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The Roman Pottery of Kent
by Dr Richard J. Pollard  -  Chapter 4  page 146
Doctoral thesis completed in 1982, published 1988

stone in a post-destruction deposit in the ‘Deep Room’ (late fourth-early fifth century: Pollard 1987, Group LII, fig. 76, no 173). These may be Kent products, or from kilns north of the Thames. Burnished bead-and-flange dishes also occur in the aforementioned Lullingstone deposits. These are in a finer fabric than the formally similar vessel found in Kiln III at Mucking, ostensibly the latest of the six kilns on that site and possibly operating in the fourth century (Jones and Rodwell 1973, no. 18; the dating published therein has since been challenged —M.U. Jones and V. Swan, pers. comm.), and may thus not emanate from that site. It is impossible to ascertain how important unslipped grey sandy wares were in Kent in the late fourth century, but they were almost certainly used for some time after the disappearance of BB2. Much Hadham oxidised wares are rare throughout this region (q.v. the preceding section), partially at least as a result of the strength of competition from Oxfordshire colour-coated ware. The ratios of oxidised to grey Much Hadham wares on sites in Hertfordshire and north Essex need to be established before discussion of the issue of Much Hadham grey ware export to Kent can usefully proceed. At present, it may be proposed that local kilns continued to supply the bulk of the plain grey pottery of north Kent for the greater part, if not the whole of, the fourth- to early fifth-century period. These wares were the coarsest of the grey wares, dispensing as they did with the labour-consuming processes of slipping and burnishing, and by virtue of their lack of refined finishing and bulky shapes may have been the most uneconomical to import from Alice Holt-Farnham, Much Hadham or elsewhere (see below, this section, however). The burnished bowls and dishes may indicate that some marketing headway could be made against fine grey imports also, at least by unslipped wares.
   Exportation of Alice Holt-Farnham white, black and grey slipped grey wares to Kent may have begun in earnest in the final decade of the third century, or slightly later (cf. 4.IV.2). The ‘rim counts’ percentages published by Lyne and 

Jefferies (1979, Appendix 3) may be suspect on theoretical grounds (cf. Orton 1975; 1980, 156—67; Hinton 1977), but the figures from Lullingstone villa and Springhead are in harmony with those calculated by the present author using vessel rim equivalents; these reveal Alice Holt-Farnham slipped grey ware to have provided 8—10 per cent of all wares in the third to fourth century at Springhead and Rochester, and 14 per cent of all wares in the fourth-century ‘cellar’ infill at Chalk. The proportion of coarse ware assemblages alone is in each case some 2 per cent higher. These are minimum estimates, as the slipped Alice Holt ware was not manufactured before c. A.D. 270 (Lyne and Jefferies 1979; 35; M. Millett, pers. comm.), and significant quantities of pre- A.D. 270 wares are certainly present in the first two assemblages at least. The ware reached every fourth-century site studied in west Kent with the possible exception of Cooling (Fig. 38) where only tiny quantities of late pottery were found (Pollard forthcoming, b). The numbers of types of this ware, and of the buff coarse sandy ‘Portchester "D" ware with which it was imported from c. A.D. 325/330 (see below), appear to be similar on a number of different sites, the variations exhibited being possibly functions of the amount of fourth-century pottery recovered and the length of occupation of sites rather than of site type or location (Fig. 11). East of the Medway both the range of types and the proportions of fourth-century assemblages which they comprise fall off, however (see the following section). The most frequently occurring types in west Kent are everted rim jars (Lyne and Jefferies 1979, Class 3B.1Q—13), bead-and-flange dishes (ibid., Class 5B.4—10), dog-dishes (ibid., Class 6A.8—10, 12—13), heavy-bead rim storage jars (ibid., Class 4.42, 4.44—45), flange rim necked jars (ibid., Class 1.32—33), moulded rim necked storage jars (ibid., Classes 1.14—20, 1C.2—5), and flagons (ibid., Class 8.11—14). It has been suggested

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