Page 16 - Phonebox Magazine September 2012

Archaeological Discovery in Olney High Street
Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of the earliest known tenement in Olney High Street. The discovery was made by Souterrain Archaeological Services Limited at the site of the new office extension of David Coles Architects at Cobbs Court.
Bedford and are particularly well-attested in Oxfordshire, where they were sometimes lined with clay or wattle. It is thought that two others were uncovered during building works at Rose Court, Olney in the late 1990s. Martin Wilson, director of Souterain, remarked that the apparent lack of finds of this type in Buckinghamshire is largely due to limited opportunity to explore medieval street frontages. The environmental analysis of soil from the cellars paints a picture of rural domestic economy where livestock was slaughtered close by the dwelling. The Olney diet included wheat, cabbage, peas, cattle, goats, pig and eels. There is also a glimpse of the medieval trading network, for while most of the everyday cooking pots were acquired from local potters from Olney Hyde and Harrold, the more fancy tableware - green glazed jugs and plates - came from as afield as Lyveden (28 miles) and Potterspury (20 miles) in Northants, and even from Brill and Boarstal in south Bucks (37 miles).
The remains were that of a large timber house that fronted the road (now High Street) in the 12th / 13th centuries. It comprised a group of sub-rectangular cellar-pits, one with post-holes indicating a suspended floor, and a number of substantial post-holes. When this house was demolished to make way for new timber-framed building erected on stone
extend to West Street and East Street; a large proportion of these property boundaries are still in existence today.
Medieval cellar- pits of this type are believed to have been
Souterrain has been providing professional archaeological services throughout England, Wales and Spain since 1997, and is now based in Olney. The archaeological investigation at Cobbs Court was funded by David Coles Architects Ltd. The full report is to be available at www.souterrain.biz and the English Heritage website www.oasis.ac.uk.
used for cool storage of food such as meat and dairy products; they have been found in
foundations, the cellars were in- filled with soil and household rubbish. An unused cooking pot left in the bottom of one of the cellars shows that the redevelopment took place in the late 13th century.
Historians have long believed for that at sometime in the 13th century Olney underwent planned expansion northwards from the original Saxon settlement around the church and market place area. The new areas of the township were characterised by long narrow burgage plots at right angles from either side of the High Street which
The new archaeological findings from Cobbs Court, suggest that this was not so much a simple ʻexpansionʼ onto virgin ground, but moreover a large scale and radical socio- economic revision of the existing layout of the market town whereby tenements already stood, perhaps randomly along the approach road from the north.
16 Phonebox Magazine