Gaywood, Norfolk
 |
Gaywood is today a small community which is effectively a suburb of Kings Lynn, lying on this town’s east side. The medieval community of Gaywood seems always to have been small, but hosted two hospitals, including a leper hospital founded in 1145. Settlement at Gaywood today is arranged along three main roads. Gayton Road runs east-west from Kings Lynn to Gayton, with the parish church of St Faith 50m to its south, near its junction with Lynn Road (running west to Kings Lynn) and Wootton Road, which runs in a north-easterly direction on the east side of the Lynn River. Housing along these roads is mostly late Victorian, with twentieth century estates infilling the surrounding area. Test pit digging by HEFA teams took place in 2010 in response to the discovery of substantial quantities of middle Anglo-Saxon Ipswich Ware (produced 720 – 850 AD) in the garden of one resident of Wootton Road, which was reported to Andrew Rogerson at Norfolk Landscape Archaeology.
Local Information Websites
West Norfolk and King's Lynn Archaeology Society
2010
Six test pits were excavated in Gaywood in 2010, one in the garden the Ipswich Ware had been found in (GAY/10/4), two in adjacent gardens (GAY/10/5 and GAY/10/6), another in a garden on the opposite side of the road (GAY/10/3), and two more at some distance to the east in areas of twentieth century housing. GAY/10/4 producedeleven sherds of Ipswich Ware, including five from a cut feature in an undisturbed deposit with no later material at all. The significant conclusion which could be drawn from the excavation of the test pit was that the Ipswich Ware previously found during gardening did derive from intensive activity of middle Anglo-Saxon date on this site, and not from material recently imported from elsewhere. Test pits in the gardens immediately adjacent also produced copious quantities of Ipswich Ware, mostly from contexts with no later material, indicating that the settlement extended some way to the south of the original find-spot. Rather unexpectedly, the two more distant pits each also produced Ipswich Ware. Although these yielded only a single sherd each, they nonetheless suggested that middle Anglo-Saxon activity extended over a wide area.
All of the 2010 pits also produced Thetford Ware (850-1100 AD), although in the case of the Wootton Road pits this was in smaller quantities than for the Ipswich Ware, with only a single sherd being found in GAY/10/6. GAY/10/3, on the opposite side of Wootton Road, produced five sherds of Thetford Ware, and the hypothesis was tentatively advanced that in the later Anglo-Saxon period the focus of activity moved from the riverside to a precursor of the present road. GAY/10/3 also produced disarticulated human bone, giving support to the suggestion advanced by local residents that the leper hospital had been in this area. However, the assertion also made that the garden where this test pit was dug had been subject to much disturbance within living memory, with human bone found in the back garden re-deposited in the front garden (where the 2010 test pit was located) made it difficult to be entirely confident about this material. The spits containing the bone also produced Thetford Ware and small amounts of Grimston Ware.
All the pits bat GAY/10/2 produced high medieval pottery (mid eleventh to mid fourteenth century date), mostly Grimston Ware, but mostly in modest quantities (2-4 sherds). Hardly any pottery of later medieval date was found. Further test pitting will be carried out in Gaywood in 2011.
 |
Pottery Report |
 |
Test Pit Location Map |
 |
Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
2011
May
|
Pottery Report |
|
Test Pit Location Map |
|
Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
June
|
Pottery Report |
|
Test Pit Location Map |
|
Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
 |
Pottery Distribution Map |