidence of medieval occupation for a much more extensive excavation to be carried out by the field archaeology department of the museum fifteen years later immediately before the shopping mall was built. This recovered valuable evidence about medieval St Albans. I took part in that excavation as well, as on-site finds officer. By then I had a degree in archaeology and another 10 years experience in various parts of the world. I went on to study and publish some of the medieval pottery from Gentles Yard, now renamed Christopher Place, and eventually became part of the museum staff myself.

I did find treasure on that dig. I found the profession I wanted to spend my life in, and which today, still fascinates me more than anything else.