Monument record 2659/21 - Medieval Tenement, Deene End

Archaeological excavation ahead of a housing development identified the remains of late 12th-century post-built structures and quarrying. In the 13th-century a stone-built range, including a kitchen and a bakehouse, were constructed. In the final phase, iron smelting was being carried out within the tenement and the debris was deposited around the building range.

{1} The remains of a former stone building were revealed. These comprised a robber trench, floor surfaces and stone-lined hearth, as well as a series of walls. The larger groups of slag from trenches 1, 2, 3 and 7 are dominated by fragments of tap slag. This indicative of the presence of a smelting furnace or furnaces in the immediate vicinity of the excavated trenches.

{2} The first phase of medieval activity to the south of the excavation area comprised two clusters of postholes. A roughly square posthole structure fronted onto the Deene End road. It measured at least 5.0m across and may represent a small outbuilding. A series of irregular, shallow quarry pits were dug in the late 12th century to early 13th century, probably to exploit the soft, sandy naturals.

By the early thirteenth century the area was taken into settlement, and probably comprised a series of tenement plots, although no systematic pattern of contemporary ditched boundaries were located.
The site may have been of high status, based on the various aspects of the pottery assemblage.

Through the thirteenth century the site was occupied by a stone-built range of three rooms set along the frontage with a small walled yard to the rear.The building was 14.5m long 4.3m wide in its probable original, two-roomed form, with the addition of the northern room extending it to a length of 21.20m.
The building walls were represented by isolated surviving lengths, often poorly preserved. The remainder had been fully robbed, making it difficult to interpret the full sequence of development. The entire structure can best be viewed as a single-phase development as the the extensive robbing makes it impossible to confirm a more complex sequence. The oblique alignment and substantial nature of the northern wall of the central room suggests that this may have been the original northern wall of the building, set in line with the end of the walled yard. The northern room may therefore be a later addition, but there is no other evidence to confirm this.
The central room was the best preserved and contained a range of internal features indicating that it had been used as a kitchen.
In the southern room was a substantial circular oven, which falls within the standard form of sunken, circular baking oven.
A short length of stone-lined drain within the northern room was formed of limestone pieces placed on the base of a narrow cut into the natural, with upright slabs lining the sides. The feature drained down to the east and it is possible that it pre-dated the room and drained into the stone-lined pit.
Whether the elements of this building were part of a single small tenement or merely the detached service range to a higher status domestic dwelling that has not been located cannot be definitively determined.
To the east of the building there was a walled yard with a trapezoidal plan, measuring 12m north to south by 5.0 to 6.5m east-west. Little of the boundary walls had survived the process of later robbing.

The thirteenth century tenement and domestic ranges within them were abandoned, the buildings demolished, and the rubble picked over during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, while the site was extensively quarried. The site was then abandoned and sealed by a buried soil. The dwellings shown in 1587, therefore, cannot have been established for a long period and their tenements appear to have been freshly laid out on what had become a wasteland pock marked with abandoned and no doubt overgrown quarry pits. Therefore the land plots shown on the 1587 Hatton Estate Map have no direct relationship to any medieval tenement plots.

There was a large volume of tap slag within the soils and rubble over the southern and around the southern end of the building. At the western edge of excavation and adjacent to the southern room, a thin run of in situ tap slag sloped down towards the east, over a length of almost 0.80m. At the north-western corner of the southern room, the fills of three pits all contained quantities of slag and large pieces of limestone, much of it burnt. One of these pits lay on the line of the western wall, suggesting that it had been dug at a late stage, and at least after the levelling of the southern room. This indicates that the smelting represented a final phase of use after the building had fallen out of use as a kitchen/bakehouse, and after at least its partial demolition.
The smelting furnace lay below and beyond the modern site boundary wall, making it inaccessible for excavation. As it must have lain within the medieval tenement and adjacent to the medieval road, the present location indicates that the modern road is wider than its medieval predecessor.

CBA South Midlands Group (Group 9), 2002, South Midlands Archaeology: CBA Group 9 Newsletter, p. 31-2 (Journal). SNN102413.

<1> Webster M., 2001, Deene End, Weldon, Northamptonshire, Archaeological Evaluation: Stage 2 Trial Excavation, 2001, (checked) (Report). SNN100726.

<2> Thorne A.; Chapman A., 2002, Excavation of A Medieval Tenement at Deene End, Weldon, Northamptonshire 2001, (checked) (Article). SNN112184.

<2> Thorne A.; Chapman A., 2002, Excavation of A Medieval Tenement at Deene End, Weldon, Northamptonshire 2001, p.4+25 (checked) (Report). SNN104779.

Record last edited

Apr 19 2022 2:09PM