Archaeology

This year (2025), I spent my summer holiday down south. While I was in London, a friend, knowing that my current historical interest is the 18^th century, took me to see two 18^th century houses administered by English Heritage. The one that particularly caught my fancy was Marble Hill House, a small Palladian villa in Twickenham. It’s a little gem. The proportions of the house are so beautiful, that it didn’t really matter that the original contents were sold with the house in 1824, and that most of the furniture, pictures etc. displayed there today have been replaced from other sources. Nor did it matter that the gardens are still in process of restoration, and the lawns at the front and back were burnt brown by the heat wave this year, because the setting on the north bank of the Thames is so lovely.

Marble Hill House* was a villa built on what was then the outskirts of London, so that its owner, attached to the royal court, could enjoy fresh country air and scenery from time to time. Henrietta Howard was a Woman of the Bedchamber to Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II. Henrietta was also George's mistress, both before and for some time after he succeeded his father as King of England and Elector of Hanover. The villa was in the neo-Palladian style, popular in Britain from the early to the mid-18^th century. This was based on the work of Andrea Palladio, a 16^th century Italian architect. He was inspired by the work of the Roman architect Vitruvius and by the proportion and ornament used in the buildings of ancient Rome. Neo-Palladian buildings were symmetrical, one side being a mirror image of the other. They often had fronts similar to a classical temple, with a triangular pediment over the main entrance, supported by columns or pilasters, and large tripartite Venetian windows (a central large arched window with smaller rectangular windows either side). The principles of Palladianism could be applied to small houses as well as to what were virtually palaces. While the exteriors of the buildings were simple and plain, the interiors, which also contained classical features, might be richly decorated. The houses usually had gardens carefully designed to complement them.

Marble Hill is a small square symmetrical building with four floors. It has five bays across the front and three across the side; the centre three bays on the north front project slightly. The north front faced the road and originally had a forecourt; this was where visitors arrived by carriage. It has a triangular pediment supported by four pilasters with simple Ionic capitals. The south front has no pilasters but is very similar. It faces the river (visitors might arrive by boat) and overlooked the garden. The garden included a flower garden, a greenhouse, a grotto, a bowling alley, and an ice house; also lawns, woods and walks. On the east side there was originally an L-shaped service wing which no longer exists.

The interior had some lovely features. I can't go into detail about all of them, but the ground floor included a hall which opened onto the south front and was based on the Roman atrium. This was the entry to a Roman house, open to the sky in the centre with a square pool for rainwater below the opening. This pool is represented at Marble Hill by four columns surrounding a square marked by floor tiles in the centre of the room. A beautifully-carved mahogany staircase (unfortunately, the mahogany was probably the result of slave-labour) leads up to the first floor where the most important rooms were located. In the ‘Great Room’, music, dancing and other entertainments took place. Henrietta Howard was known to be a very intelligent, well-educated and cultured woman and she had a wide circle of talented friends. The large marble fireplace in the Great Room, with its classical decoration, is really beautiful. Her bedroom, which was also decorated with columns and pilasters, would have been open to visitors when she had guests, although this was where she normally slept and dressed. The second floor, as well as three more bedrooms, contains a non-Palladian feature, the gallery, which stretches from the north to the south sides of the house. Galleries were traditional in English houses, providing display space for paintings and other art objects, and a place to exercise in bad weather.  The final floor was the attics, probably where servants slept. A stone staircase connected all four floors and was used mainly by servants.  The contents of the house, either recorded or on display, illustrate the interests and pursuits of the English aristocracy in the 18^th century – excellent paintings on the walls; tea-drinking and collections of porcelain used for serving it; elaborate dining; chinoiserie – there is a fine lacquer screen in the Great Room.

London was by far the largest city in Britain during the 18^th century, the location of Parliament and the royal court. So what was going on in the rest of the country, while royal courtiers built Palladian retreats along the Thames and collected Chinese porcelain? What about Scotland, united with England since 1707? Just over 500 miles to the north of London, Orkney and Shetland did not host a royal court, none of the 18^th century monarchs ever paid a visit, and there was no resident aristocracy. George Douglas, 13^th earl of Morton, who was earl of Orkney and Lord of Zetland, did not live there. But the much smaller houses built by the local gentry (lairds) in the 18^th century often had Palladian features and were expensively furnished. Unfortunately it isn't possible for the public to visit either of the following two examples at the moment, but they are well-documented.

The Hall of Clestrain in Orphir, Orkney, was built in 1768 by Patrick Honeyman, the laird of Graemsay. This estate was the largest in Orkney after the bishopric and earldom estates. Although small, the house is in the Palladian style and said to be ‘of exceptional quality’.  It was a square stone building, symmetrical in design, linked to low pavilions at each side by connecting walls (only one survives).These pavilions are usually drawn in two-dimensional reconstructions as if they were level with the front elevation of the house, but in fact they were level with the back and formed two sides of a courtyard of which the rear, north wall of the house formed the third. There are three bays to each elevation and three floors, if you include the attic and basement floors. Probably the reception rooms were on the middle floor, with bedrooms above and service/family rooms in the basement, reached via an internal stone staircase. Entrance to the house was by a graceful stair into the middle floor through the projecting central bay, which was probably topped by a pediment. It faces south, and had a walled garden, like most gentry houses in the Northern Isles. The laird’s family later moved to the mainland of Scotland and left the Hall of Clestrain to their factor or agent. This was John Rae, whose son, also John Rae, was the famous Arctic explorer. The house is a category A listed building. It had become derelict, although many important Georgian interior details apparently survive.  The building is now in process of restoration with a view to opening it to the public.

The 18^th century lairds** of Orkney were known as the ‘Merchant Lairds’ since they used  the goods such as grain, butter and kelp, which were paid to them as rent by their tenants, for trading purposes and became wealthy on the profits. They also benefited from rent paid in the form of free labour, useful in the kelp industry. Kelp was one of the most profitable commodities in the 18^th century. It was an alkaline product made by burning seaweed in pits on the beaches, and Patrick Honeyman was engaged in the kelp trade. A 1764 inventory made when another wealthy laird, James Baikie, 6^th Laird of Tankerness, died, listed expensive household goods: walnut and mahogany furniture, gilded mirrors, brass candlesticks, clocks, writing desks, and easy chairs. There was table ware of silver, pewter, delftware and stoneware, and large stores of linen napkins and tablecloths. The cellars held 10 gross of wine bottles and 14 ale casks. Robert Baikie, the 7^th laird, owned a fine library, paid for out of his kelp profits. It is reasonable to suppose that the Hall of Clestrain was furnished in similar style.

And at the farthest northern point of the British Isles, the island of Unst in Shetland, a small Palladian house was built in 1775 by Thomas Mouat of Garth, the son of a laird. Belmont House, now a Category A listed building with an important garden, was occupied until the mid-20^th century, when the family sold it and it fell into serious disrepair. It was restored over the years between 1996 and 2010 by local groups, and is now in private ownership. Like Marble Hill, it has a lovely view, facing south over an inlet of the sea dividing Unst from Yell.  It is two storeys high, with attics and basements, and two pavilions at the sides linked to it by connecting walls which surrounded the forecourt. To the north at the back of the house was a farmhouse. To the south were three walled gardens and a park, and an avenue leading down to the shore. Many of the garden features such as walls, remains of a summerhouse, footpaths etc. are still visible. It sounds absolutely lovely.

Perhaps Hall of Clestrain and Belmont House are not large enough to count as ‘stately homes’, but they are beautiful examples of a particularly graceful style of architecture which spread from south to north of the British Isles in the 18th century.

*Marble Hill English Heritage Guidebook 2023 Dr Megan Leyland & Emily Parker;

** Profit Not Loss The Story of the Baikies of Tankerness 2003 Bryce Wilson

I have just had another happy holiday in a Hanseatic League town. In 2018, I had a wonderful trip to Lübeck, ‘Queen of the Hanseatic League’.  I made a resolution that someday I would visit Lüneburg, which supplied much of the salt traded by the League. Covid and a few other things got in the way, but I finally made it this year. Why did I never hear of the Hanse until I moved to Orkney? In spite of their importance in medieval Europe, I don’t remember them being mentioned during my school history lessons, nor during the years I spent working on medieval and early modern history. I was in my sixties when I finally came across the Hanse.

The Hanseatic League was a confederation of trading towns in North Germany from the 12th to the 17th centuries. During that period the Hanse dominated trade around the North Sea and the Baltic, and their operations extended as far as Southern Europe. It was originally formed in 1158 in Lübeck as a union of individual merchants. The first Hansetag (Hanseatic council meeting) was in 1356 and the last in 1669, the official beginning and end of the League. The merchants of the Hanseatic towns became so powerful that they were able to throw off the rule of the local rulers and answered directly to the Holy Roman Emperor.  They had ‘kontors’ or trading centres in towns in many European countries, the most important being Bergen in Norway; London in England; Bruges in the Low Countries; and Novgorod in Russia.  Such was the power of the Hanse, who used trade embargoes and even outright warfare to enforce their demands, that these enclaves were given special privileges by the local rulers.

One of the Hanse’s main trade items was salt fish. This was an essential commodity at the time, because the Catholic Church required its members to avoid meat on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and the whole of Lent and Advent. Fish was usually substituted. For those living inland, or during seasons when fishing was not possible, this meant fish preserved by salting and drying. There were, after all, no freezers or tins in those days.

Shetland was a major supplier of the fish. Merchants from the Hanseatic cities of Bremen and Hamburg are known to have traded regularly with Shetland for stockfish (dried cod and ling). Records show that in 1539 more than 20% of the stockfish declared to the customs at Bremen came from Shetland*. The tiny stone ‘bod’ (booth) at Symbister on Whalsay in Shetland was built for this trade, as were those at Hillswick on the Shetland mainland and Greenwell’s Booth on Unst. These merchants were supposed to trade through the Bergen kontor, but as time went on, a lot of them dealt direct.  Shetland is easy to visit from Orkney, and I have made several short trips there

The trade in salt was just as important as the fish itself, and salt was so valuable that it was sometimes referred to as ‘white gold’. At Lüneburg, 71km to the south of Lübeck, rock salt was obtained from a geological formation known as a ‘salt dome’. An underground salt-water spring was exploited from the 12^th century or earlier. The strong brine was directed through wooden pipes to boiling houses where it was put into large shallow lead trays with fires underneath them, and boiled until the water had evaporated. Wood for the fires was imported via the river Ilmenau, a tributary of the Elbe, which runs through Lüneburg. The work was continuous, 24 hours per day, and the town was noticeable for the clouds of steam and smoke rising from the salt works.  It seems highly likely that the salt so produced would have been contaminated by lead, and therefore so would the fish it was used to preserve. Might this have been another important source of lead poisoning in medieval Europe, besides lead-glazed pottery? Food contamination is not a new problem.

The salt was initially transported from Lüneburg to the Baltic port at Lübeck along a 100km track known as the ‘Old Salt Road’ which connected the two towns. In the late 14^th century, a small canal was built connecting tributaries of the rivers Elbe and Trave, which allowed the salt to be transported all the way from Lüneburg to Lübeck in boats.

The Hanse usually used cogs, small clinker-built ships with a single mast and a single square sail. They had flat bottoms which allowed them to settle on a level at low tide on a beach or harbour. Their squat shape allowed them to carry more cargo than the Viking vessels they replaced during the course of the 13^th century. They also had a rudder mounted on a stern-post rather than a steering oar, which made them easier to steer. The well-preserved remains of a 14^th century Hanseatic cog were recovered from the mud during dredging work on the river Weser near Bremen in 1962. The preserved timbers are now on display in the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven.

Lüneburg was the main town of the principality of Lüneburg, a territory of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1247 the Lüneburg town charter was confirmed, giving privileges to the burghers or citizens. However, in 1371 the citizens of the town expelled their territorial sovereign and destroyed his castle on the Kalkburg. In 1412 the first Hansetag of Lüneburg was celebrated in the town. The salt masters, from the small number of merchant families who leased the salt works, came to dominate the town. They grew extremely rich, and were able to afford beautiful imported glass and pottery, silver cups and salt-cellars; and to build magnificent tall brick houses and public buildings in the ‘Brick Gothic’ style.

Brick Gothic is slightly simplified Gothic architecture, with tall windows, high pointed arches, rib vaulting and flying buttresses, but built in brick. It was common during the medieval/Hanseatic period in northern and central Europe in the Baltic area where there is little building stone available. The buildings are a beautiful warm red colour, and in Lüneburg were decorated with glazed bricks, roof furniture etc. as well as some expensive imported stone. I saw some excellent glazed brick in the town museum. The tall churches are fiendishly difficult to photograph, though, because you can’t get far enough away from them in the narrow streets.

By the 17^th century, the power of the Hanse was declining. The rule of the merchants was replaced by the rulers of new territorial states and new trade routes, for example with India and America. The last Hansetag was in 1669.  Lüneburg was once again ruled by a local prince, and the town, having lost much of its salt trade, declined. The extraction of salt continued, however, and this has left a lasting legacy. So much salt was extracted, especially during the 19^th century, that the land above the dome, on which part of the town had been built, started to subside and is still doing so. Many buildings in the area have collapsed or had to be demolished. The salt works was finally closed entirely in 1980. They now only produce very small amounts of salt for the town spa, and to sell to tourists.

(*ref. panel text, Pier House Museum, Symbister, Whalsay)

Toilets are a major interest of mine. I suppose it’s the result of so many years of analysing groups of medieval pottery thrown away in cesspits.  I have published a short account of the history of sanitation in St Albans, where I worked for many years, and recently gave a talk on the evidence for the history of sanitation in Orkney. So I am always on the lookout for interesting loos of any age. The Northern Isles have more than their fair share, it seems to me, of rather special toilets. I have already drawn attention to the delightful Hillswick community toilet in Shetland with its flowery forecourt. Nearer at hand is the salt water toilet on Shapinsay.

The island of Shapinsay is only a half-hour ferry ride from Kirkwall, Orkney’s principal town. It is noteworthy for its regular pattern of square, 4-hectare fields, the result of a mid-19^th century landowner’s agricultural improvements. David Balfour’s family owned the entire island by that point. In order to re-house some of the workers he displaced to build his ‘castle’, he reconstructed the nearby Shoreside village as a model village and re-named it Balfour village. The 19^th century public loo was just one of its features.

I have been going on occasional trips to Shapinsay since I arrived in Orkney twelve years ago, but somehow I never noticed the little stone building tucked down on the beach below the level of the pier, just as you get off the ferry. I suppose I must have been looking around for more conspicuous buildings, such as the Dishan Tower, also known as the Douche, a 17^th century dovecot converted into a salt water shower in the 19^th century, or the Gas House (gasometer), another 19^th century tower at the north end of the village. Or indeed the monstrous Scottish Baronial edifice known as Balfour Castle.

The Shapinsay salt water toilet is a single-storey stone building built at the top of the beach with a space below, so that at high tide the sea will wash underneath it and remove the waste. It has two rooms, each approached via a short passage on the landward side. (N.B. it is no longer in use as a working toilet; there is a modern facility nearby)

The design is extremely simple. Each room has a vertical wood-topped stone slab for sitting on, dividing the paved floor of the entrance area from the hole down to the beach.  There is room for two people to sit side by side.  The roof is made of stone slabs, and there is a tasteful if potentially damaging growth of ivy over the landward side. Although in fair condition, the building is on the At-Risk register, although it is unlisted. It doesn’t help that apparently no-one is quite sure who owns it.

Using the tides to remove sewage is a practical idea. The 12^th century bishop’s Palace in Kirkwall has a latrine chute which emptied onto what would have been a beach in those days. I wonder how many other loos there were in the past in the islands, which used the surrounding sea and its twice-daily tides to deal with their waste?

The Balfour Village salt water toilet is a worthy addition to my collection!

I wonder how many people quite realise the number of remarkable archaeological finds that have been made in Orkney over the last 150 years. Many of them are not on display in Orkney museum and can easily be overlooked. In fact many of them are apparently not on display in the National Museum in Edinburgh either, although that is where they are kept (see their collections database). Some are objects of national significance, and some are there because Orkney Museum didn’t open until 1968 and it didn’t have a full-time curator until 1976. There was nowhere to safely store or display finds in the islands. The Treasure Trove laws also come into it, and they are different in Scotland from those in England. Among these special finds from Orkney is a group of silver dirhams, Arab coins found with a hoard of Viking silver.

Silver dirhams were coins used throughout  the Islamic world at that time. They are a fascinating reminder of how far Viking contacts reached in the 10^th century. Vikings traded from Scandinavia to the Irish Sea, where the ircity of Dublin was probably the richest port in Western Britain at that time. They travelled to Russia and as far as Constantinople to the east and south, to Iceland and Greenland to the west. And Orkney lay in the middle of these, ruled by a Viking earl.

Several hoards of precious metal from this period have been found in Orkney. The Skaill hoard, which weighed 8kg, was found in March 1858 in sand dunes near St Peters Kirk at the Bay of Skaill. It was buried in a stone cist and contained not only hack-silver (chopped –up silver objects intended for recycling), but brooches, arm- and neck-rings, ingots, three Anglo-Saxon coins, and twenty-one Arab dirhams. Only one of the Arab coins is complete. The dates of the coins suggest that the hoard was buried in the 10^th century CE:  the latest of the dirhams was struck at Bagdad in 945CE, and the latest Anglo-Saxon coin was dated to c.925.

The hoard contained a number of silver brooches of probably Irish or Manx origin which have attracted much more attention. They are beautiful. But somehow I find these coins with their graceful writing even more beautiful, and coming from so much farther away, more exotic.

In the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall, in the ‘Merchant Lairds’ gallery, there is a large lump of butter excavated from a bog. Records show that rents and taxes in the Northern Isles were often paid by tenant farmers in butter as well as grain. There is even a skerry in Scapa Flow named the “Barrel of Butter”. The butter was usually poor quality fat known as ‘grease butter’,  intended as a lubricant rather than for eating. The Merchant Lairds of the 17^th and 18^th centuries then sold it abroad, to the German merchants who visited Orkney and Shetland. It was a well-documented trade. Shetlanders also paid part of their rent in butter, storing it during the year until payment was due in early summer.

 ‘Bog butter’, a waxy substance which may be either actual butter or tallow, has been recovered from peat bogs in Ireland and Scotland. It was deliberately buried in wooden containers or wrapped in things like animal skins or bark. This is a good method of preservation, as peat bogs are highly acidic and low in oxygen and so bacterial growth is inhibited. The earliest examples known so far date back thousands of years ago to the early Bronze Age. Bog butter typically does not contain salt, and does contain cattle hairs.

Burying a valuable commodity may have been intended to keep it safe from robbers in unsettled times, or to accumulate enough for a rental payment at a later date, or even to hide it from the landlord. A number of writers suggest that the taste of butter intended for eating is improved by burial in a bog (I do NOT recommend trying this.) Several reports mention bog butter being used for waterproofing, for making candles or cement, for greasing wool, or possibly as ritual offerings.

 I have never so far found a reference to the need to grease the axles of carts in any of the publications which describe the wheeled wooden vehicles used in medieval and early post medieval Europe. Diaries describing the difficulties of travel talk about dreadful tracks, and wheels coming off carriages, but do not mention stopping for the wheels to be greased. Other wooden machinery such as windmills, or windlasses for lifting, where friction would also have been a problem, would probably have needed greasing as well. 

However, from archaeological sources it is known that the use of animal fats to grease the moving parts of wooden vehicles goes back to at least the third millennium BCE. A wheel from a sled belonging to an Egyptian pharaoh, which had been used to transport heavy goods, was found to have been greased with animal fat (tallow). So had some chariot wheels from a later Egyptian tomb. The ancient Greeks used animal fat to lubricate chariot wheels during the Olympic Games. The Romans in the early centuries AD are said to have  done the same and in the early middle ages, it was used to grease the wheels of royal carriages and the lifting gear for castle gates. Other lubricants in antiquity included plant and fish oils. By the 18^th and 19^th centuries CE moving parts were starting to be made of metal and mineral oils took over.

So when you next pile your slice of toast high with cholesterol, or pay the garage bill for lubricating the many moving parts of your car, think of the days when a humble crofter’s wife churned rather nasty butter to pay the rent and keep the wheels going. And if you find a reference to greasing cartwheels with butter in early modern Europe anywhere, please let me know.