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Lossenham Pottery Project - origins of the project.

 

Sometime around 1243 a small group of monks arrived in the Kent village of Newenden on the River Rother, then a busy river crossing and small port. The monks came from Aylesford Priory, in northern Kent, and belonged to what would become the Carmelite order, then newly arrived in Britain. They came to Newenden at the invitation of the local landowner, Sir Thomas Aucher, to set up a religious foundation on his land at nearby Lossenham Manor. The priory was built where the land gently rises above the floodplain of the Rother, and the monastic community persisted here for nearly three hundred years until the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.

 

In subsequent centuries agriculture and the reuse of building materials slowly obliterated the visible remains of the priory from the landscape. It was not until recent archaeological surveys and subsequent excavations by archaeologists from Isle Heritage that the foundations of the priory church were revealed, confirming its location, and turning up artefacts from both the buildings and the activities of the community. Many of these fragments - pottery, floor tiles, roof tiles, drainpipes - are testament to the importance of clay as a material in this period and place.

 

Fragment of decorated medieval floor tile from the Lossenham Priory excavation

 

The Lossenham Pottery Project was initiated (as a part of the wider Lossenham Project) by Russell Burden in 2022 as part of an arts residency at Lossenham, at the same time as the archaeological investigations were taking place. One of the aims of the project was to test whether the local clay on the site could be used to make pottery and floor tiles of the sort being recovered from the archaeological dig, using a wood-fired, medieval type kiln. It also provided an opportunity for some contemporary ceramics interpreting elements of the landscape and history, again using the local materials and fired in the same kiln. 

Lossenham is on wealden clay soil - specifically Wadhurst clay - which makes for hard archaeology but good potential resources for potters. We know that at the same time as the construction of the Priory at Lossenham, there was also a pottery and tile works at nearby Rye, on much the same clay deposits. The remains of the Rye pottery were discovered and excavated in the 1930s and there are the records of that dig, and the material from it - much of which is in Rye Museum - which gave both historical context for the project, and some confidence that the clay would be usable for pots and tiles.

A medieval jug, in Rye Museum, from the excavations of the Rye Pottery site

 

It is not known whether any of the materials for the priory at Lossenham were made on site (as was sometimes the case for big projects such as monasteries) or were imported. No evidence of a pottery kiln has yet been found at Lossenham and, given the proximity Rye with its direct river connection to Newenden, the Rye pottery seems an entirely plausible source of supply. Nonetheless, it is interesting to know whether the sort of things used in the building and functioning of the priory could have been made there too.

 

With that background in mind a small group of volunteers, drawn mainly from those already involved in the achaeological dig, under Russell’s guidance, set about digging clay, preparing it, and making tiles, pots and a kiln (modelled on kilns of the Romano-British and early medieval period) to fire them in. This became year 1 of the Lossenham Pottery Project.

 

The successes and failures of the first year of the project, in 2022, provided a basis for a second season, which happened in 2024, and this in turn for a third, running from 2025-2026. Subsequent posts here summarise the first two years, and document the ongoing work.