Norfolk Heritage Explorer

Every year Adrian Marsden, the Numismatist for Norfolk’s Identification and Recording Service, logs a large number of finds of seventeenth-century tokens. These small discs of metal were produced by traders to alleviate a desperate shortage of small change after the execution of Charles I in 1649 during the period of the Commonwealth (1649-1660) and in the first dozen or so years of the Restoration when Charles II returned as king in 1660.

 A 27th century trade token of Thomas Cannon of Swaffham. Recorded under NMS-00C7DC. (Copyright Norfolk County Council).

The tokens name the men and women who had them made and thus offer enormous potential for further research. Since 2014, when he set up the Norfolk Token Project to foster interest in this unique currency, Adrian has investigated many aspects of Norfolk’s seventeenth-century token coinage, from who used it, how it circulated, and who had it produced.

This last area of research has involved much searching of the records relating to the men and women who had these tokens produced. The results have built up a picture of their lives, of how those lives were lived, where they were lived, and what relating to their lives survives on the ground today.

Since 2018, Adrian has been leading a series of very popular and well-attended Token Tours around the city of Norwich, telling the stories of these token issuers as he guides groups around the city of Norwich as it is today. History is, quite literally, under our feet, and the Norwich Token Tours take us back to these long-forgotten people, visiting the places where they lived and died.

Adrian’s Norwich Token Tours – unique in Britain and indeed the World – demonstrate how research on copper alloy discs found by metal detectorists can uncover all manner of hidden tales of people long dead and – until now – long forgotten. They bring to life the small copper alloy tokens produced many generations ago and prove why recording those finds is so important.

It’s not often the Norfolk County Council Find Team are left scratching their collective heads over a discovery. But this very unusual object, found at Brundall, was one of them.

Stone tool: a Mayan chert stemmed macro blade. (© Norfolk County Council).

The first thing to say is that it isn’t a handaxe or a giant arrowhead. Its actual technical name is a ‘stemmed macro blade’, but it’s easier to think of it as a large handheld knife, or a stone dagger. But it’s unlike anything else that’s ever been found in Norfolk: the shape’s wrong, the size is wrong and that stone looks nothing like our own famous and very distinctive black and grey flint.

So what is it – and where did it originally come from?

I mentioned we were scratching our heads. And so were until our flint specialist Jason Gibbons stepped in. There was something about the object’s heft (it’s almost 11cm long, and was once much bigger), the way it had been worked and the colour of the stone which seemed instantly familiar to him. His answer was truly astonishing: this object wasn’t made in Norfolk at all, but 5,250 miles away in Belize in Central America. And the people who made it were one of the most famous from history – the once-extensive 'Maya' civilisation, which survived until the fateful encounters with colonising Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

Ancient culture: A painted plaster cast of a Mayan sculpture from Chichén Itzá, Lower Temple of the Jaguars. (© The Trustees of the British Museum).

Jason takes up the story: ‘I could see it was made from a massive struck blade, there are a few cultures that make them (we made long blades in the Upper Palaeolithic, 40,000 to 10,000 BC) but nowhere remotely near that big, apart from only one culture, and that is in Belize, so it was narrowed down very quickly.’ This stone is known as Colha chert, and is found in abundance in the north-east central area of the country, formerly known as ‘British Honduras’.

He adds: ‘I studied these back around 2012 along with trying to familiarise myself with both North and South American worked flints and flint types. I’m still working on that as there are thousands of variations.’

This type of tool was used for more than 1000 years, from circa 250 BC to AD 900. This example is a little battered, having lost its point and handle. It would have been used as a large knife or dagger.

‘They were also used by the "elite" class of Maya society in ritual caches,’ Jason says, ‘the favoured deposition of which appears to be in rivers.’

So that’s the object identified. But how on earth did it arrive in the Broads?

The tool was actually found in the 1950s, from the surface very near to Brundall Gardens. This was a popular tourist attraction founded in the 1880s, its attractive slopes giving rise to the nickname of ‘Little Switzerland’. The name of the attraction lives on in Brundall Gardens station. An old map shows the gardens once had a small museum. Was this Mayan tool one of the exhibits perhaps, a curiosity accidentally dropped and then lost one day? Decades after its rediscovery it was brought to Norwich Metal Detecting Club for identification and recording by the present owner.

Beauty spot: Brundall Gardens, pictured in the 1920s. (Image courtesy of www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk)

We may never truly know how it came to Brundall in the first place, although Jason has an interesting theory about that. You can find out what it is – and more about the story behind this fascinating object – by visiting the full record on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database under NMS-E80743.

Well we have been looking at our recent archaeological records of Norfolk finds hoping to find something fitting for the current 2018 Christmas festive season.  We were drawing a blank until we came across this rather nicely preserved Iron Age to Roman quern stone. What has that got to do with the festive season I hear you ask, very little I guess, until you know that it’s made out of ‘puddingstone,’ sourced just down the road in Hertfordshire.  There are no figs in this though and it’s a bit on the crunchy side, so we made it a bit more festive with a sprig of holly.

Usually we provide a link to the PAS database so you can see the record for the Quern in full, on this occasion however we have included a screen shot of the database page allowing you to see the format and the precise description and interpretation of the object. If it is too small to read press Control and + together on your keyboard to magnify the screen. If you are still unable to read the description the link to the database record is as follows  https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/930847

Merry Christmas to one and all.

There is a wonderful array of archaeological finds made by the public in Norfolk.  In general, because of the sheer volume involved we are only able to record artefacts that are more than a nominal 300 years old.  However, if an object has additional merit, for example through its cultural history then we will often try to make an exception.

This artefact unearthed recently in a field near Dereham is one such example. It’s a copper alloy token struck in 1788 to commemorate the jubilee of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-1699 when James II was removed from the throne in favour of the Dutch William and Mary. 

This was a pivotal time in British history with politics and religion dividing the kingdom into civil unrest.  The Dutch invasion force of England assembled by William was four times the size of the Spanish Armada of 1588 and landed in Torbay, Devon on 5^th November 1688.  Apart from a skirmish near Reading the invasion was largely uncontested with James’s army and supporters defecting in the support of William, including his daughter Anne.

Our chosen find this month is a middle to late Saxon copper-alloy bow brooch. It was found recently on farmland in Breckland and is notable because of its size, richly cast decoration, and excellent level of preservation. It never ceases to amaze that an object can spend well over a 1000 years in the ground, be subjected to the vagaries of the weather, chemical fertilizers and ploughing and still survive in relatively good condition. Not so for the iron spring and pin mechanism though, as the rusty concretion on the back bears witness to the original location. Iron corrodes much more readily than copper alloy in the ground. 

The date of the brooch is circa AD 800-910 and it is of a brooch form now described as Ansate. The term Ansate means ‘handle-shaped’ and it is clear how the brooch style got it's name.  The adjacent distribution map uses national data from the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database and illustrates that the type was particularly popular in Anglo Saxon East Anglia. Full details of the brooch can be found at https://finds.org.uk/database  using the reference NMS-EB5046 in the search field.

Found in Broadland our Find of the Month this month is a rather large and hefty 13^th-14^th century sword pommel. Pommel styles are many and varied and this type goes under the unsurprising name of a Wheel pommel. What makes this particular pommel stand out is the decoration and the rather unusual incised inscription which ‘reads’ along the following lines…

+ * + B S PCA EIS [small cross, circle with eight radiating rays, cross potent, retrograde B, retrograde S, P, C, inverted A with broken cross bar, E, I, retrograde S]. The inscription is indecipherable to modern interpretation, but bearing in mind that by far the majority of the population in the medieval period was illiterate, it may just be meaningless. The sword Pommel has a number of functions. Firstly, it prevents the hand slipping off the handle and aids a firm grip. Secondly it provides a counterweight to the heavy blade, meaning that the point of balance is shifted just forward of the hilt making the weapon more balanced and easier to handle fluidly. Indeed, to help facilitate this, the inside of the pommel is part-filled with lead.  Finally, Pommels can be used as a weapon in their own right and used to strike the opponent, particularly around the head.  Interestingly, this latter usage is where our modern term pummelling is derived from. 

Full details of this find can be seen at https://finds.org.uk/database using the reference NMS-567099 to search against.

For February's Find of the Month we have selected a rather unusual post-medieval nutcracker to show you. It was discovered in a field near King's Lynn in West Norfolk and is exceptional in both its preservation and its unusual form. It is designed around a miniature of a tripod cooking pot or cauldron, of a type that was in use from circa CE 1200-1700.

Cleverly the nutcracker uses the miniature pot as the container for the nut. A threaded shaft with an openwork handle enters from the side which when turned crushes the nut against the side of the pot.

Screw threaded nutcrackers did not appear until the 17^th century so this example probably dates from circa CE 1600-1800

The full record on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database for this lovely object can be found at: https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/879671

In honour of Halloween, we have something a little different for October's Find Of The Month. The Norfolk Historic Environment Record is full of strange entries. We have everything from The Great Stone of Lyng, which supposedly bleeds and stops birds singing, to four mummified cats! 

This month we will focus on one of my favourite entries which I discovered, in my first week on the job, over five years ago. While familiarising myself with the secondary files (the collection of sources our records are based on) I decided to look up my new office. In among the photographs, building plans, newspaper clippings and badger excavations I found a typewritten sheet of paper titled 'The Ghost Of Gressenhall Workhouse". Intrigued, I read on to discover that this was in fact our most thoroughly recorded haunting! 

What follows is a copy of the file.

Further updates followed:

For more of our peculiar records check out Norfolk's Archaeological Curiosities

Happy Halloween!

This month we have a rather nice zoomorphic (animal-shaped) enamelled Roman strap fitting to show you. At first glance it looks very much like a plate brooch, but an examination of the fittings on the reverse show this not the case. Instead of hinged lugs and an opposing catchplate, characteristic of a brooch, the fitting has two T-shaped projections for attaching it to a strap.

It is made in the shape of a right facing boar. The facial features are moulded in relief and one ear is projecting slightly from the top of the head. The eye is recessed and inlaid with black enamel. The mouth is shown by a groove just below the snout with a moulded tusk projecting from the edge. A series of fine grooves across the head indicate the texture of bristles. The head is divided from the body by a line of punched holes. The body has a recessed area filled with blue champlevé enamel and three spots of white enamel; one at the shoulder, one at the top of the foreleg and one, larger spot on the flank. This last spot has a central hollow with traces of a red substance within. The finder notes that it originally had a dark-coloured enamel filling when discovered, but this dropped out and was lost in the soil. The large hole in the centre of the find would have originally held a loop for a pivoting copper alloy ring. Both of the legs end in cloven trotters. Two projecting stubs at the rear of the animal indicate the position of the missing tail.

The boar is a relatively common figure in Roman iconography, with many examples recorded on the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database including: WILT-5D5B17 & SUSS-DB2C32. The banners of several Roman legions depicted a boar. Notably the XX legion used a jumping boar. The boar is said to be a symbol of strength and an embodiment of the warrior spirit.

The full record can be found at www.finds,org using the reference NMS-F70707 in the search field.