In 1967, an aerial photograph taken by archaeologists based at the University of Cambridge revealed a previously unknown set of anomalies in Dell Field, south of Codicote. It shows an almost square set of ditches, extending away from the northeast corner to the east and from the southwest corner to the south. Another ditch runs from the southern end of the eastern side, apparently parallel with the northern ditch. For many years, the date and nature of the enclosure remained unknown, although its shape suggested that it might belong to the Late Iron Age or Roman periods (about 100 BC to AD 420). In 1989, North Hertfordshire District Council received an application to develop a golf course on the farmland between Hollard’s Farm on the B656 Codicote Road and the St Albans Road. Part of the permission required an archaeological evaluation of the site by trial trenching, which took place in March 1990.

The enclosure sits on the edge of a plateau with good views across the River Mimram valley to its west and south. The eight trial trenches examined the ditches on all four sides of the enclosure, as well as the ditches extending away from it; one targeted an area outside, to see if there was any evidence for activity in that area, while another extended into its centre. As well as digging trenches, the team of archaeologists from North Hertfordshire Museum carried out fieldwalking on the rest of the site, recording visible finds picked up from the surface, and recorded visible earthworks.

The underlying geology of the site was complex, with the weathered chalk bedrock disrupted by extensive areas of acidic silty clays. The clays appeared in bands running roughly west to east across part of the site, but as mottles elsewhere, making it challenging to identify archaeological features. These clays are evidence for the Pleistocene history of this area. During the Anglian Glaciation, 478,000 to 424,000 years ago, an ice sheet pushed westwards across this area from the direction of Ware. It tore up the underlying chalk, creating grooves and hollows in it. The clays known as the Ware Till filled these holes and remained after the ice sheet melted.

The ditches extending away from the enclosure look like part of an earlier system of land division. They were U-shaped and up to a metre of so deep. The sections across these ditches produced Late Iron Age grog-tempered pottery from their lowest fills. Grog is crushed pottery, used in making new pots as a way of helping water escape from the clay during firing. If trapped, microscopic droplets of water can expand as they turn into steam, making the pot explode and destroying others in the same firing. Grog-tempered wares are typical of the first century BC in Hertfordshire, continuing well into the first century AD. All of the types found were of first-century date. One of the sections also contained a sherd of flint-tempered pottery, more typical of the first half of the first millennium BC. As it came from one of the upper fills of the ditch, it is of no help in dating its construction. The ditches had been cleaned out and recut at some point during their use.

The enclosure ditches presented a very similar picture in some ways. They, too, had at least one recut. One of these recuts contained a very fine copper alloy brooch, as pictured here. More of this later. Unlike the ditches described previously, they were V-shaped with steep sides and at least 1.5 m deep. The lower fills had a mixture of grog-tempered wares and post-conquest types, including pottery from the Verolamium region kilns at Bricket Wood and part of an amphora. Some of this material dates from after AD 70 and it came from a layer that suggested nearby demolition. One of the trenches uncovered a large subrectangular feature, perhaps a pit or quarry, but there was no time to investigate it. The confusing character of the mixed geology made it impossible to identify postholes, so we do not know if any of the trenches revealed traces of buildings. A fragment of Roman roof tile from one of the sections, though, showed that there must have been a structure nearby. It is more likely that this lay inside the enclosure rather than outside it.

Away from the excavation trenches, almost 95% of the 437 finds picked up during fieldwalking were medieval or later in date. Most of the Roman finds, including roof tile, came from the field close to the enclosure. This probably means that the most intensive activity at this time lay in and around it. A couple of waste flakes from making flint tools came from the field on the eastern edge of the area surveyed. They perhaps date from the Early Bronze Age (about 2500-1400 BC) and, like the later material, tell us nothing about the enclosure.

The site does not exist in isolation. During the growth of Welwyn Garden City, several similar sites were uncovered and examined rapidly. Traces of buildings and hearths at these sites show that they were domestic enclosures, with substantial ditches (and, presumably, now-levelled banks). At Codicote, there are hints that the banks were deliberately pushed back into the ditches; there is similar evidence from two of the Welwyn sites, including one where fills pushed into the ditches had crushed complete pots in the bottom.

What were these sites and when were they in use? Although the V-shaped ditches look defensive, the pottery found in them shows that they were domestic. There are the remains of pre-conquest grain storage jars and post-conquest flagons, and there are bones from the main meat animals (sheep/goats, cattle, pigs and chickens), some of which have butchery marks. Oyster shells show that people were also eating seafood, while fragments of hare bone from the initial silting of the enclosure ditch may have come from a wild animal not used as a food source.

The pottery from all of them falls into a very specific period: the first three quarters of the first century AD. Welwyn archaeologist Tony Rook has suggested that they all fell out of use at the same time, perhaps following the rebellion of Boudica against Rome in AD 61. This is too early for some of the pottery from the Codicote site, which probably did not arrive in this part of Hertfordshire before AD 70. Indeed, the brooch already mentioned provides important clues to dating. An almost identical brooch from excavations at Baldock is of a type generally datable to the 60s AD. It is in near-mint condition, with no real sign of wear, showing that it cannot have been lost long after AD 70. At the same time, it comes from a recut through fills containing pottery no earlier than AD 70. As a result, we can suggest that demolition of this site – and probably the others, too – happened a decade or so after the Boudican revolt.

The scale of the ditches (and presumably the banks made from chalk quarried from them) shows that these enclosures belonged to people anxious to display their status. One, at Grubs Barn in Welwyn Garden City, lay very close to the high-status Welwyn Type burial on the Panshanger Estate excavated in 1965 and now displayed in the British Museum. Might this have been the tomb of one of the wealthy owners of this type of site? At least nine other enclosures are known within 5 km or so of that at Dell Field and they must have been a conspicuous part of the landscape. All that can be dated were abandoned at around the same time, which can hardly be a coincidence. As this was not a time of economic or agricultural collapse, we need to find some other cause. The sites were abandoned around the time that a village-like settlement was growing at Welwyn, southwest of where the Roman road crossed the River Mimram. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that land ownership became concentrated in the hands of one wealthy family, who encouraged independently-minded farmers to move from their showy enclosed farmsteads into a fashionably nucleated settlement. That way, the local authorities could make sure that a Boudica type rebellion would not happen again.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

On 5 July 1902, workmen at 25 High Street, Colchester, uncovered a lead canister buried in the back yard. On opening it, they discovered between eleven and twelve thousand silver short cross pennies minted in England, Scotland and Ireland, as well as 23 minted overseas. The most recent coin had been minted in 1237, so the hoard probably dates from shortly after then. A second hoard, also in a lead canister, turned up in the same garden, only 20 m away, in 1969. This one contained 14,065 coins, dating from up to 1278. A third lead container, with only one coin inside, dated 1247/8, was found only 200 m away in 2000.

The coin pictured is a short cross penny from the 1902 hoard, minted in London on behalf of Henry II between 1180 and 1189. Henry II was the son of the Empress Matilda, who had fought a bitter civil war against Stephen. She was the daughter and heir of Henry I, who under English law ought to have succeeded to the throne when he died in 1135. Stephen was Henry I’s nephew and had sworn allegiance to Matilda in 1127, recognising her as the future queen. However, when Henry died, Stephen rushed to England to be chosen by the barons as king. Although the pope agreed to this arrangement in 1136, Matilda invaded in 1139 to claim what was – according to her supporters – rightfully hers.

The civil war rumbled on for years, with neither side gaining a distinct advantage. Stephen tried to prevent Matilda or her son Henry from succeeding him by having his own son, Eustace, crowned joint king of England in 1152. The church refused to co-operate and, when Eustace died prematurely in 1153, Stephen grudgingly negotiated the Treaty of Wallingford, which proclaimed Henry as his heir. Stephen died in the following year and Henry became king.

Henry II ruled an empire that stretched from the Scottish border in the north to the Pyrenees in the south. He inherited his continental territories from his father, Geoffroy Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. During his reign of thirty-five years, he spent only thirteen of them in England. He is remembered for two main things: his quarrel with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, which led to Thomas’s murder, and his interest in reforming English law.

Henry introduced a penny with a short, equal-armed cross on the reverse in 1180. They stayed the standard design until 1247, even keeping the name of the king as hENRICVS during the reigns of Richard I and John. Richard did mint coins in his own name in Aquitaine, while John did as Lord of Ireland. This caused early numismatists no end of problems, as they thought that either these kings did not issue coins or that none have survived. Henry III reformed the coinage in 1147, bringing in a design with a cross that extended to the edge of the coin. This design remained in use until 1509, during the reign of Henry VII.

How did a coin found in Colchester come into the possession of North Hertfordshire Museum? In the years after the hoard’s first discovery, Colchester Corporation began sending examples to national and provincial museums, as well as to private collectors. Letchworth Museum received nine coins from the hoard: two of Henry II, two of Richard I, three of John and two of Henry III. They were entered into the Accessions Register in February 1927 but were already in the museum collections. It is possible that they were part of the ’19 English Silver Coins’ that form the first entry in the register, 1916.1, on 20 March 1916.

Why were the coins buried in such huge numbers? Hoards are found throughout history, often put into the ground during times of economic or political crisis. The date of the second hoard, about 1278, has been linked with Edward I’s Statutum de Judaismo (‘Statute of the Jewry’), issued in 1275. Among the provisions of the statute, lending at high interest rates (usury) was outlawed, some debts to Jewish money-lenders were written off, and Jewish people could live only in certain designated towns, where they had to wear a yellow felt badge on their clothing. The statue effectively put an end to Jewish banking businesses, and wealthy bankers may have hidden their capital for safe keeping. The canisters found in Colchester were perhaps under-floor ‘safes’ used by bankers, as 25 High Street was probably in the city’s ghetto.

Like so many museum objects, the back-story of this coin holds more interest than the artefact itself. This is one of the reasons why archaeologists bristle when the media focus on reporting discoveries as ‘treasure’ worth so many thousands of pounds. However, this financial value pales into insignificance when put beside the priceless historical information such discoveries can yield.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

When is a Chinese god not a Chinese god? When he’s Hercules, of course!

This may sound like a cryptic riddle with an answer so obscure that it’s meaningless, but it isn’t. It’s a tale of misidentification from 1926. On 29 July in that year, Walter Whiting, the manager of Barclays Bank in Hitchin High Street, loaned a collection of 67 antiquities to Letchworth Museum (accession numbers 1926.3656 to 1926.3708) on behalf of a client. Walter and his wife Marion lived above the bank, with their children and household servants.

Most of the objects loaned to Letchworth Museum came from a Roman burial ground discovered at Foxholes, on the Pirton Road in Hitchin, about 1880. The items consisted of pottery vessels, copper alloy brooches and other metal items. There were also a Saxon pin from St Andrews Hill, a pilgrim flask, a key found in the wall of a house in Bucklersbury during demolition (‘many years ago’), a belt slide, a lead cloth seal, 15 jetons (all from Hitchin) and two bone spoons from Arlesey as well as ‘1 Chinese Bronze God, Royston Heath’. In January 1940, Mr Whiting removed them from Letchworth and deposited them in the newly-established (and still unopened) Hitchin Museum. When the objects were accessioned to Hitchin Museum (accession number 220 to 232), the ’figurine of a god’ had become ‘?Chinese or Indian’.

In 1976, the object was transferred back to Letchworth Museum, along with most of the archaeological material accessioned to Hitchin. Some time between 1940 and 1976, the loan had become a donation from the heirs of the Lucas family. The ‘?Chinese or Indian’ god had also been downgraded to Hercules, who was a demigod; it had also acquired a label that had fallen off one of the pots from Foxholes giving the original Letchworth Accession number. Perhaps all the objects from the Lucas collection were kept in the same box, allowing the labels to become muddled.

How do we know that the statuette shows the classical demigod Hercules rather than an Indian or Chinese god? There are several pieces of evidence. Firstly, the figurine is naked. Hercules is always naked, as in so much classical art (except in the terrible Disney™ animated cartoon from 2008). Secondly, he is brandishing a club in his right hand. A knobbed wooden club was his favourite weapon, which became a common design for talismans from the second century onwards. Thirdly, he has a cloak draped over his left arm. This is actually a lion skin, taken from the Nemean lion, which Hercules killed as the first of twelve labours he had to perform for King Eurystheus. Its fur was its protection: no arrow or missile could pierce it. After stunning it with his club and then strangling it, Hercules used one of the lion’s claws to remove the pelt. The skin protected him not just from arrows but also from the elements (very useful if one has no other clothing!).

The Roman Emperor Commodus (AD 161-192, emperor from 176) liked to present himself as a second Hercules. He was left-handed and proud of the fact. He was also unusually handsome and strong, and even trained as a gladiator to perform in arenas, to the disgust of the Roman upper classes. Like Hercules, he was able to kill lions (the historian Cassius Dio, a younger contemporary, claimed that on one occasion, he killed a hundred in a single show) and he was a skilled archer. Although popular with ordinary people and the army, he was disliked by the Senate. His rule became increasingly dictatorial during his 20s, after his father Marcus Aurelius’s death. Cassius Dio thought that he was not naturally evil but was too easily led astray by friends. Eventually, his mistress Marcia arranged his murder. Although the Senate declared him a public enemy, the Emperor Septimius Severus (145-211, emperor from 193) reinstated his memory and had him deified in 195.

Might this statuette be a depiction of Commodus, then? Similar claims have been made for the notorious Cerne Abbas Giant, an unashamedly male chalk hill figure in Dorset. Our figurine seems to be wearing a radiate crown, an attribute of the god Helios. An intaglio in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg shows Commodus with one; Hercules never wears a crown. Perhaps this is not so much a statuette of Hercules than one of Commodus-as-Hercules-and-Helios. Merging humans, demigods and gods was something that Roman religion was more than capable of doing, especially if the statuette dates from after 195 and shows Divus Commodus (‘divine Commodus’).

Unfortunately, we know nothing about the circumstances of its discovery. The Letchworth Museum accessions register states that it was from ‘Royston Heath’, meaning Therfield Heath. Although the heath is a place with many important archaeological remains, almost nothings found there dates from the Roman period. A low mound excavated during improvements to the cricket pitch in 1855 covered a pit containing a Roman pot, but its precise location is unknown. Roman finds have been made by metal detectorists in Therfield (although not on the Heath, where detecting is not allowed). There are some in the northwest corner of the parish, at the end of what was formerly counted as part of the heath but is no longer. A barrow that once stood in this area, at The Thrift, was opened about 1830 and found to contain ‘pottery and other objects reputed to be Roman’. Might this statuette of Commodus-Hercules-Helios have been one of those objects? We will never know.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews