News
York Archaeological Trust has become a sponsor of the York Design Awards. The aim of the Awards is to encourage and promote excellence in conservation and new build, striving for the highest standard of design in 21st Century developments which will contribute to York’s great heritage.
New Discoveries
Excavations at Heslington to the east of York have unearthed an extensive prehistoric farming landscape. A skull discovered on the site was found to contain intact brain tissue – the oldest surviving human brain found in Britain, dating to the 6th century BC. The skull is now being studied by a team of specialists to determine how it survived and glean any information about life and death in Iron Age York. More details in Yorkshire Archaeology Today issues 16, 17
The Hungate site has recently uncovered the remains of a timber-lined sunken building similar to those found at the nearby Coppergate site excavated in the late 1970s. Timbers from the Hungate building have been dated by dendrochronology to the late 960s AD. Full article will appear in the next issue of Yorkshire Archaeology Today.
The seal of
a horologiarius
Researchers from York Archaeological Trust have identified
a remarkable object which shows that around AD 1300 York
was at the forefront of science and engineering. The Trust
undertook excavations before developers George Houlton and
Sons transformed the former York College for Girls in Low
Petergate into an award-winning series of luxury apartments,
retail units and a restaurant. In contrast, the Trust's
archaeologists revealed that in the medieval period the
site contained a series of metalworkers'
workshops. One of the objects they recovered was a small
circular copper-alloy disc. Expert cleaning in YAT's Archaeological
Conservation Laboratory has now revealed that one face carries
an inscription around its edge, and that the object is therefore
a seal matrix that could be impressed into wax to seal documents.
It probably dates to around AD 1300. Part of the inscription, in
abbreviated Latin, can be read as SIGILLUM ROBERTI HOROLOGIARII
DE IERM, and this translates as 'The seal of Robert the
clockmaker from ?Yarmouth'.
Clocks were first made in England only a very few years
before this seal may have been lost. An itinerant horologiarius
is mentioned in the account books of Beaulieu Cistercian
Abbey, Hampshire, in 1269-70, and there are records of a
clock made by the Augustinian Canons of Dunstable Priory,
Bedfordshire, in 1283. In the following few years there
are records of other clocks at major English churches –
Exeter Cathedral in 1284, St Paul's London in 1286, Merton
College Oxford and Norwich Cathedral before 1290, Ely Abbey
1291, Canterbury Cathedral 1292, and Salisbury Cathedral
before 1306. York has hitherto been missing from this list,
but now it seems possible that Robert the clockmaker may
have been engaged upon works in York c.1300. The most likely
venue for his skills must be York Minster, although the
first references to a clock there do not appear in the surviving
documents until much later.
