Making a living on the Severn Vale: the invisible potters of Domesday

An ‘in person’ talk only, in Wheatstone Hall, Museum of Gloucester.

When surveyors for the 1086 Domesday book arrived at Haresfield, Gloucestershire, they did something unusual: they recorded potters within the village, a presence recorded at only two other locations within William’s new realm. Potters were common, of course, just not relevant to the survey, but this whim on the part of an unnamed commissioner has prompted decades of searching for the Haresfield potteries. Work at Quedgeley East by Cotswold Archaeology has now identified one of these potteries and has also uncovered a nationally rare example of an excavated pre-Conquest farmstead that survived until its replacement in the 13th century by an elite landscape.