What’s in a name?

If you’re a bit of a whizz in the kitchen, you’ll no doubt be familiar with a pestle and mortar. And if you spent your Easter bank holiday trudging round the DIY stores you’re likely to come across mortar of a very different kind. Or so you might think. But in fact, the origin of the word is one and the same. Like many words in the English language, the word “mortar” has its roots in Latin but has slipped into our mother tongue via a slightly indirect route – in this case, Old French.

Around 1300AD, the French word “mortier” began to be common currency in English too. It derived from the Latin word “mortarium”, which meant both a bowl for mixing or pounding, and the material prepared in it. If you’ve never before thought of a cement mixer as a giant pestle and mortar, join the club. However, you can see where those Romans were coming from. And presumably the foreign pronunciation skills of our forebears were about as tenuous as ours today, and mortier became mortar within hours of crossing the English Channel.

There’s another significant link to this week’s object. You may have noticed the word “via” a few sentences ago – that crept in to English in the 18th Century, but is Latin for “way” or “road”. And that’s particularly pertinent to today’s object – the Wanborough Mortarium.

The Romans built a settlement, Durocornovium, on one of its arterial roads, Ermin Way or Ermin Street* – which linked Glevum (now Gloucester) and Corinium (now Cirencester) with Calleva, (now the site of the village Silchester, north of Basingstoke). The siting of Durocornovium, slightly northwest of where Wanborough later grew up, was down to one thing. Horses. If the Romans were to have any hope of persuading their horses to make the steep climb up the slope of the Marlborough Downs, they would need to feed and water them properly first. And of course, they needed to feed the horses’ steeds, too. And this humble mortarium played its own small part in the process.

Mortaria were very much standard Roman pottery kitchen vessels. They were usually hemispherical or conical in shape, and had coarse sand or grit embedded into their internal surfaces so that food could be pounded or mixed very easily. They were also sometimes used in the preparation of drugs, which is why the mortar and pestle were early symbols of a pharmacist or apothecary.

It became clear that there were Roman remains on the Durocornovium site as far back as 1692, when workmen uncovered an earthen pot – complete with 2,000 coins.

In 1862 the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine noted that some years earlier an eminent local archaeologist, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, had visited the site. Sir Richard said of the man who farmed some land there: “Mr. Carpenter, an intelligent old farmer, 50 years at Covenham, 85 years of age, had found every mark of Roman residence, in coins, figured bricks, tiles, etc but unfortunately had not preserved them.”

However, on the site of the old road itself, Sir Richard had more luck.

“Every heap of earth, every new-made ditch, and every adjoining road, teemed with Roman pottery of various descriptions, from the fine red glazed Samian and thin black, to that of a coarser manufacture,” he wrote.

“In no one Roman Station have I ever found so many fine specimens of Roman pottery, without the assistance of the spade, as at this place.”

*Ermin Street is of course in Stratton, which was originally called Street-Town. A warning – this hunt for the derivation of names can become addictive, and can seriously impair your ability to progress any cookery or DIY projects you may have planned.