a position as a one-year assistant keeper at the Ashmolean Museum. Initial work included rearranging and displaying the museum's collection of medieval pilgrims' badges. Soon, however, he was introduced to what would be later termed rescue archaeology, when a group of seventeenth-century houses gave way to a large extension to the Bodleian Library. Before the demolition, Bodley's Librarian invited the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society "to investigate and record any features of architectural or antiquarian interest which are contained in the block of houses ... and also to watch for any finds that may turn up during the demolition of these houses and the subsequent excavations for the foundations of the new building". The Society, in turn, created a subcommittee consisting of E. T. Long, Edward Thurlow Leeds, and William Abel Pantin, the latter of whom wrote an article on the houses and commented on the "practical consideration or morals to be drawn" from their destruction. Demolition lasted from December 1936 to March 1937, after which began, according to the geologist William Joscelyn Arkell, "the removal of the greatest quantity of subsoil ... ever taken out of one hole within the City of Oxford". Bruce-Mitford was tasked with watching the site during the excavation. Much of his work involved waiting for the well in front of each house to be dug out, revealing two or three feet of mud at the bottom, filled with broken medieval pottery and other artefacts. He would wait "impotently", he later recalled, for the jaws of the mechanical diggers (which would not wait for the archaeologists) to pick up the mud and transfer it to a lorry; he would then jump aboard, and pick out the artefacts as the lorry made its way "to some gravel hungry site at Cumnor". When back at the Ashmolean he would wash the sherds and stick them together. Bruce-Mitford's "energy and keen eye captured a treasure chest", the archaeologist Maureen Mellor wrote four decades later. Because the wells would quickly silt up and be replaced by new ones every 50 or so years, Bruce-Mitford found it possible to accurately date pottery within uniquely short time-frames. In 1939, he published an article on the finds, in which he described, among other things, five distinct groups of pottery in their probable chronological order; his brother Alaric provided the illustrations. This was "the first serious study of medieval pottery", wrote Mellor, and