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The men-at-arms came clanking down the street amid the swirls of acrid smoke. Visors down, brandishing their swords and pikes, they strode past the Clock Tower and with ferocious cries, disappeared up the narrow street between the timber-framed tenements.

“Quick, get those fires out!”

…said the museum manager, who was standing beside me clasping two buckets of water, and watching in an agony of apprehension as the heaps of smouldering straw blew across the street and up against the nearby shop fronts. We ran about dousing the flames. Wrapping the parking meters with hessian didn’t exactly make them look medieval so lots of smoke was required to obscure their presence, but setting fire to a bicycle shop would not have made us popular. The men-at-arms reappeared grinning, their visors up.

“OK that time?” asked their leader cheerfully. He and his men were happy to play the scene over and over again, until everyone was quite satisfied. They were professional re-enactors and their hourly rate reflected it. Worth every penny.

Half an hour later, the street cleaned scrupulously in time for the shops opening, I was over at the cathedral, once a famous abbey, gulping mouthfuls of coffee between smearing my colleagues’ ragged costumes with a mixture of mud and strawberry jam to make them look like beggars come to pray for healing at the shrine of the saint. Though I say it myself (a colleague and I made the costumes), they looked most authentic. The jam was so cheap and horrible that it was better used externally anyway. They went off to huddle pathetically around a rusty cast-iron barbecue, among more artistic swirls of smoke.

When I signed up for a career in museums I didn’t foresee that one day I would be credited as co-Assistant Director and co-Executive Producer of a historical film, to say nothing of co-wardrobe and props mistress. One of the museum’s two sites had the standard short introductory film on the history of the site but the second museum, which dealt with the post-Roman history of the town, hadn’t got one. So we teamed up with the film studies unit at the local college to make an extremely low-budget ten-minute film summarising 1500 years of stirring events, including a famous 15^th century battle which featured in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

This project began with a bunch of curators spending many an hour arguing with the director of the film studies unit, a forceful lady with a well-deserved reputation in her own field, as she tried to keep the script short enough to fit into 10 minutes and snappy enough to engage the public, while we tried to stop it being oversimplified to the point of total inaccuracy.

Curators, front of house staff and film students were co-opted as actors. The film studies students practiced their skills as makeup artists, hairdressers, caterers etc. A small amount of money was allowed to pay for a few professionals like the soldiers, a real actor for the narrator, and the musician who provided the background music. A number of local groups like the lace-makers society and a men’s choir donated their services for free. We had to get permission from the various locations, from the police if we were going to hold up the traffic; find out where parking and toilets were available, and so on.  I became lost in admiration of the director’s ability to wheedle reluctant people into giving her what she wanted for nothing, especially when they had refused my request three times already.

I really had fun with that film. I enjoyed all the background research with my colleagues for the script, the locations, the costumes and props. We all pooled our knowledge of different aspects of different historical periods. It was a great feeling to see local events which I had known about for years come to life. But I also found pure pleasure in watching people with real expertise in a different profession do their job. The director and her camera-woman would quietly discuss the scene they were about to film, and then get everything and everyone organised to produce just the effect they wanted. One occasion I remember particularly was an evening when, after filming a scene which was supposed to be set in a 15th century shop in a small square room in a historic building, they proceeded to record another scene in the same room, but this time set in the 17th century, simply by turning the camera around to face the other way and altering the lighting so that it looked like a completely different place. It was extraordinarily effective.

The scenes I have described so far were perhaps my favourites, but they were run a close third by the totally incongruous scene which was supposed to represent a visit by Elizabeth I to a local manor owned by one of her courtiers. At the time of her most famous visit she was thirty-seven years old. The sight of a teenaged Gloriana sitting on a purple carpet on the steps of the now totally ruined manor, forking up sweetmeats (made by me) from a pewter platter held on her lap, was enjoyably ludicrous.

And finally, there was the men’s choir from a local church who sang plainsong for us one evening as a background to our monastery scenes. It was the most beautiful end to a long day’s filming.

Looking back on it, I still think that the script was pretty good, although some of the scenes, costumes and props were not quite what I would wish. But overall, it was an experience I shall always enjoy revisiting.

Title from William Shakespeare, Second part of King Henry VI, Act V, Scene II

Reader, have you ever relaxed in a sauna? Or a jacuzzi or a hot tub? Yes? Congratulations – you have experienced some of the pleasures of a Roman bath. But have you ever smeared yourself with oil, sweated until you were scarlet and then removed the dirty oil and sweat with a curved metal blade known as a strigil? Following up when you were clean with a long relaxing soak in hot water, while chatting to your friends? Or indeed to people you have never met before and never want to meet again? How about the ghastly shock of plunging into a pool of cold water afterwards?

Taking a bath in the proper manner was part of being a Roman, even if some sturdy citizens considered that all the scented oil and massage was a bit self-indulgent.  If you were wealthy, you might have your own private bath house attached to your mansion. If you were a soldier, there would be a bath house attached to your fort. But most people would have gone to a public bath house, paying a small fee for the privilege. Public bath houses were like modern leisure centres. As well as bathing facilities, there were usually exercise areas, massage rooms, libraries, food outlets and gardens for strolling in. Baths were not just a place to get clean and relax, but also an important place to socialise, meet your friends and business associates, and show off how important you were. Some of course had better facilities than others. In the course of my life I have visited a wide variety of Roman bathing establishments in various parts of the empire.

I was loosely attached on one occasion to the excavation of a site which included a private bath house. It was a small Roman country house or ‘villa' in Hertfordshire, at a place called Turners Hall Farm (See Current Archaeology 198). A team based at the museum where I worked excavated it, and I spent some time at the site, although not while the bath building was being excavated. The modest villa, apparently built of timber on flint and chalk foundations, was built at the site of a previous Iron Age farm, presumably by a family who had adopted Roman ways. The bath house had warm and hot rooms and a plunge pool. Perhaps a local British family succumbing to Agricola’s introduction of baths and banquets as part of their enslavement? (Tacitus, “Agricola”, Chapter 21)

That was the nearest I have come to working on the excavation of a Roman bath house, but I have looked after hundreds of  boxfuls of the various sorts of tile required for building them, which filled up many a shelf in the museum store. The basic requirement for any Roman bath house, aside from a good water supply, is a hypocaust, a floor with a space underneath it which can be filled with hot air from the fire in a furnace on an outside wall. The hot air is then led up through the wall through flues or a hollow wall and escapes just under the eaves of the roof. The tiles come in various shapes : flat rectangular tiles to make the floor itself; flat square tiles to be cemented on top of each other to form the pillars which support the floor; box tiles to make the flues; lugged tiles to make the double walls. Even broken bits of them are quite recognizable. All these I have been familiar with since my youth.

There were alternatives to tiles. When I moved north I visited a small Roman military bath house attached to a fort on the Antonine Wall in Scotland. Bearsden bathhouse, in a suburb to the north of Glasgow was built of stone, which is readily available in the area. I found this a fascinating contrast after a lifetime spent with brick and tile. When you visit Bearsden, which is now set unromantically in the middle of a housing estate, you can wander through the foundations of the various rooms: a changing room leading to the usual cold room, two warm rooms, a hot wet room, a hot dry room, a hot bath and a cold bath. There was even a loo. Must have been pleasant after a hard day marching up and down the hills in the freezing rain and driving snow, although the thought of plunging into ice cold water when you have only just warmed up seems a bit macho to me.

At the other end of the scale I visited an enormous public bath house in Rome itself. The Baths of Caracalla were begun by the emperor Severus in 206 CE, and opened in 217CE under the emperor Caracalla. Later emperors completed various areas. The facilities could accommodate 1600 people at once, and thousands of people would use them in a single day. A special aqueduct, the Aqua Antoniniana, was built to provide the massive quantities of water needed by these baths, which included a swimming pool of Olympic proportions. To someone used to seeing only the foundations, the height of the surviving walls and the decoration of the floors of the rooms is stunning, although much of the original marble, statues and decoration have long gone. Unfortunately when I visited, the underground areas were not open. These included not only areas where the water was distributed, and furnaces stoked by an army of slaves using an estimated 10 tons of wood per day, but a temple to the god Mithras, who was usually worshipped in underground shrines.

The Baths of Caracalla were the inspiration for a painting by the 19^th century artist Lawrence Alma Tadema. It may not be strictly accurate but it does convey the atmosphere of luxury and pleasure and lots of people socialising.  My environmental-setting shower in the morning may get me cleaner and doesn’t require an aqueduct and a small wood, but it probably isn’t as much fun!

 “…the breakfast, a meal in which the Scots, whether of the lowlands or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland.” 

Thus spoke the 18^th century English writer Dr Samuel Johnson, who made a tour of the Western isles of Scotland in 1773. Although extremely rude about much of the food he was offered on the journey, he was whole-heartedly in favour of Scottish breakfasts. So I am currently living in the right country, and I strongly agree with the marmalade bit.

When I was working on a dig in France, we lived in tents in the field next to a small country restaurant. We had our breakfasts (jam not marmalade but it was good and the coffee was marvellous) on the terrace of the restaurant in the early morning sunshine, surrounded by tubs of petunias and geraniums. The owner of the establishment had an ancient father who used to come and sit on a corner of the terrace while we were eating. His breakfast consisted of a piece of salami and a large glass of cognac.  To each his own…

I saw an interesting breakfast in a Singapore café. A little old Chinese lady came and sat at my table, bringing with her a very large bowl of curried noodle soup. She was a tiny, skinny little thing, and I watched with interest as she steadily spooned and chop-sticked the enormous bowlful into her diminutive person. She looked very perky so it was obviously doing her good. Maybe I should try it. Probably this form of breakfast was the inspiration for my son’s current favourite, which is to take a pot of instant curried noodles, break two eggs into it, and pour boiling water over the lot. When the noodles have had their due time, the eggs could by a stretch be said to be poached.

I myself was eating the signature breakfast of the city, or at least part of it. This is coffee and kaya toast, eaten with two boiled eggs. I skipped the eggs as I am not fond of soft eggs in any form, and the eggs that go with this breakfast are so soft boiled that you are expected to break them into a bowl, stir them up with soya sauce and drink them. ‘Kaya toast’ is white toast made into a sandwich with kaya jam. Kaya jam is a combination of coconut milk, egg and sugar flavoured with pandan leaf, and is very nice. My first attempt at this breakfast was a bit oversweet, as I did not understand how to specify that I wanted my coffee without sugar.  I watched the man preparing it  put a tablespoon of sugar into the (glass) mug, then about an inch of condensed milk, and then fill it up with coffee. But once I had got the coffee sorted out it was a fine tropical start to the day’s sightseeing, especially when I started adding miniature, perfectly fresh bananas bought from a nearby supermarket. Oh joy!

The Full British Breakfast, in its English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish variants, is part of the pleasure of staying in B&Bs all over the British Isles. Sausage, bacon, egg, fried bread, baked beans, fried mushroom and fried tomato: a decadent combination of saturated fats to begin a day walking up mountainsides or along the seashore in the freezing rain and/or howling gale. I like the Scottish version (Lorne sausage and haggis) even better than the traditional English one. The Irish version (black and white pudding, soda bread and potato cake) is not to be sneezed at either. I haven’t yet tried a Full Welsh, which allegedly includes seaweed and cockles made into a patty with oatmeal, but it sounds promising.

But I think my favourite breakfast is the bacon butties you get on the local ferries to the Outer Isles of Orkney. Coffee and really good bacon butties munched as you sail across a brilliantly blue sea past small green islands on your way to visit a chambered tomb is the absolute best. Oh, how I’ve missed them during Lockdown!

Archaeology is a very badly paid profession for all but the very lucky. It is also very insecure, with many short –term contracts. It is regarded as non-essential to the well-being of society in many countries, although there are others so fiercely proud of their national heritage that they will put you in jail for picking up stones in the river bed in case they were prehistoric tools. In 2010, as the recession bit and redundancy loomed, some of us in the archaeology curators’ office at the museum where I worked had a discussion about possible alternative jobs…

One of my colleagues suggested becoming a private detective. As he pointed out, this would involve spending a lot of time sorting through the contents of people’s dustbins, analysing what they have thrown away and what it tells you about them. Perfect! As archaeologists we have all spent ages digging out people’s rubbish pits, the pre-modern equivalent of the dustbin, and drawing deductions from the contents, so we have loads of relevant experience. Well, sort of. As the museum’s specialist in medieval pottery my deductions tended to be along the lines of how much local as opposed to imported pottery the household was using, as a very rough guide to what date the site was, and an even rougher guide to how rich the household was and who the town was trading with. I yearned to get someone to do a chemical analysis of the cooking pots to see what they were boiling up in them, but there was never enough money.

Another colleague suggested becoming an undertaker, since we have all spent plenty of time exhuming corpses, albeit usually reduced to skeletons.  I dug up my first skeleton when I was still at school. Subsequent years of work in a museum involved caring for many boxfuls of human bones and crunchy bags of cremated ones. The latter contributed to the education of my son’s class in infant school. I was asked to talk to twenty five-year-olds about being an archaeologist. We all sat in a big circle on the carpet and solemnly passed round a selection of objects I had brought in. Before we started I had asked the teacher privately if she thought the children would be upset by a small bag of cremated dead Roman. Beaming, she said that would solve a problem for her, as they were supposed to “do death” that term, and she would now be able to tick the topic off quite painlessly. The weeny ones didn’t seem at all upset, although I’m not sure how many of them really understood that what was in the bag was the remains of a 2000-year-old person.

Sewage worker would also be appropriate. There is nothing like a really good cesspit. I had been working on the contents of a sixteenth century cesspit at the time. The pottery had wonderful green stains from the cess (sewage), and the soil samples contained things like blackberry pips and the eggs of parasitic worms that had gone right through the people who had used the loo. Most cesspits in the medieval town produced traces of parasitic worms; those poor medieval guys were full of them. But my favourite was one amazing latrine which produced a whole jar of 14^th century plum stones that someone had tipped down the loo.

Well, today’s job market is all about transferable skills….

People have often asked me what was the most exciting object I ever found while working in archaeology. Two finds stand out in my memory and I can’t decide between them, so I will describe both. They could not have been more different. One dated from the Ice Age, the other was medieval. One I uncovered on an excavation, the other in a museum.

The excavation was in south-west France. We were working in the cool shade under the overhang of a limestone cliff. Above us towered the cliff, below us stretched a gentle wooded slope. Saplings had grown across the entrance to the shelter and filtered the sunlight. Fourteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, people had lived there, blocking the entrance with a wall and lighting a fire year after year on the same spot to make a snug home for the winter. Now some of us were uncovering the hearth, slowly peeling off the layers of earth and ash, while others were working on the area just outside the living space, where they had thrown their rubbish. Strings weighted with fishing line sinkers hung from a frame across the ceiling, marking the ground below into one metre squares so that we could make records of the horizontal distribution of the finds.  A string triangle at the edge of the working area allowed us to record the depth above sea level of finds and surfaces.

I was working on the rubbish dump. As I gently scraped the earth away, I found two tiny flakes of fine bright yellow stone, each with minute chips removed from the edges to shape it. They were the stone barb and tip of an arrowhead made of yellow jasper. The wood of the arrow had decayed, leaving them lying in the exact position they had been in when they were still attached to it, one lying flat, one on its side.  They were quite beautiful, the fine yellow stone looking like solidified butter. And mine were the first eyes that had seen them, mine the first hand that had touched them, in fourteen thousand years.

But you don’t have to be working on site to make an exciting discovery. Almost equally thrilling was a find I made when I was doing post-excavation work on the pottery from a medieval town. All the potsherds had been washed clean and marked with the code for the site and the layer it had come from. This was done in a shed on site while the excavation was going on. Then it was my job to lay all the pottery out on a huge table and see if any of the broken bits would stick together, before proceeding with the cataloguing. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but with half the pieces missing, because for various reasons, we never found all the bits.

One of the medieval pits had produced a number of very large sherds of coarse grey unglazed pottery made locally in the thirteenth century. I fitted them together to produce the best part of two dripping dishes. Dripping dishes were shallow pans that were placed under the roasting spit in front of the fire to catch the fat and juices that dripped out of the meat. Mine were semi-circular in shape, with a straight edge on the side nearest the fire, and a handle on the round edge away from it. Each corner had a lip for pouring off the fat. And the best thing of all was that these two dripping dishes had actual medieval fat still sticking to them, where it had burnt onto the lip and the edge against the fire. Just like the fat burned onto your barbecue or your roasting pan, but seven hundred years old.

The thing I found exciting about both of these finds was not that they were made of gold or silver or had an enormous financial value. It was that they connected me to my fellow human beings, who had made and used them long ago: the hunter from so long ago who chose to make an arrow using a stone which was beautiful as well as functional; and the medieval housewife cooking her chicken or leg of lamb on a spit in front of the fire, basting it from time to time with the juices and fat collected in the dish below it. I could almost smell the roasting meat…