Plough Pebbles from Holderness, East Yorkshire

Photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum (Stephen Devine)

This photo shows early medieval plough pebbles from Holderness in East Yorkshire now in the Manchester Museum collection. For anyone not familiar with plough pebbles they are small ovoid pieces of hard stone (typically quartzite) that were inserted into the surface of a wooden plough in order to protect it from abrasion. They are effectively a kind of alternative to using iron and a number of archaeological examples of wooden ploughs complete with stones inserted in them have turned up in bogs in Denmark. The stones become worn over time and develop distinctive facets with striations. When they eventually fall out of the plough they remain in the soil to be picked up during field-walking. A wooden fragment with plough pebbles from the Whithorn excavations was dated to the 7th century AD.

My interest was drawn to the plough pebbles here at the Manchester Museum because of my work on the Morfitt family of Atwick (see the most recent Medieval Section Journal). Prof William Boyd Dawkins of the Manchester Museum corresponded with William Morfitt and identified animal bones that the family collected from the ancient lake beds of Holderness. He also visited the Morfitts at their home at Charlotte’s Cottage. The plough pebbles from Holderness in the Manchester collection almost certainly were given to Dawkins by William Morfitt and have been here ever since.

What is particularly interesting about the plough pebbles, however, is that the literature on plough pebbles frequently refers in passing to their discovery in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Whilst some of the Lincolnshire examples have been published in the pages of the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, the Yorkshire (Holderness) ones have never, as far as I can tell, been brought to the attention of a wider audience.

There may be a good reason why these finds seem to have been overlooked. The Morfitt family did not document its discoveries as well as it should but I also suspect that anything associated with William and his sons was regarded as slightly suspect because of the Holderness ‘harpoon’ controversy (see YAJ 1999). It is clear that there are several dozen references to the discovery of ‘rubbers’ (the Morfitt family’s name for plough pebbles) in and around the village of Atwick amongst their papers. So it is with the intention of celebrating the archaeological work carried out by William Morfitt and his sons Beaumont and Aaron and of sharing these discoveries more widely, that I send this information to the website. A fuller article will appear in a future issue of the section journal. I would welcome any contributions from members or the general public.

Bryan Sitch
Head of Human Cultures
The Manchester Museum
Wednesday, 30 September 2009

A photo of Plough Pebbles from Whithorn on the SCRAN website.
SCRAN is part of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.