SNN112207 - The Archaeology of 46-50 Sheep Street, Northampton 2003-2004

A possible cellar, perhaps beneath a timber building, had been filled in by the 12th century. It may have been either a building outside the late Saxon town or an early development within the enlarged Norman new borough, which had been established in the later 11th century. It was succeeded by intensive pit digging through the 12th and into the early 13th century. Many pits lay adjacent to the street frontage, indicating that the frontage was not fully occupied by buildings at this time, perhaps reflecting a broader pattern in which many burgage plots within the enlarged town were still unoccupied. A well, constructed in the mid-13th century and in use into the 14th century, presumably served a nearby building that had not survived. The well was in use until the late 14th century and, in its later use, it lay adjacent to a wall corner that may have been part of a boundary wall. It is possible that some of the present property boundaries had been established by this time. The 15th to mid-16th centuries saw less activity, perhaps reflecting the general decline in the fortunes of the town at this time. Cottages were established on the Sheep Street frontage c1540, when the street name first appears in documentary sources. A large clay extraction pit was excavated in c1670 on land to the rear of the cottages and served some of Northamptonshire's earliest clay tobacco-pipe makers. Activity through the 18th and 19th centuries included the refurbishment of the cottages along the frontage, the addition of several ancillary buildings to the rear in connection with resident traders, and the construction of two tenements in Wells Yard in c1871, immediately behind the cottages.