2017:818 - 30 & 32-36 THOMAS Street, DUBLIN 8, Dublin

From November 2016 through to March 2018, archaeological test trenching, open excavation and monitoring works were carried out at the site of what was Frawley’s department store on Thomas Street in the Liberties area of Dublin. The excavations were carried out in advance of redevelopment of the site. The works were completed by a crew of between 14-20 archaeologists, generating an archive of 1,790 contexts, 5,802 photographs, 5,975 artefacts and 746 samples.

The site comprised an area of approximately 1,820 square metres. Within the site boundary, a number of protected structures dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries fronted onto the street. To the rear of these properties several buildings of twentieth-century date had been constructed on pile and groundbeam foundations. The area beneath this twentieth-century structure had been reduced by over 1m below the level of the ground along Saint Catherine’s Lane. The excavation was divided into two distinct areas – a block parallel to Saint Catherine’s Lane which was reduced to c. 1.4m below the level of the modern laneway and a larger area to the east, comprising the majority of the site footprint which was reduced to c. 3m below the previous ground level to accommodate a basement. It should be noted therefore that the archaeology along Catherine’s Lane was not fully excavated with significant deposits and features being preserved in situ beneath the development. The activity encountered onsite can be grouped into five general phases:

Phase I Eleventh – twelfth century: Pre-priory/abbey burials.

Phase II Twelfth – thirteenth century: abbey cemetery, abbey boundary ditch and adjacent secular plots/toft areas to the north.

Phase III Fourteenth – fifteenth century: abbey precinct wall and later phase of tanning/cess pits. Beginning of garden soil deposits.

Phase IV Sixteenth century: timber-lined cess/tanning pit to north of precinct wall, stone-lined cess/tanning pits built into line of precinct wall on southern side, boundary walls along St. Catherine’s Lane. Bulk garden soil deposits across the northern portion of the site.

Phase V Seventeenth century: tanning pits, timber water pipes, row of Dutch Billy-type structures fronting Saint Catherine’s Lane. Several timber- and stone-lined tanning pits. Bulk garden soil deposits.

Phase VI Eighteenth century: multiple red brick boundary walls, structures, brick surfaces, cobbled surfaces, wells, waterpipes, timber water cisterns, timber tanning pits, a brick-built tanning pit, a brick-built lime slaking pit.

Phase VII Nineteenth century: boundary walls, buildings, surfaces and an industrial complex along Saint Catherine’s Lane comprising two coal-fired furnaces set into a sloping brick-floored sub-basement.

Phase VIII Twentieth century: yard surfaces, stone foundations, concrete pile clusters and concrete groundbeams. Sewer pipes, waterpipes and other services.

Given the limitations in space, the following text focuses on the medieval phases.

The Precinct Wall
Early on in the excavations, a large east-west running wall was discovered towards the southern end of the site. This wall survived for a length of 37.2m, was up to 2.3m wide and stood to a maximum height of four courses, with an average height of 0.43m. The wall had been heavily impacted upon, in several places, by a modern concrete ground beam, a modern test pit or refuse pit, an eighteenth-century well, a seventeenth-century wooden water pipe and a seventeenth-century stone-lined tanning pit. Two further stone-lined tanning/cess pits had been built into the line of the wall and all three pits had utilised robbed stone from the wall in their construction. The wall was entirely robbed out towards the western end of the site, the stone having been re-used in the foundation of a row of seventeenth-century houses fronting Saint Catherine’s Lane, as well as in paved surfaces, a well and boundary walls.

This wall had acted as a barrier between the sanctified space of the graveyard of the Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr to the south and an extended area of densely clustered and intercutting tanning and cess pits to the north. This wall, in other words, was the outer precinct wall of the Abbey of St Thomas as depicted on John Speed’s map of 1610.

The wall was constructed of large to medium sized slabs of limestone laid on the flat. The lower two courses of the wall comprised a clay bonded plinth foundation up to 0.2m wider than the upper courses which were bonded with a friable cream coloured lime mortar. A total of 29 ceramic sherds were retrieved from within the fabric of the wall and immediately below it. These fragments suggest a construction date for the wall sometime in the late thirteenth to fourteenth centuries.

Abbey Graveyard
On the southern side of the precinct wall, a burial area was encountered extending across the width of the site. Previous excavation had identified graves immediately south-east of the site and it was presumed that the abbey graveyard was located to the south and east of the excavation area. However, excavation revealed a relatively even density of burials extending across the east-west axis of the southern portion of site, totaling 142 interments. Many of these burials were truncated by later burials or post-medieval and modern features, and as a result a large quantity of disarticulated human remains was retrieved. The disturbed bone was usually reinterred with some care within later graves, sometimes laid out around the edges of the graves or placed upon the interred individual.
While some localised areas exhibited higher density burials with more frequent intercutting of graves, in the south-west and south, the distribution of burials was generally of moderate to low density. Perhaps this layout reflects the fact that the excavation area was located at the outer limit of the cemetery.

Generally, the graves were aligned west-east, with deviations towards the north aligned west-north-west/east-south-east and north-west/south-east. Grave goods were almost entirely absent and the cemetery soil was conspicuously devoid of ceramic or other artefactual material. No evidence for the use of coffins or shrouds was present; no coffin nails, shroud pins or other items from clothing or personal adornment such as buckles or buttons were found. Osteological analysis of the population is ongoing but preliminary results indicate that the cemetery was open to all age categories including infants, young and older children, adolescents, and adults of all ages and both sexes. Several burials had received specific attention in their burial and these are described below. At the time of writing, carbon 14 dating has been completed on five burials. Further dates will follow.

Slab-lined burial
In the south-west of the site, an increased density of burials was observed. This higher density of graves appeared to be clustered around an individual who had been interred in a grave lined with rectangular blocks of limestone set on their edge. Osteological analysis has shown that this possible male was a young/middle aged adult at the time of death. Surprisingly, the carbon 14 dating for this individual returned a date of AD 894-1146 (sigma 2 – UBA 40201). This date range clearly predates the establishment of the priory by, at the very least, 31 years.

‘Plague-pit’ burials
A large, shallow, sub-square cut immediately to the north of the slab-lined burial was found to contain the remains of at least five individuals. This pit was covered by a layer of white lime mortar of varied thickness which lay directly on top of the skeletal remains. Given the jumbled nature of the burials within the cut and the fact that the mortar lay directly on the bones, this pit may represent a mass burial, or plague pit where bodies were interred quickly and sealed be a layer of lime which ultimately solidified once combined with the moisture in the bodies and in the surrounding soil. One of the individuals from the pit – a young middle adult female, returned a date of AD 1040-1214 (sigma 2 – UBA 40202).

Pilgrim burials
The only intentionally buried grave goods discovered in any of the interments consisted of two examples of perforated scallop shells retrieved from two older middle adult male individuals. The positioning of the scallop shells, on the lower chest and over the right humerus, is suggestive of these items being sewn into garments or worn on a leather thong around the neck. The scallop shell is a symbol of St James the Apostle and such perforated scallop shells were used as pilgrim badges indicative of a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain.

Deviant burials
To the south of the slab-lined grave, two individuals were interred with rounded stones wedged in their mouths. These individuals appear to have been in middle adulthood at their time of death, with one identified as male and one as a possible female. These two burials represent the only obvious deviance from the normative burial practice in the cemetery population.

Secular plots
A series of six plots extended north from the precinct wall to the edge of excavation. These plots represent the rear toft areas associated with the houses that would have fronted onto Thomas Street in the medieval period. The plots, while not evident during excavation, can be traced in the finalised site plan with discontinuous, shallow linear features delineating the parcels of ground and many features respecting these divisions. The entire area to the north of the precinct wall was dominated by dense intercutting and interlocking pits of varying shape, size and depth. In addition to these pits, one plot contained a timber-lined well and a possible cereal-drying kiln.

A total of 68 pits were excavated in this area. Several of the pits were lined with a thick layer of blue-grey clay. No pits from this period were timber lined and the majority seemed to rely on their depth relative to the water table to ensure they were water tight. In two instances, timber retaining walls built of posts and re-used planking/staves were constructed along a single side of a pit. This was particular to instances where a later pit cut through an earlier one and the retaining wall was installed to prevent the slop from the earlier pit collapsing into the new cut.
The pit morphologies included very large deep rectangular pits (c. 3m x 2m x up to 3m deep) generally concentrated towards the southern end of the plots; large circular pits (c. 2-3m diameter and 2-3m deep); large oval pits (c. 2m x 1.5m by 1.5m deep) and smaller shallower square pits (c. 1-2m square and up to 1m deep). Clustering of these pit types was also noted with instances of deep pits adjacent to or interlocking with small oval pits and large shallow rectangular pits, suggestive of a specific industrial purpose.

Not all of the pits respected the boundaries of the plots and this may suggest that the individual plots were amalgamated or that larger industrial areas emerged over time. The later mapping of the area presents a picture of such courtyards/open spaces between buildings. The most notable density of pits occurred within the c. 2.5m-wide strip of land located between the abbey precinct wall to the south and the ditch to the north. Almost the entire surface area of this strip of land had been subjected to cutting and re-cutting from generally large pits. The pits in this area did not respect the plot boundaries discussed above.

The pits were filled for the most part with black noxious smelling material. In several instances, green and brown foul-smelling organic deposits interspersed with layers of straw were encountered. The fills of the pits were rich in ceramic, leather and wooden artefacts as well as animal bone/horn core and environmental remains. The head of a wooden paddle which was perforated with a series of holes to allow it to be drawn through liquid, was retrieved from one of the larger pits along the eastern edge of the site. Such paddles were employed in the tanning process to agitate the tanning liquor in which hides were placed, indicating an industrial function. However, a double toilet seat was also recovered from a moderate sized pit in the south-east area of the secular plots, illustrating that at least some of the pits were in use as latrines/cess pits. Whether this was the primary function intended for the pit or whether there was crossover in use at different stages of the life-cycle of the pits is explored further below. The toilet seat finds a parallel in an excavated example at Emmet Street, Trim, where a similar layout of rear plots and dense intercutting pits was encountered in a medieval suburban context, just outside of the town walls.

Soluble salts were prevalent across the site, and particularly in the areas of highest pit densities. These salts exuded out of artefacts, architectural stone and also the natural subsoil once exposed to the air. The salts presumably derived from some function of the pits and were carried into the surrounding subsoil and deposits by the movement of rainwater and groundwater. It should be noted that the tawing process requires the use of alum, a double sulphate salt, and this may be significant in interpreting what activities were being undertaken onsite.

Conclusions
Based on the ensemble of information currently in hand from these excavations, the following precisions in the timeline can be proposed for the site and the abbey as a whole:

Pre-1100: graveyard (and potentially church) in existence.
c. 1172: pre-existing chapel (with chaplain) dedicated to Thomas Becket by citizens of Dublin.
1177: priory established and lands encircled with a ditch, larger and more substantial to the south (the side exposed to Gaelic attack) and smaller to the north. The northern ditch carries water and may represent the ‘Luttebrune’ mentioned in a late twelfth/thirteenth-century charter.
1192: elevation to abbey and significant building projects begun – some of the Dundry stone recovered may date to this period.
1225: the ‘Luttebrune’ is tapped into for the purpose of carrying water from the city cistern to the west, towards Saint John's Mill and the city.
1227: foundation stone laid in construction (extension?) of Abbey church – the majority of the carved Dundry dates to this period.
c. 1360: the ‘Luttebrune’ stream east of Saint Catherine’s Church is diverted into the thoroughfare of Thomas Street, becoming the Glib Stream. This potentially done to facilitate access for citizens for pubic washing (as per a reference in 1538). Intensification of tanning/cess pits along its former course.
c. 1360-1400: Construction of outer precinct wall. Potentially in response to an attack by the mayor, bailiff and citizens of Dublin in 1392. Possible renovation of the Abbey Church at this time in the 'Decorated Style' Gothic, accounting for the extensive retrieval of high-quality sandstone pieces of cusped-arch window tracery.
1478: money given in reparation of the monastic church of St Thomas’ may account for the few 'Perpendicular Style' limestone masonry pieces recovered, most notably the fifteenth-century cloister column base.
c. 1538: quarrying of stone from the Abbey church and buildings to line cess pits and tanning pits which begin to eat into precinct wall.
c. 1650: precinct wall levelled, large-scale secular (tanning) activity established within abbey precinct.

Given the scale of the excavation there is some post-excavation work remaining to complete. This entry will be updated upon submission of final report.

REFERENCES
Duffy, P. 2020 ‘Saints and Skinners, excavations along the northern precinct of the Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr, Dublin’ in Duffy, S. Medieval Dublin XIX Dublin: Four Courts Press.

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