I have lived a lifetime in the
Ingatestone area but had never heard of Mill Green Ware. So when I saw a booklet within a pile of
ephemera my immediate thought was that this could not be true, or there must be
another Mill Green. But it is.
Mill Green Ware dates from the
late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century, was fired in
kilns around the Ingatestone area and supplied to London. According to the article – an offprint form
the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society (LAMAS) – the pottery was dated
by reference to tree-ring dating the timbers from the wharfs along the River
Thames where it was landed. These
revetments changed position every thirty to fifty years thus making it possible
for archaeologists to track the frequency of pottery types as well as their
age.
Having been involved in a
tree-ring dating project ten years ago I found this fascinating.
Examples of Mill Green Ware
can be found on the Museum of London website: http://archive.museumoflondon.org.uk/ceramics/pages/subcategory.asp?subcat_id=702&subcat_name=Mill+Green+ware
The article is entitled ‘A
Dated Type Series of London Medieval Pottery. Part One; Mill Green Ware’ by J E
Pearce, A G Vince & R White with C M Cunningham, and was published in 1982.
It appears in Volume 33 of the
Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society and may be
downloaded free of charge from their website: http://www.lamas.org.uk/archives/transactions/volume33.html
1 comment:
Hence Potter Row Farm near The Viper Inn.
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