RECYCLING IN BRITAIN AFTER THE FALL OF ROME’S METAL ECONOMY Some times and places are difficult to see because they have been obscured by our periodization. This is certainly the case for fifthand sixth-century Britain, especially its eastern half. There is a very wide gulf between historians of Roman Britain and AngloSaxon England. They inhabit different worlds, each one with a distinct historiography, period-specific journals and professional conferences, as well as separate bodies of evidence, burning questions and enemy camps. Further widening the gulf is the fact that most scholars working on Roman Britain concentrate their efforts on the earlier part of their period, while those studying AngloSaxon England labour, for the most part, in the latter half of theirs. As a result, far fewer historians work in the gap between c.350 CE and c.650 than on either side of it, and fewer still are sufficiently familiar with both the before and the after to think constructively across the two periods. Our difficulties in coming to grips with what actually happened in these three centuries are not, however, simply those we have inflicted upon ourselves: they have been compounded by the shortcomings of our written evidence, most of which was composed not in the fourth, fifth or sixth centuries, but rather in the eighth and ninth.1 The texts that remain to us were framed by their authors in ways that made sense to contemporary audiences, especially their twin assumptions that eastern Britain after Rome’s fall c.400 was a highly aristocratic place and that kings and their war bands were the period’s only historical actors. Although this view of the past doubtless rang true to the better sorts of people living at the time of their compositions, there are 1 Kenneth Sisam, ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies’, Proc. Brit. Acad., xxxix (1953); David N. Dumville, ‘Kingship, Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, in P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood (eds.), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds, 1977); Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle’, Anglo-Saxon England, xii (1983); Barbara Yorke, ‘Fact or Fiction? The Written Evidence for the Fifth and Sixth Centuries AD’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, vi (1993). Past and Present, no. 217 (Nov. 2012) doi:10.1093/pastj/gts027 ! The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2012 4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 good reasons to believe that we ourselves ought to be more sceptical.2 In actual fact, the bulk of contemporary evidence — which happens to be material rather than textual — clearly argues that the people of fifth- and early sixth-century eastern Britain were much more involved in subsistence agriculture than warfare, and that most people during much of this period lived in highly circumscribed worlds in a ranked, rather than a steeply hierarchical, society.3 A careful reading of the evidence further shows that most people during the first three or four generations after Rome’s fall were profoundly poor, a fundamental fact that has disappeared from historical memory both because we historians too often limit our investigations to early medieval texts, and because most of us are not fully aware of the level of material prosperity found in Britain before Rome’s fall. Evidence actually dating to this period — composed primarily of things excavated by archaeologists — challenges the pictures painted by our later textual sources, something, at least in theory, that will surprise few historians working in the field. But if Roman and Anglo-Saxon historians inhabit different planets, historians and archaeologists live in different galaxies. With a few happy exceptions, most historians are not as familiar as they should be with the large amounts of evidence unearthed by archaeologists, especially that explicated in the more technical and scientific portions of site reports.4 So, although a handful of historians have made very good use of this material, most have not; and the period, with its few late and lapidary sources, has yet to receive sufficient attention from them.5 2 John Moreland, ‘Concepts of the Early Medieval Economy’, in Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham (eds.), The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand (Leiden, 2000), 17, 21. 3 For a discussion of this, and bibliography, see Robin Fleming, Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 (London, 2010), 39–59. 4 For a general discussion of historians’ discomfort with scientific evidence and arguments that it is important to consider this evidence, see Robin Fleming, ‘Writing Biography at the Edge of History’, Amer. Hist. Rev., cxiv (2009), 109; Michael McCormick, ‘History’s Changing Climate: Climate Science, Genomics, and the Emerging Consilient Approach to Interdisciplinary History’, Jl Interdisciplinary Hist., xlii (2011). 5 The bulk of the work on this three-hundred-year gap has been written by archaeologists, rather than historians. For the basics of the arguments they have put forth over the past two and a half decades, see H.-W. Böhme, ‘Das Ende der Römerherrschaft in Britannien und die angelsächsische Besiedlung Englands im 5. Jahrhundert’, Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz, xxxiii (1986); Steven Bassett (ed.), The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (London, 1989); (cont. on p. 5) RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 5 This article attempts to bridge those various historiographical, disciplinary and evidentiary gaps, in order to tell one of the major but forgotten stories of this time and place: the collapse of Rome’s metal economy in Britain and the related and subsequent deskilling and impoverishment of people living in its eastern half. I describe the ways people went about procuring metal in the generations both before and after the ancient economy’s implosion in Britain. I then go on to investigate changes in metal production which began to take hold in England in the sixth and seventh centuries, and argue that access to freshly smelted metal and the ability to produce it helped drive important economic and social transformations, including the development of a steeply hierarchical society which came to take hold in Britain’s Anglo-Saxon culture zone in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. In short, metal supply sits at the heart of two important stories that can help us to understand the years between 350 and 600 — the calamitous material impoverishment of post-collapse Britain, and the gradual re-establishment of a hierarchical society which began to take place within a century or so of the collapse. (n. 5 cont.) A. S. Esmonde Cleary, The Ending of Roman Britain (London, 1989); Nicholas J. Cooper, ‘Searching for the Blank Generation: Consumer Choice in Roman and Post-Roman Britain’, in Jane Webster and Nicholas J. Cooper (eds.), Roman Imperialism: Post-Colonial Perspectives (Leicester, 1996); John Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 1997); Tony Wilmott and Pete Wilson (eds.), The Late Roman Transition in the North (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Brit. ser., ccxcix, Oxford, 2000); Neil Faulkner, The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain (Stroud, 2000); N. Faulkner with R. Reece, ‘The Debate about the End: A Review of Evidence and Methods’, Archaeol. Jl, clix (2002); Helena Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements: The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe, 400–900 (Oxford, 2002); Catherine Hills, Origins of the English (London, 2003); Rob Collins and James Gerrard (eds.), Debating Late Antiquity in Britain, AD 300–700 (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Brit. ser., ccclxv, Oxford, 2004); Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005); Ewan Campbell, Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland, AD 400–800 (Council Brit. Archaeology, Research Rept, clvii, York, 2007); Paul Booth et al., Thames through Time: The Archaeology of the Gravel Terraces of the Upper and Middle Thames. The Early Historical Period, AD 1–1000 (Thames Valley Landscapes Monographs, xxvii, Oxford, 2007); Rob Collins and Lindsay Allason-Jones (eds.), Finds from the Frontier: Material Culture in the 4th–5th Centuries (Council Brit. Archaeology, Research Rept, clxii, York, 2010); Adam Rogers, Late Roman Towns in Britain: Rethinking Change and Decline (Cambridge, 2011); Simon Esmonde Cleary, ‘The Ending(s) of Roman Britain’, in Helena Hamerow, David A. Hinton and Sally Crawford (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology (Oxford, 2011). 6 PAST AND PRESENT * NUMBER 217 * * Mining and metallurgy lay at the heart of the Roman economy. Each year something on the order of 100,000 metric tons of lead and about 15,000 tons of copper were produced within imperial territory; and in Britain alone about 2,250 tons of freshly smelted, finished, ready-to-smith iron was manufactured each year. Indeed, Roman metal production was so extensive that the pollution it generated has been dramatically captured in the Greenland ice, which records, among other things, a fourfold increase in tropospheric lead-pollution in the first four centuries of the common era, and with an order of magnitude more copper-smelting pollution than that prevalent during the nineteenth-century industrial revolution.6 One consequence of Rome’s extraordinary capacity to produce metal was that local markets throughout the empire, including Britain, were awash with inexpensive, readily available, ready-to-smith metal as well as finished metal goods; and this, in turn, made people more productive and more prosperous than they would have been without it, enabling them to live more comfortable lives.7 Behind the mountains of lead, copper and iron stood a highly organized constellation of processes, resources and specialist labour.8 Three major steps, for example, stood behind finished 6 For both levels of metal production and pollution, see Sungmin Hong et al., ‘History of Ancient Copper Smelting Pollution during Roman and Medieval Times Recorded in Greenland Ice’, Science, 12 Apr. 1996; E. Borsos et al., ‘Anthropogenic Air Pollution in the Ancient Times’, Acta Climatologica et Chorologica, xxxvi–vii (2003); J. Nriagu, ‘Environmental Pollution and Human Health in Ancient Times’, in Jerome O. Nriagu (ed.), Encyclopedia of Environmental Health (London, 2011), 502– 3: 5http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/referenceworks/97804445227264; David Sim and Isabel Ridge, Iron for the Eagles: The Iron Industry of Roman Britain (Stroud, 2002), 23–4. Within Britain evidence from peat bogs confirms that there was a substantial increase in lead smelting during the Roman period: T. M. Mighall et al., ‘An Atmospheric Pollution History for Lead-Zinc Mining from the Ystwyth Valley, Dyfed, Mid-Wales, UK as Recorded by an Upland Blanket Peat’, Geochemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis, ii (2002). 7 William V. Harris, ‘The Late Republic’, 532, and Philippe Leveau, ‘The Western Provinces’, 661, both in Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge, 2007). For a good comparison of metal’s general availability in Britain before and after the Roman conquest and for the ubiquity of iron tools during the Roman period, see Kevin Greene, The Archaeology of the Roman Economy (Berkeley, 1986), 143, 170; Lee Bray, ‘ ‘‘Horrible, Speculative, Nasty, Dangerous’’: Assessing the Value of Roman Iron’, Britannia, xli (2010), 182–3. 8 Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome and End of Civilization, 88, 136. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 7 iron objects — the smelting of iron ore in a purpose-built furnace, which transformed the ore into a bloom of iron (a spongy lump of iron with many impurities); the reheating and repeated hammering of the bloom, which rid it of most of the slag and charcoal inclusions left by the smelting process, and welded together the iron particles of the bloom in order to make a workable billet or bar; and, finally, the blacksmithing of the finished iron into usable objects. Each of these processes, in turn, demanded multiple intermediate steps — the mining and breaking up of iron ore; its roasting, further breaking up, washing and sorting; the production of copious amounts of charcoal and all that that entailed (between 8 and 10 kg of charcoal were required to produce a kilogram of bloom); the building, usually from clay, of smelting furnaces; the organizing of large amounts of the skilled labour and muscle to undertake all iron production’s associated tasks; and the marshalling of wagons, oxen, barges and carters to move the metal. Of course, a multitude of traders and craftsmen also had to be able to make a living while engaging in iron-related work.9 And standing behind all these things were individuals and institutions powerful enough both to supervise a highly managed landscape which enabled the systematic husbanding of woodland resources (so crucial for making the tens of thousands of tons of charcoal 9 For clear descriptions of these processes and the resources and skills needed, see G. McDonnell, ‘Ore, Slag, Iron and Steel’, in Peter Crew and Susan Crew (eds.), Iron for Archaeologists: A Review of Recent Work on the Archaeology of Early Ironworking Sites in Europe (Plas Tan y Bwlch, 1995); David Sim, Beyond the Bloom: Bloom Refining and Iron Artifact Production in the Roman World, ed. Isabel Ridge (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Internat. ser., dccxxv, Oxford, 1998), 9; Irene Schrüfer-Kolb, Roman Iron Production in Britain: Technological and Socio-Economic Landscape Development along the Jurassic Ridge (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Brit. ser., ccclxxx, Oxford, 2004), 7; P. T. Craddock, ‘Mining and Metallurgy’, in John Peter Oleson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (Oxford, 2008), 101–13. For an ancient description of these processes, see Diodorus of Sicily on metalworking on Elba, in Roman Civilization Sourcebook, ii, The Empire, ed. and trans. Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold (New York, 1966), quoted in D. Sim, ‘Roman Smithing’, in Friederike Hammer, Industry in North-West Roman Southwark: Excavations, 1984–8 (Museum of London Archaeol. Service Monographs, xvii, London, 2003), 22. For a helpful diagram which lays out the complex processes standing behind non-ferrous metalworking, see Justine Bayley, ‘Non-Ferrous Metalworking in Roman Yorkshire’, in Pete Wilson and Jennifer Price (eds.), Aspects of Industry in Roman Yorkshire and the North (Oxford, 2002), 101–8 and figure 2. For fuel requirements, see Sim, ‘Roman Smithing’, 22; Radomı́r Pleiner, Iron in Archaeology: The European Bloomery Smelters (Prague, 2000), 118. 8 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 necessary each year for this scale of metal production), and to oversee policing, markets and the distribution of capital.10 This complex of institutions, materials and workers lay behind the extraordinary productivity of Roman ironworkers, something witnessed by a find that is simultaneously quotidian and astonishing: at the short-lived, first-century Roman fort at Inchtuthil, in Scotland, a cache of several tons of well-made nails — almost a million in all — has been found; the nails were fabricated in a variety of standard sizes and hardnesses (the longer ones containing more carbon steel, because they needed to withstand more hammering than shorter nails). The iron had probably been smelted in the Weald, but the nails were produced within the fort itself.11 This very large cache of nails hints at the awesome capacity of iron-producers and blacksmiths in Roman Britain, a capacity that would be unmatched after Rome’s fall until the later Middle Ages. Large numbers of man-hours were needed to transform ore in the ground into a handful of nails, and experimental archaeologists have attempted to calculate the total amount of time. Peter Crew, for example, managed to create a usable iron bar with 100 kg of charcoal and twenty-five man-days of work; but Romans must have produced iron more efficiently, given the metal’s cheapness and ubiquity during the period, and given the fact that hundreds of thousands of tons of iron were produced within the Empire. Indeed, David Sim has observed, from a back-of-the-envelope calculation, that if Crew’s numbers were correct the estimated 2,250 tons of finished, smithable iron produced in Roman Britain each year would have required 88 million man-hours per annum — proving, if nothing else, that Romans were better than archaeologists at ironworking!12 Whatever the 10 P. T. Craddock, ‘Cast Iron, Fined Iron, Crucible Steel: Liquid Iron in the Ancient World’, in Paul T. Craddock and Janet Lang (eds.), Mining and Metal Production through the Ages (London, 2003), 232–4; J. C. Edmondson, ‘Mining in the Later Roman Empire and Beyond: Continuity or Disruption?’, Jl Roman Studies, lxxix (1989), 94–7. 11 Lynn F. Pitts and J. K. St. Joseph, Inchtuthil: The Roman Legionary Fortress Excavations, 1952–65 (Britannia Monograph ser., vi, London, 1985), 109–13, 289– 92, 301; C. Mapelli et al., ‘Nails of the Roman Legionary [sic] at Inchtuthil’, Metallurgia italiana, ci (2009), 51–6. 12 Peter Crew, ‘The Experimental Production of Prehistoric Bar Iron’, Hist. Metallurgy, xxv (1991), 35; Sim, Beyond the Bloom, 35. Sim’s own experiments have cut down on Crew’s time, and rough calculations have led him and Isabel Ridge to suggest that just over 4 per cent of the population of Roman Britain were engaged, in (cont. on p. 9) RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 9 actual figures, it is clear that many steps and processes, as well as much expertise, labour and fuel, lay behind those seemingly humble and ubiquitous iron objects excavated from RomanoBritish sites. The regimes of metal production just described meant that metal was omnipresent in Britain, and it was Rome’s highly organized economy which enabled the manufacturing of copious amounts of metal and highly standardized, high-quality, inexpensive metal objects. Beginning in the later fourth century, however, as the Romano-British economy began to unravel and as Britain’s many dozens of small towns — places centrally involved in iron-related activities — failed,13 the production and availability of freshly smelted metal first faltered and then, by and large, ceased. For the metal-using people of lowland Britain this was a calamity, and they needed to develop new means of procuring this most basic of materials for themselves. The strategy many seem to have adopted to compensate for disappearing supplies of fresh metal stock was scavenging.14 Indeed, there is evidence that smiths in the late fourth century were beginning systematically to scavenge, stockpile and rework old iron and bronze metalwork.15 The clearest example of this can be found in the very (n. 12 cont.) some way, in metal production: Sim and Ridge, Iron for the Eagles, 23–4. Another series of experiments, by Sauder and Williams, further reduced the labour needed from the mining ore to a kilogram of finished iron bars to twenty-three hours, and their calculation of the amount of fuel consumed for every kilogram of finished iron bars is 82 kg: Lee Sauder and Skip Williams, ‘A Practical Treatise on the Smelting and Smithing of Bloomery Iron’, Hist. Metallurgy, xxxvi (2002), 127–8. 13 Schrüfer-Kolb, Roman Iron Production in Britain, 115, 52 and table 4; Esmond Cleary, Ending of Roman Britain, 75, 153–4. 14 Although recycling did take place throughout the Roman period, it was undertaken in systematic and organized ways, often, in the case of metal, during periods of temporary shortages: Sim, ‘Roman Smithing’, 22. For organized recycling of lead, see M. Boni et al., ‘Lead Isotopic Evidence for a Mixed Provenance for Roman Water Pipes from Pompeii’, Archaeometry, xlii (2000). For copper-alloy recycling during the Roman period, see Justine Bayley et al., ‘Technological Material from Catterick’, in P. R. Wilson, Cataractonium: Roman Catterick and its Hinterland. Excavations and Research, 1958–1997, 2 vols. (Council Brit. Archaeology, Research Rept, cxxviii– cxxix, York, 2002), ii, 164–6. For a Roman-period scrap-iron collection found near Bicester, see S. S. Frere, M. W. C. Hassall and R. S. O. Tomlin, ‘Roman Britain in 1988’, Britannia, xx (1989), 297. For the recycling of pottery, see J. Theodore Peña, Roman Pottery in the Archaeological Record (Cambridge, 2007). For the recycling of glass in Roman Britain, see John Shepherd and Angela Wardle, The Glass Workers of Roman London (London, 2009). 15 For a summary of the evidence for this from Silchester and Wroxeter, see Rogers, Late Roman Towns in Britain, 142. 10 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 late fourth-century levels of two long-running Roman metalworking sites — one in Southwark and the other at Ickham, in Kent — from which metalwork odds and ends, originally produced across a wide range of dates, have been excavated. Thus, it is likely that, in the last couple of decades of the fourth century, smiths at both places were reworking quite motley collections of scavenged metalwork rather than forging items out of newly smelted metal, as had been the practice of smiths at the two sites during the previous three centuries.16 So, by the last couple of decades of the fourth century, it looks as if the production and supply of new metal was breaking down in Britain; and by 420, both these centuries-old metalworking sites had been abandoned, not only because of the problems associated with metal supply, but doubtless also because Britain could no longer sustain specialist communities of skilled workers producing for the market. And with the extinction of places and workers like these, cheap necessities like nails became much rarer and much more difficult to procure. Although historians rarely think about nails, it is clear that all our lives would be difficult, if we (or someone in our household or on our city block) had first to procure iron and then to make all the nails we use in our lives. In Britain what we see during the last couple of decades of the fourth century is the disappearance of traditional and crucial everyday objects which used nails, including hobnail boots and coffins;17 and I would argue that for the people who grew up with these things, rainy days and funerals were a lot grimmer without them. The practices of scavenging and recycling, which we can see taking place in the last couple of generations of the Roman period, 16 Hammer, Industry in North-West Roman Southwark, 166; Paul Bennett, Ian Riddler and Christopher Sparey-Green, The Roman Watermills and Settlement at Ickham, Kent (Archaeology of Canterbury, new ser., v, Canterbury, 2010), 339–40. In earlier periods, although scrap was sometimes used, smiths in Roman-Britain typically used pre-made billets of freshly smelted metal, which had been manufactured elsewhere: Jenny Hall, ‘The Shopkeepers and Craft-Workers of Roman London’, in Ardle Mac Mahon and Jennifer Price (eds.), Roman Working Lives and Urban Living (Oxford, 2005), 131–2; P. M. Booth, Asthall, Oxfordshire: Excavations in a Roman ‘Small Town’ (Thames Valley Landscapes Monographs, ix, Oxford, 1997), 94–8. 17 For the ubiquity of nailed coffins in the Roman period, see David Petts, ‘Burial and Gender in Late and Sub-Roman Britain’, in Colin Forcey, John Hawthorne and Robert Witcher (eds.), TRAC 97: Proceeding of the 7th Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (Oxford, 1998), 115. For hobnail boots, see Nina Crummy, ‘Travel and Transport’, in Lindsay Allason-Jones (ed.), Artefacts in Roman Britain: Their Purpose and Use (Cambridge, 2011), 48–50. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 11 came to be the primary way the vast majority of people living in lowland Britain would supply themselves with workable metal for the next several hundred years. Although a few late Roman iron-smelting communities doubtless persisted into the fifth century,18 and handed down their knowledge to others,19 the amount of new iron produced in lowland Britain after c.370 must have been minuscule. We know this, in part, because smelting (that is, the process of making iron blooms) produces copious amounts of slag (generally something on the order of 3 kg of slag for every kilogram of iron produced),20 and it survives well in the archaeological record. Indeed, Romano-British iron-producing enterprises, over the course of their long years in operation, especially those active before the third century, often generated tens of thousands of tons of slag.21 The slag heap which in the classical 18 The fifth- and sixth-century graves excavated at the East Yorkshire cemetery at Kelleythorpe, for example, which lay very near the late Roman iron-producing site at Elmswell, contained an unusually large number of high-quality iron artefacts, including iron brooches, and this may hint at continuities in iron production and ironworking skills in the area after 400: C. P. Loveluck, ‘The Development of the Anglo-Saxon Landscape, Economy and Society ‘‘On Driffield’’, East Yorkshire, 400–750 AD’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, ix (1996), 27, 35–8. Elsewhere around Driffield, J. R. Mortimer uncovered early medieval graves with many iron objects: see his Forty Years’ Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds of East Yorkshire (London, 1905), 271, 279–80, 290–1. The same is true in the Rockingham Forest area, where much iron smelting had been undertaken in the Roman period. Here, at the early medieval cemetery excavated at Wakerley, in Northamptonshire, many iron grave goods have been recovered: B. Adams and D. Jackson, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Wakerley, Northamptonshire: Excavations by Mr D. Jackson, 1968–9’, Northants. Archaeology, xxii (1988–9); Burl Bellamy, Dennis Jackson and Gill Johnston, ‘Early Iron Smelting in the Rockingham Forest Area: A Survey of the Evidence’, Northants. Archaeology, xxix (2001), 114. Iron smelting also took place in Wakerley in the early Middle Ages, although none of this activity can be dated before the seventh century: David Fell, Archaeological Evaluation: Land at Wakerley, Northamptonshire, 698/WKM/1, 2 vols. (Archaeological Services and Consultancy Ltd, Milton Keynes, 2006), ii, 83. 19 The few metallurgical comparisons of Roman and early Anglo-Saxon slags that have been made have found that smelting methods were different in the two periods, which argues that Roman smelting knowledge in many places did not survive: David A. Hinton, ‘Raw Materials: Sources and Demand’, in Hamerow, Hinton and Crawford (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, 424. 20 Henry Cleere and David Crossley, The Iron Industry of the Weald, 2nd edn (Cardiff, 1995), 80. 21 R. F. Tylecote, The Early History of Metallurgy in Europe (London, 1987), 65; J. S. Hodgkinson, ‘Romano-British Iron Production in the Sussex and Kent Weald: A Review of Current Data’, Hist. Metallurgy, xxxiii (2000). At Laxton, in Northamptonshire, for example, slag from the Roman iron-smelting furnaces filled the valley in which they were located, and initially, because there was so much of it, it was thought that it had been produced by the modern ironworks at Corby: Dennis (cont. on p. 12) 12 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 period loomed over and eventually collapsed and destroyed an ancient bath-house at Beauport Park, in Sussex, once contained about 100,000 tons of material, and represents the creation of about 30,000 tons of iron.22 But even smaller-scale late Roman smelting sites, identified by noticeable mounds of slag, like many operating in the east midlands, were producing iron for the market and depended on specialist labour, in part because the kinds of iron ore generally available in Britain required too much skilled labour and fuel to make household production viable.23 In stark contrast to these Roman sites, the handful of fifth- and sixth-century places in Britain with evidence for iron smelting typically produce only a few kilograms of smelting slag.24 This (n. 21 cont.) Jackson, ‘Roman Ironworking at Laxton’, Northants. Archaeology, xxviii (1998–9), 159. Elsewhere, though, large Roman slag heaps are much reduced because the slag itself was recycled. Iron slag was used in the Roman period for road-making in the Weald: Justine Bayley, David Crossley and Matthew Ponting, Metals and Metalworking: A Research Framework for Archaeometallurgy (Hist. Metallurgy Soc., Occasional Publication, vi, 2008), 45. Most Roman slag, however, was not exploited until the seventeenth century and beyond. A seventeenth-century entrepreneur, for example, hauled ‘many thousand tons or loads’ of Roman slag away from Worcester so that he could resmelt it in his blast furnace: R. Jackson, ‘Production: Roman Ironworking’, in Hal Dalwood and Rachel Edwards, Excavations at Deansway, Worcester, 1988–89: Romano-British Small Town to Late Medieval City (Council Brit. Archaeology, Research Rept, cxxxix, York, 2004), 101. In Devon, slag was used to construct walls and houses: Frances Griffith and Peter Weddell, ‘Ironworking in the Blackdown Hills: The Results of Recent Survey’, Mining Hist., xiii (1996), 31. And much of the slag heap that had engulfed the Roman bath-house at Beauport Park was used in the nineteenth century for road-making, with something on the order of 2,000 or 3,000 cubic yards of cinder removed each year for a decade: Gerald Brodribb et al., ‘The ‘‘Classis Britannica’’ Bath-House at Beauport Park, East Sussex’, Britannia, xix (1988), 217, 239. 22 Large imperial operations, like the one at Beauport Park, were producing between 140 and 210 tons of iron per year, and medium-sized concerns, like those at Bardown and Broadfields, were producing around 40–50 tons per annum: Cleere and Crossley, Iron Industry of the Weald, 80. Even private villas engaged in iron smelting could be impressively productive. The one at Chesters, in Gloucestershire, produced about 2 tons of iron per annum: M. G. Fulford and J. R. L. Allen, ‘Iron-Making at the Chesters Villa, Woolaston, Gloucestershire: Survey and Excavation, 1987–91’, Britannia, xxiii (1992), 199–201. 23 Frances Condron, ‘Iron Production in Leicestershire, Rutland and Northamptonshire in Antiquity’, Trans. Leicestershire Archaeol. and Hist. Soc., lxxi (1997), 10–12; Schrüfer-Kolb, Roman Iron Production in Britain, 101–6. 24 For example, 47 kg of metalworking debris, only a tiny fraction of it smelting slag (the bulk was, instead, the by-product of smithing), was recovered at the early medieval settlement at Catholme, in Staffordshire, a place where smelting on a very small scale took place sometime in the early Middle Ages: K. Brown, ‘Metal Slag’, in Stuart Losco-Bradley and Gavin Kinsley, Catholme: An Anglo-Saxon Settlement on the Trent Gravels in Staffordshire (Nottingham, 2002), 113. More typically only small amounts (cont. on p. 13) RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 13 radical diminution of slag is a direct reflection of the precipitous decline in iron production itself. Forty-two dates before 900 have now been acquired for smelting activity in lowland Britain, mostly radiocarbon and taken from charcoal derived from early medieval slag heaps or smelting furnaces (see Appendix). Only nine of these might have witnessed smelting in the fifth century. Eight others hint at episodic, small-scale smelting during the sixth century. But the date ranges here are very wide, and at all but two of these sites, smelting is more likely to have taken place in the late sixth, seventh or even eighth century, than in the fifth. So, although there is evidence for iron production in England before 900, very little of it can be assigned to the 150 years after the collapse of the Roman economy. Elsewhere in the post-Roman world, however — in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Schleswig-Holstein and Scandinavia — archaeologists have found unequivocal evidence for relatively large-scale fifth- and sixth-century iron-smelting operations. Admittedly, at these Continental sites, the scale of smelting was considerably smaller than that found on secondor third-century Roman sites: the largest were producing approximately 10 per cent of what the large Roman concerns had once done: in other words, tens of tons of iron rather than hundreds of tons.25 But many of these production sites have made (n. 24 cont.) of smithing slag and no smelting slag are found on early medieval sites. For example 10 kg of slag were uncovered at the early medieval settlement at Market Lavington: Phillip Williams and Richard Newman, Market Lavington, Wiltshire: An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery and Settlement (Wessex Archaeol. Rept, xix, Salisbury, 2006), 83; and at the settlement at Spong Hill, 13 kg of smithing slag were recovered: Robert Rickett, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham, pt 7, The Iron Age, Roman and Early Saxon Settlement (East Anglian Archaeology, lxxiii, Dereham, 1995), 83. 25 For iron production and its scale inside the former Roman empire, see Pleiner, Iron in Archaeology, 47–8; Ludwig Eschenlohr and Vincent Serneels, Les BasFourneaux mérovingiens de Boécourt, Les Boulies (JU, Suisse) (Cahier d’archéologie jurassienne, iii, Porrentruy, 1991); L. Eschenlohr, ‘Les Ateliers de forgerons de Develier-Courttételle (Jura, Suisse)’, in Gérard Nicolini and Nadine Dieudonné-Glad (eds.), Les Métaux antiques: travail et restauration (Montagnac, 1998); Denis Morin, Patrick Rosenthal and Michel Fontugne, ‘Roman–Early Medieval Iron Mining and Smelting at High Altitude in the Alps (ArgenteraMercantour Massif — Alpes-Maritimes, France)’, Antiquity, lxxxi (2007): 5http:// www.antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/morin1/index.html4 (accessed 3 Aug. 2011). For iron production outside the former Roman empire, see O. Voss, ‘Snorup: et jernudvindingsområde i Sydvestjylland’, in Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark (Copenhagen, 1993), 97–111; Bert J. Groenewoudt and Matthijs van Nie, ‘Assessing the Scale and Organization of Germanic Iron Production in Heeten, the Netherlands’, Jl (cont. on p. 14) 14 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 impressive marks on the landscape. For example, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of some eight thousand early medieval iron-smelting furnaces in a 35-hectare area centred on Snorup, in Denmark.26 Similar-scale sites in Britain, however, have simply not been found, and the few fifth- or early sixthcentury British smelting sites that have been identified represent one-time or episodic operations which produced no more than 10 or 20 kg. Therefore, it seems that in Britain — when markets collapsed, towns lost their populations and the money economy ceased to function — it became nearly impossible for ironsmelting communities and operations to continue their specialist production. Once iron production ceased to be a viable way of making a living, the knowledge of most skilled workers formerly involved in the various enterprises that stood behind it would have rapidly disappeared. Thus, accompanying the collapse of the metal economy was a constellation of economic dislocations — some the result of the scarcity of basic materials like metal, others stemming from the deskilling of the population, the extinction of urban communities and the breakdown of the money economy. The end result is clear in the archaeology of fifth-century lowland Britain. The former Roman diocese was now home to a society dependant on small-scale subsistence agriculture and capable of producing only very limited surpluses, much reduced from the (n. 25 cont.) European Archaeology, iii (1995); I. Joosten, J. B. H. Jansen and H. Kars, ‘Geochemistry and the Past: Estimation of the Output of a Germanic Iron Production Site in the Netherlands’, Jl Geochemical Exploration, lxii (1998); Christiane Zimmermann, ‘Zur Entwicklung der Eisenmetallurgie in Skandinavien und Schleswig-Holstein’, Prähistorische Zeitschrift, lxxiii (1998), 83–8; H. Jöns, ‘Zur Eisenverhüttung in Schleswig-Holstein in vor- und frühgeschichtlicher Zeit’, Offa, xlix–l (1992–3); Henriette Lyngstrøm, ‘Farmers, Smelters and Smiths’, in Lars Christian Nørbach (ed.), Prehistoric and Medieval Direct Iron Smelting in Scandinavia and Europe: Aspects of Technology and Society (Aarhus, 2003). For an up-to-date bibliography on metal production in late antiquity, see Nathalie Kellens, ‘Metal Technology in Late Antiquity: A Bibliographic Note’, in Luke Lavan, Enrico Zanini and Alexander Sarantis (eds.), Technology in Transition, AD 300–650 (Leiden, 2007). 26 O. Voss, ‘Snorup — Iron Producing Settlement in West Jutland, 1st–7th Century AD’, in Gert Magnusson (ed.), The Importance of Ironmaking: Technical Innovation and Social Change. Papers Presented at the Norberg Conference on May 8–13, 1995, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1995), i; Vagn Fabritius Buchwald, Iron and Steel in Ancient Times (Copenhagen, 2005), 132–9. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 15 Roman period.27 In short, lowland Britain had become a very poor place. Yet, in spite of the collapse of the metal economy, people in Britain did not give up on metal: evidence for the smithing, repairing and reworking of iron artefacts is ubiquitous on early medieval sites, and in many places so, too, is that for lead- and copper-alloy working. So, where were people finding workable base metals? The most likely source was abandoned Roman sites. By the second decade of the fifth century the overwhelming majority of Roman towns, manufacturing sites, forts, villas and temple complexes had been abandoned,28 and many of these places would have contained literally tons of reusable metal. Derelict stone buildings would have been a good place to start, because Roman builders used impressive amounts of metal in their work. They often employed large iron clamps to hold stone walls together or to attach marble façades onto more modest stone, brick or rubble walls.29 Countless Roman buildings also had iron door- and shutter-handles, hinges and hooks; grills, grates, structural beams, and nails; as well as lead window frames, gutters and water-pipes.30 Still, archaeologists rarely find much architectural metalwork in their excavations of RomanoBritish structures because so much of it, over the centuries, has been carted away for reuse. Salvage operations to remove Roman architectural metalwork could, of course, have taken place at any time between the late fourth century and the beginning of the twentieth. As a matter of fact, a nineteenth-century excavator at Bath famously sold all the lead he discovered in one of the Roman baths to a scrap-metal dealer.31 There is evidence, however, to suggest that people at the very end of the Roman period and during the first two centuries of 27 For more on the small-scale, subsistence agriculture of the fifth century, with only very limited surplus, see Booth, Thames through Time, 322. 28 Dodie A. Brooks, ‘A Review of the Evidence for Continuity in British Towns in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries’, Oxford Jl Archaeology, v (1986); Esmonde Cleary, Ending of Roman Britain; Fleming, Britain after Rome, 22–60. 29 Jean-Pierre Adam, Roman Building: Materials and Techniques, trans. Anthony Mathews (London, 2005), 55–7, 227 and fig. 263; W. H. Manning, Catalogue of the Romano-British Iron Tools, Fittings and Weapons in the British Museum (London, 1985), 124–43. 30 Adam, Roman Building, 293–5, 321 and fig. 701; Bayley et al., ‘Technological Material from Catterick’, 164–72; Manning, Catalogue of the Romano-British Iron Tools, Fittings and Weapons, 124–37. 31 Barry Cunliffe, English Heritage Book of Roman Bath (London, 1995), 24. 16 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 the Middle Ages were responsible for removing considerable quantities of metal from abandoned Roman buildings. This activity is witnessed by a number of very late Roman metalwork hoards. One, discovered in Northamptonshire, is made up of a cache of lead weighing 11.5 kg. At least some of it was architectural and bears marks of having been cut free from buildings with a combination of axes and saws.32 Another, found at Icklingham, in Essex, contained not only a collection of iron saw blades, but also large numbers of iron hinges, nails and rings which had been extracted from a building.33 Other evidence besides that of hoards also argues that metal was being taken from buildings. One of the buildings at the Roman villa at Little Oakley, in Essex, for example, appears to have had all its metal, including nails, removed for recycling after the building had fallen down.34 The most closely dated example of post-400 metal salvaging from buildings comes from Bath. Sometime around 450 the monumental stone walls of the derelict Roman temple and bathing complex there, once dedicated to Sulis Minerva, either fell down or were pulled down.35 But before this happened, all the iron clamps with lead seatings used by its builders to connect the stone blocks together were hacked out of the walls in some kind of deliberate salvage operation.36 We know that this had to have happened after c.400 (because the building was in use until then), but before c.450, when it collapsed — because once it fell, its rubble lay undisturbed for centuries. Yet the metalwork once housed in the stone building blocks of this structure, even that found at the bottom of the tumble of stones, had been removed; so the metal had to have been taken away before the building’s collapse.37 This kind of salvaging activity could recover considerable amounts of metal. It has been estimated, for example, that the Roman coliseum at one time contained 300 tons of iron to bind its travertine 32 W. H. C. Frend and J. A. Hadman, ‘A Deposit of Roman Lead from North Lodge Farm, Barnwell, Northants.’, Britannia, xxv (1994). 33 Stanley E. West and Judith Plouviez, ‘The Roman Site at Icklingham’, East Anglian Archaeology, iii (1976), 74–9. 34 P. M. Barford, Excavations at Little Oakley, Essex, 1951–78: Roman Villa and Saxon Settlement (East Anglian Archaeology, xcviii, Chelmsford, 2002), 195–6. 35 James Gerrard, ‘The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath and the End of Roman Britain’, Antiquaries Jl, lxxxvii (2007). 36 Barry Cunliffe and Peter Davenport, The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1985–8), i, 72–3, 185. 37 Ibid., 72–3; Gerrard, ‘Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath and the End of Roman Britain’, 158–9. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 17 facing to the body of the structure.38 The temple of Sulis Minerva, although a much smaller building, would have provided plenty of scrap metal to anyone with the tools and the patience to extract it. Such dismantling of abandoned buildings to get at scrap metal was probably a commonplace subsistence strategy in fifth- and sixth-century Britain. As a matter of fact, we know that metal was sometimes looted from buildings in Francia during this period, despite the fact that freshly smelted metal was still being produced there, albeit on a much diminished scale. In his History, Gregory of Tours recounts that when one of Chilperic’s men attacked Tours around 570 ‘he pulled apart the chapter house . . . The building had been held together by nails [and] the men of Maine, who made up [his] army, put the nails into their pockets and took them away with them’.39 Easily portable iron, bronze and brass objects were also being salvaged from deserted Roman sites in Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. This metalwork — everything from agricultural implements, to spoons, to cooking equipment — would have been present on abandoned urban and rural sites, not only in and around deserted buildings, but also in these settlements’ former rubbish dumps.40 As with architectural metalwork, there is some evidence that people were beginning to scavenge movable metalwork in earnest in the very late Roman period, when the economy began to unwind, as we have seen happening with those late Roman metalworkers in Southwark and Ickham.41 38 D. L. Bomgardner, The Story of the Roman Amphitheatre (London, 2000), 30. Gregorii episcopi Turonensis, libri historiarum X, V. 4, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, i, pt 1, Hanover, 1937–51). 40 That rubbish dumps were being mined in this early period is suggested by the close association of an early medieval cemetery and a late Roman refuse tip at Frilford, Berks. Even in the nineteenth century the surface of the site was strewn with Roman material, much of it probably coming from the tip. One of the site’s nineteenth-century excavators, George Rolleston, remarked in his report of the excavation of the cemetery that ‘great numbers of Roman coins have been and still are found by labourers engaged in ordinary agricultural work all round this spot; and fragments of very many varieties of Roman pottery are equally accessible’. Indeed, during his excavation of the early medieval cemetery at Frilford, he uncovered the Roman rubbish pit as well, which contained a layer many metres thick made up of Roman pottery and metalwork, material to which the families burying their dead in the early Middle Ages there would have had access. George Rolleston, ‘Researches and Excavations at an Ancient Cemetery at Frilford’, Archaeologia, xlii (1869), 434. See also J. S. P. Bradford and R. G. Goodchild, ‘Excavations at Frilford, Berks, 1937–8’, Oxoniensia, iv (1939), 54– 5, 57 and figs. 12A, 12B. 41 See n. 16 above. 39 18 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 But many others were doing this as well. Take, for example, the comically luxurious Roman carpenter’s plane found at Goodmanham in Yorkshire, the body of which is made from elephant ivory. Still, it has the standard iron rivets, iron bottom and iron blade of a more ordinary carpenter’s plane. This extraordinary object was recovered from a very humble rural site some 20 km from York in a late fourth-century context, and a likely explanation for its appearance there, alongside a late Roman copper-alloy lock plate that had been stripped from a door or chest, is that it had been scavenged from a deserted high-status residence.42 Other late Roman metalwork finds, especially in hoards, suggest that people during the period were collecting metal objects for recycling. One hoard found at Sibson, in Huntingdonshire, for example, included farm tools and bucket fittings; and, although it might be a votive hoard, there is nothing in the context of the find to suggest this, so it may well represent someone’s collection of scrap metal.43 Enterprising scavengers could also find caches of metal objects if they dug in and around abandoned Roman ritual sites, which were often surrounded by zones of pits filled with collections of metalwork, originally placed in the ground both as votive offerings and for safe keeping: these deposits included everything from pot stands and woodworking tools, to architectural metal and vessels.44 We do not find Roman pot stands or woodworking 42 Derek A. Long, Ken Steedman and Leesa Vere-Stevens, ‘The Goodmanham Plane: A Unique Roman Plane, of the Fourth Century AD, Discovered in Yorkshire in AD 2000’, Tools and Trades, xiii (2002), 13; Roger B. Ulrich, Roman Woodworking (New Haven, 2007), 43–4; Anon., ‘Ivory Plane from Roman Settlement in the North East’, Brit. Archaeology, lxviii (2002), 43–4. The plane had probably been scavenged to use as a tool, rather than as scrap metal, since it is intact. 43 W. H. Manning, ‘A Hoard of Late Roman Ironwork from Sibson, Huntingdonshire’, in Joanna Bird (ed.), Form and Fabric: Studies in Rome’s Material Past in Honour of B. R. Hartley (Oxford, 1998). Although many Roman metalwork hoards are described as votive, some scholars have questioned this assumption. It has been suggested, for example, that the people who buried the late Roman iron hoard discovered at Kilverstone, Norfolk, were responding to political and economic concerns. Duncan Garrow, Sam Lucy and David Gibson, Excavations at Kilverstone, Norfolk: An Episodic Landscape History (East Anglian Archaeology, cxiii, Cambridge, 2006), 120–9, 169. For a sustained critique, see Catherine Johns, ‘The Classification and Interpretation of Romano-British Treasures’, Britannia, xxvii (1996). 44 The most common votive offerings at Romano-British ritual sites were jewelry, figurines, miniature weapons, tools, pottery, metal vessels and coins: Tim Malim, ‘A Romano-British Temple Complex and Anglo-Saxon Burials at Gallows Hill, Swaffham Prior’, Proc. Cambridge Antiq. Soc., xcv (2006), 112; Ann Woodward and Peter Leach, The Uley Shrines: Excavation of a Ritual Complex on West Hill, Uley, (cont. on p. 19) RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 19 tools, like the ones found in Roman metalwork hoards, on early medieval sites; but then again, we rarely find early medieval pot stands or woodworking tools either, and this is probably because old iron is easily reworked — consequently, early medieval smiths could reforge mixed jumbles of scrap iron into just about anything except fine-edged tools.45 Indeed, archaeologists excavating settlement sites dating to the first few generations after Rome’s fall often recover almost no metalwork (certainly several orders of magnitude less than found in contemporary cemeteries), which is probably because metal implements and dress-fittings of use to neither the living nor the dead were carefully husbanded and reused in the fabrication of new objects.46 Although archaeologists have not recovered Roman pot stands or door hinges from early medieval sites, they often encounter other kinds of Roman metalwork — items like spoons, keys, balance arms from scales, brooches, coins, ear-scoops, and rings from horse harnesses and bits.47 These particular objects regularly turn up in early medieval contexts because people in the fifth (n. 44 cont.) Gloucestershire: 1977–9 (English Heritage Archaeol. Rept, xvii, London, 1993), 327– 34 and table 20. For the ubiquity of deposits of metal objects at such shrines, see W. H. Manning, ‘Ironwork Hoards in Iron Age and Roman Britain’, Britannia, iii (1972); Richard Hingley, ‘The Deposition of Iron Objects in Britain during the Later Prehistoric and Roman Periods: Contextual Analysis and the Significance of Iron’, Britannia, xxxvii (2006); Jean Bagnall Smith, ‘Votive Objects and Objects of Votive Significance from Great Walsingham’, Britannia, xxx (1999); David Petts, ‘Votive Deposits and Christian Practice in Late Roman Britain’, in Martin Carver (ed.), The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300 (Woodbridge, 2003). 45 See n. 65 below. 46 Robert Cowie and Lyn Blackmore, Early and Middle Saxon Rural Settlement in the London Region (Museum of London Archaeol. Service Monographs, xli, London, 2008), 151. 47 For a general discussion of these objects, see Roger H. White, Roman and Celtic Objects from Anglo-Saxon Graves: A Catalogue and an Interpretation of their Use (Brit. Archaeol. Rpts, Brit. ser., cxci, Oxford, 1988), 136–51; Roger H. White, ‘Scrap or Substitute: Roman Material in Anglo-Saxon Graves’, in Edmund Southworth (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: A Reappraisal (Stroud, 1990). For a discussion of the collecting of Roman coins during this period, see T. S. N. Moorhead, ‘Roman Bronze Coinage in Sub-Roman and Early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Barrie Cook and Gareth Williams (eds.), Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c.AD 500–1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald (Leiden, 2006). For the symbolic meaning of such objects in mortuary contexts, see Hella Eckardt and Howard Williams, ‘Objects without a Past? The Use of Roman Objects in Early Anglo-Saxon Graves’, in Howard Williams (ed.), Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past Societies (New York, 2003). 20 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 and sixth centuries had uses for them, and therefore, when they came upon them, they saved rather than reforged them. For example, Stanley West excavated an impressive number of Roman metalwork artefacts at the early medieval settlement at West Stow, in Suffolk — bronze spoons, bracelets, finger rings, ear scoops and a steelyard, alongside almost three hundred Roman coins. These items look to have been scavenged from abandoned Roman sites in the neighbourhood and brought home for reuse as found or after some minor modifications.48 Similarly, the women around Alton, in Hampshire, seem to have spent time poking around old Roman sites looking for metalwork, some of which they saved as keepsakes, something that happened with a bronze Roman theatre ticket which ended up in a bag worn on one Alton woman’s hip.49 Thus, it seems that particular objects were sometimes held back from the jumble of metalwork being collected by scavengers. Once gathered, though, the items individuals or communities were not interested in reusing were sorted by metal type and then reforged. We can actually see this happening at the seventh-century settlement at Bloodmoor Hill, in Suffolk, where archaeologists have recovered a few identifiably Roman metal objects mixed in with deposits of undatable scrap, smithing slag and hammer-scale; the Roman material here looks as if it had been deliberately collected for reworking.50 This is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that even in the seventh 48 Stanley E. West, West Stow: The Anglo-Saxon Village, 2 vols. (East Anglian Archaeology, xxiv, Ipswich, 1985), i, 60, 76–85, 122. It has also recently been argued that people in the late Roman period in the north of England carefully husbanded and reused Roman metalwork objects like belt buckles as is, and this practice, too, may have continued into the fifth century: J. C. N. Coulson, ‘Military Equipment of the ‘‘Long’’ Fourth Century on Hadrian’s Wall’, in Collins and Allason-Jones (eds.), Finds from the Frontier, 59–60. 49 Vera I. Evison, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Alton, Hampshire (Gloucester, 1988), 85 and fig. 40. For other scavenged metalwork associated with women’s bag collections, see Audrey L. Meaney, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England’, in D. G. Scragg (ed.), Superstition and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 1989), 10–12. For an example of a typical bag and its collection of metalwork odds and ends, see F. K. Annable and B. N. Eagles, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Blacknall Field, Pewsey, Wiltshire (Devizes, 2010), 149–50, 241–2. 50 Sam Lucy, Jess Tipper and Alison Dickens, The Anglo-Saxon Settlement and Cemetery at Bloodmoor Hill, Carlton Colville, Suffolk (East Anglian Archaeology, cxxxi, Cambridge, 2009), 171. Similarly, at the early medieval settlement at Brixworth, Northamptonshire, evidence for both smithing and scavenging Roman metalwork have been found: Steve Ford, ‘The Excavation of a Saxon Settlement and a Mesolithic Flint Scatter at Northampton Road, Brixworth, Northamptonshire, 1994’, Northants. Archaeology, xxvi (1995), 94–6. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 21 century, when, as we shall see, some people were beginning to have better access to freshly smelted metal, metalwork produced in the Roman period continued to be an important source of raw material for smiths. The grave goods accompanying a seventh-century smith also provide us with a glimpse of the kinds of scrap metalworkers collected in Britain in the early Middle Ages. Not only was this man buried with a set of metalworking tools, but he also shared his grave with a box full of scrap iron, copper alloy, lead and silver. Included in his collection were metal bars and sheets, broken knife blades, the remains from castings and off-cuts, as well as damaged jewellery, belt buckles, metal studs and Roman coins.51 Like the ironworking evidence from Bloodmoor Hill, this burial dates from the seventh century, a period for which there are signs of a small increase in new iron production.52 Even so, it is clear that our smith, like the metalworkers at Bloodmoor Hill, continued to husband small bits of metal, including iron, and to collect Roman metalwork, and this must be because smiths continued to recycle metal.53 Early medieval people were interested in the whole range of Roman metalwork (except pewter, which they did not use), which would have been present on almost every deserted Roman site. There is no question, for example, that Roman lead was collected and reworked. Doughnut-shaped lead ingots, first identified by Helena Hamerow at Mucking, in Essex, have now been recovered from a number of fifth- and sixth-century settlement sites.54 Relatively large numbers of them (along with evidence for lead-working) have been found not only at Mucking, but also elsewhere in Essex, as well as on sites in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Kent, Middlesex, Oxfordshire, Suffolk and Sussex.55 These ingots had to have been fashioned from 51 David A. Hinton, A Smith in Lindsey: The Anglo-Saxon Grave at Tattershall Thorpe, Lincolnshire (Soc. Medieval Archaeology Monographs, xvi, London, 2000), 5–6, 15, 67–70. The smith’s collection of materials included a little glass as well, some Roman and some contemporary, a material used by the period’s jewellery workers: ibid., 75– 83. 52 See pp. **–** below. 53 Hinton, Smith in Lindsey, 87, 105. 54 Helena Hamerow, Excavations at Mucking, ii, The Anglo-Saxon Settlement (English Heritage Archaeol. Rept, xxi, London, 1993), 70–1. 55 K. Barton, ‘Settlements of the Iron Age and the Pagan Saxon Periods at Linford, Essex’, Trans. Essex Archaeol. Soc., 3rd ser., i (1962), 67–8; P. J. Drury and N. P. Wickenden, ‘An Early Saxon Settlement within the Romano-British Small Town at (cont. on p. 22) 22 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 recycled Roman lead, because there are no natural lead deposits in the parts of Britain where they have been found, and because there is no evidence that there was trade in this period between the people who were producing doughnut-shaped ingots and the people living in lead-producing areas far to the west or north.56 And, interestingly, there seems to have been a lot more lead around in the fifth and early sixth centuries than in the seventh, probably because easily recyclable Roman lead gutters and pipes had grown scarce after a hundred years of scavenging. Certainly, the people of Mucking used lead in a profligate fashion in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, even incorporating it into their funerary rites. Sometimes, for example, they poured molten lead onto the lids of coffins to seal them, or fashioned it into vessels to accompany their dead. They even used it to plug holes in cremation urns that they had deliberately pierced before filling with human ash. The ruins of a Roman villa lay less than a kilometre from Mucking, and its buildings are the likely source of all this lead. Lead, however, was not much in evidence in Mucking by the late sixth century, probably because by this time all the Roman lead had already been salvaged.57 A variety of copper alloys were also used in the fifth and sixth centuries to make the buckles, brooches and girdle-hangers that so many people both wore in life and were buried with, and many of these quintessentially Anglo-Saxon objects, too, were likely to have been fashioned from recycled Roman metalwork. Typically, these objects were fabricated out of bronze contaminated with brass and quite heavily leaded, a sign that metalsmiths were (n. 55 cont.) Heybridge, Essex’, Early Medieval Archaeology, xxvi (1982), 26 and fig. 11.5; J. Murray and T. McDonald, ‘Excavations at Station Road, Gamlingay, Cambs.’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, xiii (2005), 224–5; 232–5; Graham D. Keevill, ‘An Anglo-Saxon Site at Audlett Drive, Abingdon, Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia, lvii (1992); L. E. Webster and J. Cherry, ‘Medieval Britain in 1972’, Medieval Archaeology, xvii (1973), 145; David Miles, Archaeology at Barton Court Farm, Abingdon, Oxon: An Investigation of Late Neolithic, Iron Age, Romano-British, and Saxon Settlements (Council Brit. Archaeology, Research Rept, l, London, 1984), ‘The Finds, Part One’, microfiche, 5:A6–7; R. E. M. Wheeler, London and the Saxons (London, 1935), 136 and fig. 19; Cowie and Blackmore, Early and Middle Saxon Rural Settlement in the London Region, 204–6 and table 72; Barry Cunliffe, Excavations at Fishbourne, 1961–1969, 2 vols. (London, 1971), i, 10–11 and fig. 66. 56 Tylecote, Early History of Metallurgy in Europe, 40. 57 Hamerow, Excavations at Mucking, ii, 70–1; Sue Hirst and Dido Clark, Excavations at Mucking, iii, The Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries (London, 2009), 15, 70–1, 477, 559. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 23 crafting their pieces from recycled scrap, which included bronze, brass, gunmetal and pewter objects, and which they had not sorted very carefully by alloy type before reforging.58 Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that alloy compositions vary considerably from one object to the next. This mixing of alloy types, though, was not something that happened much in the Roman period.59 At the same time, there is some indication that non-ferrous metal objects in the fifth century were closer to standard alloys than they would be in the sixth — evidence, as we move forward in time, that metal which had already been recycled at least once was being recycled with other metal yet again.60 Some fifth- and sixth-century copper-alloy metalwork, moreover, contains minute traces of silver and gold, suggesting the recycling of debased late Roman silver coins, which often contain only tiny amounts of silver, as well as gilded Roman metalwork.61 There is also no evidence to suggest that metalsmiths in Britain during this period had access to either pure copper or true brass, a fact that strongly indicates that there were no new supplies of these metals available in Britain, and that non-ferrous metalworkers used only scrap.62 Indeed, as late as the eighth century it seems that 58 Tylecote, Early History of Metallurgy in Europe, 75. Most Roman brooches in Britain, for example, were apparently made from unleaded brass or unleaded bronze: Justine Bayley and Sarnia Butcher, Roman Brooches in Britain: A Technological and Typological Study Based on the Richborough Collection (London, 2004), 14 and table 6; and locking mechanisms were typically fabricated from a quaternary alloy: David Dungworth, ‘Roman Copper Alloys: Analysis of Artefacts from Northern Britain’, Jl Archaeol. Science, xxiv (1997), 906. Although there is evidence that Romano-British copper-alloy workers recycled scrap, filings and off-cuts, they seem to have sorted this scrap very carefully before they reused it: Bayley et al., ‘Technological Material from Catterick’, 164–6. For more general discussions on this, see Justine Bayley, ‘Non-Ferrous Metalworking: Continuity and Change’, in Elizabeth A. Slater and James O. Tate (eds.), Science and Archaeology, Glasgow 1987 (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Brit. ser., cxcvi(i), Oxford, 1988), 204–5; Dungworth, ‘Roman Copper Alloys’, 907, 909; David Dungworth, ‘Iron Age and Roman Copper Alloys from Northern Britain’, Internet Archaeology, ii (1997), sections 5.4, 7.6, 8.4, 10.2. 60 Cath Mortimer, ‘Compositional Analysis of Non-Ferrous Metalwork in Wasperton Anglo-Saxon Cemetery’, ALSF Project Number 3682 (2006): 5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/wasperton_eh_2008/downloads. cfm?CFID¼2259&CFTOKEN¼A89B69A5-CC15-4EE9-B93084B6C98379824 (accessed 15 Aug. 2011). 61 N. Blades, ‘Chemical Analysis of the Copper Alloys’, in Christine Haughton and Dominic Powlesland, West Heslerton, the Anglian Cemetery, 2 vols. (Yedingham, 1999), i, 130. 62 Bayley, Crossley and Ponting, Metals and Metalworking, 50–1; Ian Meadows, An Anglian Warrior Burial from Wollaston, Northamptonshire (Northampton, 2004), 36–8. 59 24 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 non-ferrous metalsmiths working at Southampton and York were still collecting Roman scrap for reuse.63 Thus, an analysis of the metals in early medieval copper-alloy objects argues that the metal used for brooches and the like was prepared in small batches, each one often quite different in its composition from the last (although pairs of brooches and wrist-clasps sometimes seem to have been made from the same melts), and each dependant on the particular collection of odds and ends being melted down.64 Similar arguments can be made for the metal standing behind many early medieval iron artefacts. In the light of the dearth of evidence for smelting already presented, it seems likely that most of the iron used by blacksmiths in the fifth and early sixth centuries was recycled. For many classes of objects — cooking equipment, shield bosses, bucket hoops, firedogs — recycled iron is perfectly serviceable. But it is a different matter for things that needed hard, sharp cutting edges;65 and it is worth thinking about sharp-edged objects, because in the couple of generations after c.500 this class of iron implement was going to play a starring role in the reorientation of resources in such a way that a minority of individuals and households were going to end up with more than their share of Britain’s slowly but steadily increasing surplus.66 63 David A. Hinton, The Gold, Silver, and Other Non-Ferrous Alloy Objects from Hamwic, and the Non-Ferrous Metalworking Evidence (Stroud, 1996), 6; Nicola S. H. Rogers, Anglian and Other Finds from 46–54 Fishergate (Archaeology of York, xvii, ‘The Small Finds’, fasc. 9, York, 1993), 1357–8. 64 Cath Mortimer, ‘Metallurgy of Brooches and Pendants’, in Martin Carver, Catherine Hills and Jonathan Scheschkewitz, Wasperton: A Roman, British and Anglo-Saxon Community in Central England (Woodbridge, 2009), 58–9; P. Wilthew, ‘Analysis of Non-Ferrous Metal Objects’, in Sonia Chadwick Hawkes and Guy Grainger, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Finglesham, Kent (Oxford, 2006); N. Blades, ‘Preliminary Report on Analyses of Copper Alloys’, in Jane R. Timby, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Empingham II, Rutland (Oxford, 1996), 71–6. A recent study, however, suggests that matched pairs of saucer brooches were made with metal of different alloy combinations, suggesting that each member of a pair was made from a different melt: Chris Caple, ‘Ancestor Artefacts — Ancestor Materials’, Oxford Jl Archaeology, xxix (2010), 311–12. 65 G. McDonnell, ‘Iron and its Alloys in the Fifth to Eleventh Centuries AD in England’, World Archaeology, xx (1989). 66 For evidence of this small increase in agricultural surplus, see Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements, 120–4, 139, 148–55. For the reorientation from a ranked to a steeply hierarchical society during the sixth century, see Christopher Scull, ‘Social Transactions, Gift Exchange and Power in the Archaeology of the Fifth to Seventh Centuries’, in Hamerow, Hinton and Crawford (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, 852–3. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 25 Ironsmiths working in Britain in the early Middle Ages were often highly skilled,67 but many of the bladed objects they crafted were not very serviceable. The period’s best spearheads and knives had bodies fabricated from low-carbon iron (which is not brittle and, therefore, does not break easily) and blades edged with steel for precision cutting.68 Scrap iron, however, when heated and reforged, does not have the strength of freshly smelted metal; and it would not have been possible in the early Middle Ages to make steel from it.69 Given the limitations of recycled iron, it is particularly interesting that metallurgical studies of the knives and spearheads excavated from early AngloSaxon cemeteries have identified many poor specimens. Thus, many of the spearheads examined from the cemeteries at Wasperton, Edix Hill, Empringham, Mucking and Boss Hall were so poor that archaeologists have suggested that they are not actually ‘real’ spearheads, but rather tokens made specially for burial.70 It seems more likely, however, given the realities of the iron supply in Britain, that the chief shortcoming of these spearheads is that they had been made from recycled scrap by smiths who had little access to freshly smelted iron and steel. Early knives sometimes exhibit the same flaws as spearheads, and, like spearheads, many were fabricated from low-quality iron and were innocent of steel.71 Some knives, though, were actually smithed from both low-carbon and high-carbon iron, but at times these different alloys, rather than being deployed strategically 67 McDonnell, ‘Iron and its Alloys’, 380. K. Wiemer, ‘Metallurgical Analyses of Iron Knives’, in Timby, Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Empingham, 84–5; David Starley, ‘The Metallurgical Examination of Ferrous Grave Goods from Wasperton Anglo-Saxon Cemetery MN80–85’, ALSF Project Number 3682 (2006), 2: 5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives /view/wasperton_eh_2008/downloads.cfm?CFID¼2259&CFTOKEN¼ A89B69A5-CC15-4EE9-B93084B6C98379824(accessed 15 Aug. 2011). 69 Schrüfer-Kolb, Roman Iron Production in Britain, 34–5, 116. 70 Starley, ‘Metallurgical Examination of Ferrous Grave Goods from Wasperton Anglo-Saxon Cemetery’, 15, 28–30; B. Gilmour and C. J. Salter, ‘Ironwork: Technological Examination of the Knives, Spearheads and Sword/Weaving Batten’, in Tim Malim and John Hines, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), Cambridgeshire (Council Brit. Archaeology, Research Rept, cxii, York, 1998), 250–5 and appendix microfiche; V. Fell and D. Starley, ‘Technological Study of Ferrous Blades’, in Christopher Scull, Early Medieval (Late 5th–Early 8th Centuries AD) Cemeteries at Boss Hall and Buttermarket, Ipswich, Suffolk (Soc. Medieval Archaeology Monographs, xxvii, Leeds, 2009), 78–80. 71 David Starley, ‘A Technological Study of Knives and Spearheads’, in Hirst and Clark, Excavations at Mucking, 423–6; Wiemer, ‘Metallurgical Analyses of Iron Knives’, 76–85. 68 26 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 (with the softer iron forming the body of the knife and the stronger iron welded along its edge), had simply been hammered together to form a single bar, and then that bar, in turn, had been used to make knives.72 This is a classic sign that smiths were using a jumble of recycled objects as their source for iron. All of this suggests that, while there was little new iron being smelted in lowland Britain, smiths had easy access to recyclable Roman iron — certainly enough to allow most people in the fifth and early sixth centuries, even children, to wear knives on their belts and for leading men in many households to possess spears.73 At the same time, however, there was only very limited access to freshly smelted iron and steel, and because of this many early knives and spearheads were poor quality. The problem of recycled iron makes it useful to think about swords and their female cousins, iron weaving beaters, the most important iron status-objects of the early Middle Ages. For our purpose, there are five important things to know about these objects. First, many more swords and iron weaving beaters were placed in graves during the sixth and the early seventh centuries than in the fifth,74 so the vast majority date not from the first three or four generations after the fall, but from the next period on. Second, some, but by no means all, of these objects, alongside other kinds of prestige weapons, are Frankish imports.75 Third, almost as many have been found in Kent as in all other counties combined, with the bulk of the rest found along England’s 72 Starley, ‘Metallurgical Examination of Ferrous Grave Goods from Wasperton Anglo-Saxon Cemetery’, 5, 22–3, 26; Gilmour and Salter, ‘Ironwork’, 250–5. 73 Sally Crawford, ‘Children, Grave Goods and Social Status in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Joanna Sofaer Derevenski (ed.), Children and Material Culture (London, 2000), 176–7; Heinrich Härke, ‘ ‘‘Warrior Graves’’? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite’, Past and Present, no. 126 (Feb. 1990), 25. 74 Heinrich Härke, ‘Early Saxon Weapon Burials: Frequencies, Distributions and Weapon Combinations’, in Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, Weapons and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989), ch. 3; Sue Harrington, Aspects of Gender Identity and Craft Production in the European Migration Period: Iron Weaving Beaters and Associated Textile Making Tools from England, Norway, and Alamannia (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Internat. ser., mdccxcvii, Oxford, 2008), 96–8. 75 Brian Gilmour, ‘Swords, Seaxes and Saxons: Pattern-Welding and Edged Weapon Technology from Late Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England’, in Martin Henig and Tyler Jo Smith (eds.), Collectanea Antiqua: Essays in Memory of Sonia Chadwick Hawkes (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Internat. ser., mdxlxxiii, Oxford, 2007), 101; Harrington, Aspects of Gender Identity and Craft Production in the European Migration Period, 32; Svante Fischer, Les Seigneurs des anneaux (Paris, 2008), 22. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 27 southern and eastern coasts or in the Thames Valley.76 Fourth, 90 per cent of these swords and weaving beaters, especially those made after c.500, are pattern-welded.77 Fifth, and finally, blades made in the seventh century were generally crafted from higher quality metal than earlier blades.78 Pattern-welded swords and weaving beaters were often very beautiful, and it is clear that the complexity of their blades’ designs was seen as an important measure not only of the blade, but of the person who owned it.79 Indeed, although some specialists still argue that pattern-welding served a functional purpose in sword blades, it is difficult to come up with any kind of practical explanation for why weaving beaters, which women used to beat up the weft when weaving on a warp-weighted loom, should be pattern-welded.80 Instead, it seems that part of the value of these pattern-welded objects to their owners was their rare and conspicuous beauty. Not only did the men and women in possession of these blades need the services of highly skilled smiths, but they had to have unusually good access to freshly smelted iron-alloy bars. This is because pattern-welded blades could not be made from recycled iron, nor could they be fashioned from a single type of iron alloy. Instead, their cores, their edges and their patterned centres were typically smithed from a variety of bars made from different iron alloys — some low carbon, others carbon-free, some with phosphorus and still others made with steel. Thus smiths generally needed multiple bars of at least four different iron alloys in order to produce a pattern-welded blade.81 76 Gilmour, ‘Swords, Seaxes and Saxons’, 99, 101; Harrington, Aspects of Gender Identity and Craft Production in the European Migration Period, 96–9. 77 Janet Lang and Barry Ager, ‘Swords of the Anglo-Saxon and Viking Periods in the British Museum: A Radiographic Study’, in Chadwick Hawkes, Weapons and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England, 107. 78 For swords, see R. F. Tylecote and B. J. J. Gilmour, The Metallography of Early Ferrous Edge Tools and Edged Weapons (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Brit. ser., clv, Oxford, 1986), 249. We have no comparable metallographic information for iron weaving beaters. 79 Tylecote and Gilmour, Metallography of Early Ferrous Edge Tools and Edged Weapons, 246; Brian Gilmour, ‘Metallurgical Analysis of the Swords’, in Jacqueline I. McKinley, ‘The Early Saxon Cemetery at Park Lane, Croydon’, Surrey Archaeol. Collections, xc (2003), 97–8; Gilmour, ‘Swords, Seaxes and Saxons’, 104, 107. 80 Harrington, Aspects of Gender Identity and Craft Production in the European Migration Period, 46–9, 52. 81 Gilmour, ‘Swords, Seaxes and Saxons’, 107. 28 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 In view of the state of iron smelting in early sixth-century England, it is inconceivable that bladesmiths working there would have been able to get hold of the variety of freshly smelted iron-alloy bars they needed from indigenous sources. It is much more likely that they were procuring their iron from traders, who were bringing it in from the Continent, where, as we have seen, quite large-scale smelting concerns were still in operation.82 Because so many early swords and iron weaving beaters have been found in Kent, it is not unreasonable to argue that much of the iron used to make Kentish swords, at least initially, was being brought in from Francia, alongside the garnets, gold coins, pottery, wine and high-quality quern-stone that were beginning to flow into Kent from Francia as early as c.500.83 And considering the close proximity of the two places, such trade would hardly be surprising. But impressive amounts of iron, as we have seen, were also being smelted in the Netherlands and southern Scandinavia. Here archaeologists have uncovered a number of hoards of smallish, standard-sized iron bars, some of them steel, which had been smithed with holes in one end, so that they could be tied together into bundles for shipping.84 We know this material travelled: there is evidence from sixth-century Denmark, for example, that people there were getting hold of higher carbon iron than they were producing locally, and that it was coming all the way from Norway.85 It is also clear that by the early sixth century there were people from south-western Norway and Frisia prowling around the northern and eastern coasts of 82 Brian Gilmour, in his discussion of the Croydon swords, comments that the variety of iron bars needed for a pattern-welded sword would have required an iron trade, but he does not speculate as to the origins of this iron: Gilmour, ‘Metallurgical Analysis of the Swords’, 98. 83 Robin Fleming, ‘Elites, Boats, and Foreigners: Rethinking the Rebirth of English Towns’, in Città e campagna nei secoli altomedievali (Atti delle settimane di studio, lvi, Spoleto, 2009), i; Scull, ‘Social Transactions, Gift Exchange and Power in Archaeology’, 853. During the Viking Age there is also evidence that the metal for high-quality sword blades was being imported from far away: in this case some crucible steel from Persia or India was being brought into Scandinavia for this purpose. A. Williams, ‘Crucible Steel in Medieval Swords’, in S. La Niece, D. Hook and P. Craddock (eds.), Metals and Mines: Studies in Archaeometallurgy (London, 2007), 233–41. 84 Buchwald, Iron and Steel in Ancient Times, 216, 237; Lyngstrøm, ‘Farmers, Smelters and Smiths’, 22; Lars Erik Narmo, ‘Iron Production in Medieval Norway’, Ruralia, vi (2007), 209–10. 85 Lyngstrøm, ‘Farmers, Smelters and Smiths’, 21–5. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 29 England,86 and perhaps, like the Franks, one of the things they were doing was trading iron. If what I am arguing is correct, in the early sixth century, just at the moment when individuals and households in England were beginning to compete intensely for social position and resources (something clearly marked in the archaeological record), and in the decades when the possession and burying of pattern-welded blades began to play a central role in this competition, the only people who were going to be able to stay in the game were those with access to imported iron alloys. And in order to get their hands on imported iron, they needed something to trade. Of course, having swords must have helped them command the surplus they needed to get more iron, though, admittedly, it seems that what we have here is a classic chicken-and-egg situation: we cannot tell if some households were motivated to get more surplus because they wanted access to important but locally unavailable commodities like freshly smelted iron-alloy bars, or if they had more surplus because they had managed to get hold of iron. Whatever the case, the point worth emphasizing here is that standing behind England’s new sword- and iron-weavingbeater-bearing elites were not ancient warrior pedigrees, but rather access to trans-Channel trade networks and traders, as well as control over economic activities at home, which allowed these people to exchange what they had for a sought-after import. Thus, it seems that economic development, trade, a new emphasis on surplus, and the desire for exotic commodities were driving crucial changes in English social structures in ways that are completely unacknowledged by surviving early medieval texts. From the mid sixth century onwards, however, newly emerging elite families’ desire for fresh iron looks to have stimulated smelting at home. Certainly, the archaeology suggests that by the late sixth/early seventh century, a number of people within England itself were beginning to put considerable effort into the production of new metal. Chris Loveluck, for example, has argued that the barrow-building, grave-goods using families establishing 86 John Hines, The Scandinavian Character of Anglian England in the Pre-Viking Period (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Brit. ser., cxxiv, Oxford, 1984), 14; Chris Loveluck and Dries Tys, ‘Coastal Societies, Exchange and Identity along the Channel and Southern North Sea Shores of Europe, AD 600–1000’, Jl Maritime Archaeology, i (2006). 30 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 themselves in seventh-century Derbyshire may have become the people they were because they had made themselves the masters of lead production.87 And from the late sixth/early seventh century onwards, more iron-smelting furnaces, more smelting slag and more evidence for long-term iron production are visible in the archaeological record; it has now been identified at over three dozen sites, some of which are quite impressive for the scale of their output and the sophistication of their technological development, particularly smelting operations dating from the late seventh century onwards (see Appendix). At Worgret, in Dorset, for example, it is possible that a watermill was being used sometime in the late seventh or early eighth century to drive mechanically operated bellows or a heavy hammer at an iron-smelting operation;88 and by the late eighth or early ninth century ironworkers at Ramsbury, probably by this time an important royal estate, produced about 10 tons of iron over the span of a generation or two.89 Contemporary with and on a similar scale to the operation at Ramsbury was the iron-production site at Weldon, in Northamptonshire, probably part of another royal estate.90 Here, remarkably, it seems that smelters were able to produce three different iron alloys: ferretic iron, phosphoric iron, and steel, a feat which points to the existence, by this time, of highly 87 Christopher Loveluck, ‘Acculturation, Migration and Exchange: The Formation of Anglo-Saxon Society in the English Peak District, 400–700 AD’, in John Bintliff and Helena Hamerow (eds.), Europe between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Recent Archaeological and Historical Research in Western and Southern Europe (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Internat. ser., dcxvii, Oxford, 1995). Certainly, there are indications that elite households had access to freshly processed Derbyshire lead rather than recycled Roman lead by the ninth century: Lisa M. Wastling, ‘Evidence for Leadworking’, 337–8, and Patrick Ottaway and Jane Cowgill, ‘Woodworking, the Tool Hoard and its Lead Containers’, 270, 273, both in D. H. Evans and Christopher Loveluck, Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, c.AD 600–1000: The Artefact Evidence (Oxford, 2009). Lead-smelting sites dating to the ninth or tenth centuries have also been found, for example in Bollihope Common, County Durham, radiocarbon dated 880–1050 (2 sigma): 5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archsearch/record.jsf? titleId¼950244(accessed 20 Aug. 2011). 88 For the site, see Michael J. Heaton, ‘Two Mid-Saxon Grain Driers and Later Medieval Features at Chantry Fields, Gillingham, Dorset’, Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist. and Archaeol. Soc., cxiv (1992); Hinton, ‘Raw materials’, 1426. For a redating of the site, see D. A. Hinton, ‘Revised Dating of the Worgret Structure’, Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist. and Archaeol. Soc., cxiv (1992). 89 Jeremy Haslam, ‘A Middle Saxon Iron Smelting Site at Ramsbury, Wiltshire’, Medieval Archaeology, xxiv (1980). 90 In 1086, Domesday Book tells us specifically that the woodland and ironworking site in Weldon belonged to the king: Domesday Book, i, fo. 219v. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 31 adept smelting practitioners in England.91 There is also evidence, beginning in the seventh century, for the local production of steel and the making of relatively large quantities of charcoal, a fuel critical for smelting.92 Indeed, given iron smelting’s voracious appetite for charcoal, it is inconceivable that an iron-production site the size of the one at Ramsbury could have taken place without carefully managed woodland resources, because without planned coppicing, fuel supplies would have been quickly exhausted.93 So, this level of production would have been impossible in a period before there were households powerful enough to control extensive woodlands. Accompanying the increasing number of smelting sites in England, we find evidence for specialist groups of metalworkers, like the ones active at Bloodmoor Hill and Brandon Road, Thetford, and possibly at Cottam, in East Yorkshire, and Lyminge, in Kent.94 At places like these, several generations of 91 T. Rayner, ‘Archaeological Excavation of Land to the Rear of Chapel Road, Weldon, Northamptonshire (WCRE01)’, 1, 6, 12, and Jane Cowgill, ‘Appendix 8: Report on the Slags and Related Debris from the Iron-Smelting Site at Chapel Road, Little Weldon, Northamptonshire (WCRE01)’, 29–30, both in Archaeol. Project Services Rept, iii (2003). Smelters working around ninth- or tenth-century Flixborough may have been producing a similar range of different iron alloys: David Starley, ‘Physico-Chemical Analysis of Debris’, in Evans and Loveluck, Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, 328. Another relatively large-scale iron-smelting site, operating within a century of Ramsbury and Weldon, has been excavated at Mersham, in Kent. This site may have been linked to Christ Church Canterbury. When excavated, the site was found to contain an estimated 3.75 tons of ironworking debris. R. Helm and J. T. Munby, ‘Medieval Ironworking Evidence at Mersham, Kent’, Oxford Wessex Archaeology Joint Venture: London and Continental Railways, Oxford (2006): 5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/arch ives/view/greylit/details.cfm?id¼11330&CFID¼2259&CFTOKEN¼A89B69A5CC15-4EE9-B93084B6C98379824(accessed 25 Aug. 2011). 92 Bert Groenewoudt, ‘Charcoal Burning and Landscape Dynamics in the Early Medieval Netherlands’, Eva Svensson, ‘Before a World-System? The Peasant-Artisan and the Market’, and James Bond, ‘Medieval Charcoal-Burning in England’, 286–90, all in Jan Klápště and Petr Sommer (eds.), Arts and Crafts in Medieval Rural Environment: Ruralia VI (Turnhout, 2007). 93 Cowgill, ‘Appendix 8’, 29–30. 94 Lucy, Tipper and Dickens, Anglo-Saxon Settlement and Cemetery at Bloodmoor Hill, 372–81; Rob Atkins and Aileen Connor, Farmers and Ironsmiths: Prehistoric, Roman and Anglo-Saxon Settlement beside Brandon Road, Thetford, Norfolk (East Anglian Archaeology, cxxxiv, Bar Hill, 2010), 113–15. At Cottam an unusually large number of knives have been metal-detected, perhaps because large numbers of knives were being made there: P. Ottaway, ‘Cottam Ironwork Recovered by Metal Detector’, in Julian D. Richards, ‘Burrow House Farm, Cottam: An Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Settlement in East Yorkshire’, Archaeological Data Service (2001): 5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-312-1/dissem ination/html/md.html4 (accessed 28 Aug. 2011). Recent excavations at Lyminge (cont. on p. 32) 32 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 workers plying their trade across the seventh century were smithing large numbers of iron implements not only for themselves, but also for some broader market; and they clearly had access to increasing supplies of iron — some still coming from scavenging, but some, judging from the offcuts of fresh billets, now derived from newly smelted iron.95 At the same time, both the knives and the swords produced in England from the seventh century onwards were generally of a very high quality and often made from steel.96 These things together argue for the re-establishment of smelting within England over the course of the seventh and eighth centuries, with numerous sites by the ninth century producing enough metal to supply the masters of the large estates of which they were part with sufficient metal for their own needs and even, perhaps, for local markets. What increasing levels of metal production could do for those who either controlled such sites or had access to the metal they produced is witnessed by the large hoard of high-quality iron tools uncovered at Flixborough, in Lincolnshire, which dates from between the eighth and tenth centuries.97 Certainly, elite households with smelters and metalworkers would have not only had a commodity worth trading in the region’s newly emerging urban markets,98 but they would also have been able to provide their own farming operations with high-quality agricultural tools.99 (n. 94 cont.) suggest large-scale smithing took place at the edges of the monastic precinct: Gabor Thomas, ‘The Big Dig: Bishopstone and Lyminge’, British Archaeology, cxix (2011): 5http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba119/feat1.shtml4 (accessed 25 July 2011). 95 Atkins and Connor, Farmers and Ironsmiths, 60. Similarly, the smithing of fresh blooms may have been taking place sometime between the seventh and the ninth centuries at a settlement at Church Street, in Maldon, Essex: T. Ennis, ‘Former Croxley Works Site, Church Street, Maldon: Archaeological Evaluation and Excavation’, 1763’ Essex County Council Field Archaeology Unit, Braintree (2009), 19: 5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/greylit/details. cfm?id¼4562&det¼y&CFID¼21871&CFTOKEN¼BE9C8C25-9383-491E-BA1599F5F7C0A3184(accessed 12 Jan. 2012). 96 E. Blakelock and G. McDonnell, ‘A Review of Metallographic Analyses of Early Medieval Knives’, Hist. Metallurgy, xl (2007), 48–9, 54; Tylecote and Gilmour, Metallography of Early Ferrous Edge Tools and Edged Weapons, 249; David Starley, ‘Metallographic Examination of Knife Blades’, in Evans and Loveluck, Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, 229–31. 97 Evans and Loveluck, Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, ch. 7. 98 John Moreland, ‘The Significance of Production in Eighth-Century England’, in Hansen and Wickham (eds.), Long Eighth Century, 98. 99 Peter Fowler, Farming in the First Millennium AD: British Agriculture between Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror (Cambridge, 2002), 16. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 33 The recent find at Lyminge of an iron plough-coulter dating to the seventh century, and the central role such ploughs must have played in the extension of arable land during this period, is suggestive of how crucial a supply of iron was to the households standing behind the economic transformations taking place during these years.100 And the discovery, in the past couple of decades, of a number of large lead storage tubs dated from the seventh century onwards — homely but valuable objects, the ownership of which would have been limited to people who had access to trade networks centred on lead — allows us to see the ways in which the possession of relatively large supplies of metal might improve the abilities of the period’s best-connected households not only to create agricultural surplus, but also to store it.101 The arguments made here about the central role of metal production in the re-emergence of a steeply hierarchical society in Britain find parallels in Norway during the Roman Iron Age. Kristin Prestvold has argued that the remarkable increase in iron smelting there c.200 CE was closely linked to the rise of an elite with growing political and economic power and ever more control over landscape and labour. She sees the social changes spurred on by iron smelting linked to increasing warfare in the region, the need by those attempting to benefit from its production to participate in conspicuous display (including new and extravagant forms of weapon burials), and the appearance of high-status settlement sites.102 All these things can be found in sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-century lowland Britain as well.103 Fresh metal production, then, is perhaps both diagnostic for the development of stratified societies and an important engine driving such change. 100 5http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/newsandevents/releases/PR361415.aspx4 (accessed 1 Aug. 2011). For the kinds of transformations and increased agricultural surpluses iron plough-coulters could make possible, see Susan Oosthuizen, ‘New Light on the Origins of Open-Field Farming’, Medieval Archaeology, xlix (2005), 187–91. 101 Jane Cowgill, ‘Overview of the Lead Vessels (with Chemical Analysis)’, in Peter Boyer, Jennifer Proctor and Robin Taylor-Wilson, On the Boundaries of Occupation: Excavations at Burringham Road, Scunthorpe and Baldwin Avenue, Bottesford, North Lincolnshire (London, 2009), 82–3. 102 Kristin Prestvold, ‘Iron Production and Society: Power, Ideology and Social Structure in Inntrøndelag during the Early Iron Age. Stability and Change’, Norwegian Archaeol. Rev., xxix (1996), 42, 57. 103 Fleming, Britain after Rome, 65–119. 34 PAST AND PRESENT * NUMBER 217 * * The collapse of Roman Britain’s metal economy in the late fourth century serves both as evidence for the major dislocations experienced by people living in the period after Rome’s fall and as a partial explanation for the long-term impoverishment endemic in Britain in the first generations after CE 400. Its study thus contributes to the ongoing debate of Rome’s fall in Britain. Although I would not argue that this was the ‘end of civilization’ for everyone living there (there is, after all, compelling evidence that working people in some parts of the former Roman Empire lived longer, healthier lives after Roman tax collectors and landlords faded away),104 the economic dislocations, or so the evidence of metal argues, were nonetheless calamitous and long-term. The collapse of the metal economy in Britain also lays bare the extraordinary transformations people lived through as complex systems of production disappeared, and as they were left without access to very basic commodities like freshly smelted metal and nails, things that their great-grandparents would have bought with money. It also underscores the ways in which the collapse of the Roman economy was accompanied by the rapid and dramatic deskilling of Britain’s population. Roman society, like modern society, depended on carefully co-ordinated systems of production, supply and transportation, but when the economy imploded, when money ceased to have value (as it did in Britain), and when the Roman state withdrew, it was impossible for these systems of production to persevere. Once they disappeared, there would have been fewer and fewer people who knew how to do all the tasks associated with the production of iron, or who could marshal all the necessary resources and know-how to do so. But even if a few such people survived, it is hard to imagine how the fruits of their activity could have been passed on to ‘consumers’, once towns, markets and the money economy disappeared. Smelting skills, moreover, were not absolutely necessary, since metal from abandoned Roman sites was widely available. In the new world in which the people of Britain found themselves, it was easier to acquire metal by scavenging than it was to mine, make 104 Robin Fleming, ‘Bones for Historians: Putting the Body Back into Biography’, in David Bates, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton (eds.), Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow (Woodbridge, 2006), 45–6. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 35 charcoal, and smelt.105 One of the more damaging effects of this general trend was that in the face of widespread recycling the knowledge used to produce new metal disappeared.106 The deskilling of the population and the loss of basic technological know-how cast a very long shadow in Britain. As we have seen, it took centuries for smelting expertise to be re-established in Britain. But other examples of deskilling abound. Mass-produced, wheel-thrown pottery disappeared with Rome’s demise, and it would not be re-established in England for three centuries.107 Similarly, a study of surviving early medieval wood suggests that all boards made in England before the twelfth century were axe hewn, because wood-working saws, common in the Roman period, were a lost piece of technology in Britain after the fall, and it took six hundred years for them to be reintroduced.108 This kind of technological loss, which was pervasive in Britain in the early Middle Ages, made the creation of basic commodities like nails or pots or boards much more labour intensive and much slower. And such losses made people poorer. Still, in spite of the economic collapse that accompanied Rome’s fall in Britain, by the early sixth century some households had come to have enough surplus to engage in trade with foreigners. It is likely that these people were interested not only in 105 Something very similar has taken place in post-colonial Africa, where iron smelting was ubiquitous until the 1960s, but unlike blacksmithing, is now extinct because of the large amounts of scrap metal available in the rubbish tips and abandoned buildings dating from the colonial period: Sim, Beyond the Bloom, 4. 106 On this phenomenon more generally, see Tiziano Mannoni, ‘The Transmission of Craft Techniques According to the Principles of Material Culture: Continuity and Rupture’, in Lavan, Zanini and Sarantis (eds.), Technology in Transition, pp. xli–lx. 107 Paul Blinkhorn, ‘Of Cabbages and Kings: Production, Trade and Consumption in Middle-Saxon England’, in Mike Anderton (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Trading Centres: Beyond the Emporia (Glasgow, 1999), 9. 108 D. M. Goodburn, ‘Woods and Woodland: Carpenters and Carpentry’, in Gustav Milne, Timber Building Techniques in London, c.900–1400: An Archaeological Study of Waterfront Installations and Related Material (London and Middlesex Archaeol. Soc. Special Paper, xv, London, 1992), 112–14; D. M. Goodburn, ‘Medieval Circular Saws for Shipbuilding?’, Internat. Jl Nautical Archaeology, xxii (1993), 291; Julian Hill and Aidan Woodger, Excavations at 72–55 Cheapside/83–93 Queen Street City of London (Museum of London Archaeol. Service, Archaeology Studies ser., ii, London, 1999), 27–37. Not just wood from buildings was recycled. At Cheapside, in London, the remains of an eleventh-century building has been excavated, the floor of which was made from recycled barrels: 5http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/laarc/catalogue /siteinfo.asp?search¼adv&go¼Go&id¼1768&code¼CID90&terms¼CID904 (accessed 29 Apr. 2010). 36 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 the garnets, gold coins and wheel-thrown wine bottles we find in their graves, but in freshly smelted iron-alloy bars, which they could have fashioned into the swords and other sharp-edged implements that were becoming prerequisites for making claims to high social status. Over the course of the sixth and seventh centuries, as social hierarchies solidified and elite households gained power over both the landscape and the labour of others, a meaningful level of iron and lead production was once again established in lowland Britain. In the long run, the increased availability of freshly smelted metal not only consolidated the economic positions of the people who controlled its production, but it provided many more people with access to better tools, helping to increase surpluses. Thus, I would argue that both the story of the collapse of the metal economy and its gradual revival are crucial for understanding what Britain was like in the years between c.350 and c.650 and how it evolved from Late Roman to early medieval. It is a story, however, completely unwitnessed by texts, and the only way it can be recounted is by taking seriously the period’s material remains. Boston College Robin Fleming RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 37 APPENDIX EVIDENCE OF NEW IRON PRODUCTION IN BRITAIN, c.400–c.850 CE Rural smelting sites with further information on dating (followed by means of dating in parentheses), the kind of iron-related activities evidenced on the site, and references. (N.B.: sites with evidence only for ironsmithing, a ubiquitous activity, are not included.) Bestwall Quarry, Dorset date(s): associated with iron smelting furnaces: 420–580; 690– 970; 680–890; 770–980; 780–990 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) associated with charcoal making: 540–660; 600–680; 650–780; 660–810; 660–810; 665–780; 660–890; 700–850; 680–900 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: charcoal making; smelting source: Alex Bayliss et al., Radiocarbon Dates from Samples Funded by English Heritage under the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, 2004–7, 2 vols. (Swindon, 2008), i, 27–9; ii, 14–21. Billingford, Norfolk date(s): 7th–8th century (pottery) activity: smelting source: P. Andrews, ‘Metalworking Debris’, in Heather Wallis, Romano-British and Saxon Occupation at Billingford, Central Norfolk (East Anglian Archaeology, cxxxv, Dereham, 2011), 48–9. Blacklake Wood, Devon See under Dulverton below. Bonemills Farm, Cambridgeshire See under Wittering below. Bulwick Parish, Northamptonshire date(s): 590–775 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: smelting source: Burl Bellamy, Dennis Jackson and Gill Johnston, ‘Early Iron Smelting in the Rockingham Forest Area: A Survey of the Evidence’, Northants. Archaeology, xxix (2001), 111. 38 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 Burlescombe, Devon date(s): 770–980 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: smelting; bloom-smithing source: J. Reed, G. Juleff and O. J. Bayer, ‘Three Late Saxon Iron-Smelting Furnaces at Burlescombe, Devon’, Proc. Devon Archaeol. Soc., lxiv (2006), 86–92, 110, 115. Carhampton, Somerset See under Eastbury Farm below. Catholme, Staffordshire date(s): 5th–7th century (excavation) activity: smelting source: Stuart Losco-Bradley and Gavin Kinsley, Catholme: An Anglo-Saxon Settlement on the Trent Gravels in Staffordshire (Nottingham, 2002), 113–15, 123. Clearwell Quarry, Newland Parish, Gloucestershire date(s): late 8th–9th century (radiocarbon) activity: smelting; ore roasting; charcoal making source:5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archsearch/ record.jsf?titleId¼18944384(accessed 1 Sept. 2011). Cross Leys Quarry, Wittering, near Peterborough, Northamptonshire date(s): associated with smelting: 520–660; 570–770 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) associated with charcoal making: 460–480; 570–770; 660–990 activity: smelting; possible charcoal making source: W. Wall, ‘Middle Saxon Iron Smelting Furnaces in Cambridge’, Hist. Metallurgy Soc. News, xli (1999), 3–4; Joe Abrams, ‘An Archaeological Watching Brief at Cross Leys Quarry, Wittering, Peterborough. Phase 4, Stage 1’ (Phoenix Consulting Archaeology Limited, viii, 2003), 25–7, 33. Dulverton (Blacklake Wood), Devon date(s): 415–650 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: smelting source: Anon., ‘New Radiocarbon Dates for Iron-Working Sites on Exmoor’, Hist. Metallurgy Soc. News, xliv (2000), 3–4. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 39 Dunkeswell Parish, Devon date(s): 664–889 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: smelting source: Frances Griffith and Peter Weddell, ‘Ironworking in the Blackdown Hills: The Results of Recent Survey’, Mining Hist., xiii (1996), 33–4. Eastbury Farm, Carhampton, Somerset date(s): post Roman/early medieval (dating method unclear) activity: smelting; billet-smithing source:5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archsearch/ record.jsf?titleId¼12292494. Easton Hornstocks Wood, Northamptonshire See under Easton on the Hill below. Easton on the Hill, Northamptonshire date(s): 440–670; 620–880 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: smelting source: Bellamy, Jackson and Johnston, ‘Early Iron Smelting in the Rockingham Forest Area’, 122–3. Fineshade, Northamptonshire date(s): 465–480; 520–660; 585–675 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: smelting source: Bellamy, Jackson and Johnston, ‘Early Iron Smelting in the Rockingham Forest Area’, 111; Andrew Mudd, ‘Early to Middle Saxon Iron Smelting Furnaces at Fineshade Abbey, Northamptonshire’, Northants. Archaeology, xxxiv (2006). Flixborough, Lincolnshire date(s): associated with access to freshly smelted iron bars: late 7th – mid 8th century (excavation); associated with smelting: mid 9th – mid 10th century activity: access to freshly smelted iron bars; smelting source: D. H. Evans and Christopher Loveluck, Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, c.AD 600–1000: The Artefact Evidence (Oxford, 2009) 317, 324. Geddington, Northamptonshire date(s): ‘early or middle Saxon’ (pottery) 40 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 activity: smelting source: Glenn Foard, ‘An Archaeological Resource Assessment of Anglo-Saxon Northamptonshire (400–1066)’, 27: 5http:// www.le.ac.uk/ulas/publications/documents/29nhas_000.pdf4 (accessed 28 Aug. 2011). Gillingham, near Shaftesbury, Dorset date(s): 641–680 (radiocarbon, 1 sigma); 8th century (archaeomagnetic) activity: smelting source: G. McDonnell, ‘The Slag’, in Michael J. Heaton, ‘Two Mid-Saxon Grain Driers and Later Medieval Features at Chantry Fields, Gillingham, Dorset’, Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist. and Archaeol. Soc., cxiv (1992), 114–15. Grendon, Northamptonshire date(s): ‘early or middle Saxon’ activity: smelting source: Foard, ‘Archaeological Resource Assessment of AngloSaxon Northamptonshire’, 27. Laxton, Northamptonshire date(s): 7th century (radiocarbon) activity: smelting source: Irene Schrüfer-Kolb, Roman Iron Production in Britain: Technological and Socio-Economic Landscape Development along the Jurassic Ridge (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Brit. ser., ccclxxx, Oxford, 2004), 59. Little Totham (Rook Hall Farm/Slough House Farm), Essex date(s): 560–760 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma); centring on c.530 (thermoluminescence); 6th century (pottery) activity: smelting source: Patrick Adkins, ‘Archaeology North of the River Blackwater, Essex, United Kingdom’, 5http://adsl06805.free space.surfree.co.uk/4 (accessed 12 May 2011); Patrick Adkins, ‘Rook Hall’, Current Archaeology, cxv (1989), 262–3; R. Ball, ‘Technological Samples’, in S. Wallis and M. Waughman, Archaeology and the Landscape in the Lower Blackwater Valley (East Anglian Archaeology, lxxxii, Chelmsford, 1998), 125–6. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 41 London (Royal Opera House) date(s): 730–770 (excavation) activity: access to freshly smelted iron, but no smelting source: Gordon Malcolm, David Bowsher and Robert Cowie, Middle Saxon London: Excavations at the Royal Opera House, 1989–99 (Museum of London Archaeol. Service Monographs, xv, 2003), 176. Maldon (Church Street), Essex date(s): 7th–9th century (excavation) activity: access to fresh blooms of iron, but no smelting source: T. Ennis, ‘Former Croxley Works Site, Church Street, Maldon: Archaeological Evaluation and Excavation’, 1763, Essex County Council Field Archaeology Unit, Braintree (2009), 19: 5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view /greylit/details.cfm?id¼4562&det¼y&CFID¼21871& CFTOKEN¼BE9C8C25-9383-491E-BA1599F5F7C0A3184 (accessed 12 Jan. 2012). Mayton Wood, Norfolk date(s): 661–778; 689–890 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: charcoal making; no evidence for smelting source: L. Webley, ‘Prehistoric, Roman and Saxon Activity on the Fen Hinterland at Parnwell, Peterborough’, Proc. Cambridge Antiq. Soc., xcvi (2007), 94. Melbourne, Leicestershire date(s): ‘early to middle Anglo-Saxon’ activity: smelting source: Nicholas J. Cooper, The Archaeology of the East Midlands: An Archaeological Resource Assessment and Research Agenda (Leicester Archaeology Monographs, xiii, Leicester, 2006), 177–8. Melford Meadows, near Brettenham, Norfolk date(s): late 5th–6th century (excavation) activity: access to freshly smelted blooms made elsewhere source: C. J. Salter, ‘Metalworking Residues’, in Andrew Mudd, Excavations at Melford Meadows, Brettenham, 1994: RomanoBritish and Early Saxon Occupations (East Anglian Archaeology, xcix, Oxford, 2002), 74–6. 42 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 Millbrook, Ashdown Forest, Sussex date(s): 745 þ9#/#65 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma); 860 þ/# 60 (directional magnetic dating) activity: smelting source: C. F. Tebbutt, ‘A Middle-Saxon Smelting Site at Millbrook, Ashdown Forest, Sussex’, Sussex Archaeol. Collection, cxx (1982), 28, 30. Mucking, Essex date(s): 6th or 7th century (excavation) activity: smelting source: G. McDonnell, ‘The Slags and Metallurgical Residues’, in Ann Clark, Excavations at Mucking, i, The Site Atlas (English Heritage Archaeol. Rept, xx, London, 1993), 31–4; Helena Hamerow, Excavations at Mucking, ii, The Anglo-Saxon Settlement (English Heritage Archaeol. Rept, xxi, London, 1993), 17; G. McDonnell, ‘Slag and Ironworking Residues’, ibid., 82–3. Newland Parish, Gloucestershire See under Clearwell Quarry above. Parnwell, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire date(s): 661–778; 689–890 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: relatively large-scale charcoal making source: Webley, ‘Prehistoric, Roman and Saxon Activity on the Fen Hinterland’, 94. Purdis Farm (Bucklesham Road), Suffolk date(s): ‘middle Saxon’ (dating method not specified) activity: charcoal making; ‘nearby’ smelting source:5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archsearch/ record.jsf?titleId¼18967034(accessed 15 Feb. 2012). Quarrington, Lincolnshire date(s): 5th–6th century (excavation) activity: smelting source: Gary Taylor et al., ‘An Early to Middle Saxon Settlement at Quarrington, Lincolnshire’, Antiquaries Jl, lxxxiii (2003), 256. RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 43 Radley, Oxfordshire date(s): 5th–6th century (excavation) activity: limited access to freshly smelted blooms source: C. Salter, ‘Slag’, in R. A. Chambers and E. McAdam, Excavations at Radley Barrow Hills, Radley, Oxfordshire 1983–5, ii, The Romano-British Cemetery and Anglo-Saxon Settlement (Oxford, 2007), 259–62. Ramsbury, Wiltshire date(s): 735–885; 830–980; 725–875; 770–920; 585–735; 880– 970 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) strap-ends (8th–9th century) activity: smelting source: Jeremy Haslam, ‘A Middle Saxon Iron Smelting Site at Ramsbury, Wiltshire’, Medieval Archaeology, xxiv (1980), 52–5. Romsey, Hampshire date(s): 6th–7th century (excavation) activity: smelting source: P. Andrews, Excavations at Hamwic, ii, Excavations of Six Dials (Council Brit. Archaeology, Research Rept, cix, London, 1997), 222; J. G. McDonnell, ‘The Ironworking Residues from Romsey, Hampshire’, Ancient Monuments Laboratory Rept, 72/88. Rook Hall Farm, Essex See under Little Totham above. Shakenoak Farm, Oxfordshire date(s): 6th–7th century (excavation) activity: smelting source: A. C. C. Brodribb, A. R. Hands and D. R. Walker, The Roman Villa at Shakenoak Farm, Oxfordshire: Excavations, 1960– 1976 (Brit. Archaeol. Repts, Brit. ser., cccxcv, Oxford, 2005), 166, 173, 175, 241. Slough House Farm, Essex See under Little Totham above. South Hook, Herbrandston, Pembrokeshire date(s): ‘early medieval’ (dating method not specified) activity: smelting 44 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 217 source: Nancy Edwards, Alan Lane and Mark Redknap, ‘Early Medieval Wales: An Updated Framework for Archaeological Research’ (2010), 5:5http://www.archaeoleg.org.uk/pdf/reviewdocs/earlymedreview.pdf4(accessed 29 Aug. 2011). Thetford (Brandon Road), Norfolk date(s): early 8th–9th century (excavation) activity: access to fresh billets, but did not make iron on site source: N. Crummy, ‘Metalwork’, in Rob Atkins and Aileen Connor, Farmers and Ironsmiths: Prehistoric, Roman and Anglo-Saxon Settlement beside Brandon Road, Thetford, Norfolk (East Anglian Archaeology, cxxxiv, Bar Hill, 2010), 54–5. Wakerley, Northamptonshire date(s): 670–870; 620–690; 790–990; 690–900; 670–880 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: smelting source: David Fell, Archaeological Evaluation: Land at Wakerley, Northamptonshire, 698/WKM/1, 2 vols. (Archaeological Services and Consultancy Ltd, Milton Keynes, 2006), ii, 83. Weldon (Chapel Road, Little Weldon), Northamptonshire date(s): 840–980 (archaeomagnetic); 850–900 (pottery) activity: smelting; bloom-smithing source: T. Rayner, ‘Archaeological Excavation of Land to the Rear of Chapel Road, Weldon, Northamptonshire (WCRE01)’, 1, 6, and Jane Cowgill, ‘Appendix 8: Report on the Slags and Related Debris from the Iron-Smelting Site at Chapel Road, Little Weldon, Northamptonshire (WCRE01)’, both in Archaeol. Project Services Rept, iii (2003). West Heslerton, Yorkshire date(s): ‘early to middle Saxon’ (dating method not specified) activity: smelting; access to blooms source: Jane Cowgill, ‘4.11. The Slags and Metal-Working Debris’, in Dominic Powlesland, ‘The West Heslerton Assessment’, Internet Archaeology, v (1998). Wittering (Bonemills Farm), Cambridgeshire date(s): 575–875; 680–905 (radiocarbon, 2 sigma) activity: smelting; possible ore roasting RECYCLING IN BRITAIN 45 source: personal communication, Elizabeth Popescu, Oxford Archaeology; Wall, ‘Middle Saxon Iron Smelting Furnaces in Cambridge, 3–4. Wittering, near Peterborough, Northamptonshire See under Cross Leys Quarry above. Witton, near North Walsham, Norfolk date(s): 5th–6th century (pottery) activity: smelting source: K. Wade, ‘The Early Anglo-Saxon Period’, in Andrew J. Lawson, The Archaeology of Witton near North Walsham, Norfolk (East Anglian Archaeology, xviii, Dereham, 1983), 50, 58, 67. Wollaston (Dando Close), Northamptonshire date(s): 500–850 (pottery) activity: smelting; bloom-smithing source: Karin Semmelmann, ‘Land at Dando Close Wollaston, Northants.’, Heritage Network Limited, no. 205 (2003), 28, 35–6: 5http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/ arch-442-1/dissemination/pdf/heritage1-4985.pdf4. Wootton, near Hunsbury Hill Fort, Northamptonshire date(s): ‘early or middle Saxon’ activity: smelting source: Foard, ‘Archaeological Resource Assessment of AngloSaxon Northamptonshire’, 27; Dennis Jackson, ‘Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon Settlement and Activity around the Hunsbury Hillfort, Northampton’, Northants. Archaeology, xxv (1993–4). Worgret, Dorset date(s): after 664 (dendrochronology) activity: smelting source: D. A. Hinton, ‘Revised Dating of the Worgret Structure’, Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist. and Archaeol. Soc., cxiv (1992), 257–9.