Greyfriars
Blue Boy Yard
Tyler Hill
Greyfriars
The friary building set over the small branch of the river Stour on the north side of Binnewith Island was drawn in 1844 by F Fairholt in commemoration of a visit to Canterbury by the British Archaeological Association. A review of the history of the Canterbury Greyfriars was published in 1920 with a tantalising footnote on the 'substantial remains' of the friary still standing, though little is shown on the 1871 Ordnance Survey map of the area.
However, it was not until the clearance of a forcing house on the site of the church and the refurbishment of the structure over the river by its owner in 1919 that a survey of the upstanding fragments of the friary buildings was undertaken. This shows fragments of the southern and western walls of the chancel, the building spanning the river channel and the fragmentary remains of some domestic buildings to the west. A further plan published in 1929 added little detail, though suggested a much larger church divided into nave and chancel by a 'walking space' aligned with the passage leading to St Peter's Street.
No further work seems to have taken place until the early 1970s, when Millard opened a large number of trenches to the south-west of the presumed nave. The site remains unstudied and unpublished, though it appears that an extensive range of major friary buildings was located here. In 1973 a trial trench was excavated in advance of the construction of St Peter's Methodist School, revealing a lead coffin, an extensive area of mortar floors and the foundations of a small building interpreted as a free-standing bell tower.
A number of small evaluation trenches were opened by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust in 1988 on either side of the two arms of the Stour encircling Binnewith Island, revealing post-Dissolution building work. Further small-scale evaluation work was carried out in 1990 by the Trust in the northern part of the friary precincts where traces of the medieval lay cemetery were revealed, together with the arch of a small bridge over the boundary dyke of the friary precinct.
In 1993, consolidation work on the Greyfriars Gate allowed the exposure and recording of the south-east corner of the chancel. Further evaluation work in this general area in 1997 and 2000 revealed traces of courtyard metallings, small domestic structures and the western end of the church nave.
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Blue Boy Yard
In the late 1st/early 2nd century AD, the centre, at least, of Roman Canterbury was subjected to a comprehensive programme of rebuilding. Though far from a regular grid, the street plan of this period was dominated by two parallel roads 1,000 pedes Monetales (pM> hereafter, standard civilian Roman feet, each about 0.2955m) apart and running roughly NNW/SSE. One of these was Watling Street, which passed through the site of the later Ridingate, while the second ran through that of Westgate. A narrower road lay midway between these two.
Though the majority of known or suspected secondary roads were probably laid out parallel or orthogonal to these three, there were several exceptions. Chief among these was a stretch running almost perfectly NE/SW. Another street further north was also not orthogonal to these, perhaps due to the presence of a pre-existing natural or artificial drainage channel to its north, where the intramural branch of the Stour now runs.
The four insulae (city blocks) that held the principal elements of the Roman civic centre were arranged around the junction between two of these streets. Starting north-east of this point and running anti-clockwise, these consisted of the forum/basilica complex (centre for administration, judiciary proceedings, etc.), the trapezoidal temenos (precincts) of the main temple, the semi-circular theatre and the main public baths. There is evidence for relatively minor buildings north-west, south-west and perhaps south-east of the theatre and to the south-east of the baths.
During the installation of mains sewers in 1868, the supervising engineer observed: 'Throughout Beer Cart Lane there was full evidence at 4 feet deep of the old Roman road ... At the end, however [at Castle Street], a very heavy foundation and paving of stones, 6 inches and 8 inches thick, was laid bare.'
As Beer Cart Lane roughly continues the line of modern Watling Street, this 'road' was originally identified as Roman Watling Street. However, all save the northern end must, in fact, have been part of the temenos courtyard, perhaps interrupted by the robbing-out of the footings of any masonry structures, which would probably have been dismissed as one or more later pits cutting across the road. The reported foundation may have been part of the Roman theatre. The depth of 4 feet (c. 1.2 m) may refer to the lowest phase of metalling encountered rather than the uppermost.
A fragmentary inscription recovered from the Stour Street area in 1911 had previously been identified as part of a tombstone. However, the dedicatory inscription – […V]LIIAE FIL[IAE... ...] A MATER [...] – apparently from a mother to her daughter, need not have been sepulchral in nature. Roman law forbade the burial of all save the very youngest within the pomerium (municipal boundary), and it is therefore unusual to find funereal stones in Roman city centres, though some have been brought in for reuse in later periods. Thus, unless the dedicatee was stillborn or died a babe-in-arms, the fragment almost certainly came from some other form of personal monument. In either case, the most probable sites for the inscription to have been set up would have been the temenos or the forum/basilica complex.
In 1956, a wall and thick metallings were found in a small excavation by the Canterbury Excavation Committee in the rear garden of 38 St Margaret's Street. This was tentatively identified as part of a temple podium or of the stage of the theatre, but the wall stood about 32.5m away from the current street frontage. It has thus been suggested that it may instead have been part of a monumental entrance to the temenos. There is anecdotal evidence that substantial masonry work was encountered during construction of the KCC offices in the early 1970s.
Since 1976, a major series of excavations in advance of development, conducted by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust in the Beer Cart Lane area, has successfully identified the nature and limits of the temenos. Elements of the surrounding porticoes on all four sides have been found and extensive areas of multi-phase courtyard metallings examined. A Romano-Celtic shrine has been identified in the western corner of the courtyard. A rectilinear feature, perhaps a fountain base, found near the centre of the south-eastern side was later replaced by a semi-circular structure. Portable finds from the area have included fragments from Corinthian capitals, parts of fluted column shafts and their bases as well as over 1,000 fragments of (largely imported) white and coloured marble and other decorative stones. The precise location and alignment of the main temple, from which it is assumed many of the architectural fragments derived, has, however, hitherto eluded detection.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Canterbury and the neighbouring area lay largely abandoned from the early or mid-5th to the mid- or late 6th centuries. However, it has been suggested that there may have been almost continuous occupation, albeit perhaps at a reduced level, with a break of possibly only 20 to 25 years. An unusual 'family' burial (two adults, two children and a dog), datable to the 5th century, has been excavated in the southern end of the temenos courtyard.
The Roman street pattern in the vicinity of the theatre, temple, forum, basilica and principal baths appears to have been largely lost in the Saxon period. These public buildings seem to have been extensively robbed of reusable materials, perhaps during Canterbury's regrowth consequent upon the Augustinian mission of 597. It is conjectured that haulage tracks out of the theatre then 'fossilised' into the roads now known as Beer Cart Lane, St Margaret's Street, Watling Street and Castle Street, which meet at a staggered junction at the centre of the theatre site. Middle to late Anglo-Saxon occupation in the area is attested by the excavation of a sunken-floored grubenhaus in the southern portico of the temenos and by another just south of the putative fountain base referred to above.
Excavations at 3 Beer Cart Lane indicated that two buildings were erected along the frontage here in the late 11th or early 12th century, and that these properties, often rebuilt, remained in continuous use as housing or workshops up to around 1970.
Late 12th- and early 13th-century cathedral rentals indicate that the staggered junction at the eastern end of Beer Cart Lane was referred to, with various spellings, as Thierne and that a cross (Tiernecrouch) stood here. The road itself may then have been known as Ottemellane and appears to have been flanked by a mixture of houses and open ground, though only those at the street corners can be located with any certitude.
Two virtually identical versions of an early bird's-eye view of Canterbury, by Braun & Hogenburg (1573) and by William Smith (1588), show the area west of Castle Street only schematically. A better, though still not particularly reliable, view of Canterbury was published in turn by John Speed (1611), William Hollar (c.1670) and by Nicholas Battely (1703). This indicated buildings lining both sides of Beer Cart Lane for its full length. An independent view of the city, dated to c.1640, is held in the Archives of Canterbury Cathedral. This shows the southern side of the lane fully built-up but only half a dozen buildings spaced along its northern frontage.
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Tyler Hill
Archaeological investigations at Tyler Hill have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion by numerous individuals and by professional and amateur groups over nearly 60 years. Much of this work is unpublished or published only as interim reports. A summary of previous work, to 1991, has been published, based partly on an earlier summary by Tim Tatton-Brow, with a follow-up of discoveries made in 1993.
A wartime bomb in 1942 first drew attention to the presence of pottery kilns here, thus arousing the interest of Gerald Clough Dunning, regarded by many as the founding father of medieval pottery research. Dunning described the essential features of Tyler Hill ware in his 1942 Archaeologia Cantiana report and added to this in subsequent reports. Further visits to the bomb-damaged area by P J Spillet in 1945 and 1947 revealed a second kiln site, leading to the realisation that decorated floor tiles as well as pottery had been produced here. Fieldwalking and investigations by local individuals and by amateur groups, such as J Chappel in the 1950s and the Forest of Blean Research Group in 1960-6, led to the location of more medieval kiln sites in the area. None of these discoveries, however, appears to have been adequately recorded, let alone published.
The late 1960s and early '70s saw a relative flurry of activity at Tyler Hill by professional and amateur archaeologists alike. In 1967, members of Brian Philp's Reculver (CIB) Excavation Group carried out a limited rescue excavation on an incomplete tile kiln immediately south of the Sarre Penn stream, leading to the recovery and publication of a substantial corpus of decorated floor tiles. Part of the Tyler Hill complex lies within the campus of the University of Kent, and an active but relatively short-lived University Archaeological Society, led by Gerald Cramp, conducted excavations and made numerous observations at about this time in advance of an expanding programme of college building.
Excavations revealed the unusual bottle-shaped plans of two medieval tile kilns in the grounds of Darwin College, one of which was archaeomagnetically dated to AD 1300 +\-25. A drain associated with one of the kilns was constructed of ridge-tiles and a complete reject chimney pot. In 1971, Duncan Harrington, another member of the university group, conducted his own researches off-campus in a field 200m north-east of the university kilns on the brow of the hill traversed by Giles Lane. The tile kiln uncovered by Harrington and his associates, which they considered to be 14th century, was markedly different from the university kilns in having a rectangular plan. Unpublished photographs and a detailed plan of the kiln show an impressive structure measuring 6 x 3.5m and surviving to a height of c. 0.66m with much of its complex flue system still surviving. Interim reports on these kilns were published in the Kent Archaeological Review.
It is noteworthy that no unequivocal purpose-built pottery kilns have yet been identified at Tyler Hill, but neither floor tile or pottery wasters have yet been found in situ in any of the kilns excavated to date. It seems likely, however, that some of these structures were dual-purpose tile and pottery kilns, but this remains to be demonstrated. The only possible exception is the much earlier Brittoncourt Farm kiln site (see below), which seems to have been solely for the production of pottery.
Fieldwalking in the later 1970s/early '80s by local schoolteacher Wes McLaughlin in collaboration with Canterbury Archaeological Trust led to the discovery and recording of a number of new pottery and tile-making sites (though no actual structures), including a probable late medieval pottery kiln site at Cane Wood. McLaughlin's most significant discovery, made in 1983, was the site of a 12th-century pottery kiln near Brittoncourt Farm, about half a mile north of Tyler Hill. Significantly, the find-spot produced evidence for a kiln structure (wall fragments of fired daub with wattle impressions) as well as pottery wasters consisting of roulette-decorated pitchers of a type known to date from c. 1150-1200, thus making this the earliest known kiln found at Tyler Hill to date.
An extensive fieldwalking programme was conducted by Canterbury Archaeological Trust in 1991 in the area of the proposed Broad Oak reservoir; this would have flooded the archaeologically sensitive area of the Sarre Penn valley just below Tyler Hill, including the site of Philp's 1967 kiln. (In the event, plans for the reservoir were shelved.) The fieldwalking led to a number of useful observations on the geographical extent of the ceramics industry in this area and to the (re-)discovery of a large 13th-century waster pit in the bank of the stream.
In 1993, a replacement sewer pipeline (rising main), stretching for nearly 0.6km, was laid along the east side of the road (Canterbury Hill), from a pumping station by the Sarre Penn stream southwards to a point on St Stephen's Hill east of the University of Kent. The watching brief and limited excavations along the course of the pipeline located a number of ephemeral features associated with the ceramics industry (tile drains, tile-metalled surfaces, probable clay extraction pits and ashy spreads), demonstrating that the industry stretched all the way down from Tyler Hill to the ancient industrial suburb of St Stephen's, just outside the city walls, where Roman and post-medieval brick, tile and pottery kilns have been discovered. At the top of St Stephen's Hill, not far east of the university kilns, the 1993 watching brief revealed a waster pit containing numerous decorated floor tiles including designs not previously ascribed to Tyler Hill. No significant work has been conducted in the area since.
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