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Hey, welcome to this short stuff.
I'm Josh, there's Chuck, we got a clam diggers on, and we're ready to go to do a little
mud-larking, which just happens to be the subject of this short stuff.
Have you ever heard of this term?
I want to say yes, but sometimes my brain makes up memories just to be cool.
I would assume that etymology didn't look it up because I just assumed that mud-larking
was just having a lark in the mud.
It's got to be it, right?
Or maybe you flitter about from one place to another, like a lark in the mud?
Okay.
I like them both.
Can we both win like a soccer game?
Sure.
I love it.
I love it.
Mud-larking is a thing that we're talking about.
It's a term you probably hear in England more readily and specifically even maybe London.
In the 18th or 19th century, and back then it was basically when people with lesser means
would walk along the mud banks at low tide of the river Thames.
It's Thames, right?
Thames.
Thames.
Thames?
Yeah.
The Thames.
And collect stuff to try and sell.
Yeah.
Everything from a little bit of rope to coins if they were lucky.
Having somebody would buy, that's how some people actually supported themselves in the
19th century.
Fast forward to today, I'm guessing starting around the 70s, maybe the 80s.
Now it's just the past time.
I don't think anybody supports themselves mud-larking any longer.
It's just a hobby.
A kin to people who are beach comers with metal detectors on the beach.
Yeah, we're like a magnet fishing.
Yes, similar to that.
We actually did a short stuff on that.
Remember that?
Yeah.
This is like that, but there are definite nuances that distinguish it from either one
of those two things.
Yeah.
And the reason why this has become a pastime, or I guess sort of a hobby now, on the Thames,
is because the Thames was a garbage dumping ground for many, many years.
People would just, you know, we did our thing on New York City Trash and how previous to
trash collection, people would just dump it on the sidewalks and in the rivers there
in New York.
But they did the same thing in London and it was a junky, nasty, polluted river until
about, you know, 60 something years ago when they took great, great efforts to really clean
up that river.
And now, apparently, at least as far as urban rivers goes, it's one of the cleanest ones.
Right.
But there is still, because that happened for so many years, and because so much happened
in London over those years.
There's just, you know, thousands of years of potential gold and sometimes real gold
in those muddy banks.
Yeah.
Because a lot of people have lived densely in the London area on the Thames for like you
said, multiple thousands of years.
So there's just a lot of stuff there.
That separates the Thames in and of itself from other rivers.
But one of the other things that really makes the Thames so great for mudlocking is the
title action that it goes through every day, four times a day, two high tides, two low
tides are so pronounced that when low tide goes out, it exposes a tremendous amount of
the Thames to open air for people to walk around and look for stuff.
That's part one.
The other part is that when the tide comes back in, it comes back in with such force that
it actually can scour the river bottom, deposit stuff up on what will soon be the shore
at low tide.
And then when the water goes back out, there you go, presto, something that was thrown
in the river 500 years ago is now at your feet mudlocker.
That's right.
And if you remember, actually, I don't know if this has kind of come out before that with
how our publishing works.
But there's a thing that we either discussed or will discuss in our, no, I think it's
already out actually our episode on the Salary and Hypothesis.
It is out.
And that is the fact that something stuck down in mud can survive in better shape much,
much longer than something subjected to the forces of wind and erosion and things like
that.
So a lot of the stuff that these mudlockers are finding in the mud on the Thames is in
great shape.
Yeah.
For sure.
I mean, like really, really old stuff.
I saw somebody who found a tutor shoe and it was in such great shape that you could see
where like the person wearing it their heel or like the side of their big toe had like
shaped the shoe around it.
Those impressions were still there.
Isn't it?
They had a corn or maybe even a bunion if you're a lucky mudlocker and you find a tutor
shoe.
We should do a shorty on corn and bunions.
Sure.
All right.
So if you are in England and you want to do this before the break, we should tell you
that you do need a permit.
You have to get a permit from the Port of London Authority.
Apparently it takes about a month or longer and it will cost you about about 35 quid.
And you will get a standard license to dig about three inches deep.
You can't go in there with your with your shovel or your backhoe and dig like six, eight
feet down.
You just can't do that.
You still want to not disturb the Thames that much.
They're trying to protect that thing.
Right.
So you can go about three inches down.
Okay. Well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about some amazing stuff
that people have found.
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Nice.
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Sip the sky.
All right, Chuck, you talked about digging maybe three inches
down tops.
I've seen there's some places where you can't dig at all, but you can pick stuff up if
it's sitting on the surface of the mudbank, right?
The four shores, what they call it.
But there are other parts along the terms where you can't even go.
They're protected like cultural sites.
The Tower of London, you can't mudlarke along.
There's a Roman dock area that was later developed by Alfred the Great and the 700s and that
was later used by Charles II to survey the damage of the Great Fire of London in 1666 called
Queen Heist.
I don't know if I got that right or not, but that's how it's spelled.
At least if you're an American, that's what you would say if you saw this word spell
that like this.
Am I getting that across?
I think so.
Okay.
It's just such a cultural treasure and archeological site, essentially, if they're like, don't
even go near this.
That's right.
But let's say, my friend, you're mudlarking there on the terms, you pull something out and
you're like, oh, this might be worth a well treasure.
What would you do with that item?
I would go on eBay and sell it.
But you can't do that.
Well, let's see.
What else can I do?
I would hide it under my bed for a decade until the heat went down.
No.
Unless that's what you're going to do either what you're supposed to do, they have laws in
England that basically said they like these treasure laws where, hey, if you find something
like that, something from antiquity, that's worth something that belongs to the people
of England, my friend.
And you have to go to the finds liaison officer and you have to give it to them and they
have will help you identify and determine what that is and what it's worth.
And they have to sell it.
No, no, no, they have to record it in their portable and
antiquities scheme, which is basically a British museum project that just keeps track of all
that stuff.
And then finally, if it does have value, a museum has the right to buy that and you could
potentially be compensated for that.
Sure.
And then if they're like, this is totally valuable.
Let's get this out of our face.
You get to keep it.
eBay.
Sure.
If you can find a chump who wants this extraordinarily common thing, apparently clay pipes
from like the 16th century are a dime a dozen in the temps.
And the reason why, I mean, look at these things, you're like, that seems like that's a pretty
cool archaeological find.
It's not because at the time starting from about the 1500s onward, they were essentially
treated like cigarette butts are today.
Like you just finished using the pipe and you just throw it.
Like you just threw it over use?
Yes, from what I saw, or after maybe a couple of uses, whenever you got tired of carrying
it around.
Okay.
Actually, I guess having formally smoked a pipe at two separate times in my life, I would
say that you probably tossed it when it started to get gummed up with like tar.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That makes sense.
Yeah, pretty.
