Short Stuff: What's a mudlarker?
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Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. We got our clam diggers on, and we're ready to go to do a little mudlarking, which just happens to be the subject of this short stuff. Have you ever heard of this term? I want to say yes, but sometimes my brain makes up memories just to be cool. Okay.

I'm not sure. I would assume the etymology. I didn't even look it up because I just assumed that mudlarking was just having a lark in the mud. It's got to be it, right? Or maybe you flitter about from one place to another like a lark in the mud.

Okay. I like them both. Can we both win like a soccer game? Sure. I love it. I love it. Mudlarking is a thing that we're talking about. It's a term you probably hear in England more readily and specifically even maybe London. Originated in the 18th or 19th century. And back then it was basically when people of lesser means were

would walk along the mud banks at low tide of the river Thames. It's Thames, right? Thames. Thames? Yeah. The Thames. And collect stuff to try and sell. Yeah. Everything from little bits of rope to coins if they were lucky. Anything somebody would buy. That's how some people actually supported themselves in the 19th century. Fast forward to today.

I'm guessing starting around the 70s, maybe the 80s. Now it's just a pastime. I don't think anybody supports themselves mudlarking any longer. It's just a hobby akin to people who are beachcombers with metal detectors on the beach. Yeah, or like magnet fishing. Yes, similar to that. We actually did a short stuff on that. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah.

This is like that, but there are definite nuances that distinguish it from either one of those two things. Yeah. And the reason why this has become a pastime or I guess sort of a hobby now on the Thames is because the Thames was a garbage dumping ground for many, many years.

People would just – we did our thing on New York City trash and how previous to trash collection people would just dump it on the sidewalks and in the rivers there in New York. They did the same thing in London, and it was a junky, nasty, polluted river until about 60-something years ago when they took great, great efforts to really clean up that river. And now apparently –

at least as far as urban rivers goes, it's one of the cleanest ones. But there is still, because it happened for so many years and because so much happened in London over those years,

There's just, you know, thousands of years of potential gold and sometimes real gold in those muddy banks. Yeah, because a lot of people have lived densely in the London area on the Thames for, like you said, multiple thousands of years. So there's just a lot of stuff there that separates the Thames in and of itself from other rivers.

But one of the other things that really makes the Thames so great for mudlarking is the tidal action that it goes through every day, four times a day. Two high tides, two low tides are so pronounced that when low tide goes out, it exposes a tremendous amount of the Thames to open air for people to walk around and look for stuff.

That's part one. The other part is that when the tide comes back in, it comes back in with such force that it actually can scour the river bottom, deposit stuff up on what will soon be the shore at low tide. And then when the water goes back out, there you go. Presto, something that was thrown in the river 500 years ago is now at your feet, mudlarker.

That's right. And if you remember, actually, I don't know if this is going to come out before that with how our publishing works, but there's a thing that we either discussed or will discuss in our, no, I think it's already out, actually, our episode on the Silurian hypothesis. Yeah, that came out today. And that is the fact that something stuck down in mud can survive in better shape much, much longer than something subjected to the forces of wind.

wind and erosion and things like that. So a lot of the stuff that these mudlarkers are finding in the mud on the Thames is in great shape. Yeah, for sure. I mean, like really, really old stuff. I saw somebody who found a Tudor shoe and it was in such great shape that you could see where like the person wearing it, their heel or like the side of their big toe had like shaped the shoe around it. Those impressions were still there. They had a corn? Yeah.

Or maybe even a bunion if you're a lucky mudlarker and you find a Tudor shoe. We should do a shorty on corns and bunions. Sure. All right. So if you are in England and you want to do this, before the break, we should tell you that you do need a permit. You have to get a permit from the Port of London Authority. Apparently, it takes about a month or longer and will cost you about 35 quid.

And you will get a standard license to dig about three inches deep. You can't go in there with your shovel or your backhoe and dig like six, eight feet down. You just can't do that. You still want to not disturb the Timbs that much. They're trying to protect that thing. Right. So you can go about three inches down. Okay. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about some amazing stuff that people have found. Music.

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All right, Chuck, you talked about digging maybe three inches down tops. I've seen there's some places where you can't dig at all, but you can pick stuff up if it's sitting on the surface of the mud bank, right? The foreshore is what they call it. But there are other parts along the Thames where you can't even go. They're protected like cultural sites.

The Tower of London, you can't mudlark along. There's a Roman dock area that was later developed by Alfred the Great in the 700s and that was later used by Charles II to survey the damage of the Great Fire of London in 1666 called Queenheith.

I don't know if I got that right or not, but that's how it's spelled. At least if you're an American, that's what you would say if you saw this word spelled out like this. Am I getting that across? I think so. Okay. It's just such a cultural treasure and an archaeological site, essentially, if they're like, don't even go near this. That's right. But let's say, my friend, you're mudlarking there on the Thames. You pull something out and you're like, oh, this might be worth a well treasure, right?

What would you do with that item? I would go on eBay and sell it. But you can't do that. Well, let's see. What else can I do? I would hide it under my bed for a decade until the heat went down.

No, that's not what you're going to do either. What you're supposed to do, they have laws in England that basically said they're like these treasure laws where, hey, if you find something like that, something from antiquity that's worth something that belongs to the people of England, my friend, and you have to go to the finds liaison officer.

And you have to give it to them and they will help you identify and determine what that is and what it's worth. And they help you sell it? No, no, no. They have to record it in their portable antiquities scheme, which is basically a British museum project that just keeps track of all that stuff.

And then finally, if it does have value, a museum has the right to buy that and you could potentially be compensated for that. Sure. And then if they're like, this is totally valueless, get this out of our face. You get to keep it.

Sure. If you can find a chump who wants this extraordinarily common thing. Apparently, clay pipes from like the 16th century are a dime a dozen in the Thames. Nothing. Yeah. And the reason why, I mean, you look at these things, you're like, that seems like that's a pretty cool archaeological find. It's not because at the time, starting from about the 1500s onward, they were essentially treated like cigarette butts are today. Like you just finished using the pipe and you just throw it. Like you just threw it out. After every use? Yeah.

Yes, from what I saw, RF, or maybe a couple of uses, whenever you got tired of carrying it around. Okay. And probably, I would guess, having formerly smoked a pipe at two separate times in my life, I would say that you probably tossed it when it started to get gummed up with, like, tar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I think they had pretty little thin stems, so it probably got gunked up pretty quick. Probably. Probably.

So before we get on to what we really want to talk about, which is some of the cool stuff they found in the Thames, we should say to be careful. This is something you want to get into. That tidal action is pretty severe. It can come in pretty quickly. And sometimes you're just so into what you're doing out there in the mud that you might look up and be like, oh, crud, I'm now stranded here and the water is coming at me. And there have been people that have had to have been rescued that are mudlarking out there because the water is coming at them. Yeah.

Some other hazards are you can slip on rocks because they're wet and covered in algae. So you want to be careful walking around. You also want to wear gloves. You want to wear boots. You do not want to wear clam diggers, like I said. You want to kind of keep your skin covered as best as possible because there's all sorts of communicable diseases you can catch still by digging around on the Thames foreshore. One of them is called Wheel's disease.

And it is transmitted through water via rat urine. It's transmitted from rat urine via water. Either way, rat urine is involved and you're getting a disease from it. You don't want that. I'm surprised there are rats in London. What else? Well, I think we should talk about some of the things they found because, you know, we could go on and on about these. I just picked out a few. I don't know if you found any other ones. But for my money, I would love to talk about the Dove's Press collection.

or the Doves type or Doves Roman because it was an actual typeface that was found and recovered from the Thames, a long-lost, forgotten, well, not forgotten, but a long-lost typeface from this company called the Doves Press. And it was co-owned in, I believe it was the early 20th century. It was a guy named T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker-Sanderson.

And apparently they dissolved their partnership. Eventually the press closed in 1917. When they were dissolving the partnership, they came up with an agreement where Cobden Sanderson was like, that typeface is mine. This is what we print all our stuff in. When I die, then you can have it. I'm assuming he was older, but I'm not sure exactly.

Why Walker would agree to that unless C.S. was a little closer to death. But at any rate, that was what happened. After the final publication, C.S., apparently, it just did not go down well between them. And he said, I bequeath this font to the bed of the Thames and over 170 trips through

threw these metal molds into the river. Yeah, 200,000 pieces. He threw the entire proprietary typeface into the Thames, and there were no other copies of it. So this beautiful typeface that there are plenty of examples of, because this publishing house that used it was around for a while, it was just lost forever. And that really got in the craw of a modern designer named Robert Greene,

who, based on examples of it from books or something like that, created a digitized version of it. But he was like, this can be better. And I'm not sure if he got into mudlarking to find these types. I'm not sure what you call them, the little dye that you would actually use on the printing press. The molds. The molds. Yeah. Or if he ran across mudlarkers who had found them or something, but he became...

He's, you could probably say, obsessed with finding these original molds and did. He launched like some expeditions on the Thames to find them and came up with like 150 or so of them and used them to really drive home the digitized version of Dove's type that he created.

Yeah. Do you know what he did in 2014? He got the port authority, uh, port of London authorities dive team to go get this stuff. Yeah. Pretty neat. And they did it. And now we have doves roaming again. And I'm, as you know, uh, I'm a times new Roman guy. We each have our fonts that we print our various stuff in. And I've always been a times new Roman guy, but boy, this doves Roman is beautiful. Yeah. I love it. Give me Calibri or give me death.

There's more things that people have found. That was the coolest story. So you can just go check it out and look up more things that have been found mudlarking. A lot of cool old things from antiquity. Yep. Very cool. And if you got the mudlarking bug and you go to London, make sure you get a permit first. And I guess since we talked about permits, the mean short stuff's out.

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