Stirling Castle

The Stirling Castle

~ Serena ~ 8 Comments

Eat my Hat

Sailors kept their chewing tobacco in their hats, the linings of which became soaked in sweat and tobacco juice. If they ran out of tobacco they would take out the linings of their hats and chew them. [http://www.plymouth.gov.uk/navalsayingsdh accessed: 11.07.2016]

So this famous phrase has a nautical origin! Sailors and their hats are today’s theme:

One of the perks of being an archaeological conservator is that you get close to artefacts. Really close! Even closer! So close in fact, that you can hold, smell and properly look at artefacts: back, front, sides, and all around. And we conservators like to look closely. We like to see what an artefact is made from, how it is made, what condition it is in, and what that can tell us about the people that made or used it.

I recently had the privilege to work on the collection from the Stirling Castle protected wreck owned by the Isle of Thanet Archaeological Society on a project funded by Historic England’s commissions fund and headed by the Maritime Archaeology Trust. The main aim of this project was to catalogue and consolidate the archive, to enhance access to this fantastic wreck assemblage dating to the early 18th century.

Some of my favourite artefacts were beautiful knife handles, an ivory comb and copper alloy cauldrons. But two items stood out: leather hats. Items of clothing rarely survive in the archaeological context. But due to special preservation conditions for organic materials, such as leather, wool or linen, wreck sites play an important role in redressing the imbalance by allowing us an insight into clothing and dress, which are under-represented in collections when compared to non-organic materials, such as ceramics, for example.

Side view of crown and brim of brown leather hat, against a wide background.
Leather hat, Stirling Castle wreck assemblage, on loan from the Isle of Thanet Archaeological Society to the Shipwreck Museum, Hastings. Image © Historic England

The hats stood out from the rest of the Stirling Castle collection for a number of reasons:

  • Beaver felt and wool seem to be the prevailing materials for hats of this period both in surviving examples and in art;
  • The style and method of construction also appear unusual for the period;
  • They are very well preserved: they are better-preserved than other leather artefacts from the same collection, such as the shoes or book covers;
  • There are no parallel finds known to us at the time of writing

Because these hats are so unusual, we are trying to learn as much about them as possible. They are a strong contrast to the leather shoes which are regularly found in shipwreck contexts and are well-understood, e.g. Mary Rose (1545); London (1665), HMS Invincible (1758).

Component parts of black leather shoes, such as uppers, heels and small parts, laid out together against a white background, with a ruler at bottom left for scale.
Leather shoes from the Stirling Castle wreck assemblage. Image © Historic England.

And this is where you come in: We have embarked on a project to study and investigate these two hats from various angles. We have chosen a multidisciplinary approach combining scientific investigations with art historical research as well as citizen science.

We’ve identified some surviving hats and contemporary images of hats, but we need your help to find more. We are putting the word out there asking members of the public as well as museums and collections to look at paintings and drawings of hats, or even hats themselves, dating to around the end of the 17th to early 18th centuries. Our aim is to collate a database of other hats and depictions of hats, to be able to compare our two hats from the Stirling Castle with other examples.

Here is the other hat from the assemblage:

 

View of brown leather hat against a white background, showing that the crown of the hat is laced together with a decorative thong.
Leather hat from the Stirling Castle wreck assemblage, Ramsgate Maritime Museum, showing thong lacing at the back. Image © Historic England

To examine the hats more closely, have a look at the 3D animations of the Hastings hat and the Ramsgate hat: click and drag to rotate in any direction, and see inside the hats, use mousewheel to zoom. (Best viewed in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari 10.9 and above, IE 11)

As you can see, the hats are constructed in several pieces, with one piece for the top of the crown, the main body of the crown overlaps at the front and is laced at the back with a thong, and finally a wide brim.

We are mainly focussing on maritime scenes in paintings and drawings, due to the obvious maritime connection of the hats to the wreck of the Stirling Castle, but are interested in other depictions or real-life examples of similar looking head gear from other contexts too, perhaps hats worn by working-class people such as labourers and agricultural workers. These can be of any date to help with the comparison, but late 17th to early 18th century works would be especially helpful.

Please tell us as much as you can about the images or surviving examples of hats: where they’re from, their date and context, and a brief description of the style of hat, and its construction, and send us a link or photograph if possible.

As an example of what we’re looking for, have a look at this engaging 18th century image and the caption we have written for it.

Painting in neutral shades depicting two men, one wearing a hat and white shirt, clutching a wine bottle, the other behind his outstretched arm, looking at him. This man has a patched sleeve and holds a wine glass.
unknown artist, European School, 18th century; The Wine Seller; Southend Museums Service; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/the-wine-seller-2514. (Creative Commons license). The wine seller wears a brown hat with a low, wide, rounded crown, and a shaped wide brim. The texture suggests it may be a felt hat, as was usual for hats of this period.

The citizen science part of the project opens today, 1st August 2016, and will run until 31st August 2016. It will be shared on the @HE_Maritime Twitter account with the hashtag #LeatherHats. Please feel free to share widely, using the same #LeatherHats hashtag. If you have any clues, ideas or images of hats you would like to share with us, please contact us by commenting on this blog, on Twitter @HE_Maritime, or by e-mail at StirlingCastleHats@HistoricEngland.org.uk

Thank you!

Angela Middleton, Archaeological Conservator, Historic England, and Serena Cant, Marine Information Officer, Historic England.

 

 

 

8. The Great Storm

~ Serena ~ Leave a comment

Man Friday

With the stormy weather continuing until earlier this week, giving rise to the usual media reports wondering whether it is unprecedented/is evidence of global warming, maritime archaeology does indeed give us a perspective that reassures us storms in late November are by no means unusual.

The ultimate example is, of course, the Great Storm of 1703, 309 years ago. Many readers familiar with maritime archaeology will know the three certainly-identified Designated Wrecks arising out of the storm, the Northumberland, Restoration, and Stirling Castle and another Designated Wreck which may be the remains of a fourth, the Resolution. The havoc wrought by similar storms during the same period in other years is also well documented.

However, today I’d like to draw attention to a documented wreck event arising from the storm, a little ship laden with tin.  She was driven helplessly before the wind out of Falmouth and scudded along all the way to the Isle of Wight in 8 hours.

This was remarkable enough in itself. What was more remarkable was that such a small vessel, which would otherwise have been overlooked in contemporary records on both social and economic grounds, should survive at all in the documentary record. Even more remarkably, she was included in three separate reports collated and published by a young journalist struggling to make his name in a ground-breaking work of early journalism, The Storm, 1704. One surviving report from this period per wreck is often about as good as it gets.

Was it a question of ‘never letting the facts get in the way of a good story’? I had my doubts as to the time frame, since in the text the repetition of ‘next morning’ (Freudian slips, or careless editing?) suggested two consecutive mornings, rather than 8 hours; perhaps a period of 30 hours. When I initially blogged this story, a modern-day sailor got in touch to say that he felt that in 8 hours the vessel would have been making an extraordinary number of knots, but over 30 hours a more credible number of knots and a sailing speed fast enough to have caused comment at the time would be plausible. So we have arrived at a similar conclusion from forensic examination of language and a hands-on sailing perspective!

This little wreck, however, also illustrates how specialist knowledge can lift a documented wreck off the page into the realms of archaeological potential. I have not only the modern sailor to thank, but a diver who used his local knowledge to suggest an excellent location for the wreck in Freshwater Bay which fulfilled all the criteria as described in the original sources.

This ground-breaking work was eclipsed at a later date by another, one of the earliest examples of the novel form. The journalist was, of course, Daniel Defoe, and his novel, also centred on a shipwreck event – Robinson Crusoe. It is fascinating to speculate how much he gathered from the accounts of the 1703 storm, and other stories he must have heard, for, of course, Robinson Crusoe was based on a real-life castaway, Alexander Selkirk.