An excavation has to be important to merit four A4 fascicules, totalling around 1,200 pages, accompanied by two Cd-Roms and with contributions from more than forty people, including several Fellows, which is what the mid-1970s High Street excavations in Perth have now been given. One justification is the 4m-depth of medieval deposits, many waterlogged and leading to exceptional preservation, as Olwyn Owen notes in her brief foreword to the first fascicule, published in 2010 – the other three followed over the next two years. The other reason is that medieval Perth was not only a mercantile port and town, but, as Tom Beaumont James notes in a useful historical exposition (p 4), stood in relation to the ceremonial centre at Scone much as London did to Westminster in England, but with the difference that parliaments often met within it. ‘Old Parliament House’, however, was not purpose-built for assemblies, being a merchant's house that probably acquired the name because it had been their occasional venue. Perth's royal connections helped to establish it as Scotland's leading port in the early twelfth century, to judge from David i’s toll records, but by the end of the fourteenth it had been outstripped by Edinburgh and other east coast rivals, a decline begun by an early thirteenth-century flood only indirectly reflected in the site's archaeology (pp 119–20).
The title of Fascicule 1 includes 5–10 Mill Street; that excavation has in fact been published elsewhere (Brann and McGavin Reference Brann and McGavin1995), though the results are mentioned on pp 120–3, as the site was potentially crucial for understanding the town's defences. The High Street excavations were on the large scale that by 1975 had become familiar, and David Perry makes sense of a very detailed archive. The phasing would have been easier to follow if the headings had included approximate date ranges, and if the relationship between the ‘phases’ and the ‘periods’ tabled on p 33 had been explained. The phase plans are in a folder at the back, which conveniently allows side-by-side comparison with the photographs, sometimes suggesting discrepancies: I could not reconcile the plan of the north and west walls of Building 34's footings with the photograph (p 73), with what Hilary Murray says about their being of wattling with uprights set into the ground, whereas on the east side the wall possibly had a sill beam (p 133), or with the statement (pp 71–2) that ‘The W, N and E walls were built on timber sill foundations’. This criticism would be mere pettifogging but for the quality and quantity of finds from an associated midden, such as a lace hairnet (p 71).
Fascicule 3 reveals that ‘hairnet’ to be a ‘hair-covering of embroidered silk net with braid edging’ (frontispiece caption), the largest of three fragments, and not the only silk from the site (pp 37–58). Woollen twills were recovered in much greater quantity, giving Penny Dransart the opportunity for a chapter on medieval dress in Scotland generally, a useful basis for an assessment of Scottish identity, the impact of Norman culture in the twelfth century and how subsequent European contacts changed clothing, though perhaps inevitably with an emphasis on social elites and on clerics who, it is suggested (p 106), used their robes to assert their position and to challenge English overlordship. This discussion is good on how clothes were cut, but an odd discrepancy is noted about their final colouring, as analyses (pp 11–14) showed that only some 30 per cent of the fragments sampled had been dyed, which is in contrast to the samples from another High Street site in Perth, which had all been dyed. Whether most of the clothes were rather drab must be in doubt, therefore. Clare Thomas reviews the huge number of boot and shoe parts; she finds plenty of parallels from Scotland, but also from England and further afield, and does not consider ‘Scottishness’ in a brief conclusion that points out some absences and the few signs of wealth in possible silk and other vamp decoration (pp 255–7). Knife sheaths had much more ornamental finishing.
Fascicule 2 covers ceramics, wooden objects and metalwork, which raise a difficulty over the period when the High Street took on an urban character, as calibrated radiocarbon dates such as 800–1050 and 890–1030 (Appendix 6 in Fascicule 1) obtained from residues on some of the sherds, from wood and from leather are earlier than those expected both from documentary evidence and from the London pottery sequence (pp 11–16). Some of the earliest, however, derive from the destruction layer of a building from which the floor yielded two samples that gave more credible dates (1020–1230 and 1030–1210). Of course, residuality can occur, but so many of the radiocarbon ranges are earlier than would be expected that they have to be in doubt when compared to other evidence, and Fascicule 1 points out that dendrochronology gives much more realistic dates (pp 103–8 and Appendix 5). A few weapons and spurs could, if not heirlooms, be Viking losses not indicative of settlement. The late Ian Goodall did not consider that any of the other excavated ironwork necessarily pre-dates the twelfth century (p 123), the sole coin is late twelfth-century (p 119), and John Cherry only reluctantly allows even a twelfth-century date for the earliest piece of jewellery (p 199). The argument that Perth became urban a century or more before David i’s reign needs to be supported by more than radiocarbon.
Weaving may also be brought into the dating argument. Dransart takes the several pin-beaters found as showing that the warp-weighted vertical loom remained in use for household production long after the introduction of the horizontal type with its implication of specialist production (pp 73–4). No loom weights are reported, however, and the only pin-beater illustrated is single-pointed, not the double-ended type usually taken as associated with the warp-weighted loom. The single-pointed type is thought to have been used with the two-beam vertical loom introduced into England in the tenth/eleventh century. The beaters do not support such dating for Perth, however. Only one was in an early context (p 104), and the two-beam loom continued elsewhere in use for tapestries and rugs; furthermore, Dransart notes that one probably produced the selvedge for a textile with a ‘light shaggy surface’ (p 100). Since the number of pin-beaters from Perth is in marked contrast to their paucity from most contemporary English sites, perhaps the two-beam loom was used in Scotland to produce the elusive ‘shaggy mantles’, which Dransart says characterised the Scots.
The high-quality cloth and silk hairnets show that luxury items were available in Perth, in contrast to most of the leatherwork or wooden objects, but as shown also in other finds, many of which Mark Hall has discussed in previous publications, most notably the ‘green man’ ivory handle (Hall Reference Hall2001). On the other hand, the animal, bird and fish remains studied by Catherine Smith and others in Fascicule 4 do not appear different from an ordinary urban assemblage: a little venison, but not more than usual, cattle and sheep mostly slaughtered when getting elderly and tough, no pheasant, peacock or porpoise.
Smith is clear that her contribution takes account of excavations undertaken in Perth since the mid-1970s. Many of the authors, however, have suffered long delays to their reports, and the compilers are to be congratulated on bringing something usable to publication, after the death of Nicholas Quentin Bogdan, the site's director.
