Clay pipe and pot fragments connect us to Maldon’s past

James, the well-known current owner/manager of Reeve’s, tells me that it once formed part of his grandfather Jack Reeve’s garden, but it was decided to annex it and use it as an outside display for shop products, such as wheelbarrows and dustbins.

And that’s how it was for many years. Recently, however, James has kindly agreed to let the hardworking volunteers of Maldon in Bloom turn it into a garden again.

The first job was to remove the old concrete – no mean feat in itself. Next, the soil, which hadn’t seen the light of day in ages, needed turning over, sifting and refreshing.

I watched the work with great interest, particularly as I can’t walk past freshly dug areas of our ancient town without seeing what has turned up.

On this occasion I certainly wasn’t disappointed. But then I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, because this part of town dates back many centuries.

In the 1500s it was a busy junction known as Jacob’s Cross - an intersection between Rankstile Lane (the former name of Wantz Road), the High Street and the route to the town’s archery butts (which we still call Butt Lane).

Whilst there was an early house, called Spencer’s - alias Harding’s - on the opposite side of Wantz Road (where, since 1935, King George’s Place has been located), as Bill Petchey said in his A Prospect of Maldon (1500-1689), “…fields occupied nearly all of the land between Jacob’s Cross and St Mary’s Church, clearly separating the Hythe from the rest of the town”.

So Jacob’s Cross was an interesting, strategic place that would have been well trod by those on their way to either their weekly shooting practice, to their boats moored on the riverside, or up to the commercial hub of the High Street.

You can imagine that it must have been pretty muddy and churned up in the winter months and littered with all the detritus of everyday life. And that brings me on to the finds from that new garden.

To many people the little pieces picked out of the soil there would not be worth much – and they aren’t (at least not in monetary terms), but as far as our local history is concerned, they are absolutely priceless.

Among the small assemblage of early-medieval to modern-day, I immediately spotted the bowl of a clay tobacco pipe.

The fragments of an old clay pipe 

These usually turn out to be Victorian, but this example is much older. From its size, the slope of the bowl, the flat spur (or foot) and the thickness of the stem and diameter of the bore, it definitely dates to a relatively narrow period between 1660 and 1710.

Nearby were two small base and body shards of a distinctive blue and grey patterned pot. These have been identified by experts to be the fragments of an imported Rhineland (Germany) Westerwald Stoneware drinking vessel – of around the late-17th or early-18th Century, say c.1700, the same kind of date as the pipe.

When I heard of that attribution, my imagination immediately ran riot – who discarded their broken smoking pipe and shattered beer tankard here and under what circumstances?

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Sorry to say, we still see plenty of discarded cigarette ends and the occasional pinched pint glass in the High Street today. In the era that we are talking about, however, on the opposite side of the road, where Maldon Spice is now, was the Cock pub and on the other corner of Butt Lane Cobbes-at-the-Corner, or Jacob’s, which would go on to become the Red Lion and then, in the early-18th Century, the Rose and Crown (aka the Crown).

Had the person (or persons) unknown who left us these precious clues to the past been over at one of those establishments?

We know that William and Alice Backhouse were running the Rose and Crown in the 1690s, while John Day was at the Cock in 1707.

Fragments of the Westerwald Stoneware pot

Did our anonymous drinker know them and muse into his pint about the election of Maldon’s first mayor, John Pond in 1687?

Mayor Pond’s legacy is the town mace of the same year and is still in use today.

And did the bars ring with the declaration of the town crier, John Richmond, when, in March 1702, he bellowed out to our drinker and the other residents that Anne was now their Queen? She still looks down at us from her portrait in the Moot Hall.

Just two years later, local boy made good Dr Thomas Plume died and bequeathed his library (and much more besides) to the town.

That pipe and pot would have been instantly recognisable to all of those people. The fragments are, in themselves, connecting blocks to a long-gone time and, with a bit of reflection, they really can make our local past live again.