If you browse auctioneers’ or metal detectorists’ websites, even Etsy or eBay, you may come across things referred to as ‘Celtic woad grinders’. The example seen here comes from Baldock. Leaving aside the fact that the term ‘Celtic’ is today used mainly as a linguistic rather than art historical label and that archaeologists today call them simply ‘cosmetic grinders’, what evidence is there for how their owners used them?
The Baldock cosmetic grinder was found with a pair of tweezers in a ditch excavated on Clothall Common that was infilled some time between AD 180 and AD 200. The ditch formed part of the western boundary of a large trapezoidal enclosure with a roundhouse in its southern part. Although interpreted at the time as a house, the range of later finds from the enclosure – a pit with 33 iron spearheads, votive axeheads and spears, part of a large bronze statue and an iron rattle – suggests that this was religious rather than domestic.
The grinder consists of a crescent-shaped copper alloy trough with a horned animal head (cow or bull) at each end and a central ring underneath. One of the animal heads has a blunt-ended muzzle, the other is more pointed and open-mouthed. Each side of the trough is decorated with three shield-shaped panels containing enamel inlay, red in the centre and light turquoise either side. The top of the grinder has a deep V-sectioned trough with a slightly squared off base, which seems to derive from wear. Its capacity when full would have been about 1.8 ml.
When Reginald Smith first described three examples from Wroxeter in 1918, he was misled by the position of the loop into thinking that they were pendant charms associated with horses as the loops were evidently made to hang from a cord. He compared them with a serrated nose-band or cavesson, used for controlling unruly horses. He distinguished a type with a central suspension loop and one with an end loop; by the 1930s, he had also recognised a ‘solid’ type. The identification as pendants or amulets remained standard until the 1980s, although Ian Stead and Val Rigby had recognised in the 1970s that the troughs and solid pieces belonged together. About twenty complete sets have been found.
During the 1980s, Ralph Jackson recognised that the two elements formed either a rocking pair or a sliding element along the trough part. He concluded that they must have been grinding implements, a miniature mortar and pestle. Their association with other items and personal care, such as tweezers, and their small size made it likely that they were used to grind mineral-based pigments. It was from this work that the wrong idea of the ‘woad applicator’ or ‘woad grinder’ arose: the dye extracted from woad by steeping and boiling the leaves does not need to be dried and can be used as a liquid. The dried powder does not need grinding like minerals.
It is not even certain that Julius Caesar’s description of the Britons (de Bello Gallico V.14) mentions woad. His text reads omnes uero se britanni uitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem (‘Indeed, all the Britons dye themselves with uitrum, which produces a blue colour’). The Latin word uitrum usually means ‘glass’. The first person to translate it as ‘woad’ was Arthur Golding in 1565 and experiments with the plant have shown it not to be effective as a skin decoration. The usual Latin term for woad was isatis (from Greek ἰσάτις). Caesar’s description of ‘blue’ Britons may even derive from the traditional associations of blue in the Classical world with barbarians, ghosts and death and not reflect reality.
A second quote, from Propertius’s Elegies Book II, that has been taken to refer to woad, does not mention uitrum or isatis but just describes the Britons as infectos, ‘stained’, without mentioning a specific dye or colour. Moreover, Pliny (Historia Naturalis XXII.2) describes how the Britons use a plant known as glastum in Gaul, which by which they are aethiopum colorem imitantes (‘imitating the colour of Africans’), so dark rather than blue; the Celtic word glastos means ‘blue’ and survives in Welsh as glas, which refers to a range of colours from sky blue through greenish blue to grass green. Ovid (Amores II.16) talks of uiridesque Britannos (‘and the green Britons’), while Julius Solinus (de Mirabilibus Mundi XXIII) mentions tattooing: inde a pueris uariae animalium effigies incorporantur (‘from childhood, they embed in their bodies various images of animals’). Claudian (de Consulato Stilichonis II.248) gives the personification of Britannia picta genas (‘painted cheeks’, often but unnecessarily translated as ‘tattooed cheeks’).
These texts, written a long way from Britain, are evidence that the Roman aristocracy perceived the Britons as unusually decorated. Solinus’s animalium effigies must be tattoos, as he describes how they grow as the person with them grows; none of the other descriptions are clear about whether the staining is permanent or temporary. However, the cosmetic grinders are evidence that many Britons did stain their skins with coloured materials.
Other cosmetic grinders come from a range of sites dating from the Late Iron Age through to the end of the Roman period, all but four of the more than 1000 known examples having been found in Britain. Most date from the first and second centuries AD, although they sometimes turn up in early medieval graves among collections of ancient Roman objects. They are most common in East Anglia, the Ciuitas Icenorum in the Roman period, although they turn up throughout Britain apart from North Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. They also occur most often on urban sites, including so-called ‘small towns’ like Baldock, particularly in burials and religious contexts.
In a major study published in 2010, Ralph Jackson divided the mortar elements into thirteen types: ten with a central loop, two with an end loop and two examples of three joined into a triangle with no loop. He published evidence that they were case in bronze from lead models (there is an example from Skipton Street, London), with finishing ranging from almost non-existed to smooth polishing, punched decoration and elaboration of the terminals. The wide variation of styles is partly a result of different treatment at the finishing stages, and it is possible that decoration was added following instructions from the buyer.
He also showed that many examples were heavily worn, showing intensive and prolonged use. Some examples have repairs, meaning that they were probably not cheap to replace. The groove or trough of the mortar element often shows wear in the base, as with this example from Baldock. Crescent-shaped pestles with end-loops are always damaged on the convex underside, while those with centre loops show the greatest wear at the centre of the convex side. Rod-shaped pestles have wear at the tips and some are even shortened.
Some examples seem to have entered the archaeological record as votive gifts at temples. At Wicklewood in Norfolk, this was certainly the case, and it is likely that the Baldock example entered the ditch from a clearing-out of temple gifts. Nevertheless, their wider distribution shows that they were relatively common items associated with grooming and body care.
On 18 September 2019, the BBC ran a news story about how a curator at English Heritage had recently recognised the three examples Reginald Smith had described in 1918 as pestles and mortars. Their reporter had evidently not seen any of Ralph Jackson’s publications, beginning in 1985! More worryingly, the report said that they ‘allowed women to achieve their look using charcoal, soot and chalk without importing expensive products like kohl’.
We do not know that these cosmetic grinders were used exclusively by women: one of the sets found in a grave was with a definitely male skeleton. The idea that only woman in Roman Britain would wear makeup is a good example of projecting not only current social norms back into the ancient past but also of assuming that what was standard in Roman Italy – where much of the surviving literature was written – was also standard in the far north of the empire. We know from this literature that some men did wear makeup, but men who were vain about their personal appearance (such as the Emperor Otho) were often mocked. Some writers even complained about women who wore makeup, suggesting that their morals were loose.
We have no way of knowing if men in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain did wear cosmetics and, if they did, what sorts they used. Indeed, Gillian Carr suggested as long ago as 2005 that these peculiarly British cosmetic grinders are evidence that attitudes to makeup were very different here from the rest of the Roman world (perhaps except for Egypt). She even speculated that the pigments were being used to make dyes for tattooing rather than (or along with) temporary makeup. As we have already seen, the literary evidence shows that the Roman upper classes viewed the Britons as having eccentric, even terrifying attitudes to colouring their skin.
This is yet another object that highlights how our own sexist attitudes can unfortunately pervade our interpretations of the past. No, these cosmetic grinders are not ‘hugely important to understanding women’ in Roman Britain, despite the statement by English Heritage’s Cameron Moffett. Instead, they underline the remoteness of Roman Britain and how little we understand of how different it was from today’s United Kingdom.
Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
Sometimes, maps and placenames hint at past activities that are not immediately visible. Often the places are on private land but, as we’ve seen in previous Archaeology Tuesdays, aerial (or satellite) photography can reveal details. But how do we cope with woodland, such as at Tingley Wood in Pirton, just north of the B655 Hexton Road to the west of Hitchin? The name Tingley, while obscure, is first recorded in the thirteenth century as Tinele, the first element of which may derive from Old English tȳned, ‘enclosed’.
What might have been enclosed? Was it the wood (although the second element leah implies a clearing within woodland) of something already there when the wood got its name? Here, we can use a technique known as Lidar to help us see through the tree canopy to what lies on the ground surface below. Lidar has been around for more than 60 years, yet its applications in archaeology only go back twenty-five years or so. Its great advantage is that it enables us to see subtle earthworks and, remarkably, those under woodland. When first developed for satellite tracking in 1961, during the space race, it was known as Colidar (Coherent Light Detecting And Radar).
Like any such new technology, the military soon spotted that it might be useful, and the US army began using it for long-distance targeting from 1963. Around the same time, the name Lidar was first used. In 1971, astronauts in the Apollo 15 mission used it to map the moon’s surface, at it provides a very accurate altimeter (height measuring system). Altimetry is the aspect of Lidar that archaeologists find so useful.
Lidar works by sending a narrow laser beam (which can be in ultraviolet, visible or near infrared light) in pulses towards a target, measuring the time it takes to reflect. It gives a very precise measurement of the distance between the laser source and the thing being measured. Micropulse Lidar uses low energy lasers that cannot cause damage to eyesight, while high energy systems used in atmospheric studies point away from the ground into the sky. Surveys can be done from an aircraft or can be ground based; in the latter type, the scanners can be stationary or attached to moving vehicles.
From an aircraft, Lidar can give a spatial resolution – the distance between individual measurement points – of less than 30 cm. Global Position Systems record the precise location of each pulse, including the altitude of the aircraft (which is not available to sufficient resolution in everyday GPS devices). The data is returned in the form of a ‘point cloud’, a set of measurements located in three dimensions: latitude, longitude and elevation.
As raw data, point clouds are not easily ‘read’, so they have to be processed. They are excellent for producing contour maps more accurately than any human surveyor could achieve, but their most familiar applications are to make Digital Surface Models (which include buildings and trees) and Digital Terrain Models (which ‘remove’ buildings and trees).
There are numerous uses for the data produced by Lidar surveys, from agriculture (such as monitoring crop growth) through conservation (such as measuring the biomass of an area), to geology (such as identifying uplift after earthquakes) and atmospheric studies (including measuring wind speed and cloud structure). More controversially, hand-held ‘speed guns’ used by traffic control are based on Lidar, while self-driving vehicles rely on it to avoid obstacles.
Archaeological uses have become one of the most widely-publicised applications of the technique. There have been numerous press stories about the rediscovery of ‘lost’ cities and even entire civilisations beneath the jungle canopies of central America and the Amazon basin. In England and Wales, the Environment Agency has been the main force behind Lidar surveys, although other organisations (such as the Chilterns Conservation Board) also commission them.
During 2022, the Environment Agency made all its data, covering most of England and parts of Wales, available free of charge. All of North Hertfordshire can now be viewed through portals such as lidarfinder.com or the National Library of Scotland’s very useful georeferenced historic maps website (which also covers Scotland and includes a Lidar Digital Terrain Model at 50 cm resolution as one of the background layers).
Tingley Wood, in the southwestern corner of Pirton parish, just to the west of High Down, appears on maps as a simple block of woodland. Large scale maps show a track running through it from east to west, aligned roughly on High Down. Three other tracks cross it, two more-or-less straight, the third curving. Another track leads through a lobe in the southwest of the wood, while a sixth runs from the axial east-west track to the south, where it joins a track that follows the southern boundary.
The maps do not begin to hint at what the Lidar shows. The main east-west track is clear enough, including an extension at the western end, where the mapped track diverts to the south. The track south of the wood also shows, as do others outside the woodland. More significant are a series of banks and ditches around, inside and outside the wood. On the western edge of the photograph is a bank without associated ditch: this marks the line of the county boundary. The origins of Hertfordshire probably lie in the wars between King Eadweard the Elder (AD 899-924), who established fortified towns at Hertford in 912 and Bedford in 914 (and probably also Hitchin and Ashwell, about 913). The shires provided men to staff these burhs, as they were known. The boundary between Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire cut through the earlier folk territory of the Hicce, who gave their name to Hitchin. Because these new shires were artificial creations whose boundaries did not follow those that were long established, banks often mark their course, as here. The bank between Pirton and Pegsdon probably dated from the 910s.
The next thing to notice in the Lidar is a boundary bank for Tingley Wood itself. It encompasses the whole wood apart from a stretch in the south, where it is obliterated by very straight ridge-and-furrow probably created by steam ploughing in the nineteenth century, and at the north-eastern corner, where it also seems to have been ploughed away in recent centuries. A ditch follows outside the bank around the northern side of the wood, but to the southwest, the ditch is inside the bank. To the southeast, the ditch has a bank both inside and outside the wood.
The differences in the relationship between the bank and ditch hint at a complex history. Although it was usual to enclose medieval woodland, the nature of the enclosure depended on its purpose. In woodland used as part of a deer park, the ditch is always inside the bank as it makes it more difficult for the animals to jump across the boundary. For woods that were coppiced to provide timber, the ditch would be outside, as it was intended to keep animals out. We seem to have both systems here, in different parts of Tingley Wood.
Next, we seem to have subdivisions inside the woodland, marked by three banks, two with ditches, running north to south. Those with ditches both have the ditches to the west. The westernmost, which does not have a ditch, lines us with the inner bank of the southwestern lobe of the wood. Does it perhaps mark the original western edge of Tingley Wood? At the eastern end, there is a ditch with only slight traces of an internal bank running from about the middle of the southern edge up to the northeastern corner. Is this perhaps the original eastern edge of the wood? The current eastern part of Tingley Wood disrupts a pattern of ridge-and-furrow cultivation, suggesting that it has expanded over formerly arable land.
These details perhaps show the growth of the wood. If this suggestion is correct, then it was originally about 70% of its current size (11.4 ha as opposed to its current 16.0 ha). The two other north to south internal banks and ditches then divide the original woodland into three zones of unequal area. These separate parts of the wood hint at its original purpose: one of the areas would be coppices, while the other two continued to grow and provide pannage (foraging) for pigs. Perhaps the wood expanded as the demand for timber increased in the later Middle Ages, both for building work and as fuel.
There are also hollows visible both inside and outside the woodland. Most of these are irregular and surrounded by spoil. The area still had several chalk and gravel pits marked on the early Ordnance Survey maps, and this suggests an origin for those in Tingley Wood. At least one of them has partly destroyed the boundary bank and ditch, showing that this activity took place once the wood was no longer being used as a source of timber. However, one hollow to the southwest of the centre is very rectangular and may have been a saw pit, used for cutting timber when the woodland was still in use.
The story does not even end there. As well as the banks and ditches associated with boundaries and the quarry pits, there are other embanked and ditched areas that bear no relation to the woodland. All three lie south of the centre of the wood and all are disrupted by the woodland banks. The southwestern of the tree is very rectangular and lies between the proposed saw pit and the denuded original southern bank of the wood. Could this have been a penned off area used for storing wood processed in the storage pit while it seasoned?
The two other groups of ditches, only one of which is associated with banks, are more enigmatic. One overlies the other (that with banks seems to overlie the purely ditched part enclosure) and both seem to be earlier than any of the woodland management banks and ditches. What they are is unclear. The very straight edges of the ditched trapezoidal part enclosure look to be Romano-British rather than prehistoric or early medieval. Its western ditch appears to continue into the southern extension of the wood as a bank, perhaps showing that its bank within the early phase of Tingley Wood was deliberately levelled.
The bank and ditch of the northern and western edges of a perhaps polygonal (certainly not curved) enclosure overlie the southern end of the possibly Romano-British ditched enclosure. The relationship with the subdivision of the woodland seems to make this enclosure earlier, as it is cut by it and its southern and eastern edges are not visible beyond it, suggesting that they have been obliterated by the woodland. The most reasonable explanation sould be that it is intermediate in date between the underlying putatively Romano-British enclosure and earlier than the woodland. Less easy to characterise, some have identified similar enclosures as early medieval sheepcotes, areas where sheep could be penned. This high ground in the southwest of Pirton could well have been an area used for keeping sheep before being brought into arable cultivation. Other origins are, of course, possible. Might the first element of the name Tingley be not Old English týned, ‘enclosed’, but another derivative of týnan, ‘to fence or close’, perhaps an unattested but plausible *týne, ‘an enclosure’, referring to the possible sheepcote?
The Lidar results for just a small patch of land, only sixteen hectares in extent, give us a complex picture with much to digest and attempt to interpret. As a relatively new technique in archaeology, its potential is only just beginning to be tapped.
A guest post by Juliette Simpson, work experience student.
For my year 10 work experience, I decided to come to the North Herts Museum in order to see the work it takes to organise a museum and put up the displays, I learnt all this and more.
All the staff were incredibly nice, and I learnt so much history about the area I am from. During my time here I helped with exhibitions, created a trail, logged multiple items and much more. It was a great insight into the world of work and how unpredictable daily life is in museums. It was also very interesting to go through things like documents that are hundreds of years old as well as explore the museum and its artifacts. Ultimately, I have really enjoyed my time here and will take the skills and knowledge I have acquired with me for the rest of my life.
Juliette working with a painting