Christmas shopping looms and as we are being deluged with online promotions for ‘Black Friday’ ( a decidedly un-English concept in my opinion ) and it occurs to me a recently publicised late-medieval archeological find from near Kings Lynn in Norfolk may have once been, for all we know, a medieval stocking filler or ‘New Year Gift’ for a man or woman who had everything - well almost.
It is an ear scoop and nail cleaner which has been dated to the second half of the fourteenth century. Such items for personal grooming are known from other discoveries and survivals, but are equally the type of thing that gets lost in daily life, and forgotten in the popular memory.
The BBC News report about the find can be seen at Earwax scoop find in Norfolk gives insight into medieval hygiene
Given where it was found one wonders if it was once the property of a pilgrim to Walsingham or the Holy Rood of Bromholm, or of someone who knew Margery Kempe in what was then Bishop’s Lynn, or maybe somebody who knew the Pastons, or a present from them to Sir John Fastolf, or lost by an English soldier sailing from Lynn and going to fight with the Teutonic Knights against the pagan Lithuanians, or by someone accompanying King Henry IV’s daughter on her way to be Queen of Denmark, Sweden and Norway ……..almost certainly none of these possibilities given the probabilities of daily living, but a reminder that people had such things.
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