Today (27th February), Trust archaeologist Howard Brooks was studying the post-Roman pottery which we excavated at Stock, near Chelmsford in Essex. Howard is our post-Roman pottery specialist. The Stock pottery is actually post-medieval: Howard dates it to the 17th-18th century. It consists of two kinds of pottery, ie post-medieval red earthenware and Metropolitan slipware, and all the forms represented are kitchen wares like plates and dishes. There are also fragments of peg-tile with green glaze which has dripped on to them – they are parts of tiles which were used to build structural stacks inside pottery kilns. Pottery vessels were placed in a kiln with wet glaze and, in the heat of the kiln, the glaze dripped on to the tile stacks while the vessels were being fired.
The pottery and tile fragments together indicate the site of a nearby kiln, although we didn’t find a kiln. There must have been two or three pottery kilns in Stock, as other groups of pottery have been found there. These two or three kilns would have produced a lot of the pottery for the Chelmsford and London markets (Metropolitan slipware was mostly exported to London).
Trust archaeologists Adam Wightman and Chris Lister undertook the evaluation at Pottery House in Stock and excavated the pottery and tile fragments.
The images show Howard studying the pottery in the store room at Roman Circus House today, some of the kiln tile fragments, and some of the fragments of Metropolitan slipware.
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