Experts have uncovered a 200-year-old carved, wooden fish while restoring the Palace of Westminster.
Archaeologists found the animal figure beneath the House of Lords’ Royal Court and said it was most likely used as a token in card games.
Roland Tillyer, a senior geoarcaeologist at the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), discovered the object while monitoring the digging of a borehole.
“Counters like this were commonly used at gaming tables in Britain during the 18th and 19th Century and were used as tokens for scoring,” Michael Marshall, MOLA finds team leader explained.
“A famous literary description of this practice comes from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice - published in 1813 - where Lydia Bennet is described as winning and losing fish while playing games of ‘lottery tickets’,” he added.
Archaeologists from the programme said the fish counter would have been whittled to shape, then polished - the mouth cut with a saw and the eye inscribed with a centre bit tool or compass.
The eye may originally have been filled with black wax, or a similar dark substance, experts explained.
Diane Abrams, from the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Programme, described the discovery as “amazing”.
“It certainly highlights the value of the Palace’s ‘hidden’ archaeology beneath its buildings and spaces and how even a single find such as this can contribute to its overall sense of history and our literary past,” she added.
It comes after the remains of a medieval stone wall likely to be at least seven centuries old may have been found beneath the Palace of Westminster last year.
The structure, thought to be the original medieval Thames River wall which ran under the Houses of Parliament, was unearthed during restoration work.
Experts said it was likely to be at least 700 years old and made from Kentish ragstone, a hard grey limestone quarried from Kent and used in the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey.
