The only Wetherspoons in Hereford, in Commercial Road, is called the King's Fee. We excavated the site during the summer of 2001 and again in the spring and early summer of 2002. The site had been a Kwik Save supermarket in a building which had originally been a motor repair garage.

The King’s Fee public house in Hereford.  The excavations took place entirely within this building which includes a rear extension to the original structure.

The site was to the south-west of the site of the old Benedictine priory of St Guthlac, which was established to the north-east of the old Anglo-Saxon town in the 1140’s, having been re-located from the site of Hereford Castle.

The south-western boundary of the priory precinct is likely to have been on the line of present Union Walk, in which case it was preserved at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries and was re-emphasised in the 1790s when a new county gaol, designed by John Nash, was erected on the old priory site. 

Commercial Road had been a main road into Hereford when the town was part of the Kingdom of Mercia. Heading north-east it ran in the direction of the old Mercian royal and ecclesiastical centres of Tamworth and Lichfield.

The Hereford Baptists built their first purpose-built chapel in 1837 on land behind a row of houses fronting Commercial Road.  The garden in which the chapel was built was used as a burial ground. The burial ground was first used shortly after the Baptists acquired the site and continued to be used into the 1880s.

An early 19^th century print of the Zion Baptist chapel on the site (courtesy of Hereford City Library).

In 1881 a new chapel (which is still in use) was opened on the site of the former Star and Garter public house, a short distance to the south-west along Commercial Road.    The old chapel was then used as a Sunday school. It was demolished in 1980.

Stray sherds of Pottery on the site suggested that the first occupation somewhere in the area dated from before the Norman Conquest. 

A well and rubbish pits dating from the 12^th century suggest that the site was within a built-up area.  This agrees with the dates from other recent excavations in this part of Hereford and suggests that the whole frontage of Commercial Road – Union Street – St Owen’s Street between St Guthlac’s Priory and the centre of the market place was planned and developed as a single project. It seems likely that most, if not all, of this was land of the Bishop of Hereford at the time (he had been the original owner of the site of St Guthlac’s) and that therefore the bishops seem the most probable developers of this area.

Sometime in the late 12^th to early 13^th century domestic activity seems to have stopped in the site.  We can’t really explain this at the moment, although there seems to have been a change of use and the evidence points to pottery being made either on site or nearby.

Following this more normal domestic occupation resumed until the early 14^th century when activity seems to have ceased.  This would suggest shrinkage of the town in this period. This is a well-know phenomenon in towns and is often associated with the Black Death although economic decline actually preceded that plague.

The town re-expanded into the area in the 18th century.  Buildings stretched along this part of the street by the time that the Baptists purchased property at the rear of them on which to build their chapel.

The site on the 1886 1:500 OS plan of the area.  The chapel has become a Sunday School.  The burial ground was at the end of its use.

A clay-lined oven or kiln.  Similar features have been found elsewhere in Hereford and are more likely to be industrial than domestic.

The excavation located the remains of around 40 individuals who had been buried in the cemetery.

On the left is the skull of an older adult male with fractured nasal bone.  Over 10% of this group of Victorian Baptists had broken noses.  Although these injuries can result from sporting or other accidents, they are often as a result of interpersonal violence.  There is no obvious explanation for this.

The green stain around the left eye socket is from a halfpenny which had been placed there.

The lowest burials in each grave in the Baptist burial ground at the King's Fee site. Some of the graves had been emptied when the site was redeveloped in the early 1980s

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