Medieval Occupation at the Rectory, Church Road

79 MEDIEVAL OCCUPATION AT THE RECTORY, CHURCH ROAD, CAVERSHAM, READING JAMES MCNICOLL-NORBURY AND DANIELLE MILBANK WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY STEVE FORD AND PAUL BLINKHORN SUMMARY A small area excavation took place at The Rectory, Church Road, Caversham, prior to redevelopment. It revealed features of medieval and later date. These comprised a small group of pits and parallel linear features, one of which was replaced by a flint-built wall. These are thought to be successive boundaries for properties fronting Church Road and add modestly to our knowledge of the topography of medieval and early post-medieval Caversham. A single struck flint of Mesolithic or earlier Neolithic date and three sherds of Bronze Age pottery were also found. Previous phases of investigation on the site had encountered only 19th- and 20th-century (or undated) features, but residual finds of medieval pottery and further prehistoric flints add to the evidence from the more recent work. INTRODUCTION of the chapel is not known, but it may have stood in The Rectory, Church Road, Caversham (Grade II this general area. Caversham Court (the Old Rectory) Listed) was built in 1823 and the Simonds family stood within the modern park. employed A. Pugin to remodel the house and gardens in the 1840s. In 1904, the (new) Rectory gained the The Notley lands passed to Christchurch College, land between that building and the boundary wall to Oxford. The extent of the late 16th century estate was described in Chancery proceedings: “The mansion or Caversham Court, together with more land behind the Rectory down to the River Thames. dwelling house, the lesser barn called the wheat barn, the stable, the brew house, the malt house, the The large grounds and its position have made it tenement where one William Hunt there dwelt, the attractive to developers and there have been a number dove or culver house, the barn adjoining the of investigations into different parts of the garden in churchyard, the orchard and gardens and all recent years. These previous investigations found glebelands, the mount, the warren, being severally features mainly dating back to the 19th century with bounded and enclosed, the barn adjoining the warren, little before that. The most recent investigation in the chancel, the churchyard, the hides, the Great 2011 revealed the lines of successive medieval and Mede with tithes of the same hindes and the glebe and later property boundaries as well as pottery from both tithes of all such grounds as the complainants tenure” the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age and the (R.B.C. 2013). medieval to modern periods. Caversham Court (the Old Rectory) was used by HISTORY Charles I during the Civil War as a headquarters, Just north of the site is the Norman parish church of St which the Parliamentarians attacked, destroying the Peter. The site also lies partly within the old tower of St Peter’s and damaging the Old Rectory’s boundaries of Caversham Court, which had its origins staircase with bullets (Ford 2006). From the 17th to in the 12th century when Walter Giffard, 1st Earl of the late 18th century the Caversham Court estate was Buckingham, endowed the land together with the variously let out, and parts sold off, until what church of St Peter to the Augustinian Priory of Notley, remained passed to William Simonds, the brewer, in near Long Crendon (Buckinghamshire). The priory 1799. Caversham Court is now a Registered Garden, provided a priest for the church until just before the containing several listed buildings, including the Reformation when the parish of Caversham was given boundary wall along the west side of the (new) the right to provide its own priest. The Priory of Rectory. The Old Rectory buildings themselves were Notley also controlled a cell of canons at the chapel of demolished in the 1930s. Our Lady of Caversham, which was sometimes unofficially referred to as Caversham Priory (Ford LOCATION AND GEOLOGY 2001). The Chapel was an important site of Caversham stands north of Reading on the north side of the River Thames at a bridging point (Figure 1). pilgrimage for worshippers of the Virgin Mary during the medieval period and reportedly contained a statute The site (SU 7099 7480) consisted of a roughly of the Virgin adorned with gold and silver, a piece of rectangular parcel of garden bounded by Church Road to the north, Caversham Court Gardens to the west, the rope with which Judas hanged himself, and the knives that killed both the Saint-King, Edward the residential buildings to the east and the Thames to the Martyr, and King Henry VI (Ford 2001). The relics south (Figure 2). The site slopes gently from the north down towards the river at c. 40m above Ordnance were removed during the Reformation; the Statue of Our Lady of Caversham being was taken to London, Datum and was largely overgrown at the time of the where it was burnt (Wright 1843: 224). The exact site fieldwork. The underlying geology was a clayey loam above Upper Chalk (BGS 1971). Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 81, 2013 80 THE RECTORY, CHURCH ROAD, CAVERSHAM, READING Figure 1. Locations of sites at Caversham Rectory and St Peter’s Hill, Caversham. In 2011, Thames Valley Archaeological Services Ltd 2009), and indicated the site had undergone several (TVAS) conducted a small archaeological excavation successive periods of remodelling and truncation. in advance of an application for planning permission Only the later post-medieval phases of the site’s use for the building of a house. The site’s archaeological survived: most of the finds were clearly redeposited. potential had already been demonstrated by an No securely dated medieval deposits were recorded, evaluation in 2007 (Weale 2007) and during an but the full sequence of deposits above the natural excavation in 2008 ahead of an intended development, geology was not examined as the intended which subsequently never took place (Milbank 2009). development would not have penetrated to that depth. A floor surface and a hearth (112) probably belonged A field evaluation carried out in September 2007 to a late 17th or 18th century building; this may have (Weale 2007) identified a sequence of three walls, two been demolished when William Simonds took brick and one chalk, and chalk surfaces, to the west of possession. A brick-and-flint wall foundation (1002) the Rectory and a number of cut features and deposits, probably belonged to the late 18th or early 19th mostly of 19th century date, but with others of century and appeared to have been the western unknown, but earlier, dates. The walls were thought boundary to the Rectory plot at the time the new to be the boundary of Caversham Court to the west, Rectory was built in 1823; it would have been which was demolished and rebuilt in the 1840s as part demolished and robbed out during the remodelling in of the remodelling of the estate, and the chalk wall the 1840s when it is known that additional land in this perhaps related to an earlier building. A single sherd direction was acquired. of medieval pottery was found. Several sherds of medieval pottery and both The 2008 excavation opened a number of small areas Mesolithic and Neolithic flints pointed to some earlier to the west, south and east of the Rectory (Milbank Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 81, 2013 JAMES MCNICOLL-NORBURY AND DANIELLE MILBANK 81 Figure 2. Plan of features excavated at Caversham Rectory, with features from a previous evaluation and excavation in 2007 and 2008 (grey). activity, and potentially earlier phases (if present) than that put forward in 2008, and so the area under would have been preserved in situ. These would, the proposed new building footprint (at the eastern however, be damaged or destroyed by the new side of the overall site) was excavated in 2011. building proposal, which would have a deeper impact Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 81, 2013 82 THE RECTORY, CHURCH ROAD, CAVERSHAM, READING Figure 3. Plan of features excavated at Caversham Rectory, with features from previous evaluation THE EXCAVATION (FIGURES 3 AND 4) frequent crushed mortar, flint fragments and gravel. Topsoil (50) and other overburden (51, 52, 53) was This, in turn, overlaid subsoil (52) up to 0.30m thick, removed to fully expose archaeological deposits from which fragments of animal bone and clay pipe which were then excavated or sampled. The features were recovered, along with a mixed group of pottery from the earlier investigations are not discussed in sherds, the latest of which date from the 19th century. detail, as they were all either 19th century or undated, A mortared flint nodule wall (54), first observed but their residual finds are included in the quantifications below. within the subsoil, was 0.40m wide and up to 0.30m high, consisting of nodules in horizontal courses with Beneath the topsoil (50) was a 0.24m thick layer of up to four courses preserved. Larger nodules (c. made ground (51), a loose brownish/yellow sand with 0.25m across) were present at the base, with smaller Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 81, 2013 JAMES MCNICOLL-NORBURY AND DANIELLE MILBANK 83 ones (c. 0.1m across) higher up. The lower courses Ten sherds of medieval pottery and some animal bone were less well laid and appeared to be foundations, were recovered from it. Posthole 8 was undated. whereas the higher courses appeared to be the wall FINDS proper. No construction cut was observed, yet the feature was aligned exactly along the centre of Pottery underlying Gullies 1003/1004. The orientation of the Paul Blinkhorn The pottery assemblage from all phases of wall and underlying gullies matches closely with a remnant of brick wall adjoining the site boundary just investigation combined comprised 87 sherds with a to the east, demolished in relatively recent times.

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