History

The Gloucester City fabric type series currently housed at Gloucester City Museum comprises some 293 samples of pottery and tile fabrics dating to the Roman, post-Roman, medieval and post-medieval periods. Work started in compiling this type series back in 1974 when Alan Vince was working in the area collating data for his PhD thesis on the medieval ceramic industry of the Severn Valley (Vince 1983a). Alan’s knowledge of medieval pottery remains unsurpassed and it is a tribute to his scholarship that a rigorous reference system was devised that has survived over 40 years and still has great relevance for current work.

From the 1970’s there was much redevelopment in and around Gloucester City leading to the establishment of the City Archaeology Unit. The first tranche of excavations were undertaken by Henry Hurst to be followed by Caroline Heighway both assisted by Patrick Garrod. Pottery work was originally split between Alan (medieval and post-medieval) and Cherry Goudge (Roman) who worked at the Gloucester Archaeological Unit. Cherry was responsible for reports on the assemblages from St Oswald’s Priory (Goudge 1982) and, with Alan, the report on Westgate Street (Vince and Goudge 1980). Alan worked on many assemblages from the City, most notably Westgate Street (Vince 1979); the East and North Gates (Vince 1983b); the defences (Vince 1986); the Norman Castle (Vince 1988) and the City Centre (Vince 2020), as well as various unpublished sites. He also published an overview of late Saxon and medieval pottery in Gloucestershire using the TF codes (Vince 1984).

Several other pottery specialists have subsequently worked on the Roman assemblages from different excavations in the City including Maggi Darling on the Kingsholm fortress material (Darling 1985); Caroline Ireland who completed work on the Roman wares from the East and North Gates (Ireland 1983) and Jane Timby who worked on the various assemblages from Henry Hurst’s excavations (Timby 1986; 1991; 1999; 2020). Many of the samian reports throughout this period were undertaken by Felicity Wild. In the later years of the City excavation unit pottery work was undertaken by Phil Greatorex who published a report on the Norman Castle medieval wares (Greatorex 1988). Since the demise of the Excavation Unit, excavations within the City have been undertaken by the Gloucester County Archaeological Unit and other professional units. Completed publications have included London Road and Tanners’s Hall (Timby 2008; 2009) with others in the pipeline.

The Gloucester TF Codes

The TF codes have also been used on a limited number of sites across Gloucestershire from the 1990s onwards, for example, Kingscote (Timby 1998). This has allowed the compilation of distribution maps beyond Gloucester thus enhancing our knowledge of the distribution of certain wares (cf. Timby 2017).

The type series was originally developed as a numerical series starting with TFs (type fabric) 1-39 allocated to Roman wares and TF 40-200 to post-Roman wares. The Roman series out-grew the allocated numbers and thus restarted again at TF201 continuing up to TF243¹. The discovery of the first ‘dark age’ pottery in the excavations of the Norman Castle (Vince 1988) added a further two new fabrics TF 300-1 which probably represent the latest material to be added to the system. The present website has focussed on the extant material as it survives in the fabric series using the original coding. In a few cases samples are missing or may not necessarily be the best sherds for that ware. Some sherds have become worn and abraded from repeated handling.

Most of the accompanying descriptions and text are drawn from the original documentation for the TF series, but where our knowledge has improved in terms of the identification of wares the information has been updated for the Roman component. Named, traded, Roman wares which already appear in the National Roman fabric reference series (Tomber and Dore 1998; http://www.romanpotterystudy.org.uk/nrfrc/base/) are cross-referenced to these codes where more detailed information and images can be found. The most significant part of the Gloucester series will thus be the local wares, particularly those known to come from local kilns within the City (Rawes 1972; 1978; Hurst 1972; Timby 1991).