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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2011
The Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University was for some years interested in a hut on Bucklebury Common, Berkshire, which was occupied as a workshop by the Lailey family who used it for the manufacture of wooden bowls which found a ready market. When the last of these craftsmen bowlturners died without male heirs in 1958 and the workshop was likely to be demolished, the Museum took steps both to secure one of the primitive pole-lathes used by the Laileys in their craft, which is now displayed in the Museum, and also to make a photographic and measured record of the hut itself and its contents. From this record, which the Museum has kindly allowed us to use in preparing this article, it is evident that the hut itself had been a structure of considerable architectural interest. Part of it had a deeply sunken floor which had carried the pole-lathes, and was similar in size and shape to an Anglo- Saxon Grubenhaus of the pagan period. Although the walls and roof were clearly of later date, they could well have taken the place of much earlier predecessors. The purpose of this article is thus to draw attention to the continued use into the present century not only of the bowltumer's primitive craft at Bucklebury but of its housing in a hut which probably began as an Anglo-Saxon Grubenhaus. As such its structure and furnishing may throw light on features that have sometimes puzzled students of excavated Anglo-Saxon Grubenhäuser elsewhere.
page 121 note 1 See Archaeologia, lxxiii (1923), 147–92; lxxvi (1927), 59–80; xcii (1947), 79–93.
page 121 note 2 A recent discussion by Rahtz, P. in Wilson, D. M. (ed.), The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1981), 70–81Google Scholar, raises many questions on which the study of the Bucklebury Grubenhaus may throw light. A possible parallel is the hut from Athelney, ibid., fig. 2.13.
page 122 note 1 Skeat, W. W., Place-names of Berkshire (Oxford, 1911), 22Google Scholar. That Burghild had Mercian associations is further suggested by the occurrence of her name in Buggilde straet, a Roman road in the west midlands which became the later Ryknield Street. Hooke, D., The Anglo-Saxon Landscape (Manchester, 1985), 208.Google Scholar
page 122 note 4 Hurry, J. B., Reading Abbey (London, 1904), gives details.Google Scholar
page 122 note 5 These records, held at Bucklebury Manor, were used by A. L. Humphreys, Bucklebury, a Berkshire Parish (Reading, 1932), from which the information here given about the Laileys has been taken. The descent of the last bowlturner (d. 1958) is from independent genealogical research.
page 122 note 6 This description may have merely indicated his social status in general terms. His son's widow was later (1881 census) described as the relict of an ‘Agricultural Labourer’, despite her late husband having been consistently entered both on census returns and in the parish register as ‘Bowl Turner’. Being illiterate, she may not have known (or cared) how the clerk described her husband. In 1466 John Goddard of Bucklebury contracted with the University of Oxford to make 37 desks and benches for the new Divinity School. Though clearly in a big way of business and of some repute as a woodworker, he is described in the contract merely as ‘husbandman’: Salter, H. E. (ed.), Registrum Can-cellarii Oxoniensis 1434–1469, II, Oxford Hist. Soc. 94 (Oxford, 1932), 185.Google Scholar
page 122 note 7 Morton, H. V., In Search of England (London, 1927).Google Scholar
page 122 note 8 Written evidence for the earlier state of the sunken floor of the hut includes Woods, K. S., Rural Industries round Oxford (Oxford 1921), who described (1919) the bowlturner as ‘standing in a pit’, and Mrs J. L. Wynne-Thomas, who noted that there was still ‘one step down’ in c. 1945. There is also the photographic analysis of old prints dating c. 1930 at the Institute of Agricultural History, Reading University.Google Scholar
page 122 note 9 Our attention has been drawn to the fact that the buildings at Coppergate, York, were also sunken horizontal-plank-built, and secured by posts. Moreover, one of the workshops was that of a bowlturner. See Hall, R., The Viking Dig (London, 1984), 78.Google Scholar
page 122 note 10 It is stated by Rackham, O., The History of the Countryside (London, 1986), 237, that ‘only in modern times does elm appear to have been used for platters and bowls’. No evidence is given for this assertion, nor is it clear what he means by ‘modern times’.Google Scholar