About 700 m east of the village of Sandon lies a tree-covered mound, off Park Lane and north of Notley Green. According to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) in 1911, it is a ‘moated tumulus’. This is not a recognised term in archaeology and shows that the surveyor had difficulty recognising what it was. Indeed, there has long been speculation about its origins and purpose. It has been described as a prehistoric burial mound, an early medieval moot hill, a Norman motte, a medieval windmill mound or a combination of these.
It is almost circular, measuring about 26.2 m northwest to southeast, and 26.8 m northeast to southwest. The flat top of the mound measures 17.7 by 19.5 m and is raised a little over a metre above the surrounding ground level. A shallow ditch 4.3 m across surrounds the mound, with a gap of 4.9 m towards the northeast. Water collects in part of the ditch during wet weather. It was covered in trees by the time of the Tithe Award in May 1840; although trees are not shown here on Bryant’s map of 1822, he may have ignored small clumps in his survey.
The Mount lies in a field called Woodley Yards by 1910, although in 1840 it was called Knotley Field. A field east of it was known as
Knotley Mill Field, to the south of which was Mill Field. Knotley is a variant of Notley, the name of the green south of the site, itself recorded as Knott Green in 1676. Mill Field is over a mile north of Mill End in the parish, so the names can hardly be connected.
The Hertfordshire folklorist William Blyth Gerish (1864-1921) recorded a gruesome story about The Mount. A house belonging to a wealthy man stood on the top of it and a local boy overheard some men plotting to burgle it. They spotted the boy, captured him, and threated to flay him (remove his skin) if he told anyone what he had overheard. The brave lad did tell the owners what he had heard, so they could defend their property. The attempted burglary was foiled, but the thieves caught the boy and carried out their threat. The boy survived the ordeal, saying that the most painful part of being flayed was having the skin removed from his fingertips and his toes. Letchworth Museum’s archives (now in North Hertfordshire Museum) have a typescript bearing the name of R J Kingsley of Nelson in New Zealand dated May 1904, which may be the source of Gerish’s published tale.
The East Hertfordshire Archaeological Society organised a trip to The Mount on 24 July 1929. The visit reignited interest in it. The headmaster of Sandon School, James W Sherlock (1898-?), suggested that it was a ‘Late Bronze, or Early Iron Age’ burial mound in 1932. He reported that the owner of the site, Joan Bowman of Sandon Bury, had given permission to excavate in the near future. As it is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, Percival Westell of Letchworth Museum got permission from the Ministry of Works to undertake investigations.
He organised a cross-shaped trench across the centre of the mound between April and September 1933. Local volunteers, including many residents of the village who had attended an adult education class run by Mr Sherlock, did the bulk of the work. Westell was rarely on site, and Mr Sherlock kept him informed of progress by letter. Around the time of the excavation, a schoolboy discovered a Romano-British melon bead from the field surface near The Mount, raising the possibility that it was of Roman date.
The excavators began by sinking a cross-shaped trench across the centre of The Mount, labelling each arm as a separate trench (1 to the north, 2 to the south, 3 to the east and 4 to the west). Each branch was three feet (0.9 m) wide and none went deeper than six feet six inches (2 m). Two extensions made later were labelled 5 and 6. At the centre of the mound, the deepest part, the top deposit was a layer of loamy topsoil, one foot (0.3 m) this. Beneath this was a layer of chalky clay two feet six inches (0.75 m) thick above a band of loamy clay-with-flints six inches (0.15 m) thick. The lowest two feet six inches (0.75 m) consisted of boulder clay containing glacial erratics. This was the underlying natural subsoil.
The first finds were made immediately beneath the topsoil, with those at the lower levels found in an area of 16 by 3 feet (4.9 by 0.9 m). The excavators found 757 potsherds, four small copper alloy objects, 200 iron nails, a knife blade, a key and other iron objects, animal bones (cattle and pig, including teeth) and oyster shells. On 27 April 1933, Mr Sherlock wrote to Westell mentioning the discovery of a coin. According to the Royston Crow of 21 April 1933, all the finds made by that time were made at depths of between six inches and five feet (0.15 to 1.5 m) but no deeper.
Six feet (1.8 m) down, the excavators discovered two wooden beams, arranged at right angles. They extended away from the sides of the trenches in which they were found (1 and 3) and numbered these extensions Trenches 5 and 6. The beams were made from oak, 16 feet (4.9 m) long and one foot (0.3 m) square and at each end, there were recesses to take angled uprights. The excavators correctly identified the beams as a cross-tree, the base elements of a wooden post mill, the earliest type of windmill. They lay at the bottom of a pit cut through the layers of the mound, apart from the topsoil, and into the underlying subsoil; it was the fill of this pit that contained all of the finds. The cross trees were no longer in their original positions, one lying on top of the other in such a way that they were disconnected at the mortices that originally held them together.
Although Percival Westell reported that all the finds went on loan to Letchworth Museum (accessioned as 1935.6922), there are only 13 potsherds in the collection. Perhaps the loaned material was returned (to Mr Sherlock or Mrs Bowman?) or it suffered from a ‘rationalisation’ of the archaeological collections in the early 1970s. However, the thinning out of archaeological material involved mainly disposing of unfeatured body sherds, yet only one of the ten handles, none of the twenty-five base sherds and none of the thirty-six glazed or decorated sherds remains in the collection.
However, Gerald Dunning of the British Museum examined the entire collection of pottery in the 1930s, after visiting the site. He identified about 75% of the material as being of thirteenth-century date, with some extending into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a few residual Romano-British sherds. He reported that the most common form was cooking pots, followed by bowls and jugs. In a letter to Westell dated 30 May 1933, he stated that ‘I see no reason for dating the mound earlier than 13th or even 14th century’.
Controversy arose from the identification of three potsherds from low down in the trenches. Fortunately, they survive in the museum’s collection. Gerald Dunning concluded that they were from a single vessel, which he dated to the seventh to ninth centuries. Westell seems not to have been satisfied with Dunning’s dating and he approached O G S Crawford, M O’Reilly, L A Curtis Edwards and Sir Cyril Fox for further opinions. Their estimates of the date of the pottery ranged from Pre-Roman Iron Age to High Medieval. Puzzled, but realising that the date of these sherds might throw some light on the date of the mound, Westell left a note with the sherds: ‘Please keep these 3 sherds separate & kindly date if possible. ?Iron Age or Romano-British? Found 6 ft down in Sandon Mount resting on undisturbed, original ground level. ?Urn containing cremated interment. ?Do these a/c for origination of the Mount? ?Tumulus.’.
Dunning’s published description of the sherds was wrong in several ways. Although he was correct to say that the outer surface of the sherds is black, the ware itself is a reddish-brown and the surface has been blackened by smoke action, suggesting that they are from a cooking vessel. His dating is also wrong. These sherds are identical to the Museum Service’s reference sherds of St Neots-type Ware, a fairly rough fabric tempered with fossiliferous shell and a slightly soapy feel to the surfaces. This ware was produced in the south and east Midlands, centring on the towns of Cambridge, St Neots, Bedford, Northampton and Oxford. Several kiln sites exist, including St Neots and Olney Hide. The date is firmly Saxo-Norman (AD 850-1200).
Westell also changed the stratigraphic position of the sherds between the original draft of the text and the publication. In the published version, Dunning states unequivocally that they came from ‘the old ground level below the mound’, presumably because this is what Westell had told him. However, the typescript contains the crossed-out phrase ‘found close to, if not upon, the original ground level’, suggesting that while they were indeed found at a considerable depth, they were nevertheless contained in the mound material.
The excavators found a coin towards the northern end of Trench 1, at a depth of three feet (0.9 m). Mr Sherlock sent it by post to Letchworth Museum on 27 April 1933. He described how it had been ‘encased in clay’ and ‘covered in a greenish deposit’. However, we do not know what the coin was as it is not mentioned in Westell’s report. There is a medieval coin from Sandon, donated by a Miss Field, which is an issue of Edward IV, dated 1464×70 and minted in London. Although it is possible that this is the one from The Mount, Miss Field’s two other donations of coins (a Roman coin of Antoninus Pius and a late medieval jeton) both came from Roe Green.
The excavation at the Mount shows that it was undoubtedly the site of a sunken post mill, the pottery suggesting that it was raised in the thirteenth century. Although Westell was determined to demonstrate that the mound pre-dated the mill, there is little reason to believe this to be the case. The pit dug through the mound down to the level of the cross-trees could have been dug after the mound to insert them or, perhaps more likely, to remove timbers at the time of its demolition. If the latter, the ceramic finds suggest that it happened in the fifteenth century at the earliest.
Westell angered Ruth Pym of The Settlement, who read his account of the excavation in The Times. In a letter of 12 November 1933, she said ‘I have seen the Times article & find it almost unconceivable that you should have let the Settlement down so completely – the “elder scholars” were in the Settlement Class, which gave you the opportunity of making the whole excavation – that is where you should have paid your debt to us & given us our due place – no wonder you did not show me the draft report.’ He was evidently taken aback by this and the published version of the report acknowledges ‘Miss Ruth Pym and members of Sandon Adult Educational Settlement Class’.
Westell did his best to create an air of mystery about The Mount by creating a ’manufactroversy’ around the three sherds found low down in the excavation. Having received an answer from Gerald Dunning that he did not like – that they were medieval – he sought the opinions of other experts and we no doubt he was delighted that they did not agree. It is fortunate that they remain in the museum collection, it is clear that they are contemporary with the other pottery found, albeit at the early end of the range.
Westell also tried to establish the mill on the mound as one of the earliest in England, if not the earliest. The earliest documented mill in England is from 1185 at the ‘lost’ village of Weedley in Yorkshire, but they were known in the Arab world before AD 800. The earliest types in this country are the post mill, as at Sandon, in which the entire body of the mill pivoted around a central post to allow the miller to catch the best wind direction. There is a documentary record of a mill in Sandon as early as 1222, on land belonging to the manor of Gannock. Whether this is the windmill at The Mount (which is close to Gannock Green) or the lost mill that gave its name to Mill End is uncertain. The mill at The Mount was probably known as Knotley Mill, to judge from the nearby field names.
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
I have received your letter for which many thanks. Thank you also for the description and friendly greetings. It is very interesting after 30 odd years to reconstruct the events of that night and I am certainly ready and willing to make any contribution I can towards assembling the book – which would be nice to accomplish.
We flew a Heinkel III, the crew consisted of the following:
Pilot Lt. Julius Tengler
Observer Gefr. Wolfgang Earle
Wireless Operator V.O. Hubert Faber
Flight Mechanic Gefr. Franz Reitmayr
One other airman flew with us that night V.O Zander. So far as I can remember I was the last to leave the aircraft. As I came down through the air suspended below my parachute, I saw the open parachutes of my comrades and the crashing, burning aircraft under me. I landed on a pasture or field. My parachute was caught in the branches of a small tree or bush and I remained hanging. I had been wounded in the left leg by a phosphorus bullet – incendiary bullet, and I was also lightly wounded in the hands. I was able to free myself and I hobbled to where I thought my comrades would be. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anyone. I decided to return to where I had left my parachute. On the way there by a hedge I was taken prisoner by Home Guards – they were armed civilians. They took me to a nearby village. In the village there were many people on the roads. I was put into a car the guards did not put their weapons into the car; they opened the side windows and pointed their guns through from the running board. So we journeyed through the darkness of the night. When I got out I was handed over to soldiers. One of these was a Pole He had a great hatred against the Germans and he expressed this. I was taken into a room – there were two of my comrades there already. One was Lt. Tengler who had internal wounds. He lay rolling about on the ground. It seems that he had knocked himself against the aircraft tail as he bailed out. The other was Franz Reitmayr. He had a wounded left arm and had lost a lot of blood and was very weak. I could not grasp why all the people in the room were so mad to get hold of souvenirs; as I took of my flying suit they came at me from all sides with scissors and so on to cut off my shoulder epaulettes, collar tabs and all my other badges markings and orders and took them all off. After that and only then were our wounds provided for and we were taken to an ambulance and on to a hospital. There I lay a long time with Reitmayr in the same room. Afterwards we received medical attention and were taken to separate rooms. As I asked after my comrades it was said to me that they are here no more but have been taken to a special hospital. Whilst I was there I had many visits from an interrogation officer, an Austrian. As there were things he wanted to know, I received only short replies to my personal private questions.
My unit was the 3rd group of Kamp;geschwaden 26 – the Lion Geschwaden. It was a special group with special orders. It flew on a directional beam whereby we were also guided from home over the target and received a signal to drop the bombs.
The security re the aiming points regarding this system was very great. We flew in advance of other units (pathfinders).
Our bomb bays were loaded with incendiary bombs to mark the target, usually with one heavy bomb as well so that the following aircraft knew when and where to drop their bombs. Over this system the officer interrogating asked various questions of me. My seemingly plausible statements did not seem to satisfy him. One day he was with me he said the doctor would be coming soon and would be coming to see my wounds and it would not hurt as I would get an injection. Afterwards when I became fully awake and established my whereabouts I realised that I was still wearing the old bandage – it had not been changed. I did not see the interrogating officer again. During my residence in the hospital I was also visited by the R.A.F. Fighter pilot who had knocked me down. As my wounds started to heal and I was capable of being transported so I was taken to the military hospital at Knutsford near Manchester. I was astonished when I met Franz Reitmayr there. We travelled by train together to Manchester. From a platform in Manchester we were taken in an ambulance to the military hospital. The reception in Manchester railway station and the journey through the town was very unnerving. The night before there had been an air attack on Manchester and the civilian population were still very shocked as, of course, I can well understand. Today I am only too thankful that there was with us a body of uniformed troops to protect us. Behind the cordon the civilians threatened us – calls like ‘kill him’ were shouted at us. In the military hospital we were again with German P.O.W.s – brought together. There came new wounded prisoners of the Air Force and of the Navy – some from the Bismarck and they brought us the latest national news with them. Reitmayr went from here to an exchange camp and was later repatriated on an exchange basis. I came after my convalescence to the P.O.W. camp at Bury. It was a former old textile factory and here we began to get the feeling that we were P.O.W.s. The food was not very good, something we could understand, the English civilians had the same. The guards were variable – the Scots have their special peculiarities. I know not whether they valued such or lay any value on such individuality but I will therefore in catch words drive away (Can’t get that bit!). On 22.12.41 I was with the greater part of the camp and transferred to Canada. The journey by train, the ship a freighter the journey across the water in a convoy and again a railway journey to another camp was very interesting, it was a small new camp which we ourselves beautified – it contained 800 prisoners. The difficulties were made lighter not least of all through the help of the Y.M.C.A. I willingly went to work in E…….as a lumberjack – it made a pleasant change. After residence in the woods as a lumberjack I was taken to another camp at Medicine Hat and Lethbridge – these were in the province of Alberta. Each camp numbered about 10,000. I can only say looking back that in Canada we had a good time to the end of the war. In 1946 we were transported to England. There, there were two possibilities, we could go to work in a work camp or we could go to a camp in Scotland. I declared myself ready to work and was sent to Wales. From the camp we were sent to farms. I worked in the area of Tenby, Pembroke and Carmarthen. At the end of 1946 I was prepared for my release and in December 1946 I commenced my journey home from Hull. In Germany I was in 3 camps but with patience at last, on 5.1.1947 I was released from imprisonment.
It was not easy for me – I had been imprisoned for six years – to find myself a free man without a home in a destroyed Germany.
Letchworth Museum had a long-standing connection with archaeology. One of its curators, John Moss-Eccardt, was an archaeologist who conducted excavations at Blackhorse Road in the Garden City between 1958 and 1974. He became something of a local celebrity as a result. His circle of friends included Richard Wiggs (1929-2001), who is perhaps best remembered as the founder of the campaign against the development of Concorde, the supersonic aeroplane.
Early in 1967, Richard loaned two prehistoric axeheads to the museum. Both supposedly came from the Welwyn Garden City area, although neither had a precise findspot. The original documentation did not mention where they were from, but a later entry in the museum register, from 1975, did provide vague locations. One was a looped and socketed copper alloy axehead dating from the thirteenth century BC, from Panshanger; the other was the stone axehead we’re going to try to find out more about. The Museum Service returned them to Richard’s family in 2013 as their findspots fall outside the district.
The stone axehead measures 157.4 mm along its long axis, is 69.9 mm wide at its broadest point and 37.9 mm thick. It weighs 622 g (a small part of the axehead has been cut away, as we shall see, so it was originally slightly heavier). It is a mostly greenish-black colour with many pale grey-green mottles. Three parallel dark bands run through the axehead at about 60° to the long axis. They show separate bedding planes in the original rock. The cutting edge is asymmetrical between top and bottom, with one side showing traces of re-grinding. There are also fine scratch marks counter-clockwise by about 5° to the long axis on the reground edge. These marks are most likely from using the axe for cutting wood, perhaps in felling trees.
The overall shape is roughly triangular. Mike Pitts’s analysis of polished stone axeheads, published in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society in 1996, defined seven main axehead forms, based on size, dimensions and rock type. The example from Welwyn Garden City falls into his Cluster 5, axeheads with a much broader cutting edge than butt end, and curving sides. The different shapes that Mike Pitts identified were partly a response to working a variety of stone types; they do not seem to be an indication of date.
It was one of the first stone axeheads to have a thin slice removed for petrological analysis, which can indicate the rock source used. The curator at the time filled the hole left by the sliver taken from one edge with plaster-of-Paris, most of which had fallen out by the 2000s. The thin section showed that it belonged to a stone type known to prehistorians as Group I. By the 1970s, petrologists had identified thirty-four different stone types (with four of them further subdivided into two). The stone of Group I is known as uralitized gabbro, epidiorite or greenstone. Axeheads of Group I stone are commonest in southwest England, but are also found widely across the south and into Yorkshire. Early studies suggested that the outcrop used in making the axes was somewhere in west Cornwall. Although some experts, such as Peter Berridge, questioned the idea of a single outcrop, Mik Markham’s geochemical analyses showed that Mounts Bay is the most likely source.
The earliest axeheads from this source circulated only in southwest England until about 3150 BC, during the later Neolithic. After that, they occur more widely across England and South Wales. Outside west Cornwall, they are commonest in a band running from Dorset to the London area. A recent (2019) study by Peter Schauer and others used computer modelling of the distribution of polished axes from different sources to investigate how far that can be used to determine regionality in Neolithic Britain. They recognised seven zones (1 Cumbria and southern Scotland, 2 Wessex and south Wales, 3 North Wales, 4 East Anglia and southeast England, 5 Devon and Cornwall, and 6 the north Midlands and Yorkshire); Welwyn Garden City falls on the boundary between zones 2 and 4.
The Neolithic of this part of Hertfordshire is poorly known. Most finds of this date have come from the higher ground between river valleys, especially from the northern scarp of the Chiltern Hills and from the bottom of the gentler dipslope to the south. This may show that people were living and starting to farm the higher ground, where soils were thinner and easier to clear for agriculture as they never supported dense woodland. Late finds are dense in the north, especially around Baldock and Letchworth Garden City, but they hint that people were moving into the river valleys.
The axehead we are looking at comes from the lower ground, if its attribution to Welwyn Garden City is correct. Its owners would have been farmers who began clearing the slightly thicker woodland in the river valleys after about 3000 BC. In 1863, Henry Cowper described a polished axehead found on his estate at Panshanger, in the Mimram valley. The Portable Antiquities Scheme records another polished stone axehead near Stanborough Lakes, southwest of the Garden City (https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/62249), showing that farming communities were beginning to exploit the Lea valley at this time.
As earlier generations of prehistorians discovered that many polished stone tools came from sources a very long way from their findspot, they sought explanations. That axeheads rather than blanks travelled is shown by the lack of unfinished examples distant from the quarries. Some axeheads, deriving from continental Europe and Ireland, must have arrived in Britain by sea. As most are found close to their stone outcrops and drop off in number with distance, it was first proposed that they were traded by professional pedlars, even travelling ‘salesmen’! The distribution maps also suggested that there were secondary distribution centres. W A Cummins also suggested that some may have moved as gifts. Tim Darvill also wondered if some axe users might have travelled to the sources to buy them directly from the producers or even if the distribution showed patterns of seasonal migration.
During the 1990s, these views came under scrutiny and attack. Some rightly pointed out that ‘trade’ in Cummins’s terms is a relatively modern concept and that it is dangerous to project it back into the prehistoric past with assumptions of mercantilism and profitability. Surveys of source sites indicate that the scale of production was not large, the numbers of axehead finds representing long-term rather than intensive exploitation of the sources. It is also notable that a number of quarries – such as Great Langdale in Cumbria – are not easily accessible even though there are nearby places that would have been more convenient. Further critiques focused on earlier assumptions that producers at the different sources competed against each other and to what extent expanding patterns of distribution were a result of increased demand among consumers.
Schauer and his colleagues used computer-based spatial analysis on more than 18,000 provenanced axeheads for their 2019 paper. Their results show that concentrations of finds away from regions with quarries probably match areas of high population density. They also show that some types were more popular than others and travelled further from their sources. The two most widely distributed axehead types are of the west Cornish Group I, like the present example, and of the Great Langdale Group VI. Flint axeheads, on the other hand, rarely moved far beyond areas where flint nodules occur, perhaps because it was inherently more fragile.
They also point out that the findspot is the final place an axehead had travelled. It may have experienced many journeys between the quarry and there. Indeed, one of the critiques of the long-distance trade model focuses on the nature of pre-modern trade. It was very rare before the late Middle Ages for merchants to go on long journeys, taking products from their homeland to exchange for products in a distant port of trade.
In 1973, Thomas Beale used ethnographic data to examine different types of trade. He recognised that they form an additive sequence. The simplest is trickle or down-the-line trade, where goods are exchanged between neighbouring communities. Some goods will then be re-exchanged, gradually reaching more distant places. Slightly more complex, local redistributive or market-centred trade involves people from different communities meeting regularly at recognised centres to exchange goods. This type can grow into a regional organised trade, based on emporia, places to which people will travel sometimes long distances to exchange goods. The most complex type, long-distance organised or mercantile trade is what we are used to in the twenty-first century.
In the Neolithic, we are probably looking at local redistributive trade. There is good evidence for people meeting seasonally at special sites, such as causewayed enclosures, where they would engage in all sorts of activities, including exchange. This type of trade could have been informal, using barter, or based around gift-giving or ceremonial exchange. Details of this type are all but impossible to reconstruct from archaeological data. As the distribution of axehead finds does not match the regions defined by Peter Schauer and his colleagues, it seems less likely that we are looking at a pattern produced by gift exchange, as that tends to cover regionally organised communities.
The value of these axeheads is unknown, but as they were traded from place to place, they would have acquired value and stories. It is likely that people learnt something about their histories and places of origin. Perhaps, like early medieval swords, they had their own names and reputations. To their owners – even if ownership was merely temporary – they meant a great deal more than a simple tool for chopping down trees!
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews