During a search for completely unrelated material this morning, I discovered that North Hertfordshire Museums does in fact have all the pottery recovered during Christopher Beresford-Webb’s excavations. It was in a box of material from Bedfordshire, the bag labelled “Biggin, Beds.”, although somebody had crossed out the “Beds.” and replaced it with “Herts.” without moving it from the Bedforshire box. The same box contains bags of pottery from Abington Piggotts, which is in Cambridgeshire, so it seems to have been used as a repository for material whose provenance was unclear to someone.
None of these finds has been recorded on the database of either Hitchin or Letchworth Museums, although that is not unusual for material in the archaeological collections. However, a quick search of the database revealed that there are some jetons from The Biggin accessioned to Letchworth Museum, which ought to be in the archaeological store. It will probably be worth doing a more thorough search to see what else there is among the ‘small finds’.
The collection of pottery is small, and several of the medieval sherds were published by Susuan Moorhouse in 1970 (they are easily recognisable in the bag), but there are others for which there is no report, so it will clearly be worthwhile to commission a brief report on the material. There are also some post-medieval and Romano-British sherds, the latter probably being those that were associated with the cremated bone found towards the north-eastern corner of the site. Each sherd is numbered and it will be interesting to see if every find from the site was given its own unique identifier. It certainly seems likely and as the numbers go above 170, it means that there is probably still a lot mroe to locate.
As I find more of the material, I’ll post details here.
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