Exchanging Medieval Material Culture Studies on archaeology and ...

68
George Haggarty & Derek Hall
Fig. 1 Location of fi ndspots of stove tiles in
Schotland.
were manufactured in that area10. From 1508 the Walcheren
port of Veere was the compulsory entry port (or staple) for
Scottish shipping to the Low Countries. Th is trade was predominantly
in the hands of Edinburgh merchants through the
port of Leith, and consisted principally of wool, woolfells,
hides, skins and fi sh. Occasionally, Scottish ships also called in
to Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Bergen op Zoom, Vlissingen, Sluys,
Bruges, and Antwerp11.
Th e use of purpose built smokeless stoves from North
Germany was relatively common in England in the 15th and
16th centuries. Initially found purely in monasteries, in later
centuries they become popular high status objects in a domestic
setting. By 1990 thirty-fi ve fi ndspots for continental stove
tiles had been recorded in Britain, and of those approximately
twenty-fi ve were in the Greater London area12. Th e fragment
10 Gaimster et al. 1990, 10.
11 Lynch and Strang, 1966, 239.
12 Ibid. 1.
13 Lamb 1972.
found furthest north was from Fountains Abbey in North
Yorkshire, with Scotland drawing a blank. Th e recently identifi
ed, copper rich, monochrome, white slipped, lead glazed,
stove tile fragments from six Scottish sites under discussion
in this paper, all seem to have been recovered from later middens,
or soils, of 16th- or 17th-century date. Th ree tiles are
without doubt from either religious institutions or royal castles,
while the two Canongate examples could well have come
from similar sources. Th e Perth sherd, however, is most likely
to be from high status secular buildings, as yet unidentifi ed.
It is probably no coincidence that the generally accepted date
bracket given to these tiles includes the onset of the ‘Little Ice
Age’, when an already cold Northern Europe became at least
a few degrees colder; a good reason for those who could
aff ord it to fi t central heating13.