THE exploration of a North-East riverbed over more than a decade has revealed significant new information about the history of the textile industry in the region.

And now the results of painstaking analysis of hundreds of the small objects found in the River Wear at Durham City are to be published.

Gary Bankhead, a watch manager at Durham Fire Station, first began searching the river under the city's Elvet Bridge in 2009.

Since then, the underwater archaeologist has recovered 11,453 medieval artefacts dating from the late 13th to the early 20th century, forming a unique national resource

The collection, known as the Durham River Wear Assemblage (DRWA), includes 306 cloth seals – small lead objects that were once linked to the trade, industrial regulation and taxation of commercially produced cloth. The cloth seals were attached to bolts of cloth by weavers, clothiers, dyers, and searchers as a degree of quality control and by Crown appointed official to confirm a subsidy (tax) had been paid. It is the largest collection of such objects available for analysis outside London.

The seals are believed to have settled on the river bed after they were shaken free from bolts of cloth when being rinsed by dyers, who occupied premises on the banks of the Wear.

Careful analysis of the seals – and the textiles still trapped within some of them – have revealed some important information.

"It's the information contained in these that gives us the provenance of the objects," said Mr Bankhead.

"They are like little postcards from the past.

"It's through the interpretation of these devices that we are able to understand exactly where they came from, from what period and information about the precise nature of the textile industry that was taking place in the area, as well as providing direct links to the history of those individuals involved with it."

Mr Bankhead has for the first time been able to identify ancient trade routes between Durham and continental centres in southern Germany, northern France and Belgium, which were producing high high quality linens and luxury woollens.

And he has established that the citizens of Durham City were using and wearing the same quality textiles as those being worn in London and other major English and European cities.

The significance of Mr Bankhead's finds was recognised by Geoff Egan, National Finds Adviser for the Portable Antiquities Scheme at the British Museum and the "guru" of lead cloth seals, who began to research them in 2010 when only 90 examples had been recovered.

Sadly, Mr Egan died two months later – prompting Mr Bankhead to conduct his own research.

He said: "All of this knowledge was lost, so it inspired me to look at doing all of this research myself. Geoff was the single reason I became an expert – in my own way – on lead cloth seals."

Since then, Mr Bankhead has been on a remarkable academic journey within Durham University.

The 52-year-old, from Pity Me, near Durham, is now an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Archaeology and the country's leading expert on cloth seals. He recently researched two important groups of cloth seals found in London for MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology)

Now his thesis based on the research of the lost cloth seals is to be published in a report later this year by the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland.

"That's an incredible honour for me to have that endorsement," said Mr Bankhead, who hopes that as many of his objects as possible will go on display in local museums and galleries.

For more information on the DRWA, visit www.diveintodurham.uk

What are cloth seals?

Cloth seals consist of small lead discs, often about the size of a 10p piece and with a thin strip between them. They worked via a rivet device, lined up with a hole, pushed through the textile and sealed with a pair of tongs. The action of sealing the cloth imparted a privy mark, ligature or royal device.

The seals were attached to bolts of cloth by a Crown – or in Durham's case Bishop – appointed official to verify that the textile or the cloth had been inspected, conformed to the standard and that a tax had been paid.

In England, from the time of Edward III, you were not allowed to sell you cloth unless it had been inspected and you'd paid your tax first, one of the biggest money raisers for the Crown for more than 400 years.