|
Dunstable historian Worthington Smith in the brick works at Caddington, pointing to the strata in one of the pits where he had noticed large numbers of flint implements. He had discovered, in 1890, an important prehistoric site where Stone Age implements had been produced on a considerable scale. Almost a ton of these were collected over the next few years as the clay pits were extended . The best of these are preserved in the British Museum. Another of Smith's most important discoveries was the charter granted to Dunstable in 1132 by King Henry I. He had been asked, in 1899, to find a later charter, from Henry III, to help resolve a court case involving who should pay the costs of local drainage. After a fruitless search in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum he turned to the Public Record Office where, to everyone's astonishment, he found both documents. In 1894 he had published a famous archaeological work, Man The Primeval Savage, and in 1910 he produced two large coloured sheets for display in the British Museum illustrating Edible and Poisonous Fungi. His research for this, wrote biogapher James Dyer, consisted of sampling the various fungi and noting the effects! |