Saxon butter churn found in Staffordshire sheds light on life in Mercian Kingdom

Archaeologists working on the site of a rail improvement project in the UK have discovered the lid of a butter churn from the Saxon period.

The discovery of a wooden object at Norton Bridge, reported in the Staffordshire Newsletter, was made on the site of a new flyover currently being constructed by Network Rail along with 11 new bridges. The work is being carried out in order to remove a bottleneck on the busy West Coast Main Line.

The artifact was discovered among the remains of worked wooden stakes and wood chips on waterlogged peat near Meece Road, just south of Yarnfield in Staffordshire. Radiocarbon tests have dated the wooden lid to 715 to 890 AD when the area was part of the Saxon kingdom of Mercia. The results show that the artifact is roughly the same age as the famous Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold found anywhere in the world.