Along the Thames in London, the mud keeps giving back toys: tiny metal riders, thumb-sized jugs, and a bird that sticks out its tongue when you rock it.
For most of the 20th century, many historians argued that medieval parents did not treat childhood as a stage of life worth marking. Then archaeologists started pulling playthings from the riverbank. The Thames foreshore, the stretch of mud uncovered at low tide, has produced hundreds of miniature pewter toys. Pewter is a cheap gray metal. The London Museum now holds what is thought to be the largest collection of early cheap-metal toys anywhere.
Wood, cloth, and wax usually rotted. What survived is mostly metal, bone, and fired clay. The picture of medieval play is shaped by the soil as much as by what children liked.
The knight figures look like early action figures, and they were already made in numbers. One hollow pewter rider in the London Museum wears a hauberk, a shirt of metal rings, and carries a sword. The armor style dates him to around 1300. The museum calls him the earliest hollow pewter figure known in England. A bronze rider from the 13th or 14th century, now in the Walters Art Museum, once held a lance, probably wooden, in its fist.
If you want the toy that turns up most often in the ground, it is a tiny pewter vessel. The London Museum has a lead-alloy toy jug from the mid-13th to early 14th century, only 39 millimeters tall. A 15th-century toy ewer, a small water jug, pulled from the Thames measures 43 millimeters. A stone mold for casting them came out of a 15th-century layer in Hereford, one of only two medieval toy molds known from Britain.
A workshop is stronger evidence than scattered finds. In 2025, one turned up under a construction site in Freiburg, Germany. Diggers in the Neuburg quarter found pottery kilns from the 13th and 14th centuries. One kiln belonged to a potter who specialized in clay toys. Reports of the dig put the find at fragments of more than 40 small figures: women in headdresses, men in caps, horses, and mothers holding babies.
What children did with a stick is harder to prove from objects alone. One unusually good source is a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, the Romance of Alexander. Along its margins, boys ride hobby horses at tilting targets, shoot bows, work catapults, and stage puppet shows. Scholar Sarah McNamer, writing in a history journal, argues that the book was made for a five- or six-year-old child in a wealthy household. It should be read as evidence of what a child in that setting had, not necessarily a village child.
Toymakers also built moving parts. A 14th-century pewter bird from London turns on a horizontal bar. A rod makes a tongue slide in and out of its beak when the bird is rocked. The museum says it is the earliest surviving toy with moving parts from the centuries after Roman rule in Britain.
Somebody also figured out that a pig's foot makes a noise. Buzz bones are pig foot bones drilled through, threaded onto a twisted cord, and spun until they hum. Archaeologists are still not sure whether they were toys, musical instruments, or hunting lures, which is a polite way of saying they were loud. Fired clay lasts, so noisemakers last with it. The Gibraltar National Museum holds a small clay whistle shaped like a fish, dated to 14th-century Gibraltar. A kiln site in Stanion, Northamptonshire, produced three rare whistle pots from about the 15th century.
Around 1173, the London clerk William FitzStephen described the city's young men crossing the frozen marsh at Moorfields on polished animal bones tied to their feet. The skates were cattle or horse shin bones strapped under the shoe with leather. A skater pushed himself along with an iron-tipped pole. Surviving examples in the London Museum have bases worn flat.
The old claim was that childhood left little mark. The mud, the molds, and the workshop say otherwise. Children had toys made for them, in metal and clay, some built to move, some built to rattle, and some worn down on winter ice.