NETTLE QUESTION: I tried finding the threads for spinning in a couple of nettle stalks yesterday, but all I got was a hollow husk lined with a white pith (I think). What are you supposed to spin/twist into string ?

Hi Eve
It's the outer part - as you work it you'll see that it separates into fibers. It works best if you dry it and re-wet it, but you can do it fresh, you just get slimy hands. For a full instruction sheet from our last YAC leaders weekend go you http://www.britarch.ac.uk/yac/leaderdocs/leaders2008/20_Nettle_and_String.pdf
Soph

Hi Soph, I just ran off the pages. I'll give it a try when it isn't pouring with rain (and maybe when I can scrounge a pair of gloves first; I gather nettles can be picked and handled gloveless but I haven't developed the technique yet).

Hey Soph

Will you come over for the soiree du punch the week after next? This it is the 25th July or so. It will be extra fun i'm sure and you can stay in my tent if you need to. I believe Erica will be there.

Noz xx

Yeah i'll still be there then - looking forward to seeing you soon xx

Hi Phil,
Thanks for the gloves. I have managed to pick nettles bare-handed but it's not much fun. I've presently got some in a bucket of water, waiting to find out how long it takes for them to be retted.
Eve

Hi Eve
We're back to the same thing - this is twine, it's not the thread you would use for weaving, which is made by a different process. You can get cotton twine, but you don't use it to make shirts with! If you want a weaving thread you need to rett the nettles, beat them, comb out the fibers and spin them into a thread - ply that thread or not depending on the weight you need, and finally weave it on a suitable loom. Twine would only be worn as espadrille type shoe soles, outer rainproof layers like capes, basketwork backpacks etc so it could be a bit scratchy without it mattering. Mind you it does get smoother, and speedier, if you use dried and soaked stems (they separate much more easily as well), and of course as you get more practiced - Joy (who wrote the notes) makes much finer twine than me!
Does that make sense?
Soph
(PS: I hope the water in your bucket is from Reedam? You need the bacteria, so tap probably won't work. And I hope it's out of smelling distance!)

Hi Eve
The retting uses natural bacteria to break down the outer coating of the stalks, which is a bit waxy, and then separate the connective tissue between the pith and the bark. That's why it's stinky - retting is just an older spelling of rotting! When you pull the bundle out, you lay them on a stone and whack the heck out of them with a wooden mallet (ideally the old fashioned sort which is shaped like a small club - so a thick stick would do). If they have retted enough, the pith will basically disintegrate as you do this, and if you chuck a bit of water over them it will literally wash away. You are left with a bundle of course fibers, a bit finer than the hand pulled ones, but still not spinnable. You then need an iron comb, a bit like a tiny garden rake, with which you separate the strands down and get then all lying in the same direction. The whole process removes the remaining vegetable component and leaves you with a bunch of silky, yellowish fibers a bit like corn silk to look at. It's a highly skilled job, as is the spinning and weaving of linen. Raw linen cloth then has to be fulled (cleaned and bleached, by sunlight or using ammonia from urine) and funally smoothed with hot glass irons. It's all much harder than processing wool, which is a very forgiving fiber, because the individual fibers are smooth and silky not barbed so they have no natural desire to stick together! The process is the same for all the linens - hemp, nettle, or flax. Evidence suggest it was not carried out in every community, unlike wool spinning, and it was obviously regarded as a lifelong specialism for some people. My feeling is in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary you'd have to think of the Sedgeford community buying/bartering for linen and perhaps only making their own string at home.

Right, this is about the limit of my linen expertise - I'm very happy to look up more detail but after this I'll just be reporting what others say. I'll look forward to seeing how you go from here!

Soph

Indeed! I may be able to have a look on Friday and see how you're getting on - but if it's stinky it should be working.
S

Hello, Phil, interested about Brancaster site.. where did you find the reference?

Hi Phil - don't think we met, but I'm happy to stick in an oar as usual... My books are at home and I'm at work, but if i remember correctly there's no overlap with the proposed Brancaster site and the current Sedgeford pottery assemblage (I say current, because of this issue with there maybe being more pre-conversion pottery than we think, but until that's definitive we really don't have much pre 8th century on the main site). I also think Myres over eggs what the Brancaster site might be, and although 'settlements' was rewritten in 1986, there are still quite a lot of ideas in it taken straight from his earlier work of 1936 (yes..that's right, 1936!) Sorry to sound negative, but I'll get some details for you tonight if I can.
Soph

my mistake, I misread the key to the map I was looking at. Brancaster is listed as a site where frisian pottery has been found at the Saxon shore fort. Not as a manufacturing site for Frisian type pottery.
Thanks again for the web addresses. Keep them coming, I am soaking all this anglo-saxon stuff up like a sponge. I liked the Wuffingas site, the map showing the extent of the wash where it becomes Whittlesea mere was interesting.
Just a quickie though,roughly when does middle saxon become late saxon and for that matter when does early saxon become middle saxon? It could be that these headings were given to different times of migration. New manufacturing processes and new tastes creating different styles of pottery?

Argh... not the fast and slow wheel again! This is a major personal bugbear of mine.
A potters wheel is a potters wheel if it throws, that is to say if the clay is flung outwards by centrifugal force. If it doesn't it's just a turntable - which is a useful aid in finishing hand built pottery, but the pot is still hand built and not thrown. (Any rilling that appears will be surface only, and not reflected in a directionality of any inclusions visible in the cross section.) Apart from this distinction there is not difference in the pottery produced on different speeds of wheel. A good potter will cause the wheel to move at different speeds depending on what s/hes doing anyway.
Sorry, will go and find my pills now...
Soph

Hi Phil
No - not that Sophie. I guess I'm a sharp old timer, but I only popped in for brief visits this year so I hardly met anybody.
It's great fun reading the classic experts, but they can get pretty violent about one another can't they! I don't have the Miles book, but I think I've glanced at it in shops, I'll keep an eye out.
To try and answer your other question, although I haven't looked at the grass tempered wear myself, It's always been an issue that there didn't seem to be much pagan Saxon/early Saxon handmade pottery on Boneyard/Chalkpit fields. We know there are finds of cremation urns all along the valley from the last century, and a few other early Saxon finds although not a lot, but there was no domestic stuff on this site. BUT apparently it now looks like it might not have been recognised, and been mixed in with our Iron Age finds up to now. If this turns out to be the case it will fill in a bit of a blank on some ways.
If you're asking what it's actually like physically, the answer is that it looks a bit rubbish really - which is why it gets mixed up with the prehistoric stuff! It's fairly basic cooking pots, which have chopped grass mixed into the clay to reduce the chances of them exploding when they're fired. That kind of organic tempering is something it's useful to do if you don't have very good control of your firing temperature. It's funny really, because the same communities could make Urns so well formed and fired that they look just like thrown pots. It looks therefore as if that was a specialist job for just a few potters who sold over a wide area, and maybe every village made it's own rubbishy cooking pots!
Anyway I should do some of the work I get paid for, not that this isn't more interesting...
Soph

Absolutly, we need to wait and see. I was just trying to outline the issues involved. Incidently I'm really looking forward to seeing the results so that I can update the conclusions of my old survey of the pre-conversion finds from the parish - it never rang true to me that there was so little on the main Sharp site.
Soph

Sorry, red herring implies some sort of deception. I simply want to know how often grass tempered ware is mentioned only to find that it is a false alarm? In this instance obviously, as John points out, time will tell but how often is grass tempered ware found in relation to how often it is suspected? Not just at Sedgeford but elsewhere in England.

I understand that grass tempered ware is not at all common. What I am asking is how often do archaeologist think they have some only to discover on investigation that it is something else? I do appreciate what John is saying about the difficulties of identifying it. I need to reiterate where I am coming from. Until 6 weeks ago I had no interest whatsoever in the social and domestic life of the sedgefordians. My interest has always been military history and defence. Then I did a BERT, something I have planned and wanted for many years. Now I want to know all about the people of sedgeford. Ask my fellow berties and they will tell you that I was so enthusiastic that they had trouble shutting me up! Every animal bone or tooth and every piece of pottery interested me. I was even enthusiastic about the stratigraphy. Before BERT I was reading archaeological text books and military history. Now I am reading about the everyday life of iron age/romano british and anglo-saxons but it is all new to me. Ask me about the hundred years war, the wars of the roses or the napoleonic period and I know my stuff. My BERT was a way for me to enter into battlefield archaeology. Maybe later I'll get round to that. For now I can't wait to get back to sedgeford and dig some more. In fact if I could I would like to be more involved now.
phil.

Point taken. Here's one you will be able to answer....who or what is Gressenhall?

Are there cremation urns from Sedgeford? Maybe the good stuff was just too delicate for everyday use?

Jerry thanks for your comments. An interesting insight and I had not been looking at it that way. If the type of pot manufacture is based on the use of the pot it suggests that they really understood the technology and seems to say something about their development and knowledge.

I was reading K Leahy's book on Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire last night. He mentions a number of funeral urns found in the county that might have originated in East Anglia and I think he mentioned a manufacturing site but I can't recall where. I'll look it up when I get back home tonight.

I've reread the chapter in Leahy's "The Anglo Saxon Kingdom of Lindsey" and I've misremembered it somewhat. They've found a funeral urn in Cleatham Lincolnshire that was made by the same potter as two urns found at Spong Hill in Norfolk. He did not claim they were made at the same site.

The thing is, it's not just the same design of stamp that matters, but the same individual stamp - because they are hand carved each one is different, so they can be traced like coin dies. That's how 'potters' (or maybe workshops) are traced. The networks are now quite extensive, but there is still the issue of locations for many of the early finds of Urn. We generally know what parish they came from, but often now where in the landscape compared to other sites, as at Sedgeford.
Soph

Well there are lots and lots or articles about what it might mean if you want to get stuck in!
In fact there are going to be a lot more now, I stopped looking at them in detail about five years ago after my masters, but you could do worse than to start with the list of references provided here: http://bubl.ac.uk/docs/bibliog/biggam/
Soph

English Spring:
When do the leaves come out on the trees in the spring in England ?
When would crops start to grow ?
Saxon calendar:
Anyone know if the months as we know them were introduced into the Saxon language by Christianity ?

More English Spring questions:
Are nettles available all year ? In March ?
What about hawthorn leaves ? I've read you can eat those. Are they out in March ? April ?

I'm trying to put together a plausible scenario of crops being sown, little food left after winter with a bit of gathering of wild plants being possible and a kid (baby goat) still sucking and too young to be worth slaughtering, but old enough for the mother to be milked without depriving the kid too much.
Does this all sound plausible ?