Cooking Pot from New Wintles Farm, Eynsham, Oxfordshire

On a gravel ridge west of the River Evenlode, an important Anglo-Saxon settlement site was excavated in 1968 before gravel extraction began. The site sprawled over about 11 acres and was enclosed by palisades and fences and crossed by a trackway leading through the inhabited area, which contained several post-built houses, the largest 5m square, and numerous small sunken-floor huts, all probably belonging to a single farmstead of the 7th and 8th centuries, specialising in sheep-farming and concentrating on producing surplus wool, and possibly cloth which would have been woven on individual looms in the little huts.

Characteristic of 7th- to 8th-century English settlements is roughly gritted handmade pottery, often built up from coils of clay and fired in the back yard. The medium-sized to large, rather shapeless, forms can be bucket- or barrel-shaped as well as roughly pot-shaped. One of the most characteristic features of English pottery of this period are the rims with little peaks pierced with holes which look designed for suspension by ropes or chains over a fire. Given the rather fragile nature of these pots, it seems unlikely that they would have withstood such suspension when filled with hot cooking stock or gruel; the rims peaks and holes may have been copied from better-made Netherlands pottery of this period with these features. This pot was probably used for slow cooking in the embers.