In April and July 2022, twenty-one holes were dug in gardens across Bewdley. Each one was a metre square. Together they were an attempt to answer a question the documents cannot: what was here before there was a town?
How you dig a town
The excavation was part of Small Pits, Big Ideas, a Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and it was carried out with Bewdley Historical Research Group and students from The Bewdley School.
The method is deliberately modest. A test pit is one metre by one metre, dug in ten centimetre layers called spits, with the finds from each spit bagged separately so it is always known how deep down a thing was lying. Most pits go down to what archaeologists call the natural, meaning the level where human disturbance stops and undisturbed geology begins. In Bewdley that came at anywhere between thirty centimetres and one metre forty.
The reason for digging in back gardens rather than anywhere more promising is refuse. Rubbish is collected now. For most of history it went over the back fence, and not only food waste but broken pots, building rubble and anything else past use. Pottery is the useful part, because styles changed with fashion and can be dated closely, so the quantity of pottery of a given date in a given garden gives a rough measure of how busy that spot was at that time.
Bewdley was harder than the villages the project had dug before, and the report says so. A town that has been built, rebuilt and dug up for five hundred years has thoroughly churned ground, and the finds from the more central pits had mostly been shifted about and knocked around before anyone got to them.
Before the town
Prehistoric and Roman material turned up in small quantities, which is normal for this region and indicates long, low-level occupation rather than anything dramatic. What is interesting is where it turned up. The early finds clustered on the east side of the river, which points to a long, thin prehistoric settlement south of the present town, on the Wribbenhall bank.
That fits what is otherwise known. Bewdley does not appear in the Domesday Book; Wribbenhall and Ribbesford do. The Archaeology Service’s own account goes further, and it is worth quoting the shape of it: the name Wribbenhall applied to both sides of the Severn until 1275, when the west bank began to be called Bewdley, from Beaulieu, and settlement over there started to grow. The town on the tourist side of the river is the newcomer, and the ground agrees with the documents.
The peach stone
The best find came from Ribbesford. Test pits nine and ten produced undisturbed medieval deposits pointing to twelfth to fourteenth century settlement, and enough household rubbish and building material to say with confidence that there were medieval houses near Ribbesford Church.
In test pit nine they found a peach stone. It is medieval, and it survived only because it had been burnt, which is the usual reason organic material lasts at all. Peaches were being grown in England from at least the early thirteenth century, but the remains almost never turn up, and their presence says something about the climate of the period being kinder than the one that followed.
Somebody at Ribbesford, seven or eight hundred years ago, ate a peach and threw the stone on the fire.
Wyre Hill, and a date confirmed by absence
Local tradition holds that the Wyre Hill area was developed in the 1460s, in a burst of rebuilding after the town was damaged during the Wars of the Roses. Two test pits were dug up there, and neither produced a single piece of material earlier than 1500.
That is a negative result, and negative results are usually weak. This one is not, because it is exactly the result the tradition predicts. If Wyre Hill had been occupied in the fourteenth century there would be fourteenth century pottery in the gardens, and there is none. The absence supports the date.
Where the pots came from
The pottery also carries information about trade, and this is where the dig quietly confirms something the town’s whole economic history depends on.
Two thirds of the pottery from before 1350 came from Worcester and Malvern, a considerably higher proportion than was found at Wolverley, only six kilometres to the north east. Bewdley had correspondingly less local ware and less Staffordshire whiteware than Wolverley did. So even before it was a town, this spot was looking south, down the river, rather than inland.
Two pottery types from further off make the point sharper. Ham Green ware, from Bristol. Brill-Boarstall ware, from Buckinghamshire. The Bristol connection that eventually made this town rich, and that later tied it to a trade the town has to be honest about, is sitting in the ground here as broken crockery, centuries before the quays were built.
The Black Death, probably not
Only three of the twenty-one pits held anything datable to the mid fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, and the Ribbesford area produced nothing at all after the fourteenth century. The obvious reading is the Black Death, which reached England in 1348 and killed something in the order of a third to a half of the population.
The Archaeology Service does not take that reading, and its reasoning is worth following because it is a good lesson in not grabbing the exciting answer. The same gap shows up across the region generally, so it is not telling us anything specific about Bewdley. More to the point, there is a much duller explanation available: ceramic cooking pots were being replaced by metal ones around this time, so people were simply throwing away less pottery. Ribbesford may also have changed for reasons of its own that had nothing to do with plague.
The honest position is that the pits show a fourteenth century thinning that could be plague, could be saucepans, and cannot at present be told apart.
The port shows up
From the sixteenth century onwards the finds change, in both quantity and quality, and they keep improving into the nineteenth. There is a particularly wide range of later eighteenth century pottery. That is the port doing its work, and it is what wealth looks like in a rubbish heap: more things, better things, from more places.
And in the river
The other archaeology of Bewdley is underwater, and it is all about the bridges.
In 1973 members of the British Sub-Aqua Club located the remains of two central piers of the old bridge in the river bed. In 2004, work on the Severnside South flood defences involved lifting a bandstand put up in the 1920s, and the footings and piers of the medieval bridge were found underneath it, having sat unsuspected under a bandstand for eighty years. They were recorded and protected before being backfilled. Further investigation two years later, ahead of more flood defence work, found the first pier and the abutment of the fifteenth century bridge, along with quay walls, the remains of several eighteenth century buildings, and a timber structure in the river bed dated to around 1600 and interpreted as a jetty.
What it adds up to
None of this rewrites the town’s history. What it does is put physical evidence underneath a story that was previously held up by documents alone, and the two turn out to agree: activity on the east bank first, the west bank growing from the late thirteenth century, Wyre Hill built in the 1460s, trade running south to Worcester and Bristol, and a serious jump in prosperity from the sixteenth century.
It also produced a burnt peach stone, which no document was ever going to tell us about.