what is a ‘raspberry prunt’?

Today (13th January), Trust pottery specialist Steve Benfield and Trust volunteer Arthur carried some extremely heavy crates of archaeological material from our storage building and into the large room of the Roman circus centre. Here, Trust volunteers Wendie and Jane helped Steve to sort through the large amount of material into categories for him to study and write a report on. The material is part of the very large amount of archaeological material which we excavated in 2014 at the Williams & Griffin store in the High Street at Colchester. The crates of material being sorted today contain fragments of pottery and some glass. These have all been washed, marked and bagged by our team of dedicated archaeology volunteers. However, fascinating fragments are still there to be rediscovered in the crates – today, Wendie picked out two fragments of post-medieval glass which represent one or two glass vessels. The fragments are made of colourless glass which is now silvery/iridescent on the surface and they display applied decorative elements in a pattern. The two fragments were retrieved from a very large rubbish-pit on the site (AF18).

Trust senior archaeologist Howard Brooks is our in-house post-medieval expert, and he identified the two fragments of glass as parts of one or perhaps two early post-medieval, high-status glass drinking-vessels: these might have been a short or tall beaker or, perhaps, a roehmer (a drinking-glass with a bowl on a hollow stem), and a possible stemmed goblet. The two fragments are decorated with a pattern of an element which is known as a ‘raspberry prunt’: ie the glass vessel was ‘prunted’. Raspberry prunts are three-dimensional and were made by applying a molten glass drop to the surface of a glass vessel and then impressing the drop with a pattern using a prunt stamp. The prunts on our two fragments are all a ‘dotted prunt’. We think that this kind of glass vessel was imported from Germany. These fragments represent a well-made drinking-glass or -glasses and seem to be unusual in including so many prunts. Prunts were decorative but also, apparently, helped to give the drinker a better grip on the drinking-glass…

The Williams & Griffin store is at the upper or western end of the High Street and its site was at the heart of the walled town. This was a high-status area and it included Norman stone houses and, possibly, the house of a medieval money-lender, as well as the moot hall, which housed the town’s law court, gaol and wool market. It was the centre of the town’s commerce and control and was where high-status townspeople would have lived. Some of the post-medieval finds from our site at the Williams & Griffin store have already been identified as high- status domestic items, and now including the drinking-glass or -glasses represented by our two ‘raspberry prunt’ glass fragments.

The images show: the two glass fragments decorated with the raspberry prunts (which have different designs); Steve and Wendie in the Roman circus centre today, sorting the material to be studied; three crates of material from pit AF18; and some of the (very large) fragments of post-medieval pottery from AF18. The larger glass fragment is cylindrical and about three inches long.

.