A musician would have played a melody on the pipe while beating the rhythm on the drum with his other hand. Three tabor pipes and a tabor, or drum, were found among personal chests on the orlop deck. Musical instruments were also among the artefacts found on the Mary Rose. Eleven dice made of bone were discovered in chests, which is to be expected as gaming was popular in the Tudor period. The findings have enabled ‘experimental archaeology’, where experts recreate the cooking facilities and the type and variety of meals that might have been on the Mary Rose.ĭivers found a fine wooden backgammon set which still had some of its counters, and a nine men’s morris board scratched into the end of a barrel. The food remains were analysed early on in the excavation and give historians an invaluable insight into how much food was needed to run a ship like the Mary Rose. It looks as if the animals were butchered to meet certain standards – for instance, there were no marrow bones as presumably they would have gone off more quickly than other bones. The excavation also found casks containing meat bones, both cattle and pig. Smaller bronze, iron and ceramic cooking pots were also found nearby. The crew’s food was cooked here in two large cauldrons supported on iron bars over a fire box. In the galley, down in the hold just in front of the step for the main mast, were two massive brick ovens. These are extremely important finds as these kinds of everyday domestic objects were normally just thrown away rather than kept for posterity. However, the site also contained lots of wooden bowls, dishes, plates and tankards. Having so many similar artefacts enables historians to study the standards of production and the quality of goods manufactured at a specific time.įine pewter dishes, plates, tankards and spoons were found on the wreck, which were probably used by the officers. One other unique aspect of the objects found on board is the huge numbers of identical objects, such as 6,600 arrow fragments, or the large number of wooden dishes. There were a number of professional objects, such as the tools owned by onboard carpenters, or the ointments and medicine flasks used by the surgeon. We were able to recover a number of chests from the site, so we could study collections of objects and ascertain which crew members might own which possessions. As the ship was rapidly buried in very fine silt, a lot of their possessions are very well preserved, including wood, leather, human and animal bones. The Mary Rose was the crew’s home and their workspace. Even with the normal crew size of around 400, conditions would have been very crowded. There were 415 crew members listed in 1513, but during wartime operations there would have been more soldiers on board, with numbers perhaps swelling to around 700 men in total. The artefacts found on board give us a unique insight into what their life was like. Servants also appear on some of the later pay rolls. The first recorded crew list for the Mary Rose dates back to 1513 and consists of mariners, soldiers and gunners, although their names were not given. However, the Mary Rose enables us to see day-to-day life in all its wonderful detail. For instance, graves or ritual sites only contain a small fraction of day-to-day objects. Many archaeological sites from the past have been filtered by the society that made them.
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