Anglo-Saxon Romsey and the Lower Test Valley
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Anglo-Saxon Iron Smelting by Karen Anderson
Iron smelting was carried out in Romsey on an industrial scale. It left behind a distinctive dark black soil containing charcoal and slag. Pieces of slag have turned up on many excavations. With no stone to hand on the gravel river terrace, blocks of slag were put to use as packing in postholes. The smelting took place in an area south of the Abbey, on a corner of the terrace bordered by the Test floodplain on the west and the eastwards bend in the river where it meets the Tadburn on the south. The excavation at Narrow Lane uncovered evidence for slag pit furnaces, a relatively inefficient technology that produces massive blocks of slag. This material has not been dated. A deep deposit of smelting debris at the Creatures Pet Shop site (4 Market Place) provided a 7th/8th century date. Further smelting material in a channel cutting the mid-Saxon layer was associated with Saxo-Norman pottery - smelting continued into the Late Saxon period. A recent re-assessment of archived material from the Midland Bank site (10 Market Place) has found that smelting was carried out just 20m from the current abbey building, within the abbey precinct. None of these excavations have been published. Most of the discussions on Saxon iron smelting in the published literature fail to mention Romsey.
Creatures Pet Shop Excavation A1986.12
A small, but important, excavation was carried out in 1986 at the rear of the then Creatures Pet Shop. This business traded at the south side of the Market Place, in the third building west of the Town Hall, 4 Market Place. The excavation produced a considerable quantity of iron smelting debris. A feature identified as a water channel cut through a deep deposit of ash, charcoal and iron slag. Charcoal samples from this deposit have been radiocarbon dated to the 7th/8th century. The water channel lies on the line of the west branch of the Fishlake which now runs through a culvert along Church Street and then turns west into Abbey Water. Lenses of smelting debris within the fill of the channel demonstrate that smelting was taking place after the channel was diverted, continuing into the Late Saxon period. Pottery within the channel fill is Saxo-Norman.
The notes, site drawings and finds from the Creatures Pet Shop excavation are stored at Chilcomb House in Winchester. This material has been examined and photographed as part of the Anglo-Saxon project. More information on the site is available by clicking the links below:
Richard Palmer and Jessie Russell excavating behind Creatures Pet Shop in 1986. They are at the west end of the L-shaped trench shown in the plan. This small excavation produced 150kg (330 lbs) of iron smelting slag.
Photo by Frank Green
A short, anonymous note entitled ‘New light shed on Romsey’s early history’ was bound along with the context sheets for the Creatures Pet Shop excavation stored at Chilcomb House. After 36 years the deposits have finally been radiocarbon dated.
Drawing of the south section and a detail of the channel fill. Red arrows point to Contexts containing smelting debris. Yellow arrows point out the edge of the water channel.
A fragment of charcoal was removed from a block of slag found in Context 4, the deep deposit of smelting debris cut by the channel. The sample was radiocarbon dated to 667-774 (95.4% probability).
A fragment of a cattle tibia was radiocarbon dated by the CARD Fund. It was found at the bottom of the water channel, in Context 55. The dating of the bone to the 7th century indicates that it was residual, eroded from deposits cut by the channel. Although it doesn’t date the Fishlake, it provides evidence for cattle rearing as another aspect of the economy of the mid-Saxon settlement at Romsey.
Bone photo by Frank Green.