AIMS.

The aims of this study are firstly to present evidence for pottery production and distribution during the medieval period and secondly to examine how data relate to the economies in which the pottery was used. The study uses the evidence of the potsherds themselves and especially the evidence of pottery fabrics, rather than kiln or workshop excavations or documentary sources.

The reasons for this limitation are not that kilns and workshops have not been excavated in the area (there are in fact several 13th century and later kiln sites known from excavation) but that for this study the presence of an excavated kiln site is not so much of an advantage as may at first be thought. Kiln sites provide a skewed detail of the production of the kiln, biased in favour of those forms which are less easy to fire or where a blemish is a serious disadvantage in selling the item. For example, the level of waste from tile production will be much lower than for pottery vessels and it is not possible by examining the ratio of pottery types to tile waste at a kiln to say in what proportion the products were manufactured. Similarly documentary evidence for production and distribution of pottery, although interesting for the light it sheds on archaeological evidence, is too piecemeal to produce the type of picture available from archaeology (Le Patourel, 1968; Moorhouse, 1981).

There are two specific problems posed by data. Firstly, how did the medieval pottery industry develop from what appeared to be the domestic production of the early to mid-Saxon period and secondly, were there changes in scale or organisation of the industry during the medieval period to mirror those seen in, for example, the cloth industry? The exact scope of the study was therefore determined by the need to acquire enough data for any patterns in the production or distribution of pottery to be recognised.