It’s a long story! – and very unusual finds from Head Street

On Friday (27th September), at Roman Circus House, senior Trust archaeologist Howard Brooks was photographing an assemblage of finds from the site of 45 Head Street in Colchester, as he is currently writing a report on our fieldwork on the site.

These finds have a long and interesting history. After being made and used, and broken and discarded, and then spending several centuries in the ground, they were actually found by builders in 1982, during a Trust watching brief on works on the building on the site. On an initial site visit, our archaeologist didn’t observe anything but, on a later visit, the builders produced this assemblage of finds, consisting of fragmentary fine glassware and pottery vessels. These were, possibly, from a rectangular, brick-lined cess-pit at the rear of the building. The finds had clearly been hand-picked by a non-archaeologist, and there may have been further material. The story of the discovery of the finds was published in ‘Notes’ in the Trust’s Catalogue (no 11, summer 1982, on page 9). Not long after that, the Trust sent the finds to a medieval finds specialist, so that he could study the finds and contribute to our report. Years passed, and the arrangement with the specialist slipped off the record…  Then, in 2007, the Trust received a postcard from the specialist’s daughter, saying that she had discovered the finds in her late father’s loft. So the finds were returned to the Trust, and the process leading to the production of our report was begun. We then commissioned the recognised, freelance medieval specialist David Andrews in Essex to study the glass finds for us.

45 Head Street was formerly Williams & Glynn’s Bank, and is now the premises of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The finds consist of fragments of pottery and glass (including parts of three glass goblets), a fragmentary but reconstructed German stoneware tankard and an almost-complete ceramic moneybox, and a beautiful, fragmentary but reconstructed glass goblet. David Andrews has dated the finds to the 16th century and describes them as being relatively common in ‘gentry’ houses, but such finds are not commonly discovered in urban contexts. Howard says that these are very unusual finds for Colchester.

One of the challenges for a busy field unit in commercial archaeology is dealing with some backlog of material, which even the best field unit can acquire, due to circumstances beyond our control… The Trust actually has an excellent record for our fieldwork and for our post-excavation work, including the management of finds, and an excellent record on completing reports for our clients, often to strict deadlines; and we also have an excellent publication record!

The images show the finds at Roman Circus House, on Friday: the reconstructed goblet with part of another goblet, and the moneybox with the tankard.

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