 Barking Abbey
The great abbey at Barking was originally founded by Erkenwald, Bishop of London, in AD 666, for his sister Ethelburga. However the classic excavations by Sir Alfred Clapham in 1912 failed to find the Saxon remains, so it was a great surprise when recent rescue excavations, just outside the medieval abbey precincts, discovered the workshops of the Saxon Abbey.
There were numerous high quality objects, including this fragment of a bone comb, decorated Saxon-style with the head of a horse. The excavators also found part of the leet of a horizontal mill, and most surprising of all, the foundations of a glass furnace dated to around 900, producing very high quality glass.
It would appear that these were the workshops producing the high quality goods that an abbey would need in a society still dominated by gift exchange.
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