An archaeological excavation at St Peter's, Marefair, Northampton was held in July as part of the on-going refurbishments of the adjacent Old Black Lion Inn. In addition to this, volunteers were invited to take part in a rare opportunity to excavate a 19th-century brick alleyway next to the historic Old Black Lion Inn and help uncover historical features, check excavated soil for artefacts, and prepare findings for specialist study. The excavations revealed a multitude of finds, some which were to be expected and others which proved rather suprising. John Buglass from JB Archaeology Ltd explains more:
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As part of the on-going refurbishment of the Old Black Lion Inn on Marefair for the Churches Conservation Trust it was necessary to excavate a ‘ditch’ along its eastern wall. This was to lower the ground level along this wall in order reduce the significant amount of damp which was affecting the former pub. So far so routine for old buildings…..however, the challenge lay in fact that the eastern boundary of the Old Black Lion is the graveyard of St Peter’s Church.
St Peter’s is a Grade I Listed Building of mostly Normon architecture which in turn is located over the remains of a much earlier Anglo-Saxon complex of halls and buildings (which are themselves a Scheduled Ancient Monument). The fact that there is extensive buried Anglo-Saxon remains below the church shows that the ground level here has risen over time. This raising of the ground level continued steadily with the graveyard around St Peter’s seeing a constant flow of burials from its 12th century foundation until its closure for burials in the early 20th century. With the use of the churchyard as a burial ground for around 1,200 years and assuming 10-20 burials a year, depending on past mortality rates, there could be between 10 and 20 thousand burials in the churchyard. This, along with the buried Anglo-Saxon remains, meant that any digging in the graveyard had a very high possibility (to put it mildly) of encountering buried archaeological remains. Therefore, in order to minimise any damage and loss of archaeological information the ditch alongside the Old Black Lion was excavated archaeologically with a small team of professional archaeologists excavating in the graveyard and a Community Archaeology team of 35 volunteers excavating the more recent Victorian feature associated with the pub as well as sorting and washing the finds from the excavations.
So, what was discovered? As the excavations were relatively shallow compared to the depth of the burials, we only encountered human remains at the very bottom of the depth we were digging to. These remains consisted of separate four adult burials and four infant burials. Interestingly one of the adult burials appeared to have five spare heads as there were a total of six skulls in the one grave. This is not a case of ‘one for wear and five for spare’ but is due to the sexton reburying skeletal remains which had been disturbed during the digging of other graves. The infant burials were mostly clustered together and are probably in an area reserved for child burials.
Above the level of the burials, as is typical in graveyards, the ground is very disturbed as it has been dug over many, many times in the past with each successive generation of burials. This means that there is very little chance of there being any undisturbed archaeological remains. However, our excavations did, somewhat unexpectedly, produce a large amount of finds from this level, and these were finds that were not what was expected.
The majority of the finds recovered were animal bone and definitely not what would be expected in a graveyard. The animal bone consisted mostly of cow and sheep but there were also remains of pig, horse, at least two cats, rat and bird. The animal bone is a mixture of butchered bones from the domestic species (cow, pig, sheep) that would have been for consumption and wild species (rat and bird) that may have been living in the graveyard.
As well as the animal bone quite large amounts of pottery were also recovered which, on very preliminary dating, appears to cover a period of time from the later Iron Age/Roman period through to the late 20th century! This is a much greater time span than should be expected and strongly suggests, along with all the animal bone, that something may be not quite as we expected in the deposits in the graveyard.
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In addition to the bone and pottery there were several more interesting artefacts including a possible 16th century German thimble; 19th century pipe clay figurine of a dog; decorated bone knife handle; possible medieval floor tile and a ‘T Manning & Co Ltd Northampton’ bottle stopper. T Manning & Co Ltd were brewers who were based at the Castle Brewery on Black Lion Hill to the west of the Old Black Lion Inn and the stopper dates to around 1896.
So what does this wide range of finds and bones tell us? At the moment, whilst we await full identification of the artefacts, it is only possible to suggest a possible reason for all this diverse material. This diverse material has all the apparencies of being domestic refuse – broken pottery and glass along with food waste – and from a long period of time. It would be very unusual to see this sort of material dumped in a graveyard and it would almost undoubtedly not be tolerated at all by the incumbent priest of St Peter’s. So, if the material was not dumped there originally it would seem that possibly large amounts of soil, containing all this refuse, have been brought in from elsewhere into the graveyard for some reason. But what reason? At the moment the ‘leading contender’ for this is potentially the levelling of the graveyard when the memorials and headstones were removed in the late 1970s.
Currently all the finds are being identified and a detailed report on the results of the excavation will be produced in the future once all the ground investigations have been completed.