British Archaeology

In an extract from her new book, A Mudlarking Year: Finding Treasure in Every Season, Lara Maiklem describes the thrill of discovering a 16th century sword on a Bankside beach.

Thursday 2 February 2022

I hear from the Museum of London today about the 'sixteenth-century bladed object' I found last year. My Excalibur moment happened at the beginning of December on a murky Saturday afternoon. I don't usually mudlark on the weekend — the foreshore is often busier and I try to keep weekends for family time — but I was in London meeting friends for lunch that day, and as I made my way back to the station, I saw the tide was low. Actually, I knew the tide was low, which is why I took the longer route along the river to the station. How could I not? I only briefly considered my new brogues, which were entirely unsuitable, before unlatching the metal gate and taking the concrete stairs down onto the foreshore at Bankside. The light was fading, and I knew I didn't have long before I lost it altogether, so I headed straight for my favourite patch. People were already there, and I could see from the footprints that it had been well searched, so I walked a little further along and that's when I saw it.

...

The handle and hilt loomed out at me from a small area of gritty sand that thinly covered the mud into which the blade disappeared. What caught my eye was its regular shape and the two lines of twisted gold wire embedded in the dark brown material of the handle. The blade was only just beneath the surface, and I gently cleared away the sand until I felt the end of it with my fingers. Easing my hand carefully underneath, I lifted it free quite easily, leaving a perfect impression of where it had lain for the best part of 500 years in the dark grey mud. I held the sword aloft. Excalibur of the Thames! And looked around, but everyone had gone and there was nobody to share the moment with. The handle looked to be made of wood with a square pommel carved into the end, finished off by a four-petalled flower or quatrefoil in what I assumed was copper alloy. The blade was broken at about eight inches long and was encrusted in a thick layer of mud, pebbles and rust. When iron rusts, it often engulfs whatever is lying next to it in the mud and ends up looking like a giant caddisfly larva case. If it had been a Victorian padlock or an old horseshoe, I would have been tempted to knock the concretion off with a stone, but this was too precious.