15.3: Feature Groups

Archaeologically, material remains of writing are with a few exceptions relatively rare in Britain prior to the 18th century. As a result, in bringing together enough material to enable meaningful comment most considerations of topics such as this generally have a relatively broad temporal and geographical scope. These tend to be ‘culture-historical’ in their approach, emphasising similarities and broad patterns (e.g. Evans 1987; Okasha 1995). A rather different approach is possible for 18^th–20^th century Britain, and indeed much of the rest of the world. Around the middle of the 18^th century a significant change occurs in the nature of the archaeological record in Britain. Increasing numbers of short-term deliberate depositional events survive, frequently containing hundreds of ‘items’ that can broadly be interpreted as ‘feature groups’, closed assemblages of domestic artefacts discarded as a single deposit (Barker and Majewski 2006: 207; Fryer and Shelley 1998; Pearce 2000). These are interpreted as ‘household clearance’ events, such as those described in 19^th-century fiction in which they are characterised as profoundly brutal and disturbing (Trotter 2008). Objects that had been viewed by the Victorians as ‘household gods’ (Cohen 2006) imbued with personal meaning and social memory became simply commodities with an exchange value, and in the case of the material in the archaeological record simply ‘stuff ’ that is just waste matter (Trotter 2008) except in the contexts of deposition and potentially subsequent archaeological recovery.

The phenomenon of feature groups presents investigators studying writing from a material cultural perspective with various interpretive possibilities and challenges. The contextual richness of such deposits means that they can become the primary analytical unit, rather than more spatially and temporally diffuse entities such as sites or cultures. These feature groups lend themselves to consideration through a form of “thick description”, which does not look at material in isolation but takes account of context so that the things become more meaningful to an outsider (Geertz 1973), and the preservation of detailed archaeological associations provides a wealth of information about the meaning(s) of objects when situated in their various contexts.

Deposits of this type are attested in earlier periods in Britain but prior to the 16^th century they do not occur with any frequency. Only in the mid-18^th century do they become a more common occurrence. The increase in levels of discard in ‘feature groups’ at this time is probably linked to a consumer revolution, where in contrast to earlier periods dominated by scarcity and frugality there was a marked increase in consumption of a wide range goods and products by individuals from different social and economic backgrounds (Bermingham and Brewer 1995; Brewer and Porter 1993; Fairchilds 1993). This consumer revolution was fuelled by competitive emulation whereby individuals and groups lower down the social scale sought to imitate those higher up (McKendrick et al. 1982) or the restructuring of social relations particularly with regard to the changing nature of the bourgeoisie who owned the means of capitalist production, and to a growing and more assertive middle class (McCracken 1990). However, discussions of such assemblages often employ, albeit implicitly, the “Pompeii Premise” (Binford 1981; Schiffer 1985), assuming that the deposit represents a single moment frozen in time and that whoever made the deposit was also the original owner and/or user of the material. Once quantified these assemblages are used as the raw material for discussions of a host of themes, including social status and gender relations. Minimal consideration is usually given to the fact that the dumped material has probably been carefully selected. Still fashionable or valuable material was probably saved for further use, either on the same site or elsewhere (Johnson 1996: 182–183). This becomes apparent when the material from large assemblages is compared to that derived from other types of context, such as those related to middening and night soiling. The relative proportions of different material types and wares in the different types of deposit vary markedly, demonstrating that discard in ‘feature groups’ was carefully organised.

The nature of the assemblages, where objects are often complete or substantially complete and where broken typically consist of large unabraded fragments that can readily be refitted, means that material from these features can be quantified in terms of a count of ‘minimum number of items’ (MNI). This method is relatively straightforward, although not entirely unproblematic, for certain types of material such as ceramics (Brooks 2005), glass (Willmott 2002), clay pipes and worked bone objects. Based upon these MNI counts and the number of items with writing on them it is possible to calculate the percentage of writing-bearing items from the overall assemblage (Table 1). There are a number of complicating factors such as incomplete items and items that bear more than one form of writing, which affect the quantification. The quantification used in this study specifically excludes categories of material that never or rarely bear any writing and focus principally upon ceramics, vessel glass and clay tobacco pipes.

The general availability of well surveyed cartographic evidence from the mid-18^th century onwards means that such assemblages can almost always be linked to particular plots or properties, while documentary sources mean that in many, but by no means all, instances land can be linked to known households. While there are occasional instances where some or all of the material deposited may originate from outside the particular plot in which it was recovered, the composition of most of the assemblages strongly indicates that they relate to a single household and originated on the plot where they were recovered. Such ‘household archaeology’ which developed in the 1970s (Wilk and Rathje 1982) has been extensively applied to archaeological remains of the post-1800 period (Allison 2003; Barile and Brandon 2004; Beaudry 1999; King 2006). The ‘household’ commonly consists of a nuclear family plus other elements, such as extended family members, household servants, employees and lodgers but can also encompass larger entities such as large businesses that included dozens of staff members. Nonetheless, it is clear from contemporary documentary sources that such large business ‘households’ were still viewed in familial and paternalistic terms (Roberts 1979). These feature groups can therefore be understood as representing assemblages of artefacts that relate to a single household and were discarded at a particular point in time, although the individual artefacts and assemblages also possess longer term ‘biographies’ (see below), and as such are an admittedly biased sample of the material culture of a given household.

By undertaking a detailed study of inscribed objects in a series of feature groups in what follows below, it is possible to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of writing materials and associated practices, in contrast to accounts produced by considering written evidence from a much wider geographical and temporal distribution. The material in this chapter derives from the large-scale excavations covering 1.5 hectares undertaken at the Grand Arcade site in Cambridge (Figure 2), by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit in 2005–2006 (Cessford and Dickens, in preparation). This site is located on the edge of historic Cambridge, lying mainly in a suburb outside the town boundary known as the King’s Ditch. The assemblages discussed here relate to a single ‘street block’ or group of plots bounded by street lines (Conzen 1960: 5), bounded by St. Andrew’s Street, Downing Street, and the King’s Ditch and its successor St. Tibb’s Row.

While the writing on objects can be categorised in many different ways, two particular distinctions appear to be particularly significant. These are:

• Writing that is primarily visual or primarily tactile
• Writing that was apparent during normal usage of the item and writing that was concealed during normal usage of the item

Of more than 40 feature groups investigated eight are considered here, although two of the feature groups are related, so this study effectively comprises six groups (Table 1). The features have been selected to provide a chronological range covering the longest possible period and also to include those with the more informative examples of writing.