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
Local folklore in Hitchin for the past hundred years has insisted that there is a plague pit on Queen Street. According to Reginald Hine, quoting an (unnamed) ‘old historian’, ‘every man, woman and child in Dead Street (now Queen Street) died’ in 1665. The ‘old historian’ was probably William Dunnage, whose 1815 manuscript history of Hitchin states ‘1665 The Plague raged in a very violent manner; whereof great numbers of Persons died; from which circumstance it is generally believed that Dead Street took its name’. Hine’s exaggeration suggesting that all the inhabitants died from the plague is typical of his purple prose. He adds that in ‘1853 a large number of skeletons, buried only two feet deep, were discovered behind No. 40, Queen Street, with several coins upon them dated 1660’. One of the pieces of evidence for this supposed devastation by the plague was the name of the street.
However, Dead Street was a name used in other places for an urban back street: part of what is now called King Street in Royston (the part where you can find Royston Museum) was once known as Dead Street, as was King Street in Brighton. The Royston Dead Street also claims to take its name from the number of people who died there from plague. Both the Hitchin and Royston streets were one of the back streets of their respective towns. Even more worrying is that our first record of the name in Hitchin dates from 1556, more than a century before the plague that supposedly lent it its ominous name. In placing the plague in his chronology under 1665, Hine seems to have forgotten that in the first volume of his history, he ascribed the name to the Black Death of 1349.
Moreover, Hine also records the number of burials made in the churchyard during 1665: 36 in August, 55 in September, 52 in October, 23 in November and 6 in December. These include the burials of the victims of the plague of that year, showing a peak in September. All were buried in consecrated ground, not in the yard or yards of properties fronting Dead Street. Indeed, burying people in gardens was not legal in the 1660s: even those who died from plague were buried in churchyards.
During 2004, the demolition of the former Sodexo House on Queen Street to make way for retirement apartments led to a flurry of press interest when The Heritage Network, monitoring the work, discovered human remains. Scare headlines in the local press suggested that disturbing the burials – assumed to be from the long-rumoured plague pit – would release noxious gases into the atmosphere and that there was a real risk to public health. There might even be an outbreak of plague in the town! These silly stories were published more than a century after Robert Koch had conclusively shown the miasma theory of transmission to be wrong.
In fact, the burials were from a disused Congregational burial ground that had supposedly been ‘cleared’ in 1969. Instead of removing the burials for reburial elsewhere, the company had merely emptied 45 of the 276 graves and dumped the bones into a pit on the edge of the site. The remains of at least 349 people were eventually found there by archaeologists, all dating between 1690 and 1869, long after the last outbreak of plague.
So, whose burials were those found in 1853? The answer came when a full-scale excavation took place in 2001 at 40 Queen Street, the site of the earlier discoveries. Here, the site was found to have been agricultural ground throughout the High Middle Ages, with a field boundary ditch falling out of use after about 1350. The abandonment of the field could easily have been a result of the population fall after the Black Death, between 1349 and 1361. The ploughsoil overlay the burials found during the excavation, showing that they were earlier than both the 1665 plague and the Black Death. No artefacts accompanied the skeletons, so it was not clear how much earlier they were.
Six graves survived, of which only two were complete: later activity had truncated the others. All were aligned east to west, with the head at the western end. This is usually an indication that the cemetery was used by Christians. That made the original excavators from the Museum of London’s Archaeological Services suspect that the burials dated from the late seventh century onwards. At this time, the local area was part of the statelet of the Hicce, a people whose name ended up being that of their largest settlement.
There was enough bone in five of the graves to send off for radiocarbon dating. When the results came back, they surprised the team, as they all fall in the fourth to early seventh centuries: the median dates were AD 588, 609, 431, 609 and 609, but the range was AD 253 to 772. Dates at the extreme ends of the range are unlikely to be accurate. If we take the most likely dates from each, the range is reduced to AD 320 to 688. This meant that the earliest burials may have been made in the Roman period and the latest in the early medieval. The early medieval period is usually and misleadingly labelled ‘Anglo-Saxon’; these burials show why the label is wrong, as there were no Anglo-Saxon settlers in Hitchin in the fourth or fifth centuries.
This is the burial ground of a Christian community. Even if we go with the median date range (AD 431 to 609), the first Anglo-Saxons to be converted were in the Kingdom of Kent, and that was after St Augustine arrived in 597. What we are looking at is a burial ground that began to be used in the late Roman period and continuing well into the time of Anglo-Saxon domination of this area, unlikely to have happened before AD 500. In other words, it is the cemetery of people who would have thought of themselves as Britons or Romans (perhaps even both, just as people today can call themselves English and British at the same time).
By coincidence, Pre-Construct Archaeology was excavating a settlement barely 70 m to the north at 33 Queen Street around the same time. Although the results have not yet been published, a draft from 2011 tells the story of the site and look at its artefacts. At the street frontage, the excavators found a timber-framed house that was rebuilt on the same location at least twice after it was first founded. Pottery associated with the first phase of the building included fourth-century types. There was also Alice Holt/Farnham type ware, which is typically found in North Hertfordshire between 390 and 420, in one of the many pits to the east of the house. Other pits contained pottery suggesting that the earliest activity on the site (before the buildings) began after about 270. Clearly, the three phases of building cannot all fit into the ‘Roman’ period and must extend into the fifth century, if not later.
Activity on the two sites overlaps. We seem to have a community that began to grow up on Queen Street in the final quarter of the third century, and a cemetery that was established at some point after AD 253. So far, so good. However, the excavators of 33 Queen Street did not recognise any artefacts between the early fifth century and medieval pottery (after about 900). This is a period when industrial pottery production ended (perhaps some time between about 420 and 440) and coin use stopped, around 435.
Dating features of the later fifth and sixth centuries is not easy in North Hertfordshire (or anywhere, for that matter), and much of it depends on context. Although fifth- and sixth-century locally made pottery in the Roman tradition occurs in Baldock and some surrounding settlements, the excavators of 33 Queen Street did not recognise it there. This does not mean that it is not present: small sherds of this material can look like earlier Roman or even Iron Age types, and if the pottery analyst has not seen the local types, they may easily overlook it. It is quite possible that the Queen Steet settlement continued into the seventh century, as the burials suggest.
So these people were Christian Romano-Britons. Their presence in Hitchin forms a contrast with Baldock, where pagan practices continued into the sixth century. Although there is a late fourth-century Christian cemetery at The Tene in Baldock, there is so far no evidence that it continued in use into the fifth century or later. It is very tempting to think that the local Christians moved to Hitchin to get away from the pagans; perhaps they were following St Paul’s advice in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians VI.14 Μὴ γίνεσθε ἑτεροζυγοῦντες ἀπίστοις (‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers’ in the King James Version).
We may even be able to work out what these people called themselves in addition to Brittones (‘Britons’) and Romani (‘Romans’). We have long known that the placename Hitchin comes from the word Hicce, recorded as the name of a tiny stately in the ‘Tribal Hidage’, a possibly seventh-century document. It is usually taken to be a list of Anglo-Saxon peoples who were tributary to the King of Mercia. However, Hicce is not a Germanic word (nor is Gifle, the name of the people listed before the Hicce, whose name survives as the River Ivel). It is much more likely to be Brittonic, the branch of the Celtic languages spoken in Great Britain. The most likely form of the name to give Hicce would be something like *Succiī, ‘Pig-Breeders’, a typical Celtic ethnic name. We know that pigs were especially important to the local economy in the century or more before the Roman invasion of AD 43, and the *Succiī perhaps prided themselves on the quality of their pork.
Perhaps I could have entitled this piece ‘From Plague Pit to Pork Producers’!
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
A guest post by Isobel Evans, work experience student from Marriotts School, Stevenage
Isobel studies a museum accesion register, where we record items donated to the museum from 1914 to present day
Coming to north herts museum for my year twelve work experience was really enjoyable and gave me a lot of insight as to how a museum functions and how they prepare for exhibitions. The staff were really friendly which made my week here really fun. My work experience took place during the half term and the beginning of a new exhibition which meant I got to see a lot of people’s enthusiasm of the museum and what it displayed. Learning more about the history of the areas in which I grew up in and around was really insightful as it allowed me to learn about things that I more than likely wouldn’t of found out about anywhere else. Another thing that was interesting, were the accession books. Throughout the week, I spent a bit of time going through a few of them and helping log them onto a website they use to track what they have and also onto a spreadsheet. Seeing this was really insightful as I got to see what kind of things are donated to the museum and sometimes they were items I hadn’t heard of before and so it led to me researching them to gain a further understanding.
Thanks for all of your work during your week Isobel, all the best from us here at North Herts Museum.