After Ending

Wharram Percy is a deserted mediaeval village in North Yorkshire, England. The site has become the most archaeologically explored site in Britain. Between 1950 and 1990, students, commercial archaeologists and academics would descend upon the village for a three week excavation every July. The digs were not only a site of intensive research, but a rite of passage, an epistemological testing ground and a sizable undertaking of group authorship.

After Ending consists of a series of interviews conducted between April and September 2021 with Stuart Wrathmell and Paul Stamper, supervisors on the site. Both address their own relationship with Wharram and its wider political implications.

Wharram Percy is a deserted mediaeval village in North Yorkshire, England. The site has become the most archaeologically explored site in Britain. Between 1950 and 1990, students, commercial archaeologists and academics would descend upon the village for a three week excavation every July. The digs were not only a site of intensive research, but a rite of passage, an epistemological testing ground and a sizable undertaking of group authorship.

After Ending consists of a series of interviews conducted between April and September 2021 with Stuart Wrathmell and Paul Stamper, supervisors on the site. Both address their own relationship with Wharram and its wider political implications. 

STUART WRATHMELL OF STUART WRATHMELL ASSOCIATES

What happened at Wharram Percy?

So, Wharram was a very long running excavation project. It started in 1951 and went on for 40 years, and it was really the first systematic attempt to look at the lives of the mediaeval peasants in England. English Heritage’s forebears, the old Ministry of Works, kept the castles and abbeys, and palaces, and those sorts of sites, but they were not interested in the people who actually built them all - who lived out in the country, growing the crops which paid for all the work.

So it was two scholars, a historian called Maurice Beresford and an archaeologist called John Hurst who first got interested in the lives of the peasants. And they found, through various field research, that there were around the country, what turned out to be something like 2000 village sites, which have been deserted since the Middle Ages.

In that area?

No, no, across the whole country, there's about 2300. But there are quite a lot on the Yorkshire Wolds. They hit upon Wharram Percy as a good example of a mediaeval village, a place where they could explore the lives of the people who lived there, the ordinary folk, and that was very much a deliberate exercise on their part. It became the best known, most influential mediaeval excavation, in terms of the peasantry, that there was in this country. And it became a model for work on other sites - comparable sites on the continent. So, in France, for example and in Germany, people started to do excavations, which were comparable to Wharram Percy - they too started to look at the lives of the peasants.

At the same time, Wharram also became a testbed for ideas, both about the techniques of excavation and about understanding the way the settlement developed. There were remains of buildings and ditches from around 600 AD, right down until the 1520s, when the village was finally deserted, so there's quite a lot there.

Particularly John Hurst was a key member of the government's archaeology service, the Ancient Monuments section. So he knew a lot of people who were interested in this sort of thing. And he developed a group called the ‘Deserted Village Research Group’. That drew in a lot of scholars from all over the UK, a lot of them used to come and visit Wharram and they used to have a look at what was being done, come up with some ideas, and learn about what was going on at Wharram or what was being found.

Wharram benefited (although pluses and minuses) but by and large, benefited from the input of people coming in from the outside; who were mainly academics, other archaeologists, historians, and so on. So its importance kind of grew in that way. Because it wasn't just some isolated spot up on the Wolds. It was actually the hub for a lot of information exchange, in terms of what people understood about the lives of peasants. Because it was also influential on the continent, it meant that the people, the volunteers who came to excavate (it wasn't run as a professional project - some of the supervisors were paid by English Heritage, but everyone else volunteered), if they were interested in archaeology, or wanted to make a career out of it in particular, then having been to Wharram Percy and worked there was quite a good way of getting into archaeology. Because they, first of all, they met key archaeologists who might be interviewing for jobs and also they gained experience so could put that on the CV, and so when they went elsewhere, they could say, ‘Oh, yes, Wharram Percy, worked there’.

I got involved in the early 1980s and supervised one of the sites there. We got up to about 100 volunteers on some summers, who were all camping out on site. So it was the first time the village had been populated by that many people since 1520. Which was quite fun. It was just this sort of village of tents, up on the fields on the top. And there were, in some years, more volunteers from the continent than there were from England. On one of my site tours, I actually learned a bit of Dutch so I could begin in Dutch because there were more people on the site whose native language was Dutch, than English. Just as a joke.

I remember one - we had a torrential downpour one evening. It was almost the end of the excavation and my trench was going to fill up with water before we'd finished photographing it. That was the problem. So we had to start sort of digging drains out and this was in absolutely torrential rain, as it was getting dark. Just trying to keep the water away from the site, you know. We used to have an ex army marquee, a big one, which we used for evening lectures, evening talks and occasionally for other entertainment. This particular evening was when the local brass band came, believe it or not. So it was thundering and lightning. There was this marquee. I was standing outside absolutely saturated with about six other people digging away and the brass band, believe it or not, was in the marquee playing ‘Abide with Me’. Fork lightning coming down, torrential rain everywhere.

Was it the same group of people each year?

A lot of people came back every year, which again, is not something that would normally happen, I think, on most archaeological excavations. But I remember one of the students, Nicky, who worked on one of my sites. Her parents had been coming to Wharram, her father was a vicar, her parents had been coming to Wharram since the mid 1950s. She said that she'd been told she'd been conceived at Wharram. So generational, yeah. Yes, there were quite a lot of people who were coming each year.

Were these people coming over to dig because of anything specific that was going on at Wharram?

Well, the techniques. This is where it does get a bit technical, but a lot of the excavations in the 1950s were done on what was called a grid system. So you had a number of squares with undug plots in between them so you could read the vertical section down. And this was the way Roman forts have been dug and it kind of became more widespread. But in the 1950s, there was a chap in Denmark called Axel Steensberg who tried different, new techniques on sites there, because those sort of grids of boxes didn't really work. So he used what was called open area excavation, where you just dug everything and took it all down from one level to the next. He dug sites there and John Hurst and some others involved in Wharram Percy went over there to look at the excavations. And so when they came back, they tried it out at Wharram. So Wharram Percy was really one of the first open area excavations where you aim to dig. If you had, as I said, you know, the earthworks on site show where the peasant houses were, and where the yards were, the outbuildings and so on, you can see them all because the lumps and bumps and so they, they took one of these as a whole, and just cleared everything inside and dug it down, recording everything as they went down.

So, it was a full analysis?

Well, for instance, working out the sequence of buildings of what the church looked like, at different stages in its life - there is a series of plans which shows in fact an earlier church below the present church, so that started off in about 1000 or 1050, something like that. They could dig inside the church where there were lots of burials. There had been a graveyard at Wharram, serving not just Wharram Percy, but also other villages around. Basically, it was one of the biggest excavations of its kind so far, I think. I think that in total, something like 700 skeletons, plus lots of other bits of bones, have been disturbed, and so on, but several skeletons could be analysed. Of course, these were the people who lived in the village. So you're not just seeing what their houses looked like, and what pottery they used and what metal, you know iron they used, you can also see what their skeletons can tell you about their lives. There's quite a lot of information, obviously, on mortality, how long people lived and about sort of wear and tear on the skeleton. Obviously, you don't get anything from the soft tissue, because that's long gone. But the skeleton, thinking of two things, a lot of the male skeletons showed evidence of traction of pulling things across shoulders, and that kind of thing. A lot of the female skeletons showed evidence of long periods of squatting, which might well be around the fire during the cooking or something like that, because they wouldn't have tables, they would just work around the fire. And of course, nutrition. So we had a major, one of the biggest yet, analyses of skeletons from a rural settlement site that had been undertaken. It compared nutrition there with nutrition, for example, from York, from the excavations in York to compare the urban poor against the rural poor and that kind of thing.

Was the focus on peasant life outlined at the start or did it develop?

Both. John Hurst and Maurice Beresford were socialists, so they cared about it. I mean, John Hurst went to Harrow or he was forced to go to Harrow - however, they came out of the education system, they were both strongly socialist inclined, and therefore they had an interest not just in the top people but in the ordinary population too. Thinking about what life was like for them.

Did they see what they were doing as political?

It was never overtly political. I mean, because, you know, the government in this country is still run by people from the top, and English Heritage were the people at the top. Wharram is part of a landed estate of I think about 12,000 acres owned by Lord Middleton. And so, you know, the sort of context of the excavation-

As in Kate Middleton?

No, they are posher than Kate Middleton. But yeah, the contrast is quite interesting because now it may not seem it for you, but the Yorkshire Wolds are still in the 18th century. The Middletons own 12,000 acres, the Sykes’ at Sledmere, they own 18,000 acres of land, I mean, the place is just covered in these major estates and they kind of run the show. So they're in the constituency of Ryedale, the MP constituency and at one point it was said that Sir Tatton Sykes who was the owner of Sledmere, fell out with his Tory MP. It was always Tory. He fell out with his Tory MP, and at the next election, they voted in the Lib Dem candidate for the first time. That's just from Sykes telling all their tenants to go out and vote for who they want. So it's still this sort of feudal system. It's really quite an odd place to be in some ways. Well, quite a good place to be looking at the peasantry, because you get these sort of contrasts in experience. Very, very marked - still today.

Was your research on house structures relevant to that contrast?

Well, in a way, that was a bit of a contradiction.

There is no decent building stone on the walls of the peasant houses, it's all chalk. You can quarry the chalk, and you can use the chalk rubble for walling. But it doesn't last very long, you know, the first frost and it all shatters. So when they were digging the houses, they found these sort of lines of chalk blocks, which had obviously been rebuilt lots of times and very frequently. So they got this idea - and I think it was one of the visitors (that’s why I said sometimes the visitors were good and sometimes they didn't do the project any favours, because one of them who was from Cambridge, was a pre-historian, and used to dealing with the very early past and the little shelters that people then lived in) he saw these sort of rebuilt stretches of grotty walling all over the site, and he said, ‘Oh, obviously they're not building sort of proper houses, you know, they’re building shacks, which last for maybe 10-20 years, and then they have to rebuild them’.

This became then the idea about what peasant life was like. It sort of drove the idea of how the peasants lived for about 10 years. I wasn't involved at the time at Wharram, but I’d dug some other sites - and I didn't believe them. So when I went to Wharram, I reinterpreted them all. The problem was that the walling was not the permanent parts of the houses. You get cruck buildings - and I mean, the local tradition is cruck - which are, you take a tree which is bent, and you halve it vertically, you put the pieces together, and you get that triangular shape. So these are major timbers that run down to the ground. So what you then do is you use those timbers, you pair them through a building, and that supports the roof. And so you've got a roof on the building without even thinking about the walls. What you then do is you use whatever's to hand for the walling because the walling just screens out the weather, it doesn't actually support the roof. You use chalk because that's all you've got and then plaster, clay, cow dung, whatever it is goes on the surface of the wall, just hold it all together. But of course, every few years it would need rebuilding. So when the timbers have gone and the roofs gone, all you’ve got are these bits of walling. I put that argument in the late 80s and then that was accepted. The peasants weren't some sort of marginal, you know, grotty community - they were actually farmers who made a reasonable living, although they were very much under the thumb of the church and the landowners.

Why are there no remains of the cruck structures?

Because there weren't many trees on the Yorkshire Wolds. There was a great shortage, particularly in the later Middle Ages, because the whole of the Wolds by the later Middle Ages was arable. So it'd all been cleared. The only trees that there were, grew in some of the narrow valleys where you couldn't cultivate. So if people left a building, then you would naturally use the timbers for other purposes somewhere else. I think that's why - then of course timber rots - it wouldn't be in any case, even if they'd left the timbers on the ground that wouldn't have survived until the 20th century, but chances are usable timber was taken elsewhere for use in new buildings.

Was there a benefit to the way that Wharram worked?

It's quite an interesting one because what normally happens is that you have - whether it's commercial excavation or one that is a research excavation but directed by someone at a university - you get this single mind which is running it - it's a bit of a stretch to say a single mind. But it's a corporate effort. You start with objectives and then you say where you got to at the end of it. Whereas for Wharram, because it went on for so long, because so many people were involved, it really morphed into other things. So a lot of that final volume is actually a re-interpretation. It wasn't supposed to be a re-interpretation because English Heritage weren't paying for the sites to be reinterpreted. But it isn't just the final sites that are in there. It's a reinterpretation of everything.

There are new things in there. So the earthworks were surveyed as the work went on. In the early days, it was a chap who used to come with his theodolite tapes, and he just surveys as a levelling thing - you can get heights. And tape measures. That was what people had been doing since the Ordnance Survey was founded in the beginning of the 19th century. For the final volume, I actually got a new survey. It's completely different, you know, because it's computer data and that sort of thing, and GPS locator. You get a very different picture. This didn't exist at any time during the excavations. So Wharram evolves in a way which other excavations don't because it went on for so long.

So were other people involved in writing it up?

Put it this way, there would have been supervisors of sites who didn't recognize their sites by the time the final volume came out, you know, because the interpretations have changed, because the context changed because everyone was digging everywhere else. So your thinking changes, because new information is coming up all the time. So whether they were writing their own site up or not, what they thought when they were digging the site ten years earlier, would not be what they were now thinking as they were writing it up. Since the end, since that came out, there have been times when people have looked at the assemblages of information, of artefacts, environmental remains, and so on, and come up with new ideas, which is great, because that means that Wharram is still in play as somewhere of significance to do archaeological research.

At the end of that volume, I put something like, Wharram was abandoned once, it will either now remain a source for people to do research into the future, or it'll be abandoned a second time, but this time by the academic community.

What is the significance of Wharram in terms of how archaeology operates now?

Wharram is quite rare. I mean, now I think you kind of get a smaller window for looking at society even at a much bigger archaeological site because it's being done usually commercially and so there's going to be a development of the site.They're going to destroy it so you have an opportunity to do what you do and then that's it. Whereas here you could go back and think about it a long time later. Maybe do a few more holes, you know if it was part of the overall scheme to test things but it just just feels very different. These days you have a lot of people that obviously made a connection with the site. I suspect quite a lot of people come back here with children and grandchildren. Whereas there is neither the opportunity nor the wish to do that if it's a commercial site. You just go there because you're being paid to dig and then you go away again. That's that.

PAUL STAMPER OF PAUL STAMPER HERITAGE

What is your relationship to Wharram Percy?

Well it goes back, really, I suppose to possibly the winter of 1972 when I would have been 15. I was a keen schoolboy digger. We were digging on a freezing cold, prehistoric site during the Christmas holiday’s somewhere on the edge of Northampton. And I'd already been digging on a deserted village site called Lyveden in Northamptonshire. And so the chap who was giving me a lift out to the site in the morning from my bus stop, a man called Mike McCarthy, knew that I was interested - that I'd been digging on a deserted mediaeval village. And so we were driving along in his brown Robin Reliant Three Wheeler. And he said, Paul, if you're really interested in deserted villages, you should really go and dig at this place called Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, if only once for the experience. So being a very dutiful, small boy, I duly applied using something called the Council for British Archaeology calendar and that listed all the digs that were going to be running and you could write and apply. And I was accepted, even though I was technically too young for the dig but they could see I was keen as mustard.

So I got the train up from Kettering probably. Got stuck on York station overnight, so I'd missed the last train to Moulton, which was the nearest station, got the milk train out to Moulton. And then with my rucksack walked eight miles to Wharram Percy, which is a deserted village on the Yorkshire Wolds about 20 miles from York. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

So I walked in from Moulton or Wharram-le-Street and arrived at breakfast time. There would have been about 60 people milling around. This was in July 1973. I introduced myself to Maurice Beresford who was the co-director and said, 'Oh hello, I'm Paul Stamper'.

He said, ‘Oh, hello, hello, cornflakes over there fried eggs in the kitchen.’

So I was in at the deep end, really. I stayed there for a week. It was very, very odd. The dig had been running by then, by 1973, for over 20 years. A lot of people went back every year. So the combination of that, the fact it was in the middle of nowhere, there was no electricity, no sanitation - meant that there were very well developed routines to enable the whole machine to work and feed the diggers and this, that and the other. Parachuting in from outside, there were lots of routines and quirks that took some time to begin to absorb. But at the end of the first week, I was really starting to enjoy it.

It was a three week season each year in July. And I went back the next year. I think it's perhaps that year that they thought I'd done very well, so I was made a site assistant. I went back every year until the dig ended in 1990. So in other words, it ran for almost 40 - effectively 40 years. And for the last 10 years, I was the assistant director of the whole excavation, as well as running one of the main sites with my friend Bob Croft - an Anglo Saxon site at the south Manor. And so I was at Wharram through various milestones, not the least of which was right at the start of my time there…

Before that, the dig received no funding and so people used to pay to go. That paid for the food, huge cans of baked beans and tinned rhubarb and blancmange - I mean we were only just after the end of the rationing era, in fact well, rationing was still going when Wharram started. That spirit persisted really until the end of blancmange and rhubarb and whatever.

In about 1973, the then Department of the Environment, which is effectively now Historic England, started to put money into the excavation, so that whatever was found could be laid out to the public. This would be the first time that something other than a high status site - a castle, or an abbey, a monastery - was going to be open to the public to show how the ordinary folks lived in the Middle Ages, on the basis of the earthworks and what was excavated beneath them. What is by today's standards a very, very modest grant, was made every year. That essentially meant that the volunteers got their food for free, and the supervisors got paid standard Historic England day rate to supervise. The money coming into the dig also meant that there was some spare cash slopping around for what we'd today call infrastructure.

Electricity was brought in, which was transformative because previously water had to be heated using calor gas in a big boiler. There were no showers. We used to get a bus once a week that would take us into Moulton eight miles away. And we'd all have a shower, the men in the men's, communally, and the ladies in the ladies. Then there would be a lecture. And then the dig would pay for sit down fish and chips. We'd be let loose until nine o'clock or something when the bus went back. So there's the frantic drinking in Moulton. It was great. A great, big night out.

So electricity came. There were very good handymen there, they were able to construct two single showers. So we had electricity for light rather than gas Tilly lights, we had electricity for the showers. That was one transformative element. And actually what that also enabled - it enabled us to take on more volunteers. In crude terms, the peak head count went from around 60 or 70, up to 100. Previously very primitive sanitary arrangements, which were basically buckets, big buckets; we had portaloos thereafter. I mean, it's astonishing.

Look, I mean, even by the standards of archaeology, Wharram was operating on a shoestring quite late, but it worked. You know, it worked very well. And people went back year after year. I mean, I went back for 20 years. And there were people who had been going for much longer than me. And I used to reckon that of the new comers each year, and there might be, say, 40 of those spread over the three weeks - some were students - we'd partnered with the University of York in 1990, with Philip Rahtz - I used to reckon that we could rely that about half of those newcomers would come back next year or become regulars, you know, they'd be thoroughly soaked into the atmosphere, as it were. So in a very big nutshell, that's a story of my involvement with Wharram: school board volunteer who rose through the ranks to assistant director. And then, of course, we had to write up the excavations. And that took another seven or eight years.

You know, if you were to ask me, why was Wharram important? Why arguably is Wharram still important? It's because it lasted so long. First of all, if you like stepping back a stage, it looked at things that no excavation had previously looked at or attempted - the full excavation of mediaeval peasant houses. That was a first. John Hurst, who was the archaeological director there, one of his catchphrases was 'another first for Wharram'.

It's the first time two peasant houses were excavated - the first time that had ever happened properly, and excavated to a very high standard. Techniques learned from prehistoric archaeology where every stone was planned, every find was individually plotted. Those records were actually reinterpreted. 30 or 40 years later, they were of a quality to allow that. And then right at the end of the 60s into the early 70s, the whole of the church was excavated inside and out. We then moved on to the mill. And by that time, we started to realise that the village wasn't fresh in the landscape at the Norman Conquest, or whatever, that there was an older Wharram underneath. So we started to look at aspects of that. And we also started to push the story forward in time from the village's desertion. And it turned out in the mid 16th century to look at the improved farm of the 18th century. And indeed, the cottages that we'd been using and inhabiting since the early 50s, it turned out that they were part of the 18th century farm, and we completely missed that, just hadn't been interested. Nobody was interested in post mediaeval stuff until maybe the early 1980s.

So that was one reason why Wharram was important. It looked at new stuff, constantly new stuff.

Secondly, because it ran for such a long time, 40 years, what had been found 10/20 years ago, was often reinterpreted. Because all the same people there were on the same site. The story was constantly being retold in lectures and publications. Sometimes people said, ‘hang on, that just doesn't tally with what we now know or what we found’.

So again, that's another reason why Wharram is so important is because it was like a 40 year rolling seminar, with people staying, going back to the same landscape, digging up new bits of it, and talking about the old work in the context of new discoveries.

The last point was that Wharram was always in July because a lot of well known medievalists went there to have their summer holidays. From the 50s, it was a magnet for friends and informed visitors. So they'd come and they talk and they say, Well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? They'd be roped in to give lectures in the evening. So it became a kind of freewheeling three week seminar. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two days. 

Was there conflict?

I don't think anybody's nose was ever out of joint about a reinterpretation. I should say that when Beresford and Hurst started to work together in the very early 50s, they would have laughed their heads off if you'd have said to them this is going to run for another 35 years. It was very much a short term exercise. Let's look at a mediaeval peasant house. But it just seemed to work and it produced excellent results. I think everybody enjoyed themselves. I wouldn't underestimate that at all. But by the time I was involved, you know, one of the things that made Wharram stand out was this seminar aspect. It was intellectual, not in a kind of po-faced way. But everybody that was there was interested in what they were doing, and were discussing what they were doing.

Beresford and Hurst were always very free, at least a couple of times during the excavation. And John Hurst would give a, you know, this is what we're thinking kind of address to the troops. Once a week, there would be a full site tour where a hundred people would trail round in a great crowd from site to site after work one evening, and the perhaps five supervisors would talk individually about their sites. 

Why did people keep going back? It's because although it was hierarchical, in the sense of Beresford and Hurst, and then later Rahtz at the top, and then all the site supervisors, the volunteers, cook, the queen of the find tent, this that and the other, you know, we were still a tribe. It was quite, you know, democratic, anybody could say anything, chip in ideas, and so forth. The fact that whether you were a supervisor, or whether you were a lowly volunteer, the fact that you were a Wharramite because it - does Desmond Decker's The Israelites mean anything to you, the pop song? Okay…well, find it on whatever device you use. It was a hit record - they were the Israelites, and we are the Wharramites.

So it was cohesive?

Absolutely. I mean, we were - you've been to Wharram? Okay, well, you know how isolated it is. And it was when we were there. You know, if you wanted to go three miles to the pub, it was an expedition. Everything had to be brought in, the food and so forth. Sanitation was non-existent. Hygiene was non-existent. Most years there was an outbreak of what we called the lurgi, basically a sickness and diarrhoea bug that used to hit, and it used to hit with a switch in the weather. Usually from very hot weather, to cold and wet weather. Believe me in July Wharram could be baking hot, particularly in the valley bottom if you were digging, no breeze. If it was cold and wet. And we were camping, difficult to dry out, there was an open fire always going in one of the common rooms. If you didn't have a constitution of iron that switched from very hot weather, to very cold, to wet weather, along with the slightest bit of poor hygiene, it meant the lurgi would arrive and it was highly transmissible.

I can't remember what the year was, it was somewhere probably around 1980. I can't remember how many people we had down with the lurgi, but it was over 40. And it was nasty for 36 hours. I don't think we ever had anybody carted off to the hospital, but you know, people took to their tents and just stayed near to the toilet.

We're all there, locked in. It was lovely, it's gorgeous, you know, in terms of the scenery, it was absolutely gorgeous. The people were nice, lots of us. You know, we'd known each other for 5 or 10 or 20 years. So it was like a family. You know, I think, lots of friendships and indeed, marriages were forged there. There were kindred spirits.

So all those things together, made it a very, very, very happy place, there were rarely fallings out, either academically or domestically.

So you all shared the same aim?

I think people came for two reasons. It was part of that shared mission to discover more about Wharram. As the research agenda evolved through time, it was to learn more about Wharram and thereby about the history of England, in the wider sense, because, as I was explaining with peasant houses, the church, the time depth in the landscape, it was Wharram time and time again that you will find in the textbooks pushing the agenda.

We all saw that we were engaged in a very worthwhile, intellectual academic exercise. But also it was like a homecoming to a family. Every year, it must have been like people on a submarine or whatever, they were away for umpteen months and got back to their family. We were all part of a family that was bigger and warmer, in many ways, and perhaps less fractious, than our own blood families.

There were two or three people that had been there since the early 50s. Not necessarily archaeologists, but just locals who came along to help out and got you know, roped in. I'm thinking in particular, the cook Johnny Watt, who was an aerospace engineer with Hawker Siddeley in real life. He was one of the best. When I went there in the mid 70s I dug with Johnny, and he could work me into a standstill with a pick and shovel. He was so fit, he could pick and shovel all day long. Because he was a mechanical engineer, he was the digs maintenance man. New pickaxe handles, popped wheelbarrow tyres, building the showers - anything that demanded practical skills and ingenuity, Johnny would sort that out. Into the last ten years I think he just got fed up with mending wheelbarrow tyres. The old cook had gone so Johnny took over the cooking. And he was great. I mean he fed up to a hundred people twice a day. Sadly, he died five years ago.

The other one I'm thinking of is a chap called Dennis Lum. He was a man from Bridlington, who came just out of interest. Dennis worked variously as an electrician and on farms. He would come over at weekends. He could use a scythe properly, for instance, and he could put up a fence properly, he could get barbed wire tight, which of course, people like me, we'd have a go, but you know… it would be Dennis who would gently show us how you did these things. He's in an old folks home now... I forgot your question.

Was the dig political?

No, no. No, it was an apolitical environment… But when you start to chisel away at it a bit, it was unorthodox. I mean, living in tents for three weeks in your summer holidays, on an archaeological dig. I don't think you get many captains of industry, we did have a few.

To some extent, we were in our annual three week escape from real life. From our comfortable beds. We were slumming it for three weeks and eating tinned rhubarb. It was very open, so - democratic is not the right word… It was a very open and happy atmosphere.

Maurice Beresford, who was the co-director who did all the logistics, was a lifelong bachelor. He started off as the warden of an adult education centre in Warwickshire, that's when he started to discover lost villages in Warwickshire. But for most of his career, he was at the University of Leeds, and ended up for a long time as Professor of economic history there. In real life, he had a very considerable social conscience, which manifested itself in a lifetime of being a borstal and prison visitor.

It was always an international crew, we always had a smattering of people coming in from all over the world. And particularly in the 80s, from Holland from the Dutch Youth Archaeological Organisation. It would be Maurice who would sit down in the evening, plonk himself down next to them, and then just talk to them and bring them into the fold as it were, explain what was going on a bit - take an interest in them. That didn't stop at the end of July. He would write - he wrote to me. People weren’t just there to dig, they weren't just cannon fodder. They were cared for. They were part of the tribe.

John Hurst, the other co-director, had a bad stammer possibly because he's left handed and when he was at Harrow public school he was forced to write with his right hand. That was the understanding as to why John stammered. Incredibly bright, but didn't say a lot. Maurice was known as the prolix professor, because he was always talking. He could talk for England. If he was giving a lecture after an evening meal in the ever darker and ever colder marquee, Maurice’s billed hour-long lecture would go on for at least an hour and a half. He'd have his eyes shut and he'd be talking and talking, anyway I just wanted to tell you something about Kirby Grindalythe before you finish and you're looking at your watch you're thinking, thank god he's finished. Then all of a sudden he’d say and of course another site in the East Riding is and you would think can I slip through this flap in the tent or will he notice if I actually go underneath the side of the marquee. 

I'm sure you know the story behind Maurice and John’s meeting, that Maurice Beresford had been working on lost villages in Warwickshire, and he did a radio broadcast in 1948, on the 600th anniversary of the Black Death, and he said there are these lost villages out there. It's popularly believed that they were deserted because of the Black Death in 1348, but there are other causes. He was contacted by Mr. Winstanley, who was a schoolmaster on the Wolds, who said I think we've got one of your lost villages at Wharram Percy. So Maurice came and saw these humps and bumps and thought there might be walls underneath. So there was a little village station at Wharram le Street in those days. With a couple of students he kind of scraped off the turf, and there were rough chalk walls underneath. They went back several times over the next year or two and did more scraping. News of this got to Cambridge where John Hurst was a student. And John, one of the first mediaeval archaeologists, went to visit and was horrified by the delvings of the historian, but saw that it was a very interesting site with huge possibilities. So they agreed that they'd launch a short project, and that Maurice would take care of the people, the admin, the food, the logistics, and John would direct the excavations. So from the start, there was a very clear division of roles.

References

Paul Bahn and Colin Renfrew, Archaeology: The Key Concepts, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005)

L. S. Bruce-Mitford and J. G. Hurst, Recent Archaeological Excavations in Britain, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1956)

G. S. Crawford, Archaeology in the Field, (London: J.M. Dent & Sons , 1970) 

Paul Stamper, Interview, 10/08/2021

Stuart Wrathmell, Interview, 09/04/2021

Stuart Wrathmell, Interview, 05/08/2021

S. Wrathmell, Wharram Research Project and Department of Archaeology, WHARRAM: A Study of Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds, XIII, A History of Wharram Percy and its Neighbours, (York: The University of York, 2012)

A lot of your research is based around interviews and testimony. How has overseeing this research within the framework of School of Commons shaped the way you include individual and collective voices and narratives within your project?

Working within the framework of the READ programme (that structure being regular conversation) has encouraged an approach in which antagonisms within or between accounts are able to sit alongside each other.