Objects

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Women’s football

This Sunday the England Women’s football team take on Spain in the World Cup Final over in Australia. Throughout the history of organised football in Britain, women have struggled for acceptance from certain sectors of society. Our football collection of 1000 objects was assembled between the 1950s and 1970s and once had only one object with a relation to women in football. A cartoon from 1877 titled ‘Football for Ladies’ mocking the very idea of women’s football. Despite such mockery the first high profile women’s match took place in 1895, drawing a crowd of over 10,000.

 

Football for ladies

For a short time, during and after the First World War, women’s football overtook the men’s game in popularity. As male footballers and football fans from up and down the country were called to war, professional football ground to a screeching halt. Women who had taken up positions in factories and other places of work, in aid of the war effort, stepped in to fill the void on the pitch. Teams such as Dick Kerr Ladies emerged from Dick, Kerr & Co of Preston. This famous team of female wartime munitions workers played matches against other newly formed women’s teams to crowds of tens of thousands.

In one of British football’s most controversial moments the Football Association ended the flourishing women’s game with the stroke of a pen. On 5 December 1921, they declared that “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”. In a cruel move, which many believe was made to protect the financial interests of those involved in the men’s game, the FA banned any affiliated team from hosting a women’s match inside its stadium. This meant that teams who had been achieving roaring crowds of tens of thousands suddenly had nowhere to play but parks and fields. The ban stood for fifty years and still persists in the minds of some people who believe that football is ‘just’ ‘a man’s game’.

The recovery of womens football has gained momentum in the last two decades. Last year our museum collected some representitive shirts and trophies from the Hitchin Belles, a team formed in 1999 which has grown into one of the largest women and girl’s teams in the country. A perfect representitive of the growth of the women’s grassroots game on our very doorstep!

Despite the absolutley momumental fifty year set back “football for ladies” has risen from the ashes to a place where tens of thousands will cheer once again.

Hitchin Belles shirt from our collection

Dr Arthur Robert Waddell (1854-1924) and his Australian wife Helena (Dorothy) Henrietta (née White, 1873-1938) lived in a house on the Great North Road called Roseland at Hinxworth, north of Baldock, before moving to Cambridge about 1921. Inspired by Robert Clutterbuck’s (1772-1831) account of Roman discoveries in 1724 at Hinxworth (Clutterbuck was Lord of the Manor there), he set out to see if any more antiquities could be found. The earlier historian Nathaniel Salmon (1675-1742) had described the original finds as ‘some earthen vessels or large urns, full of burnt bones and ashes… a human skeleton… bodies… not above a foot under the surface… and with urns great or small near them, and pateras of fine red earth, some with the impression of the maker on the bottom’. As he was writing just four years after they were found, there is every reason to trust his description, which sound as if they included Bronze Age vessels (‘earthen vessels or large urns, full of burnt bones and ashes’) and Roman samian ware (‘pateras of fine red earth, some with the impression of the maker on the bottom’).

Dr Waddell settled on a disused gravel pit to the east of Newinn, the earlier name of his house Roseland, in the southwestern corner of the parish on the north side of the Cat Ditch. Although we do not have Waddell’s own account of the work he carried out, there is a paper by W Percival Westell (1874-1943) of Letchworth Museum that seems to be based on Waddell’s notes as the style – and some of the conjectures – are quite unlike anything else Westell wrote.

According to the publication, ‘The root of the word “Newinn” is of great antiquity… it is suggested that something sacred can be read into the name of the meadow’. This is patent nonsense (Newinn means exactly what it seems to mean at first sight) and, for all his faults, Westell was not given to such wild conjectures. Indeed, the entire paper is full of strange ideas that are quite foreign to his usually meticulous and down-to-earth accounts. We can probably assume that much of the paper – apart from the catalogue that forms over half of the text – was effectively Waddell’s work.

One of Dr Waddell’s misapprehensions was that the greater the depth, the older the material found. The publication includes a schematic section through the site, which shows ‘No Finds’ 6 inches (0.15 m) below the surface, but ‘3 Roman Cinerary Urns, Jugs, Vases, & Samian Ware’ at 1 foot (0.3 m). There was then a blank zone, followed by ‘Seven Cinerary Urns, Native British Ware, circa 50 AD’ at two feet (0.61 m), with ‘Fragments of Bronze, Iron, & Pottery’ below at two feet six inches (0.76 m). A ‘Bronze Age Food Vessel used as Cinerary Urn’ was recorded at 3 feet (0.91 m), with the skeletal remains at 3 feet 6 inches (1.07 m).

The sequence led Waddell to conclude that the skull that was ‘partly embedding itself in the gravel… [and] lay face downwards’ (unpublished photographs show that in reality, it lay on its left side, next to what was clearly a broken humerus), while he claimed that seven skeletons aligned with their heads to the south were ‘tens of thousands of years old’. He also thought that they ‘had not been buried until the bones were bare of flesh… [and] may have been killed sacrificially, and buried in a spot regarded as sacred’. This is again fanciful. All the indications are that most of the burials – the Bronze Age cremation burial apart – belonged to the Late Iron Age and early Roman periods. The probable cemetery comprised twelve cremation burials and eight inhumation burials in the area investigated.

Unfortunately, if Waddell had kept the pots together as assemblages from individual burials, his notes seem not to have included these details. Westell simply published a list of objects separated into groups according to date and form, assisted by W H Lane and Erik Shimon Applebaum (1911-2008). One of the eight samian vessels – a bi-lobed cup of form Dragendorff 27 – contained ‘ten bone counters having concentric rings’. Five of them are illustrated here. Bi-lobed cups date from the first century AD to the 150s (or possibly later in the Rhineland factories); this one was stamped with the potter’s name Sabinus. As more than ten potters with this name made samian vessels at one time or another, it is impossible to be more precise about the date of the cup, although Westell suggested AD 80-120.

Bone counters from Newinn

Bone counters are relatively common finds on sites of Roman date. The earliest were made from glass, but bone types began to dominate during the second century. Their decoration varies from plain (but with an indentation from the lathe used to turn them), countersunk on the upper face, with concentric rings on the upper face or with a domed upper face. The plain types are the earliest (from before the Roman Conquest in AD 43 to the first half of the third century), while those with countersunk upper faces are probably second century and later. Grooved types occur throughout the Roman period, while convex upper surfaces are a late feature that continue into early medieval (‘Anglo-Saxon’) types. Some plain forms have traces of Roman numerals and letters.

These counters were probably pieces in a board game. We know of several Roman era board games, including XII scripta or Ludus duodecim scriptorum (‘(game of) twelve markings’) and ludus latrunculorum (’game of robbers’). The first was perhaps like backgammon and involved throwing a die to determine how the pieces moved; each player had fifteen pieces (the ‘markings’ were on the board, in three rows of twelve). The second was a game of strategy in which one player had to trap their opponent’s pieces between two of their own; the trapped piece would be removed, as in draughts.

Latrunculus referred to an individual piece in the ludus latrunculorum, and eventually came to refer to counters in any game. Unfortunately, none of the rules for any of these games has survived: although you can buy reproduction sets today, the rules have all be ‘reconstructed’ (‘made up’ would be a better term!) by scholars in the past century and a half.

There is no consensus about whether board games developed in pre-Roman Britain or if evidence for them before the conquest shows contact with the Classical world (which we know was extensive). Counters often turn up in graves, sometimes just one or two short of a full set, and occasionally there is evidence for a gaming board, often just in the form of hinges. The burial of a mature or older adult dating from about AD 65-80 found at Clothall Road, Baldock, in 1968 had an opened gaming board, interpreted at the time as a ‘folding tray’, but no latrunculi.

Games were not just for children, then. At Stanway, Colchester, a grave found in 1996 contained a gaming board with its glass pieces still almost in place. The game was played over a grid of perhaps twelve by eight squares, with twelve blue pieces lined up along one edge and twelve white along the other. One of the white pieces had moved forward one square, while two of the blue had also moved; one, opposite the moved white counter, had moved on space, while the other had moved two spaces. A thirteenth, smaller white counter lay near the centre of the board, while the thirteenth blue counter sat upside down a square in front of the second blue counter from the left. The grave also contained a set of iron and copper alloy medical instruments forming a basic surgical kit of Romano-British type. The man who owned the game was therefore likely a doctor about the time of the Roman conquest.

Why would a doctor have a game in his grave? There is a further group of objects that we need to take into account. Eight metal rods with cylindrical sections but flattened triangular heads lay next to the board, with three of them resting on it. The excavators thought that the rods – four copper alloy, four iron, so different colours, with two of each type shorter than the others – were part of a divination set. The rods would perhaps be used to ask the gods about the medical intervention: did they approve or not? We think that the prospective patient would grasp the rods and perhaps drop them, like the traditional Chinese I Ching, where the pattern made by fifty yarrow stalks would enable the operator to answer the questioner. Perhaps the patient would take some from the doctor, which may explain why some are shorter, a bit like the method of ‘drawing the short straw’.

Medicine in the ancient world was tied up with religion, as were all aspects of life, something we might today regard as superstition. Although evidence-based medicine had a long tradition, especially in the Greek world of the eastern Mediterranean, it was still under the purview of the gods. People would only many major decisions after consulting oracles. Perhaps the ‘game’ was less of a pastime than part of the doctor’s equipment for asking the gods about what sort of treatment to give their patients and what outcome they might expect.

We have less information about the person whose grave at Newinn contained the ten bone latrunculi. Thanks to what seem to have been fairly chaotic excavation techniques, we do not know if the burial contained a gaming board. It is possible that the ‘fragment of square belt ornament’ and ‘fragment of thin bronze plate’ (Westell though this last might have been part of a shield) could have been elements of one.

What seem to be simple parts of a board game may have had deeper meanings to their user. We will never know anything about the person buried at Newinn: were they a doctor, a priest or simply someone who enjoyed playing the ludus latrunculorum or something like it?

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

In October 2014, Phil Kirk was metal detecting on a field at Kelshall in the hills south-west of Royston, when he encountered a strong signal. Digging down about 15 inches, he found the top of something bronze. Thinking initially that it might be nothing more than a modern filter from a car, it turned out to be a complete Roman jug, missing its handle. On lifting it, he spotted the handle and bowl of a bronze patera (or trulleum). Next to this lay the battered bottom half of a large jug and last of all a third jug with a trefoil mouth in four or five pieces, apparently crushed by a large flint. All four vessels came out from a hole no more than 50 cm across. Quite by chance, the broken base of the third vessel matched a bronze object found a few months earlier and about ten metres away, which had been discarded under a nearby hedge as probably a twentieth century oil funnel, but which was the top half of the jug.

Phil recognised the importance of his find and contacted Julian Watters, who at the time was Finds Liaison Officer for Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. He then contacted the museum to see if it would be worth investigating the site further. So, on a cold morning later that month, a group went up to the site and expanded the original hole to a one metre square. Early in the digging, the missing jug hand turned up, but no sign of the edge of the pit into which they had been put could be found, so we needed a larger excavation trench.

We returned to the site in November, when the farmer scraped the topsoil from an area three metres square. During the initial cleaning, the rim of a glass bottle became visible, then more shards of glass. Next, an iron lamp-holder and suspension bar turned up. Two layers of hobnails were the remains of shoes placed one on top of the other. Next, a bronze corner binding from a wooden box or tray turned up, followed by the other three.

On top of the decayed tray stood a shattered but otherwise complete shallow dish, about the size of a saucer, 14.5 cm in diameter. When first exposed, it seemed to be iridescent from decay, but as the excavator exposed more, it became obvious that it was multicoloured millefiori. The pattern was made from lozenges of fused dark purple, white, yellow, blue and red glass rods. Then a second dish with the same basic pattern turned up next to it. Both were covered with a thin fibrous carbonised deposit, perhaps the remains of a delicate cloth wrapping. Along with these were two shattered glass cups and a pair of blue glass handles, fragments of a lava object and a silver denarius of the emperor Trajan (reigned AD 98-117).

Next to the box stood a collection of glass bottles. The largest was hexagonal, 23 cm across, and contained the cremated bone of a probably middle-aged (40+) man and three worn second-century coins. A second bottle was octagonal, with two long sides, a type rarely found in Britain, and two square bottles. One has the letters IΛƧ (IAS) on its base, a type exactly paralleled at the Roman fort at Cramond, near Edinburgh, in a ditch dated AD 208-212. There was also a rectangular bottle. All these bottles were typical Romano-British products and represent the complete range available at the start of the third century. All were shattered because the pit – a grave – lay beneath a mound of large flint nodules that had collapsed onto them, but which had also protected them from the effects of ploughing.

The grave probably dates from a few years either side of AD 210, and all the finds apart from the millefiori dishes are typical of this period. The dishes are more unusual. Tests by the British Museum show that the glass was made in Alexandria, and the colours are right for a date around 200. Archaeologists have found sherds from similar vessels at Carlisle, Wroxeter, Inveresk, Frocester Court, Eccles (Kent) and London. The importance of the Kelshall examples is that they are the only complete vessels made from this mosaic glass so far discovered.


Each dish is about 14.5 cm in diameter, with straight sides rising at 30°-40° from a small flat base. The rim edges are plain and a little uneven, suggesting that the excess glass was sheared off while the vessels were still hot. They were not blown, but perhaps pressed into a mould. The pressing distorted the lozenge design, and one of the dishes appears to have been made by combining two or more sheets of the patterned glass. Millefiori consists of rods of different coloured glass arranged in a pattern, which are then heated to fuse them together. While still hot, the fused rods – about the size of a baked bean tin – are stretched into a long rod. This can then be cut into shorter lengths, which are then fused in the same way to create a pattern. With the final pattern created, the cylinder of glass can be cut into slices, ready to be reheated and pressed into moulds to make vessels. Some brooches also have millefiori decoration, often much finer than that used to make vessels.

What are these remarkable dishes doing in a grave on an exposed hilltop in Kelshall? Who had owned them? Where did that person live? One thing we can easily guess is that they were wealthy. Most Roman graves of this date might contain some pottery vessels and perhaps one or two glass vessels. Wealthier families could afford to put more things into the ground and some graves could be very ostentatious. This is the case here. Not only could they put in nine glass vessels (five bottles, two cups and two rare dishes), but also four bronze vessels (three jugs and a patera, a libation-pouring dish) and four coins.

Perhaps most significantly, the family did not put any ceramics into the grave. There was a distinct hierarchy to vessel use in the Roman world. Only the imperial family could use gold; other high-ranking families could have silver. Rich people would use bronze, which is what we see here. Aspiring families would use pewter. The silly idea promoted by so many popular works and television series that samian ware is ‘high status’ is nonsense: people who used pottery were rather low down in the pecking order. Yes, samian was more expensive than other earthenwares, but it was definitely not something that the rich would use, much less put in the graves of their loved ones.

The Kelshall family made a definite statement about its position in society during the funeral. They could afford the best quality bronze and glassware to put in the grave; perhaps not putting ceramics in was part of their ostentatious show of wealth. Some of the items were imported, and we can speculate that the cloth covering of the millefiori dishes was something expensive (fine linen or silk, perhaps). Large parts of the grave appear ‘empty’, but probably held items that have since decayed (clothing, wooden items and so on). After the contents of the burial were in the ground and the pit filled in, it was covered with a low cairn of carefully interlocking flint nodules.

Where might the family have lived? The closest Roman settlement of any size is the town at Baldock, only 8 km to the west and visible from the hilltop. There was also a settlement between Kelshall and Baldock, at Slip End, and villas at Steeple Morden, Litlington and elsewhere. The nearness of these places does not mean that the man buried here lived in any of them, though. The grave is in an area where aerial photographs, geophysics and random discoveries show that there was a lot going on in the past and specifically the Roman period.

Kris Lockyear of University College London used a cart-based magnetometer to survey part of the field where the burial was found. It showed that the burial lies inside a large, almost square ditched area about 90 m across, with ditches up to 4 m wide on three sides and open to the east, with hints of a fence on this side. There are other, smaller and irregular enclosures to both west and east of it, as well as buildings composed of postholes and rammed clay floors, pits and at least one well. There are traces of ditched roadways around the site. The scale of the enclosure does not look domestic, nor is it military or a cemetery type. Instead, the most likely explanation is that it is religious.

Unlike medieval churchyards, Roman temple sites are not often associated with human burials. At a temple in Wynn Close, Baldock, the precinct held the graves of several new-born babies, but this is unusual. Late Roman Christian graves often clustered around what were believed to be the graves of martyrs, which could then develop a religious building such as a chapel or church, as happened at St Albans.

The contents of the Kelshall grave include a bronze patera, used in religious rituals. Might the man buried in the grave have been an important patron of the temple or even its chief priest? In the Roman world, this was not necessarily a professional post, and local dignitaries would often serve as the priests in their communities. Perhaps the man buried with the costly goods was just such a priest, perhaps even a major patron of the temple who paid for its refurbishment or rebuilding.

The range of glassware is as remarkable as the dish pictured here. It includes every type that was available at the time the grave was dug. Some of the vessels were new, but the hexagonal bottle containing the owner’s ashes shows extensive wear on the base, where it has been taken on and off a shelf over some years. Does the range hint that the owner had made his wealth as a merchant trading in glassware? This is going beyond what we can reasonably infer from the contents of the grave. Even so, we ought to be able to speculate about such things, always acknowledging that they are merely guesswork.

Written by Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

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