Introduction The excavation of a development site on the corner of Ardee Street and Cork Street at the southern end of the Liberties of Dublin was undertaken between October 2003 and February 2004 by Margaret Gowen & Co. A monitoring phase in the early summer of 2004 resulted in a further phase of excavation in June.
The site was bounded to the east by the culverted course of the Abbey Stream, an artificially created watercourse constructed for the abbey of St. Thomas the Martyr at some stage after 1185. Bisecting the site from east to west was the Commons Water, a natural stream culverted by Dublin Corporation in the 1870s. The stream constituted the southern boundary of the medieval Liberty of St. Thomas Court and subsequently became part of the boundary of the city and was thus along the Riding of the Franchises. The Liberty of Donore, also within the possession of the abbey, extended to the south, outside of the city’s jurisdiction.
The excavation recorded evidence for the ponding of the Commons Water, presumably to create a head of water to power mills further downstream towards the city. Several medieval flood channels of the Abbey Stream were recorded on the eastern periphery of the site. Sealing this activity was evidence for a defensive bank erected by troops loyal to the duke of Ormond in the 1640s.
Medieval occupation
The ‘millpond’ The silted-up pond constituted the bulk of the medieval evidence on the site. The material was unfortunately quite sterile and nothing was recovered, despite there being documentary evidence for a drowning there in the fifteenth century. The pond followed the natural contour of the valley and would have been up to 2.75m deep when fully flooded.
The pond first appears on the documentary sources at a point somewhere between 1181 and 1212, but may well have existed prior to the foundation of the abbey, within whose lands it was situated, in 1177.
There was no evidence recovered to indicate what had actually blocked the Commons Water, thus creating the pond. There may however be a rise in the subsoil to the west of the site (underneath a protected structure), which would have assisted the process.
A secondary consideration here is the presence of the Abbey Stream. This was brought through the area at some stage prior to the mid thirteenth-century and would have constituted a major feat of engineering. Local topography suggests that it would have been unnecessary to have raised the watercourse above the ground surface and it is thus unlikely that it was brought along a raised embankment.
The Riding of the Franchises The route of the Commons Water formed part of the tri-yearly procession around the bounds of the city by the mayor, sheriffs, aldermen and guilds. This was a major event in the civic life of the city and is accordingly well documented in J.T. Gilbert’s Calendar of ancient records of Dublin.
The route of the procession through the monastic liberties went to arbitration in 1527. It would seem that on previous years, damage had been caused to the abbot’s meadow to the west of the pond and that the abbey had petitioned for rerouting the procession. The court found in favour of the city and the traditional route was confirmed, with some concessions made to the abbey. The mayor, bailiffs and commons were permitted to proceed,
‘that they leave Waxamys gate and the whole Monastery of St. Thomas Court upon their right hand, and the aforesaid Abbot and Convent… upon a reasonable submission… to make and prepare a way over the millpond by Waxamys gate…’
However, only the mayor, bailiffs, aldermen, sword bearer and macebearers were permitted to proceed across the pond and through the meadow, and only then on foot without the horses, ‘doing as little prejudice or hurt unto the said meadow as they can’. The remainder of the procession had to take to the nearby highway.
This account strongly suggests that the pond had silted up by 1527. The 1603 account of the Riding confirms this and on that occasion planks were laid down by the earl’s men in order for the procession to pass over what by now must have been a swamp.
In any case, the Commons Water continued to flow through the valley and was brought underneath the Abbey Stream, where it then ran counter-topographically before returning to its original course down the Coombe.
Wycesthames Gate Just to the northeast of the site stood Wycesthames Gate, effectively the southern entrance to the abbey precinct. Peter Walsh’s suggestion that the variant names Washams, Waxhams or Whiteschams, may be a corruption of withershins, meaning counter-clockwise, is an attractive one; with some little effort of the imagination, the two watercourses running in opposite directions can be easily visualized at this location and this may have been remarkable enough to have given the adjacent gate its name.
The Abbey Stream flood channels The post-medieval culverted Abbey Stream lay just outside the limit of the excavation, although it was exposed and recorded on the southeastern boundary of the site. To the west of this, four intercutting channels were recorded, representing frequent episodes of flooding. A small quantity of local medieval pottery was recovered and Alan Hayden, who excavated the same features just to the south, recovered several late medieval shoes from the silts.
Post medieval occupation
The defensive bank Sealing the flood channels was an earthen bank which survived to a height of 1.14m over a distance of 5.8m (a more truncated version of the bank survived for a short distance further to the north). The bank appears to be a portion of a defensive system of earthworks located around the outskirts of the city and depicted on the Down Survey map of 1655. While the defences have apparently presented as negative archaeological features elsewhere to the east, the survival of a bank on Ardee Street is particularly fortitudinous, especially as the site was so heavily developed from c.1680 onwards. The lack of evidence for a ditch on Ardee Street may indicate that it was considered unnecessary due to the presence of the silted-up millpond, which may even have been re-flooded to improve the defences.
The section of the defences between Crooked Staff and St. James’ Gate was controlled in 1644 by the regiment of sir John Borlaise, which was quartered locally at Thomas Court, Pimlico, Crooked Staff, Donore (or the Coombe) and on Francis Street. Guards were placed at the bulwark positioned at the drawbridge over the Abbey Stream at the top of Cork Street (still called Cork Bridge in 1756), at the ‘shoulder beyond the sluice’, at the bulwark next to the millpond, at the angle or shoulder next to Browne’s garden and at the bulwark next to St. James’ Gate.
Brown’s garden has been located by Peter Walsh at the corner of School Street and Thomas Court; the millpond does not appear to be the one recorded over the excavation, being located further to the north near Thomas Court Bawn. The sluice referred to could be a sluice along the Commons Water the top of the Coombe, along the earlier extent of the watercourse.
A pit located on the top of the truncated bank may have been a make-shift latrine; there was no evidence recorded for an associated temporary structure. While it is highly likely that the troops guarding the defences would have had a formalised latrine system in operation, it is odd that a latrine would have been situated at such a visible location. An examination of the environmental remains may throw further light on the function of the pit. A single gun flint was recovered from over the bank.
Tanning and dumping Prior to the construction of a brewery over the ‘millpond’, small scale tanning and localised dumping were recorded in the area between the bank and the now silted-up pond. This appears to have been an opportunistic use of the area which does not really seem to have been developed until the 1680s.
More tanning Evidence was recovered for more formalised tanning on both sides of the Commons Water. To the very west of the site, an extensive tannery was excavated which appeared to have operated in two phases. The earlier phase constitutes a large shallow pit dug out of the silted-up pond material and seems to have been abandoned as a more formalised operation began just to the north. Here, several pits were excavated, both timber- and stoned-lined, with a drain discharging directly into the Commons Water.
If the contents of the drain were at least as malodorous as the contents of the pits, it is worth noting that the drain began at the heads of two latrines belonging to domestic properties on the Cork Street frontage to the south! The tannery is depicted on Rocque’s map of 1756 and on a lease map drawn by John Brownrigg from 1793 which is preserved in the National Library of Ireland.
The tannery appears to have closed down by the early years of the nineteenth century and the pits were backfilled with substantial quantities of pearlware, which may indicate that a local tavern or substantial house in the neighbourhood were cleared out at the same time.
The more truncated remains of a second tannery were located north of the Commons Water. This tannery was leased to John Brookes, formerly of Athy, who took the lease for a period of seventy two years at an annual rent of £10.7s. in August 1684.
Domestic occupation The back ends and plots of three early eighteenth-century housed were excavated at the southwestern corner of the site. Some evidence was recorded for earlier structures and domestic dumping, although they would have been located well away from the Cork Street frontage within the back plots.
The houses were probably Dutch Billys, narrow gable-fronted structures that were common in the area until the early years of the twentieth century. There is evidence that the plots were rebuilt on two occasions between the early 1700s and the early nineteenth century, before being cleared altogether for a terrace of artisans’ dwellings in the early twentieth century.
The eighteenth-century houses were unusual in having indoor latrines (which as we’ve seen, discharged out through the tannery into the Commons Water). A more usual solution to the problem of human waste was the provision of a dung house, or ‘ash pit’, effectively a hole in the ground which functioned as a septic tank, slowly discharging the waste out into the surrounding soil through holes in the masonry or brick.
The breweries Two breweries were investigated. The least well-preserved was situated on the northern bank of the Commons Water and occupied the site of Brookes’ tannery. The buildings which stood until recently on the site contained fabric from this early eighteenth-century undertaking and their subsequent demolition removed much of the archaeological evidence below.
The brewery on the southern side of the watercourse survived in better condition. A sequence of water cisterns (with water taken directly from the Abbey Stream) and malting kilns dating from the 1680s through to the late eighteenth century was excavated while evidence of a major rebuild towards the middle of the eighteenth century was also recorded.
Porter or stout does not appear to have been brewed in Dublin in the early eighteenth century. The brew of choice in the city would have been a brown ale similar to that produced by English craft breweries today. The introduction of a new product from London, porter, fundamentally changed the city’s drinking habits and brought the domestic brewing industry to a crisis point. This can be best appreciated in the contemporary revenue returns. Within the period 1762-1773 there was a decrease in the revenue raised of £51,463 10s.6d. per annum while at the same time, the quantity of English porter imported rose from 28,935 barrels to 58,675 barrels. The root of the problem lay with excise duties between the two islands. The Dublin brewers were obliged to source their raw materials in England at inflated prices. Price increases levelled on the publicans trickled down to the customers, who began drinking the cheaper imported porter. The publicans for their part took a greater profit from the sale of porter and consequently ordered more, to the detriment of the Dublin brewers.
The English brewers, due to favourable tariffs, could afford to sell porter cheaper in Ireland than in England and for that matter, cheaper than what it would cost a local brewer to produce it. By 1770 the brewing industry in Dublin was in a state of crisis, and on foot of a petition from the Brewers’ Guild, the Irish House of Commons established a committee of inquiry into the matter in 1773.
One of the witnesses was George Thwaite[s] who operated the brewery under discussion. He was in addition the Master of the Corporation of Brewers who, according to his deposition, had been a Dublin brewer for 34 years. He recalled a time when there had been seventy breweries in Dublin, but by 1773 the number had been reduced to thirty. He alleged that a quarter of the breweries had failed over the last ten years due to the increased price of raw materials, energy (‘fire’) and labour. Rather than raise the prices of their products, the brewers had been forced to lessen the quality of the malt and hops, which had produced an inferior brew, presumably further encouraging the consumers to drink the cheaper imported porter.
The obvious solution was for Dublin brewers to start brewing porter themselves and according to one commentator, the first porter brewery was established in 1778. However, in 1746 George Twaite began to donate six barrels of porter annually to the Lying-In Hospital on George’s Lane, possibly as a marketing ruse to publicise his brewery and its new product (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 25 August 1746). The brewery in Ardee Street was therefore probably one of the first, if not the first Dublin brewery to produce what became the staple brew of the city. It is possible that a new phase of building in the malt house represents a change over to a new style of brewing, which was to dominate the Irish market to such an extent that by the early nineteenth century, English imports had virtually ceased. By 1816 it was estimated that 300,000 barrels of porter had been produced by Dublin’s 35 breweries over the previous five years; of these 269,000 were consumed in Dublin, 30,000 were consumed within the country and 1,000 were exported.
Conclusion The excavation succeeded in discovering the origins of the dog-leg out of the city on the Coombe-Cork Street route, by locating the presence of a large area which once held a significant body of water. Unfortunately, the eventual use that the water was put to remains something of a mystery.
It would seem likely that the body of water constituted a mill pond or reservoir, which probably discharged in the medieval period down the slope at the western end of the Coombe. Its location within the Liberty of St. Thomas Court and Donore would suggest that the pond was eventually under the control of the abbey of St. Thomas, however, it is impossible to say whether the damming of the Commons Water occurred before or after the abbey’s foundation in 1177.
It would certainly appear however that the pond below St. Thomas Court was in existence between 1181 and 1212. Linzi Simpson’s suggestion that the Abbey Stream was created shortly after 1185 might suggest that the construction of the new watercourse had the secondary benefit of damming the Commons Water, thus controlling the supply of water down the Coombe and toward the mills situated along the Poddle downstream. These mills as such were outside the direct control of the abbey, yet, the abbey would have exercised control over the volume of water available if this were indeed the case. There are no known documentary sources identifying the pond as a bone of contention between the abbey and the city, although there were extensive problems with the abbey’s perceived interference with other watercourses, most notably the City Watercourse.
Evidence for milling was recorded in the form of six millstones, which were recovered from secondary locations. On the basis that millstones were (and indeed are) difficult to move, it would seem likely that there was a mill in the immediate vicinity. Documentary sources locate the Malt Mill in the general area, situated however along the Abbey Stream. This is first referred to in 1544 and is thus of relatively late construction in the scheme of things. The late seventeenth-century reference to Joseph Thomas, a well known miller who had leased both the Double Mill at Warrenmount and the Wood Mill at Harold’s Cross, would suggest that the mill, if one existed, was located in the property north of the Commons Water. The millstones recovered on site however came from the properties south of the watercourse and it is likely that they belonged to a post medieval mill, wherever it was located.
The post medieval industrial development of the site echoes the archaeology of the Liberties as a whole, with both tanning and brewing represented. The recovery of evidence for a section of the defensive bank erected around the city during the Cromwellian wars is an added bonus to our understanding of the military history of the city and it is to be hoped that further sections of the bank will be located on other sites in the future.
