CHOICE OF REGION.

Throughout this study the term 'Severn Valley' is used to denote the modern Counties of Avon, Hereford and Worcester, Gloucestershire and Gwent. The Severn Valley was chosen as the study area mainly because a preliminary survey of the medieval cooking pottery of the area had shown that considerable petrological variability existed. Therefore, it is possible to characterise a high proportion of the pottery found using simple petrological techniques (Vince, 1974).

The study is not strictly limited to county boundaries. Collections from Somerset, Salop, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire were examined although no attempt was made to characterise the local wares unless they were also found in the Severn Valley.

In order to chart the coastal trade in pottery, collections in Wales were examined, but only the English wares and some distinctive South Welsh wares are described in this thesis. The pottery of Wiltshire, Berkshire and the northern part of Hampshire was examined as part of the post-excavation research for the 1979 excavation at Bartholomew Street, Newbury (Vince, 1980) and the results are incorporated here since they usefully extend the range of topography and geology within the survey area and show that several of the conclusions reached on the basis of the Severn Valley study have a wider validity.

The study area forms a heterogeneous region varying in geology, topography, and medieval land use and so it includes most of the geographical variation present in lowland England. In addition there is an east-west contrast between Wales, which experienced considerable political upheaval and movement of people during the medieval period and the heartland of Wessex where social and political movements were more gradual and less severe. In between the two is the main study area, much of which was in the Saxon Kingdom of Mercia at the beginning of the late Saxon period.

The study region therefore is Lowland Britain in microcosm. Nevertheless, one of the striking characteristics of material culture in the medieval period is its regional variability (Jope, 1963) and we should not necessarily expect to find exactly similar processes and developments in the pottery industries of other regions even when the factors underlying these changes are the same. Less comparison with other regions is included in this thesis than the author would have liked because while the fieldwork for this thesis was being undertaken there was no comparable published survey of other areas. This has restricted interpretation of the results of this survey.

The chronological limits to the study were chosen in order to give a clear picture of the development of the industry. At the end of the Roman period the pottery industry collapsed. The archaeological evidence for the following centuries in western Britain is characterised by an extremely elusive material culture, in which locally produced pottery (when used) was handmade, with a restricted range of forms and decorations, made in a limited range of fabrics (predominantly chaff-tempered) and was quite probably domestically produced. This 5th- to 9th-century pottery is briefly included in this thesis, but there is very little of it and to interpret it correctly would require a survey of all the domestic pottery of the British Isles of the post-Roman period. There is a sharp break between this pottery and that of the late Saxon period, but no break at all between the late Saxon pottery industry and that of the post-conquest period. It is in fact impossible to distinguish pre-conquest from post-conquest pottery by fabric and form alone.

There is more difficulty in finding a suitable cut-off point to end the study. The change-over from medieval to post-medieval wares is obscured because the Malvern Chase was responsible for supplying much of the pottery in both periods. It is convenient therefore to end this study in the early 17th century with the demise of the Malvern Chase pottery industry. The study therefore ends before the influx of Staffordshire and Bristol slipwares into the region and the beginnings of factory production.