Page 56 - John Barber's Oakham Castle and its archaeology

At this point, a drystone wall of limestone, five courses high, was discovered, running parallel to the present
Castle drive, and abutting on to the curtain wall. It was c. 3ft thick and 11 ft long, and was roughly faced with tooled
limestone blocks. Between two of these was found a stem fragment of clay pipe, a Chester type dated c. 1700. This
appears to have been a post-medieval revetment wall to the entrance.
This wall, however, had been built over an earlier structure, which had been ruined in the process. When the
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limestone blocks were removed, a partly preserved oven was revealed, standing directly on the rampart (Pl. IIIb).
This was strongly made of limestone slabs, with a floor arranged in herringbone fashion, and when found was semi-
circular in shape, its walls standing 2ft 1½in high, and its base 3ft 9in wide. Presumably it was once facing inwards,
in the external wall of a building, and may be of late medieval or sixteenth-century date. No wall footings were found
to the east of the oven, where it is likely that a building would have been situated, but here unfortunately there had
been much disturbance.
In a layer of rubble piled against the lower courses of the revetment wall, there were medieval and later sherds and
tiles and Colleyweston slates, evidence of the levelling which swept away the building to which the oven belonged.
Any footings that remain must be under the Castle drive, where it was impossible to excavate. Mr Ralegh Radford
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considers that the curtain and gateway date from the same time as the great hall, that is, 1175-1200. If there was any
building inside the gate, of which the oven formed a part, it might have been ‘a room for the porter’, as recorded in
1340.

THE FINDS

In the following catalogue, layer numbers of stratified finds from the 1954 excavation are shown within a circle. All
the material has been deposited at the Oakham School Museum. [The archive is now at Rutland County Museum –
Ed]

SAXO-NORMAN POTTERY

(a) Stamford Ware

A total of 377 sherds were found, of which
most came from the rampart or below. A
number were unstratified, and a few sherds
were discovered in an isolated pocket of the
old ground surface between stanchion holes I
and II (Fig. 1). There were 10 rims of
cooking-pots, of which one was decorated
with rouletting; 10 of bowls (two
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decorated), and at least 15 of pitchers. 131
sherds were glazed, a rather higher
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proportion than at Alstoe Mount. Glaze
was found on pitchers and bowls. Most of
the sherds were of a distinctive buff colour,
thin in texture, but occasionally (for
example, where the body of the vessel
thickened towards the base) with a grey-
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black core. Surfaces were sometimes grey
or red. Glaze varied in colour from green to
yellow (or yellow-brown) and pink,
sometimes on one sherd. Six sherds had
narrow incised grooves on the outside.
Base sherds were of the normal sagging
type, often showing the characteristic knife
trimming. In form and fabric the Stamford
ware at Oakham compared very closely with
that from Alstoe Mount, a motte and bailey
castle a few miles to the north of Oakham,
excavated and fully published by Mr G C
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Dunning . An extended discussion here is
therefore unnecessary.

Fig. 5. Saxo-Norman Pottery:
Stamford Ware.

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