Digging for Barton: restoration finds on display in Tudor holiday house

Partly inspired by the popular TV show Digging for Britain’ and similar archaeology programmes, but driven mainly by my obsession to find and keep all my home’s historic material, I have spent the last 20 years building up a small finds collection. Sifting through restoration debris and any disturbance of the garden of this Tudor farmhouse in the Warwickshire hamlet of Barton, I have put aside literally everything that might be interesting.

Now cleaned and sorted, the items – ranging from pottery shards to lost toys – are in a display in the house, which is now available for holiday rental. Alongside a mini library including books about sixteenth century life and timber frame building restoration, the display of finds intrigues the friends and family who have seen it so far, and I hope will be of interest to holiday guests, so I am sharing it here.

Everything that looks man-made has been put aside throughout a 20-year restoration project. A more systematic listing is in Finds and Mysteries but these are my highlights. Interpretation is based on amateur research and is intended only as an indicator of the variety of items left by the people who lived at Wisson Hill during – and in some cases before – its 500-year existence.

Medieval jug pieces

These two pieces suggest that there were people living on this piece of land before the house was built in 1530 and Victoria County History summarises Barton’s history since medieval times, so this is entirely likely.

These fragments look like the end of a jug handle, which is consistent with jugs and cooking pots being the most common medieval pottery items. The green and patchy glaze also looks right for pre-1500. The display at Wisson Hill includes other fragments, not yet dated and possibly including other equally old shards.

Bone flute

This bone has a single, sharply cut hole near one end. A bone flute would have several such holes but it looks like this bone is quite large, possibly from a deer, and incomplete. The chew marks at one end suggest it has been chewed (the dog got it?) so this would only be a section of the instrument. Bone flutes were generally more common in pre-Tudor days, but a farm worker such as a shepherd would not have afforded the wooden instruments that became more popular in cities and among the wealthier, so this tradition probably survived longer in the countryside.

Horseshoes

These were all picked up near the house, from the fields which were part of the land farmed from Wisson Hill during its hundreds of years as a farmhouse. The horse shoes on the left of the photo are probably from the larger working horses that were so critical to working farms in the nineteenth century. They may even have belonged to one of the named working horses in the 1795 inventory taken on the death of tenant farmer George Hurst: could one of them have belonged to 22-year old Duke or Jack ‘about 16 or 17’?

The two horse shoes top right are possibly older, as they are smaller and have visible ‘calkins’ or turned down ends. The shoe centre bottom is probably 20th century and the tiny shoe is not from a horse at all, but from a human boot.

Clay tobacco pipe bowl

Possibly 17th century, based on the design, so in my mind’s eye, one of the Payton menfolk sat and smoked his pipe as he talked about the Civil War. The most local events of this frightening time included royalist forces grazing their horses on the meadows nearby and Bidford Bridge having an arch destroyed by Charles I’s troops retreating from the Battle of Worcester.

Having bought out the Bushell family, who owned the house and farm until 1589, the Paytons lived in this farmhouse from the sixteenth century until they built themselves a new and larger stone building 30 metres to the west in 1663. Another story of a family improving their position through the Tudor period.

Delftware

Blue and white china became popular from the 17th century, when glazed earthenware copies of Chinese porcelain were made in Delft, now in the Netherlands, and also in England. An inventory made in 1795, on the death of tenant farmer George Hurst, mentions ‘Delfware’ .

Many blue and white pottery fragments have been unearthed around the house, although some will be later than true Delftware. The cobalt blue of Delftware and some inherited blue and white tureens are the inspiration behind Wisson Hill’s blue and white kitchen decor.

Stone Age debitage

This tiny fragment has been identified as possibly a piece of waste from Stone Age flint tool making. These tiny pieces of stone are hard for an amateur to be sure of identifying correctly, but the fields around Wisson Hill are rich with such tools and the waste from their crafting (debitage) so it would not be surprising.

This position near a crossing point on the River Avon, and the overlooking hill, have been attractive to people before and since the Romans directed Ryknield Street over a ford next to the current position of Bidford church (a 10-minute walk from the holiday house).

Fragment of stitched leather

When the space next to the gable bedroom door was opened up for repairs, it had clearly not seen light for around 200 years. Holiday guests can see the roughly mortared chimney breast, which had previously been plastered, the brace with an apotropaic burn mark, and the clearly very old floorboards still in place. Amongst the fallen plaster and other debris, two significant items emerged: one was a stone rooftile, which suggests that Wisson Hill may once have been roofed in that way, and the other is fine cream-coloured leather, two pieces held together with tiny stitches.

It looked like an offcut from glove making, which would be another tantalising connection to William Shakespeare, whose father was famously a glovemaker. Although the stone roof tile is displayed in Wisson Hill’s study, the piece of leather was too delicate to store with more robust finds and was ‘carefully put away’, sadly yet to emerge from storage. Although it would clearly be wonderful to be able to show this find, rural glove making was common to earn a few extra pennies. Hopefully it will be re-found one day.

The house itself has – through good fortune and neglect – retained an unusual amount of original material and is fascinating in its own right, telling the story of its construction and use, but the small items offer such a direct connection to the people who have lived in it for generations.

I thank my metal detectorist friends Wasp and Helen for their help identifying these items. We have done our best, but we are not experts in this area and any comments from better informed readers would be very welcome.

Find out more about Wisson Hill’s history or have a look at availability for holiday booking.

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