On 31st May, Catherine Richardson was one of the organisers of a training day focused on ‘Status, power and authority’ at LAARC – the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre. The day was the first in a series of AHRC-funded Skills Development workshops on the theme of Methodologies for material culture, in which the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies is a partner with the Institute for Historical Research and the Museum of London.
Under the expert supervision of Alex Werner, Head of History Collections at the Museum of London, and Roy Stephenson, Head of the Museum’s Archaeological Collections and Archives, we tried our hands at constructing biographies of early modern urban things. 
This late sixteenth-/ early seventeenth-century floor tile with a picture of a grasshopper on it is one of the objects that a group of postgraduate students and early career researchers spent the day learning to look at in detail. It was found on the site of Baynard’s Castle, Upper Thames Street, and is tin-glazed earthenware, probably made in London, painted with green, yellow, two shades of blue, and mauve.
How we might use this evidence was the question the day set us. Our instinct seemed to be to try to use it as a series of stepping stones that, placed sequentially, generated a particular kind of narrative that was very focused on specific people and important actions. That desire to create a biography that does not grow out of the things, but rather tries to join the blanks between them into a coherent narrative was almost irresistible. But given time and the interventions of people who work with these objects every day, we were brought back to our ‘active looking’, to focusing on how these objects worked, both individually and as groups. Through this kind of looking we gained insights into material lives of early modern Londoners, walking through a city whose elite spaces might have been highly decorated with showy renaissance ornament. It was a fascinating and thought-provoking day, and we’re looking forward to the next one…