Intersections: The Archaeology and History of Christianity in England, 400-1200: Papers in Honour of Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle 9781407305400, 9781407321721

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Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Preface
Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle: An Appreciation
List of Publications by Martin Biddle
List of Publications by Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle
Commendation by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark
1. A Roman Silver Jug with Biblical Scenes from the Treasure found at Traprain Law
2. Hand-washing and Foot-washing, Sacred and Secular, in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period
3. Christian Origins at Gloucester: A Topographical Inquiry
4. New Evidence for the Transition from the Late Roman to the Saxon Period at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London
5. Ethnic Identity and the Origins, Purpose and Occurrence of Pattern-Welded Swords in Sixth-Century Kent: The Case of the Saltwood Cemetery
6. Communities of the Living and the Dead: The Relationship Between Anglo-Saxon Settlements and Cemeteries, c. 450 – c. 850.
7. The Oliver’s Battery Hanging-Bowl Burial from Winchester, and its Place in the Early History of Wessex
8. More Markets, Minsters, and Metal-Detector Finds: Middle Saxon Hampshire a Decade On
9. Food, Fasting and Starvation: Food Control and Body Consciousness in Early Anglo-Saxon England
10. Bede and Roman Britain
11. Questioning Bede
12. Offa’s St Albans
13. A Possible Commemorative Stone for Æthelmund, Father of Æthelric
14. The Prehistory of English Fonts
15. Architecture, Music, and Time in Wulfstan’s Verse
16. “Knights” before the Round Table: Cnihtas, Guildhalls and Governance in Early Winchester
17. Winchester in Domesday Book
18. The Romanesque West Front of Winchester Cathedral
19. Reflections on Tithes and the Formation of Parishes
20. Henry of Blois, the Cluny Connection and Two Ivories in the Victoria and Albert Museum
Credits for Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

BAR 505 2010 HENIG & RAMSAY (Eds) INTERSECTIONS: THE ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

B A R

Intersections: The Archaeology and History of Christianity in England, 400-1200 Papers in Honour of Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle Edited by

Martin Henig Nigel Ramsay

BAR British Series 505 2010

Intersections: The Archaeology and History of Christianity in England, 400-1200 Papers in Honour of Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle Edited by

Martin Henig Nigel Ramsay

BAR British Series 505 2010

ISBN 9781407305400 paperback ISBN 9781407321721 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9781407305400 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

BAR

PUBLISHING

Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle

The photograph shows a fragment of an early thirteenth-century wall painting that was discovered in 1909, when seventeenthcentury bookshelves in Winchester Cathedral’s Morley Library were temporarily removed. It is argued (John Crook, ‘King Edgar’s reliquary of St Swithun’, Anglo-Saxon England, 21 (1992), pp. 177-202) that the main subject of the painting is the elevation of the body of St Swithun in 971 – though the living participants are anachronistically shown as Benedictine monks, and the body is portrayed as incorrupt. Less probably, given that the corpse has a nimbus, the scene might show Swithun’s burial in 863. In the background is a church, which appears to be a view of the Cathedral in the Romanesque form with which the thirteenth-century artist would have been familiar: the high altar stands within an apse, and on it stands a reliquary. The depiction of this object introduces a third level of interpretation, for it is possible that it is intended as the scrinium magnum which was given to Old Minster by King Edgar in 974, which was placed on the high altar of the present Cathedral in 1093. In any case, the subject matter would be appropriate for the sacrist’s office, which was probably located in the present Cathedral Library until the dissolution of St Swithun’s Priory in 1539.

Contents

Preface .....................................................................................................................................................................iii Martin Henig and Nigel Ramsay Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle: An Appreciation ....................................................................................... v Martin Henig, Thomas Beaumont James, Anthony King and Nigel Ramsay List of Publications of Martin Biddle and of Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle .......................................................................... ix Compiled by Anthony King Commendation by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark .......................................................................................... xxvii A Roman Silver Jug with Biblical Scenes from the Treasure found at Traprain Law .................................................. 1 Kenneth Painter Hand-washing and Foot-washing, Sacred and Secular, in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period ................. 25 Anthea Harris and Martin Henig Christian Origins at Gloucester: A Topographical Inquiry ....................................................................................... 39 Carolyn Heighway New Evidence for the Transition from the Late Roman to the Saxon Period at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London ................................................................................................................................................................... 49 Alison Telfer Ethnic Identity and the Origins, Purpose and Occurrence of Pattern-Welded Swords in Sixth-Century Kent: The Case of the Saltwood Cemetery ........................................................................................................................ 59 Brian Gilmour Communities of the Living and the Dead: The Relationship Between Anglo-Saxon Settlements and Cemeteries, c. 450 – c. 850. ..................................................................................................................................... 71 Helena Hamerow The Oliver’s Battery Hanging-Bowl Burial from Winchester, and its Place in the Early History of Wessex .............. 77 Barbara Yorke More Markets, Minsters, and Metal-Detector Finds: Middle Saxon Hampshire a Decade On ................................. 87 Katharina Ulmschneider Food, Fasting and Starvation: Food Control and Body Consciousness in Early Anglo-Saxon England ..................... 99 Sally Crawford Bede and Roman Britain ....................................................................................................................................... 107 Michael Lapidge Questioning Bede .................................................................................................................................................. 119 James Campbell Offa’s St Albans..................................................................................................................................................... 129 Rosalind Niblett

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A Possible Commemorative Stone for Æthelmund, Father of Æthelric .................................................................. 135 Michael Hare The Prehistory of English Fonts ............................................................................................................................ 149 John Blair Architecture, Music, and Time in Wulfstan’s Verse ................................................................................................. 179 David Howlett “Knights” before the Round Table: Cnihtas, Guildhalls and Governance in Early Winchester ............................... 201 Derek Keene Winchester in Domesday Book ............................................................................................................................. 213 Julian Munby The Romanesque West Front of Winchester Cathedral ......................................................................................... 219 John Crook Reflections on Tithes and the Formation of Parishes ............................................................................................. 237 Christopher Brooke Henry of Blois, the Cluny Connection and Two Ivories in the Victoria and Albert Museum ................................. 243 Pamela Tudor-Craig Credits for Illustrations.......................................................................................................................................... 253 Index

............................................................................................................................................................. 255

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Preface This collection of papers is a celebration of the achievements of two eminent scholars: archaeologists in the widest sense of the word, who have worked especially in those areas where archaeology and history meet, and, so frequently, intersect. In these cases an understanding of historical sources is essential for the understanding of the results of archaeological excavation. We have focused on the Christian Church in England in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, although as the introductory essay emphasises the interests and achievements of Martin and Birthe range much more widely. When we invited contributions for a Festschrift in their honour it became obvious to us how warmly all their many colleagues in quite disparate disciplines hold them in their affections. We gratefully acknowledge help from various colleagues and friends – most especially Marian Campbell, John Crook (who provided the cover illustration), Simon Keynes, Grahame Saxby-Soffe and Richard Sharpe. MH is grateful to St Stephen’s House, Oxford, for providing encouragement and cloistered calm. David Davison and Rajka Makjanic have produced this book with wondrous efficiency, patience and expedition. That it is appearing in such handsome guise, and with Howard Cooke’s index, is thanks to the generosity of the Marc Fitch Fund, and we owe special thanks to its Director, Elaine Paintin. Martin Henig and Nigel Ramsay

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Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle: An Appreciation Martin Biddle comes from a distinguished family which includes on his fathers’s side, an ancestor who was Sir Humphry Davy, inventor of the miner's safety lamp. Birthe comes from a well-known Copenhagen family, her father being Landsretssagfører Axel Kjølbye. Amongst her earliest memories are wartime ones in occupied Denmark, when her parents sheltered Allied airmen at very great risk to themselves. Martin’s schooling at Merchant Taylors’, at Sandy Lodge, Hertfordshire, in the early Fifties showed him already set fair as an archaeologist, conducting a model excavation at the important medieval and early modern site (Wolsey’s Palace) at the Manor of the More (not far from the school) which he was later to publish in the Archaeological Journal. National Service, with the Royal Tank Regiment, brought him to Berlin, and he went on to dig with (Dame) Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho in 1957-8. Before he went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1958, he had already examined the Deserted Medieval Village at Seacourt, on the site of the by-pass west of Oxford – and thus made an early foray into Rescue Archaeology – which he was subsequently to publish in Oxoniensia. While still an undergraduate at Cambridge he also conducted in 1959 and 1960 two seasons of excavation on the site of Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace, near Ewell in Surrey. After a brief spell between 1961 and 1963 at the Ministry of Works as an Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Martin took up an appointment as Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Exeter. He already knew Winchester and had led the excavation of a Roman villa just to the south at Twyford, while in 1961 he began the famous series of excavations in the city itself. In 1968 he was asked to become the Director of the Winchester Research Unit, a post which has now attached him to the city as a senior scholar and adviser for over forty years. While Director of the Research Unit he has held a number of other significant posts, notably Director of the University Museum, and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. He returned to England in 1981 as Lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. While holding this post he characteristically embarked on a broad spectrum of other activities, for example as a Commissioner of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. In 1989 he was appointed Astor Senior Research Fellow in Medieval Archaeology at Hertford College, Oxford, becoming Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 1997 – a position he held until his retirement in 2002. Martin has always liked to undertake long-term projects – all complicated and requiring vast amounts of documentary research – which he has patiently seen through to publication. As noted above, he began work on the massive task of unravelling the ruined palace of Nonsuch in 1959 during his undergraduate days. His interpretation of that extraordinary site – its uniqueness embodied in its name – which had been built by Henry VIII in 1538 using Italian Renaissance artists and craftsmen, is masterly. Some of his work has been published in the last few years, but for one part of it – an essay on the Italian artificer Nicholas Bellin, who came from Modena and worked for Francis I at Fontainebleau and for Henry VIII at Whitehall and Nonsuch – he won the British Archaeological Association’s Reginald Taylor Prize in 1965, publishing it in the Association’s Journal in 1966. He showed how much could be learnt from very fragmentary remains, and with an unerring eye was able to find elements of the relief decoration that were otherwise known only from distant views in drawings and engravings. He brought the palace back to life, and his lectures on the subject have held audiences spellbound for over forty years. If ever an archaeologist has had the magic touch, it is Martin Biddle. Together with the late Roger Quirk, he established the position of the lost Old Minster at Winchester, immediately north of the Cathedral. The Minster was significant well beyond the bounds of England, but had been robbed and the stones re-used (always an issue in Winchester, where there is no ready supply of building stone). Undaunted by this and the many hundreds of skeletons from the overlying medieval burial ground, Martin and Birthe established the ground-plan of the Old Minster in a technically innovative excavation. The great Saxon Minsters had no obvious parallels in England, and so they turned to the early cross-plan churches of Italy and the Carolingian architecture of Germany to reconstruct it. Work at Winchester from 1964 onwards was based round a ‘project design’, long before such jargon became central to archaeological practice. Martin established archaeological understanding of large parts of the great buildings of the medieval city: the three Minsters (Old, New and Nunnaminster), the royal castle and palace, and Wolvesey, the bishops’ palace. He also examined the poorer area of the city, the Brooks, north of High Street where, among the ruins of Roman and Saxon structures, he found a brace of abandoned parish churches and was able to detect the v

flimsy, timber remains of early fourteenth-century ‘artisans’ houses’ (which have appeared in every text-book ever since). Vigorously pursuing the royal role of the city in the pre-Norman Conquest era, he established the site of the seventh-century royal chapel beside the Cathedral and argued for the site of a royal palace west of the current Cathedral. He searched for remains of the Norman palace, which doubled the area occupied by its Saxon predecessor, just as the Cathedral doubled the size of its precursor, Old Minster. Each site proved a treasure house, but every one of them presented challenges of a fiendish complexity. Far more important, it was at Winchester that Martin met Birthe Kjølbye. She came to the city as a magister student from Aarhus University in her native Denmark on her way to study the Early Bronze Age at Edinburgh. She was thus highly qualified on paper; but it was her evident skill in the techniques and management of excavation that meant that before her first season was out, she was given charge of the excavations at the Cathedral. In 1966 she married Martin, and their two daughters, Signe and Solvej, have given them great joy. Birthe has ever since formed Martin’s partner in an almost countless series of excavations and publications. It might also be said that, sartorially speaking, while Martin has always been very respectably turned out, Birthe has always dressed with distinctive flair and style. Two other major sites have claimed the interest of the Biddles. Martin had known St Albans since his schooldays (St Albans was after all only a few miles from Merchant Taylors’) and from 1978 excavations were conducted on the site of the new Chapter House which proved the existence of a Roman cemetery on the site and hinted at the possibility of a late Roman martyrium for St Alban. Further, the Biddles were able to examine the medieval shrine and reveal the twelfth-century shrine-table. One of Birthe’s many distinctive contributions to the project was to reveal that the St Alban’s Cross of distinctive form was very probably a Coptic antiquity brought to St Albans in the Middle Ages. And then there was the great Repton project, which revealed not simply the structural history of an important Middle-Saxon church but a history of bloody conflict as Mercians confronted Vikings. Here as elsewhere excavation resulted in major studies of Saxon sculpture and physical anthropology. Work commenced here in 1974, unearthing the remains of the Great Heathen Army that had overwintered there in AD 873-4, their archaeological findings (which included the massacred remains of at least 264 individuals, dated by coins to the Viking period) corroborating an account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The most spectacular find from that excavation, however, was perhaps that of a memorial with a carving of an Anglo-Saxon ruler – possibly commemorating the murdered King Aethelbald, who is known to have been buried at Repton. Famously working together as a team, the Biddles have combined a thorough awareness of all that past scholarship can contribute with the introduction of new techniques of archaeological recording, devised in order to understand the complicated stratigraphy of Winchester. These techniques revolutionised the discipline of excavation itself, replacing the Wheeler system as modified by Sheppard Frere and others, with a far better model – used today but rarely with such skill and intelligence as by the Biddles in all their investigations. Experienced field-archaeologists of the older generation like Dr Graham Webster actually came to dig at Winchester in order to re-learn how to excavate and came away enormously impressed. It has rightly been claimed that the Winchester excavations trained a whole generation of archaeologists and that all well-conducted excavations conducted since are effectively tributes to the Biddles’ methodology. In recent years Martin has returned to the land of his earliest foreign investigations, with his work in Jerusalem on the Tomb of Christ (1998, 1999) and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (2000). These are sacred places which allow only of above-ground probing, but are every bit as complicated as any urban below-ground site, and have had the additional need for the most delicate of political negotiations. Here too a keen eye has helped to provide convincing historical and architectural reinterpretations. Characteristically, at almost the same time he used the latest techniques in radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology in order to examine the Winchester Round Table, which has hung on the wall of the city’s Castle Hall for over 400 years, and thereby established its late thirteenth-century date beyond reasonable doubt, also editing the definitive collection of essays on it in 2000. Birthe’s publications have also frequently been focused on Winchester, but have also ranged as far and wide as Martin’s, with essays on a Nubian church at Qasr Ibrim, on the remains of frogs and toads from the excavations at Repton, and on the technical problems of excavation in general and especially on complex urban sites. Martin and Birthe have always believed in sharing their ideas with others. Both have been active instructors in the field, whilst Martin, at Hertford College, was a wonderful teacher and tutor of both undergraduates and graduates vi

(having general charge over all the graduate students there for several years). Of all the students who came to Oxford in order to read Archaeology and Anthropology the lucky ones were those accepted by Hertford College (although Martin would have preferred to see established a far more innovative course, that was centred on Archaeology as part of History). But of course both Martin and Birthe have influenced far more people than these. In the public sphere they have campaigned and continue to campaign for the preservation of the archaeological and built heritage, threatened alike by urban redevelopment and intensive agriculture. Martin was a leading light in the foundation of Rescue in 1970, and served as its first Chairman. In his chapter in Philip Rahtz’s influential Penguin Book, Rescue Archaeology, published in 1974, he argued passionately for the study and preservation of the urban past, noting that ‘evidence is being destroyed unrecorded on a scale and at a pace which might seem unbelievable were it not so fully documented.’ He made a special point about standing buildings (for which some of us can remember that some archaeologists still in the early 1970s had little regard), declaring unequivocally that ‘there is no divide between above and below ground; archaeology is an analytical study of the material remains of the past, however they may be preserved, whether buried, or forming patterns of settlement on the ground, or standing several storeys high.’ London provided one of the greatest challenges, and the direct result of the volume, The Future of London’s Past, which Rescue published in 1973, by Martin, Daphne Hudson and Carolyn Heighway, was the setting up of a major Excavation Unit in the capital which has revolutionized our knowledge. Indeed London as much as Winchester owes a great debt of gratitude to the Biddles. Martin and Birthe are remarkable in the interest they take in subjects which are, at first sight, entirely outside their own fields, such as the history of the British mandate in Palestine. Their wide human sympathies render it far from surprising that on a personal level they have been such great encouragers of other people, having a generosity of spirit which is not so commonly found in these dark days of hectic competitiveness. By their kindness, hospitality and courtesy, they have always maintained an outstanding level of friendship. For decades they have been a famous duo, to the extent that it is often hard to disentangle what each has done, and their method of working has imparted to their labours a strength and integrity which will pass the test of time, and assure them a major place in half a dozen different academic fields. Martin was honoured with election as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985 and was appointed OBE in 1997. He and Birthe were jointly awarded the Frend medal of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1986. Martin was elected an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke, Cambridge, his undergraduate college, in 2006. Martin Henig, Thomas Beaumont James, Anthony King and Nigel Ramsay

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List of Publications by Martin Biddle Compiled by Anthony King BK-B = Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle MB = Martin Biddle

1952 ‘Visit to Italy’, The Taylorian [Merchant Taylors’ School Journal], 65.4 (December 1952), pp. 152-4. 1953 ‘Archaeological Society’, The Taylorian, 65.5 (March 1953), pp. 206-7. ‘Archaeological Society’, The Taylorian, 65.6 (July 1953), pp. 248-9. ‘Archaeological Society’, The Taylorian, 65.7 [correctly, 66.1], (December 1953), p. 286. 1954 ‘Wolsey’s Palace’, The Taylorian, 66.2 (March 1954), pp. 58-9, opp. p. 69. ‘Archaeological Society’, The Taylorian, 66.4 (December 1954), p. 144 (with K[eith] M[anning]). ‘The Manor of the More’, Rickmansworth Historical Society Quarterly Magazine, 1.1 (December 1954), pp. 10-11, 16. 1955 ‘Italy and Greece 1954’, The Taylorian, 66.5 (March 1955), pp. 194-5. ‘Bisley Camp, Easter, 1955’, The Taylorian, 66.6 (July 1955), p. 238. 1959 ‘Antiquity of Man’, letter to The Times, 27 May 1959 (with Brian Fagan and Richard Imison). [See also, 2009.] 1960 John Dent and MB, Nonsuch 1960: The Banqueting House. With an Account of Last Year’s Excavation of the Palace Site (Ewell: Nonsuch Palace Excavation Committee). ‘The Palace which Henry VIII Built and Charles II’s Mistress Demolished: Nonsuch, Revealed in Recent Excavations’, Illustrated London News, 28 May 1960, pp. 936-9. MB and E.S. Higgs, ‘The Animal Bones’, Appendix III to ‘Report on the Investigation of a Round Barrow on Arreton Down, Isle of Wight’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 26, pp. 301-2. 1961 MB, Lawrence Barfield and Alan Millard, ‘The Excavations of the Manor of the More, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire’, Archaeological Journal, 116, pp. 136-99 ‘Sudanese Pottery in Britain: A Warning’, Antiquity, 35, pp. 60-1. ‘Nonsuch Palace 1959-60: An Interim Report’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, 58, pp. 1-20. ‘Nonsuch Palace’, History Today, March 1961, pp. 206-14. ‘The Vanished Gardens of Nonsuch’, Country Life, 130 (26 October 1961), pp. 1008-10.

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‘A Thirteenth-century Architectural Sketch from the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 54, pp. 99-108. ‘Medieval Pottery from Elstree’, Transactions of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, 1961, pp. 65-9. ‘Medieval Pottery from a Site at Otterspool, near Watford, Herts.’, Transactions of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, 1961, pp. 70-6. ‘Prehistoric and Roman Finds from the Colne Valley, near Hamper Mills, Watford’, Transactions of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, 1961, pp. 77-89. Translation of Milutin V. Garasanin, ‘The Neolithic in Anatolia and the Balkans’, Antiquity, 35, pp. 276-80. 1962 ‘The Deserted Medieval Village of Seacourt, Berkshire’, Oxoniensia 26/27, pp. 70-201. ‘Archaeological Excavation in the Cathedral Car Park, 1961’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 31, pp. 14-17. ‘Excavations at Winchester’, letter to The Times, 13 August 1962 (with R.N. Quirk). 1963 ‘Archaeological Excavations North of the Cathedral, 1962’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 32, pp. 15-21. 'Excavation in Winchester 1961-2', Archaeological Newsletter, 7.9 (April 1963), pp. 195-200. ‘Nonsuch Palace’, Journal of the London Society, 363 (June 1963), pp. 14-30. ‘Imports of Medieval Stoneware from the Rhineland’, Medieval Archaeology, 6/7, pp. 298-300, pl. XXX. ‘Acoustic Pots: a proposed study’, Medieval Archaeology, 6/7, p. 304. 1964 ‘The Excavation of a Motte and Bailey Castle at Therfield, Hertfordshire’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, Ser. 3, 27, pp. 53-91. MB and R. N. Quirk, ‘Excavations near Winchester Cathedral, 1961’, Archaeological Journal, 119, pp. 150-94. ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1962-63: Second Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 44, pp. 188-219. ‘Excavations North of the Cathedral Nave, 1963’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 33, pp. 13-19 ‘A Boy Bishop Token from Bury St. Edmunds Abbey’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 56-57, pp. 126-7. ‘Mr Roger Quirk’, The Times, 4 December 1964. Translation of Hartwig Zürn, ‘An Anthropomorphic Hallstatt Stele from Southern Germany’, Antiquity, 38, pp. 224-6. 1965 P.V. Addyman and MB, ‘Medieval Cambridge: Recent Finds and Excavations’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 58, pp. 74-137. ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1964: Third Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 45, pp. 230-64. ‘Excavations North of the Cathedral Nave, 1964’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 34, pp. 23-31. Excavations near Winchester Cathedral, 1961-1964 (Winchester: Warren and Son, The Wykeham Press). [Reprints of four articles from the Winchester Cathedral Record.] ‘Winchester: The Archaeology of a City’, Science Journal, 1, no.1, p. 55. Winchester. Two Thousand Years of History (London: Trust House Hotels Ltd.). Review of Caernarvonshire, III (RCHM, 1964), Archaeological Journal, 122, pp. 259-60. Review of Field Archaeology (1963), Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser., 28, pp. 134-5. 1966 ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1965: Fourth Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 46, pp. 308-32. ‘Excavations North of the Cathedral Nave, 1965’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 35, pp. 23-33. Excavations near Winchester Cathedral, 1961-65 (Winchester: Warren and Son, The Wykeham Press). [Reprints with an introduction five articles from the Winchester Cathedral Record.] x

‘Winchester’, in Programme of the Summer Meeting of the Royal Archaeological Institute in Hampshire, pp. 15-18; reprinted with additions in Archaeological Journal, 123, pp. 182-3, 211-15. [Catalogue edited by MB] Winchester 1066: an exhibition illustrating some aspects of life in Winchester during the century before and after the Norman conquest, Winchester, 10-15 October, 1966 (Winchester: City of Winchester, Museums and Libraries Committee). Alan W. Pike and MB, ‘Parasite Eggs in Medieval Winchester’, Antiquity, 40, pp. 293-6, pl. XLI. ‘Nicholas Bellin of Modena, An Italian Artificer at the Courts of Francis I and Henry VIII’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, Ser. 3, 29, pp. 106-21. Review of V. I. Evison, The Fifth-Century Invasions South of the Thames (1965), History, 51, p. 341. 1967 ‘Two Flavian Burials from Grange Road, Winchester’, Antiquaries Journal, 47, pp. 224-50. ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1966: Fifth Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 47, pp. 251-79. ‘Excavations North of the Cathedral Nave, 1965-1966’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 35/36, pp. 26-35. ‘Health in Medieval Winchester: The Evidence from Excavations’, in Infectious Diseases: their Evolution and Eradication, ed. Aidan Cockburn (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas), pp. 58-60. MB and BK-B, ‘Some New Ideas on Excavation’, Research Seminar on Archaeology and Related Subjects (15 December 1967) (London: Institute of Archaeology, University of London). Review of B. Cunliffe et al., Winchester Excavations 1949-1960, vol. 1 (Winchester Museums and Libraries Committee, 1964), Medieval Archaeology, 11, pp. 338-40. Review of L. Grinsell, P. Rahtz, and A. Warhurst, The Preparation of Archaeological Reports (London 1966), Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser., 30, pp. 156-7. 1968 ‘Archaeology and the History of British Towns’, Antiquity, 42, pp. 109-16; also in Res Mediaevales. Ragnar Blomqvist Kal. Mai. MCMLXVIII Oblata, ed. Anders W. Mårtensson, Archaeologica Lundensia. Investigationes de antquitatibus urbis Lundae III (Lund: Lund Kulturhistoriska Museet), pp. 91-102. ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1967: Sixth Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 48, pp. 250-84. ‘Excavations North of the Cathedral Nave, 1967’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 37, pp. 33-44. Excavations near Winchester Cathedral, 1961-1967, 3rd edn. (Winchester: Warren & Son), 65 pp. [Reprints with an introduction seven articles from the Winchester Cathedral Record.] ‘The Research Group on the Origin and Development of Urban Settlement’, Urban History Newsletter, 11 (December, 1968), pp. 10-11. ‘The Winchester Research Unit', Urban History Newsletter, 11 (December, 1968), pp. 11-12. ‘The Excavations at Abingdon Abbey, 1922’, pp. 60-8 in MB, H.T. Lambrick and J.N.L. Myres, ‘The Early History of Abingdon, Berkshire, and its Abbey’, Medieval Archaeology, 12, pp. 26-69. Review of Novgorod the Great. Excavations at the Medieval City..., ed. M.W. Thompson (London: Evelyn, Adams and Mackay, 1967), Antiquity, 42, pp. 68-9. 1969 MB and BK-B, ‘Metres, Areas and Robbing’, World Archaeology, 1, no. 2, pp. 208-19. ‘The Archaeology of British Towns’, Antiquity, 43, pp. 42-3 [Response to a reply to MB’s article in Antiquity, 42, 1968]. ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1968: Seventh Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 49, pp. 295-329. ‘Wolvesey: the domus quasi palatium of Henry de Blois in Winchester’, in Château Gaillard, III, ed. A.J. Taylor (Chichester: Phillimore), pp. 28-36. ‘Winchester 1961-8’, in Château Gaillard, IV (Ghent : Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent), pp. 19-30. ‘Excavations North of the Cathedral Nave, 1968', Winchester Cathedral Record, 38 (1969), pp. 69-81. Excavations near Winchester Cathedral, 1961-1968, 4th edn., Winchester: Warren & Son: Wykeham Press). [Reprints with an introduction eight articles from the Winchester Cathedral Record.] Review of London Museum, Medieval Catalogue (London: HMSO, 1968), Antiquity, 43, pp. 80-1.

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1970 ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1969: Eighth Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 50, pp. 277-326. ‘The Excavation of the Old Minster, 1962-1969’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 39, pp. 49-63. The Old Minster: Excavations near Winchester Cathedral 1961-1969, 5th edn., (Winchester: Warren & Son: Wykeham Press) [Reprints with an introduction nine articles from the Winchester Cathedral Record.] ‘A ‘Fontainebleau’ Chimneypiece at Broughton Castle, Oxfordshire’, in The Country Seat: Studies in the History of the British Country House, ed. Howard Colvin and John Harris (London: Allen Lane), pp. 9-12. Edited ‘Urban Archaeology’ issue of World Archaeology, 2.2 (October 1970). Review of I. Noel Hume, Historical Archaeology (1968), Antiquaries Journal, 51, pp. 132-3. 1971 MB and David Hill, ‘Late Saxon Planned Towns’, Antiquaries Journal, 51, pp. 70-85. ‘Archaeology and the Beginnings of English Society’, in England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 391-409. ‘The Buildings of the New Minster: Excavations North of the Cathedral, 1970’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 40, pp. 48-56. ‘Winchester and Deerhurst’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 89, pp. 179-80. ‘Britain’s Vanishing Urban Archaeology’, New Scientist, 49 (no. 734), 14 January 1971, pp. 76-8 (and unsigned leader ‘Archaeology and Britain’s Towns’, p. 63). ‘Rescue the Archaeology of Britain’, New Scientist, 49 (no. 736), 28 January 1971. Review of ‘The Impact of the Natural Sciences on Archaeology’ (British Academy-Royal Society Symposium, 1970), New Scientist, 49 (no. 743), 18 March 1971. 1972 ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1970: Ninth Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 52, pp. 93-131. ‘Excavating near the Cathedral: a Director’s-eye View’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 41, pp. 14-17. Winchester Saxon and Norman Art. An Exhibition of the Artistic Achievement of an Early Medieval Capital A.D. 9001150, Winchester Cathedral Treasury, 20 May - 30 September 1972, Winchester: Winchester Cathedral Treasury. ‘The Winton Domesday: Two Surveys of an Early Capital’, in Werner Besch (ed.), Die Stadt in der europäischen Geschichte. Festschrift Edith Ennen, Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid Verlag, pp. 36-43. Concept of, preface to, and sections contributed to C. M. Heighway (ed.), The Erosion of History: Archaeology and Planning in Towns, London: CBA Urban Research Committee. MB, Alan Brown, T.J. Brown and Peter Hunter Blair, ‘Bibliography for 1971’, Anglo-Saxon England, 1, pp. 309-32. Introduction to Albrecht Dürer, Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett, Schloss und Flecken (Farnborough: Gregg International). [Facsimile reprint of 2nd edn., Nuremberg, 1527.] Introduction to G. B. de’Zanchi, The maner of fortification of cities, townes, castelles and other places (Farnborough: Gregg International). [Facsimile of book in the British Library, ‘...translated oute of Frenche into the English tong but also corrected and augmented by Robert Corneweyle’, 1559.] Introduction to Paul Ive, The practise of fortification (Farnborough: Gregg International). [Facsimile of the 1589 edn.] ‘The Buried Past’, letter to The Times, 15 January 1972. 1973 MB and Daphne M. Hudson, The Future of London’s Past: A Survey of the Archaeological Implications of Planning and Development in the Nation’s Capital (Worcester: Rescue Publication 4). MB and BK-B, Winchester Saxon and Norman Art. The Artistic Achievement of an Early Medieval Capital A.D. 9001150 - A Revised Exhibition, Winchester Cathedral Treasury, 26 May-30 Sept. 1973 (Winchester: Winchester Cathedral Treasury). MB and V.W. Emery, The M3 Extension: An Archaeological Survey (Winchester: MARC 3). MB, Alan Brown, T.J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Peter Hunter Blair, ‘Bibliography for 1972’, Anglo-Saxon England, 2, pp. 303-33. xii

MB and V. W. Emery, ‘The M3 and Archaeology’, The Village, Spring 1973. 1974 Archaeology and Government: A Plan for Archaeology in Britain (Worcester: Rescue). ‘Foreword’ and ‘The Future of the Urban Past’, in Rescue Archaeology, ed. Philip A. Rahtz (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), pp. ix-x, 95-112 ‘The Archaeology of Winchester’, Scientific American, 230, no. 5 (May 1974), pp. 32-43. ‘The Development of the Anglo-Saxon Town’, in Topografia urbana e Vita cittadina nell’Alto Medioevo in Occidente, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo XXI (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo), pp. 203-30, 299-312. ‘Winchester: The Development of an Early Capital’, in Vor- und Frühformen der Europäischen Stadt im Mittelalter, ed. Herbert Jankuhn, Walter Schlesinger and Heiko Steuer, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse, 3 Folge, nr. 83 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), pp. 22961, and pl. 19-24. MB and Katherine Barclay, ‘Winchester Ware’, in Medieval Pottery from Excavations. Studies Presented to Gerald Clough Dunning, With a Bibliography of his Work, ed. V.I. Evison, H. Hodges and J. G. Hurst (London: J. Baker), pp. 137-65. Preface to G.D.B. Jones et al., Roman Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. vii. MB, Alan Brown, T.J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Peter Hunter Blair, ‘Bibliography for 1973’, Anglo-Saxon England, 3, pp. 233-70. Review of Colin Platt, Medieval Southampton: The Port and Trading Community, AD 1000-1600 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), Antiquity, 48, pp. 247-8. Review of Scientific Methods in Medieval Archaeology (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1970), ed. Rainer Berger, Antiquity, 48, pp. 321-2. 1975 ‘Felix Urbs Winthonia: Winchester in the Age of Monastic Reform’, in Tenth-Century Studies. Essays in Commemoration of the Millennium of the Council of Winchester and Regularis Concordia, ed. David Parsons (London and Chichester: Phillimore), pp. 123-40, 233-7. ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1971: Tenth and Final Interim Report’, Antiquaries Journal, 55, pp. 96-126, 295-337. ‘Ptolemaic Coins in Winchester’, Antiquity, 49, pp. 213-15. ‘Excavations at St Wystan’s Church, Repton, 1974-75’, Repton Parish Magazine, 25, no. 9, pp. 3 ff.; Repton School Terminal Letter, 247, pp. 7-10. Foreword to M3 Archaeology 1974, ed. P.J. Fasham (Winchester, MARC 3), p. ii. Edited ‘Burial’ issue of World Archaeology, 7.i (June 1975). ‘Archaeology Enters a New Age’, The Observer, 30 March 1975, p. 9. ‘King Alfred, Our First Town Planner’, Observer Magazine, 25 May 1975, p. 21. MB, Alan Brown, T.J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Peter Hunter Blair, ‘Bibliography for 1974’, Anglo-Saxon England, 4, pp. 223-62. Review of J.N.L. Myres and Barbara Green, The Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of Caistor-by-Norwich and Markshall, Norfolk (London, Society of Antiquaries 1973), History, 60, p. 28. ‘In Search of Roman Britain’, reviews of Roger Wilson, A Guide to Roman Remains in Britain (London, 1975) and John Wacher, The Towns of Roman Britain (London, 1975), Country Life (May 1975), p. 1204. Reviews of Ralph Merrifield, The Archaeology of London (London, 1975), Graham Webster, The Cornovii (London, 1975), and Rosalind Dunnett, The Trinovantes (London, 1975), Times Educational Supplement, 25 July 1975. ‘Early Man and his Landscape’, reviews of J.G. Evans, The Environment of Early Man in the British Isles (London, 1975) and R.L.S. Bruce-Mitford, Recent Archaeological Excavations in Europe (London, 1975), Country Life, 20 November 1975, p. 1387. 1976 (ed.) Winchester in the Early Middle Ages. An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, by Frank Barlow et al., edited by MB, Winchester Studies 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). MB and D. J. Keene (ed.), ‘The Early Place-Names of Winchester’, ‘Winchester in the Eleventh and Twelfth xiii

Centuries’, and ‘General Survey and Conclusions’, in ibid., pp. 231-9, 241-448, 449-508. ‘The Corrections’, in T.J. Brown, ‘Appendix II. The Manuscript of the Winton Domesday’, in ibid., pp. 522-6. ‘Venta Belgarum (Winchester)’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, ed. Richard Stilwell et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 964-5. ‘Hampshire and the Origins of Wessex’, in Problems in Economic and Social Archaeology, ed. G. de G. Sieveking et al. (London: Duckworth), pp. 323-42. ‘Towns’, in Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. David M. Wilson (London: Methuen), pp. 99-150. ‘A Widening Horizon’, in The Archaeological Study of Churches, ed. Peter Addyman and Richard Morris, CBA Research Report No. 13 (London: Council for British Archaeology), pp. 65-71. ‘The Evolution of Towns: Planned Towns before 1066’, in The Plans and Topography of Medieval Towns in England and Wales, CBA Research Report No. 14, ed. M.W. Barley (London: Council for British Archaeology), pp. 1932. ‘The Archaeology of Winchester’, in Avenues to Antiquity. Readings from Scientific American, ed. B.M. Fagan (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman), pp. 311-22. MB, BK-B and H.M. Taylor, ‘Investigations at St Wystan’s Church 1976’, Repton Parish Magazine, 26, no. 11, pp. 2 ff. MB, Alan Brown, T.J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Peter Hunter Blair, ‘Bibliography for 1975’, Anglo-Saxon England, 5, pp. 245-80. ‘Rescue Excavation: Where Next?’, Country Life, 2 December 1976, p. 1641. ‘The Riches of Sutton Hoo’, review of R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, I, (London, 1975), Country Life, 11 March 1976, p. 626. 1977 ‘Alban and the Anglo-Saxon Church’, in Cathedral and City: St Albans Ancient and Modern, ed. R.A.K. Runcie(London: Martyn Associates), pp. 23-42, 138-42. MB, Alan Binns, J.M. Cameron, D.M. Metcalf, R.I. Page, Charles Sparrow and F.L. Warren, ‘Sutton Hoo Published: A Review’, Anglo-Saxon England, 6, pp. 249-65. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, T.J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1976’, Anglo-Saxon England, 6, pp. 267-316. ‘New Directions; the Director Writes’, Expedition, 20 (1977-8); 21 (1978-9); 22 (1979-80); and 23 (1980-1). [Quarterly column in The University of Pennsylvania Museum Magazine of Archaeology/Anthropology.] 1978 MB and John Collis, ‘A New Type of 9th- and 10th-century Pottery from Winchester’, Medieval Archaeology, 22, pp. 133-5. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, T.J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1977’, Anglo-Saxon England, 7, pp. 267-303. 1979 (ed.) The Roman Cemetery at Lankhills, by Giles Clarke et al., edited by MB, Winchester Studies 3.ii, Pre-Roman and Roman Winchester (Oxford: Clarendon Press). St. Albans Abbey Chapter House Excavations 1978, Fraternity of the Friends of Saint Albans Abbey Occasional Paper 1 (St Albans: Fraternity of Friends of St. Albans Abbey). Carl T. Berkhout, MB, T.J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1978’, Anglo-Saxon England, 8, pp. 335-76. 1980 ‘The Experience of the Past: Archeology and History in Conservation and Development’, in Conservation as Cultural Survival: Proceedings of the Seminar ‘Architectural Transformations in the Islamic World’, Istanbul, 1978, ed. Renata Holod (Philadelphia: Aga Khan Award for Architecture), pp. 9-14. MB and BK-B, ‘England's Premier Abbey: the Medieval Chapter House of St. Alban's Abbey, and its Excavation in 1978’, Expedition (The University Museum Magazine, University of Pennsylvania), 22, no. 2, pp. 17-32. xiv

MB and E. K. Ralph, ‘Radiocarbon Dates from Akrotiri: Problems and a Strategy’, in Thera and the Aegean World, ed. C. Doumas, II, Papers and Proceedings of the Second International Scientific Congress (London), pp. 247-52. 1981 MB and BK-B, ‘England's Premier Abbey: the Medieval Chapter House of St. Alban's Abbey, and its Excavation in 1978’, Hertfordshire’s Past, 11, pp. 2-37. MB and BK-B, ‘The Wall Plaster on the East Wall of the Present Nave’, in Richard Gem and Pamela Tudor-Craig, ‘A “Winchester School” Wall-painting at Nether Wallop, Hampshire’, Anglo-Saxon England, 9, pp. 115-36, at 135-6. ‘Capital at Winchester’, in The Vikings in England, ed. Else Roesdahl et al. (London: The Anglo-Danish Viking Project), pp. 165-70. [Exhibition catalogue.] MB and BK-B, ‘Model of Winchester’s Old Minster in the Time of Cnut the Great’, in ibid., p. 170. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, T.J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1979’, Anglo-Saxon England, 9, pp. 281-318. 1982 H.M. Colvin, John Summerson, MB, J.R. Hale and Marcus Merriman, The History of the King’s Works, vol. IV, pt. 2, 1485-1660 (London: H.M.S.O.). MB and BK-B, ‘St Albans Abbey’, Bulletin of the CBA Churches Committee, 17, pp. 7-9. ‘Vers une Archéologie Urbaine au Service de la Société’, in Archéologie Urbaine. Actes du Colloque de Tours 1980 (Paris: Association pour les Fouilles Archéologiques Nationales), pp. 47-53. MB and BK-B, ‘The Repton Project, Ninth Season, 2-29 August 1982’ (Oxford: privately circulated). MB and BK-B, ‘Excavations in the Cloister of St. Albans Abbey, First Season, 14 June to 25 July 1982’ (privately circulated). ‘Spending on Ancient Monuments’, letter to The Times, 20 February 1982 (with Philip Barker and Charles Thomas). Carl T. Berkhout, MB, T. J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton, C.R.E. Coutts and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1980’, Anglo-Saxon England, 10, pp. 245-84. 1983 ‘The Study of Winchester: Archaeology and History in a British Town’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 69, pp. 93-135. MB and Beatrice Clayre, Winchester Castle and the Great Hall (Winchester: Hampshire County Council). ‘Nonsuch’ [Introduction and Entries 91-7], in The Renaissance at Sutton Place (Sutton Place: Sutton Place Heritage Trust), pp. 92-5. [Exhibition catalogue.] Carl T. Berkhout, MB, T. J. Brown, Peter A. Clayton, C. R. E. Coutts and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1981’, Anglo-Saxon England, 11, pp. 275-335. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, T. J. Brown, C.R.E. Coutts and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1982’, Anglo-Saxon England, 12, pp. 277-329. 1984 The Study of Winchester: Archaeology and History in a British Town (London: Oxford University Press for the The British Academy). [Reprinted from the Proceedings of the British Academy 69, 1983.] ‘Narrative Frieze’ and ‘Window Glass’ [from Winchester], in The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art 966-1066, ed. J. Backhouse et al. (London: British Museum Press), pp. 133-5. MB and BK-B, The Origins of Saint Albans Abbey: Excavations in the Cloister 1982-1983, The Fraternity of the Friends of Saint Albans Abbey Occasional Paper 2 (St Albans: Abbey Research Committee with the Friends of Saint Albans Abbey). MB and BK-B, ‘Floor Tiles’ [from the Chapter House at St. Albans Abbey], in English Romanesque Art 1066-1200, ed. G. Zarnecki et al. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain), p. 392. ‘The Stuccoes of Nonsuch’, The Burlington Magazine, 126, pp. 411-16. ‘London on The Strand’, Popular Archaeology, 6, no. 1, pp. 23-7. xv

MB and BK-B, ‘Repton 1984’, Bulletin of the CBA Churches Committee, 21, pp. 6-8. BK-B and MB, ‘St Albans Abbey’, Bulletin of the CBA Churches Committee, 21, pp. 14-16. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, C. R. E. Coutts, David Dumville and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1983’, Anglo-Saxon England, 13, pp. 269-321. ‘Dark Age London’, letter to The Times, 5 September 1984. Review of Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England, ed. Jeremy Haslam (1984), Landscape History, 6, pp. 90-2. 1985 (ed.) Survey of Medieval Winchester, by Derek Keene, edited by MB, Winchester Studies 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). MB and BK-B, ‘The Repton Stone’, Anglo-Saxon England, 14, pp. 233-92. MB, Rosemary Cramp, Milton McC. Gatch, Simon Keynes and BK-B, ‘Anglo-Saxon Architecture and Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Review’, Anglo-Saxon England, 14, pp. 293-317. ‘Farming, Trade, and Manufacture [in Britain, c. 410 to c. 1154]’, in Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland, ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 78-80. MB and BK-B, ‘Repton 1985’, Bulletin of the CBA Churches Committee, 22, pp. 1-5 Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, C.R.E. Coutts, David Dumville, Sarah Foot and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1984’, Anglo-Saxon England, 14, pp. 319-68. Review of Ian Soulsby, The Towns of Medieval Wales (Chichester: Phillimore, 1983), Antiquity, 59, pp. 62-3. 1986 ‘Seasonal Festivals and Residence: Winchester, Westminster and Gloucester in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries’, in Anglo-Norman Studies VIII. Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1985, ed. R.A. Brown (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press), pp. 51-72. ‘Archaeology, Architecture, and the Cult of Saints in Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Anglo-Saxon Church: Papers on History, Architecture and Archaeology in Honour of Dr H. M. Taylor, ed. L.A.S. Butler and R.K. Morris, CBA Research Report No. 60 (London: Council for British Archaeology), pp. 1-31. Wolvesey: The Old Bishop’s Palace, Winchester, Hampshire, English Heritage handbook, (London: Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England). MB, BK-B, J.P. Northover and Hugh Pagan, ‘A Parcel of Pennies from a Mass-burial associated with the Viking Wintering at Repton in 873-4’, in MB et al., ‘Coins of the Anglo-Saxon Period from Repton, Derbyshire’, in Anglo-Saxon Monetary History. Essays in Memory of Michael Dolley, ed. M.A.S. Blackburn (Leicester: Leicester University Press), pp. 110-32, at 110-24. MB and BK-B, ‘The Repton Coin Finds: Archaeological and Historical Significance’, in MB et al. ‘Coins of the Anglo-Saxon period from Repton, Derbyshire, II’, British Numismatic Journal, 56, pp. 16-34, at 24-32. ‘Martin Biddle’, Current Archaeology, 100, pp. 138-9. [On CA’s 100th issue.] ‘Repton’, Current Archaeology, 100, pp. 138-41. ‘St. Albans’, Current Archaeology, 101, pp. 178-83. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, C.R.E. Coutts, David Dumville, Sarah Foot and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1985’, Anglo-Saxon England, 15, pp. 205-53. 1987 ‘Early Norman Winchester’, in Domesday Studies. Papers read at the Novocentenary Conference of the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of British Geographers, Winchester, 1986, ed. J.C. Holt (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press), pp. 311-31. MB and John Blair, ‘The Hook Norton Hoard of 1848: A Viking Burial from Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia, 52, pp. 18695. MB and BK-B, ‘Repton 1986. An Interim Report’ (Oxford: privately circulated). Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, C.R.E. Coutts, David Dumville, Sarah Foot and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1986’, Anglo-Saxon England, 16, pp. 309-55.

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1988 ‘Authority and Continuity’, in First Millennium Papers: Western Europe in the First Millennium AD, ed. R.F.J. Jones et al., BAR International Series 401 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports), pp. 257-8. ‘Winchester: the Rise of an Early Capital’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain, I: Prehistoric, Roman and Early Medieval, ed. B. Ford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 194-205. MB and BK-B, ‘The So-called Roman Building at Much Wenlock’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 141, pp. 179-81. MB and BK-B, ‘An Early Medieval Floor-tile from St Frideswide’s Minster’, Oxoniensia, 53, pp. 259-63. ‘Wolsey's Bell-Tower’, Oxoniensia, 53, pp. 205-10. ‘”Oxoniensia” and the Study of Early Wine-bottles: a new example dated 1659’, Oxoniensia, 53, pp. 342-6. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, C. R. E. Coutts, David Dumville, Sarah Foot and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1987’, Anglo-Saxon England, 17, pp. 283-335. 1989 The Gresham Jerusalem Project: Recording the Tomb of Christ (The Edicule) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Preliminary Report on Phase I (London: Gresham College). ‘The Rose Reviewed: a Comedy(?) of Errors’, Antiquity, 63, pp. 753-60. ‘A City in Transition: 400-800’, in The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c. 1520, ed. Mary D. Lobel and W. H. Johns, The British Atlas of Historic Towns, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press and The Historic Towns Trust), pp. 20-9. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, Sarah Foot, Simon Keynes and Alexander Rumble, ‘Bibliography for 1988’, Anglo-Saxon England, 18, pp. 245-92. 1990 MB, with contributions by I. H. Goodall, D. A. Hinton, and 81 other authors, Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester, 2 vols, Winchester Studies 7.ii, Artefacts from Medieval Winchester (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ‘The Study of Winchester: Archaeology and History in a British Town’, in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E.G. Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 299-341. [Revised version of 1983 article in Proc. Brit. Acad.] MB and BK-B, ‘Painted Wall Plaster from the Old and New Minsters in Winchester’, in Early Medieval Wall Painting and Painted Sculpture in England: based on the Proceedings of a Symposium at the Courtauld Institute of Art, February 1985, ed. Sharon Cather, David Park and Paul Williamson, BAR British Ser. 216 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports), pp. 41-4. MB and BK-B, ‘The Dating of the New Minster Wall Painting’, in ibid., pp. 45-63. MB and BK-B, ‘Early Painted Wall Plaster from St Albans Abbey’, in ibid., pp. 73-8. C. J. Raxworthy, BK-B and MB, ‘An Archaeological Study of Frogs and Toads from the Eighth to Sixteenth Century at Repton, Derbyshire’, Herpetological Journal, 1, pp. 504-9. ‘The Tomb of Christ’, Illustrated London News, Christmas 1990, pp. 83-6 ‘Twelve Days to Ibrim’, Hertford College Magazine, 76, pp. 15-16. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, Sarah Foot, Simon Keynes and Alexander Rumble, ‘Bibliography for 1989’, Anglo-Saxon England, 19, pp. 247-88. 1991 ‘Why is the Bishop of Winchester Prelate of the Garter?’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 60, pp. 18-22. ‘Dismantling the Shrine [of St. Alban]’, The Alban Link, 35 (September 1991), pp. 4-7. ‘Jerusalem: the Tomb of Christ’, Current Archaeology, 123, pp. 107-12. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, Sarah Foot, Alexander Rumble and Simon Keynes, ‘Bibliography for 1990’, Anglo-Saxon England, 20, pp. 231-79. ‘Robin Home McCall, Joan Elizabeth McCall’, address given in Winchester Cathedral, 3 December 1991. [Privately circulated.]

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1992 MB and BK-B, ‘Repton and the Vikings’, Antiquity, 66, pp. 36-51. MB and BK-B, ‘Viking Grave from Repton’ and ‘Charnel from a Burial Mound in Repton’, Entries 352-3 in From Viking to Crusader. The Scandinavians and Europe 800-1200, ed. E. Roesdahl and D. M. Wilson (New York: Rizzoli), pp. 318-19. [22nd Council of Europe Exhibition, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen.] MB, M.A.R. Cooper and S. Robson, ‘The Tomb of Christ, Jerusalem: A Photogrammetric Survey’, Photogrammetric Record, 14 (79) (April 1992), pp. 25-43. ‘St Albans: Who was Buried in the Tomb of St Alban?’, Current Archaeology, 130, pp. 412-13. ‘Restoring the Shrine [of St. Alban]’, The Alban Link, 37 (September 1992), pp. 7-13. MB and BK-B, ‘Excavation [of the Chapter House of St. Alban's Abbey]’, in Lasting Letters, ed. R. McKitterick and L. Lopes Cardozo (Cambridge: Cardozo Kindersley), pp. 15-32, 94. ‘An Eye for Archaeology’, in David Astor. Tributes by Friends and Colleagues on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, ed. Anthony Sampson (privately printed), pp. 23-4. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, Sarah Foot, Simon Keynes and Alexander Rumble, ‘Bibliography for 1991’, Anglo-Saxon England, 21, pp. 265-315. 1993 ‘Early Renaissance at Winchester’, in Winchester Cathedral. Nine Hundred Years, 1093-1993, ed. John Crook (Chichester: Phillimore), pp. 257-304. ‘The Repton Arch and the Tithe Barn’, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal, 113, pp. 61-8. ‘The Shrine [of St. Alban] Restored’, The Alban Link, 39 (September 1993), pp. 13-20. Carl T. Berkhout, MB, Mark Blackburn, Sarah Foot, Simon Keynes and Alexander Rumble, ‘Bibliography for 1992’, Anglo-Saxon England, 22, pp. 281-325. 1994 What Future for British Archaeology?, Oxbow Lecture 1 (Oxford: Oxbow). [The opening address at the 8th annual conference of the Institute of Field Archaeologists, Bradford, 13-15 April 1994.] ‘The Tomb of Christ: Sources, Methods and a New Approach’, in Churches Built in Ancient Times, Society of Antiquaries Occasional Paper 16, ed. K. Painter (London: Society of Antiquaries of London), pp. 73-147. ‘Rupert Bruce-Mitford’, The Times, 23 March 1994. [Unsigned obituary; reprinted Hertford College Magazine, 80, pp. 89-90.] ‘Rupert Bruce-Mitford, 1914-1994’, Medieval Ceramics, 21, pp. 119-22. [Memorial address given at St. George’s, Bloomsbury, Tuesday, 14 June, 1994.] ‘Why Hoxne Hoard Must Stay Intact’, letter to The Times, 13 January 1994. ‘Challenging the Normal Presumption’, British Archaeological News [Council for British Archaeology], n.s. 11 (March 1994), p. 9. MB and BK-B, ‘Digging alongside the Nave [of St Albans Abbey]’, The Alban Link, 41 (September 1994), pp. 1517. ‘Can We Expect Museums to Cope? Curatorship and the Archaeological Explosion’, in Museum Archaeology in Europe. Proceedings of a Conference held at the British Museum 15-17 October 1992, ed. David Gaimster, Museum Archaeologist 19 (Oxford: Oxbow Monograph 39), pp. 167-71. 1995 MB and BK-B, ‘The Excavated Sculptures from Winchester’ and ‘Catalogue [of the Anglo-Saxon Carved stones from Old Minster, New Minster, and Lower Brook Street, Winchester]’, in Dominic Tweddle, MB and BK-B, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, IV: South-East England, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, pp. 96-107, 273-327, 330-3, 337-40. MB and BK-B, ‘Alban and St. Albans: the Quest for England's Premier Saint. Digging alongside the Nave in 1994’, The Alban Link, 43, pp. 10-19. ‘Medieval Archaeology in England’, Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters, Beiheft, 9, pp. 105-16. ‘Foreword’ to Excavations at York Minster, vol. 1: From Roman fortress to Norman cathedral, ed. Derek Phillips and Brenda Heywood (London: H.M.S.O.). xviii

‘Harold Taylor’, The Times, 1 November 1995. [Unsigned obituary.] 1996 ‘Bellin, Nicholas’, ‘Haschenperg, Stefan von’, ‘John of Padua’, ‘Nonsuch Palace, 1. Buildings’, ‘Nonsuch Palace, 2. Gardens’, ‘St Albans, History and Urban Development, (ii) Later Development’, ‘Winchester, History and Urban Development’, in The Dictionary of Art (London: Macmillan), vol. 3, p. 646; vol. 14, pp. 211-12; vol. 17, p. 612; vol. 23, pp. 197-8, 198-9; vol. 27, pp. 526-7; and vol. 33, pp. 229-32. MB and BK-B, ‘Winchester, Cathedral Architecture, (i) Anglo-Saxon’, in The Dictionary of Art (London: Macmillan), vol. 33, pp. 233-5. ‘La Tomba di Cristo’, in Dalla Terra alle Genti. La Diffusione del Cristianesimo nei Primi Secoli, ed. Angela Donati (Milan: Electa), pp. 143-9, 324-31. [Catalogue of an exhibition at Rimini.] MB and BK-B, ‘The Quest for Alban Continued: Excavations South of the Abbey, 1995’, The Alban Link, 45, pp. 10-22. ‘The Records of the British Mandatory Government of Palestine 1920-1948: a Question of Location’ (Oxford: privately circulated). 1997 R.P. Evershed, P.F. van Bergen, T.M. Peakman, E.C. Leigh-Firbank, M.C. Horton, D. Edwards, MB, BK-B and P.A. Rowley-Conwy, ‘Archaeological Frankincense’, Nature, 390, pp. 667-8. ‘Winchester’, in Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn., ed. E.A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 1752-3. Review of Church Archaeology. Research Directions for the Future, ed. John Blair and Carol Pyrah (London, CBA Research Report 104, 1996), Church Building, 46 (July-August 1997), pp. 70-1. ‘His Castle was his Home’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 4927 (5 September 1997), p. 13. [Review of Tom McNeill, Castles in Ireland. Feudal Power in a Gaelic World (London and New York, 1997).] 1998 Das Grab Christi: Neutestamentliche Quellen, Historische und archäologische Forschungen, Überaschende Erkenntnisse, Giessen-Basel: Brunnen Verlag. ‘The Tomb of Christ: A New Investigation of its Structural Evolution’, in Acta XIII Congressus Internationalis Archaeologiae Christianae, Split-Porec, 25.9-1.10.1994 (Split: Arheoloski Muzej; Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana), part 1, pp. 427-45. Review of Jerry Sampson, Wells Cathedral West Front: Construction, Sculpture and Conservation (Stroud, 1998), Church Building, 53 (September-October 1998), pp. 21-2. 1999 The Tomb of Christ (Stroud: Sutton Publishing). ‘The Tomb of Christ’, Ariel: The Israel Review of Arts and Letters, 109, pp. 17-31. [Also in Arabic, French, German, Spanish, and Russian.] ‘The Tomb of Christ’, Church Building, 55 (January-February 1999), pp. 17-19; and 56 (March-April 1999), pp. 1718. ‘The Gardens of Nonsuch: Sources and Dating’, Garden History, 27, no. 1, pp. 145-83. MB and BK-B, ‘Repton’, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge et al.(Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 390-2. ‘But Who Was He?’, review of Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo. Burial Ground of Kings? (London, 1998) and Richard Underwood, Anglo-Saxon Weapons and Warfare (Stroud, 1999), Times Literary Supplement, 2 July 1999, p. 7. 2000 MB and 17 other authors, King Arthur’s Round Table. An Archaeological Investigation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press). [Paperback edn., 2009.] Gideon Avni, Jon Seligman, MB and Tamar Winter, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (New York: Rizzoli, in xix

cooperation with Israel Antiquities Authority). [Photographs by Michèl Zabé and Garo Nalbandian.] MB, Gideon Avni, Jon Seligmann, Tamar Winter, Die Grabeskirche in Jerusalem. Zeugnisse aus 2000 Jahren (Stuttgart: Belser). Il Mistero della Tomba di Cristo (Rome: Newton and Compton). MB and Beatrice Clayre, Winchester Castle, The Great Hall and Round Table (Winchester: Hampshire County Council). 2001 MB, Jonathan Hiller, Ian Scott and Anthony Streeten, Henry VIII's Coastal Artillery Fort at Camber Castle, Rye, East Sussex: An Archaeological, Structural and Historical Investigation (Oxford: Oxford Archaeological Unit, for English Heritage). MB and BK-B, ‘Repton and the ‘Great Heathen Army’, 873-874’, in Vikings and the Danelaw. Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21-30 August 1997, ed. J. GrahamCampbell et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books), pp. 45-96. MB and BK-B, ‘The Origins of St Albans Abbey: Romano-British Cemetery and Anglo-Saxon Monastery’, in Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology, ed. M. Henig and P. Lindley, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 24 (Leeds: Maney), pp. 45-77. ‘Remembering St Alban: the Site of the Shrine and the Discovery of the Twelfth-century Purbeck Marble Shrine Table’, ibid., pp. 124-61. ‘Franks and Crusaders in Palestine and the Lebanon’, Antiquity, 75, pp. 635-9. [Review of Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge 1992 and 1998); Denys Pringle, Secular Buildings in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: an Archaeological Gazetteer (Cambridge 1997); and Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge 1998)]. ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’, BBC History Magazine, 2 (2001). ‘A Taste of Bodley’, Oxford Magazine, 196 (Eighth week, Michaelmas Term 2001), pp. 1-4. 2002 (ed.) Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester. Documents Relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman City and its Minsters, by Alexander R. Rumble; edited by MB: Winchester Studies 4.iii, The AngloSaxon Minsters of Winchester (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ‘Leo Biek’, The Times, 8 February 2002. [Unsigned obituary, with Justine Bayley.] 2003 (ed.) The Cult of St Swithun, by Michael Lapidge et al.; edited by MB: Winchester Studies 4.ii, The Anglo-Saxon Minsters of Winchester (Oxford: Clarendon Press) ‘John Hurst’, The Times, 15 May 2003. [Unsigned obituary.] 2004 ‘Winchester’, in Ancient Europe 8000 B.C. - A.D. 1000: Encyclopedia of the Barbarian World, ed. Peter Bogucki and Pam J. Crabtree (Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons), II, pp. 501-7. ‘Alban’ and ‘R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford’, entries in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol. 1, pp. 564-7; and vol. 38, pp. 459-60. 2005 Nonsuch Palace, vol. 2: The Material Culture of a Noble Restoration Household, (Oxford: Oxbow). MB and Derek Keene, Winchester: Cathedral City and County Town of Hampshire, about 1800, showing Major Late Medieval Buildings and Other Features (Winchester [?]: Historic Towns Trust; Winchester Excavations Committee). [Map, scale 1:2500, compiled for Winchester Studies 11 and Historic Towns Atlas IV; cartography by Lovell Johns.] M.T.P. Gilbert, L. Rudbeck, E. Willerslev, A.J. Hansen, C. Smith, K.E.H. Penkman, K.Prangenberg, C.M. NielsenMarsh, M.E. Jans, P. Arthur, N. Lynnerup, G. Turner-Walker, MB, BK-B and M.J. Collins, ‘Biochemical and xx

Physical Correlates of DNA Contamination in Archeological Human Bones and Teeth Excavated at Matera, Italy’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 32 (5), pp. 785-93. ‘Martin Biddle’, Current Archaeology, 200, pp. 442-3. [On CA’s 200th issue.] ‘Holy Sepulchre’, in Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. E.A. Livingstone, 3rd edn, revised (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 787. Review of M. Davies and A. Saunders, The History of the Merchant Taylors’ Company (Leeds, Maney, 2004), Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 158, pp. 108-9. ‘Reichstag, Kroll Opera House, Berlin, March 23, 1933’, letter to The Daily Telegraph, 23 February 2005. ‘William Frend’, ‘Lives Remembered’, The Times, September 2005. 2006 ‘Æthelwold’s Abbeys in Abingdon and Winchester’, Aspects of Abingdon's Past, 3, pp. 3-16. ‘June (Stranack) Lloyd 1928-2005’, Winchester Archaeological Rescue Group Newsletter, Spring 2006, pp. 3-6. [Memorial address, 22 December 2005.] 2007 MB and BK-B, ‘Winchester: from Venta to Wintancaestir, in Pagans and Christians – from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Papers in Honour of Martin Henig, Presented on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Lauren Gilmour, BAR International Series 1610 (Oxford: BAR Publishing), pp. 189-214. ‘Edgar’s Lost Grant of Exton, Hampshire’, in ‘Collectanea Antiqua’: Essays in Memory of Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, ed. Martin Henig and Tyler Jo Smith, BAR International Series 1673 (Oxford, BAR Publishing), pp. 75-9. 2008 MB and BK-B, ‘Alban’, in St Albans Cathedral and Abbey, ed. Ailsa Herbert, Pam Martin and Gail Thomas (London: Scala Publishers), pp. 11-31. Review of J. Munby, R. Barber, R. Brown (and T. Tatton-Brown), Edward III’s Round Table at Windsor. The House of the Round Table and the Windsor Festival of 1344 (Woodridge, Boydell Press, 2007), Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 161, pp. 189-90. ‘Recollections of a Student Archaeologist’, Pembroke College Cambridge Society Annual Gazette, 82, pp. 51-5. ‘Palestine’s Lost Records’, letter to The Daily Telegraph, 14 May 2008. 2009 ‘Origin of the Antiquity of Man’, letter to The Times, 2 June 2009 (with Brian Fagan) [with a facsimile of their letter of 27 May 1959]. ‘Lawrence Barfield, 1935-2009. Lawrence: The Making of an Archaeologist’, Antiquity online edition, obituary http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/memoriam/memoriam.html (accessed July 2009). ‘Paul Ashbee’, Lives Remembered, The Times, 7 October 2009. In press MB and BK-B, ‘Danske Kongegrave i Winchester: Knud den Store og Hans Familie’, in Danske Kongegrave, ed. Karin Kryger (Copenhagen: Selskabet til Udgivelse af danske Mindesmærker [in press]). ‘Saint-Sépulcre’, in Dictionnaire Européen des ordres militaires au Moyen Age (Paris, [in press]). ‘“Making of moldes for the walles”, The Stuccoes of Nonsuch: Materials, Methods, and Origins’, in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, ed. Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin, 2010 [in press]). ‘Nonsuch: Henry VIII’s speculum principis’, in Henrici-Medici: Artistic Links between the Early Tudor Courts and Medicean Florence, ed. Cinzia Maria Sicca and Lou Waldman,Yale Studies in British Art 22 (London and New Haven, [in press]). BK-B and MB, The Anglo-Saxon Minsters of Winchester, Winchester Studies 4.i (Oxford [forthcoming]).

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List of Publications by Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle 1965 ‘Et Lerkarfund fra Stenalderen’, Als og Sundeved, 44, pp. 5-11. 1967 MB and BK-B, ‘Some New Ideas on Excavation’, Research Seminar on Archaeology and Related Subjects (15 December 1967) (London: Institute of Archaeology, University of London). 1969 MB and BK-B, ‘Metres, Areas and Robbing’, World Archaeology, 1, no. 2, pp. 208-19. 1973 MB and BK-B, Winchester Saxon and Norman Art: The Artistic Achievement of an Early Medieval Capital A.D. 9001150 - A Revised Exhibition, Winchester Cathedral Treasury, 26 May-30 Sept. 1973 (Winchester: Winchester Cathedral Treasury). 1975 ‘A Cathedral Cemetery: Problems in Excavation and Interpretation’, World Archaeology, 7, no. 1, pp. 87-108. BK-B and R.I. Page, ‘A Scandinavian Rune-stone from Winchester’, Antiquaries Journal, 55, pp. 389-94. 1976 MB, BK-B and H.M. Taylor, ‘Investigations at St Wystan’s Church 1976’, Repton Parish Magazine, 26, no. 11, pp. 2 ff. 1979 J.R. Collis and BK-B, ‘Early Medieval Bone Spoons from Winchester’, Antiquaries Journal, 59 (1979), pp. 375-91.

1980 MB and BK-B, ‘England’s Premier Abbey: The Medieval Chapter House of St. Alban’s Abbey, and its Excavation in 1978’, Expedition (The University Museum Magazine, University of Pennsylvania), 22, no. 2, pp. 17-32. 1981 MB and BK-B, ‘England’s Premier Abbey: The Medieval Chapter House of St. Alban's Abbey, and its Excavation in 1978’, Hertfordshire’s Past, 11, pp. 2-37. [Revised version of the Expedition article above.] MB and BK-B, ‘The Wall Plaster on the East Wall of the Present Nave’, in Richard Gem and Pamela Tudor-Craig, ‘A “Winchester School” Wall-painting at Nether Wallop, Hampshire’, Anglo-Saxon England, 9, pp. 115-36, at 135-6. MB and BK-B, ‘Model of Winchester’s Old Minster in the time of Cnut the Great’, in The Vikings in England, ed. Else Roesdahl et al. (London: The Anglo-Danish Viking Project), p. 170. [Exhibition catalogue.] 1982 MB and BK-B, ‘St Albans Abbey’, Bulletin of the CBA Churches Committee, 17, pp. 7-9. MB and BK-B, ‘The Repton Project: Ninth Season, 2-29 August 1982’ (Oxford: privately circulated). xxii

MB and BK-B, ‘Excavations in the Cloister of St. Albans Abbey, First Season, 14 June to 25 July 1982’ (privately circulated). 1984 ‘The Winchester “Weather-vane” Reconsidered’, Hikuin, 10, pp. 307-14. [Memorial issue for Ole Klindt-Jensen.] MB and BK-B, The Origins of Saint Albans Abbey: Excavations in the Cloister 1982-1983, The Fraternity of the Friends of Saint Albans Abbey Occasional Paper 2 (St Albans: Abbey Research Committee with the Friends of Saint Albans Abbey). MB and BK-B, ‘Floor Tiles’ [from the Chapter House at St. Albans Abbey], in English Romanesque Art 1066-1200, ed. George Zarnecki et al. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain), p. 392. BK-B and MB, ‘St Albans Abbey’, Bulletin of the CBA Churches Committee, 21, pp. 14-16. MB and BK-B, ‘Repton 1984’, Bulletin of the CBA Churches Committee, 21, pp. 6-8. ‘The Brighton Conference: A Feeling of Unease’, Rescue News, 36 (Autumn 1984), p. 2. 1985 MB and BK-B, ‘The Repton Stone’, Anglo-Saxon England, 14, pp. 233-92. MB, Rosemary Cramp, Milton McC. Gatch, Simon Keynes and BK-B, ‘Anglo-Saxon Architecture and Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Review’, Anglo-Saxon England, 14, pp. 293-317. MB and BK-B, ‘Repton 1985’, Bulletin of the CBA Churches Committee, 22, pp. 1-5. 1986 ‘The Seventh-Century Minster Church at Winchester Interpreted’, in The Anglo-Saxon Church. Papers on History, Architecture and Archaeology in Honour of Dr H.M. Taylor, ed. L.A.S. Butler and R.K. Morris, CBA Research Report No. 60 (London: Council for British Archaeology), pp. 196-209. MB and BK-B, ‘The Repton Mound and the Discovery of the Coins’, in MB, BK-B, J. P. Northover and Hugh Pagan, ‘A Parcel of Pennies from a Mass-Burial associated with the Viking Wintering at Repton in 873-4’, pp. 110-24, at pp. 111-15, in MB et al., ‘Coins of the Anglo-Saxon Period from Repton, Derbyshire’, in AngloSaxon Monetary History. Essays in Memory of Michael Dolley, ed. M.A.S. Blackburn (Leicester: Leicester University Press), pp. 110-32. MB and BK-B, ‘The Repton Coin Finds: Archaeological and Historical Significance, in MB et al., ‘Coins of the Anglo-Saxon Period from Repton, Derbyshire, II’, British Numismatic Journal, 56 (1986), pp. 16-34, at 24-32. 1987 MB and BK-B, ‘Repton 1986. An Interim Report’ (Oxford: privately circulated). 1988 MB and BK-B, ‘The So-called Roman Building at Much Wenlock’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 141, pp. 179-81. MB and BK-B, ‘An Early Medieval Floor-tile from St Frideswide’s Minster’, Oxoniensia, 53, pp. 259-63. 1990 MB and BK-B, ‘Painted Wall Plaster from the Old and New Minsters in Winchester’, in Early Medieval Wall Painting and Painted Sculpture in England: based on the Proceedings of a Symposium at the Courtauld Institute of Art, February 1985, ed. Sharon Cather, David Park and Paul Williamson, BAR British Ser. 216 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports), pp. 41-4. MB and BK-B, ‘The Dating of the New Minster Wall Painting’, in ibid., pp. 45-63. MB and BK-B, ‘Early Painted Wall Plaster from St Albans Abbey’, in ibid., pp. 73-8. C. J. Raxworthy, BK-B and MB, ‘An Archaeological Study of Frogs and Toads from the Eighth to Sixteenth Century at Repton, Derbyshire’, Herpetological Journal, 1, pp. 504-9.

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1992 ‘Dispersal or Concentration: the Disposal of the Winchester Dead over 2000 years’, in Death in Towns. Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100-1600, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester: Leicester University Press), pp. 210-47. MB and BK-B, ‘Repton and the Vikings’, Antiquity, 66, pp. 36-51. MB and BK-B, ‘Viking Grave from Repton’ and ‘Charnel from a Burial Mound in Repton’, Entries 352-3 in From Viking to Crusader. The Scandinavians and Europe 800-1200, ed. E. Roesdahl and D. M. Wilson (New York: Rizzoli), pp. 318-19. [22nd Council of Europe Exhibition, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen.] MB and BK-B, ‘Excavation [of the Chapter House of St Alban’s Abbey]’, in Lasting Letters, ed. R. McKitterick and L. Lopes Cardozo (Cambridge: Cardozo Kindersley), pp. 15-32, 94. 1993 ‘Old Minster, St. Swithun’s Day 1093’, in Winchester Cathedral. Nine Hundred Years, 1093-1993, ed. John Crook (Chichester: Phillimore), pp. 13-20. 1994 ‘The Small Early Church in Nubia, with reference to the Church on the Point at Qasr Ibrim’, in ‘Churches Built in Ancient Times’. Early Christian Archaeology in Britain and Ireland and in the East Mediterranean, ed. Kenneth Painter, Society of Antiquaries Occasional Papers no. 16 (London: Society of Antiquaries), pp. 17-47. ‘Radiocarbon Dates from Winchester, Lower Brook Street, Hampshire: An Analytical Investigation’, MS prepared for English Heritage, for Radiocarbon Dates from Samples Funded by English Heritage and Dated Before 1981, ed. D. Jordan et al. (London: English Heritage), partly printed [without acknowledgement] at pp. 212-32. MB and BK-B, ‘Digging alongside the Nave [of St Albans Abbey]’, The Alban Link, 41 (September 1994), pp. 1517. 1995 MB and BK-B, ‘The Excavated Sculptures from Winchester’ and ‘Catalogue [of the Anglo-Saxon Carved stones from Old Minster, New Minster, and Lower Brook Street, Winchester]’, in Dominic Tweddle, MB and BK-B, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, IV: South-East England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy), pp. 96-107, 273-327, 330-3, 337-40. ‘Anglo-Saxon Baluster Shafts from St Albans Abbey’, in ibid., pp. 236-40. ‘Iron-bound Coffins and Coffin-fittings from the Pre-Norman Cemetery’, in Excavations at York Minster, vol. 1: From Roman Fortress to Norman Cathedral, ed. Derek Phillips and Brenda Heywood (London: H.M.S.O.), pp. 489-521. MB and BK-B, ‘Alban and St. Albans: the Quest for England’s Premier Saint. Digging alongside the Nave in 1994’, The Alban Link, 43, pp. 10-19. 1996 MB and BK-B, ‘Winchester, Cathedral Architecture, (i) Anglo-Saxon’, in The Dictionary of Art (London: Macmillan), vol. 33, pp. 233-5. MB and BK-B, ‘The Quest for Alban Continued: Excavations South of the Abbey, 1995’, The Alban Link, 45, pp. 10-22. 1997 R.P. Evershed, P.F. van Bergen, T.M. Peakman, E.C. Leigh-Firbank, M.C. Horton, D. Edwards, MB, BK-B and P.A. Rowley-Conwy, ‘Archaeological Frankincense’, Nature, 390, pp. 667-8. ‘Two Anglo-Saxon Relief-decorated Floor Tiles’, in Canterbury Cathedral Nave: Archaeology, History, and Architecture, ed. K. Blockley et al., The Archaeology of Canterbury, new series, 1 (Canterbury: Canterbury Archaeological Trust), pp. 196-200.

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1998 ‘Anglo-Saxon Baptisteries of the 7th and 8th Centuries: Winchester and Repton’, in Acta XIII Congressus Internationalis Archaeologiae Christianae, Split-Porec 25.9-1.10.1994 (Split: Arheoloski Muzej; Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana), part 2, pp. 757-78. Review of A. Boddington et al., Raunds Furnells. The Anglo-Saxon Church and Churchyard, English Heritage Archaeological Report 7 (1996), Medieval Archaeology, 42, pp. 196-8. 1999 BK-B and MB, ‘Repton’, in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge et al. (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 390-2. 2001 ‘The Alban Cross’, in Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology, ed. Martin Henig and Phillip Lindley, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 24 (Leeds: Maney), pp. 85110. MB and BK-B, ‘The Origins of St Albans Abbey: Romano-British Cemetery and Anglo-Saxon Monastery’, in ibid., pp. 45-77. MB and BK-B, ‘Repton and the ‘Great Heathen Army’, 873-874’, in Vikings and the Danelaw. Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21-30 August 1997, ed. J. GrahamCampbell et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books), pp. 45-96. 2005 M.T.P. Gilbert, L. Rudbeck, E. Willerslev, A.J. Hansen, C. Smith, K.E.H. Penkman, K. Prangenberg, C.M. Nielsen-Marsh, M.E. Jans, P. Arthur, N. Lynnerup, G. Turner-Walker, MB, BK-B and M.J. Collins, ‘Biochemical and Physical Correlates of DNA Contamination in Archeological Human Bones and Teeth excavated at Matera, Italy’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 32 (5), pp. 785-793. 2007 MB and BK-B, ‘Winchester: From Venta to Wintancaestir’, in Pagans and Christians – from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Papers in Honour of Martin Henig, Presented on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Lauren Gilmour, BAR International Series 1610 (Oxford: BAR Publishing), pp. 189-214. 2008 MB and BK-B, ‘Alban’, in St Albans Cathedral and Abbey, ed. Ailsa Herbert, Pam Martin, and Gail Thomas (London: Scala Publishers), pp. 11-31.

In press MB and BK-B, ‘Danske Kongegrave i Winchester: Knud den Store og Hans Familie’, in Danske Kongegrave, ed. Karin Kryger (Copenhagen: Selskabet til Udgivelse af danske Mindesmærker [in press]). BK-B and MB, The Anglo-Saxon Minsters of Winchester, Winchester Studies 4.i, (Oxford [forthcoming]).

Awaiting publication ‘Cuddington Church’, to appear in Nonsuch Palace 1: The Architecture ‘The Parish Churches of St Mary in Tanner Street and St Pancras in Middle Brook Street’, to appear in The Brooks and Other Town Sites of Medieval Winchester, Winchester Studies 5. ‘The Excavated Sculptures from Repton’ and ‘Catalogue [of the Anglo-Saxon Carved stones from Repton]’, in MB, xxv

BK-B, Jane Hawkes and Philip Sidebotham, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture,VIII: Derbyshire and Shropshire (Oxford for the British Academy).

In preparation Investigations at Repton, I-III (with MB and others) The Chapter House of St. Albans Abbey (with MB) The Church on the Point at Qasr Ibrim, Egypt Exploration Society (with MB)

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A Roman Silver Jug with Biblical Scenes from the Treasure found at Traprain Law1 Kenneth Painter

Discovery

Description

In 1919 a hoard of 152 pieces of Roman silver was found at Traprain Law, the hill-fort generally seen as one of the central sites of the Votadini, about twenty miles east of modern Edinburgh.2 The silver included belt-fittings, jewellery and coins, while the remaining 140 items were plate, most of which had had been cut into fragments. Some of the ornaments and military belt-fittings show that the hoard was deposited about the middle of the fifth century.3 The fact that it was possible to reconstruct some of the vessels showed that the fragments had not been widely dispersed or passed from hand to hand in the course of trade or as gifts and therefore that the silver was deposited not long after the plate had been hacked to pieces. Of the reconstructed vessels one of the most remarkable is a partially gilt silver jug, decorated with scenes from the Old and New Testaments (Fig. 1a-h).4

The restored jug is 21.6 cm. high, its greatest diameter is about 7.6 cm., and it was made by raising and by decorating in repoussé. When found, the jug was in three pieces, the neck and mouth torn from the rest and folded up, the body cut into two equal parts and crushed flat.5 Part of the rim was missing. The metal below the rim had entirely corroded away. It was restored and other gaps were similarly made good with pieces of plain metal. The relief, in repoussé, was partially crushed. There are numerous cracks and missing pieces. Parts of the sides and upper half of the neck are restored with smooth sheets of silver-plated tin. The gilding was lost during restoration; but Curle reported that an accurate note had been made of its incidence and that it was restored accordingly.6 The jug has a circular mouth, a rim rising at right-angles to the mouth and forming a small, vertical, upright edge, and a

1

Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle have made a major contribution to the history and archaeology of religion in Britain and abroad. It is a great pleasure to be able to thank them for their outstanding scholarship and their greatly valued friendship with this small study of an aspect of Christianity in Roman Britain. 2 A.O. Curle, The Treasure of Traprain. A Scottish Hoard of Roman Silver Plate (Glasgow, 1923); T. Rees and F. Hunter, ‘Archaeological Excavation of a Medieval Structure and an Assemblage of Prehistoric Artefacts from the Summit of Traprain Law, East Lothian, 1996-7’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 130 (2000), pp. 413-40; M. Erdrich, K. Giancotta and W. Hanson, ‘Traprain Law: Native and Roman on the Northern Frontier’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 130 (2000), pp. 441-56. 3 The objects, all silver, are two buckles and two strap ends (Curle, Traprain, pp. 86-90, nos. 146-7, 149-50; K.S. Painter, ‘The Traprain Law Treasure’, in Constantine the Great, York’s Roman Emperor, ed. E. Hartley, J. Hawkes and M. Henig, with F. Mee (York, 2006), pp. 229-46, nos. 196-222, and esp. pp. 244-5, nos. 256-62. The dating evidence will be discussed in detail in the forthcoming study of the whole treasure to be published by the National Museums of Scotland and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. 4 The hoard is part of the collections of the National Museums of Scotland, and the registration no. of the jug is GVA 1. The jug has a large bibliography: Curle, Traprain, pp. 13-19, nos. 1, 94-5; T. Dohrn, ‘Spätantikes Silber aus Britannien’, Mitteilungen des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, 2 (1949), pp. 66-139, esp. 100; D. Talbot Rice, Masterpieces of Byzantine Art (Edinburgh: The Edinburgh Festival Society, 1958), esp. no. 24; J.M.C. Toynbee, Art in Roman Britain (London, 1962), pp. 171-2, no. 107; J.M.C. Toynbee, Art in Britain under the Romans (London, 1964), p. 313;

L. Pirzio Biroli Stefanelli, ‘I tesori di argenteria rinvenuti in Gran Bretagna ed in Irlanda’, Archaeologia Classica, 17 (1965), pp. 92-125, 271-83, Pls. 31-43, 84-92, and esp. pp. 100, 102, 112; D.E. Strong, Greek and Roman Gold and Silver Plate (London, 1966), pp. 182-6, Pl. 35A; J. Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 22, Fig. 41; J.P.C. Kent and K.S. Painter, Wealth of the Roman World, AD 300-700 (London, 1977), p.123, no. 193; L. Kötzsche, ‘Flagon with Scenes from the Old and New Testaments’, in Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century, ed. K. Weitzmann (New York, 1979), pp. 431-3, no. 389; D. Stutzinger, ‘Silberkanne’, in Spätantike und frühes Christentum, ed. H. Beck and P.C. Bol (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), pp. 665-6, no. 241; F. Baratte, La vaisselle d’argent en Gaule dans l’antiquité tardive (Paris, 1993), p. 79; M. Mundell Mango, ‘Silver-gilt Ewer from Traprain Law’, in Byzantium. Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections, ed. D. Buckton (London, 1994), p. 51, no. 35; M.P. del Moro, ‘Brocca con scene bibliche’, in S. Ensoli and E. La Rocca, Aurea Roma: dalla città pagana alla città cristiana (Rome, 2000), pp. 614-15, no. 316. The iconography of the jug is also the subject of a thorough new analysis by Prof. Dr Josef Engemann, to be published as part of the current research project on the Traprain Law treasure by the National Museums of Scotland and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Prof. Engemann’s conclusions will undoubtedly make redundant much of the interpretation adopted in this paper. 5 Curle, Traprain, Pl. VII, facing p. 18. 6 Ibid., p. 18.

1

KENNETH PAINTER

1a

1b

1d

1c

1e

2

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW

1f

1g

1h

Fig. 1a-h Silver jug, decorated with repoussé scenes from the Old and New Testaments, from the treasure of Hacksilber found at Traprain Law, east of Edinburgh, Scotland. Late 4th or early 5th century AD. Ht. 21.6 cm. Diam. c. 7.6 cm. National Museums of Scotland, GVA 1. a Adam and Eve in Paradise next to the tree with the serpent; b A miracle by Moses, possibly that of the quails in the desert (deduced from the downward gaze of the figures); c Mary and the Christ-Child, facing right, towards the Magi.; d The Magi, advancing left, towards the Christ child; e Moses at right, facing left, striking water from the rock of Horeb for the Israelites, who are shown at a smaller scale; f Drawing of the upper panel of figured decoration showing sheep in the countryside; g Drawing of the panel of decoration round the centre of the jug, showing the biblical scenes; 1h Drawing of the rosette on the underside of the base of the jug. 1f-1h: after Curle, Treasure of Traprain, pp. 15, 17, Figs. 2-4.

3

KENNETH PAINTER slim neck, encircled by a knop in the form of laurel leaves. The neck expands smoothly to a globular, pear-shaped body, and the integral base rests on a series of large beads hammered out from within, while on the underside of the base is a quatrefoil within three concentric circles, in the middle of which is a cruciform rosette.

fourth and early fifth centuries, however, reasonably well dated hoards show that there was a renewed interest in using silver for jugs. In the treasure from the Esquiline Hill in Rome, for example, there are two jugs, and in the Seuso treasure (probably from the Balkans) there are at least five.10 The Traprain Law jug belongs to the type of the fourth and early-fifth century, which includes jugs from Water Newton (England) (Fig. 2a), Trier (Germany), Aquincum (Hungary), Taraneš (Macedonia), Daphne (Syria), and Bol’shoi Kamenets (Dnieper basin, Russia).11 Except for the jug from Daphne, they have a knop on the neck and an integral foot, and those from Trier, Aquincum and Taraneš have a rightangled handle.12 The knop is of little help in dating these jugs, as they share this feature with the third-century jugs from Chaourse and Sisak. Right-angled handles, on the other hand, do seem to date to the fourth and early fifth centuries. The type is divided by the shapes of the bodies. The body of the one group has a marked shoulder between the neck and the ovoid body, like that of the decorated jug in the Water Newton hoard. The other group, to which jugs such as those from Traprain Law, Bol’shoi Kamenets and Seuso all belong, has a regular, globular or pear-shaped body, with its maximum diameter fairly low on the vessel (Fig. 2b).

The body is decorated in five zones of varying heights, with repoussé relief, the raised areas, except for the flesh of the figures, being gilded. From the top the decoration of each zone (discussed below) is: a. wreath of vertically pendent acanthus leaves; b. a pastoral frieze interspersed with shrubs: two sheep (possibly with a fragmentary shepherd) flanking a hut, and a pair of butting rams; c. a band of leaf and egg ornament; d. a frieze with four scriptural scenes (described and discussed below); e. a scrolling vine with bunches of grapes. Form, date and area of manufacture Is the vessel a jug or a bottle? No handle was found attached to the vessel fragments; but the small upright rim, as Curle pointed out, could have formed an area for the attachment of a handle, and a piece of silver is missing from the body at the point where the bottom of a handle would have been soldered to the body, and so the damage could have been caused by wrenching off such a handle. Further, there is in the hoard a fragment of a horizontal handle-plate, of which the curve matches that of the rim.7 The vessel is therefore likely to have had a handle, probably turning down through a right-angle, and it is interpreted here as a jug, not a bottle.

The associations of the form of the Traprain Law jug are confirmed by parallels for the non-figured decoration. As a whole, the decoration is arranged, as on many jugs of this period, on the neck and knop, and on the body, itself divided into five zones (of which two are figured), while the foot is

10

Esquiline treasure: K. Shelton, The Esquiline Treasure (London, 1981), pp. 83-4, no. 17; Seuso treasure: M. Mundell Mango and A. Bennett, The Sevso Treasure, Part One, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 12 (Ann Arbor, 1994), nos. 6, 7, 10-12. 11 Baratte, Vaisselle, p. 77. Water Newton: K.S. Painter, ‘The Water Newton Early Christian Treasure’, in Constantine the Great, ed. Hartley et al., pp. 210-22, nos. 196-222. Trier: H. Cüppers et al., Trier, Kaiserresidenz und Bischofsitz: Die Stadt in spätantiker und frühchristlicher Zeit (Mainz, 1984), p. 128, no. 40. Aquincum: A. Radnóti, Die römischen Bronzegefässe von Pannonien (Leipzig, 1938), p. 169, Pl. XLV, 1; P. La Baume, Römisches Kunstgewerbe (Braunschweig, 1964), p. 44, Fig. 35. Taraneš: M.A. Guggisberg and A. Kaufmann-Heinimann et al., Der spätrömische Silberschatz von Kaiseraugst. Die neuen Funde (Augst, 2003), p. 129, Fig. 122, with earlier bibliography. Daphne: M.C. Ross, ‘A Small Byzantine Treasure found at Daphne-Harbié’, Archaeology, 6 (1953), pp. 40-1; id., Catalogue of the Byzantine and Early Medieval Antiquities in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection I: Metalwork, Ceramics, Glass, Glyptics, Painting (Washington, D.C., 1962), p. 1, no. 1. Bol’shoi Kamenets: M. Bell, ‘Pitcher with Nine Muses’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann, pp. 261-2, no. 241; E. Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (Washington, D.C., 1961), pp. 236-7, no. 84; A. Bank, Byzantine Art in the Collections of the USSR (Leningrad and Moscow, 1966), p. 333, Pls. 2-5. 12 Baratte, Vaisselle, pp. 74-82.

Jugs are known in the hoards of silver plate of the late third and early fourth centuries from Chaourse (France; buried about 260), and from Sisak (Croatia; buried about 300).8 In general, however, the use of silver for drinking vessels, whether cups or pouring vessels, seems in the third century to have fallen out of fashion, presumably in favour of the use of glass.9 The preference for glass for drinking vessels, including cups, jugs, bottles and amphorae seems to have continued until at least the middle of the fourth century. In the later 7

Ibid., pp. 78-9, no. 121: cut into a plate and terminating in a bird’s head. 8 Chaourse: F. Baratte and K.S. Painter, Trésors d’orfèvrerie galloromains (Paris, 1989), pp. 113-14, no. 50. Sisak: E.B. Thomas, ‘Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silbergegenstände im mittleren Donaugebiet, innerhalb und ausserhalb der Grenzen des Römerreiches’, in Argenterie romaine et Byzantine: Actes de la table ronde, Paris 11-13 octobre 1983, ed. F. Baratte (Paris, 1988), pp. 13552, esp. 147, Pl. II, 4. 9 S. Martin-Kilcher, ‘Römisches Tafelsilber: Form- und Funktionsfragen’, in Der spätrömische Silberschatz von Kaiseraugst, ed. H. Cahn and A. Kaufmann-Heinimann (Derendingen, 1984), pp. 393-404, esp. 396; Baratte, Vaisselle, p. 73.

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A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW

Fig. 2b Jug with eight vertical panels, decorated in relief with twisted Dionysiac figures. From the Seuso treasure. Early 5th century AD. Ht. 43.5 cm. Drawing by Miranda Schofield. The jugs in Figs. 2a and 2b demonstrate the two main forms of jugs in the 4th and early 5th century, one with a marked shoulder and a maximum diameter about half way down the body, the other with a pear-shaped body, with its maximum diameter low on the vessel.

Fig. 2a Silver jug, originally with a handle attached to the neck and the shoulder, decorated with zones of acanthus leaves and rosettes. From the early Christian treasure found at Water Newton, Cambridgeshire. Second half of 4th century AD. Ht. 20.3 cm. Max diam. 11.6 cm.

beaded. The mouth is plain, and the knop is in the form of a laurel wreath. Laurel is common at this point, as for example on the Bol’shoi Kamenets jug; but leaves from other trees are possible, as for example the oak garlands on the Dionysiac, Animal and Hippolytus jugs in the Seuso treasure.13 The upper and lower zones on the body are filled respectively with acanthus leaves and a scrolling vine with bunches of grapes. This is simply decorative. Acanthus, sometimes done in gouged work, sometimes in relief, is used as decoration in the fourth century and later. Examples of acanthus in relief, as on the Traprain Law jug, are seen on two other late-fourthcentury jugs, one in the Water Newton treasure, and the other a lost jug formerly in the Bianchini collection (Fig. 8),

13

and on two small vases in the Hoxne treasure, deposited between 407 and 450.14 The decoration is also paralleled on a sixth-century silver hanging lamp in the Kaper Koraon treasure.15 Acanthus is found in combination with scrolling vine in the early fifth century, for example, in the Seuso treasure, the Dionysiac jug has a mixture of vine and acanthus in each zone, while the Hippolytus jug has acanthus only, 14

Water Newton jug: British Museum, reg. no. P&EE 1975.10-2.1; K.S. Painter, ‘The Water Newton Early Christian Treasure’ (cit. in n. 11), pp. 210-22, nos. 196-222, esp. 212, no. 196, with earlier bibliography. Bianchini jug: R. Garucci, Storia dell’arte Cristiana, VI (Prato, 1881), pl. 460, 9; H.H. Árnason, ‘Early Christian Silver of North Italy and Gaul’, Art Bulletin, 20 (1938), pp. 193-211, esp. 205-7, Fig. 3. Hoxne jug: R. Bland and C.M.J. Johns, The Hoxne Treasure. An Illustrated Introduction (London, 1993), p. 26. 15 M. Mundell Mango, Silver from Early Byzantium: The Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures (Baltimore 1986), pp. 155-8, no. 33.

Mundell Mango and Bennett, Sevso, pp. 240-318, 364-401.

5

KENNETH PAINTER above and below.16 The cruciform rosette on the underside of the base has parallels, not only on earlier and later vessels but also on silver and glass vessels of the later Roman period (Fig. 1b).17 There are two examples in silver. A gilded silver cup of the late third or early fourth century, from Hagenbach in Germany, has a ten-petalled rosette within a wreath of ivy,18 and the perforated base of the strainer inside the thirdcentury ‘Mithraic’ casket found in the north wall of the London Temple of Mithras, has an eight-petalled rosette at its centre.19 In glass there are at least twelve examples, as well

as one vessel in agate. A jar of the late third or early fourth century with wheel-cut and abraded decoration and the inscription Vita bona has an eight-rayed star on its base, as do two other bowls in the same technique but of the second half of the fourth century, one with dancing boys and the other with four male figures separated by columns.20 Three of the best known glasses of the late fourth or early fifth century also had rosettes. The cage-cup bucket in Venice with a hunting scene is decorated with a rosette; the base of the purple bucket with a Bacchic scene, also in Venice, has an eighteenpetalled rosette; and the Lycurgus Cup had a four-petalled rosette.21 There are six-petalled outlines on the bases of a network cup from Niederemmel, of a network bowl from Hohensülzen, and of network cups from Komini and Taraneš, all of the fourth century.22 Finally, the agate Rubens vase has a rosette of a six-petalled flower within six leaves.23

16

Mundell Mango and Bennett, Sevso, p. 240, Fig. 6-1a/b (Dionysiac jug), and p. 367, Fig. 10-5 (Hippolytus jug). 17 Such rosettes were surveyed in 2000 by Marlia Mundell Mango, who pointed out that the earliest examples are found on East Greek and Hellenistic silver: M. Mundell Mango, ‘Byzantine, Sasanian and Central Asian Silver’, in Cs. Balint, Kontakte zwischen Iran, Byzanz und der Steppe in 6.-7. Jahrhundert, Varia Archaeologica Hungarica IX (Budapest, 2000), pp. 267-84, esp. 273, and 283, Fig. 7, citing D. von Bothmer, A Greek and Roman Treasury (New York, 1984), nos. 39-43, 51, 75, 78, 79, 84, 87, and 92; to these references may be added: A. Oliver, Silver for the Gods: 800 Years of Greek and Roman Silver (Toledo, 1977), nos. 35, 40, 42 and 43. She also recorded examples later than the Roman period, both from the Mediterranean area and from the orient: Mediterranean area examples: a silver censer from Attarouthi in Syria, as well as a group of early medieval bronze censers decorated with New Testament scenes, including one from Samarkand. Oriental silver: objects ranging from the Bactrian period to the 9th century. In the earlier Roman period there is a variety of vessels with such decoration, in both silver and glass. Silver vessels: two cups from the Hockwold treasure (C.M. Johns, ‘The Roman Silver Cups from Hockwold, Norfolk’, in Archaeologia, 108 (1986), pp. 1-13, esp. 2-6, nos. 2-3, Fig. 3, Pl. 5; S. Künzl, ‘Römische Silberbecher bei den Germanen: Der Schalengriff’, in Das germanische Königsgrab von Mušov in Mähren, ed. J. Peška and J. Tejral (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 329-49, esp. 337, Fig. 5), 1st-century; a cup possibly from Turkey, 1st century BC or AD (Oliver, Silver, p. 117, no. 76); and two twohandled silver cups from the Hildesheim treasure, 1st century BC or AD (Der Hildesheimer Silberfund: Original und Nachbildung vom Römerschatz zum Bürgerstolz, ed. M. Boetzkes and H. Stein, with C. Weisker (Gerstenberg, 1997), pp. 40-1, nos. 5 and 6). There is also a gold cup from Azov in the Russian Federation (M. Vickers, ‘Roman Faceted Silver and its Relationship to Rock Crystal and Glass’, The Silver Society Journal 1996, pp. 462-4, esp. 464; M. Mundell Mango, ‘Byzantine, Sasanian and Central Asian Silver’, p. 273, Fig. 3a. Glass vessels: the Morgan cameo cup (D.B. Harden, H. Hellenkemper, K.S. Painter and D.B. Whitehouse, Glass of the Caesars (Milan, 1987), pp. 80-2, no. 35; Mundell Mango, ‘Byzantine, Sasanian and Central Asian Silver’, p. 273); a cameo bottle (Harden et al., Glasas of the Caesars, pp. 83-4, no. 36; Mundell Mango, ‘Byzantine, Sasanian and Central Asian Silver’, p. 273; cup painted with deck and vegetation (Harden et al., Glass of the Caesars, p. 269, no. 147; Mundell Mango, ‘Byzantine, Sasanian and Central Asian Silver’, p. 273). 18 H. Bernhard, H.-J. Engels, R. Engels and R. Petrovsky, Der römische Schatzfund von Hagenbach (Mainz, 1990), pp. 31-2, Fig. 18.3. 19 J.M.C. Toynbee, The Roman Art Treasures from the Temple of

Two of the silver jugs can be dated by evidence other than their form. The Taraneš jug was found with a gold brooch to be dated before AD 324: the jug is therefore later than this, though perhaps not much later as the owner seems to have Mithras, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, Special Paper no. 7 (London, 1986), pp. 49-50; J. Shepherd, The Temple of Mithras, London: Excavations by W.F. Grimes and A. Williams at the Walbrook, English Heritage Archaeological Report no. 12 (London, 1998), p. 181. 20 Vita bona jar: Harden et al., Glass of the Caesars, p. 207, no. 115. Bowl with dancing boys and bowl with men between columns: ibid, pp. 236-7, no. 133. 21 Venice bucket with hunt scene: Il Tesoro di San Marco e il museo, ed. H.R. Hahnloser (Florence, 1971), no.13. Venice purple bucket: K.R. Brown, ‘Glass Situla with Dionysiac Scene’, in The Treasury of San Marco, Venice, ed. D. Buckton (Milan, 1979), pp. 77-81, and p. 80, Pl. 1a; Harden et al., Glass of the Caesars, pp. 220-1, no. 122. Lycurgus cup: D.B. Harden and J.M.C. Toynbee, ‘The Rothschild Lycurgus Cup’, in Archaeologia, 97 (1959), pp. 179-212; Harden, Glass of the Caesars, pp. 245-9, no. 139. 22 Niederemmel: H. Eiden, ‘Diatretglas aus einer römischen Begräbnisstätte in Niederemmel an der Mosel’, Trierer Zeitschrift, 19 (1950), pp. 26ff., Pls. i-ii, Figs. 4-6, esp. p. 37, Abb. 5; Toynbee and Harden, Lycurgus, p. 210, B9; O. Doppelfeld, ‘Das Diatretglas aus dem Gräberbezirk des römischen Gutshofs von KölnBraunsfeld’, Kölner Jahrbuch für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, 5 (19601), pp. 7-35, esp. 30; G. Ristow, Das Kölner Diatretglas, Rheinische Kleinkunstwerke Heft 3 (Cologne, 1988), pp. 19-21, Abb. 23-4; K. Goethert, ‘Fragmente eines Diatretbechers und andere Gläser von der Saarstrasse in Trier’, Trierer Zeitschrift, 52 (1989), pp. 353-68, esp. 358, Fig. 4a; M.J. Klein, ‘Das Diatretglas von Hohen-Sülzen’, Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt, 24 (1994), pp. 311-18, esp. 315, Abb. 7-8; Hohensülzen bowl: Toynbee and Harden, Lycurgus, pp. 208-9, no. 4; Ristow, Diatretglas, p. 19, Abb. 22; Goethert, Fragmente, p. 360, n. 7; Klein, Diatretglas, pp. 312, Abb. 2, and 315, Abb. 8; Komini: Klein, Diatretglas p. 315, Abb. 9-10; Taraneš: Klein, Diatretglas, p. 315, Abb. 11. 23 Rubens Vase: Toynbee and Harden, Lycurgus, pp. 201-2, 204, Pl. LXXIVc; K.R. Brown, ‘The Rubens Vase’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann (cit. in n. 4), pp. 333-4.

6

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW been a supporter of Licinius.24 The Bol’shoi Kamenets jug is dated by a stamp on the base which shows that it was made in the late fourth or early fifth century.25 This accords with other evidence. The Esquiline treasure, for example, is generally agreed to have been deposited towards the end of the fourth century or the beginning of the fifth, and the Seuso treasure towards the middle of the fifth century.26 The Traprain Law jug thus belongs to a type of the fourth and early fifth centuries, and more specifically it is to be dated not earlier than the late fourth century.

or by a special function for individual vessels, or by the decoration or inscriptions on the vessels?29 Church hoards of the fourth to seventh centuries included chalices, patens, jugs, strainers.30 The fourth-century Water Newton and sixth-century Gallunianu hoards from the west, and the fifth- to seventh-century hoards from Marato tes Myrtes, Kaper Koraon, Beth Misona, Phela, Maaret-enNoman and Sarabaon in the east all contain such vessels.31 Nevertheless, although such vessels are not out of place in a church hoard, it does not follow that they could not also fit into secular hoards. Nor is it the case that the forms of individual vessels are related directly to the liturgy, in spite of the fact that William Frend argued as much for the Water Newton objects.32 He pointed out, rightly, that the Water Newton dish is of the same form as undoubted patens of the sixth and seventh centuries,33 and the two-handled cup (no. 6; Pl. 8) also looks to most modern eyes like an ecclesiastical chalice.34 However, while such objects were appropriate and necessary in a church, the concept of exclusively liturgical silver had not been formed clearly in the fourth century and lacks demonstration for later periods. Unlike modern church plate, vessels in antiquity were not of distinctive form and sacred by consecration. They acquired their character from the authority of the person using them.

Where was the Traprain Law jug made? The form of the jug was widespread in the Roman world, such jugs having been found at sites from Scotland, through Germany, Hungary, and Macedonia, to Syria and Russia. It is implausible that jugs so far apart should have been made at a single site. On the basis of the form, therefore, it is not possible to point to any precise area as the source of the Traprain Law jug. Function Curle noted that some of the objects in the treasure had Christian associations: the jug with biblical scenes, a bottle with a Chi-Rho and an inscription round its neck which included the Chi-Rho flanked by alpha and omega, a strainer with the Chi-Rho monogram and IESUS CHRISTUS perforated in the bowl, and two spoons with the Chi-Rho symbol in their bowls.27 He was inclined to believe that at least some of these – the jug with biblical scenes and a cross on its base, and the strainer, but not the spoons, were possibly ‘loot from a Christian church or monastery’.28 Curle did not state precisely what he understood by the jug and strainer being ‘from a Christian church or monastery’; but it may be assumed that he thought that they were used in the liturgy. We can apply three tests to his theory – is it supported by the composition of groups of vessels accepted to be church silver,

The religious nature, therefore, of the vessels in the fourthcentury Water Newton treasure or the groups making up the sixth-seventh-century Kaper Koraon treasure is to be adduced only from their association within the whole group and from 29

The argument here considers only vessels in church silver, not other objects such as the votive plaques in the Water Newton hoard or the processional crosses and fans, as well as votive plaques, spoons, ladles, book-covers and lighting equipment, found in the Kaper Koraon treasure. 30 Mundell Mango, Kaper Koraon, passim. Contents of hoards also summed up in K.S. Painter, ‘The Water Newton Silver: Votive or Liturgical?’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 152 (1999), pp. 1-23, esp. 9, Table 5: Contents of Church Hoards, 4th7th centuries. 31 Painter, ‘Votive or Liturgical?’, with bibliography. 32 W.H.C. Frend, ‘Syrian Parallels to Water Newton’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, 27-8 (1984-5), pp. 146-50, esp. 146-7. 33 E.g. the seven patens in the Kaper Koraon treasure (Mundell Mango, Kaper Koraon), all but one of which were dedicated for church use. The alpha was not visible on the Water Newton dish when the hoard was first published in 1977. The faint letter became visible only after subsequent conservation. 34 K.S. Painter, The Water Newton Early Christian Silver (London, 1977), p. 13, Pl. 6; Dalla terra alle genti: la diffusione del cristianesimo nei primi secoli, ed. A. Donati (Milan, 1996), p. 229; F. Baratte, J. Lang, S. La Niece and C. Metzger, Le trésor de Carthage: contribution à l’étude de l’orfèvrerie de l’antiquité tardive, Études d’antiquités africaines (Paris: CNRS, 2002), p. 49. It is reasonably closely matched in form by the 6th-century chalices in the only other church treasure found in the west, that found at Gallunianu in Italy.

24

A. Kaufmann-Heinimann, ‘59a.b Decennalienplatte des Constans’, in Der spätrömische Silberschatz von Kaiseraugst. Die neuen Funde, ed. M.A. Guggisberg and A. Kaufmann-Heinimann (Augst, 2003), pp. 129-30. The implication of the support for Licinius was pointed out to me by Annemarie KaufmannHeinimann. 25 E. Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (Washington, D.C., 1961), pp. 5, 236-7, no. 84; M. Bell, ‘Pitcher with Nine Muses’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann, pp. 261-2, no. 241; Baratte, Vaisselle, p. 79. 26 Esquiline treasure date: K. Shelton, The Esquiline Treasure (London, 1981), p. 55. Seuso treasure date: Annemarie KaufmannHeinimann, personal communication. 27 Jug with biblical scenes: Curle, Traprain, pp. 13-19, no. 1, pls. IIIB, V, Figs. 2-4; bottle with a Chi-Rho and an inscription round its neck: ibid., pp. 19-21, no. 2, Pls. VI, VII; strainer with the Chi-Rho monogram and IESUS CHRISTUS perforated in the bowl: ibid., pp. 756, no. 111, Pl. XXVIII, figs. 59-60; two spoons with the Chi-Rho symbol in their bowls: ibid., pp. 63-6, nos. 97-8, Figs. 41-2. 28 Ibid., p. 103.

7

KENNETH PAINTER internal evidence, such as inscriptions related to the Bible and the liturgy, not through any difference of form which can distinguish them visibly from vessels made and sold for other, secular, purposes.35 The sixth- or seventh-century Antioch treasure, for example, includes a chalice and a cross revetment, each with inscriptions which make it clear that they belonged in a church.36 By association, therefore, the other, uninscribed, objects in the hoard have been interpreted as also belonging to a church. Four plaques (one fragmentary), with repoussé portraits of St Paul, of St Peter, and of saints, are widely accepted as book-covers but may equally have been parts of an iconic revetment; but in either case their attribution to a church is convincing.37

any more than pagan representations on other vessels means that they were necessarily used in pagan rites. This has also recently been spelled out succinctly by Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann, ‘Religious subjects (on silverware) do not in any way prove religious use; they can just as well decorate secular plate.’39 Prime examples are those with which Engemann began his paper, fourth-century glass bowls made in Cologne, one showing Adam and Eve with the inscription GAVDIAS IN DEO PIE (Fig. 7a), or another showing the awaking of Lazarus, with the inscription, VIVAS IN DEO PIE.40 There is therefore no reason to suppose that the purpose of biblical decoration was different from that of other decoration on silver vessels. But what was that purpose? One primary intention of any owner was clearly to bring his silver and its decoration to the attention of his guests, as François Baratte has shown beyond question, his conclusion being: ‘(le) role de l’argenterie ... L’image prime toute autre function: elle est là pour être contemplée, scrutée dans le detail, commentée dans un échange complexe entre tous ceux qui regardent les objets, que le context soit ou non celui du banquet.’41 On some occasions the silver may have been displayed without the setting of a meal. At the end of the Republic, Varro describes the marble tables in the atria of houses on which stood bronze vessels, and so silver vessels may also have been shown in this way, although François Baratte points out that Varro is actually describing bronze vessels, less luxurious than silver, and that he is referring to an old custom from his childhood, therefore dating from the end of the second century BC.42 Cicero, Varro’s contemporary, however, reports that, between courses at dinner, silver plate was displayed for guests to inspect.43 This is what is represented in the painting from the tomb of Caius Vestorius

Christian decoration and inscriptions such as VIVAS IN DEO have been held also to establish that objects were used in the liturgy.38 Nevertheless, Joseph Braun, in 1932, and Josef Engemann, in 1972, both spelled out very clearly that there are numerous examples of Christian illustrations and inscriptions on vessels which were for the use of the owner, and that it is a mistake to interpret vessels as cult objects simply because they carry biblical or other religious scenes, 35

Painter, ‘Votive or Liturgical?’, p. 11, Table 6: Inscriptions on Temple and Church Hoards, 3rd-7th centuries. 36 Mundell Mango, Kaper Koraon, nos. 41 (chalice), and 42a-c (cross revetment). The Antioch, Stuma, Riha, and Hama treasures have been explained by Marlia Mundell Mango (Kaper Koraon, 20-35) as four parts of the Kaper Koraon treasure. Her conclusions should now be read in conjunction with the disagreements of Effenberger (A. Effenberger, ‘Bemerkungen zum “Kaper-Koraon-Schatz”’, in Tesserae. Festschrift für Joseph Engemann, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, Ergänzungsband 18 (1991), pp. 241-64) and of Hauser (S.R. Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel: Bemerkungen zur Produktion von Luxusgütern im 5. bis 7. Jahrhundert, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, Ergänzungsband 19 (1992), esp. pp. 45-9). 37 One object, a mirror, has no obvious connections to a church; but in its context Mango suggests (Kaper Koraon, p. 214) that it may have been donated to a church for its monetary value. 38 In addition to the Traprain Law jug, only two objects have been found in Britain with biblical decoration. One is a piece of folded bronze sheet from a 4th-century box, found at Uley in Gloucestershire (M. Henig with Mark Hassall and Justine Bayley, ‘Votive Objects: Images and Inscriptions’, in A. Woodward and P. Leach, The Uley Shrines: Excavation of a ritual complex on West Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire, 1977-9 (London, 1993), pp. 89-112, esp. 10710). The other is also bronze sheet, on a bucket from an AngloSaxon burial at Long Wittenham in Oxfordshire (D. Petts, Christianity in Roman Britain (Stroud, 2003), pp. 123-4). The latter has been described (M. Henig, P. Booth and T. Allen, Roman Oxfordshire (Stroud, 2000), pp. 134, 185-6, 196; Petts, Christianity, pp. 122-4) as a ‘cup’, ‘probably of Romano-British origin’ and it has been suggested that it ‘may have been used as a chalice’. In fact, it is on an Anglo-Saxon copper-alloy bound bucket, and it probably dates to the 6th century (J.M. Cook, Early Anglo-Saxon Buckets: A Corpus of Copper Alloy- and Iron-Bound, Stave-Built Vessels, Oxford University School of Archaeology: Monograph 60 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 82-3, no. 199).

39

Braun, Altargeräte, p. 201: ‘Darstellungen dieser Art waren bei den alten Christen keineswegs den liturgischen Geräten vorbehalten, sondern bei ihnen nicht minder beliebt als Dekor der Geräte des Alltagslebens’. Engemann, ‘Anmerkungen’. KaufmannHeinimann in A. Kaufmann-Heinimann and M. Martin, ‘Die Trierer Silberkanne’, in Konstantin der Grosse, ed. A. Demandt and J.Engemann (Trier, 2007), pp. 382-6, esp. 193. 40 Engemann, ‘Anmerkungen’, pp. 154-5, Figs. 4, 5. 41 F. Baratte, ‘Vaisselle d’argent, souvenirs littéraires et manières de table: l’exemple des cuillers de Lampsacus’, Cahiers archéologiques, 40 (1992), pp. 5-20, Figs. 1-15, esp. 18; F. Baratte, ‘Silbergschirr, Kultur und Luxus in der römischen Gesellschaft’, 15. Trierer Winckelmannsprogramm 1997 (Mainz, 1997), pp. 1-26, Pls. 1-16. 42 Varro, Lingua latina, V, 125: ‘altera vasaria mensa erat lapidea, quadrata, oblonga, una columella, vocabatur cartibulum. Haec in aedibus ad compluvium apud multos, me puero, ponebatur in ea et cum ea aenea vasa.’ 43 Cicero, In Verrem IV, de Signis IV, 15: ‘apud L. Sisennam, virum primarium, cum essent triclinia strata argentumque expositum in aedibus, cum pro dignitate L. Sisennae domus esset plena hominum honestiorum, (Verres) accessit ad argentum, contemplari unum quidque otiose et considerare coepit.’ See also Cicero, In Verrem IV, 20, 25.

8

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW Priscus at Pompeii.44 For late antiquity we have only two literary passages. In the late fourth century John Chrysostom criticises as misers those who keep their plate in chests, implying that in his social circles it was normal to leave it accessible.45 In the mid fifth century, on the other hand, Sidonius Apollinaris, writing about the preparations for a banquet, describes how the waiters open deep cupboards and bring out silver which has been there so long that it has been blackened by the years.46 That Chrysostom may refer to more usual practice is perhaps confirmed by the presence of handles on the backs of some dishes, implying that they were hung up, probably on view.47

the first century AD at which the silver plate and discussion of its decoration were part of a refined way of life. The most striking parallel is between Trimalchio, playing with a silver skeleton at the table while reflecting that they recall the fragility of the human condition, and a pair of cups in the Boscoreale treasure, on which poets and philosophers, also in the form of skeletons, accompanied by explicit texts, offer the same sentiment.50 Towards the end of the first century there seems to have been a profound change of table manners, when vessels with relief decoration disappear in favour of more open forms, particularly dishes, such as those of the third century from Gaul, which are decorated on the interior surface with relatively simple subjects which could be taken in and understood at a single glance.51 In the Berthouville treasure, for example, one of the most impressive plates has no more than a hunter on horseback being attacked by a lioness, and in the margin six animals being hunted, the scenes separated by Bacchic heads – not a subject to stimulate a long or interesting discussion.52 In late antiquity, however, there was a return of first-century manners and concepts. For this period we do not have texts which might document these social changes; but the objects demonstrate fresh attention to the content of the decoration, combined with renewed taste for a variety of vessels, such as large dishes and closed forms.

Silver could also be brought to guests’ attention at the dinner table, whether by inscriptions, or decoration, or both.48 In the first century AD, silversmiths concentrated attention on the closed forms of drinking silver, covering the outside of deep cups and jugs with decoration in deep repoussé relief. The reliefs sometimes depicted a continuous frieze; but this emphasised the difficulty that the whole of the decoration on these cylindrical surfaces could not be seen at one time. More often, therefore, the reliefs were divided into two scenes, and, in addition, the cups or jugs were mostly designed as pairs. The result was that the images could not be taken in at a quick glance. The subtly connected scenes had to be looked at carefully, first on one cup and then on the other, while taking the vessels into one’s hands, if one wished to understand and discuss the scenes that they illustrated and their relationships. At the same time, of course, the reverse sides of the cups and their scenes were visible to one’s fellow guests. This was not, therefore, the solitary activity of an individual but a communal exploration of fine, subtle objects, carried out with one’s fellow diners. Supporting evidence for this suggestion is offered by the parody of such a dinner given by the nouveau riche, uneducated freedman Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyricon, who swears that silver plate is his great passion.49 The text makes sense only if it is a caricature of real dinner parties in

The large dishes are a notable part of the repertoire, clearly exploited because of the variety of what they could display. The Corbridge lanx, for example, featured scenes of the worship of Apollo on Delos, the Parabiago dish represented the cult of Cybele (Fig. 3), while a dish from Kerch (Fig. 4) celebrated the triumph of Constantius II (AD 337-61), and the Theodosius missorium celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the reign of Theodosius in AD 388.53 At the 50

Petronius, Satyricon, 34, 8-10: ‘heu nostros miseros, quam totus homuncio nil est. sic erimus cuncti, postquam nos auferet Orcus. Ergo vivamus, dum licet esse bene’. K.M. Dunbabin, ‘Sic erimus cuncti … The Skeleton in Graeco-Roman Art’, Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, 101 (1986), pp. 185-255, esp. 224-30; Argenterie romaine et Byzantine, ed. Baratte, pp. 64-7; Baratte, Vaisselle, pp. 15-16; Baratte, Silbergeschirr, pp. 19-20, Abb. 9-10. 51 Baratte, Vaisselle, p. 17; e.g. vessels in hoards of the 3rd century from Gaul. 52 Baratte, in F. Baratte and K.S. Painter, Trésors d’orfèvrerie galloromains (Paris, 1989), pp. 93-4, no. 24; Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus, p. 17. 53 Corbridge lanx: O. Brendel, ‘The Corbridge Lanx’, Journal of Roman Studies, 21 (1941), pp. 100-27, Pls. VIII, 1, 2, IX, 1.2; T. Dohrn, ‘Spätantikes Silber aus Britannien’, Mitteilungen des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, 2 (1949), pp. 66-139, esp. 11518, Pl. 30, 4; H. Koch, ‘Zur interpretation der ‘Corbridge lanx’’, Archäologischer Anzeiger, 70 (1955), cols. 259-63; J.W. Salomonson, ‘Late-Roman Earthenware with Relief Decoration Found in Northern Africa and Egypt’, Oudheidkundige mededelingen uit het

44

G. Spano, ‘La tomba dell’edile C. Vestorio Prisco in Pompei’, Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Memorie. Classse di scienza morali, stroiche e filosofiche, Serie VII, 3.6 (1943), pp. 237-306; Strong, Greek and Roman Gold and Silver Plate (cit. in n. 4), p. 130; Argenterie romaine et Byzantine, ed. Baratte (cit. in n. 8), p. 6; J. Tamm, ‘Argentum Potorium and the Campanian Wall-Painter. The Priscus Service Revisited’, BABesch (formerly Bulletin Antieke Beschaving), 80 (2005), pp. 73-89. 45 John Chrysostom, In Johannem, 65, 3 = Patrologia Graeca 59, col. 364. 46 Sidonius Apollinaris, Poems, to Omatius, XVII, 7-8. 47 E.g. three missoria found at Kerch, two attributed certainly to Constantius II: A. Effenberger, B. Maršak, V. Zallesskaja and I. Zaseckaja, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silbergefässe aus de Staatlichen Ermitage Leningrad (Berlin, 1978), pp. 78, no. 1, 82, no. 2. 48 I follow here the ideas and argument of François Baratte (Cuillers de Lampsacus, pp. 14-18). 49 Petronius, Satyricon, 52: ‘in argento plane studiosus sum’.

9

KENNETH PAINTER same time the silversmiths regained interest in pouring vessels, jugs and amphorae. These carry bacchic processions or more complex images. One of the most remarkable is the large amphora of the end of the fourth century, found in the sea at Porto Baratti, off the coast of Tuscany.54 Its decoration

imitates a scattering of engraved stones, the detail of which demands as much attention as the cups from Boscoreale. In addition there were iconographic series which could be followed, sometimes on a single dish, such as the Achilles dishes in both the Kaiseraugst and Seuso treasures, or sometimes from one piece of plate to another.55 Similar iconographic series, for example the life of Achilles, are found on late-Roman African redware dishes.56 Other series on redware, for example, the labours of Hercules, may suggest other subjects which existed on metal vessels but are now lost.

Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te Leiden, 43 (1962), pp. 53-95, Pls. 1132, esp. 74-81, Pl. 12; Toynbee, Art in Britain under the Romans (cit. in n. 4), pp. 306-8; W.F. Volbach, ‘Silber- und Elfenbeinarbeiten vom Ende des 4. Bis zum Anfang des 7. Jahrhunderts’, Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und Archäologie des Frühmittelalters. Akten zum VII. Internationalen Kongress für Frühmittelalterforschung (Graz and Cologne, 1962), pp. 21-36, esp. 25, Pl. III, 6; L. Pirzio Biroli Stefanelli, ‘I tesori di argenteria rinvenuti in Gran Bretagna ed in Irlanda’, Archaeologia Classica, 17 (1965), pp. 92-125, 271-83, Pls. 31-43, 84-92, esp. pp. 95-6, 103-4, pl. 31; Strong, Silver Plate, p. 198, Pl. 61; K.J. Shelton, ‘The Corbridge Lanx’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann, pp. 132-3, no. 110; J.M.C. Toynbee and K.S. Painter, ‘Silver Picture Plates of Late Antiquity: AD 300-700’, in Archaeologia, 108 (1986), pp. 15-65, Pls. VII-XXX, esp. p. 32, no. 23, Pl. XIc; L. Pirzio Biroli Stefanelli, M.E. Micheli and B. Pettinau, L’argento dei romani, vasellame da tavola e d’apparato (Rome, 1991), pp. 230-1, Pl. 244, pp. 300-1, no. 177; M. Mundell Mango, ‘The Corbridge Lanx’, in The Treasury of San Marco, Venice, ed. D. Buckton (Milan, 1994), pp. 36, 38, no.151994. Parabiago dish: A. Levi, La patera argentea di Parabiago (Rome, 1935); A. Alföldi, ‘Die Spätantike’, Atlantis, 21 (1949), pp. 61-88, esp. 69-72; W.F. Volbach, Early Christian Art (London, 1961), Pl. 107; A. Alföldi, E. Alföldi and C.L. Clay, Die Kontorniat-Medaillons, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1976-90), esp. vol. 1, p. 194, nos. 23-6; M.J. Vermaseren, The Legends of Attis in Greek and Roman Art (Leiden, 1966), pp. 27-9, Pl. xvii; id., Corpus Cultus Cybelae Attidisque IV (Leiden, 1978), pp. 107-9, no. 268; L. Musso, Manifattura suntuaria e committenza pagana nella Roma del IV secolo. Indagine sulla lanx di Parabiago (Rome, 1983); V. von Gonzenbach, ‘Achillesplatte’, in Der spätrömische Silberschatz von Kaiseraugst, ed. H. Cahn and A. Kaufmann-Heinimann (Derendingen, 1984), pp. 225-307, esp. 256; B. Kiilerich, Late Fourth Century Classicism in the Plastic Arts: Studies in the So-called Theodosian Renaissance (Odense, 1993), pp. 174-7; R.E. Leader-Newby, Silver and Society in Late Antiquity: Functions and Meanings of Silver Plate in the Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 146, 147, Fig. 3.13, 151-2, 154-7, 159. Constantius II dish: Effenberger et al., Spätantike und frühbyzntinische Silbergefässe, p. 81, Fig., with earlier bibliography. Theodosius missorium: A. Delgado y Hernandez, Memoria historico-critica sobre el gran disco de Teodosio, encontrado en Almendralejo (Madrid, 1849); W.F. Volbach, Metallarbeiten des christlichen Kultes in der Spätantike und im frühen Mittelalter, Kataloge des Römisch-germanischen Zentralmuseums, 9 (Mainz, 1921), pp. 59-60, no. 56; J.R. Mélida y Alinari, El disco de Teodosio (Madrid, 1930), p. 200, Pls. 94-8; W. Grünhagen, Der Schatzfund von Gross Bodungen, Römisch-Germanische Forschungen 21 (Berlin, 1954), pp. 15-34, Pls. 9, 10; K.J. Shelton, ‘Missorium of Theodosius’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann, pp. 74-6, no. 64; El Disco de Teodosio, ed. M. Almagro-Gorbea, J.M. Alvarez Martinez, J.M. Blazquez Martinez, and S. Rovira (Madrid, 2000); Leader-Newby, Silver and Society, pp. 11-14, 27-39, 48-9. 54 P.E. Arias, L’anfora argentea di Porto Baratti, Bollettino d’Arte,

This variety and these iconographic links are an important indication that dinner was an important intellectual occasion.57 That this was so throughout classical antiquity has, of course, long been obvious from the tradition of symposium literature, established as a prose genre by Plato, an imagined dialogue of set speeches or discussions on themes appropriate to the occasion. Authors continued to compose them in the Roman world, right through to late antiquity. Macrobius, for example, in the mid fifth century, reported in his Saturnalia a fictitious discussion between a group of senators and scholars on the three days of the Saturnalia in AD 384. The physical evidence of objects, however, for real banquets of this sort has not been much considered; but it is now the case that, for a demonstration that this was so, and that many objects from the late-Roman dining-table were intended as essential parts of a sophisticated way of life, of which a relaxed and erudite dinner-time discussion was an essential part, one needs only to turn François Baratte’s study of the sixteen inscribed spoons in the seventh-century secular treasure found at Lampsacus on the Hellespont.58

Monografia (Rome, 1986); Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus, pp. 1718. 55 Kaiseraugst Achilles dish: Von Gonzenbach, ‘Achillesplatte’. Seuso Achilles dish: Mundell Mango and Bennett, Sevso, pp. 153-80. 56 J. Garbsch and B. Overbeck, Spätantike zwischen Heidentum und Christentum (Munich, 1989), pp. 161-206; Baratte, Argenterie, pp. 231-52; and N. Franken, ‘Imitationen römischer Silbertabletts in ton’, in Das Haus Lacht vor Silber: Die Prunkplatte von Bizerta und das römische Tafelgeschirr, ed. H.-H. von Prittwitz und Gaffron and H. Mielsch (Cologne, 1997), pp. 31-40. 57 M. Mundell Mango, ‘From ‘Glittering Sideboard’ to Table: Silver in the Well-Appointed triclinium’, in Eat, Drink, and be Merry (Luke 12:19) – Food and Wine in Byzantium. Papers of the 37th Annual Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, in Honour of Professor A.A.M. Bryer, ed. L. Brubaker and K. Linardou (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 127-62. 58 O.M. Dalton, Catalogue of Early Christian Antiquities and Objects from the Christian East (London, 1901), nos. 249-50, and pp. 82-4, nos. 376-96, Pls. XXII-XXIII; Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus; S.R. Hauser, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silberlöffel: Bemerkungen zur Produktion von Luxusgütern im 5. Bis 7. Jahrhundert, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, Ergänzungsband 19 (1992), pp. 11314, nos. 103-10, 130-1, nos. 196-201; Baratte, Silbergeschirr, 20-1. The treasure includes two bowls with nielloed monograms, a cylindrical bowl, and various fragments, including two fragmentary

10

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW

Fig. 3. Silver dish: the ‘Parabiago dish’. Diam. 39 cm. Ht. 5.4 cm. Late 4th century AD Milan, Soprintendenza Archeologica della Lombardia. ST.5986. From Parabiago, beside the River Olna, near Milan Silver dish on a footring, with traces of gilding. In the centre Cybele and Attis ride on a chariot drawn by four lions. Round the chariot dance three Corybantes. In front of Cybele and Attis a naked youth rises out of the ground holding up the zodiacal ring, in which stands another youth, Aion. To their right stands a base, on which is mounted an obelisk, and round it is twined a snake, also a symbol of time. The upper part of the dish is occupied by four figures: on the left the Sun, riding on his chariot; in front of him a winged genius, Phosphorus, the morning star; in front of the Sun the Moon travels to the right with her ox-team; and in front of her flies a winged genius, with a torch, Hesperus. The lower zone is also covered with gods, including Neptune, Thetis, and Tellus. The liaison of Cybele and Attis was celebrated as an annual cycle of death and rebirth, tied to the seasonal changes.

Fig. 4. Silver dish showing a triumph of Constantius. Diam. 24.9 cm. Ht. 3.9 cm. Middle of the 4thg century AD. From a grave ar Kerch (Panticapaeum), Crimea. The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia, 1820/79. Silver dish, with gilding and niello, on a footring; with a loop on the back for suspension. The emperor, in military uniform and on horseback, is followed by a bodyguard and is preceded by Victory, who carries a palm-branch and crown, symbols of victory over an enemy whose shield is under the feet of the horse. The emperor is celebrating his triumph. He is probably Constantius II (337-61), rather than Justinian I (527-65), as has also been suggested. The dish was probably presented as largitio to a barbarian who served in the Roman army. Photograph: after L. Matzulewitsch, Byzantinische Antike (1929), Pl. 23.

They have no figured decoration; but on each there is a nielloed monogram on the disk between handle and bowl, and a nielloed inscription on the handle, while eight have linked nielloed inscriptions on the bowl and the handle. The

eight spoons without inscriptions on the bowl have a monogram of the name Timothy on the disk and six of them have the names of Apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, James, Peter, and Simon) on the handles. The second group, to which Baratte has drawn particular attention, has the monogram of bishop Andrew on the disk and inscriptions on seven of the spoons, five in Greek and three in a mixture of Latin and Greek (Fig. 5). These texts link a text on the bowl of the spoon with a comment on the handle. The five in Greek are maxims attributed to the Seven Sages (Solon of Athens, Chilon of Sparta, Bias of Priene, Pittacos of Mytilene, and Periander of Corinth).59 Two of the

pieces of gold jewellery and a silver revetment for a domestic table and stool (Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus, p. 5, and M. Mundell Mango, ‘The Monetary Value of Silver Revetments and Objects belonging to Churches, AD 300-700’, in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate in Sixth-Century Byzantium, ed. S.A. Boyd and M. Mundell Mango (Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C., 1992), pp. 123-36, esp. 127, n. 35). The objects are in the British Museum and the Louvre (two of the thirteen spoons), except for the one spoon which was in the Musée de l’École Évangélique, Smyrna and was destroyed in 1922 (Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus, pp. 10-11, Fig. 8, and p. 19 n. 23; Hauser, Silberlöffel, p. 114, no. 110).

59

W. Fröhner, Kritische Analecten, Philologus Supplement 5 (18849), pp. 58-9, esp. 58, showed that the texts match an anonymous epigram in the Anthologia Palatina ( Anthologia Graeca, ed. H.

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KENNETH PAINTER

Fig. 5. Ten of the originally 16 silver spoons from the Lampsacus treasure. Length of complete examples: 26.2 – 26.5 cm; 6th century AD. From Lampsacus, on the Hellespont, western Turkey. The British Museum, Department of Prehistory and Europe. Spoons a (EC387), b (EC 389), c (EC390), and d (EC388), all have the Greek monogram of Bishop Andrew on the disk, and they are inscribed on the bowls and handles with sayings by the Seven Sages: a – Solon; b – Bias; c – Pittakos; d – Chilon. Spoons e (EC391), f (EC383) and h (EC392) also have the Greek monogram of Bishop Andrew on the disk, and they have quotations from Vergil inscribed in Latin on the bowls and one side of the handles, with a comment in Greek on the handles. Spoons f (EC392), g (EC382), i (EC386) and j (EC381) have the monogram of Timothy on the disk, f (EC392) has no inscription on the bowl or handle, while i (EC386) and j (EC381) have no inscription on the bowl, but the name of an Apostle on the handle, preceded by a cross: f – James; g- Luke; j – Mark.

 

Latin texts are quotations from Vergil, in each case from the Eclogues (II, 17; X, 69), while of the two associated Greek comments on the handles, one is obscure, and the other links the good looks of somebody who is presumably at the banquet with the subject of the line by Vergil.60 The third Latin inscription is matched on a tombstone from Rome and, in a Greek version, in the Anthologia Palatina (X, 112).61 The

content of the Greek sayings of the Sages is not personal and their philosophical content is relatively trivial, just as it was on the skeleton cups in the Boscoreale treasure; but the essential point here is that the spoons and all their inscriptions were intended to enable a lively discussion to develop between the diners.62 CIL, VI, 3, no. 15258. Anthologia Palatina (X, 112); Hauser, Silberlöffel, p. 73. 62 Baratte (Cuillers de Lampsacus, pp. 9-10) notes that lists of this type were popular in late antiquity: references in the Anthologia Palatina to the twelve months, the nine poetesses, the nine Muses, and – once – the Seven Sages; and representations of the Seven Sages

Beckby, 3 (Munich, 1958), IX, pp. 226-7; Anthologie grecque, ed. P. Waltz, VIII (Paris, 1974), pp. 7-8, 187); Hauser, Silberlöffel, pp. 6970; Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus. 60 Hauser, Silberlöffel, pp. 72-4; Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus. 61 Tombstone from Rome: gravestone of Titus Claudius Secundus,

12

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW Such cultural practices were not confined to objects with secular or pagan decoration. Three examples may be quoted. The first is an eight-sided jug, 50 cm. high and decorated with niello and gilding, found in 1992.63 It may be from the Trier treasure, of which the rest was discovered, and destroyed, in 1628.64 The hoard was probably buried in the first half of the fifth century. Below the neck and the knop there are three main zones, the lower two with Christian decoration. There are four apostles in each zone, of whom only Peter and Paul have been identified so far. The four panels between figures in the lower zone contain sheep, probably standing for another four apostles. There is no question of this jug having been intended to have a role in Christian worship. Like the two similarly shaped jugs in the Seuso treasure, it will have been used for water or wine at dinners. The Trier treasure, which included more than forty vessels with traditional decoration, also included two bowls with busts of Christ and four saints. Like the vessels with traditional decoration, the three vessels with Christian decoration will have played a role in the sophisticated discussion at the table.

Constantinople, to which Domnos added his personal monogram. Diehl’s alternative interpretation was that Domnos gave to his church a set of twelve spoons which already bore his monogram, and to which the word eulogia (referring to fragments of the eucharist) was then added, together with the names of the twelve apostles. Marlia Mundell Mango, however, has made two strong objections to Diehl’s theories.67 First, the boars’ heads: boars, like lions, were frequently the quarry in royal and aristocratic hunts, shown in many mosaics of the period; but the boar almost never appears in church decoration and it does not have any Christian symbolism. Second, five of the spoons in the Lampsacus treasure, in addition to a personal monogram (‘(property of) bishop Andrew’) and the aphorisms of the Seven Sages, also carry names of some of the Apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, James, and Peter).68 ‘It is tempting’, she concluded, ‘to see these ‘Sages spoons’ as a part of Late Antique, pagan ‘dining iconography’, and the ‘Apostle spoons’ as their Christianised version, serving to remind the diners of the Communion of the Apostles.’ She therefore suggested that the Antioch Apostle spoons are part of a set of twelve domestic dining spoons, which Domnos had commissioned to be made with boars’ heads, monograms and Apostles’ names. Eulogia, therefore, is to be taken in its sense of ‘blessing’ of food, like Latin blessings, such as De Donis Dei, on contemporary silver plate, shown by Engemann to be domestic and not liturgical or ecclesiastical in use.69 There is, however, an alternative explanation. François Baratte has pointed out that it might be that the Seven Sages are recalled on five of the Lampsacus spoons as representatives of pagan culture, in opposition to Christian culture, represented by the names of the Apostles on another six of the spoons in the same treasure: an interesting starting-point for a serious discussion, perhaps.70

Two examples from the sixth century are in the Antioch treasure, a group of seven spoons and the ‘chalice’.65 On each of the seven spoons, the front of the handle, above the disk, is fashioned into a boar’s head, while the terminating finial is composed of a triple set of mouldings below a vase. There is a nielloed inscription on the upper three sides of the hexagonal part of each handle, and a nielloed monogram on the right side of the disk. The inscription on the handle reads eulogia, followed by the name of an apostle (Thomas, Luke, Mark, Peter, Matthew, Philip and Paul), and the monogram on the disk is in each case, ‘(property) of Domnos’. Diehl suggested convincingly that the spoons were originally a set of twelve, naming all the apostles.66 He proposed that the inscriptions were added to the spoons in two stages, and he suggested two possible interpretations of the word eulogia. It might have meant ‘holy souvenirs’, obtained at pilgrimage sites, such as the Church of the Holy Apostles in Jerusalem or

The Antioch treasure also includes the silver, partially gilded, so-called ‘Antioch chalice’, for long erroneously identified as the Holy Grail (Fig. 6).71 It consists of a plain inner cup

on two mosaics of the fourth century, one at Apamea on the Orontes, and the other at Baalbek-Suwēdīye, the latter including inscriptions with their origin and their maxims. 63 A. Kaufmann-Heinimann and M. Martin, ‘Die Trierer Silberkanne’, in Konstantin der Grosse, ed. A. Demandt and J. Engemann (Trier, 2007), pp. 382-6; J. Spier, Picturing the Bible. The Earliest Christian Art, exhibition cat., Fort Worth (New Haven and London, 2007), no. 73. The jug is to be published in full, with a republication of the whole treasure, by Kaufmann-Heinimann and Martin in a monograph which is in preparation. 64 W. Binsfeld, ‘Der 1628 Trier gefundene römische Silberschatz’, Trierer Zeitschrift, 42 (1979), pp. 113-27. 65 Spoons: Mundell Mango, Kaper Koraon, pp. 216-26, nos. 49-56. I follow closely Mundell Mango’s discussion of these spoons and her conclusions; but note that, while his conclusions do not affect the argument here, Hauser (Silberlöffel, pp. 43-5) gives reasons for thinking that the spoons may not have belonged to the Antioch hoard. Chalice: see note 71, below. 66 C. Diehl, ‘Argenteries syriennes’, Syria, 11 (1930), pp. 209-15.

67

Mundell Mango, Kaper Koraon, pp. 217-18. Dalton, Early Christian Catalogue, pp. 82-3, nos. 380-4; Hauser, Silberlöffel, pp. 82-3, nos. 196-200. 69 Mundell Mango (Kaper Koraon, p. 218) concluded that the spoons, together with a poor eighth spoon (no. 56), were eventually presented to a church for their silver value, perhaps by the individual whose monogram was added to spoon 52; Engemann, Anmerkungen. 70 Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus, p. 10. 71 Mundell Mango, Kaper Koraon, pp. 183-7, no. 40: ht. 19.5 cm.; diam. (cup rim) 13.5-18 cm.; diam. (foot rim) 7.5 cm.; with full bibliography to that date. See further M. Mundell Mango, ‘The Origins of the Syrian Ecclesiastical Silver Treasures of the SixthSeventh Centuries’, in Argenterie romaine, ed. Baratte (cit. in n. 8), pp. 163-84, esp. 165; S. Boyd, ‘A Bishop’s Gift: Openwork Lamps from the Sion Treasure, in Argenterie romaine, ed. Baratte, pp. 191209, esp. 196; H.C. Evans, ‘The Antioch Chalice’, in Byzantium 330-1453, ed. R. Cormack and M. Vassilaki (London, 2008), pp. 68

13

KENNETH PAINTER these examples, the spoons and the ‘chalice’, carry sayings or iconography which refer directly to matters of lively debate in late antiquity, and so they would have been ideal stimuli to intellectual discussion during the formal process of dining. Silver plate with biblical scenes falls into this same category. As has been noted above, when such vessels lack quotations from or references to the liturgy and do not have supporting associations (such as Christian votive plaques) to show that they may have been in a church, there is no reason to suppose that they were used in the liturgy. This does not mean that they could not have been used for such a purpose; but equally there is no reason why they should not have been found on a dining table, side by side with vessels decorated with secular or pagan scenes. In this period of the fourth and early fifth centuries Christians and pagans were still living together in the Empire, not in separate pagan and Christian cultures,74 but sharing certain beliefs, attitudes and practices.75 This willingness to share common ground began to decline towards the end of the fourth century and intolerance began to grow; but tolerance of and interest in paganism survived into the fifth century and beyond, and pagan elements of the previous shared culture were retained and increasingly interpreted anew along acceptable Christian lines.76 It is important to note, however, that this discussion and reinterpretation was a long-drawn-out process, which must have occurred over a long period and in many different parts of the Empire. This is the picture into which much decorated silver plate fits.

Fig. 6. Silver-gilt openwork lamp with a silver liner, from the Antioch treasure, known as the ‘Antioch Chalice’. 5th or 6th century AD. Ht. 19 cm. Diam. 15.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 50.54. The openwork decoration shows, within a vine scroll, two seated images of Christ (one bearded– visible in this view – and the other beardless), acclaimed by ten figures holding furled scrolls and sitting on highbacked chairs, probably the apostles.

Silver vessels with scenes from the Bible do not seem to have survived from the fourth century. There is no reason why they should not have been made. Glass bowls, for example, with cut scenes such as the sacrifice of Abraham, the Fall (Fig. 7a), or the resurrection of Lazarus, were made in the glass workshops of Cologne in the fourth century, side by side with vessels decorated with hunting scenes, or with mythological scenes such as a meeting between Apollo and Diana (Fig. 7b) or the struggle between Hercules and Antaeus, all of them

within an openwork outer cup, it rests on a splayed foot with a knop, and it is now more convincingly identified as a lamp of the fifth or sixth century. The openwork of the outer cup consists of two zones, one on each side, worked as a pattern of vine scrolls, in which twelve seated figures are symmetrically distributed and interspersed with a lamb, a rabbit, a grasshopper, a butterfly, birds, snails and two baskets. The figures have often been identified as Christ and the Apostles, Christ appearing twice, surrounded by ten seated Apostles. Such portrayals of Christ surrounded by the Apostles are very similar to scenes of philosophers round Socrates, Diogenes or Calliope.72 Marlia Mundell Mango suggested that the composition on the Antioch Chalice deliberately mixes both the Christian and the pagan traditions in order to illustrate another group of sayings, the Theosophy, compiled, probably in the fifth century, to show that pagan philosophers had prophesied the advent of Christ, just as the Old Testament prophets had done.73 Thus, both

74 R. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), p. 12. 75 As a marker of the attitudes of the times, M.R. Salzman (‘Religious koine and Religious Dissent in the Fourth Century’, in A Companion to Roman Religion, ed. J. Rüpke (Oxford, 2007), pp. 109-25, esp. 109-10) tellingly quotes Constantius II’s visit to Rome in AD 357, when he admired its monuments and stood in awe of its religious shrines (Ammianus Marcellinus, 16.10), and she notes that Constantius ‘found much that was of value in the religious traditions attached to the state cults at Rome, and so he maintained them’. 76 For the development and changes in religion in the 4th and early 5th centuries, see Salzman, ‘Religous koine’.

382-3, no. 19. 72 Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus, p. 9, and p. 10, Fig. 7, showing the mid-4th-century mosaic of the Seven Sages from Baalbek-Suwēdīye, Lebanon. 73 H. Dörrie, ‘Theosophia’, in Der Kleine Pauly, 5 (1975), col. 732; P.F. Beatrice, Anonymi Monophysitae Theosophia: An Attempt at Reconstruction, Vigiliae Christianae, Supplement 56 (Leiden, 2001).

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A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW

Fig. 7a Greenish colourless glass bowl, engraved with scene of Adam and Eve, and inscribed GAVDIAS IN DEO PIE Z(eses) (‘May you rejoice in God, drink, and may you live’). Second third of 4th century AD. From a grave in the Luxemburger Strasse, Cologne. Ht. 5 cm. Diam. 20 cm. Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne. RGM N 340

Fig. 7b Greenish colourless glass bowl, engraved with a scene of Apollo and Diana, and inscribed ESCIPE POCVLA [G]RATA (‘Take the pleasing bowl’). Second third of 4th century AD. Found in the Luxemburger Strasse, Cologne. Diam. 18 cm. Römisch-Germanisches Museum Köln. RGM N 339 Bowls 7a and 7b were made in the same workshops in Cologne in the 4th century. In spite of the fact that one shows a Christian subject and the other a pagan subject, they were made for private, secular use and were not liturgical vessels.

being inscribed with exhortations to live well.77 It is not surprising, therefore, that there are silver vessels from the early part of the fifth century which also bear biblical scenes.

scenes, the Apostle Peter receiving the keys from Christ, and the miracle of the healing of the blind man (Fig. 9).79 The most convincing evidence that these vessels were intended for examination and discussion, most probably at formal meals, is provided by the nine silver dishes showing the story of David,

A jug formerly in the Bianchini collection, for example, illustrated in its central register the miracle at Cana with Christ and a single servant; the surviving drawing does not show the second scene (Fig. 8).78 A jug from the Strozzi collection has the entire body taken up by a frieze with two

79

British Museum, Dept. of Prehistory and Europe, 1951.10-10.1. Garucci Storia, pl. 460, Figs. 7and 8; Árnason, ‘Early Christian Silver of North Italy and Gaul’, p. 208, Figs. 11, 13; A.B. Tonnochy, ‘An Early Christian Silver Vase’, British Museum Quarterly, 17 (1952), pp. 16-17, Pl. Va; W.F. Volbach, Frühchristliche Kunst: Die Kunst der Spätantike in West- und Ostrom (Munich, 1958), no. 121; Strong, Silver Plate (cit. in n. 4), p. 186; Kent and Painter, Wealth of the Roman World (cit. in n. 4), p. 54, no. 105; L. Kötzsche, ‘Ewer with Healing of the Man Born Blind and Christ Giving the Keys to Peter’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann, pp. 441-2, no. 400; Spier, Picturing the Bible, no. 67. Although the area is damaged, it would not make sense, as Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann has pointed out to me, if Christ had held a scroll in both hands.

77

F. Fremersdorf, Die römischen Gläser mit Schliff, Bemalung und Goldauflagen aus Köln, Die Denkmäler des römischen Köln VIII (Cologne, 1967), p. 168, Pl. 223, and p. 170, Pl. 229 (Abraham); pp. 168-9, Pls. 226-7 (Adam and Eve); p. 170, Pl. 229 (Lazarus); pp. 165-6, Pl. 218 (Apollo and Diana); p. 167, Pl. 222 (Hercules and Antaeus). Engemann, Anmerkungen, pp. 154-5. 78 Árnason, ‘Early Christian Silver of North Italy and Gaul’ (cit. in n. 14), esp. pp. 205-7, Fig. 3; known only from a drawing published by R. Garucci, Storia dell’arte Cristiana, VI (Prato, 1881), pl. 460, 9.

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KENNETH PAINTER

Fig. 9a-b The ‘Strozzi jug’: silver jug with repoussé scenes of Christ healing the blind man and of Christ probably giving the keys to Peter. Ht. 12.75 cm. Late 4th or early 5th century AD. Find-place not known. The British Museum, MLA 1951.10-10.1. Formerly in the Strozzi collection, Rome. The scene of Christ giving the keys to Peter seems to have developed in the west, possibly in connection with the Roman bishops’ claim to primacy as Peter’s successors.

Fig. 8. The ‘Bianchini’ jug. Silver jug with figured decoration in relief, now lost. Late 4th or early 5th century AD. Formerly in the Bianchini collection in Rome. Find-place not known. Dimensions not known. The only record is a drawing published by Garrucci. This shows a vessel, presumably a jug (but no trace of a handle is shown), with an out-turned lip, a neck which swells out to a body with a high maximum diameter, and which turns out to form a high foot. The decoration is in three registers, divided by rope-like decoration: the upper register is filled with overlapping acanthus leaves; the middle register shows the Miracle at Cana, with Christ and a single servant; to the left of a single pillar a second scene shows only a figure of Christ; the lowest register shows lambs emerging from a building and perhaps converging on some central object of adoration. Drawing: after Árnason, Art. Bull., 20 (1938), Fig. 3.

the affirmation of the role which silver plate had already had in the first century. As François Baratte has commented, the image takes precedence over every other function.81 It is there to be scrutinised in every detail and commented on in a complex exchange between all those who are looking at the objects, whether the context is or is not that of the banquet.

part of a seventh-century treasure found at Lambousa in Cyprus (Fig. 10).80 This exceptional group shows dramatically 80

O.M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology (Oxford, 1911); L. Matzoulevitch, ‘Byzantine Art and the Kama Region’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, 6th ser., 31 (1947), pp. 123-6; Dodd, Silver Stamps, pp. 178-95; D. Wright, The Vespasian Psalter (Copenhagen, London and Baltimore, 1967), pp. 75-6; A. and J. Stylianou, The Treasures of Lambousa (Vasilia, Cyprus, 1969), pp. 47-111; K. Weitzmann, ‘Prolegomena to a Study of the Cyprus Plates’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 3 (1970), pp. 97-111; M. van GrunsvenEygenraam, ‘Heraclius and the David Plates’, Bulletin antike Beschaving, 48 (1973), pp. 158-74; S. Wander, ‘The Cyprus Plates: The Story of David and Goliath’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 8 (1973), pp. 89-104; S. Wander, ‘The Cyprus Plates and the Chronicle of Fredegar’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 29 (1975), pp. 3456; S. Alexander, ‘Heraclius, Byzantine Imperial Ideology and the David Plates’, Speculum, 52 (1977), pp. 217-37; H.L. Kessler, ‘David Plates from Cyprus’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann, pp. 475-

The same is true of the Traprain Law jug with biblical scenes. In spite of its scriptural decoration, there is no inscription which would identify it as being necessarily for use in a church. This vessel is domestic silver with Christian decoration, comparable to contemporary works with pagan representations, such as the jug from Bol’shoi Kamenets, of the same date and very similar in form, and also with much of the relief decoration gilded, which shows in its main zone a

83, nos. 425-33; Leader-Newby, Silver and Society in Late Antiquity (cit. in n. 53), pp. 181-208; P. Flourentzos, ‘Silver Plates with Scenes from the Life of David’, in Byzantium, ed. Cormack and Vassilaki, p. 385, nos. 30-2. 81 Baratte, Cuillers de Lampsacus, p. 18.

16

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW commented on the pastoral scene as follows: ‘The pastoral scene with the sheep and the house is but a late survival of a style of rim decoration without symbolical significance, which originated in the East and, after being further developed in Antioch and Alexandria during the first century of the Christian Era, remained in vogue with modifications till the fall of the Empire.’83 It is certainly true that pastoral scenes of the sort seen on the jug, together with hunting scenes, are one of the favourite motifs of silversmiths in late antiquity. They developed in parallel with Roman pastoral poetry, which first reached a peak of popularity in Vergil’s work, and was revived in the late third century in the four pastoral Eclogues of Nemesianus. From early imperial times representations of shepherds were used in a similar way as pictures of a desirable happy life in a pleasant landscape. These images, which could be understood without any religious concepts, were used more and more frequently from the second quarter of the third century in grave paintings and on sarcophagus reliefs.84 Fig. 10. David and Goliath plate; from the Cyprus treasure. Diam. 49.4 cm. Stamps of Heraclius, AD 613-629/630. Discovered in 1902 in Karavas, Cyprus, with a hoard of jewellery and gold. The climax of the story of David and Goliath is shown in three scenes. At the top, Goliath curses David, who is protected by god’s hand emerging from the heavens. In the centre David and Goliath meet between the cities of Socoh and Azekah, in the valley of Elah. In the exergue Goliath falls to the ground as David beheads him. The plate is one of nine with scenes from the early life of David, which appear to be a complete set, intended to be seen and discussed together. The David and Goliath plate is the largest and shows the climactic event of David’s youth. Of the other eight, four (diam. 26.7 cm.) show ceremonial scenes in his life (Samuel anointing David; David before Saul; Saul arming David; David’s marriage to Michal), while four small plates (diam. 14 cm.) show transitional events (David summoned to Saul; David battling the bear; David battling the lion; David’s covenant with Jonathan). It has been suggested that the set may have been made to compare Heraclius with David and to commemorate the victory of Heraclius over the Persian general Razatis in AD 627. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Pierpont Morgan 1917, 17.190.396

Such scenes on silver plate have been the subject of study by François Baratte.85 The repertoire of pastoral scenes was, like the poetry, established in the Hellenistic period and repeated in Pompeiian wall-painting; but it is not found on silver of the first century. In the second and third centuries pastoral scenes do not occur frequently on silver; but a small number is known, one, for example, on the border of a big circular dish of the late-third century in the treasure from Vienne, in which pastoral scenes alternate with scenes showing a bear hunt and a boar hunt.86 In the fourth century, by contrast, there was a big increase in popularity. Bowls from Šabac and Viminacium show isolated animals on their rims, while four bowls from Mildenhall have the animals in groups.87 On two bowls of the end of the fourth century, in the Carthage

83

Curle, Traprain, p. 19. J. Engemann, ‘Die bukolischen Darstellungen’, in Spätantike und frühes Christentum, ed. H. Beck and P.C. Bol (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), pp. 256-9. 85 Baratte, in F. Baratte, A. Le Bot-Helly, B. Helly, M.-C. Depassiot and V. Langlet, Le trésor de la place Camille-Jouffray à Vienne (Isère): un dépôt d’argenterie et son context archéologique, 50e supplément à Gallia (Paris, 1990), pp. 42-7; Argenterie romaine, ed. Baratte (cit. in n. 8), pp. 175-8; and F. Baratte, J. Lang, S. La Niece and C. Metzger, Le trésor de Carthage: contribution à l’étude de l’orfèvrerie de l’antiquité tardive, Études d’antiquités africaines, CNRS (Paris, 2002), pp. 14-30, esp. 29-30. 86 Turin: F. Baratte, ‘L’argenterie romaine de Lillebonne’, in Centenaire de l’abbé Cochet. Actes du colloque international d’archéologie (Rouen, 1978), p. 180, fig. 7; Vienne: F. Baratte and K.S. Painter, Trésors d’orfèvrerie gallo-romains (Paris, 1989), pp. 21618, no. 174. 87 Šabac and Viminacium: M. Vassits, ‘La vaisselle d’argent du Musée National de Belgrade’, Revue Archéologique, 4th ser., 1 (1903), pp. 17-32, esp. 26, no. XXIV, Fig. 19; Baratte et al., Carthage, pp. 26-8. Mildenhall: K.S. Painter, The Mildenhall Treasure (London, 1977), pp. 27-8, nos. 5-8, Pls. 15-22. 84

procession of the nine muses.82 Both the Traprain Law jug and the Bol’shoi Kamenets jug had to be handled and revolved in order to see and appreciate their full decoration. Possible significance of the figured decoration The final questions, therefore, concern what the figured scenes on the Traprain Law jug represent, and what discussion might have been raised by them. The central zone is divided into two parts. The upper, smaller part carries a pastoral scene of sheep and a building. The lower part is decorated with scenes from the Bible. Curle 82

For refs. see above, n. 11.

17

KENNETH PAINTER treasure, shepherds appear as well as the animals, while a jug of the same period or a little later, from Zhigailovka in the Ukraine, combines, in a series of friezes, garlands of acanthus and vine, a lion hunt, mythological scenes (the death of Hector and the re-purchase of his body by Priam), and pastoral scenes.88 The assemblage, though not the style, is very close to that which is found on the amphora from Conçesti.89 Such scenes continued to be used right through to the sixth century. Indeed, the object of the very highest quality with a pastoral scene is the bowl with a central medallion of a shepherd in the treasure found at Klimova, dating from about 530-40.90 It demonstrates vividly the continuity of tradition of pastoral scenes from the Hellenistic period to late antiquity, to which the pastoral scene on the Traprain Law jug belongs.

that there are sarcophagi with representations of the Good Shepherd, which because of the related images cannot be Christian.93 From the period around AD 260 to 320 more than 400 sarcophagi with pastoral representations have survived. The majority of them are linked with neither specially pagan nor Christian images; but some are, and it is today the general opinion that Christian customers took over an illustration of happiness and peace already popular with their non-Christian contemporaries, and then linked it with biblical scenes. The first clearly Christian illustration of the shepherd carrying a sheep, for example, is found in the paintings of a room in the mid-third-century house-church at Dura Europos on the Euphrates, which was perhaps used for baptism.94 Picture details were often detached from the general pastoral idyll which could be used as individual motifs to represent the allegory: individual shepherds, sometimes resting, milking, carrying a sheep, can be chosen for this purpose, but equally an individual sheep or other detail can be part of a Christian whole. This is the case with the pastoral scene on the Traprain Law jug. Its juxtaposition with the Biblical scenes makes it as near certain as can be that the significance of the idyll is Christian.

It was to these secular classical origins and development of pastoral scenes that Curle attributed the pastoral scene on the Traprain Law jug. His laconic characterisation of it as ‘decoration … without symbolic significance’ hints indirectly at the very warm debate about whether pastoral scenes, particularly with a shepherd, should be interpreted as Christian or not. Scholars had been in the habit, from as early as the sixteenth century, of interpreting any scheme showing sheep, usually with a shepherd, as being references to the New Testament parable of the shepherd bringing home the lost sheep (Luke xv, 5-6) and to Christ’s description of himself as the Good Shepherd (John x, 11-14).91 The idea that the kriophoros, a shepherd carrying a sheep, has Christian significance, is still used in the absence of supporting evidence today.92 As long ago as 1867, however, De Rossi demonstrated

The Biblical scenes in zone d (read from left to right) are: 1: the Adoration of the Magi; 2: Moses striking the rock; 3: the Fall, with Adam and Eve next to the tree with the serpent; and 4: a subject, badly damaged in the upper part. In scene 1 Mary, on the left and facing right, is seated in a chair, with her feet on a footstool (Figs. 1c, 1d). She is dressed as an upperclass lady, in a long robe, with part of it pulled up over her head; small groups of dots represent embroidered flowers. The Christ-Child is on her lap, dressed in a tunic and receiving the gift of the first Magus. The three Magi follow each other to the left towards Mary and Christ. They wear oriental dress, ‘Phrygian’ caps, tunics, a cloak over the shoulders, trousers (indicated by seams on some of the legs) and ankle-length boots. The first and the third carry vessels on each of which there are three circular objects, perhaps dishes; the second is screened behind the other two, and so the dish and gift which he is meant to be carrying are not visible. The scene of the Adoration seems to be paralleled only once on another silver vessel, a sixth-century flask now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It occupies the whole circumference of the main zone of the vessel, and it shows Mary in a high-backed chair, holding the Christ Child, who sits upright in his mother’s lap, while the archangel Gabriel presents the three Magi with their gifts.95

88

Carthage: Baratte et al., Carthage, pp. 14-30, nos. 1-2. Zhigailovka: V.G. Putško, ‘Silver Jugs from Zhigailovka’ (in Russian), Vestnik Drevni Istorij, 1984, pp. 72-85; Baratte, Vaisselle, pp. 176-7. 89 Conçesti amphora: L. Matzulewitsch, Byzantinische Antike. Studien auf Grund der Silbergefässe der Ermitage, Archäologische Mitteilungen aus russischen Sammlungen, 2 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929), pp. 131-4, Pls. 36-43; A. Effenberger, B. Maršak, V. Zallesskaja and I. Zaseckaja, Spätantike und frühbyzantinische Silbergefässe aus der Staatlichen Ermitage Leningrad (Berlin, 1978), pp. 87-93, no. 5, Figs. 6-9, Pl. 40. 90 Effenberger et al., Ermitage, pp. 97-101, no. 7, col. Pl. 6; Baratte, Vaissselle, p. 176. 91 Evidence that representations of the Good Shepherd were used as allegories of Christ is supported by passages from Tertullian (in his De pudicitia, 7, 10, written after AD 207) who reproached those who had chalices decorated with the Good Shepherd, and from Eusebius (Vit. Const. 3, 49), who interpreted as Christian statues of a shepherd carrying a sheep, seen at the fountains of squares in Constantinople. 92 The authors of the study of the late 4th-century treasure from Béziers dicuss the shepherd carrying a sheep, in the central roundel of the large dish , and conclude without further evidence that the iconography is ‘plus ou moins explicitement chrétienne’: M.G. Colin, M. Feugère and A.F. Laurens, ‘Un trésor d’argenterie antique’, Archéologia, no. 210 (février 1986), pp. 26-34.

93

G.B. De Rossi, Roma Sotteranea (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1909), 2, pp. 169-70. 94 E. Dinkler, ‘Abbreviated Representations’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann, pp. 396-403, esp. 396-7, Fig. 50. 95 M. Frazer, J. Hayward, T. Husband and K.R. Brown, ‘Flask with Adoration of the Magi’, Recent Acquisitions (Metropolitan Museum of Art), 1985/1986, pp. 14-18.

18

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW

Fig. 11. Greenish colourless glass beaker. Found before 1872 in a sarcophagus discovered near the Church of St Severin, Cologne. H. 12.8 cm. D. 11.4 cm. 4th century AD. Greenish colourless glass beaker, linear- and facet-cut decoration, showing three scenes: (a) Adam and Eve and Our Lord; (b) Moses striking the rock; (c) Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. The British Museum. MLA 1872.3-20.1.

mean that the four scenes as a whole were matched as two from the New Testament and two from the Old. On the other hand, the interpretation of scene 4 as the miracle of Moses and the quails and manna, has the advantage that the episode is represented quite frequently in the art of the period, for example on Roman sarcophagi.97 On balance, therefore, the latter explanation might be more likely. The fact that two figures are looking up, while the third is looking down, may mean that both aspects of the miracle in the desert are referred to. God granted Moses a double miracle (Exodus 11-12). In the evening there would be flesh to eat, and in the morning there would be bread. The quails flew in the evening, and in the morning, when the dew was gone, the ground was covered with manna. In the damaged scene 4, therefore, in spite of the problem that neither the quails nor the manna is shown, the figures to left and right may be looking at the quails, while the central figure may be looking at the following morning’s manna. The question of this interpretation, however, is not closed, and future work, particularly by Josef Engemann, may suggest further and better solutions.

Scene 2 shows a clean-shaven Moses, wearing a tunic and a cloak, striking water from the rock (Fig. 1e). Two small figures stand in front of him and catch the stream of water in vessels. In scene 3, to the right and left of the tree, round which is wrapped the snake, stand Adam and Eve, hiding their private parts with leaves (Fig. 1a). Adam holds the apple in his hand, and Eve might be interpreted as ordering him to eat it. Scene 4 is badly damaged in the upper part, but has three figures, all wearing togas (Fig. 1b). The one to the right, surviving complete, is bare-headed, as the other two may well have been; the figure to the left, although part of the head is missing, is looking up and has his right arm raised, with the hand open; the one to the right, who is bent back and looking upward, has his left hand raised to his face while the right arm points up or is catching something; between them is a third figure in front of a tree, with the face missing but with the right hand pointing down; the left and right figures are watching something falling from above to the ground, the left figure is catching an example in his hand, and the central figure is pointing to something, not visible to us, on the ground. This scene was interpreted by Curle as the betrayal by Judas; but Kötzsche and del Moro suggested that it shows a more commonly reproduced episode from the life of Moses – the miracle of the quails in the desert.96 It is difficult to decide on the merits of these interpretations of scene 4, as direct parallels for the image of the betrayal by Judas are very rare, as Curle himself pointed out. His suggestion is of course attractive in that a scene showing the betrayal by Judas would

Lastly, what discussion might have been raised by these scenes? This can be little more than speculation; but it is generally agreed that Christian image-makers realised that iconography could follow the lead of the theologians and of liturgical usage and profitably bring together subjects from the Old Testament and the New Testament.98 Subjects from each of the Testaments were therefore sometimes shown together, not to establish a direct correspondence between persons or events depicted, but to show through the images how history beginning in Old Testament times continued under the new covenant. At the church of S. Maria Maggiore

96

Curle, Traprain, p. 14, followed by Talbot Rice, Masterpieces of Byzantine Art (cit. in n. 4), and Toynbee, Art in Roman Britain (cit. in n. 4); L. Kötzsche, ‘Flagon with Scenes from the Old and New Testaments’, in Age of Spirituality, ed. Weitzmann, pp. 431-3, no. 389; M.P. del Moro, ‘Brocca con scene bibliche’, in Aurea Roma: dalla città pagana alla città cristiana, ed. S. Ensoli and E. La Rocca (Rome, 2000), pp. 614-15, no. 316.

97

E.g. a sarcophagus in Aix-en-Provence: J. Wilpert, I sarcofagi cristiani antichi, I (Rome, 1929), I, pl. 97, Fig. 3. 98 A. Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins (Princeton, 1968), p. 137.

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KENNETH PAINTER in Rome, for example, the mosaics show some of the earliest chapters in the history of salvation, going back to the time of the great leaders of Israel, and the same story is continued in scenes of Jesus’ childhood, with no other link between the mosaics of the nave and those of the arch.99 Alternatively, following comparisons made by the fathers of the Church, the image-makers might use scenes to show a correspondence between events of the two Testaments, to demonstrate that certain events in the Old Testament were antetypes of events in the New Testament.100 Thus, on the fifth-century door of the church of S. Sabina, the first panel shows the miracles of Moses in the desert: the sweetening of the bitter waters of Marah, the provision of quails and manna for the children of Israel, and the striking of water from the desert rock. The panel now to its left shows some of the miracles of Christ: the cure of the blind man, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, and the wine-making for the marriage feast at Cana.101

and discussion, a purpose which does not exclude subsequent re-use as needed in burial or religious contexts. It may be supposed, therefore, that the Traprain Law jug had a similar purpose, and that it was used in contexts of sophisticated dining and discussion like similar highly decorated silver plate from all over the Empire from the first century onwards. The subjects of its scenes from the Old and New Testaments were deliberately and significantly juxtaposed in order to suggest complex meanings when the jug was studied carefully.105 Thus the Adoration of the Magi in the first scene (Matthew ii, 1-12) stood for the whole Christological cycle. It stood visually for the principal argument in favour of the salvation of each believer, the fact of the Saviour’s Incarnation and His work and death on earth. The scene occurs on one other silver vessel, a sixthcentury bottle now in New York.106 This need for redemption, implied in the scene of the Adoration of the Magi (Matthew ii, 1-12), was also sometimes indicated by the scene showing the Fall (Genesis ii, 22), as in the third scene on the Traprain Law jug. The scene shows Adam and Eve, separated by the tree, with the serpent, a scene indicating Original Sin, for which man was to be redeemed by Christ. The second and fourth scenes are linked similarly. They show, probably, two of Moses’ miracles in the wilderness, providing the people of Israel with water by striking it from the rock (Numbers xx, 2-11; Exodus xvii, 5-6), and feeding them with quails in the evening and manna in the morning (Exodus xvi, 13-31). These are used as types of deliverance, prefiguring God’s deliverance of the soul from death. At the same time the desert rock is the antetype of the crucified Christ, from whose side water and blood will run. The quails and the manna are antetypes of the food which will be served at Cana and the Last Supper.107 The four scenes are thus derived from the common vocabulary of early Christian iconography of the period. They may be seen as two pairs, or as linked in a continuous narrative. Because Man fell (scene 3), Christ was incarnated on earth to save him (scene 1), and

This iconographical practice was also used on vessels, as can be seen, for example, on a glass from Germany (Fig. 11). A colourless beaker of the fourth century, found in a sarcophagus near the church of St Severin, Cologne, has three scenes in linear and facet-cut decoration round the body, Adam and Eve and Christ, Moses striking the rock, and Christ raising Lazarus from the dead.102 The combination of scenes can be explained as Adam and Christ demonstrating the old and new covenants, with the other two scenes being examples of divine salvation. We may speculate also that contrasting scenes of similar significance were shown on pairs of vessels. A blue glass vessel found in the family cemetery of the fourth-century villa at Köln-Braunsfeld, has five figured scenes in medallions, originally in gold leaf, which show Jonah thrown into the sea, the great fish spitting Jonah out and Jonah resting in the shade of the gourd-tree, Noah praying and the ark, Moses striking water from the rock, and Daniel between two lions (Fig. 12).103 Another colourless glass, a fragmentary bowl also found in the cemetery at St Severin, Cologne, is covered with blobs of blue and green glass, decorated with subjects in gold leaf which show figures including a probable Susannah, Moses as a miracle-worker, Adam and Eve, the children in the fiery furnace, a probable Daniel, Jonah, and Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac.104 These Old Testament scenes illustrate salvation, and it may perhaps be conjectured that New Testament scenes also illustrating salvation were shown on matching bowls. Scenes of great contemporary, in this case religious, interest, were shown on vessels which were probably made for secular use

105

Cf. Grabar, Iconography, pp. 128-46, Dogmas represented by juxtaposed images. 106 Frazer et al., ‘Flask with Adoration’. The bottle from New York has been dated to the 6th century by comparing the style of the relief scenes with those on a bottle from Syria which is dated on the style of its figures to the 6th century (Mundell Mango, Kaper Koraon, pp. 257-8, no. 86). Neither vessel has a 6th-century stamp. Comparanda for the shape and characteristics of the type of the New York bottle are a bottle in the Esquiline Treasure, and the bottle with the Nine Muses from Bolshoi Kalamets. The first belongs to the 4th century, and the second has a stamp of 4th or early 5th-century type. M.E. Frazer and H. Evans (‘Flask, With the Adoration of the Magi’, in Mirror of the Medieval World, ed. W.D. Wixom, exhibition cat. (New York, 1999), no. 44), however, argue convincingly, for a 6thcentury date, that the shape would be extraordinary in the 4th or 5th century, and that the type of angel does not appear earlier than the 6th century. 107 Grabar, Iconography, p. 143.

99

Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., pp. 141, 143: ‘Origen, Tertullian, Gregory of Nysa, Ambrose, and Augustine all made comparisons of this kind.’ 101 Ibid., p. 142, pls. 338-9. 102 Harden et al., Glass of the Caesars, p. 233, no. 130. 103 Ibid., p. 25, no. 5; A. Kaufmann-Heinimann, ‘59a.b Decennalienplatte des Constans’ (cit. in n. 24), pp. 117-70, esp. 1534, Fig. 160. 104 Harden et al., Glass of the Caesars, pp. 277-9, no. 154. 100

20

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW

Fig. 12.

Blue glass bowl with gilt scenes of Old Testament miracles. Mid or late 4th century AD. Found in the family cemetery of a villa at Köln-Braunsfeld. Ht. 8.6 cm. Diam. 12.4 cm. Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne. Glas 991. Deep blue cast glass bowl, decorated with wheel-cut circles, originally containing gilded figured scenes, the gold leaf now lost but the decoration is still visible as matt areas. The spaces between the circles are filled with vines, leaves and busts of youths. The five circles show Old Testament scenes: (1) Jonah is thrown into the sea; (2) below – the great fish spits Jonah out; above – Jonah rests in the shade of the gourdtree; (3) Noah in prayer, the Ark in the form of a box; (4) Moses strikes water from the rock; (5) Daniel between lions. The four small busts were once identified as portraits of the sons of Constantine I, dating the bowl to the imperial celebrations of 325/326; but it is now clear that the busts are anonymous and that the bowl can be dated only to the 4th century, but not too early in view of the use of the Old Testament scenes.

God for his creation of the world and of man and for man’sbeing placed in Paradise, as well as for other events such as deliverance from Egypt.109 Side by side with this, the prayer then sets the great works of God in the New Testament and the mysteries of Christ. It sees the Old Testament as prefiguring the New Testament and the Sacraments. The interrelationship of the two parts of the Bible was part of a widely understood common language. In the west at the same period Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo emphasise the same points.110

this salvation was prefigured by the types of miracles from the Old Testament (scenes 2 and 4, if correctly interpreted). The pastoral frieze in the register below the biblical scenes may stand for the Paradise to which Man may go after he has been saved.108 Christians and those interested in the religion would certainly have been accustomed to think of the two parts of the Bible as a whole and as complementary, and at this period they could have heard statements presupposing this at any church service. For example, in a Syrian liturgy of the Eucharist, of the last part of the fourth century, the concluding prayer of consecration deliberately gives thanks to

109

J. Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1956), pp. 142-3, citing Apostolic Constitutions, 12, 20-7. 110 E.g. Ambrose, like Clement of Alexandria and Cyprian, saw the offering of Melchizedek, who gave bread and wine to Abraham as he was returning from his defeat of the four kings (Genesis 14, 18) as an a sacrifice, like those of Abel and Abraham, typifying that of Christ on the Cross: Ambrose, De Sacrificiis, V, 1; Daniélou, Bible and

108

M. Mundell Mango, ‘Silver-gilt Ewer from Traprain Law’, in Byzantium. Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture, ed. Buckton (cit. in n. 4), p. 51, no. 35.

21

KENNETH PAINTER There is evidence, however, to set against Frend’s and Watts’s arguments. First, the Water Newton silver: one of the inscriptions on the vessels from Water Newton echoes the Vulgate, and the liturgy of Milan as recorded in Ambrose’s catechism of about 390 shows that the works of Ambrose and Augustine, which stress the close relationship between the Old and the New Testaments, could have been known and read in Britain.114 If it is correct to attribute the Water Newton liturgical silver to a date not earlier than the 380s, the presence of wealthy Christians and a church at the town of Durobrivae seems to imply that the cult continued at least in some quarters at the end of the fourth century, and, since we have no end-date for the deposit, possibly into the fifth.115

Conclusion: the jug in Britain The owner of the Traprain Law jug when it was whole did not necessarily subscribe to Christianity. Nevertheless, he will have been aware of the cult and of the way in which the scenes on the jug were complementary examples, from the Old and New Testaments, of the doctrine of salvation or deliverance. At the same time, it has been suggested at the beginning of this paper that the jug was probably in use in Britain. Would the scenes have struck any particular chord with an owner in that province? William Frend argued vigorously that, although there is good evidence for Christianity in Britain in the earlier part of the fourth century, an absence of evidence meant that the cult died in the last decades of Roman Britain, and a book by Dorothy Watts came to the same conclusion.111 Physical remains of churches of the Roman period in Britain are hard to prove.112 Even at St Albans, where a church is expected on or near the site of the martyrdom of St Alban, such a shrine has not yet been found by Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye Biddle, in spite of their research excavations.113 This shortage of evidence for the later fourth century might be taken to imply that the Water Newton treasure must have an earlier date, possibly not later than the middle of the century.

There is further evidence of continuity of Christianity into the fifth century. First, Charles Thomas has demonstrated the scholarly use in inscriptions of the fourth to eleventh centuries in the west of Britain of a ‘Biblical Latin’, based on the Vulgate of about 400, and probably derived from an earlier, fourth-century, common basis in the western Empire.116 The texts occur as inscriptions on stone, and the hypothesis supposes a standard Roman education plus a love of word puzzles to emulate God’s creation of the world as a mathematical act.117 Second, Martin and Birthe Biddle’s archaeological work has suggested strongly that at least part of the cemetery under the later cloister of the Abbey was abandoned after the middle of the fourth century, and that the subsequent graveled area was used by people attending in relatively large numbers something like a fair or market. This fits well with the presence nearby of a basilica over the grave of a saint whose relics were now the focus of a cult of St Alban, as Martin Biddle’s work on the documentary evidence shows. Third, St Albans must have had a considerable Christian population in the first quarter of the fifth century, because the heresy of Pelagianism became such a problem there that in AD 429 Germanus, bishop of Autessiodonum (Auxerre), accompanied by Lupus, bishop of Trecessina (Troyes) was sent to combat it.118 The confrontation between

Liturgy, pp. 143-4. 111 W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (London, 1984), pp. 7925; id., ‘The Failure of Christianity in Roman Britain: Some Recent Evidence’, in Acta XIII Congressus Internationalis Archaeologiae Christianae, III, Studi di Antichità Cristiana pubblicati a cura del Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, LIV (The Vatican and Split, 1998), pp. 287-300; id., ‘Roman Britain, a Failed Promise’, in The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300-1300, ed. M. Carver (York, 2003), pp. 79-91. D. Watts, Religion in Late-Roman Britain: Forces of Change (London, 1998). 112 M.J. Jones, ‘Recent Research in Britain’, in Akten des XIV. Internationalen Kongresses für Christliche Archäologie (The Vatican and Vienna, 2006), pp. 455-9. 113 M. Biddle, ‘Alban [St Alban, Albanus] (d. c.303?)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘England’s Premier Abbey: The Medieval Chapter House of St Alban’s Abbey, and its Excavation in 1978’, Expedition: the University Magazine of Archaeology/Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 22, no. 2 (winter 1980), pp. 17-32; id., ‘St Albans Abbey. Archaeology in the Cloisters: The First Stage 1982-4’, Bulletin of the Council for British Archaeology Churches Committee, 21 (1984); id., ‘Search for Alban’s Tomb Continues’, The Alban Link: Newsletter of the Fraternity of Friends of Saint Alban’s Abbey, 43 (1995), pp. 10-19; id., ‘The Quest for Alban Continued: Excavations South of the Abbey, 1995’, The Alban Link: Newsletter of the Fraternity of Friends of Saint Alban’s Abbey, 45 (1996), pp. 1022; id., ‘The Origins of St Albans Abbey: Romano-British cemetery and Anglo-Saxon Monastery, in Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, XXIV (2001), pp. 45-77. See also R. Niblett, The Excavation of a Ceremonial Site at Folly Lane, Verulamium, Britannia Monograph Series, 14 (1999).

114

K.S. Painter, ‘The Water Newton Silver: Votive or Liturgical?’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 152 (1999), pp. 123, esp. 13-16. 115 K.S. Painter, The Water Newton Early Christian Silver (London, 1977); id., ‘The Water Newton Early Christian Treasure’, in Constantine the Great, ed. Hartley et al. (cit. in n. 11), pp. 210-22, nos. 196-222. 116 Biblical style: D. Howlett, The Book of Letters of Saint Patrick the Bishop (Dublin, 1994); id., The Celtic Latin Tradition of Biblical Style (Dublin, 1995); id., British Books in Biblical Style (Dublin, 1997). Inscriptions: A.C. Thomas, Christian Celts: Messages and Images, (Stroud, 1998), with earlier bibliography. Evidence for the 4th century in Britain includes the inscription RIB 684, and the Lullingstone mosaic text: Thomas, Christian Celts, p. 31 and chapter 2. 117 Job 38, 4-7; Isaiah 40, 12; Proverbs 8, 22-31. 118 Constantius, Life of St Germanus, repeated almost verbatim by Bede, Ecclesiastical History, I, 17-21; A.C. Thomas, Christianity in

22

A ROMAN SILVER JUG WITH BIBLICAL SCENES FROM THE TREASURE FOUND AT TRAPRAIN LAW the envoys and the Pelagius took place at a public meeting, which resulted in the defeat of the Pelagius. All this is important in relation to the jug from Traprain Law because the biblical scenes on the jug, including particularly those of Adam and Eve and of the Adoration of the kings, will have made the ideal starting point for a discussion of original sin and predestination. It was the argument between St Augustine of Hippo and the Pelagians about these knotty matters of theology that led to Germanus being sent by the Pope to persuade the British Pelagians out of their heresy. Germanus appeared to succeed in his tasks of defeating the heresy and allowing orthodoxy to prevail; but he later had to return to Britain, probably in 447, accompanied this time by Severus, pupil of Lupus and now bishop of Trier, because promoters of Pelagianism were still active.119 Most importantly in the present context this implies that vigorous religious debate still persisted in the island in the middle third of the fifth century.120 We shall never know whether dinner-parties at St Albans or elsewhere, and at which the Traprain Law jug was possibly admired and discussed, were actually those which helped the sophisticated upper classes of early fifthcentury Britain to hone their arguments; but, given the role of decorated silver plate in Roman society, and whatever the persuasion of the owner of this remarkable jug with its charged Biblical scenes, it is certainly possible that it may have played a part in these historical events.121

Roman Britain to AD 500 (London, 1985), pp. 53-60, 333-4. 119 Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain, pp. 333-4. 120 Severus was bishop of Trier from 445/6 to about 450 (H. Heinen, H.H. Anton and W. Weber, Im Umbruch der Kulturen, Spätantike und Frühmittelalter, Geschichte des Bistums Trier, I, Veröffentlichungen des Bistumsarchiv Trier (Trier, 2003), pp. 96-7, 374). Germanus died at Ravenna in 448. Bede (Hist. Eccles., I, 21) reports that Germanus, after dealing with the problem, returned to Italy and died at Ravenna in 448. See C. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896), II, p. 34; Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain, pp. 33-4. 121 I have received much generous help and advice from the editors, Martin Henig and Nigel Ramsay, and from François Baratte, Charles Thomas, Anne-Marie Kaufmann-Heinimann, Max Martin, Friederike Naumann-Steckner and Charles Thomas; but any remaining mistakes are my own.

23

Hand-washing and Foot-washing, Sacred and Secular, in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period Anthea Harris and Martin Henig We offer this paper to celebrate the achievements of two great scholars whose work encompasses Rome and especially Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and indeed the Early Modern period. If one site encapsulates the achievement of the Biddles it is Winchester and our story can begin there. One of us (MH) went to the same school as Martin, who was however so much his senior that he could only admire this ‘real archaeologist’ with child-like awe. It was some years later that researching two Flavian period burials from Grange Road, Winchester, Martin came to the then Guildhall Museum (predecessor of the Museum of London) to examine a shale trencher which paralleled one from Grave II, on a day when MH was on Saturday duty. His enthusiasm and warmth made a great impression and eventually laid a foundation for friendship. Apart from the trencher, the grave contained samian and coarse-ware vessels and jugs, including one fashioned from bronze, doubtless a Campanian Import. These could, of course, all have contained liquids for drinking but as we shall see there is another explanation, which is in accord with fashionable Roman and post-Roman dining, and this is the subject of our paper.2

Generally, foot-washing is mentioned in the context of hospitality and welcome. In the Odyssey, for example, Penelope urges her female servants to wash the feet of Ulysses: ‘you maids, wash his feet for him, and make him a bed on a couch with rugs and blankets, that he may be warm and quiet till morning.’7 Servius’s (fourth-century) commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid refers to a child washing the feet of a bride as part of the marriage ceremony; the implication is that this might be a contemporary practice, especially since it does not occur in other commentaries.8 Sulpicius Severus, writing in the late fourth century, characterises Martin of Tours as washing his (Severus’s) hands before meals and of washing his feet in the evening, while Maximus, the wife of a Roman official is, in turn, depicted as washing the feet of Martin with her tears.9 The latter episode is, of course, an allusion to the Gospel narrative of the ‘penitent woman’ washing the feet of Jesus with her tears,10 but the former is one of humble hospitality, offered directly by the host himself, rather than a servant or a woman in the household. Bede’s depiction of Cuthbert as washing the feet of his visitors also fits into this narrative tradition, while Julie Kerr has recently drawn attention to foot-washing in the work of the twelfth-century writer, Daniel of Beccles.11

Literary texts, including the Old and New Testaments, demonstrate the great importance of washing the hands and feet in Jewish, Christian and Graeco-Roman cultures. A few examples will suffice. In Psalm xxvi, 6 the psalmist sings:

Other examples of foot-washing from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages suggest that the symbolism surrounding the act was not fixed. Some patristic writers make reference to the motif in the context of penitence and grief, as well as the practising of humility. For example, Jerome, describing how unhappy he was in the desert during 375-8, and in another allusion to the story of the ‘penitent woman’, claims that he ‘cast myself at the feet of Jesus, I watered them with my tears,

I wash my hands in innocence, And go around your altar, O Lord. Unknowingly, the patriarch Abraham is said to have washed the feet of three angels;3 and at Carmel, King David's wife, Abigail, washed the feet of her husband's servants.4 This motif is carried through into the New Testament where, in St John’s Gospel, we find the Last Supper narrative, in which Jesus ‘poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet’.5 Famously, too, in St Matthew’s Gospel, at the trial of Christ, Pilate ‘took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying “I am innocent of this man’s blood.”’6

7

Homer, Odyssey, xix, 33. Trans. S. Butler (London, 1900). Servius, On Aeneid, in Servius’ Commentary on Book Four of Virgil's Aeneid: An Annotated Translation, ed. C.M. McDonough, R.E. Prior and M. Stansbury (Wauconda, Illinois, 2004). Quoted in I.C. Mantle, 'The Roles of Children in Roman Religion', Greece and Rome, 2nd Ser., 49 (2002), pp. 85-106, at 100. We are grateful to Niall Livingstone for this reference and for discussion on the subject. 9 Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini, xxv, 3, in Early Christian Lives, ed. and trans. C. White (Harmondsworth, 1998), p. 157. 10 Luke vii, 38. 11 Bede, Life of Cuthbert, in Lives of the Saints, ed. and trans. J.F. Webb (Harmondsworth, 1965), chapters vii, xxix, at pp. 81, 109. J. Kerr, ‘Welcome the Coming and Speed the Parting Guest: Hospitality in Twelfth-Century England’, Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007), pp. 130-46. 8

2

M. Biddle, ‘Two Flavian Burials from Grange Road, Winchester’, Antiquaries Journal, 47 (1967), pp. 224-50, at 240-2 (for Prof. J.M.C. Toynbee’s discussion of the bronze jug). 3 Genesis xviii, 4. 4 I Samuel xxv, 41. 5 John xiii, 5. 6 Matthew xxvii, 24.

25

ANTHEA HARRIS AND MARTIN HENIG I wiped them with my hair: and then I subdued my rebellious body with weeks of abstinence’.12 The fourth-century monk, Basil of Cappadocia, used the foot-washing motif to make a different point, suggesting that the cenobitical monastic life was preferable to that of the solitary hermit insofar as it offered opportunities to practice humility in the context of community: ‘the Lord... that he might give us a pattern of humility in the perfection of love he girded himself and washed the feet of the disciples in person. Whose feet then wilt thou wash? Whom wilt thou care for?’13

It is also apparent that while in the first instance the purpose of washing was cleanliness combined with good etiquette, hand and foot washing could be assigned a symbolic value, emphasizing humility (in the case of foot-washing), purity and even the washing away of guilt. Whether or not Pontius Pilate really washed his hands to exonerate himself from shedding blood, the Gospel writer clearly expected Pilate’s action to be understood. It can be related to the total immersion of Baptism as practised by John the Baptist (Matthew 3), signifying the washing away of sin. Amongst Christians and perhaps some other faiths, as the meal of the faithful became sacralised, so did the action of washing; the rinsing of the celebrant's hands before the consecration of the elements is first mentioned by Cyril of Jerusalem in 348.18 The ritualised ablutions surely retained their original function of making sure that the officiant’s hands were clean, but it also emphasized the need for ritual purity at the altar which went back to the Mosaic command in Exodus xxx, 1721:

Just over a decade later, in 388, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, preached before the Emperor, warning him to be humble before God and also used the foot-washing motif to illustrate his point. In his written account of his sermon, sent as a letter to his sister, Marcellina, Ambrose describes how he chastised the Emperor, calling on him to ‘“give water for his [Christ’s] feet, kiss his feet, so that you may not only pardon those who have been taken in sin, but also by your peaceableness restore them to concord, and give them rest”’.14 The implication seems to be that foot-washing (and the kissing of feet) was considered a symbolically restorative and reconciling act, but it is unclear whether it had been fully incorporated into the liturgy of the Christian Church at this point.

The Lord spoke to Moses: “You shall make a bronze basin with a bronze stand for washing. You shall put it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it; with the water Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet…. it shall be a perpetual ordinance for them, for him and for his descendants, throughout their generations”.

Hand-washing, while also a gesture of hospitality offered to guests, was normally considered essential before meals. At first glance, Jesus’ argument with Pharisees and scribes in St Matthew’s Gospel over whether it was correct for the disciples to omit washing their hands before eating seems to counter this, but in fact Jesus puts to good use the rather boorish behaviour of his disciples to deliver them a lecture contrasting material with spiritual cleanliness.15 It is hardly likely that he would have advocated a general breach of custom. Hand-washing was equally the norm in pagan and secular contexts; thus in Petronius’s Satyricon we find ‘boys from Alexandria pouring iced water over our hands’ before a meal.16 In Late Antique Gaul, Sidonius Apollinaris when entertained by the Emperor Marjorian in 461 called to a servant for water to wash his hands and, as we will see, handwashing in polite dining becomes even more a feature of late Roman feasting.17 The hands of diners would be washed before meals and between courses, for in a forkless age food was generally eaten with the hands.

While hand-washing seems to have retained its significance at the altar throughout the Late Antique and Early Medieval Church and from an early date, the use of foot-washing was subject to much more variation and, indeed, resistance.19 Nevertheless, by the fifth century it had come to be incorporated into the Holy Thursday (‘Maundy’) liturgy in parts of the Christian Church, regarded as part of the symbolic process of purification in preparation for the commemoration of the death and resurrection of Christ;20 and to encourage an appropriate and commensurate human response to the ritual re-living of Christ’s humility before his

18

W.H. Frere, The Principles of Religious Ceremonial, 2nd edn. (London, 1928), pp. 45 and 70; H. Leclercq, ‘Lavement’, in F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq, Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, VIII (Paris, 1929), cols. 2002-9. G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, new edn. (London, 2005), p. 124. 19 Augustine, Letters, lv. 18. 33; trans. W. Parsons, 2 vols. (Washington DC, 1951), I, p. 289: ‘Many, however, have not accepted this as a custom, lest it should be thought to belong to the ordinance of baptism; and some have not hesitated to deny it any place among our ceremonies’. Where churches had cisterns or fountains in their atria or elsewhere in their precincts, foot-washing may also have taken on a sacralised meaning, especially in popular practice. 20 The imperative of (spiritual) foot-washing in the context of purification is indicated in John xiii, 8: ‘Peter said to him, “You must never wash my feet!” Jesus answered him, “Unless I wash you, you cannot be involved with me.”’

12

Jerome, Letters, xxii.72, in The Letters of St. Jerome, trans. C.C. Mierow (New York, 1963), p. 140. 13 Regulae Fusius Tractatae, vii. 347E, in The Ascetic Works of St Basil, trans. W.K. Lowther Clarke (London, 1925), pp. 163-6. 14 Ambrose, Letters, xli. 26; quoted in F. Homes Dudden, The Life and Times of St Ambrose, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1935), II, p. 378. 15 Matthew xv, 1-20. 16 Petronius, Satyricon, ii. Trans. S. Ruden (Indianapolis, 2000). 17 Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters. 1.xi.14. Trans. W.B. Anderson (London, 1965). K.M.D. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet. Images of Conviviality (Cambridge, 2003), p. 156.

26

HAND-WASHING AND FOOT-WASHING, SACRED AND SECULAR, IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD disciples.21 The grace of humility embodied in the footwashing ceremony was also embedded in the cultural memory and material culture of the Church in the stole; this was included in the vestments first given to a deacon at his ordination, and generally associated with the towel Christ wrapped around himself in order to perform the footwashing of the disciples.22

the octaves (before his baptism), than to one who drowned his intellect in drunkenness’.25 In a reversal of order, at Milan the foot-washing of the baptismal candidate took place immediately after his or her baptism and chrismation (which itself took place at the Easter Vigil ceremony).26 There is some doubt as to when exactly the practice of footwashing was initiated, by whom and its geographical reach, as well as whether it was an import from further East (possibly Syria). However, it may have been in place by the late-fourth century and seems to have been practiced in several regions, such as in Gaul (Frankia), Spain, Ireland, as well as North Africa and Milan. Most scholars agree that the rite did not take place in fourth-century Rome although a new archaeological discovery at San Lorenzo in Lucina (discussed below) may disturb that consensus.27

Foot-washing seems not to have been a wholly regular part, however, of the fourth-century Easter liturgy or the liturgy of baptism (which took place at this time). This point is suggested, for example, by the text associated with the Gallican/Spanish pilgrim, Egeria, who travelled to the Holy Land in c. 394. Egeria does not mention foot-washing or the specific anointing of feet in her detailed descriptions of church services, including the Lent and Easter liturgies in Jerusalem, although she does describe how, before candidates for baptism are immersed in water, their bodies, including their feet, were anointed with oil:

In the late-sixth century (591), Pope Gregory the Great encouraged the link between the foot-washing ceremony (pedilavium) and the Holy Thursday liturgy and, in this context, has been credited with linking the foot-washing ceremony to the cult of Mary Magdalene (whom Late Antique and Early Medieval tradition holds to be St Luke’s ‘penitent woman’).28 Her professed contrition and grief was

Passing into the inner chamber, they were anointed with exorcised oil, from the very hairs of their head to the soles of their feet, to chase away all the invisible powers of the evil one.23

25

Augustine, Letters, lv.19.35, trans. Parsons, I, p. 290. From at least the eighth century, the rite was known as the ‘Ambrosian Rite’, although it was not necessarily written or developed by Ambrose. 26 Ambrose, De Mysteriis, vi. 31; Ambrose, De sacramentis, iii.1.4, 5. Quoted in C. Alzati, Ambrosianum Mysterium: The Church of Milan and its Liturgical Tradition, trans. G. Guiver, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2000), II, pp. 26-7. We wish to thank Martin Stringer for this reference. 27 E. Yarnold, The Awe-inspiring Rites of Initiation (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1994), pp. 116-25. J.L. Levesque, ‘The Theology of the Post-Baptismal Rites in the Seventh and Eighth Century Gallican Church’, in Living Water, Sealing Spirit: Readings on Christian Initiation, ed. M.E. Johnson (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1995), pp. 159-201, at 173; G. Winkler, ‘Confirmation or Chrismation?’, Worship, 58 (1984), pp. 2-17; reprinted in Living Water, Sealing Spirit, ed. Johnson, pp. 202-18, at 206-8. In Aquileia, the washing of feet took place before baptism: A. Doig, Liturgy and Architecture from the Early Church to the Middle Ages (Aldershot, 2008), p. 46. In the Eastern Syrian Church, foot-washing seems to have been elevated to a high status on the basis that it represented baptism in its own right: the disciples apparently having received no other baptism. Jesus’ words, “Unless I wash you, you have no part of me” were taken to imply that the rite was necessary, and enabled people to participate in the suffering and victory of Christ. M.E. Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation, 2nd edn. (Collegeville, Minnesota, 2007), pp. 23, 145, 187; K. Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History (Leuven, 1999), pp. 177-80. 28 Gregory the Great, ‘Homily xxv on John xx, 11-18’, in Forty Gospel Homilies by Gregory the Great, ed. and trans. D. Hurst (Piscataway, New Jersey, 2009), pp. 193-205. Rosalind Love has recently argued that the hymn used in the Maundy Thursday footwashing ceremony in the Anglo-Saxon church by the tenth century was in honour of Mary Magdalene. R. Love, ‘Frithegod of Canterbury’s Maundy Thursday Hymn’, Anglo-Saxon England, 34

This is generally taken to be an allusion to the episode at the start of the Passion narrative where Mary anoints Jesus’ feet at Bethesda, apparently in preparation for burial.24 That Egeria, by the same token, does not comment on the absence of foot-washing, can perhaps be taken to suggest that neither was it common in her ‘home’ congregation at this point. It is hardly surprising that foot-washing came to form part of the rite of Christian initiation. Throughout Judaic writings, shoes and sandals are required to be removed when the wearer is standing on holy ground or is about to enter a holy place. If the ‘dirty’ sandal is to be removed, the implication, of course, is that the feet are already clean, having recently been washed. Thus, to wash feet in advance of entering the baptistery would be consistent with this logic. It seems that there were occasions when this was taken extremely seriously. In North Africa, for example, Augustine was concerned that the cleanliness (or otherwise) of feet was a matter of exaggerated pious concern in some lay quarters, for he is critical ‘that more severe rebuke would be administered to a man who should touch the ground with his feet bare during 21

M. Connell, ‘Nisi Pedes, Except for the Feet,’ Worship, 70 (1996), pp. 517-30. The word ‘Maundy’ may be from mandatum, that is, the mandatum novum that Jesus gave his disciples as he washed their feet: that is, ‘to love one another as I have loved you’ (John xiii, 34). 22 But see J.M. Pierce, ‘Vestments and Objects’, in The Oxford History of Christian Worship, ed. G. Wainwright and K.B. Westerfield Tucker (Oxford, 2006), pp. 841-56, at 842. 23 Egeria’s Travels, ed. and transl. J. Wilkinson (Warminster, 1999), p. xxxviii. 24 John xii, 3.

27

ANTHEA HARRIS AND MARTIN HENIG deemed to be an appropriate motif for baptismal candidates about to be baptised. In Rome, the ceremony took the form of the bishop washing and drying the feet of twelve men, usually deacons and priests. After the ninth century, it was developed into a ceremony where the bishop or, more particularly, a deacon washed the feet of twelve poor men or monks on Holy Thursday.29 By the eleventh century, in many areas of Western Europe the monarch or prince washed the feet of the poor at the same ceremony, symbolising the ideal of serving his subjects; in Britain the practice was only discontinued under William III (r. 1689-1702).30 By the High Middle Ages it seems to have become more of a symbolic imitation of Christ's humility than an act relating to the confession of sin and expression of penitence, although the practice of penitents conducting religious ceremonies and processions in bare feet remained common as an act of penitence. Where this was followed by restoration to communion and administration of the Eucharist, this may sometimes have incorporated a foot-washing ceremony.

this is the use of the trulleum defined in the Corpus of Latin: Trulleum, polybrum in quo manus perluuntur, quod in sinistra tenetur et aliud vas cum aqua in sinistra dextera [Trulleum, washbasin in which hands are bathed, which is held in the left hand while a vessel with water is held in the other hand].34 The set of jug and trulleum is often to be seen depicted on the sides of altars, and in pagan ritual was employed in libations, sometimes preceding sacrifice, while sets are also recorded from burials both in Britain – at Canterbury, the Bartlow Barrows on the Essex and Cambridgeshire border (Figs. 1a-c) and at Stansted (Essex) – and at numerous continental sites; the jug from Grange Road, Winchester cited above could well have been used in the ritual despite the absence of an accompanying trulleum. The connection with hand-washing may include the element of purificatory ritual which is common to both instances, but in the first instance is probably to be regarded as furnishing the funerary feast for the deceased.35 In the well-known painting of a ministerium of silver plate displayed on a table, from the Tomb of Vestorius Priscus at Pompeii, a bronze jug and a trulleum are depicted beneath the table, and may represent ‘the equipment for washing the guests’ hands’.36 There are many depictions of a servant holding a jug and trulleum, for instance on a tombstone in Cologne.37 Such scenes become common in Late Antiquity and in works of art of this time ‘one of the most [frequently displayed attendants] is the servant who carries the jug of water and basin to wash the guests’ hands, who often appears balancing the wine server and may indeed be the only other servant to be represented’.38 Examples are to be found in the painting at the Tomb of the Banquet at Constanza, on another tomb from Silistra, in Dido’s banquet as portrayed in the Vergilius Romanus (Fig.2) and on the Cesena plate.39 A characteristic feature, seen for instance in the case of the Constanza servant, is the towel over his shoulder.40

The ceremonial use of foot-washing in monastic contexts followed, at least indirectly and so far as a general practice can be determined, the view of Basil of Cappadocia that it gave the monks an opportunity to demonstrate authentic mutual service prevailed. It was institutionalised in the Rule of St Benedict (c. 540), which stipulated that the feet of all the monks in a given community should be washed once a week; and on Holy Thursday this was to be done by the Abbot.31 The use of this practice in early Anglo-Saxon England is attested by Bede’s late seventh-century Life of Cuthbert which records that Cuthbert and his fellow monks washed each other’s feet in an act of servitude.32 Archaeological evidence from Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval period Having set out a brief historical narrative on hand-washing and foot-washing, we may turn to some archaeological evidence.

2006), pp. 47-8, Fig. 6.5. 34 Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum, V, 655, 10: cited by Nuber, ‘Kanne und Griffschale’, p. 140. Also at http://www.archive.org/ details/corpusglossario02leipgoog (accessed October 2009). 35 Cf. J.M.C. Toynbee, Art in Britain under the Romans (Oxford, 1964), pp. 317-26, especially comment on p. 322; Cool, Eating and Drinking in Roman Britain, pp. 193-6, Fig. 17.3. 36 Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet, pp. 86-7, Fig. 44. The trulleum is not strictly a basin, as Dunbabin writes. 37 Nuber, ‘Kanne und Griffschale’, Taf. 20, 2 (Cologne). 38 Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet, p. 156. 39 Ibid.; Nuber, ‘Kanne und Griffschale’, Taf. 21 (wallpainting from Silistra); D.H. Wright, The Roman Vergil and the Origins of Medieval Book Design (London, 2001), p. 28; D. Parish, ‘A Mythological Theme in the Decoration of Late Roman Dining Rooms: Dionysos and his Circle’, Revue Archéologique, 1995, pp. 307-22, at 320, Fig.5. See also Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet, p. 156, Fig. 85 (Cesena plate), and Pl. xii (Constanza). 40 Ibid., p. 168.

Perhaps the most characteristic items used for hand-washing are the handled trulleum with accompanying jug.33 Indeed, (2005), pp. 219-36. 29 J. Kerr, Monastic Hospitality: The Benedictines in England, c.1070 - c.1250 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 105-6. 30 C. Levin, ‘ “Would I Could Give You Help and Succour”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Touch’, Albion, 21 (1989), pp. 191205, at 195. 31 The Rule of St Benedict, trans. Abbot Parry and ed. E. de Waal (Leominster, 1988), chapter xxxvi. 32 Bede, Life of Cuthbert, in Lives of the Saints, trans. J.F. Webb (Harmondsworth, 1965), chapters xviii, xxxvii. 33 H.U. Nuber, ‘Kanne und Griffschale. Ihr Gebrauch im täglichen Leben und die Beigabe in Gräbern der römischen Kaiserzeit’, Bericht der Römisch-Germanischen Kommission, 53 (1972), pp. 1-232; cf. H.E.M. Cool, Eating and Drinking in Roman Britain (Cambridge,

28

HAND-WASHING AND FOOT-WASHING, SACRED AND SECULAR, IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD

a

b

c

Fig. 1. a Set of trefoil-mouthed flagon and trulleum from one of the Bartlow Barrows (after J. Gage in Archaeologia, xxv (1834), p. 8 and pl. ii). b Set of sphinx-headed flagon and trulleum from another of the barrows at Bartlow. c Detailed drawing of the jug (after J. Gage in Archaeologia, xxvi (1836), p. 303 and pls. xxxiii and xxxiv).

Fig. 2. Vergilius Romanus, f. 100v. The convivium of Dido. Vatican Library.

29

ANTHEA HARRIS AND MARTIN HENIG

Fig. 3. Fluted bowl from Blunsdon Ridge, unrestored and as excavated. Swindon Museum.

Not surprisingly, hand-washing appears in specifically Christian contexts. Sometimes this is discrete, as in a fourthcentury representation of a feast depicted in the Catacomb of Peter and Marcellinus where a jug and trulleum are shown beside the table.41 Sometimes the context is biblical, for example, on one of the well-known fifth-century ivory plaques of the Passion in the British Museum, Pilate is washing his hand in a trulleum held in the servant’s left hand while the same servant pours water from a jug held in his right hand.42

One further example was found with a small hoard of silver in a large Roman villa at Blunsdon Ridge, Swindon (Wiltshire), very probably the villa where it was employed (Fig.3).46 Of course, the use of such bowls would also involve ewers, which have been found in conjunction with a fluted basin in the Sevso Treasure (probably from Pannonia).47 Although such bowls cannot be proved to have served any religious purpose they, too, played a part in aristocratic life which in Late Antiquity was increasingly ritualized and made to approximate to cult practice more and more. This can be seen in scenes of levee: for example, on the Projecta casket from the Esquiline Treasure or the circular casket in the Sevso Treasure, as well as in similar scenes on the frescos from a tomb at Silistra (Bulgaria), where one servant holds a jug and trulleum and another a towel. In addition, a maid holds a cista by three chains, which resonates with the possible usage of hanging bowls in ritual hand-washing (discussed below).48 Other thin-walled silver vessels which hardly seem designed to contain any liquid more viscous than water include bowls from the Ballinrees/Coleraine Treasure and from the late Roman ‘Bacchic’ phase of the temple of Mithras, London.49 The second was found together with a canister containing an infusor and could have been used for a ritual potion, although ablutions before a religious rite is another possible use. Another example from the Early Christian Water Newton

Other types of vessel were also used for ablutions: amongst the distinctive objects in several late Roman treasures are fluted bowls or basins. The undulating decoration of the surface of the metal is suggestive of the rippling of water, and it has been suggested that they were used for hand-washing either at table or – as the presence of the three Graces on a bowl from Chatuzange or the presence of Venus on a bowl from Thil implies – a woman’s toilette.43 One from the Traprain Law Treasure figures a Nereid riding a sea-panther while another from Sutton Hoo (Suffolk) displays a female head, perhaps Venus.44 Another Traprain bowl, as well as fine examples from the Esquiline Treasure and another from Mildenhall (Norfolk), all carry geometric ornamentation.45

41

Ibid., p. 178, Fig. 104. Age of Spirituality. Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century, ed. K. Weitzmann, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1979), pp. 502-4, no. 452, Plaque 1. 43 F. Baratte and K. Painter, Trésors d’orfèvrerie gallo-romains (Paris, 1989), pp. 233-4, no. 191; pp. 247-8, no. 203.. 44 K. Painter in Constantine the Great. York’s Roman Emperor, ed. E. Hartley, J. Hawkes, M. Henig and F. Mee (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 236-7, no. 243; J.P.C. Kent and K.S. Painter, Wealth of the Roman World. Gold and Silver AD 300-700 (London, 1977), p. 131, no. 237. 45 K.J. Shelton, The Esquiline Treasure (London, 1981), pp. 78-9,

no.4; cf. Pls. xxii-xxiv.. 46 M. Henig, ‘Silver’, in B. Phillips and B. Walters, Blunsdon Ridge, 1997. An Archaeological Evaluation (privately printed, 1998), pp. 37-9, Fig.9. 47 M. Mundell Mango, The Sevso Treasure I (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1994), pp. 402-43, nos. 11-13. 48 Shelton, Esquiline, pp. 72-5, no. 1; Mundell Mango, Sevso, pp. 444-71, no. 14. Cf. Nuber, ‘Kanne und Griffschale’, Taf. 21; W. Dorigo, Late Roman Painting (London, 1971), pp. 225-7, Figs 1813. See Yorke, this volume. 49 Kent and Painter, Wealth of the Roman World, p. 127, no. 230; J. Shepherd, The Temple of Mithras, London (London, 1998), p. 181, Fig. 211.

42

30

HAND-WASHING AND FOOT-WASHING, SACRED AND SECULAR, IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD

Fig. 4. Hanging Bowl from Sutton Hoo (Suff.) with central fish motif. British Museum.

Treasure seems to have been suspended as a hanging bowl. Kenneth Painter suggests that it could have been a lamp;50 however, the delicacy of the object seems to us to argue against such a use, coupled with the evident suitability of such a container to hold water. The use of a hanging bowl would have allowed a server to raise or lower the vessel to the required height, just as a thurifer raises and lowers the thurible, in the way that is shown on one scene in the Silistra fresco, mentioned above.

early as the fifth century although it could be as much as a century later), is embellished with dolphins and crosses, and another was found in a primary (priest’s?) grave at St Paul in the Bail, Lincoln.53 Whether employed in a secular context or in a religious one, they are certainly highly suitable vessels for ablutions. The hanging bowl tradition continues at least to the eighth century, as evidenced by the Witham hanging bowl,54 with its interior revealing an animal lurking in the depths of the water. This is most likely to have been secular, whatever its function, but the contemporary or slightly later Ormside bowl embellished with the ‘good vine’, is more plausibly sacred in function, and could well have been used for washing before the Mass.55 In Early Medieval Ireland, the very spectacular Derrynaflan hoard included a splendid outsize chalice and paten, which certainly served as Mass vessels, together with a wine strainer and also a basin – plain but related to hanging-bowls in technique – which can most plausibly be assigned to some more mundane function, such

Highly relevant here are ‘late Celtic’ hanging bowls. The main series of hanging bowls from Britain are certainly later than the conventional end of the Roman period, though the recent Corpus ascribes a few to the fifth century.51 They are widespread; one of them indeed comes from a seventhcentury grave at Winchester, but the most famous example is one from Sutton Hoo which has a fish on a pedestal in the centre (Fig. 4). Although ‘there is no ground for supposing that it represents the Christian Ichthus’, there is surely sufficient reason for supposing the bowl to have contained water.52 And a few hanging-bowls certainly seem to have ecclesiastical use: one from Faversham (Kent) (possibly as

53

Ibid., pp. 163-5, no. 37; and see S. Youngs, The Work of Angels. Masterpieces of Celtic Metalwork, 6th - 9th Centuries AD (London, 1989), p. 51, no. 36 (Faversham), and pp. 191-9, no. 53 (Lincoln). 54 Bruce-Mitford, Late Celtic Hanging-Bowls, pp. 208-12, no. 58 (River Witham). 55 L. Webster and J. Backhouse, The Making of England. AngloSaxon Art and Culture AD 600-900 (London, 1991), pp. 172-3, no.134.

50

K.S. Painter, in R.L.S. Bruce-Mitford, A Corpus of Late Celtic Hanging Bowls (Oxford, 2005), p. 81. 51 Bruce-Mitford, Late Celtic Hanging Bowls. 52 Ibid., pp. 132-6, no. 25. For Sutton Hoo, pp. 258-66, no. 88.

31

ANTHEA HARRIS AND MARTIN HENIG as holding water for the priest to wash his hands with.56

drying the feet and were presumably also provided for the hands. Washing one’s hands before meals was evidently de rigueur in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries. Some lavatoria were elaborate buildings incorporating fountains, such as appears on the Christ Church, Canterbury ‘Waterworks drawing’ of about 1165 with perhaps eight recesses, or the rather similar hexagonal lavatorium of c. 1270 whose foundations are visible at nearby St Augustine’s Abbey.65 An octagonal lavabo dated c. 1180 has been excavated at Much Wenlock Priory, containing a circular lobed or fluted cistern, partly embellished with foliage (Fig. 5).66 The lobes or flutes bring to mind the design of contemporary fonts in the St Albans area, which were possibly ultimately based on fluted Roman marble kraters but inevitably also recall the silver hand-washing bowls discussed above.67 The early thirteenth-century lavatorium at Durham was replaced at least once but the one standing in 1593 is described as comprising an octagonal basin in a round building (whose roof incorporated a dovecote) decorated with marble and with seven windows and cupboards for towels.68 Interestingly, the cupboards in which the towels were kept are described as being made of ‘carved worke [for to geve ayre to the towels]’, so they were specifically designed as airing cupboards.69 Each cupboard had a lock on it, and each monk had a key to his own towel locker.

Portable metal vessels were only one aspect of washing. In public baths of the Roman period, stone bowls or labra, like the example from the Castle Baths, Caerleon,57 were used. Such vessels (which might have their own water supply) find their Christian equivalents in the fountains or wells/cisterns placed in front of churches, from which the visitor could obtain water for refreshment or purification.58 In the Eastern Mediterranean, cisterns were often dug under the atrium of a church, being accessed through a wellhead in the centre of the atrium, and sometimes feeding a pipe leading into an adjacent baptistery.59 These features performed both practical and symbolic functions, although the descendant of such fountains, the water-stoup found in Western medieval churches, is entirely symbolic in function, usually being large enough simply to dip the fingers for blessing rather than to wash the whole hand.60 While the idea of public bathing was frowned upon by the eighth century in some areas of Europe,61 the monastic tradition nevertheless preserved several other traditions of Antiquity relating to bathing, including running water for cleansing and sanitation, as can be seen on the plans of the great monasteries of St Gall in Switzerland and Christ Church, Canterbury.62 The Rule of St Benedict recommends bathing for the sick, though less often for the young and healthy; however, cleanliness of the face, hands and feet is encouraged: guests to a monastery should be given water to wash their hands and the Abbot and his community should wash their feet.63

Although some monasteries had elaborate lavatoria, across Europe (a circular lavabo has recently been excavated at Nicosia, Cyprus70), the majority of medieval lavatoria were far simpler; by the High Middle Ages they were often constructed near the entrance to the Refectory, consisting of long troughs set in a recessed position beside the entrance to the Refectory.71 A late-medieval example in near perfect

The weekly foot-washing ritual mentioned above, known as the mandatum, was evidently the task of those monks on kitchen duty, although on Holy Thursday the abbot himself washed the feet of eight monks.64 Towels were provided for

65

History of Canterbury Cathedral, ed. Collinson, Ramsay and Sparks, plan 3. 66 J.C. Thorn, in English Romanesque Art 1066-1200, ed. G. Zarnecki, J. Holt and T. Holland (London, 1984), pp. 200-2; G. Coppack, Abbeys and Priories (Stroud, 2006), pp. 152-3. 67 M. Thurlby, ‘The Place of St Albans in Regional Sculpture and Architecture in the Second Half of the Twelfth Century’, in Alban and St Albans. Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology, ed. M. Henig and P. Lindley, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions xxiv (Leeds, 2001), pp. 16275, at 164-7, Figs. 2 and 5. 68 Rites of Durham: Being a Description or Brief Declaration of All the Ancient Monuments, Rites, & Customs Belonging or Being within the Monastical Church of Durham before the Suppression, ed. J.T. Fowler, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. 107 (Durham, 1903), pp. 79, 82-3. Also quoted by W.H. St John Hope, ‘Recent Discoveries in the Cloister of Durham Abbey, Archaeologia, 58 (1903), pp. 43760, 447. 69 Rites of Durham, p. 79. 70 E. Zachariou, ‘The Cistercian Convent of St Theodore in Nicosia’, Cyprus Today, January-March 2007, pp. 2-11 (photo on p. 6). 71 Robinson, Cistercians in Wales, p. 178.

56

Youngs, The Work of Angels, pp. 130-3; for the basin, p. 133, no.127. 57 R.J. Brewer, Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani. Great Britain, I, Fasc. 5: Wales (Oxford, 1986), pp 5-6, no. 4, Pl. 2, with references. 58 Cf. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, x. iv. 40. 59 A. Harris, ‘“Let Streams of Living Water Flow”: The Archaeology of a Secular Settlement in a Monastic Landscape’, Reading Medieval Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 37-68. 60 ‘M.C.’ ‘The Rim of a Byzantine Basin’, Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago (1907-1951), 17 (1923), pp. 38 -9. 61 P. Squatriti, Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy, 400-1000 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 56. 62 W. Horn and E. Born, The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery (Berkeley, 1979); A History of Canterbury Cathedral, ed. P. Collinson, N. Ramsay and M. Sparks (Oxford, 1995), plan 3 [from the Eadwine Psalter]. 63 The Rule of St Benedict, chapters xxxv, xxxvi and liii. 64 D.M. Robinson, The Cistercians in Wales. Architecture and Archaeology 1130-1540 (London, 2006), p. 205.

32

HAND-WASHING AND FOOT-WASHING, SACRED AND SECULAR, IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD

Fig. 5. Reconstructed twelfth-century lavabo at Much Wenlock Priory, Shropshire.

Fig. 6. Thirteenth-century pedilavium, Lichfield Cathedral.

33

ANTHEA HARRIS AND MARTIN HENIG be found towards the west end of the main aisle (Fig. 8).77 At the church of the Holy Virgin at the Monastery of the Syrians, the lakan is located towards the centre of the nave, while at Abu Iskhirun it is opposite the central entrance to the choir; both of these churches are also at Wadi Natrun.78 The tanks are basin-sized marble receptacles inserted into the floor. Floors in such churches sometimes also contain drains for ablutions before prayer.79 The examples from Wadi Natrun cannot be closely dated, but the earliest features at St Bishoi are ninth-century in date, whilst the Church of the Holy Virgin dates from the mid-tenth century, so it is possible that the depressions in the ground, if not the present mandatum tanks themselves, are of medieval date.

condition can be seen in the cloister of St Peter’s, Gloucester [Gloucester Cathedral] and there are many others.72 Archaeological evidence for Late Antique and Early Medieval foot-washing ceremonies is much more difficult to identify. An exceptional example is the thirteenth-century pedilavium at Lichfield Cathedral (Fig. 6) which has individual cubicles and takes up one whole side of the vestibule between the north Choir aisle and the Chapter House; architecturally this might represent the height of medieval emphasis on liturgical foot-washing.73 Very occasionally, the baptistery and the footwashing facility are found in proximity to each other, the spatial relationship perhaps reflecting (and affirming) the liturgical relationship between the washing of feet and baptism (or perhaps renewal of baptismal vows). This might be the case at San Lorenzo in Lucina at Rome, where a rectangular structure next to a baptistery dating to between the fourth (or earlier?) and sixth centuries has been suggested as an area for a foot-washing ceremony.74 The structure is approximately 2.20 m. by 1.35 m. and contained a rectangular depression in the floor which extended the width of the structure. An object from Soba II in Central Sudan might have served a similar function (Fig. 7).75 This is a rectangular pottery basin dated c. 500-650 and measuring 97.2 cm. by 64.2 cm. It has a spout protruding from the lower side of one face and a splayed cross in relief above the spout, while the inner base of the basin has four ridges running down its length, possibly for supporting the feet being washed. The basin was found broken into many regular sized pieces in a pit; the fact that almost all of the pieces were retrieved suggests that the basin was broken before deposition but all the pieces were gathered together and placed in the pit at the same time. Such a pattern of deposition is analogous to the ‘ritual destruction’ which has been suggested for portable fonts found in Britain and might suggest that the footwashing vessel, if that is what it is, had been consecrated and then de-consecrated, or at least deliberately destroyed to prevent it being used for another, less sacred, purpose.76

More generally, it is likely that foot-washing, like handwashing, both in ecclesiastical and domestic contexts, took place with a portable vessel (perhaps a trulleum) and ewer, as seen above, which may have served several functions, and which have few, if any, features to distinguish them archaeologically.80 This was the case at Durham Cathedral Priory, where in 1324-5 the chamberlain provided footwashing bowls for the monks.81 Most of the time, such vessels also have little in the way of supporting archaeological context to enable them to be identified as component parts of foot-washing sets.82 A rare exception might be seen at Sardis, where a copper-alloy basin (height 24 cm.; diameter at base 35-40 cm.; diameter at rim 52-57 cm.) and jug were found together beside the entrance to a building interpreted as a domestic residence.83 The combination of these two objects 77

O.F.A. Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity (Cairo, 1999), p. 165. 78 Ibid., p. 168. C.C. Walters, Monastic Archaeology in Egypt (Warminster, 1974), p. 56. 79 N. Finneran, The Archaeology of Christianity in Africa (Stroud, 2003), p. 80; J. Baldock, The Elements of Christian Symbolism (Dorset, 1990), p. 69; S. Gibson, The Cave of John the Baptist (London, 2004), p. 166. 80 Foot-washing towels, it goes without saying, are highly unlikely to be represented archaeologically, assuming that they were ever produced specifically for this liturgical purpose. 81 Extracts from the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham, ed. J.T. Fowler, vol. I (Surtees Society, xcix, 1898), p. 167. Cited by J.T. Fowler, introduction to W.H. St John Hope, ‘Recent Discoveries in the Cloister of Durham Abbey’, Archaeologia, 58, pt. 2 (1903), pp. 437-60, at 440. 82 The ewer from Lavoye (Meuse) or the stoup from Long Wittenham (Oxon.) may have been produced for use in liturgical ablutions but their archaeological context does not elucidate these origins. See C. Neuman de Vegvar, ‘High Style and Borrowed Finery: The Stroud Mount, the Long Wittenham Stoup, and the Boss Hall Brooch as Complex Responses to Continental Visual Culture’, in Conversion and Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. C. Karkov and N. Howe, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Studies, 2; Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 12 (Tempe, Arizona, 2006), pp. 31-58, at 38. 83 J.S. Crawford, The Byzantine Shops at Sardis (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 57, Fig. 225 (building E5).

Africa yields other archaeological evidence of foot-washing in a liturgical context. In some Early Medieval Egyptian churches, such as St Bishoi at the Monastery of St Bishoi at Wadi Natrun, the mandatum tank (known as the lakan) can

72

H.J.L. Massé, The Cathedral Church of Gloucester (London, 1898), pp. 108-10. Information from Carolyn Heighway. 73 N.Pevsner and P.Metcalf, The Cathedrals of England. Midland, Eastern and Northern England (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 188. 74 O. Brandt, ‘Scavi e ricerche dell’Istituto Svedese a San Lorenzo in Lucina (Roma)’, Journal of Fasti Online, no number (2004), pp. 1-4, http://www.fastionline.org/docs/2004-25.pdf (accessed April 2009). 75 D.A. Welsby, Soba II: Renewed Excavations within the Metropolis of the Kingdom of Alwa in Central Sudan (London, 1998), pp. 3940, 174-5, 272, Fig 108, Pl. 45. 76 See Note 96 below.

34

HAND-WASHING AND FOOT-WASHING, SACRED AND SECULAR, IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD

Fig. 7. Early Medieval possible foot-washing vessel from Soba II, Central Sudan (after D.A. Welsby, Soba II: Renewed Excavations within the Metropolis of the Kingdom of Alwa in Central Sudan (London, 1998), p. 272, Fig. 108).

ceremonies.85 An earlier example of a trulleum and ewer being shown as foot-washing vessels is incorporated into the silver repoussé paten from Syria (or perhaps Constantinople) and dated to 565-78. This depicts Jesus administering Communion to the disciples: the Communion vessels are arranged on a carefully dressed table, with a trulleum and ewer on the floor in the foreground, presumably symbolising the foot-washing act.86 Behind and above Jesus there is a representation of an oversized scallop shell, which might be interpreted as pointing to the relationship between baptism and the Eucharist.

together, at the threshold of a building, is probably the closest we can expect to come to finding archaeological evidence for everyday, non-ecclesiastical use of portable ablutions vessels. For example, the depiction of the illness of King Hezekiah (II Kings xx, 1; Isaiah xxxviii, 1; II Chronicles xxxii, 24) in the Byzantine 'Paris Psalter' shows a trulleum and ewer beside the shoes of the king as he lies on his sick-bed.84 Although this is a tenth-century manuscript, as Anthony Cutler has pointed out, the washing set (cherniboxeston) is of fifth- or sixthcentury type, correlating with other evidence that ‘antique’ vessels were the articles of preference in formal Byzantine

85

84

Byzantium 330-1453, ed. R. Cormack and M. Vassilaki (London, 2008), p. 114.

86

35

A. Cutler, ‘At Court’, in ibid., pp. 112-39, at 114. Byzantium, ed. Cormack and Vassilaki, p. 79.

ANTHEA HARRIS AND MARTIN HENIG

Fig. 8. Lakan, or foot-washing vessel, in the nave at St Bishoi church, Wadi Natrun, Egypt.

There are some Late Antique and Early Medieval depictions of foot-washing which lend some weight to this suggestion. These are usually based either on the Last Supper narrative or the narrative of the ‘penitent woman’. Another sixth-century depiction of Christ's act of foot-washing is found in Folio 125r of the St Augustine Gospels, widely thought to have been brought to the British Isles by Augustine of Canterbury or members of his entourage: this contains a depiction of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples.87 The mandatum image here is part of a folio divided into a grid of twelve miniatures, and is the fifth image in a series of miniatures depicting scenes relating to events leading up to the Crucifixion. The foot-washing bowl itself is placed in the lower part of the frame and is thus at the very centre of the folio as the reader observes it. The bowl itself is depicted as circular, with a shallow body and a low foot-ring. It is difficult to tell what colour the vessel was intended to be, since it now appears almost as an outline drawing. However, it seems to have no coloured decoration. Since it is only slightly wider than the adult male foot being washed in it, one might estimate it to be some 30-35cm in diameter.

question is usually interpreted as the ‘penitent woman’ and is an exceptional example of a depiction of this scene outside manuscript art or icons.88 Another rare representation of a related scene might be found at Wadi esh-Shemmarin, near Suba, about six kilometres west of Jerusalem, where a depiction of a man, interpreted as John the Baptist, is scratched in the wall plaster of a cave.89 He appears to be holding a shallow-bodied, circular vessel with three narrow feet. This has been suggested to be either a footwashing basin or a chalice, although its form seems to make the second option less likely, as chalices were (as now) deeper and narrower. The drawing has been dated to the Early Byzantine period. Later depictions of foot-washing at the Last Supper, from both East and West, also depict the receptacle as circular and with a foot-ring, although there are some variations and, in general (but not in every case), the vessel becomes more elaborate and stylised from the tenth century onwards.90 For 88

C. Farr, ‘Worthy Women on the Ruthwell Cross: Women as Sign in Early Anglo-Saxon Monasticism’, in The Insular Tradition, ed. C.E. Karkov, M. Ryan and R.T. Farrell (New York, 1997), pp. 4562, at 45, 46. 89 Gibson, Cave of John the Baptist, pp. 59-60. See also Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land, ed. A. Negev and S. Gibson, revised. edn. (New York, 2005), pp. 480-1. 90 See, for example, the fourteenth-century icon depicting six Passion

Up to 140 years after the Gospel Book arrived in Canterbury, the sculptor of the lower figural relief on the south face of the Ruthwell monument (Dumfries and Galloway) also made reference to the washing (or anointing) of feet. The panel in

87

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286.

36

HAND-WASHING AND FOOT-WASHING, SACRED AND SECULAR, IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD identified in burial contexts in Africa, where evidence from ethnoarchaeology has, perhaps, made excavators more open to identifying vessels as such. For example, pottery vessels with raised foot pedestals and deeply grooved (‘fluted’) bodies, excavated from a first- to fourth-century burial context, near Aksum in northern Ethiopia, have been interpreted as foot-washing basins (although the basis on which this identification is made is not clear in the published report).97

example, a tenth-century icon of the mandatum (that is, ‘Niptir’ in Greek) from St Catherine's, Sinai, depicts the footwashing vessel as gold-coloured with a fluted body and footring and with a broad rim.91 By the time the St Albans Psalter was produced (at St Albans) in the twelfth century, the exterior of the vessel’s body was depicted with moulded decoration and the foot-rim had a decorative bulbous insertion.92 The vessel used in the scene depicting the ‘penitent woman’ (in the same manuscript) is of the same form albeit slightly smaller and less elaborate.93 Given that the basin said to be the one used by Christ for the Last Supper foot-washing appears on lists of relics in Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century (before the sack of Constantinople in 1204), it is possible that the tradition of depicting the vessel in this way was based on descriptions of this relic.94 It is to be regretted that it is not known whether the many thousands of foot-washing vessels which must have been used in churches throughout Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval period were of similar form. Metal basins, with raised foot-rings, analogous diameters and, occasionally, fluted bodies, are found in sixth- and seventh-century contexts from high-status graves across north-western Europe (and known, misleadingly, as ‘Coptic bowls’).95 However, these have not yet been found in ecclesiastical contexts and, while it is possible that they were used in other forms of ceremonial (including domestic ceremonies and those associated with kingship), this cannot be demonstrated at present. That said, it is intriguing that the burial chamber associated with the high-status grave at Prittlewell, Essex was organised so that a large copper-alloy basin lay directly under the feet of the dead person. Whether this vessel could be associated with ritual ablutions must remain a matter of speculation at present, but it does suggest that this might be a fruitful line of enquiry.96 Foot-washing vessels have been

Conclusion The use of water in religious ceremony, pagan, Jewish and Christian, is of course much wider than merely hand-washing or foot-washing. It embraces, for Judaism, the ritual bath used by women after their periods, the miqveh and for Christianity above all baptism (which began as a Jewish rite) but developed hugely with baptisteries and fonts which became a major feature of Christian holy places. While miqvehs are important diagnostic features for Jewish sites, fonts are (archaeologically) amongst the most diagnostic of Christian artefacts and their identification at Late Antique sites has often been used to suggest the presence of a Christian community at that place.98 By the same token, the presence of a courtyard ablutions fountain is also key to identifying mosques archaeologically.99 Fixed features specifically for hand-washing or foot-washing

cannot be demonstrated that the circular lead tanks which are found in late Roman or post-Roman contexts in Britain are associated with foot-washing ceremonies, as Dorothy Watts suggested: D. Watts, Christians and Pagans in Roman Britain (London, 1991), pp. 170-3. The diameter of the smaller examples (such as those from Ireby, Oxborough and Kenilworth) might be consistent with other receptacles identified as foot-washing vessels (c. 49 cm.), but the assemblage is usually interpreted as representing portable fonts for baptism by affusion. This is partly on the basis of the example found with a possible baptism scene and partly on the basis that they appear to have been deliberately destroyed and placed in a watery environment, perhaps suggesting an attempt to de-consecrate the objects by Christians, something which would not be likely to happen to foot-washing vessels since – unlike baptism itself – the foot-washing ceremony was not a sacrament. That said, it is not clear whether foot-washing played a role in British baptismal rites in the late fourth or early fifth century. 97 K.A. Bard, R. Fattovich, A. Manzo and C. Perlingieri, ‘Archaeological Investigations at Bieta Giyorgis (Aksum), Ethiopia: 1993-1995 Field Seasons’, Journal of Field Archaeology, 24 (1997), pp. 387-403, at 397. 98 E. Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church. History, Theology and Liturgy in the first five centuries (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, 2009), especially at pp. 25-95 for pagan and Jewish antecedents. For a recent example: D. Petts, ‘The Roman Lead Tank from Perry Oaks’, in J. Lewis et al., Landscape Evolution in the Middle Thames Valley: Heathrow Terminal 5 Excavations, Vol. 1, Perry Oaks (Oxford, 2006), pp. 227-30. 99 T. Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam (Oxford, 1999), p. 32.

scenes from the Monastery of Vlatadon at Thessaloniki in the exhibition catalogue: From Byzantium to El Greco: Greek Frescoes and Icons (London, 1987), p. 88, Plate 22. Another example is the eleventh-century Tiberius Psalter from Winchester (f. 11): The Tiberius Psalter, edited from British Museum MS Cotton Tiberius C vi, ed. A.P. Campbell (Ottawa, 1974). 91 K. Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, The Icons, Vol. I: From the Sixth to the Tenth Century (Princeton, 1976), no. 56. 92 O. Pächt, C.R. Dodwell and F. Wormald, The St Albans Psalter (Albani Psalter) (London, 1960), Pl. 38. 93 Ibid., Pl. 36. 94 G. Majeska, ‘Russian Pilgrims in Constantinople’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 56 (2002), pp. 93-108, at 101, Table 1. 95 M.C. Carretta, Il Catalogo del Vasellame Bronzeo Italiano Altomedievale, Ricerche di Archeologia Altomedievale e Medievale, 4 (Florence, 1982). J. Soulat, ‘Merovingian Chamber Graves in France’, paper presented at Luciasymposium, Upsala University (13 December 2007) http://www.arkeologi.uu.se/ark/projects/ Luciasymposion/MerovingianEng.pdf (accessed June 2009). 96 S. Hirst et al., The Prittlewell Prince: The Discovery of a Rich Anglo-Saxon Burial in Essex (London, 2004), p. 22. Equally, it

37

ANTHEA HARRIS AND MARTIN HENIG are also found at monastic complexes throughout Europe in the High Middle Ages in the form of impressive lavatoria and pedilavia, as we have seen. Portable vessels for the same purpose, by contrast, are usually less easy to identify archaeologically because their form is much more generic. In general, domestic ablutions would have been carried out with simple vessels, not necessarily manufactured specifically for that purpose, but perhaps for several possible functions; indeed, such vessels may have served several purposes within the same household. Vessels specifically for ecclesiastical ablutions are more visible in the art historical evidence: they are more likely than domestic vessels to be depicted in icons, manuscripts, sculpture and wall-paintings. Hand-washing vessels, in particular, were usually produced in precious metals; as such, they tended to be retrieved from defunct buildings rather than abandoned, and so are rarely identified through excavation (with the exception of vessels deposited as parts of hoards or, perhaps, votive deposits, such as the vessel from Traprain Law, mentioned above). Possible examples are, however, quite well-represented in museum collections, as we have seen. Foot-washing vessels for both ecclesiastical and domestic ablutions, to reiterate, tend not to be identified as such archaeologically, although provision for foot-washing as a recognised gesture of domestic hospitality is mentioned in at least one twelfth-century text, suggesting that it was a longlasting aspect of the grammar of hospitality, even in temperate Europe. It is a sobering thought for archaeologists of Europe, therefore, that we probably need to look to Early Medieval Africa (Egypt and Sudan) before we can find portable foot-washing vessels positively identified in the archaeological record (from excavated contexts). Yet, the study of the sacralisation of everyday activities in religious life, and the interplay between domestic ‘ritual’ and liturgy, is necessary for a deeper understanding of this period and it is to be hoped that this contribution has gone some small way towards opening up this area of research to new scholarship. The examples we have discussed here do not constitute an exhaustive list by any means; our intention has been merely to draw attention to this topic for further research. Neither has our analytical or geographical scope been comprehensive; we have sought to provide a glimpse of the material and approaches which might be helpful for further archaeological study on the use of ablutions in liturgical and domestic settings during Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval period.

38

Christian Origins at Gloucester: A Topographical Inquiry Carolyn Heighway1

somewhere in lowland Britain, already affected by the English, perhaps leaderless though not entirely cut off’.4

In Western Christendom it was largely the Church which provided the cultural link between Roman and medieval life. It is not easy to see ecclesiastical continuity in Britain, where Roman culture seems not to outlast the fifth century. Yet literary evidence indicates a continuing and prosperous Christian culture. Perhaps, as Richard Sharpe suggests, the Romano-British archaeologists are misreading their evidence.2 To view the problem topographically might clarify the problem, given that opportunities for archaeological excavation are limited.3

Archaeological evidence, at Gloucester as in most other Romano-British towns, continues to suggest dereliction by the late fifth century.5 As at Wroxeter,6 there was a phase of timber buildings, though at Gloucester these date to the late fourth and early fifth centuries rather than later. The abandonment may not have been total: one site in the southwest quadrant of the walled town had evidence of a public courtyard building, roofed with municipal tiles, which remained in use until the sixth century.7

The Roman fortress and colonia at Gloucester controlled the main route into Wales over the River Severn involving a series of bridges and a causeway. Gloucester’s post-Roman history must have been intimately linked with its river crossing, as well as its waterfront, which was on a nowvanished arm of the river close to the town. Gloucester was a defended centre, at a key point of communication, and reasonably remote from water-borne raiders. It ought to have been one of the places where Roman culture survived: a centre for the well-educated clergy who appear in literature and in the writings of Gildas – ‘somewhere as fully Roman in culture as we can imagine surviving in Britain at this date,

Forum and west gate Two decades ago it was being claimed that the placing of churches in the Roman fora was a significant act indicating continuing awareness of the significance of the forum and basilica as administrative centres.8 The phenomenon now tends to be seen as a re-use of Roman open space; it has become clear that Roman buildings in towns were adapted and used without regard for their original function.9 The Gloucester forum buildings may already have been dismantled in the mid fourth century.10 The north range was certainly demolished in the late fourth century, along with buildings on the opposite site of the main street, and on the levelled demolition rubble were placed timber buildings. In the early fifth century, the timber buildings were covered by a well-

1

Martin Biddle, as lecturer in medieval archaeology at Exeter and as Director of the Winchester Excavations, always emphasised the importance of topographical context. His weekly lectures to the diggers made it clear how the small part of the evidence they were uncovering fitted into the whole. His interpretations and predictions naturally tended to be modified subsequently, but what a difference it made to know where we stood in the pattern of things! His ‘series plans’ in the interim reports were further examples of this contextual imperative: clarifying whether a theory made sense in space and time. They showed up gaps, as well as sequences. I owe him a great debt. 2 R. Sharpe, ‘Martyrs and Local Saints in Late Antique Britain’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. A. Thacker and R. Sharpe (Oxford, 2002), pp. 75-154, at 108. The catastrophe view is expressed by S.E. Cleary, The Ending of Roman Britain (London, 1989), pp. 144-7. Another type of continuity is implied by Stephen Yeates who sees cultural folk symbols reworked in new political situations: S. Yeates, Religion, Community and Territory: Defining Religion in the Severn Valley and Adjacent Hills from the Iron Age to the Early Medieval Period, BAR British Series 411 (Oxford, 2006). 3 For Gloucester’s topography see N. Baker and R. Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church: Gloucester and Worcester (Aldershot, 2004); C.M. Heighway, ‘Gloucester’, in 25 Years of Archaeology in Gloucestershire, ed. N. Holbrook and J. Juřica (Cirencester, 2006), pp. 211-30.

4

Sharpe, ‘Martyrs and Local Saints’, p. 108. H. Hurst, ‘Gloucester: A Colonia in the West Country’, in The Roman West Country: Classical Culture and Celtic Society, ed. K. Branigan and P.J. Fowler (Newton Abbot, 1976), pp. 63-80, at 7980; M. Atkin and A.P. Garrod, ‘Archaeology in Gloucester 1988’, Trans., Bristol & Glos. Archaeoogical Soc. [hereafter TBGAS], 107 (1989), pp. 233-42, at 238-9; Heighway, ‘Gloucester’, p. 219. 6 R. White and P. Barker, Wroxeter: Life and Death of a Roman City (Stroud 1998), pp. 118-36. 7 T. Darvill, ‘Excavations on the Site of the Early Norman Castle at Gloucester, 1983-84’, Mediaeval Archaeology, 32 (1988), pp. 1-49, at 44, adding to the quota of very large late 5th-century buildings known from Roman towns: Sharpe, ‘Martyrs and Local Saints’, p. 87. 8 W. Rodwell and J. Bentley, Our Christian Heritage (London, 1984), p. 25. 9 W. Rodwell, The Archaeology of Churches (Stroud, 2005), p. 170; M.O.H. Carver, Arguments in Stone: The Dalrymple Lectures for 1990 (Oxford, 1993), p. 65; T. Bell, ‘Churches on Roman Buildings: Christian Associations and Roman Masonry in AngloSaxon England’, Medieval Archaeology., 42 (1998), pp. 1-18. 10 Hurst, ‘Gloucester: A Colonia’, p. 79. 5

39

CAROLYN HEIGHWAY made metalling.11 The process could be seen as preparing the town for a period when stone buildings took second place to timber ones, and when open spaces were more useful than a clutter of immovable and potentially dangerous structures.

The west gate in the late Roman period was covered with building debris and wind-blown deposits which were interpreted as post-Roman abandonment of the gateway; later it was used as a ‘private stronghold’.18 There is no evidence of continued traffic on the Roman road outside the gate.19 A Roman building recorded north of the west gate, inside the wall, could have served as a gatehouse in the postRoman period.20 A new gap in the wall must have been made a little further north from the gate and the road up from the bridge or river crossing would have been diverted to enter through it.

The forum thus continued as an open space but there is no church or former church which might represent a candidate for re-use of the space.12 St Michael’s church, north of the forum, stands at the Roman road junction. However, it probably dates to the re-establishment of the town in the early tenth century, and relates to Roman topography only in that it is central to both the Roman and the late Saxon town, and may have incorporated Roman structures at its west end.13

Temples Gloucester had no late Roman temples converted into churches, as in Gaul and Italy, and as may have happened on British rural sites.21 A recent attempt to catalogue temples at Gloucester and match them to later churches does not carry conviction.22 A temple of Sabrina may have been located in the western suburb, where there was an early ecclesiastical presence and evidence of the adaptation of Roman buildings in the sub-Roman period (below). In the north-west quadrant of the Roman town, the colonnade of a probable temple precinct23 indicates a temple adjacent to a likely site of the Old Minster, but without investigation in the cathedral precinct not much more can be made of this.

The principal Roman street from the former forum to the Roman west gate may have been widened northwards to form a long open space14 (Fig. 1: fifth-seventh centuries). The north side was marked by the colonnade of a Roman temple precinct15 (in the Middle Ages the columns still survived,16 defining the north side of Westgate Street). Archaeological observations in Westgate Street imply continuous activity from late Roman through to medieval, apparently without abandonment levels or ‘black earth’.17 The widened street space presumably terminated at the western wall.

18

Site 24/87: M. Atkin and W. Loughlin, ‘A Watching Brief at 3-5 Berkeley Street/57 Westgate Street, Gloucester, 1987-8’, unpublished typescript, n.d. Summaries in Glevensis, 22 (1988), p. 13; TBGAS, 107 (1989), pp. 238-9; Glevensis, 26 (1992), pp. 45-6. 19 Site 8/89, unpublished. Section S6 of site 8/89 shows the siltedup roadside ditch containing a fallen column (diameter: 400 mm): both ditch and road were covered by a layer 0.4 m. thick of lias rubble, covered by homogeneous loam deposits; there is no evidence for post-Roman use of the street as a thoroughfare. Site summary in Glevensis, 25 (1991), p. 16. 20 Site 24/87, Atkin and Loughlin, ‘A Watching Brief’. 21 J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), p. 27, with references cited. 22 Yeates, Religion, Community and Territory, p. 830, infers from the finds of sculpture that there was a temple of Mercury and Consort. The relevant finds are distributed through the north-east quadrant of the town, and a Mercury sculpture comes from the site of the medieval church of St Aldate’s. The church is probably late AngloSaxon, and the sculpture represents only ‘the opportunistic re-use of Roman masonry’: Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, p. 117. Yeates also cites a ‘spring’ in Bell Walk as a water shrine: but this is almost certainly a misunderstanding of an antiquarian mention of what was probably an eruption of ground water (which is surprisingly high in the centre of Gloucester, given that it is on a hillock). The ‘colonnaded precinct’ interpreted as a temple is a street-side colonnade of the normal urban type. The ‘stone platform’ near the East Gate which he interprets as a Roman shrine is a length of the city wall: C.M. Heighway, The East and North Gates of Gloucester (Bristol, 1983), p. 41, Figs. 45 and 31. 23 H. Hurst, ‘Civic Space’, p. 157.

11

C.M. Heighway and A.P. Garrod, ‘Excavations at 1 and 30 Westgate Street’, Britannia, 11 (1980), pp. 73-114, at 78-9; C.M. Heighway, A.P. Garrod and A. Vince, ‘Excavations at 1 Westgate Street, Gloucester’, Medieval Archaeology 23 (1979), pp. 159-213, at 164. 12 It is hard to see why Yeates, Religion, Community and Territory, pp. 73, 829, sees the Roman shrine in the forum basilica as representing one of the points of continuity – he connects it with St Kyneburgh’s church near the South Gate which he describes as ‘near the basilica’: it is not very near, though it is interesting for quite different reasons, being an Anglo-Saxon gate chapel dedicated to St Kyneburgh. It may also have been the site of a holy well. However, the date in the Llanthony Register cited by Yeates which gives the church’s foundation as 536 is ‘valueless’, and was moreover miscalculated by the chronicler: Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, pp. 106-7; A Calendar of the Registers of the Priory of Llanthony by Gloucester 1457-1466, 1501-1525, ed. J. Rhodes, Gloucestershire Record Series, 15 (2002), pp. 20-1 (no. 35). 13 Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, pp. 109-10; C.M. Heighway and J.F. Rhodes, ‘St Michael’s Church, Gloucester. A Reconsideration of the Excavations of 1956’, in Archives and Local History in Bristol and Gloucestershire: Essays in Honour of David Smith, ed. J. Bettey (Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 2007), pp. 161-85. 14 Heighway, ‘Gloucester’, pp. 221-4. 15 H. Hurst, ‘Civic Space at Glevum’, in The Coloniae of Roman Britain, ed. H. Hurst (Portsmouth, RI, 1999), p. 157. 16 See note 23 below. 17 Heighway and Garrod, ‘1 and 30 Westgate Street’, p. 83.

40

CHRISTIAN ORIGINS AT GLOUCESTER : A TOPOGRAPHICAL INQUIRY

Fig. 1. Conjectural depiction of the topographical development of Gloucester from the 4th to the 11th centuries.

41

CAROLYN HEIGHWAY It is likely that there had been a Roman stone bridge, originally positioned on the line of the fortress via principalis.30 The medieval bridge, known as Foreign Bridge, was approximately 80 metres west of the Roman one, due to the shift westwards in the course of the river.31 The shift in the river channel would have caused major difficulties and the strong tidal nature of the Severn must have put strong pressure on any bridge structure. It is unlikely that the Roman bridge can have survived. The crossing in the sixth to ninth centuries was presumably by ferry. The foundation of the burh in the late ninth-early tenth century probably involved the construction of a new bridge; certainly there was a bridge which took the late eleventh-century military expeditions into Wales, though this had to be entirely rebuilt in 1119.32

The western suburb The minster founded by Osric of the Hwicce in c. 679 thus seems to have been placed in a largely deserted town: probably built of stone, it would have made full use of recycled Roman building materials.The Roman structures of the former town were substantial; in c. 900 when the New Minster of St Oswald was started, Roman stone was still available. The town walls and the north and east gates, and the Westgate Street temple precinct colonnade could all still be seen in the Middle Ages.24 The only area of the town where there might still have been urban presence of a sort was the western suburb. This had been a well-built-up part of the Roman town25 where some buildings survived into the post-Roman period.26 The waterfront was defined by a revetment wall which survived until the twelfth century, though by then there was dry land to the west of it.27 There was a Roman temple: the New Minster (just to the north) was built of re-used stone, including parts of a temple with Corinthian capitals, fluted columns, and decorated cornice.28 A Roman column base, presumably also from somewhere in the western suburb, found re-used in the New Minster, had been cut down for use with a more slender column and notched to take butting walls or stone/wood screens. It represents the adaptation of Roman masonry in a late- or post-Roman building.29

The strategic position of Gloucester on the lowest bridging or crossing point raises the likelihood that the waterfront area would retain a function and was never entirely deserted. Moreover, the church of St Mary de Lode is claimed as a British church, even a bishopric, of the sixth and seventh centuries.33 St Mary’s church The church of St Mary de Lode is on the site of a Roman public building, probably a baths complex. The baths building fell into ruin after a fire. Then a courtyard of the building was filled with demolition rubble and on the platform so formed a wooden building containing three burials was set up, on the Roman alignment.34 It is unfortunate that this ‘mausoleum’ could not be dated by radiocarbon means: estimates of its date range from the fifth to the seventh centuries.35 A likely date is the sixth century,

24

The columns were standing well above medieval ground level and were there when the first 11th-century cellars were dug on the street frontage: H. Hurst, ‘Excavations at Gloucester, 1968-1971: First Interim Report’, Antiquaries Jnl., 52 (1972), pp. 24-69, at 62-3; Heighway and Garrod, ‘Excavations at 1 and 30 Westgate’, pp. 81-2. 25 Sites shown on Fig. 1 are: Shire Hall (TBGAS, 86 (1967), p. 100); Barbican (TBGAS, 56 (1934), pp. 66-70); Clare Street (A.P. Garrod and C.M. Heighway, Garrod’s Gloucester (Bristol, 1984), p. 17); Westgate Flats (H. Hurst, ‘Excavations at Gloucester, 1971-1973: Second Interim Report’, Antiquaries Jnl., 54 (1974), pp. 8-52, at p. 46); St Mary’s Gate (C. M. Heighway, Gloucester Cathedral and Precinct: An Archaeological Assessment, 3rd edn. (2003) [available online: tbgas.org.uk/] no.4); St Mary de Lode (R. Bryant and C. Heighway, ‘Excavations at St Mary de Lode, Gloucester’, TBGAS, 121 (2003), pp. 97-178). 26 E.g. a range of well-appointed Roman buildings on Upper Quay Street: M. Atkin, S. Byrne, C. Parry and M. Walters, ‘Excavation in Gloucester 1990’, Glevensis, 25 (1991), pp. 5-19 at 16. 27 Garrod and Heighway, Garrod’s Gloucester, p. 50; Hurst, ‘Excavations at Gloucester, 1971-1973’, p. 46; H. Hurst, Gloucester: The Roman and Later Defences (Gloucester, 1986), pp. 15-16; Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, p. 81. 28 C.M. Heighway and R. Bryant, The Golden Minster: The AngloSaxon Minster and Medieval Priory of St. Oswald at Gloucester (York, 1999), p. 146. Yeates, Religion, Community and Territory, p. 832, suggests that the temple was dedicated to Sabrina. 29 Heighway and Bryant, Golden Minster, p. 146. It was thought that this implies late or post-Roman – 5th to 6th century? – re-use in a masonry building. But since it also implies the skill to re-use and cut masonry, perhaps this building had already been adapted in the

late Roman period. 30 Hurst, ‘Topography and Identity’, pp. 123-4. 31 On Fig. 1, 5th to 7th centuries, and late 7th to 9th centuries, the western shift is assumed to be the result of the silting of an eastern channel, so that the Roman bridge spanned two channels, and Foreign Bridge only the western of the two. This is hypothesis only; the Roman and medieval bridge may have been entirely separate. 32 J.F. Rhodes, ‘The Severn Flood Plain at Gloucester in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods’, TBGAS, 124 (2006), pp. 9-36, at 13. 33 S. Bassett, ‘Church and Diocese in the West Midlands: The Transition from British to Anglo-Saxon control’, in Pastoral Care before the Parish, ed. J. Blair and R. Sharpe (Leicester, 1992), pp. 1340, at 27. The name ‘de Lode’ was not used until 1523: Victoria History of the County of Gloucestershire [hereafter VCH Glos.], IV (London, 1988), p. 303. References to St Mary’s church in this article are all to St Mary de Lode. 34 Bryant and Heighway, ‘Excavations at St Mary de Lode’, p. 121. 35 Richard Bryant was convinced, because of the style of the building (timber on padstones), that the burials were 5th century. John Blair has suggested they were no earlier than the late 7th, and were related to the founding of the minster in 679: Bryant and Heighway, ‘Excavations at St Mary de Lode’; Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon

42

CHRISTIAN ORIGINS AT GLOUCESTER : A TOPOGRAPHICAL INQUIRY on the grounds that it predates St Peter’s abbey of 679 (it retained its own enclosure after that foundation: see below) but is some time after the Roman period (when burial in a built-up suburb would have been prohibited). The mausoleum platform extended over the walls of its surrounding courtyard, and presumably occupied an enclosure whose limits are unknown but which are assumed (on Fig. 1, fifth-ninth centuries) to have approximated to the much later St Mary’s Square. The eastern limit of the enclosure is surmised on Fig. 1 (late Roman), as the line of a street; this is suggested by the fact that Roman alignments on either side of it are slightly different.36 This line was to become the western limit of St Peter’s Abbey precinct in the eleventh century. The Roman road or track east of St Oswald’s Roman cemetery37 might have been a continuation northwards of the same street.

The plots around the market space almost certainly represent a block of abbey burgages which in c. 1100 comprised 52 houses,41 and which were an important source of revenue into the Middle Ages. The block of property had perhaps once belonged to the older church, and was taken over by the abbey in its eleventh-century expansionist period. The square also reflects the importance of the church as a quayside location: the west side of the square might originally have been open to the waterfront.42 Cemeteries The significance of late Roman cemeteries for the founding of Christian churches is established in Gaul; but in Britain it is still unclear how often – or whether – ‘martyr’ or ‘founder’ graves contributed to the ecclesiastical scene.43 The Gloucester Romano-British cemeteries were just outside the walls on the south and east, with more outside the suburb which extended well beyond the walls to north and west.44 (Fig. 1). The southern and eastern ones have no post-Roman significance.45 The cemetery, or cemeteries, at Wotton Pitch, north of the town on the approach road to the original fort at Kingsholm, were extensive and used throughout the Roman period (too far east to be shown on Fig. 1). There are two medieval chapels here, but no significance can be attributed to their presence: they are twelfth to thirteenth-century adjuncts to the medieval hospitals which were placed fortuitously in this (in medieval terms) isolated position to contain contagious diseases, and not because of any significance of the site. Recent excavation of the Wotton cemetery gives insight into Roman society and includes an early third century ‘plague pit’, but though there are late Roman inhumations there is no hint that burial continued after the end of the Roman period.46

Perhaps the ‘mausoleum’ burials simply resulted from the tradition of using ruined Romano-British buildings as locations for cemeteries.38 But the ‘mausoleum’ certainly became St Mary’s church by the tenth century; and St Mary’s might have been the British church of Gloucester, even the seat of a bishop.39 The burials could thus be seen as part of the cemetery of the ecclesiastical establishment. One might further suggest that the church itself, and associated high status buildings for the bishop and clergy, were located in the adapted monumental Roman building represented by the cut-down column already mentioned. If St Mary’s were indeed a British church, its property was presumably gifted to the Old Minster when that was founded in 679. However, St Mary’s retained the spiritual rights of its parish (a large area in the surroundings of Gloucester), and, I suggest, also initially retained control of its immediate enclosure. This enclosure was formalized in the eleventh century by the creation of a market square (St Mary’s Square), funnelling towards the abbey gate.40

Burials in the third- to fourth-century cemetery on the future site of the early tenth-century minster of St Oswald were very badly damaged by medieval and later activity. The cemetery is so thin – a few dozen individuals – that it is hard to believe it ever, even allowing for post-medieval attrition, represented a

Society, p. 31 n. 90. 36 I once suggested that this boundary was a remnant braid of the 1st-century river frontage postulated by Henry Hurst: C. Heighway, ‘Christian Continuity and the Early Medieval Topography of Gloucester’, Glevensis, 36 (2003), pp. 3-12, at 6; John Rhodes points out, however, that borehole records do not indicate a 1st-century river channel so far east: Rhodes, ‘Severn Flood Plain’, p. 12 n. 27. 37 N. Spry, J. Punshon and P. Moss, Priory Road Garden: Excavations by GADARG at … St Mary’s Street, Gloucester, 1972-1975 (Gloucester, 2006), pp. 20-3. 38 Bell, ‘Churches on Roman Buildings’. 39 Bassett, ‘Church and Diocese in the West Midlands’, pp. 26-9. 40 Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, pp. 823, 98. Baker and Holt understood the original excavation report (Glevensis, 14 (1980), pp. 4-12) to say that the church was in a Roman open space. Though the church is sited in a Roman interior courtyard, this was completely eliminated by the levelling works associated with the mausoleum: Bryant and Heighway, ‘Excavations at St Mary de Lode’, pp. 112, 121. The origin of St Mary’s Square may indeed be very early but is post-Roman rather than Roman.

41

VCH Glos., IV, p. 66; Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, pp. 83-4. 42 Ibid., p. 83. 43 Cleary, ‘Ending of Roman Britain’, pp. 127, 199. The excavated ‘mausoleum’ at Wells can be otherwise interpreted: J. Blair, ‘Wells: Roman Mausoleum or Just Anglo-Saxon Minster?’, Church Archaeology, 5-6 (2004), pp. 134-7. 44 Hurst, ‘Defences’, pp. 116-17; Hurst, ‘Topography and Identity’, pp. 120-1. 45 C.M. Heighway, ‘Roman cemeteries in Gloucester District’, TBGAS, 98 (1980), pp. 57-72; C. Bateman and J. Williams, ‘The South Gate Cemetery of Roman Gloucester’, Glevensis, 35 (2002), pp. 25-28. 46 A. Simmonds, N. Marquez-Grant and L. Loe, Life and Death in a Roman City: Excavation of a Roman Cemetery at London Road, Gloucester (Oxford, 2008).

43

CAROLYN HEIGHWAY long-used post-Roman cemetery. It seems not to have continued into the fifth century, let alone the sixth. There is, however, one burial radio-carbon dated to the late AngloSaxon period (but predating the tenth-century church), and the site has produced late eighth and ninth century crossshafts.47 It is possible that after a period of post-Roman abandonment the site became a cemetery under the jurisdiction of the church of St Mary, which as the excavations showed continued to have burial rights from its inception. An elite cemetery, perhaps with an oratory, might explain why the site was chosen as a suitable place for the New Minster.

The latest burials are within the fort circuit; until the late Roman period the fort interior was apparently part of the urban area and was not used for burials.53 Only two extensive modern excavations have been carried out: at 76 Kingsholm Road and in Kingsholm Close. At 76 Kingsholm Road a watching brief followed by an excavation disclosed 66 late third- to fourth-century burials. The burials were oriented west-east with heads to west. Grave goods were rare, but included fourth century coins and a fourth century bone comb – that is, items of apparel rather than deposited grave goods. There were two phases of burials: earlier ones rather randomly placed, and later ones in more regular rows. The later graves were more likely to have coffins. One coffin had been raised off the floor of the grave by corner stones; three were buried beneath cappings of sandstone tiles. 54

Kingsholm The cemetery at Kingsholm was sited north of the city, in the general area of the first century fort or fortress. The fort limits have not been established; the defences shown in Fig. 2 represent a hypothesis based on available information.48 Burials at Kingsholm extend over a considerable area. Information derives mostly from chance finds since the eighteenth century.49 However, a sector of evidence east of the fort is missing due to the digging of gravel pits in the eighteenth century. Some burials were cremations but the majority were unaccompanied inhumations. A few had lead coffins or coffins of lead-lined timber. Some of the burials, it is now known, relate to an early Roman, even pre-Roman settlement that was at ‘Coppice Corner’.50 Still others relate to the first-century fort, and also to the fortress site and colonia of Gloucester further south.

In Kingsholm Close, seven burials, oriented north-south, were excavated in 1972. There was also a late Roman rectangular mausoleum, just over 6m long and of unknown width, stone-built and with an opus signinum floor. This had originally contained stone placements to support a sarcophagus. Later, the sarcophagus was removed, and a burial oriented east-west was inserted in the floor. The grave contained the skeleton of an adult male equipped with a silver belt buckle, silver shoe buckle, a pair of silver strap-ends and an iron knife. The buckle type is Eastern European and the wearer was probably a foreigner recruited into Roman service and billeted at Gloucester.55 It also shows that this location in the Kingsholm cemetery was used very late in the Roman period, and might have seen continuing use in the fifth century.56 Hills and Hurst considered it unlikely that the burial belonged to the period when independent cities were recruiting their own mercenaries, because in the early fifth century the town would not have had such far-flung connections. The high status of the burial does imply the regard in which the military could be held in the late fourth/early fifth century.

The presence of a shrine is indicated by a group of five altars, of which two were inscribed, and a statue of Ceres; the shrine was possibly inside the fort circuit.51 There is no evidence that the shrine had a medieval successor.52

47

Heighway and Bryant, Golden Minster, pp. 53, 196, 201. I refer throughout this paper to the ‘fort’ for the sake of simplicity, though it was possibly a fort, followed by a fortress. Atkin (Glevensis, 20 (1986), pp. 3-11) hypothesised an early phase 1 fort with a later phase 2 extended to the south. Hurst (Kingsholm, p. 116) did not attempt to map the defences, but one of his options was a phase 2 south boundary 280 m. south of the phase 1 fort. However, this would place the south defences across the Twyver stream. Fig. 1 postulates a south boundary 120 metres south of the ‘phase 1’ boundary, roughly as shown on the location plan in Spry et al., Priory Road Garden, Fig 1.2. 49 H. Hurst, ‘Excavations at Gloucester: Third Interim Report: Kingsholm 1966-75’, Antiquaries Jnl., 55 (1975), pp. 267-94, Fig. 6; Garrod and Heighway, Garrod’s Gloucester, p. 61, Fig 50. 50 Unpublished: but see Hurst, Kingsholm, p. 118. 51 M. Henig, Roman Sculpture from the Cotswold Region (Oxford, 1993), p. 10, no. 20; RIB, p. 36, nos. 119-20. The altars are in Cirencester Museum. An additional altar was rediscovered in 1969: it had originally come from 117 Dean’s Way: Hurst, Kingsholm, p. 281, no. 4 (GLCM 1975.101). It has been suggested that this belonged with the other altars, which have no precise provenance: 48

Glevensis, 3 (1969), pp. 3-4. Yeates identified a temple of Mars (Yeates, Religion, Community and Territory, pp. 93, 819, 847), but concluded that it was under the Anglo-Saxon palace (ibid., p. 834); a statement for which there is no evidence. Hurst omits the altars from his 1975 gazetteer. 52 The Roman altar found in 1969 had an inscribed cross on each end of the volutes, but Martin Henig confirms that this is not a Christian symbol, as claimed by Garrod, Glevensis, 3 (1969), p. 19. 53 Hurst, Kingsholm, pp. 131-3. 54 Garrod and Heighway, Garrod’s Gloucester, p. 65, site 4/78; M. Atkin, ‘Excavations in Gloucester: an Interim Report: Kingsholm’, Glevensis, 22 (1988), pp. 16-21. 55 Hurst, Kingsholm, pp. 15-16, 131; C. Hills and H. Hurst, ‘A Goth at Gloucester’, Antiquaries Jnl., 69 (1989), pp. 154-7. 56 Cf. for instance the late Roman cemetery at Poundbury, Dorset: D.E. Farwell and T.I. Molleson, Excavations at Poundbury 1966-80, vol. II: The Cemeteries (Dorchester, 1993), pp. 45-9.

44

CHRISTIAN ORIGINS AT GLOUCESTER : A TOPOGRAPHICAL INQUIRY

Fig. 2. The late Roman cemetery at Kingsholm, Gloucester. After Hurst, ‘Third Interim Report’, p. 281, Fig 6, with additions from Garrod’s Gloucester, 61, Fig. 50, and including a hypothetical outline of the 1st-century Roman fort.

The dedication is not an early one, although this may have been changed. The chapel was demolished in the fourteenth century. St Oswald’s also maintained another chapel, on Deans Walk or Tulwell Street which led from the New Minster to Kingsholm, where the road crossed the Twyver brook. The origin of this can only be guessed: presumably it was a bridge chapel, and the duty to serve it was assigned to St Oswald’s because the latter already had spiritual jurisdiction over Kingsholm.

It is likely that the fort defences were still visible in the lateRoman and post-Roman centuries and that they were re-used as a cemetery enclosure and much later formed a boundary for the late Saxon palace and its chapel. The royal palace at Kingsholm existed by 1051. It may have been a royal residence as early as the late ninth century when a witan was held at Gloucester and the town was restored as a burh. 57 The alignment of the late Roman mausoleum and of the fort is retained by excavated eleventh-century buildings thought to represent part of the palace complex; the site of the original mausoleum was apparently avoided by eleventhcentury buildings.58

If late Roman burials at Kingsholm served the whole area – one of those ‘managed cemeteries’ common in late Roman towns60 – then it should have included some Christian burials, and perhaps also a Christian oratory which might be the origin of the chapel. However it is more likely that the placing of the palace and its chapel were royal developments

The chapel of St Nicholas close to the royal hall at Kingsholm was in the Middle Ages maintained by the canons of St Oswald’s priory. It may have been used for royal ceremonial in the second half of the eleventh century. In the Middle Ages the canons of St Oswald complained about its great size.59 57 58 59

Crowns and Festivals: the Origins of Gloucester as a Royal Ceremonial Centre’, TBGAS, 115 (1997), pp. 41-78, at 57-8; VCH Glos., IV, pp. 297-8, 317; Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, pp. 21, 100. 60 S.E. Cleary, ‘Town and Country in Roman Britain?’, in Death in Towns, ed. S. Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 28-42, at 38.

VCH Glos., IV, pp. 7-8. Hurst, Kingsholm, pp. 7, 133. Heighway and Bryant, Golden Minster, p. 16; M. Hare, ‘Kings,

45

CAROLYN HEIGHWAY of the late ninth century, adapting a perceived ancestral shrine as a way of marking legitimacy.61 Even then it is necessary to assume that the prestige late Roman/sub Roman burials had markers which survived 500 years.62 There is no evidence that the origins of the palace and its chapel go any further back than the late Anglo-Saxon period. The most important controlling factor must have been the fort defences: the excavated late Anglo-Saxon buildings have been shown to be aligned with these, and the palace enclosure may have fitted into the western half or north-west quadrant of the fort.63

The Old Minster Although the evidence comes from late medieval sources of dubious authenticity, it is accepted that a minster dedicated to St Peter was founded at Gloucester c. AD 679, by Osric, King of the Hwicce.69 The choice of a ruined Roman town to house an Anglo-Saxon minster would have been usual.70 However the actual site of the minster church is not certain. It cannot have been both inside the wall and under the present church, since it would then have to have been under the presbytery, and so have been one of the first parts to be demolished when work started in 1089. The Anglo-Saxon church, refurbished in 1058,71 must have been kept for worship while the new church was being built. It was an important element of the ceremonies of crown wearing, when the king would travel in procession from the royal palace at Kingsholm;72 the ceremony continued to be held through the late eleventh century and into the twelfth. A minster church within the Roman walls would have been south of the present abbey church. The continuing use of a church in this position until c. 1100 would provide one reason why the claustral buildings of Serlo’s church were built on the north.

Burial alignments There has been too little detailed recording to justify a study of burial alignments. It is no longer certain that an east-west orientation, with head to the west, necessarily denotes a Christian burial, since many late Roman non-Christian religions practised burial rites similar to the Christian.64 It may not be significant, therefore, that at the Wotton cemetery east-west late Roman burials were in one instance superimposed on north-south ones.65 The late Roman burials at 76 Kingsholm Road were orientated east-west with heads to the west66 but the late Roman burials in Kingsholm Close on the ‘palace site’ were orientated north-south, except for the special burial added to the mausoleum, which was eastwest with head to the west. This last orientation might have been a response to the constraint of the mausoleum, rather than carrying any religious significance.67 Burials at St Oswald’s priory were all north-south and north-east/southwest except for one east-west burial which had the head to the east.68

A site outside the Roman wall is also a possibility. Minster layouts of the seventh century often consisted of more than one church – sometimes an older foundation dedicated to St Mary, and a new one dedicated to St Peter. A minster church at Gloucester could have been placed in alignment with the still older church of St Mary de Lode.73 A direct alignment with St Mary’s could only be achieved with the new church on the northern side of what was later the Great Court. Though it may simply be coincidence, buildings here preserve an alignment which is that of St Mary’s.74 Pre-1089 burials in this area suggest a church or chapel in the eleventh century.75

61

Cf. Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, p. 377. Many 19th-century antiquaries were convinced that there were ‘Anglo-Saxon’ burials at Kingsholm: Yeates has recently revived this possibility, pointing to a putative 6th-7th century shield boss found in 1972: Yeates, Religion, Community and Territory, p. 848; I. Scott, ‘Ironwork’, in Hurst, Kingsholm, pp. 36-40, at 37, nos 8-9. Professor Tania Dickinson (in litt.) does not agree with the Anglo-Saxon identification. A more detailed study of the burials at Kingsholm is being carried out at present for publication in TBGAS. 63 ‘Kingsholm Close’ in 1799, shown in Fig. 2, was one remnant of an estate, the manor of Kingsholm, which had originated in the Aula Regis. The Close contained the palace site: VCH Glos., IV, pp. 3902. J.F. Rhodes, Llanthony Priory’s Terrier of Gloucester, 1443 (Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, forthcoming), shows that the southern boundary of ‘the king’s garden’ once presumably part of the palace precinct, extended to Edwy Parade, and could have coincided with the ‘phase 1’ fort boundary. 64 S.E Cleary, The Ending of Roman Britain, p. 125; Simmonds et al, Life and Death in a Roman City, p. 139; R. Philpott, Burial practices in Roman Britain, BAR British Ser. 219 (Oxford 1991), p. 239. 65 Simmonds et al., Life and Death in a Roman City, pp. 13, 15. 66 Atkin, ‘Excavations in Gloucester’. 67 Hurst, Kingsholm, p. 16. 68 Heighway and Bryant, Golden Minster, p. 53.

Since Anglo-Saxon minsters were complexes which might include a multiplicity of churches, there might have been two new churches in 679, one inside and one outside the Roman

62

69

H.P.R. Finberg, Early Charters of the West Midlands (Leicester 1972), pp. 31, 153-66. 70 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, p. 189. 71 Although it has often been suggested that the church was moved by Bishop Ealdred in 1058, there are good reasons for accepting that the site of the old minster remained unchanged until its rebuilding on the new site in 1089: M. Hare, The Two Anglo-Saxon Minsters of Gloucester, Deerhurst Lecture 1992 (Deerhurst, 1993), pp. 17-22. 72 Hare, ‘Kings, Crowns and Festivals’. 73 J. Blair, ‘Anglo-Saxon Minsters – A Topographical Review’, in Pastoral Care, ed. Blair and Sharpe, pp. 226-84, at 242. 74 Heighway, ‘Gloucester Cathedral and Precinct’, p. 20, building 12 (7 Miller’s Green). 75 Garrod and Heighway, Garrod’s Gloucester, p. 53. Michael Hare, in his discussion of this question, reached a similar conclusion though his favoured minster site was slightly further to the east under the present cloister: Hare, Two Anglo-Saxon Minsters, pp. 278.

46

CHRISTIAN ORIGINS AT GLOUCESTER : A TOPOGRAPHICAL INQUIRY wall, with an access gate through the wall. The ancient church of St Mary kept its own enclosure and even after eleventh century expansion it remained outside the abbey precinct.

would have an interest in controlling and maintaining the bridge or ferry, no doubt with the aid of military retainers.79 The burh

Seventh to ninth centuries It is generally accepted that an Anglo-Saxon fortified town or burh was created by Æthelflaed and Æthelred of Mercia at Gloucester c. 900, and that its street-plan was created in close imitation of the late ninth-century burhs of Wessex.80 The layout of the sector of streets east of the north-south principal road so closely matches that of other Anglo-Saxon burhs, especially Winchester, that it can hardly be doubted (in spite of a lack of archaeological evidence) that the Roman walled area was laid out for the burh in c. 900.81 Contemporary with the new town was the New Minster (soon to be called St Oswald’s Minster) founded by Aethelflaed and Aethelred as part of the political takeover. It was sited ‘outside the old wall of the town of Gloucester and circumscribed with very definite boundaries’82 in an area, possibly already partly ditched,83 which had perhaps been part of the cemetery of St Mary; hence the cross shafts built into the New Minster church. Indeed, the site had perhaps already been defended, and the cross shafts disturbed; it has been suggested that on their overwintering in 877 the Danes occupied this location.84 The situation is similar to that at Repton and other camps: a defended waterside position. The subsequent choice of this site for a minster would have been a reclamation from the heathen enemy; and defences would already have been in place.

Apart from the foundation of the minster – significant though that event proved to be for Gloucester’s economic development and topography – there is little evidence of what happened in the town in the seventh and eighth century. The presence of the minster must have been a stimulus to assemblies of people, if only to bring in agricultural dues. Perhaps the latter were the cause of the cattle pens and piles of manure in the centre of the town in the ninth century. However, these deposits showed no sign of industry: no iron objects, no evidence for metalworking, not even iron nails, or pottery; all activity was agricultural.76 One would expect some evidence of material culture, manufacture, and crafts, as at most minster sites:77 such activity was perhaps confined to the minster precinct. Though a river crossing by ferry close to the Roman bridge could have remained in use, the Roman west gate was abandoned and a new opening made in the wall further north (see above). The Roman street from river to west gate must have diverged at least in places from its Roman line. The walled town may not have been visited much in the seventh to ninth centuries; traders and visitors might only have been aiming to go to St Mary’s church and whatever ecclesiastical organisation was associated with it; after the late seventh century, the Old Minster of St Peter would also have been an important focus. Perhaps a western route into the abbey precinct came through the enclosure of St Mary’s and into the Old Minster (if it was inside the wall, through a opening in the western wall). A visitor crossing the river near the remains of the old Roman bridge could have arrived immediately at the church of St Mary and from it to the Old Minster. From there a route could have continued north, perhaps along the probably ancient route later known as Dean’s Walk,78 via Kingsholm, and joined the Roman road to Worcester. In the seventh and eighth centuries when – as far as we know – the town was empty and ruinous, St Mary’s church and the Old Minster were the most significant and commercially important places, as well as being dispensers of hospitality.

The burh foundation was a considerable stimulus to urban development. There is good evidence for tenth-century 79

Nicholas Brooks thinks that it was the church that had most interest in maintaining obligations with regard to bridges: N.P. Brooks, ‘Rochester Bridge AD 43-1381’, in Communities and Warfare 700-1400 (London 2000), pp. 219-265, at 229. Later minsters were not exempt from duty for maintenance of roads and bridges: Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, p. 122. 80 VCH Glos., IV, p. 8; Hurst, ‘Excavations at Gloucester, 19681971’, pp. 67-8; Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, pp. 20, 65-70. 81 I have in the past (‘Saxon Gloucester’, in Anglo Saxon Towns in Southern England, ed. J. Haslam (Chichester, 1984), pp. 359-83) proposed a circuit for the burh using the Roman quayside wall on the west. This theory has met with little support, and I now prefer to accept the topographical development suggested by Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, pp. 65, 76. 82 M. Hare, ‘The Documentary Evidence for the History of St Oswald’s, Gloucester to 1086 AD’, in Heighway and Bryant, Golden Minster, pp. 33-45, at 43, n. 21. 83 Most observations of stratigraphy under St Mary’s Street which surrounds St Oswald’s Priory seem to include a ‘black organic loam’ at more than 1m depth which extends down to more than 2m: ex. inf. P Garrod and Museum Heritage Environment Record; Spry et al., Priory Road Garden, pp. 3, 5. 84 Heighway and Bryant, Golden Minster, p. 8.

The river crossing would have needed maintenance for jetties and landing places. The proximity of St Marys church leads to the speculation that this centre of ecclesiastical authority

76

Heighway, Garrod and Vince, ‘Excavations at 1 Westgate Street’, pp. 165-7. 77 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, pp. 203-4. 78 Called ‘Tullwelle Street versus Kingsholm’ in 1458 and ‘the path to Gloucester church’ in 1607: Llanthony Priory’s Terrier of Gloucester, ed. Rhodes.

47

CAROLYN HEIGHWAY occupation, trade, and industry within the walled area,85 but little is known of the western suburb. On the slope outside the western Roman wall, tenth-century and earlier deposits are very deeply buried and include much organic material.86 The riverside wall, at that date still just visible, already had reclaimed land to the west of it.

creation of the post-Roman period, perhaps sixth century, or perhaps later. Archaeological excavation has as yet been insufficient to extend information, though more could emerge from research investigation in the churchyard of St Mary de Lode church. and at the site of the palace at Kingsholm, where there is still open space where a research excavation might be carried out. Here the medieval topography is being greatly clarified and mapped by John Rhodes.92 Finally, the potential of the western suburb is considerable: it is well-known that it retains much buried and well-preserved evidence.93 If a new wave of development is set to occur in Gloucester,94 there is a prospect that some of the questions I have touched on might be at least partially addressed.

The burh modified A significant programme of development, ‘Plan Unit I.2’, redefined the precinct of the Old Minster of St Peter, making available the space formerly occupied by the western Roman wall. The re-planning also involved the demolition of a northern length of the western Roman wall, the re-alignment of Westgate Street leading up from the bridge, and the creation of burgages on the north side of that street. This moment when the town broke out of the Roman wall was a crucial event for Gloucester’s topography. It involved the demolition of at least a two-hundred-metre length of the Roman city wall (perhaps 600 cubic metres of building stone).

There is of course a possibility that we all expect too much from archaeology. In the Romano-Frankish towns of the Rhineland, where extensive excavation under churches has been done, there is no evidence even at Xanten (once a muchcited type-site for continuity of cult) of unbroken tradition from Roman to Merovingian Christianity.95 However, cult and belief do not necessarily leave material traces (as Martin Biddle always reminded his students) – and the archaeologists are perhaps not so much misreading their evidence as construing absence from lack of it. Undetected by us, Gildas and his contemporaries may well have occupied drastically modified corners of the Roman world.

The development would have involved an agreement between the king and the abbey ‘…a co-operative venture between the Old Minster and the pre-Conquest Crown, the former acquiring an enlarged precinct, the latter, new rents’.87 I have elsewhere proposed a tenth-century date for the development88, and suggested that the stone might have been used for the building of the churches founded by royal initiative in the mid tenth century, such as St John’s, St Michael’s, and St Mary de Crypt.89 Baker and Holt date the development to ‘before the mid eleventh century’90 A point early in that century would potentially coincide with the conversion of Gloucester into a shire town: a time when the urban economy must have been developing well.91

Acknowledgements I have benefitted from many discussions over the years with (among others) Richard Bryant, John Blair, David Rice, Patrick Garrod, Richard Gem, Michael Hare, Martin Henig, and Alan Vince. I am grateful to Henry Hurst and John Rhodes who commented on a draft of this paper, to Michael Hare who commented extensively and suggested further references, and to John Rhodes who provided me with much help as well as pages of his forthcoming edition of the Llanthony Priory Terrier of 1443.

Conclusions This topographical review points to the fragmentation of the post-Roman town into several focal centres and the abandonment of the Roman walled town. The remains of massive Roman buildings and defences continued to affect the shape of the town, with ancestral late Roman burial landscapes at Kingsholm exerting a more subtle influence. Even the earliest church, St Mary de Lode, can be seen to be a 85

Garrod and Heighway, Garrod’s Gloucester, p. 4, fig. 3. Heighway, ‘Christian Continuity’, p. 6, for references. 87 Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, plan unit I.2., pp. 45-7. 88 Heighway, ‘Christian Continuity’, p. 10. 89 Baker and Holt, Urban Growth and the Medieval Church, pp. 102, 109, 112. 90 Ibid., pp. 46-7. 91 VCH Glos., IV, p. 12. It may also be the time of the introduction of the Benedictine reform at the Old Minster: Hare, Two AngloSaxon Minsters, pp. 15-16. 86

92

Llanthony Priory’s Terrier of Gloucester, ed. Rhodes. Hurst, ‘Topography and Identity’, p. 123. 94 Gloucester Heritage Urban Renewal, www.gloucesterurc.co.uk/ index. 95 S. Ristow, Frühes Christentum im Rheinland. Die Zeugnisse der archäologischen und historischen Quellen an Rhein, Maas und Mosel (Cologne, 2007), pp. 88-95, 295-8. 93

48

New Evidence for the Transition from the Late Roman to the Saxon Period at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London Alison Telfer

spearhead and two seventh-century palm cups during the construction of his grand church portico. An uncertain number of accompanying sarcophagi, apparently positioned north to south, were not dated conclusively, however, and they have since disappeared. The recovery of the artefacts, presumed to be associated with the coffins, added weight to a Saxon date for the site as a religious centre. The implications of this, as well as later finds along the Fleet Street/Strand river terrace, such as coin hoards, suggested the possibility of contemporary Middle Saxon origins for the succession of churches eastwards from St Martin’s – St Mary-le-Strand, St Clement Danes, St Dunstan in the West and St Bride’s – and reinforced Biddle’s proposal for a commercial settlement between them.3

Introduction Twenty-five years ago, Professor Martin Biddle set out a comprehensive proposal for the location of the Saxon town of Lundenwic. At that time, much was understood about the position and layout of the walled Roman town, but there was very little direct archaeological evidence to locate the Saxon settlement. In his paper, ‘London on the Strand’,1 Biddle identified the potential of the high terrace of flood plain gravel which extended westwards along Fleet Street and the Strand, from Ludgate Circus to Trafalgar Square. Biddle’s article highlighted important clues that emerged from documentary evidence; he also questioned the origins of the churches to be found along this terrace, from St Bride’s in the east to St Martin-in-the-Fields in the west.

Stratigraphic survival in the area, Middle Saxon or otherwise, has been affected adversely by the presence of fine, but deep, Victorian basements, as well as widespread excavation along the Thames, prior to the construction of the Victoria Embankment. Nash’s nineteenth-century vaults at St Martin’s have now proved to have been similarly destructive: only the bases of deep-cut, earlier archaeological features, such as Middle Saxon pits and post-medieval wells, survived their construction. Despite this, sufficient evidence has emerged for it to be proposed that the site of St Martin’s, previously thought to be Saxon in origin, has, in fact, Roman roots. Biddle had advised caution concerning dating from the stone coffins: ‘whether this cemetery marks the beginning of the continuous development of St Martin’s Church cannot be certain’. In hindsight, this appears particularly intuitive.

In the years since Biddle’s article, interest and research has focused on the area that he and the late Alan Vince2 originally highlighted, to the west of Londinium, along the Strand. As a result of several important excavations undertaken in the area since 1984, including those at the Royal Opera House during the 1990s, Lundenwic has been identified as lying between Aldwych and Trafalgar Square and extending from just below High Holborn down to the Thames, with its centre located around the area of modern Covent Garden (Fig.1). Archaeological fieldwork at the site of St Martin-in-theFields church has recently been carried out as part of a £36m renewal scheme. This included a refurbishment of the church itself, which was constructed in 1726 by James Gibbs. It is known that the present church, located at the north-eastern edge of Trafalgar Square, replaced a church constructed on the site in the medieval period (with extensive repairs being undertaken from the sixteenth century). No structural trace of the earlier church has ever been found, but there is documentary, cartographic and pictorial evidence for its existence. In addition, the fieldwork, carried out by the Museum of London Archaeology Service between 2005 and 2007, revealed a group of medieval burials immediately to the north of the present church.

The results from the fieldwork have reached a preliminary post-excavation assessment stage; further analysis is required to tighten the dating of the archaeological sequence and some conclusions may change in light of this. The results will be published in due course. This paper attempts to demonstrate the real contribution that Biddle has made, with particular regard to the initial results of the twenty-first-century fieldwork at St Martin’s; it also addresses the implications of the newly excavated information for the history of the site of a church whose renown is already worldwide.

Gibbs himself uncovered tantalising evidence for Saxon funerary activity in the vicinity, with the discovery of a

Results of the fieldwork The present church is situated in the south-western area of the site, and, prior to the redevelopment, had adjoining vaults

1

Martin Biddle, ‘London on The Strand’, Popular Archaeology, 6.1 (1984), pp. 23-7. 2 Alan Vince, ‘The Aldwych: Mid-Saxon London Discovered?’, Current Archaeology, no. 93 (1984), pp. 310-12.

3

49

Biddle, ‘London on The Strand’, pp. 23-7.

ALISON TELFER

Fig. 1. Site location, showing the position of the study area in relation to Lundenwic and Londonium.

Community centre. The construction of new facilities for the St Martin’s Connection social care centre was planned for the former National Schools building. The redevelopment of the site, therefore, created an opportunity for four separate phases of excavation and a survey of the standing buildings (see Fig. 2). An initial phase of excavation took place in early 2005 in the South Terrace, located within the Victorian vaults to the south of the church. This included the recording and subsequent demolition of the Dick Sheppard chapel, named after the vicar of St Martin’s who served during the First World War. Dick Sheppard is credited with starting the tradition at St Martin’s of providing for the homeless. At the beginning of 2006, a standing building survey was undertaken within the church, the remainder of the vaults and the National Schools building. In the summer of that year, an extensive excavation was carried out in the area of the former vaults. This was followed by a final, smaller excavation, in 2007, on a narrow strip of land to the north of the National Schools building, and within the basement of the building itself. Although no prehistoric features were recorded during the excavation, the recovery of five sherds of pottery, dating to before the Roman Conquest, suggests activity in the area. The sherds were all recovered from the western edge of the site, adjacent to Trafalgar Square.

Fig. 2. Plan showing areas and phases of fieldwork at the site.

to the north, south and east; these replaced the graveyard that surrounded the church in the 1820s. The National Schools building is located to the north (Fig. 2). To meet contemporary demands, plans for the 2005 redevelopment required the demolition of the northern and eastern vaults, the newly created space including provision for a new parish hall and the rehousing of the Ho Ming Wah Chinese

Iron Age pottery has been found at Leicester Square4 and pottery and a worked flint were recovered from weathered 4

Nick Merriman, Prehistoric London (London: HMSO, 1990), pp. 36-7.

50

NEW EVIDENCE FOR THE TRANSITION FROM THE LATE ROMAN TO THE SAXON PERIOD AT ST MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS

Fig. 3. Plan showing Roman activity on the site.

brickearth at Tavistock Street to the north-east.5 The closest evidence of pre-Roman activity is probably from Leicester Square and Southampton Street6 and in the area of Westminster Abbey. Although limited in number, the finds from St Martin’s are important for adding to our knowledge of this period in London’s past.

jar and a bead-rimmed, chaff-tempered jar were recovered.7 These either date to the time of the Conquest or just before. There is significantly very little later first- or second-century pottery on the site as a whole (perhaps ten sherds in total), suggesting a fairly solitary structure. There was evidence for modifications to this building, changing its alignment slightly, but both builds had been sealed by a general homogeneous layer dating to the second half of the fourth century, which substantiates a Roman date for the construction.

More concrete in nature is the evidence for Roman occupation (Fig. 3). The excavation to the north of the National Schools building produced surprising evidence for early Roman activity. The remains of a building were recorded: this was the earliest definite structure found on the site. It comprised beam slots and postholes, consistent with a timber structure, dated by pottery to the first century AD. Unabraded sherds from a large shell-tempered storage

The discovery of this early structure provides conclusive evidence for Roman occupation at the site, situated on a hill with a commanding view along the Thames in two directions (to the east and to the south; see Fig. 1). The structure may have been a military look-out post or something similar. Given that the centre of early Roman Londinium was two

5

Robin Densem, ‘Excavation at 20 Tavistock Street WC2’ (Compass Archaeology Unit unpublished report, 2000), p. 9. 6 Archaeology in Greater London 1965–90: A Guide to Records of Excavations by the Museum of London, ed. Alan Thompson, Andrew Westman and Tony Dyson, Museum of London, Archaeological Gazetteer Series, vol. 2 (London, 1998), p. 265.

7

Beth Richardson, ‘The Roman Pottery’, in Alison Telfer, ‘St Martin-in-the-Fields Church: A Post-Excavation Assessment’ (Museum of London Archaeology Service unpublished report, 2008), pp. 55-6.

51

ALISON TELFER kilometres to the east, it seems unlikely that a farming hinterland was established so early, unless the building was part of an existing Late Iron Age farm. As noted above, however, direct evidence for Iron Age settlement in the area has so far been inconclusive. The origins of the route of Fleet Street and the Strand, moreover, leading from Londinium to St Martin-in-the-Fields (and ultimately towards Bath), are thought to be Roman.8 The excavations in 2006 revealed a group of burials immediately to the north of the present church (Fig. 3). These had survived to the west of the deep Victorian vaults. At the time, one burial in particular attracted much media attention: that of a man with obvious high status, who had been interred in a limestone sarcophagus, orientated southwest to north-east (Fig. 4). A radiocarbon date from his femur gave the burial a date of between AD 390 and 520. This date has been calibrated using the INTCAL98 calibration curve.9 The intercept of the radiocarbon age with the calibrated result is AD 410, at the very end of the Roman period. This distinguished individual is therefore probably the latest securely dated Roman from London. Part of the coffin lid had been damaged during the construction of a nineteenth-century sewer and, in light of the fact that the majority of the skull was missing, it is thought that a Victorian workman may have taken it home as a curiosity piece. Disarticulated foot bones from another individual were present within the sarcophagus, suggesting that it had had a previous occupant. This indicates an earlier Roman date for the sarcophagus. Together, the radiocarbon date and the re-use of the coffin suggest that the other sarcophagi uncovered in the eighteenth century were also Roman in date. It seems likely that the coffins would have remained in their original burial position, regardless of the date of any burials they contained.

Fig. 4. Sarcophagus in situ, facing south-west.

A similar deliberate positioning was in evidence at a Roman cemetery in the eastern part of Londinium. During the excavation at Spitalfields Market in 1999, a fourth-century sarcophagus (with an inner, decorated lead coffin) was found with a group of other high-status burials; one had been interred in a timber vault, three others in sarcophagi. The group was located at the southern edge of the excavation site; to the south was a separate property. It is possible that the property division, although modern, had developed from a former trackway or narrow road present in the Roman period, from which the burials could be viewed.10

In addition to the late Roman’s coffin, the sarcophagi documented during the eighteenth-century excavations must also have been positioned along the western edge of the site, if they were discovered in the area of the present portico. This high-status group would have been clearly visible from the route that later became Charing Cross Road, assuming that they were marked above ground.

Immediately to the west of the recently discovered sarcophagus at St Martin’s was another grave containing a supine burial; a knife had been buried with the occupant of the grave (Fig. 3). To the south was a third burial, which contained five large iron nails (172–210 mm.) in two groups at the head end of the grave. Their position may reflect the former corners of a coffin, although their size is unusual.11 The use of multiple nails and extremely large nails is puzzling, as they are over twice the size of the coffin nails noted in the

8

Biddle, ‘London on The Strand’ (cit. in n. 1), p. 24. Minze Stuiver, Paula J. Reimer, Edouard Bard, J.Warren Beck, George S. Burr, Konrad A. Hughen, Bernd Kromer, F. Gerry McCormac, Johannes van der Plicht and Marco Spurk, ‘INTCAL98 radiocarbon age calibration 24,000–0 cal BP’, Radiocarbon, 40 (1998), pp. 1041-83; [Sample: SMD01665; Beta – 222516; Measured radiocarbon age: 1560+/- 40 BP; Convention radiocarbon age: 1649 +/- 40 BP; 2 Sigma calibration with 95% probability: Cal AD 340 to 530 (Cal BP 1610 to 1420); information from the Beta Analytic Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, Florida]. 9

10

Malcolm McKenzie, personal communication. Lyn Blackmore, ‘The Accessioned Finds’, in Telfer, ‘St Martin-inthe-Fields Church: A Post-Excavation Assessment’ (cit. in n. 7), pp. 64-81. 11

52

NEW EVIDENCE FOR THE TRANSITION FROM THE LATE ROMAN TO THE SAXON PERIOD AT ST MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS contemporary with this individual. More than this, the presence of the group of fifth-century burials in the immediate vicinity, interred within cemetery soil containing a significant mix of late fourth- and mid to late fifth-century pottery, suggests continued use of the area after the traditionally supposed end of the Roman period. Research in France of potential links between burial groups and Roman villas demonstrates that a number of Roman villa sites did develop into early Frankish churches, some with continuity in burials.14 If the site of St Martin-in-the-Fields had initially accommodated a villa, it would have afforded grand views of the surrounding landscape. Such a house might have been considered suitable for adaptation into a religious building, as were other Roman buildings, such as signal stations and martyriae,15 and there is the possibility that the site of St Martin’s included a Roman church, shrine or mausoleum. Whatever form it took, the potential for the existence of a Roman building is very strong, even though no direct structural evidence for one was found, probably because of truncation from one of the later churches.

Fig. 5. Pot dating to the late 5th century, associated with a north-south burial.

Despite the lack of physical evidence for a religious building, the presence of Gibbs’s sarcophagi, the re-used coffin from the excavation and the group of fifth-century burials together indicate a religious site outside the Roman city. Parallels for this hinterland religious activity may be found elsewhere in Europe, particularly in France, where bourgs were established during the fifth and sixth centuries. These were ‘unwalled suburban settlements near civitates and around an abbey or church’,16 sometimes developing on a principal route into the city: such is the position of St Martin-in-the-Fields. In association with monasteries, the bourgs often evolved around the burial shrine of a saint.17 Sacred centres often also attracted merchants, as ‘the demand for foods generated by the ecclesiastical nuclei was constant’.18

east London Roman cemetery.12 Precise dating of these burials has yet to be ascertained. To the east of this group, however, a more definite sequence has been established. Below the remains of a seventeenth-century cellar, directly to the east of the sarcophagus, was a layer of re-worked cemetery soil. Thirty-one pottery sherds, dating to AD c. 350–400, were recovered from this layer; it also contained five sherds that have been dated to AD c. 450–500. The layer sealed a group of five badly truncated skeletons, which overlay another inhumation, aligned north-south. This earlier burial was supine and appeared to have originally had a pot placed by the head, although both skull and pot had been displaced by later activity. The pot also dates to the late 5th century (Fig. 5); it is a substantially complete sub-biconical jar with incised and impressed ‘chevron and dot’ decoration in a sandy fabric that appear to contains Greensand quartz (ESGS), but could be an import.13

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for a Roman structure on the site at St Martin’s emerged during the initial phase of excavation south of the church, which revealed that the southern wall of Gibbs’s eighteenth-century crypt had been built directly on top of a tile kiln; archaeomagnetic dating established that the last firing of the kiln was between AD 400 and 450 (Figs 3 and 6). This makes it the latest reliably dated Roman structure to be found in London, as well as being roughly contemporary with the recently discovered sarcophagus burial. Biddle’s article highlights the discovery of

The picture of the site to emerge from the archaeological evidence is therefore one of a high-status graveyard, located about two kilometres to the west of Londinium. The distinction attached to the group is perhaps reinforced by its prominent position, on a hill overlooking the river. Earlier skeletal remains in the sarcophagus imply the existence of at least one venerated burial from an earlier Roman period. It is possible, indeed likely, that the stone coffins discovered during the eighteenth-century portico excavations were

14

John Percival, The Roman Villa: An Historical Introduction (London, 1976), pp. 183-99. 15 Tyler Bell, ‘Churches on Roman Buildings: Christian Associations and Roman Masonry in Anglo-Saxon England’, Medieval Archaeology, 42 (1998), pp. 1-18. 16 David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City, From Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century (London, 1997), p. 27. 17 Ibid., p. 29. 18 Ibid., p. 27.

12

Bruno Barber and David Bowsher, The Eastern Cemetery of Roman London: Excavations 1983-1990, Museum of London Archaeology Service, Monograph Series 4 (London, 2000), p. 94. 13 Blackmore, ‘The Saxon Pottery’, in Telfer, ‘St Martin-in-theFields Church, A Post-Excavation Assessment’, pp. 56-9.

53

ALISON TELFER throughout the Roman period: north-east to south-west. This angle was characteristic of both the first-century building and the fifth-century sarcophagus and tile kiln, and suggests that some kind of landmark – if not on the site, then at least in the area – was influencing early structural orientation and providing a reference point for later activities. It may have been the Strand, or an off-shoot from it.22 In addition to the evidence from St Martin’s, other Roman activity has come to light in the area. The earliest structure to be found on the site of the church of St Bride’s, the easternmost church on Biddle’s list, is also known to be Roman, as demonstrated by the discovery of a tessellated pavement in the 1950s.23 At a considerable distance from Londinium, a construction dating to the first century AD has been recorded below Southwark Cathedral24 and a fourthcentury sarcophagus is documented as having been discovered below Westminster Abbey in the nineteenth century.25 During the 2007 excavation to the north of the National Schools building, about 25 metres to the west of the firstcentury building, the remains of a supine burial were found, orientated south-west to north-east (Fig. 3). The head would have been at the south-western end and only parts of the humeri, and the right femur, tibia and fibula survived. This individual had therefore been buried about 30m to the northeast of the more recognised burial area, immediately to the north of the existing church. The date of this inhumation has yet to be confirmed, but stratigraphic evidence strongly suggests the potential for a Roman date. Overlying the burial was evidence for one or more buildings. The remains of mortar floors were recorded, with associated beam slots and postholes, representing two rooms or properties. To the east were the remains of a third room or property, containing an oven. Outlines of mud bricks were visible within its western wall and a number of stakeholes defined part of its superstructure.

Fig. 6. Late Roman tile kiln in situ, facing west.

a Roman brick arch on the site;19 this may well have referred to the kiln or an associated structure. The kiln was industrial in scale, with an unusual double-arched flue, shown to have been producing tile and brick. Only two other examples of double flues have so far been found in Britain. The central build of the structure was composed of stacked floor tile, with a thick outer insulating wall made from chalk blocks. Its central pedestal sloped downwards, north to south, suggesting that the kiln was built into the natural slope of the gravel terrace.20

The results from radiocarbon dates are currently being sought for both the single burial and the oven from this activity at the northern edge of the site, although the presence of the overlying building indicates that any ground-level traces of the burial had long gone. The recovery of part of a Roman green glass bracelet from the vicinity of the grave suggests, however, that further burials may have existed in the

The tile kiln, by itself, is highly significant, as are the avenues of research that it opens; it is one of the last securely dated structures that was in use in Roman Britain. It was operating after the last market had ceased, or at least the last apparent major user of fresh supplies of ceramic building material to London had left.21

22

Gordon Malcolm, personal communication. Gustav Milne, St Bride’s Church, London Archaeological Research 1952–60 and 1992–5 (London: English Heritage, 1997), p. 21. 24 Mike Hammerson, ‘Excavations under Southwark Cathedral’, The London Archaeologist, 3.8 (1978), pp. 206-12. 25 Chris Thomas, Robert Cowie and Jane Sidell, The Royal Palace, Abbey and Town of Westminster on Thorney Island: Archaeological Excavations (1991–8) for the London Underground Limited Jubilee Line Extension Project, Museum of London Archaeology Service, Monograph Series 22 (London, 2006), p. 35. 23

It may be significant that the orientation of structures and burials at St Martin-in-the-Fields is fairly consistent 19

Biddle, ‘London on The Strand’ (cit. in n. 1), p. 25. Ian Betts, ‘The Building Material’, in Telfer, ‘St Martin-in-theFields Church: A Post-Excavation Assessment’ (cit. in n. 7), pp. 4954. 21 Ibid. 20

54

NEW EVIDENCE FOR THE TRANSITION FROM THE LATE ROMAN TO THE SAXON PERIOD AT ST MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS postholes. To the east were two possible beam slots, with the remains of a brickearth floor between them. There were also stakeholes and postholes associated with this building. Across the central and south-eastern areas of the site as a whole were the remains of at least thirty Saxon rubbish pits (Fig. 8). These had been severely truncated by the Victorian vaults, but their bases had survived. Of these, some contained a large concentration of animal bone; others had more a general mix of domestic refuse, such as pottery and antler waste. The dating from these pits tends towards the seventh and eighth centuries, typical of features excavated across Lundenwic.28 Traces of a wood-lined or barrel well were also recorded in the general area of the pits at St Martin’s (Fig. 8). Two contemporary barrel wells have been discovered in the vicinity, one at an excavation at the Peabody site, Bedfordbury, to the north of the site in 1987, the other during a watching brief at Trafalgar Square in 1988.29 The presence of the second well at St Martin’s suggests that further buildings may have been present across the eastern area of the site, their traces lost during the establishment of the parish cemetery in this area from the twelfth or thirteenth century onwards.

Fig. 7. Opaque red glass bead dating to AD c. 550–600.

immediate area.26 Stratigraphic survival in this area was unfortunately limited by eighteenth-century construction to the south and modern development to the north. Above the mud brick oven were traces of a timber-framed building, comprising a beam slot with a posthole at its western end; this has been dated to the sixth century. Within the debris associated with the demolition of the building was an opaque red glass bead, with white and yellow decoration, dating to AD c. 550–600 (Fig. 7).27 To the west was another Saxon building consisting of two rooms with brickearth floors. The remains of the wall base dividing them had also survived, as well as an associated beam slot (Fig. 8). A later property disclosed well-defined internal and external areas. A posthole separated these areas, presumably as structural support for a wall. The internal area, to the west, comprised brickearth floor fragments. To the east were layers of gravel metalling forming part of a yard surface, or perhaps an alleyway; in this area were also domestic rubbish dumps, including a midden of oyster shells.

The archaeological remains, therefore – particularly to the north of the National Schools building – provide conclusive evidence for a Saxon settlement on the site, dating from no later than the sixth century. At this stage in analysis, a Roman date for the earlier buildings has not been ruled out. In the area to the north of the present-day church, the late Roman sarcophagus and fifth-century burials were succeeded by a group of seventh-century graves, recorded to their south. The later group showed apparent deference to the earlier graves, respecting and perpetuating the observance of the site as a religious place. In addition, the high-status aspect of the burial ground was clearly acknowledged by the Saxons. There were seven possible seventh-century burials in total; one of these was of another high-status male, with grave goods (Fig. 9). A silver ring was found by the left hand of the deceased and a blue-green, glass palm cup and copper-alloy hanging bowl were recorded by the feet. Traces of leather were noted, suggesting the former presence of a shoe or boot.30

A third phase of Saxon building in this area included the remains of a brickearth floor. This had most likely continued to the west, but been heavily truncated by later ditches. To the west of this sequence of buildings was an open area containing a series of large domestic rubbish pits. These appeared to separate two distinct areas of Saxon dwellings, to the east and west. On the eastern side of the rubbish pits was a large circular cut, probably a well that served the buildings on either side of it (Fig. 8). The building to the west of the well was represented by remnants of a brickearth floor and a number of stake- and

28

Gordon Malcolm and David Bowsher with Robert Cowie, Middle Saxon London: Excavations at the Royal Opera House 1989–99, Museum of London Archaeology Service, Monograph Series 15 (London, 2003), p. 59. 29 Archaeology in Greater London 1965–90, ed. Thompson, Westman and Dyson (cit. in n. 6), pp. 268, 271. 30 Anne Davis, ‘The Plant Remains’, in Telfer, ‘St Martin-in-theFields Church: A Post-Excavation Assessment’, pp. 86-92.

26

Blackmore, ‘The Accessioned Finds’, in Telfer, ‘St Martin-in-theFields Church: A Post-Excavation Assessment’ (cit. in n. 7), pp. 6481. 27 Birte Brugmann, Glass Beads from Early Anglo-Saxon Graves: A Study of the Provenance and Chronology of Glass Beads from Early Anglo-Saxon Graves, Based on Visual Examination (Oxford, 2004), pp. 80-1.

55

ALISON TELFER

Fig. 8. Plan showing Saxon activity across the site.

from the bowl had survived, their striking Celtic designs showing clear traces of red and yellow enamel, as well as indications of gilding, highlighting their prestige.

The style of the palm cup was free-blown, plain with an outfolded rim.31 This differed from the single palm cup to survive from Gibbs’s excavations, which has ribbed sides, a folded rim and a cruciform design on the base,32 considered to be traditional Christian symbolism. Palm cups are thought to serve as lamps or drinking vessels.

A few metres to the north of this burial, another group of rare goods was found. This consisted of a gold and glass cabochon pendant (Fig. 10), two amethyst beads and three opaque glass beads, all also dating to the seventh century. No exact parallels have been found for the pendant, but it has similarities to triangular pendants belonging to the Desborough necklace,34 and may therefore have been made in Kent. The St Martin’s group was recovered from a graveshaped cut that had been disturbed during the construction of an eighteenth-century cellar well. No skeleton was found within the cut, but jewellery of this kind is generally associated with female burials and it is possible that the body had been moved in antiquity.

The function of the copper-alloy hanging bowl, the main body of which was badly fragmented, is uncertain; it may, for example, have held liquids, been used during baptisms or served as pan scales for weighing wool.33 In the seventhcentury grave at St Martin’s, it had been used to hold hazelnuts, an offering which may have been either symbolic or edible. The two basal discs and two of three escutcheons 31

Blackmore, ‘The Accessioned Finds’, in Telfer, ‘St Martin-in-theFields Church: A Post-Excavation Assessment’, pp. 64-81. 32 D.B. Harden, ‘Glass Vessels in Britain and Ireland, AD 400– 1000’, in Dark Age Britain, ed. D.B. Harden (London, 1956), p. 142, n. 42. 33 Helen Geake, The Use of Grave-Goods in Conversion-Period England, c. 600–c. 800, BAR British Series 261 (Oxford, 1997), p. 87.

34

The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600900, ed. L. Webster and J. Backhouse (London: British Museum, 1991), p. 28, no. 13.

56

NEW EVIDENCE FOR THE TRANSITION FROM THE LATE ROMAN TO THE SAXON PERIOD AT ST MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS

Fig. 10. Cabochon pendant, 7th-century, from a grave-shaped cut.

recovered from post-Saxon contexts, suggesting the former presence of additional glass vessels (most likely palm cups), and, therefore, additional graves. The alignment and demographic profile of the seventhcentury burials can be compared to that of contemporary burials within London. A dispersed cemetery has been suggested as having been located at Covent Garden, to the east of St Martin’s, with the discovery of both inhumations and cremation burials.37 The spatial relationship between the groups may now be investigated.

Fig. 9. High-status Saxon burial with grave goods, facing south-west.

Conclusion Large-scale excavations in this part of Westminster in the last twenty-five years – the years since Biddle’s paper – have answered many questions about the Middle Saxon centre of Lundenwic, of a domestic, commercial, industrial and personal nature. Fieldwork at the Royal Opera House, alone, revealed an impressive layout of houses, shops and burial groups, generally dating to the eighth century.35

The discovery of stratigraphic evidence from the fifth and sixth centuries has widespread implications for the archaeological record in Westminster. It has been thought previously that the occupation of Lundenwic did not start until the mid seventh century, and the pottery was dated accordingly. The discovery of cremation burials and potential sixth-century finds at the London Transport Museum38 confirm earlier activity, but the late fifth-century jar from St Martin-in-the-Fields is one of the earliest Saxon vessels from the area.39

It has previously been thought that the medieval church of St Martin had taken the place of a Saxon one, although no structural evidence for such a building has been found. The evidence for its existence is now much more compelling. This is not just the presence of the group of Saxon burials, but also finds from elsewhere on the site, such as iron shears (commonly associated with female graves) and fragments from two other palm cups, recovered from Saxon contexts.36 Numerous further fragments of blue-green glass were also

There is now further, compelling evidence for sixth-century occupation of the area, not only on the site of St Martin’s, but 37

Robert Cowie and Lyn Blackmore with Anne Davis, Jackie Keily and Kevin Rielly, Lundenwic: excavations in Middle Saxon London, 1987-2000 (London: Museum of London Archaeology Monograph Series, in preparation). 38 AOC Archaeology Group, ‘London’s Transport Museum, Covent Garden, City of Westminster, London: Post Excavation Assessment’ (AOC Archaeology Group unpublished report, 2006). 39 Blackmore, ‘The Accessioned Finds’, in Telfer, ‘St Martin-in-theFields Church: A Post-Excavation Assessment’.

35

Malcolm and Bowsher, with Cowie, Middle Saxon London: Excavations at the Royal Opera House (cit. in n. 28). 36 Blackmore, ‘The Accessioned Finds’, in Telfer, ‘St Martin-in-theFields Church: A Post-Excavation Assessment’ (cit. in n. 7), pp. 6481.

57

ALISON TELFER also to the north-east. In November 2008, a domestic hearth was uncovered at Upper St Martin’s Lane, about half a kilometre away; archaeomagnetometry has given it a late fifth-century to early sixth-century date.40 In addition, pits recorded during an excavation at nearby 8-9 Long Acre and 16 Garrick Street contained pottery thought to predate the imports found in Lundenwic.41 These discoveries add to evidence for Early Saxon settlement in the locality, possibly forming a western precursor to Lundenwic. Archaeological evidence from the site of St Martin-in-theFields has not only been able to answer some of the questions that Martin Biddle raised, but has also shed new light upon the origins of the site, seemingly prior to its religious beginnings. The fact that the investigation has been able to demonstrate activity at the site throughout the Roman period is singularly absorbing. Traditional thought has focused on a shift in settlement between the walled centre of Roman Londinium and the Saxon town of Lundenwic. The evidence from St Martin’s provides a reason for this shift: it is possible that a community growing around a Roman shrine may have expanded to the north-east, as well as eastwards along the riverfront, to form a larger settlement which later became the thriving Middle Saxon centre. Results from the fieldwork provide the potential to bridge not only the Roman-Saxon transition, but also that from the Early to the Middle Saxon periods, for which clearly identifiable evidence is rarely present.

The author would like to thank the project team at St Martin-in-the-Fields church for their support throughout the project. Thanks also to Gordon Malcolm, Emily Burton, Lyn Blackmore, Bob Cowie, Sue Hirst and Sue Wright from Museum of London Archaeology. The fieldwork was monitored by Diane Walls from English Heritage. Photographs were taken by Andy Chopping and Maggie Cox (these are copyright to the Museum of London). The illustrations are by Mark Burch, Gabby Rapson and Juan Jose Fuldain.

40

Louise Wood, personal communication. Lyn Blackmore, Alan Vince and Robert Cowie, ‘The Origins of Lundenwic? Excavations at 8–9 Long Acre/16 Garrick Street, WC2’, London Archaeologist, 10.11 (2004), pp. 301-5. 41

58

Ethnic Identity and the Origins, Purpose and Occurrence of Pattern-Welded Swords in Sixth-Century Kent: The Case of the Saltwood Cemetery Brian Gilmour artefacts such as spears. It has allowed study of aspects of manufacture that have not have previously been revealed, noticed or understood – most particularly the swords’ intended appearance and significance as well as the technique of pattern-welding. An aspect which has emerged even more forcefully from the results of these examinations is that the blades must have been intended to be seen, for otherwise the sheer complexity and variety of designs would have been completely pointless, especially in those cases where careful planning and very painstaking care and skill were expended in making the individual elements of the patterns join up in such a way that the resultant motif would appear clear to the eye.

Introduction Swords, and especially long swords, are some of the most highly regarded but least well understood artefacts. This is particularly true of the pattern-welded iron swords that are now so well known from the archaeological record. Many swords survive from some periods but hardly any from others, their presence in the ground being almost entirely dependent upon changing and varying burial customs; hardly any have come to us through accidental loss. In this country, more swords survive from the fifth to seventh centuries than from any other period, nearly all having been among the artefacts that are so often found in pagan graves of this date.1 Most of those swords that have been recovered – and more come from Kent than from almost all other counties put together – have been found to be pattern-welded, although the significance of this is not clear.

The use and development of pattern-welding for long swords Virtually all swords of the early Anglo-Saxon period have been recovered from burials, and almost without exception these weapons can be classified as long swords, usually about 90 cm. (3 feet) in overall length. Technological investigation of many of these swords has shown the great majority to have been made by a complex composite construction technique now known as pattern-welding, in which different types or alloys of iron were combined in ways which – with final surface preparation techniques – would result in the internal construction techniques being visible as specific patterns displayed on the surface of the blades.

The origin of the swords is uncertain, and it cannot yet be said whether they are likely to be mostly of indigenous manufacture, possibly the products of some specialised sword-smithing centre. However, the large number of swords found in Kentish cemeteries gives us a better chance to look at the possible origins of the blades, by examining both the variations in how the blades are made and the style of the fittings, such as pommel caps, grip plates and suspension mounts, as well as other items that might have been buried together with the swords.

Long swords made in this way seem to have developed during the middle Iron Age in central northern Europe,2 and are known in Britain from the late Iron Age.3 One particularly well preserved example, a votive find recovered from an old bed of the River Nene at Orton Meadows, near Peterborough (Cambs.) shows how a bundle of iron rods was welded together and then heavily etched to reveal the internal structure of the blade, but only after the margins along the cutting edges had been ‘resist’-protected, using some kind of wax or grease to prevent the acid etching medium from affecting the blade’s margins on both sides. Thus the effect of separate cutting edges was created for these swords’ blades.

Preliminary results of a combined technological and stylistic study of the eleven swords (plus other artefacts) that were recovered from the very rich assemblage of metallic finds excavated at the Saltwood cemetery, on the line of the Channel Tunnel Rail link, close to the entrance of the Tunnel itself at Folkestone, offer a possible way in which we might begin to distinguish pattern-welded swords of indigenous origin from those that had been imported. The great complexity of many of the eleven swords from this cemetery was to be expected from previous studies, but such a large group as this has never been analysed in detail before and some unexpected details have emerged. The study of these objects as a group has enabled them to be approximately graded according to quality, and has provided a means to assess and compare sword production with that of other

This use of resist etching, together with the overall structure of the blade, must have been relatively common in Britain by the late pre-Roman period, given that a number of examples 2

R. Pleiner, The Celtic Sword (Oxford, 1993), pp. 117 et seq. I.M. Stead, British Iron Age Swords and Scabbards (London, 2006), pp. 47-8.

1

For the Kentish material excavated during the 18th to 20th centuries, see A. Richardson, The Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of Kent, BAR British Series 391 (2005).

3

59

BRIAN GILMOUR have been recovered from (former) river beds or boggy/pool contexts, where they had been deposited as votive offerings. Most, if not all, of these blades can be classified as long swords, which at this time occur only in the southern half of Britain. We can infer from this that both the very long (over 60 cm.) form of sword and this method of composite construction were originally adopted from mainland Europe, where earlier examples – which appear to have been made using an even less formal style of composite manufacture – have been noted. These suggest that a central European prototype form for such swords had developed by the fifth or fourth century BC as part of an early La Tène cultural tradition, and that this form of ‘Celtic art’ was then adopted further afield in places with similar cultural traditions, such as central southern Britain. It had been adopted here and become widespread by the later Iron Age, examples having been noted as far afield as Cambridgeshire (Orton Meadows, Peterborough) and north-west Wales (Llyn Cerrig Bach, Anglesey) and also in the Channel Islands (Guernsey).4

In their respective ways, both the Canterbury and South Shields pattern-welded sword finds can be classed as extremely unusual or freak survivals, and therefore the lack of similar swords before the burial finds from the later fifth or sixth centuries is perhaps not surprising: it does not mean that metalwork like this was not to be found in Britain throughout the intervening years. It is also evident that the way in which these earlier pattern-welded swords were made was significantly different from that of the swords recovered from the cemeteries of the fifth to seventh centuries. How these techniques might have varied in different areas is as yet unknown, however. The swords from the Saltwood Anglo-Saxon cemetery Nine of the eleven swords from this cemetery were identified as being pattern-welded from the now familiar traces of herringbone design, visible on x-ray along the central parts of the blades, although some were much easier to see than others as a result of their structure. However the simple x-ray-based sorting of the sword blades into pattern-welded and non pattern-welded has been found to be misleading,8 for it became clear that for most if not all of the nine swords that were readily identifiable as pattern-welded, the edges were involved with, and formed part of, the overall patterned effect.

More formal patterns, and construction methods to match these, were developed some time during the next two centuries or so, and are seen in two groups of pattern-welded sword finds from Roman Britain, although in both cases the swords themselves probably originate from (Germanic?) Europe to the north-east of the Roman Empire. Luckily it is possible to date both these groups to the late second or early third centuries AD. The first group, from Canterbury, involved two swords dumped on top of the remains of two probable murder victims in a single pit possibly dating to c. AD 186. The second group comprises the remains (possibly already fragmentary) of three similar pattern-welded swords that were found, with other fittings, buried as a probable votive offering under a rampart extension to the eastern Roman supply fort of Arbeia (now in South Shields), probably some time shortly before the arrival of the emperor Septimius Severus in AD 208.5 Many examples of similar pattern-welded swords, from about this time or slightly later, are known from the great Jutland votive bog/pool deposits, most notably Nydam6 and Illerup.7

The skill in assembling composite pattern-welded swords was undoubtedly one important aspect of the finished designs, or at least of how they would have been assessed. But these objects were undoubtedly intended to show other aspects of virtuosity in design and skill – such as the choice and combination of different types of iron to show the chosen pattern to its best optical effect – while the patterns themselves almost certainly had some particular significance to the original observers. This last aspect of their design is perhaps the most difficult to interpret from a modern perspective, but needs to be considered if we are to begin to understand these objects for what they once meant. Overall, the large number of swords excavated from Saltwood should permit some judgement as to their relative or overall quality. It is with this in mind that the eleven sword blades recovered are discussed here, in three groups that are tentatively classified as high, medium and basic quality. The assumption is that the basic-quality swords are not necessarily poor quality (although they may be), but that they just lack the better qualities of the finer blades. This is very similar to the classification used by the Iraqi scholar Ya‘qūb al-Kindī in the early ninth century to classify swords made in the wider Middle-Eastern region, where swords were clearly judged and

4

B.J. Gilmour, ‘Swords, seaxes and Saxons: Pattern-Welding and Edged-Weapon Technology from Late Roman Britain to AngloSaxon England’, in Collectanea Antiqua: Essays in Memory of Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, in M. Henig and T.J. Smith, BAR International Series, no 1673 (2007), pp. 94-6. 5 B.J.Gilmour, ‘Victims of Crime? Ferrous Technology and Origins of Two Pattern-Welded Long Swords from Durovernum Cantiacorum (Canterbury Kent)’, in Archaeometallurgy in Europe 2007: 2nd International Conference: Selected Papers, AIM (Milan, 2009), pp. 250-61. 6 M. Todd, The Northern Barbarians (London, 1975), pp. 192 et seq. 7 M. Biborski and J. Ilkaer, Illerup Adal, die Schwerter und die Schwertscheiden (Aarhüs, 2007).

8

As seen in the analysis of four probable 6th-century swords excavated at Croydon, by B. J. Gilmour, ‘Metallurgical Analysis of the Swords’, in J.I. McKinley, ‘The Early Saxon Cemetery at Park Lane, Croydon’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, 90 (2003), pp. 97100.

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ETHNIC IDENTITY AND THE ORIGINS, PURPOSE AND OCCURRENCE OF PATTERN-WELDED SWORDS categorised according to the fineness of the structure as demonstrated by the surface appearance.9 There seems no reason to suppose that swords in Europe (which are mentioned and commented on by al-Kindī) were not judged in a very similar way, and we might expect certain differences in style of manufacture and display of surface decoration to have been typical of different centres of manufacture, as was clearly the case for the different categories discussed by alKindī.

with its partially (selectively) mercury gilt silver decorated ‘cocked hat’ pommel plus associated ring and with sheetsilver cover-pieces for the upper and lower cross-guards, fixed in place with silver rivets, which would have stood out in wonderful contrast to the elaborate extremely well made allover pattern-welded blade (Fig. 2). The central, continuous double herring-bone pattern of this sword is of an unusual form, where the two different pieces of iron that make up the composite rods of this part of the blade are of very unequal thickness. The (fine-grain, low-carbon) darker etching bands of this patterned part are much thicker than the pale etching bands, although the contrast, and hence quality of pattern, is very good. The result of this would have been that this part of the blade would have etched generally darker, but each element (or rib) of the herring-bone design would have been highlighted by a thin white line. This finely detailed pattern would have stood out in marked contrast to the welded on cutting edges which were themselves each made in two pattern-welded halves.

In order to divide the Saltwood swords into these three groupings the main criteria were: the overall quality and selection of the different ferrous alloy metal parts used, together with any special non-ferrous fittings; the choice of composite construction used; and the skill in the assembling of the blade. This is only offered here as the tentative beginning of a process by which we can begin to analyse swords (in various ways) and then assess them according to quality, origin, significance and actual appearance of surface decoration (and not just relying on what is visible on x-ray, which is often only the beginning of discovering the true structure). The detailed analysis of the Saltwood swords, spearheads and related objects is seen as an early step in the process of understanding these high status objects and how they fit in with other aspects of material culture of the early Anglo-Saxon period.

The pattern-welding of the edges is not of the more easily recognised (on x-ray) form, involving tightly twisted (hence herringbone) elements, although it is made using exactly the same combination of fine-grain low-carbon iron (for dark etching) and very large grain phosphoritic iron (for pale etching). Nevertheless a form of twisted decorative welding has been used here. Both halves of the cutting edge have been made from a triple sandwich consisting of a piece of (pale) phosphoritic iron welded between two pieces of fine-grain low-carbon iron. Before being welded together, each of the bars made this way was subjected to a series of gentle twists and counter twists along its length (as described in more detail above) before being welded together, and then welded onto the composite central part of the blade. This technique and the end result – the narrow, pale snake-like line running down each of the cutting edges – is very similar to part (one side) of the rare snake design found in the only sword recovered from grave 74 (approximately datable to the second half of the sixth century), from the cemetery at West Heslerton in Yorkshire.11

The overwhelming impression from all the swords is that what you saw on the surface of the blades was what mattered, and that this was how they were judged: not just by the simple basics of the patterns exposed by x-ray study, but all the detail, fine or otherwise, that would have been visible, and not just along the central, more obviously patterned parts of the blades but right across the blades, from tip to tip of the edges. This much was clear from the detailed study of four swords of this period from the recently excavated cemetery at Park Lane, Croydon (Surr.).10 Complexity and quality in the Saltwood swords: some indicators of indigenous origin? (a) Highest quality swords

The sword from grave 3885 was also of very high quality but its design and original appearance would have been quite different. Here the twisted elements involved in the pattern were not continuous, the design having been broken up into similar-sized alternating panels where a non herringbone, part twisted/part straight-grained effect was intended (Fig. 1[2]). The pattern involved five partially twisted rods being welded side-by-side; it was rare in early Anglo-Saxon swords for so many to be welded together, although very occasionally six

We can tentatively begin to judge the swords from Saltwood in terms of their quality. Of the eleven swords examined, three can be graded high or very high quality in terms of the inter-related aspects of structure, combination of materials used, complexity and skill of manufacture and likely final appearance (Fig. 1). Unsurprisingly perhaps, the best of all overall was the blade which had by far the richest fittings, the sole ‘ring’ sword from the cemetery (from grave 3944). This must have been a magnificent object before it was buried,

11

B.J. Gilmour, ‘A Sword from Grave G74’, in C. Haughton and D. Powlesland, West Heslerton: The Anglian Cemetery: vol. 1, The Excavation and Discussion of the Evidence, Archaeological Monograph Series (Landscape Research Centre), no. 1 (Yedingham, 1999), pp. 120-3.

9

R.G. Hoyland and B.J. Gilmour, Medieval Islamic Swords and Swordmaking: Kindī’s Treatise on Swords and their Kinds (Oxford, 2006), pp. 152 and 164. 10 Gilmour, ‘Metallurgical Analysis of the Swords’ (cit. in n. 8).

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Fig. 1a

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ETHNIC IDENTITY AND THE ORIGINS, PURPOSE AND OCCURRENCE OF PATTERN-WELDED SWORDS

Fig. 1b

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BRIAN GILMOUR

1c Fig. 1. Saltwood Anglo-Saxon cemetery: simplified diagrammatic reconstructions of the original surface appearance of each of the eleven swords discovered here, plus three-dimensional views of the structure of each blade. The design is more-or-less the same on the reverse side of these sword blades, apart from [2] (grave 3885) where both sides are shown because the pattern-welded design on either side of this blade is different.

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ETHNIC IDENTITY AND THE ORIGINS, PURPOSE AND OCCURRENCE OF PATTERN-WELDED SWORDS 0.5% respectively), in addition to unusually concentrated scatters of small non-metallic inclusions (mainly a mixture of iron oxide and iron silicate). That these bands were so clearly segregated from the metal on either side suggests the possible use of a flux as an aid to adhesion during the welding process – possibly applied as a paste containing fine sandy iron ore mixed enriched with arsenic, nickel and cobalt. Although not strictly necessary to achieve successful welding, this would have greatly enhanced the quality of the finished surface appearance of the sword blade after final polishing and etching by imparting a clear outline to all the main blade components. The use of what would have been a very similar flux has been recently suggested for one of five (of seven) swords (that from grave 346) from the 1994 excavations at the roughly contemporary Dover Buckland II cemetery (15 km. west of Saltwood).12

Fig. 2. Saltwood Anglo-Saxon cemetery: view of the mercury gilded silver pommel of the ‘high quality’‘ring’ sword from grave 3944 (see [1] in Fig. 1).

A fine quality Frankish sword blade (?) adjacent rods have been encountered. Where two or three adjacent composite rods have been used in (better quality?) swords of this period, usually these are found to have been welded onto a separate plain central core piece, this additional piece perhaps being necessary for producing a better pattern for a sword of this configuration. Perhaps significantly, the sword from grave 1145, which had two pairs of adjacent twisted composite rods welded back-to-back and without a separate core-piece, was also a relatively poor quality blade – certainly as compared to the rest of the swords found here.

Of the three highest quality swords from Saltwood, the third (from grave 1081) could only be identified as such by x-ray study, as it was totally corroded; but the unusual patternwelded design, and the great skill that would have been necessary to achieve this, mark it out as being not only very fine but also of a highly unusual type. The very distinctive looped form of pattern was achieved by welding three adjacent continuously twisted rods in such a way that when half the thickness of each of the twisted rods had been ground away on the finished blade, the opposing half loops (inherent in the pattern when it is ground away to this depth) matched one another (see Fig. 1[3]). Great accuracy at every stage was required for the pattern to match up at the end. Unfortunately the internal structure and elemental composition of the various parts of this sword could not be determined, but the design is so unusual in an Anglo-Saxon context in this period as to strongly suggest that this may well be an imported blade – which, taken together with the probable Frankish form of decorated silver pommel (Fig. 3), would be indicative of a Frankish origin for the entire sword with its fittings.

However where two sets of four adjacent rods have been used, they are usually found to have been welded together back-toback without a separate core piece, and it would appear that where so many composite rods were used, a separate core piece was not necessary. Did better patterns result without one? In this case the quality of manufacture was probably judged by the skill in achieving evenly shaped and matching panels with adjacent twists running in opposite directions, together with the excellent pale-dark contrast achieved between the equal-sized elements that were welded together to make each of the composite rods or bars. This was achieved by the selection and use of very high quality examples of the two types of iron used for these rods: fairly homogeneous (giving evenly darker etching) fine-grain low-carbon iron and equally homogeneous (and therefore evenly paler etching) very large-grain, highly phosphoritic iron, the same two metals being used for all of the rods. This was different from the ‘ring’ sword from grave 3944, where the two pieces making up each composite rod were of very unequal thickness.

(b) Lesser quality swords of probable Anglo-Saxon origin According to the rough division into categories attempted here, five of the Saltwood swords can be classed as of medium quality, in that they achieved some of the criteria set out here, and therefore were good in some respects but not so good in others. However this grading exercise is intended (at least at this stage) as a relative comparison between swords of this period, and all this group of five swords were different from one another while also being of great interest and of a very high standard of manufacture.

The sword from grave 3885 was also very unusual, in that the weld boundaries between all eight of the composite rods, and between the outermost of these and the cutting edges, were very prominently marked by a band greatly enriched with arsenic, nickel and cobalt (up to approximately 3%, 1.5% and

12

65

Lang (forthcoming)

BRIAN GILMOUR

Fig. 3. Saltwood Anglo-Saxon cemetery: view of the silver pommel of the ‘high quality’‘Frankish’ sword from grave 1081 (see [3] in Fig. 1).

The composite core of the first of these five (the sword from grave 3826) is of very typical composite design and a high standard of manufacture, three adjacent partially twisted composite rods having been welded on to either side of a plain, very inhomogeneous piece of partially phosphoritic low-carbon iron (Fig. 1[4]). The central core-piece was probably rather thicker than the surface composite pieces (which would have influenced the pattern to some extent), and the surface composite rods were of a good quality combination of fine-grain, darker-etching, low-carbon iron and very large grain, paler-etching phosphoritic iron. Both types of iron were fairly homogeneous, which would have meant that the welded pattern running down this part of the blade would have had good pale/dark optical contrast between each individual small worm-like part of the design, and also that the design would have been of the same quality right along the blade.

Fig. 4. Saltwood Anglo-Saxon cemetery: view of the ribbed iron T bar pommel of the ‘medium quality’ sword from grave 6653 (see [6] in Fig. 1).

grave 3826, although little survived of the twisted parts. However the cutting edge was fairly basic, having been made from a single piece of low-carbon iron, much the same as was used for the plain central core-piece in the middle of the blade. Similar in quality although even simpler in design, was the sword from grave 1163 (Fig. 1 [7]), with its continuous single herringbone pattern. The composite twisted rods were made of a good quality combination of phosphoritic iron and fine-grain low-carbon iron pieces, between which was sandwiched a piece of plain iron. Much the same plain iron was used to make the single piece used for the cutting edge(s).

More surprising was that the cutting edge was made of a piece of inhomogeneous, partly phosphoritic low-carbon iron – much the same as the piece forming the central core of the blade – which had been welded between two pieces of much more homogeneous fine-grain low-carbon iron, the latter being much the same as was used in the composite rods of the patterned central part of the blade. From a structural point of view this may not make a lot of sense, but from the viewpoint of the pattern it is much more logical, in that the margin along the cutting edge would have had a (perhaps intentionally) slightly piebald but generally pale appearance, whereas the adjacent band would have had a more even, darker appearance, so that there would have been good optical contrast between the two.

The final two swords of this group were also probably the best quality of the five. Most unusual in design was a rare example of a sword (from grave 1767) where a separate plain core-piece was welded in between the two sets of four partly twisted composite rods, making up the pattern-welded design on the surface on either side of the central part of the blade (Fig. 1 [5]). The central core-piece was very narrow, probably a reflection of the kind of patterned finish being aimed at, and the (related) effect of four adjacent twisted composite rods having been used. As in the two previous examples, the cutting edge was again made of a single piece of low-carbon iron, but this time the metal appears to have been folded and/or cut and welded back together so as to leave a series of welds which fan out slightly towards the tip of the cutting edge. This seems most likely to have been done intentionally,

Rather simpler in overall construction and perhaps poorer in quality was the sword from grave 6653 (Fig. 4). Apart from the continuous twists used in the pattern-welded design (Fig. 1 [6]), the composite central part of this sword would appear to be very similar in materials and design to the sword from 66

ETHNIC IDENTITY AND THE ORIGINS, PURPOSE AND OCCURRENCE OF PATTERN-WELDED SWORDS so that the welds and the generally more striated or banded appearance would contrast well with the central part of the pattern-welded design. Good quality, fine-grain low-carbon iron has been used in the pattern-welded composite pieces of this sword but it has been combined with what would appear to be less good quality phosphoritic iron. This is very inhomogeneous and would have shown up on the surface with some (and probably many) dark patches where there is an appreciable carbon content. Despite being relatively simple in manufacture, with a simple herringbone pattern, the composite central part of the final sword in this group, from grave 1048, has been very skilfully made, although the combination of materials is unusual (but effective) in giving a good visual appearance to the sword (Fig. 1 [8]) In design and overall quality it was very similar to another blade from this group of five swords (from grave 1163), which had a simple herringbone pattern. However rather than being used in combination with fine-grain, lowcarbon iron (nearly always low in phosphorus), in this case large-grain, pale-etching phosphoritic iron has been combined with relatively homogeneous medium- to finegrain low-carbon phosphoritic iron – a very unusual ferrous alloy which has also been used to make the plain central corepiece onto which the two pairs of twisted composite rods have been welded. This phosphoritic iron is extremely rare in also having a relatively homogeneous and relatively high (approximately 0.2-0.3%) carbon content – as phosphorus and carbon tend to be found segregated in different parts of the same piece of iron (as with the phosphoritic iron used in the pattern-welded pieces in the sword from grave 1767 at Saltwood). This must be the result of the result of smelting phosphoritic iron ore under unusually reductive furnace conditions. However the carbon content is high enough and the metal homogeneous enough for a good, dark-etching iron to result. This has been cleverly chosen here to be combined with the (much more normal) pale-etching phosphoritic iron that we would expect to have been used. Unfortunately only a very tiny island of the cutting edge survived, but this was fairly central and it indicates that the middle (and possibly all) of the cutting edge was made of very low carbon iron.

Fig. 5. Saltwood Anglo-Saxon cemetery: view of the plain copper (gunmetal) alloy pommel cap of the lesser quality sword from grave 1145 (see [9] in Fig. 1).

have been current from the mid to late Iron Age onwards, latterly as a ‘poor man’s’ form of pattern-welded sword. The simple herringbone pattern sword from grave 1145 was the least well made sword of this kind found at Saltwood. An attempt was made to use what we can now see was the conventional phosphoritic and low-carbon iron combination for the twisted composite rods, but the selection of materials appears to have been relatively poor, as the optical contrast and definition between the individual bands was not very good. Also, there was no separate core-piece; this is usually found in swords with a simple herringbone pattern and may well have been necessary for a better quality pattern. In addition a large defect in the weld between the core and cutting edge pieces suggests that the workmanship may not have been of the highest standard – an impression further emphasised by the use of a single piece of relatively poor quality plain iron for the cutting edge. There must have been an overall low standard of optical contrast between this cutting edge and the rather indifferent iron combination used in the herringbone central pattern. It may be significant that this, thepoorest quality example of the more developed form of pattern-welded sword from the Saltwood cemetery, was also the smallest.

(c) Basic quality swords Of the final group of three swords here classified as being of basic quality (Fig. 5), one (from grave 1145) had a simple herringbone pattern running down the central part of blade on either side (Fig. 1 [9]), while the other two (from graves 3779 and 4665) did not show this kind of easily recognised or more developed form of pattern-welding, but nonetheless had a layered construction which was probably intended to result in a simple form of pattern, in much the same way that the cutting edges of some of the other swords would have done (Fig. 1 [10] and [11]). This may well represent a primitive, undeveloped type of pattern-welding – which may always

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BRIAN GILMOUR The final two swords were of a much simpler construction than the rest, and it is for this reason that they have been placed in this third category. No attempt was made at the kind of twisted or composite construction normally associated with developed forms of pattern-welding. By contrast, both these swords show a banded or striated structure indicative of a single piece of well prepared but slightly variable low-carbon bloomery iron that has been folded or cut and stacked and welded back together, to give (at least in these cases) a fairly homogeneous but striated structure that would have resulted in a fairly finely striated appearance to the surface. Although only four or five welded layers appear to have been involved, the striated appearance is the inevitable result of the extensive forging of a single piece of inhomogeneous iron. This simple pattern would at the very least have demonstrated that the iron used to make it had been well prepared, but it is just as likely that in this period simple watery patterns of this kind were also of some interest and perhaps (still) of particular significance to some observers, rather as they had been in the late Iron Age 13

century is at best uncertain but several suggestions can nevertheless be made. There seem to be two main strands of meaning or purpose, one clearer than the other. The sword blades are clearly exhibition pieces, designed to demonstrate the very best in a smith’s skill in combining the finest iron alloys in such a way as to produce precise visible surface patterns. The very best quality swords – as judged by their complexity and precision of patterns – are also found to have utilised the very best iron alloys available at that (or almost any other) time. The composite rods from which the patternwelded components were made – whether twisted or not – required alternate laminations of low-carbon iron and phosphoritic iron which had to be more or less homogeneous to enable the required optical contrast to be achieved. What the smiths (and the polishers) had discovered was that a piece of iron whose carbon content was a consistent 0.10.2% (or even slightly less) produced a grey finish when polished and etched, as a result of the fine grain size that this small amount of carbon will induce in iron. Small quantities of phosphorus induce exactly the opposite effect, so that an increasing percentage of phosphorus will produce an iron with an increasing grain size and a much more bright white effect when polished and etched. Combining these two different alloys of iron to produce laminated bars for making composite rods – and using both twisted and straight rods, for a contrasting optical effect – was a technique that was already being exploited by the late second century AD.14

No evidence for the use of recycled iron was found in any part of any of the swords from Saltwood, nor would it have beeen expected for complex high-status objects like these where it would have been essential to know the properties and consistency of each piece of iron used. This knowledge would have been essential for the smith to be able to plan and predict the eventual appearance of each blade, even those which have been classified as ‘basic’ here. All these swords would have been sought-after objects, even if some were less expensive.

Analysis carried out so far would suggest that the phosphoritic content of the iron used in the composite central rods incorporated into these much earlier patternwelded swords was typically around 0.2-0.3%, but by the sixth century – at least in an Anglo-Saxon context – it was more typically within the range 0.5-1.0%. Thus phosphoritic iron had become a highly specialised product – perhaps only smelted in a few production centres – which may well have been specially developed during the intervening period for its use in the making of pattern-welded swords; accordingly it may possibly also have been traded widely. Low-carbon iron may also have been developed and traded in this period for similar.

C. AD 450-650: The peak of pattern-welded design and use for swords? Whatever the origin of a particular sword blade, we can expect that the optical properties of different types of iron would have been exploited to show off or enhance the visual appearance of any pattern-welded sword. The quality of blades like these would have been judged by their appearance, and so the best combinations of iron alloys will have been deployed to enhance it. The structure of the many fifth- to seventh-century sword blades already examined analytically indicates strongly that the actual manufacture, exploitation and probably also the trade in the iron alloys developed significantly from earlier centuries. Technological studies to date would suggest that it was in the mid-fifth to mid-seventh centuries that this decorative style of composite welded manufacture reached its peak in terms of complexity and skill, in terms of both the development of the iron alloys used and the way they were put together.

Not only did this period see the peak in development in the combined use of low carbon iron and phosphoritic iron for pattern-welded swords, but also the use of steel15 reached a

14

Gilmour, ‘Victims of Crime?’ (cit. in n. 5). ‘Steel’ here refers specifically to hypo-eutectoid steel (the lower end of the carbon content for this iron alloy) which for practical purposes is iron alloyed with approximately 0.3 to 1.0% carbon. Hyper-eutectoid steel (carbon content approximately 1.0 to 2.0% carbon) can be expected to be found on some artefacts made in the central southern Asian region but is almost unknown on finished objects in Europe although it has been found (and is to be expected in this region) for unused steel billets, partially processed bars of bloomery steel. For a definition and discussion of the varying 15

Quite what the patterns displayed on the swords meant to people in the millennium leading up to the mid seventh

13

Stead, British Iron Age Swords (cit. in n. 3).

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ETHNIC IDENTITY AND THE ORIGINS, PURPOSE AND OCCURRENCE OF PATTERN-WELDED SWORDS minimum for sword blades such as these, and is only found to form the tip of the cutting edges. The cutting edges themselves (except in the case of poorer quality blades such as the Saltwood sword blade from grave 1145) are usually found to be quite complex, and to have been made in some kind of sandwich arrangement which would have intentionally formed part of the overall pattern-welded design.

been found that the twisted composite herringbone pattern visible on one side of each of these swords is independent of the pattern visible on the reverse side. In other words these patterns are formed from two separate layers of adjacent twisted composite rods, either welded back-to-back to give two separate but usually indistinguishable herringbone patterns, or each welded, in a single operation, to a separate plain ‘backing’ piece running through the centre of the sword.

It is much less easy to be sure of why swords were decorated in this way, although we can be certain that it was only used for swords until some time in the (perhaps early to mid) seventh century. This would appear to indicate that the patterns relate to specific pagan symbolism. Earlier medieval descriptions of analogous patterns seen on swords in the Middle East would suggest that an association with water is implied, with the patterns themselves being described as watering. It is possible that by the sixth century we are seeing a highly stylised form of the kind of pattern seen on some later Iron Age long sword blades, where the resemblance to flowing water is much more obvious.16 It may be that the patterns were seen as imbuing the blade with some kind of special property. The rare form of snake pattern described in Thiðriks Saga, and seen in a sixth-century sword from West Heslerton (Yorks.),17 can be interpreted as a more obvious good luck charm; the watered patterns may have had a similar significance.

Sometimes an alternating design is found where the simple herringbone form is mixed with straight-grained elements. Occasionally the adjacent, alternately twisted and straight, composite rods were welded side by side so that the twisted portions of one rod were next to the straight portions of the next, so that the consequent pattern alternated across the blade as well as up and down. In all the cases of alternating patterns, the pattern could only work if the alternating portions of each twisted rod were very accurately forged. If they were not the correct length, then the pattern would not work, or at best would be untidy. Inaccuracies would magnify the problem along the whole length of the blade. Thus the skill of the swordsmith in being able to make very accurate variations in the pattern was demonstrated by how good the pattern was seen to be on the surface of the blade. But another way in which his skill in making blades like these was shown, was by the appearance of their herringbone elements. If the herringbone design was undistorted then it meant that the smith had achieved a near-perfect finish on the surface of the blade without having to resort to grinding the blade’s surface to achieve a flat finish which could then be polished and etched to reveal the pattern. As soon as any of the surface was ground away, then the pattern became progressively more distorted. Thus a (near) perfect herringbone design was another indication of both the skill of the sword-smith and of the quality of the blade, and this may have been one of the main ways in which the quality of an indigenous Anglo-Saxon sword blade was judged. This is in complete contrast to the Frankish(?) sword blade from this cemetery, where the looped design depended on the careful matching and welding together of the adjacent continuously twisted composite rods, followed by the grinding away of half the thickness of each rod.

Whatever its significance, by the early seventh century pattern-welding had evolved into a highly formalised or stylised form of decorative composite welded construction and was used for the great majority of swords that have been found in Anglo-Saxon England. Almost all these swords have been recovered from burials which can be dated approximately to the period 450 to 650, when the pagan custom of burial with objects such as weapons (for male burials) was common, particularly in eastern England. The patterns on the swords from these burials are almost invariably found (by x-ray examination) to be either a single or multiple herringbone design. The simple herringbone or chevron designs are the result of welding two twisted rods with opposing spirals side-by-side – that is, with the twists running in opposite directions. Multiple herringbone patterns were built up by welding more alternating twisted rods alongside each other. Designs based on two, three or four rods are the most common, but multiple designs based on five or even six twisted rods are occasionally found. In all these cases the adjacent composite rods were continuously twisted along their entire length before they were welded together. In nearly every case it has

The possible impact of Christianity on the use of patternwelding for swords The occurrence as well as the purpose of pattern-welding is a continuing puzzle which the large numbers of Kentish examples could help to solve. During this period the technique does not appear to have been used for any other weapon. However by about the middle of the seventh century it would appear that the situation is changing, marked by the appearance of a very long bladed form of spearhead, some examples of which have been found to be pattern-welded. After this period, the pattern-welding of swords tends to

exploitation of steel see J.W. Allan and B.J. Gilmour, Persian Steel: The Tanavoli Collection (Oxford, 2000), pp. 41-79, and glossary entries, pp. 543, 548 and 553. 16 Hoyland and Gilmour, Medieval Islamic Swords and Swordmaking (cit. in n. 9), p. 15 n. 17 Gilmour, ‘A Sword from Grave G74’ (cit. in n. 11), pp. 120-3.

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BRIAN GILMOUR become less complex, and the technique was subsequently used for both seaxes (the large form of single-edged dagger) and spearheads. It seems that a significant link between pattern-welding and swords was broken during the first half of the seventh century. It may be no coincidence that this was the ‘conversion period’, when pagan symbolism can be expected to have given way or even to have been lost or suppressed with the progressive dominance of Christianity in Eastern Britain, especially amongst the elite. In the poem Beowulf which dates from this period or from later times and is Christian at least in the form we have it, dragons such as Grendel and Grendel’s Mother possess demonic significance, whereas in earlier pagan times such creatures may have been theriomorphic aspects of deities. Although dragons, serpents and the like could exist happily in purely decorative art, a sword, an object of power, was another matter. Accordingly, from the ‘conversion period’ onwards, the demonic was best avoided on the blade of a sword.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank (AE) Tony Johnson for his help and skill in turning my reconstruction sketches for Fig. 1 into the final finished computer generated diagrams reproduced here. I would also like to thank Lincoln Heritage Conservation, in particular Rob White, Michelle Johns and Tim hunter, for supplying the photographs of the four sword pommels reproduced here as Figs. 2 to 5 - and Oxford Archaeology for allowing me to use these images. Thanks are also due to both Martin Henig and Nigel Ramsay for encouraging me to produce this paper and for their expert editorial input, both suggestions and corrections. Last and certainly not least I would like to acknowledge the inspiration and example of Martin Biddle as someone who has always been quick to encourage others to examine and re-examine (and publish) various problematical issues, particularly those in earlier medieval archaeology in which I have been involved.

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Communities of the Living and the Dead: The Relationship Between Anglo-Saxon Settlements and Cemeteries, c. 450 – c. 850. Helena Hamerow Introduction

Early Anglo-Saxon England

In a paper published in 1980, Richard Bradley observed that the failure to integrate settlement and cemetery studies was ‘a real weakness of Anglo-Saxon archaeology’ and he argued that such integration was necessary if archaeologists were to assess whether the treatment of the dead reflected ‘the actual relations of the living.’1 In the last ten years or so the complex topography of Anglo-Saxon burial sites has been the subject of systematic study,2 yet, despite its importance, the relationship of rural settlements to cemeteries has still to receive extended treatment.3 This paper briefly considers how this relationship developed in Eastern England from the fifth to the mid ninth centuries, after which the increasing prevalence of burial in churchyards fundamentally and forever altered the relationship between settlements and cemeteries.4

Most of the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England during the fifth to mid seventh centuries were buried in ancestral cemeteries which remained in use for a century or more and which lay near – sometimes adjacent to – a settlement.5 The relationship between such cemeteries and the settlements of the contributing populations varied widely, however, and the ratio was not always 1:1. At Mucking (Essex), for example, two cemeteries which were both in use during the fifth and sixth centuries lay immediately adjacent to the settlement.6 They do not correspond neatly to a ‘northern’ and a ‘southern’ settlement, however, and it remains unclear how these two burial communities related to the settlement and to each other. Cemetery I appears to have been relatively small, with between 51 and 63 inhumation burials (believed to represent most of the cemetery) roughly aligned in rows, while Cemetery II contained around 750 burials, roughly two-thirds of which were cremations.7 At the recently excavated early Anglo-Saxon settlement complex at Lakenheath (Suffolk), no fewer than three cemeteries containing in total over 400 burials dating mostly to the sixth century lay some 250 m. to the south of an area of dispersed

1

R. Bradley, ‘Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: Some Suggestions for Research’, in Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries, ed. P. Rahtz, T. Dickinson and L. Watts, BAR British Series 82 (Oxford, 1980), pp. 171-8, at 172. 2 See for example J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), and H. Williams, Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain (Cambridge, 2006). 3 Hadley has, however, recently considered aspects of this relationship in later Anglo-Saxon England. D. Hadley, ‘The Garden Gives up its Secrets: The Developing Relationship between Rural Settlements and Cemeteries, c. 750-1100’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 14 (2007), pp. 195-203. 4 It does not, however, consider the so-called ‘deviant burials’ which form the subject of a recent book (A. Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (Oxford, 2009)). These appear for the most part to represent execution burials, mostly dating to the 7th to 9th centuries. Not all isolated inhumations found in settlements were ‘deviant’ however (ibid., pp. 218-9); some were associated with entrances to enclosures and buildings and may be regarded as ‘placed deposits’ (H. Hamerow, ‘“Special Deposits” in Anglo-Saxon Settlements’, Medieval Archaeology, 50 (2006), pp. 1-30). ‘Deviant’ burials have, however, been found in direct association with some settlements, as at Yarnton (Oxon.), where a burial cut into an enclosure ditch was that of an individual placed face down with the legs folded backwards. Beneath the body were found the remains of at least four further sub-adults (G. Hey, Yarnton: Saxon and Medieval Settlement and Landscape (Oxford: Oxford Archaeological Unit, 2004), pp. 163-5; A. Boyle, ‘The Human Burials’, in Hey, Yarnton, pp. 317-21.

5

Not all members of early Anglo-Saxon society were equally likely to be buried in such cemeteries, however. Infants and children in particular are greatly under-represented in early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, and it seems likely that they were often buried elsewhere, including in settlements (Hamerow, ‘“Special Deposits”’, pp. 13-14; S. Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, 1999) and ‘Special Burials, Special Buildings? An Anglo-Saxon Perspective on the Interpretation of Infant Burials in Association with Rural Settlement Structures’, in Babies Reborn: Infant/Child Burials in Pre-and Protohistory, ed. K. Bacvarov, BAR International Series, 1832 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 197-204. 6 H. Hamerow, Mucking: The Anglo-Saxon Settlement (London, 1993). Cemetery II continued in use into the seventh century; Cemetery I was incompletely excavated and it is therefore not possible to be sure how long it remained in use. The settlement excavated at West Stow (Suffolk) lay some 200 m. to the south-west of a contemporary cemetery which was partly excavated in the nineteenth century, but given that neither the precise location of the cemetery nor the full extent of the settlement is known, it is uncertain whether they were immediately adjacent, though it seems likely. S. West, West Stow: The Anglo-Saxon Village, 2 vols., East Anglian Archaeology, 24 (Ipswich: Suffolk County Council, 1986). 7 Hamerow, Mucking, p. 90.

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HELENA HAMEROW occupation consisting of Grubenhäuser, ditches and pits.8 One of the cemeteries was laid out in rows, while another was arranged around a Bronze Age barrow. Cremations (including a relatively high proportion of animal burials) were found in only one of the cemeteries. What determined who was buried in which burial ground at Mucking and Lakenheath remains a matter for speculation, although the variations in burial rite and cemetery layout coupled with the fact that the ratios of male to female burials and of adults to children appear to have been broadly similar in all three cemeteries at Lakenheath,9 suggest that cult played at least some role.

immediately adjacent to the cemetery, a small part of which has been excavated.13 To make meaningful comparisons between the size and composition of populations in settlements and associated cemeteries requires high-quality data which, for the most part, are lacking. In addition, most or all of both the settlement and cemetery (or cemeteries) need to have been excavated. At the time of writing, only two sites meet the latter criterion, Mucking and West Heslerton. The poor bone preservation at the former, however, coupled with the fact that the cemeteries remain unpublished at the time of writing, mean that it is not possible to go beyond the highly tentative, provisional comparison between cemeteries and settlement made by this author in 1993, namely that on average some 8-10 earthfast timber buildings may have stood at any one time, housing a population (excluding infants and small children) of between 80-100.14 At West Heslerton, where the demographic information recovered from the cemetery is much better, it should be possible, once the settlement is published, to make more accurate comparisons. It is possible to suggest, based on an original number of between 300-350 individuals buried over a period of between 125-175 years, that the cemetery represents a small adult population equivalent to perhaps four or five households.15

While some early Anglo-Saxon settlements lay adjacent to their burial grounds, cemeteries have also been found at a distance of several hundred metres from contemporary settlements: far enough to make it impossible to prove an association but close enough to make such an association likely. The cemetery at West Heslerton (Yorks.), which was in use from the late fifth to early seventh centuries and originally contained some 300 burials, lies c. 450 m. from a settlement which continued to be occupied for a considerable time after the cemetery went out of use.10 A similar relationship can be seen at Flixton (Suffolk), where a cemetery was identified some 600 m. from a settlement.11 In contrast to arrangements such as those just described, where the occupants of what appears to be a single settlement made use of one or more contemporary burial grounds, the large cremation cemetery at Spong Hill (Norf.), where over 2000 cremation burials have been excavated, is estimated to have served a population of between 450-750 individuals.12 This is much larger than even the largest known settlements of this period. It (and several other large cremation cemeteries found in East Anglia and the East Midlands) must therefore have acted as the central burial ground for a number of surrounding settlements, including the one which lay

Despite these uncertainties and the fact that notions of what constituted an early Anglo-Saxon ‘burial community’ varied widely and did not always correspond neatly to a number of families who lived in the same settlement, it is clear that, for the most part, the same communal burial grounds were used over many generations by members of several households. The Mid and Late Saxon periods The pre-Christian communal cemeteries described above had for the most part been abandoned by the early eighth century, though exactly what replaced them is still unclear. The number of what are conventionally referred to as ‘Final Phase’ cemeteries – namely, those characterized by aligned

8

J. Caruth, ‘RAF Lakenheath. Excavations 1987-2005. Assessment Report’, unpublished report of the Suffolk Archaeological Unit, 2005; J. Caruth, pers. comm., 2009. 9 J. Caruth, pers. comm. 10 C. Haughton and D. Powlesland, West Heslerton: The Anglian Cemetery (Yedingham: Landscape Research Centre, 1999), at pp. 69. 11 D. Garrow, S. Lucy and D. Gibson, Excavations at Kilverstone, Norfolk. East Anglian Archaeology, 113 (Cambridge: Cambridge Archaeological Unit, 2006); A. Boulter, An Assessment of the Archaeology Recorded in Flixton Park Quarry, unpublished assessment report of the Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, 2006. 12 J. McKinley, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham, Part VIII, The Cremations, East Anglian Archaeology, 69 (Dereham: Norfolk Museums Service, 1994), at p. 70.

13

R. Rickett, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham, Part VII, The Iron Age, Roman and Early Saxon Settlement, East Anglian Archaeology, 73 (Gressenhall: Norfolk Museums Service, 1995). 14 Hamerow, Mucking, p. 90. There is no generally agreed method for calculating population size from numbers of burials. Such crude calculations can, nevertheless, provide some sense of the order of magnitude. See however B. Brugmann, Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Inhumation Burial: Morning Thorpe, Spong Hill, Bergh Apton and Westgarth Gardens, East Anglian Archaeology, 119 (Dereham: Norfolk Museums Service, 2007), pp. 94-5; H. Härke 1997, ‘Early Anglo-Saxon Social Structure’, in The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century, ed. J. Hines (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 125-59, at 138-41. 15 Haughton and Powlesland, West Heslerton (cit. in n. 10), p. 93.

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COMMUNITIES OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD inhumations, a high proportion of unfurnished burials, and certain characteristic artefact types – is far smaller than the number of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries.16 Where and how the majority of the population of the eighth and ninth centuries was buried therefore remains a mystery, although John Blair has suggested that many may lie hidden among the substantial number of unfurnished inhumations which have been recorded as undated, or misdated to the late Roman or post-medieval periods.17 Despite these uncertainties, it is clear that settlement and burial space began to become more integrated, even to merge, from around the mid seventh century onward: it is common for Mid and Late Saxon settlements to yield at least a few burials. This indicates that the relationship between the communities of the living and the dead was changing well before churchyard burial became the norm from the late ninth century onwards. A few welldocumented examples of rural settlements with associated groups of burials serve to illustrate this trend.

The burials (not all of which could be aged or sexed, due to poor bone preservation) included eleven adults, a further three sub-adults or adults, and four juveniles or sub-adults. A further five small graves where bone did not survive are likely to have contained the remains of juveniles. Five of the burials were male and four female, based on skeletal evidence, while a further six are likely to have been female based on their grave goods. The total size of the contributing population represented by the cemetery is estimated to have been between twelve and twenty-nine individuals, although as already noted, such calculations can never be more than an approximation.21 This appears to correspond relatively well to the number of dwellings likely to have been in use at any one time. Yet, while it is certainly possible that the cemetery was ‘the main or single burial ground for those living in buildings nearby’, the fact that five of the burials – all female – stand out as richly furnished casts some doubt on this interpretation.22 The excavation of the settlement uncovered no exceptionally large buildings which might be regarded as having housed a leading family, nor did it recover exceptionally rich material culture dating to this period, despite having preserved midden deposits. The fact that the cemetery was divided into zones according to status and gender – the well-furnished females lay in the same part of the cemetery, while juveniles were similarly clustered – further militates against the interpretation of this as the burial place of several equally-ranked households whose heads were given an ostentatious burial rite.23 Scull offers an alternative possibility, namely that the cemetery was the burial ground ‘of a single establishment, perhaps a large farm or small estate centre’ and considers the possibility that this establishment housed a female religious community. The cemetery dates to a time when Christianity was wellestablished in East Anglia and can reasonably be described as early Christian. Certainly, as Scull observes, ‘the decision to establish a new cemetery also implies abandonment, at least by those burying here, of an earlier burial site’, and such a reconfiguration is likely to signal ‘a significant ideological or social realignment’.24 The fact that the establishment of the cemetery around the middle of the seventh century does not appear to have been marked by any obvious changes in the buildings or material culture of the settlement suggests a further possibility, namely that some of those buried in the Bloodmoor Hill cemetery – notably the high-ranking females at least – had lived elsewhere.

Two groups of burials were associated with the mid Saxon settlement at Yarnton (Oxon.). Six west-east aligned adult burials including four males and one female lay some 100 m. to the west of the settlement.18 A further three inhumations were found in grave-like scoops cut into the fills of ditches. Two of these were of children aged between six and eight years, while the third was aged between thirteen and nineteen. Radiocarbon dating of three of the skeletons – two from the first group and one from the second – indicate that they date to the ninth century. A larger and more highly structured burial ground of 26 West-East aligned graves as well as two outlying burials, lay within the settlement at Bloodmoor Hill, Carlton Colville (Suffolk), where some 38 Grubenhäuser, at least nine earthfast timber buildings, several extensive surface middens and over 250 pits were excavated.19 A substantial radiocarbon dating programme indicates that the settlement was probably established in the sixth century and was occupied until the late seventh or early eighth century. The cemetery, however, is unlikely to have been established much before the mid seventh century and had ceased to be used by c. 700;20 the radiocarbon dates and grave goods suggest that it was in use for at most fifty years, whereas the settlement was occupied for three or even four times as long.

21

C. Scull, ‘The Human Burials’, in Tipper et al., Bloodmoor Hill, pp. 385-426 22 Ibid. 23 This has become the most widely accepted explanation for richly furnished fifth- and sixth-century burials associated with settlements comprised of roughly equally sized buildings, as at Mucking: Hamerow, Mucking (cit. in n. 6); Härke, ‘Early Anglo-Saxon Social Structure’ (cit. in n. 14), p. 147; C. Scull, ‘Archaeology, Early AngloSaxon Society and the Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms’, AngloSaxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 6 (1993), pp. 65-82, at 73. 24 Scull, ‘Human Burials’.

16

A. Boddington, ‘Models of Burial, Settlement and Worship: The Final Phase Reviewed’, in Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: A Reappraisal, ed. E. Southworth (Stroud, 1990), pp. 177-99. 17 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (cit. in n. 2), pp. 243-4. 18 Hey, Yarnton (cit. in n. 4), Fig. 7.1 and pp. 163-5. 19 J. Tipper, S. Lucy and A. Dickens, The Anglo-Saxon Settlement and Cemetery at Bloodmoor Hill, Carlton Colville, Suffolk, East Anglian Archaeology 131 (Cambridge: Cambridge Archaeological Unit, 2009). 20 The outlying burials were contemporary with the main cemetery.

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HELENA HAMEROW

Fig. 1. The Anglo-Saxon settlement and burials at Gamlingay (Cambs.). After Murray and McDonald, ‘Gamlingay’.

contained a remarkably high percentage (around one quarter) of infant burials, with the mix of males and females, adults and children suggesting possible kinship groups.26 A few inter-cutting graves suggest the cemetery could have remained in use for some time. The near-complete absence of dress items and grave goods, and the apparent use in a few cases of shrouds, suggest that it was probably contemporary with the last phase of occupation. A second group of around half a dozen inhumations lay some 30 m. to the north-east of the main cemetery and adjacent to a small timber building,

A further example of a small, formal cemetery associated with a settlement comes from Gamlingay (Cambs.), where a sequence of ditched enclosures, trackways and buildings was uncovered [Fig. 1].25 Dating evidence is extremely limited, but occupation probably began in the sixth or seventh century, while the latest phase probably dates to the ninth. The cemetery consisted of over 110 west-east aligned inhumations, most of which were laid out in seven rows, and 25

J. Murray with T. McDonald,‘Excavations at Station Road, Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 13 (2006), pp. 173-330.

26

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Ibid., pp. 265-8.

COMMUNITIES OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD although one of the burials clearly postdates it. It seems unlikely that this structure was a church or chapel (as suggested in the published report); in any event, the phasing of the enclosures suggests that the main burial ground probably postdated it, potentially by a considerable length of time. The number of burials at Gamlingay seems large, given that only one or at most two potential dwellings were identified within the excavated area.

Conclusion The establishment between the seventh and ninth centuries of small, short-lived burial grounds within pre-existing settlements implies the abandonment of relatively large, longlived cemeteries which had been established in the fifth or sixth century somewhere in the vicinity, and represents a new emphasis on affiliating the dead with a particular settlement. As Richard Morris – one of the first archaeologists to consider this question – wrote in 1983, ‘the act of gathering the dead within or close to the living rather than consigning them to the perimeter…gives the impression of a definite change of practice’.30 While one might now question whether most early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries were ‘on the perimeter’ in the sense of occupying marginal locations, this change does suggest that ancestors took on a new significance as ‘the dead were no longer “out there,”’ but were instead incorporated into the settlements of the living.31

A less formal arrangement of burials was found at the mid to late Saxon settlement at Flixborough, south of the Humber estuary in Lincolnshire, where exceptional preservation conditions enabled radical changes in the character of the settlement to be traced. It has been argued that in the eighth century, Flixborough was an aristocratic estate centre marked by conspicuous consumption, which then became monastic (or part of a monastic estate) in the ninth.27 Two groups of burials were identified: eleven poorly preserved west-east inhumations, all adults, were found some 60 m. to the south of the main excavation area, while a further six lay adjacent to one of the buildings within the excavated area.28 Dating evidence for the southern group was lacking, although iron coffin fittings point to an eighth- to tenth-century date and suggest the presence of at least some burials of high status.

The examples cited in this paper suggest an intriguing diversity of practice. At Yarnton, the number of contemporary dwellings suggests that the settlement was small, though long-lived. The small number of burials could therefore correspond to one generation of a single household. The cemetery at Bloodmoor Hill was in use for one or two generations at most and included a group of high-ranking females who may have lived elsewhere. At Gamlingay, the relatively large number of burials compared to the number of potential dwellings in the settlement suggests that the cemetery must have included individuals who had lived elsewhere, although there is no indication that any of these was of high status. When viewed against the wider background of seventh- to ninth-century burial grounds, the demographic composition, size and layout of those sited in settlements do not immediately suggest that they contained only or primarily ‘special’ individuals. The key question may therefore be, not who was buried within settlements, but why were burial grounds established within settlements in the first place?

The northern group of burials was much better preserved and comprised one adult female along with one peri-natal infant and four children, all apparently eighth-century in date. Four of the graves were clearly associated with Building 1 whose unusual construction (notably the use of gravel footings) together with the associated burials has led to the suggestion that it was some kind of mortuary chapel, although the fact that it contained a hearth and domestic debris militates against this interpretation.29

27

C. Loveluck, Rural Settlement, Lifestyles and Social Change in the Later First Millennium AD. Anglo-Saxon Flixborough in its Wider Context (Oxford, 2007). 28 It is possible, however, that both groups formed part of the same cemetery. H. Geake, ‘The Human Burials’, in C. Loveluck and D. Atkinson, The Early Medieval Settlement Remains from Flixborough Lincolnshire: The Occupation Sequence, c. AD 600-1000 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 113-18. 29 Ibid. It should be noted that small burial grounds associated with settlements which lacked chapels or churches persisted well into the Late Saxon period. At Bramford, near Ipswich in Suffolk, a ditched enclosure contained several buildings of Mid and Late Saxon date (at least one further building lay outside the enclosure), and a small cemetery with a maximum of nineteen individuals, of whom at least seven were female and six were male. Radiocarbon dates from two of the skeletons indicate that both were probably 10th-century. J. Caruth, ‘Hewlett Packard, Whitehouse Industrial Estate’, Proc., Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, xxxviii, pt. 4 (1996), pp. 476-9; J. Caruth, pers. comm., 2009.

The establishment of cemeteries within settlements is only one aspect of a general dislocation of burial during the seventh to ninth centuries. This dislocation reflects the changing structure of Anglo-Saxon communities more widely and, as Geake has observed, a degree of choice (or uncertainty) regarding where the dead should be buried. 32 It is part of a wider picture which indicates that attitudes towards the dead and their proximity to the living were changing. Explanations for why members of certain communities were buried within settlements understandably tend to emphasize religious ideology. Some interpretations 30

R. Morris, The Church in British Archaeology, CBA Research Report 47 (London, 1983), p. 53. 31 M. Parker-Pearson, The Archaeology of Death and Burial, 2nd edn. (Stroud, 2003), p. 129. 32 Geake, ‘Human Burials’ (cit. in n. 28), p. 119.

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HELENA HAMEROW see the introduction of groups of burials into settlements as a kind of precursor to the establishment of later churches and churchyards into settlements.33 Hadley has conversely argued that some families may have deliberately avoided cemeteries associated with minsters, as a means of resisting ‘the centralizing forces of kings, religious communities and the secular elite’ and ‘to keep the dead…within the settlement rather than taking them to the churchyards of the elite…’34 Christianity of course encouraged a closer relationship between the communities of the living and the dead, yet adaptation to, or resistance against, a new religious ideology may not account for the whole picture.

certain dwellings could therefore have spanned several human generations, evoking links with ancestors.38 As settlements, and in some cases particular buildings (as at Gamlingay and Flixborough), became associated with ancestors and provided a focus for their veneration, the possibility that burial within settlements was used as a means of strengthening and legitimizing claims to landed resources must at least be considered.39 Such a link between land and ancestors would in one sense have been reinforced by the building of churches associated with the burials of landowning founders. Once the majority of the Anglo-Saxon dead had been ‘relegated to the graveyards of churches’, however, they – like their counterparts in Ireland – ‘lost their power to defend the land which they left to their heirs’.40

An alternative possibility hinted at by Bradley deserves closer consideration. If communal cemeteries were a means of establishing and legitimizing group rights over restricted resources by demonstrating descent from important ancestors, then it may follow that ‘the closest spatial relationship between the living and the dead may be found in periods of intensification of competition’, notably in periods of agricultural expansion or intensification.35 The ‘long eighth century’ – when new farming regimes emerged in England which were geared towards producing regular surpluses -- was just such a period, and the changes seen in burial practice should be viewed against the backdrop of contemporary changes in the configuration of settlements.36 These include the introduction of complexes of enclosures, paddocks and droveways, often maintained over long periods, and the establishment of hay meadows, developments which seem to be associated with new, more intensive animal husbandry regimes.37 Houses too underwent certain changes. In contrast to the early Anglo-Saxon period, when dwellings were essentially single-generational, some mid Saxon communities, including the one at Flixborough, attempted to extend the life of particular buildings either through repeated re-building on the same ‘footprint’ or the use of novel building techniques such as gravel footings; the ‘life-cyle’ of

38

H. Hamerow, ‘Anglo-Saxon Timber Buildings and Their Social Context’, in The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, ed. S. Crawford, H. Hamerow and D. Hinton (Oxford, forthcoming). In his work on the later prehistory of the southern Netherlands, Gerritsen has observed that from the middle Iron Age onwards, an increased emphasis on semi-permanent settlements was accompanied by the abandonment of communal, long-lived cemeteries and their replacement by short-lived, dispersed burial grounds and the burial of certain individuals within settlements themselves, a scenario which in many respects mirrors that seen in mid Saxon England. F. Gerritsen, ‘To Build and to Abandon. The Cultural Biography of Late Prehistoric Houses and Farmsteads in the Southern Netherlands’, Archaeological Dialogues, 6, pt. 2 (1999), pp. 76-97. 39 Theuws has argued that the burial of ‘founders’ in newly established Frankish farmsteads in the southern Netherlands was a means of emphasizing claims on the land, although in England burial grounds appear to have been added to pre-existing settlements, suggesting that these did not include founders. F. Theuws, ‘Landed property and manorial organisation in northern Austrasia’, in Images of the Past: Studies on Ancient Societies in Northwest Europe, ed. N. Roymans and F. Theuws (Amsterdam: Instituut voor Pre- en Protohistorische Archeologie, 1991), pp. 299407. A better parallel may be found in the law codes of early medieval Ireland, where burials sited on boundaries served a similar purpose. T. Charles-Edwards, ‘Boundaries in Irish Law’, in Medieval Settlement: Continuity and Change, ed. P. Sawyer (London, 1976), pp. 83-7. 40 Charles-Edwards, ‘Boundaries’, p. 86.

33

Cf. Geake, p. 118. Hadley, ‘The Garden’ (cit. in n. 3), p. 200. She also puts forward the alternative possibility, however, that these were individuals who had for some reason been ‘excluded from burial in consecrated ground’ at a time when churchyard burial was something to be aspired to rather than a requirement (ibid., p. 199). 35 Bradley, ‘Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries’ (cit. in n. 1), pp. 172-3. While Parker-Pearson has more recently warned that this view verges on the deterministic, he nevertheless observes that ‘the fixing of the dead in the land is a social and political act which ensures access and rights over natural resources’. Parker-Pearson, Archaeology of Death and Burial, p. 141. 36 H. Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements. The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400-900 (Oxford, 2002), especially chapters 4 and 5. 37 H. Hamerow, ‘The Development of Anglo-Saxon Settlement Structure’, Landscape History, 31 (forthcoming, 2010). 34

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The Oliver’s Battery Hanging-Bowl Burial from Winchester, and its Place in the Early History of Wessex Barbara Yorke

assessment of the bowl by Reginald A. Smith.3 Andrew published a very similar account in the Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club, and also recorded in the same journal further excavations carried out in 1931 in the hope of clarifying certain issues.4 These accounts appear to comprise the sole surviving record of the discovery of the hangingbowl. The written description of the circumstances of the discovery and the disposition of body and objects is reasonably full, but there are no plans or photographs provided of the excavation, and no further records have come to light subsequently. In 2005 an excavation directed by Richard Whinney of the Winchester Museums Service endeavoured to locate the site of the original excavation which, according to the reports, had left the body relatively undisturbed in its grave. However, neither the excavation nor a geophysical survey were able to pinpoint it.5

In a seminal paper of 1973 Martin Biddle produced a survey of burial sites around Winchester,1 and he and Birthe have recently revisited and updated this important source of evidence.2 These sites included an isolated male burial with hanging-bowl, seax and spear or javelin from Oliver’s Battery in Winchester that had been excavated in 1930. A community project in 2005 at Oliver’s Battery, organised by the Winchester Museums Service, stimulated renewed interest in the burial in the city. In 2006 the hanging-bowl returned temporarily to Winchester from the British Museum for a small exhibition in the Guildhall with the other finds from the excavation. Subsequent enquiries into the terms on which the hanging-bowl had been loaned to the British Museum by Hampshire County Museums Service led in 2007 to negotiations for its return to Winchester for display in the City Museum. I was invited by Winchester Museums Service to provide a public lecture on the hangingbowl and its historical context in connection with the Guildhall exhibition, and it is a revised version of this paper that I would now like to offer to Martin and Birthe in recognition of their major contribution to the history of Winchester and Wessex, and in gratitude for their help and friendship on innumerable occasions.

The earthwork enclosure into which the hanging-bowl burial was inserted lies on the eastern side of the crest of a chalk ridge which overlooks the walled city of Winchester, some 2.75km to the north-east, and the path of the Roman road that ran from Winchester to Old Sarum (Fig. 1).6 The earliest known man-made remains on the ridge is a Bronze Age barrow some 77 metres to the north of the earthwork, which was also partly excavated in 1930. It seems to have contained a number of urned cremation burials as well as several secondary burials, probably all dating from the time of the Civil War skirmish that gave the earthwork its popular name.7 The earthwork is an irregular rectangle in shape, and was believed by Andrew to have been a temporary camp of

Site and excavation of the hanging-bowl burial In 1930, at the invitation of the Hampshire Field Club, W.J. Andrew directed an excavation on the site of the earthwork known as Oliver’s Battery, on the south-western outskirts of the city (Fig. 1), with the aim of establishing its date of construction. The burial was discovered when excavating the north-eastern corner of the earthwork’s bank, into which it appeared to have been a secondary insertion. Andrew delivered a paper on the discovery to the Society of Antiquaries later in the same year, and this was subsequently published in its journal, together with a more detailed

3

W.J. Andrew and R.A. Smith, ‘The Winchester Anglo-Saxon Bowl’, Antiquaries Journal, xi (1931), pp. 1-13. 4 W.J. Andrew, ‘Report of the First Excavations at Oliver’s Battery in 1930’, Proc., Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, xii (1934), pp. 5-10; ‘The Winchester Anglo-Saxon Bowl and Bowlburial’, ibid., pp. 11-19; and ‘Report on the Second Excavations at Oliver’s Battery, in 1931’, ibid., pp. 163-8. 5 Richard Whinney, pers. comm. Unsuccessful efforts were made at this time by members of the project to try to locate original plans or site-reports. 6 Andrew, ‘Report of the First Excavations’, p. 6; Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Winchester’, pp. 199-200. 7 Andrew, ‘Report of the First Excavations’, pp. 9-10; A. King, ‘A Bronze Age Cremation Cemetery at Oliver’s Battery’, Proc., Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, 45 (1989), pp. 1323; Whinney, pers. comm. The barrow survives today in the garden of Hillcroft, 84 Oliver’s Battery Road, but the urns and their contents can no longer be located..

1

M. Biddle, ‘Winchester: the development of an early capital’, in Vor- und Frühformen der europäischen Stadt im Mittelalter, ed. H. Jankuhn, W. Schlesinger and H. Steuer (Göttingen, 1973), pp. 22961, especially 236-7. 2 M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Winchester: from Venta to Wintancæstir’, in Pagans and Christians – from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Papers in Honour of Martin Henig, Presented on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. L. Gilmour, BAR International Series 1610 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 189-214, especially 199-203.

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BARBARA YORKE

Fig. 1. The enclosure at Oliver’s Battery looking south (from the First Edition of the Ordnance Survey map)

with the head ‘turned to the east’.11 The hanging-bowl was cradled in its arms, with ‘the small iron spear (or javelin) … on the right thigh with its point at the knee’, and the seax upon the left hip.12 Andrew shows awareness of what other finds might have been expected to accompany a burial of this type, and was convinced that there were no other grave-goods, though the body was apparently not raised to permit a complete investigation of the grave. The follow-up excavations of 1931 confirmed that there were no other Anglo-Saxon burials inserted into the bank.13

the Roman army during their initial occupation of the Winchester area, c. AD 43.8 However, the recent excavations and reassessment by Richard Whinney suggest that it is more likely to have been a native Iron Age or Romano-British hilltop enclosure of a type found elsewhere in the region.9 The burial was inserted into the highest part of the bank of the earthwork in its north-eastern corner (Fig. 1). The skeleton is described as that of ‘a man about 5ft. 8in. or 5ft. 9in. in height and 25 or 30 years of age’ (though no justification is provided for the estimation of the age of the body).10 The body was supine and orientated north-south,

11

Andrew, ‘The Winchester Anglo-Saxon Bowl’, p. 2. Note correction by Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Winchester’, p. 199, n. 51, of statement in R. Bruce-Mitford, A Corpus of Late Celtic Hanging Bowls A.D. 400-800 (Oxford, 2005), p.132, that the body was orientated east-west. 12 Andrew, ‘The Winchester Anglo-Saxon Bowl’, p. 2; BruceMitford, Corpus, pp. 134-5. 13 Andrew, ‘Report of Second Excavations’, pp. 166-7.

8

Andrew, ‘Report on the First Excavations’, pp. 8-9. Whinney, pers. comm. 10 Andrew, ‘The Winchester Anglo-Saxon Bowl’, p. 2. However, one member of the excavation party was the physician Dr J.P. Williams-Freeman. 9

78

THE OLIVER’S BATTERY HANGING-BOWL BURIAL FROM WINCHESTER, AND ITS PLACE IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF WESSEX

Fig. 2. The hanging-bowl from the Oliver’s Battery burial. Winchester City Museum.

Fig. 3. Detail of the hook-escutcheon . Winchester City Museum.

The Winchester hanging-bowl The Winchester hanging-bowl is a particularly fine and wellpreserved example of its type (Fig. 2).14 It is of middling size, with a diameter of 287 mm. and height of 124mm., and is made of lathe-polished copper alloy.15 The bowl is typical of group B bowls (as originally defined by Kendrick and Henry) in that it has a folded-back rim, three hook escutcheons with suspension rings (one of which is missing) and two escutcheons, one on the interior and one on the exterior of its flat base.16 The hooks take the form of stylised bird heads with long beaks, described variously as swan- or heron-like, which appear to peer over the rim through prominent eyes (Figs. 3 and 4). The escutcheons were tinned to give a silvereffect and are decorated with trumpet-spirals set against a red-enamelled background. The escutcheons of the base have a complex design of six peripheral trumpet spirals linked to one central one (Fig. 5), while the hook escutcheons have a more conventional design of three linked spirals (Figs. 4 and 6). Group B bowls can be broadly dated to the seventh century. Details of the ornament of the Winchester bowl suggest that it is late in the sequence, and is likely to date to

Fig. 4. Detail of hook. Winchester City Museum.

14

‘The Work of Angels’. Masterpieces of Celtic Metalwork, Sixth to Ninth Centuries AD, ed. S. Youngs (London, 1989), pp. 48-9, no. 33; J. Brenan, Hanging Bowls and their Contexts: An Archaeological Survey of their Socio-Economic Significance from the Fifth to the Seventh Centuries AD, BAR British Series 220 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 49-50, no. 73; Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 132-6, no. 25 (with additional material by Jane Brenan). 15 The Winchester bowl is 46 out of a list of 68 bowls arranged according to size in Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, p. 68 (with no. 68 being the largest); 31 of the bowls fall between 200 and 300 mm. in diameter, which can be regarded as the median range. 16 T. D. Kendrick, ‘British Hanging-Bowls’, Antiquity, vi (1932), pp.161-84 (with discussion of Winchester bowl at pp. 176-82); F. Henry, ‘Hanging-Bowls’, Jnl., Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, lxvi (1936), pp. 209-46 (with claims that they were all made in Ireland); Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 10-19.

Fig. 5. Base escutcheon. Winchester City Museum.

79

BARBARA YORKE have analogies with the Winchester one also fall broadly into the same time-frame.18 The Oliver’s Battery burial in regional context Viewing the Oliver’s Battery burial in a broader regional context may help to take its interpretation further. There are three other well-recorded male burials with hanging-bowls from Wessex east of Selwood which offer parallels – Ford (Wilts.),19 Lowbury Hill (Berks.)20 and Banstead Down (Surr.).21 A potentially comparable site from West Ham, Basingstoke is not included here, because the site was not properly excavated or recorded when it was discovered in a railway-cutting in 1899.22 As can be seen from Table 1, the three other burials were accompanied by a greater number and a larger range of grave-goods than were found with the Oliver’s Battery burial,

Fig. 6. Hook escutcheon. Winchester City Museum.

Oliver’s Battery, Hants.

Ford, Wilts.

Lowbury, Banstead Berks. Down, Surrey

Hanging bowl

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Seax

Yes

Yes

No

No

Sword

No

No

Yes

No

Spear

Yes

Yes 2

Yes

Yes

Shield

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Knife

No

No

Yes

Yes

Buckle

No

Yes

Yes

No

Cloak

No

No

Yes

Yes

Comb

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Shears

No

No

Yes

No

Table 1. Grave-goods from four burials with hanging-bowls from eastern Wessex.

18

In addition to discussions cited in n. 14, see H. Geake, ‘When were Hanging Bowls Deposited in Anglo-Saxon Graves?’, Medieval Archaeology, 43 (1999), pp. 1-18. 19 J. Musty, ‘The Excavation of Two Barrows, One of Saxon Date, at Ford, Laverstock, near Salisbury, Wiltshire’, Antiquaries Journal, xlix (1969), pp. 98-117. 20 D. Atkinson, The Romano-British Site on Lowbury Hill in Berkshire (Reading, 1916). 21 J.E. Barfoot and D.P. Williams, ‘The Saxon Barrow at Gally Hills, Banstead Down, Surrey’, Research Volume of the Surrey Archaeological Society, 3 (1976), pp. 59-76. 22 Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 127-30, no. 21. The type-C bowl was associated with a knife, two spearheads, an iron vessel with a handle and seven bone gaming-counters. Even less is known about the circumstances in which the hanging-bowl from Kingsbury in Wilton was deposited, but this seems to be a bowl of a much earlier, fifthcentury date (Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 291-3, no. 97.

Fig. 7. Seax from Oliver’s Battery burial. Winchester City Museum.

the late seventh century. Particularly significant for dating on art-historical grounds are the hollow triangles around a ringand-dot ornament at the centre of the hook escutcheons: these have parallels in the Book of Durrow, which is generally dated to the late seventh century, as well as in other Irish metalwork. The seax that was buried with the Winchester hanging-bowl has a distinctive cocked-hat silver pommel, and is also likely to be late seventh-century in date (Fig. 7).17 Associated finds from other burials with hanging-bowls that 17

Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, p. 134.

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THE OLIVER’S BATTERY HANGING-BOWL BURIAL FROM WINCHESTER, AND ITS PLACE IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF WESSEX even allowing for the fact that some items might have been missed in the Winchester excavation because the grave does not seem to have been excavated fully. Nevertheless there are characteristics of the finds that link these four sites together and that go beyond the coincidence of all including hangingbowls in their grave assemblages. The seax from Oliver’s Battery and Ford are both of the cocked-hat type, though that of Ford is more richly decorated with a cabochon garnet set in a silver collar with filigree decoration on one face of the pommel. The Ford example also had a wooden sheath covered in leather with silver decorations. The Oliver’s Battery hanging-bowl, on the other hand, has close parallels with that from Lowbury Hill, which had a similar profile and hook-escutcheons though with simpler bird- or animal-head hooks.23 Ford, Lowbury Hill and Banstead Down all had a similar range of weapons and, in particular, all contained shields with a sugar-loaf boss. Banstead Down and Lowbury Hill were also linked by remains of a distinctive tufted cloak of a type also found at Sutton Hoo. The grave-goods indicate that all these burials are likely to be late seventh-century in date, or possibly even early eighth-century.24

the valley below, its rounded construction giving it almost the effect of a tumulus’.26 The Oliver’s Battery burial was also placed in an area that had been used for Bronze Age burial and at least one Bronze Age barrow would have been visible nearby (Fig. 1). All four burials were made on prominent sites which would have been visible from nearby routeways. Both the Oliver’s Battery burial and that of Ford would probably have been visible from the Winchester to Old Sarum Roman road,27 and were in the vicinity of its two destinations. However, the Ford burial was closer to the road itself,28 while Oliver’s Battery was placed on a downland crest. The Lowbury Hill burial was in a prominent site on the eastern extremity of the Berkshire Downs and close to the probable course of the Icknield Way. The Banstead Down site, near Ewell, would also have been highly visible (though now obscured by modern development) and for this reason was re-used as the site of a gallows, resulting in some damage to the AngloSaxon burial. These four hanging-bowl and weapon burials of probable late seventh-century date also share with other wealthy, isolated burials of the seventh century the characteristic of utilising highly visible sites and of being associated with prehistoric monuments.29

The similarities of the group are even more apparent when the location of the burials and relationship to earlier features in the landscape is taken into account. The parallels between the Oliver’s Battery and the Lowbury Hill burials are particularly striking, as the latter was placed in close proximity to the entrance to an Iron Age/Romano-British enclosure of the same type and shape as that at Oliver’s Battery. The burials at Ford and Banstead Down were also placed in barrows. At Ford the hanging-bowl burial was one of a pair of barrows, the second of which contained a Bronze Age cremation,25 while that at Banstead Down was one of a group of four, though the only one known to have been excavated. Although the Oliver’s Battery burial was not in a barrow, one can note the description of it provided by Andrew (who was evidently aware of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of placing burials in existing barrows) of the site of the burial in the north-eastern corner of the bank:

Interpretation of the Eastern Wessex hanging-bowl burials This group of four burials contain what could be seen as wealthy or prestigious items, but they are scarcely in the ‘princely burial’ league and cannot be compared to such rich, earlier seventh-century burials as Sutton Hoo, Prittlewell, Broomfield or Taplow.30 They seem to relate most closely to the earlier tradition of warrior burial,31 but unlike most warrior burials, and a number of the princely ones, they are not part of a larger cemetery that served a resident community. At the time that the four hanging-bowl burials 26

Andrew, ‘The Winchester Anglo-Saxon Bowl’, p. 2 (my italics). The raised nature of this part of the enclosure is still noticeable today. 27 Modern housing and landscaping in Winchester impede exact reconstruction of sight-lines in the early Anglo-Saxon period. 28 It lies near the intersection with a valley road running from Old Sarum to Tidworth. 29 H. Williams, ‘Placing the Dead: Investigating the Location of Wealthy Barrow Burials in Seventh-century England’, in Grave Matters: Eight Studies of First Millennium AD Burials in Crimea, England and Southern Scandinavia, ed. M. Rundkvist, BAR International Series 781 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 57-86. 30 J. Shephard, ‘The Social Identity of the Individual in Isolated Barrows and Barrow Cemeteries in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Space, Hierarchy and Society: Interdisciplinary Studies in Social Area Analysis, ed. B.C. Burnham and J. Kingsbury, BAR International Series 59 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 47-79. 31 H. Härke, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite’, Past and Present, 126 (1990), pp. 22-43.

‘ Owing to the slope of the hill-side, the north-east corner of the vallum projects further than the rest of the earthwork, and is the most prominent feature seen from

23

Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 234-8, no. 74 (Lowbury bowl); see also discussion, pp. 134-6, and ‘Work of Angels’, ed. Youngs, pp. 48-9. The Ford (Corpus, pp. 286-90, no. 93) and Banstead Down (Corpus, pp. 271-5, no. 91) bowls are less distinguished, and the former is dismissed by Bruce-Mitford as ‘an improvised or imitation hanging-bowl’, not from one of the established workshops, while that of Banstead – like the bowl from Basingstoke – is classed as group C. 24 Geake, ‘Hanging Bowls’. 25 John Musty, the excavator of Ford, thought that the barrow with the hanging-bowl was more likely to have been of Anglo-Saxon than prehistoric construction as there was Saxon pottery in the grave fill and no sign of prehistoric finds.

81

BARBARA YORKE were made, in the late seventh or early eighth century, furnished burials had become rare in the community cemeteries. Whether or not the disappearance of the habit of burial with grave-goods is ascribed principally to the advent of Christianity,32 it certainly seems to have coincided with the official acceptance of that religion (which occurred on slightly different timescales in the various kingdoms).33 By the latter part of the seventh century the West Saxon kings had embraced new forms of Christian burial. Centwine abdicated to enter a monastery in 685, and was presumably buried there.34 Caedwalla who succeeded him is the last king known to have come to the throne unbaptised. After a reign of three years he abandoned his throne to receive baptism in Rome, died shortly afterwards and was buried in St Peter’s.35 His successor Ine (688-725) made baptism of infants compulsory in his lawcode, and was also buried in Rome after making a pilgrimage there.36 However, the opportunity or desire for burial associated with a church would take some centuries to become the norm among the bulk of the population.37

so. The prominent position in the landscape and the association with prehistoric monuments recalls earlier rich barrow burials like that of Asthall, (Oxon.),40 and so may like them have been concerned to proclaim control or ownership, perhaps newly acquired.41 It is therefore possible to suggest that these four hangingbowl burials were those of West Saxon nobles who were perhaps the first of their families to establish themselves in these areas as landowners or royal officials or both, and looked back to traditional means of proclaiming their arrival. Many nobles may have led a more peripatetic existence before the greater stability in Wessex in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. The laws of Ine laid down which members of their household nobles were allowed to take with them when moving from district to district.42 The men of the four burials may have been of comparable status to those of Archbishop Boniface’s family, noble but probably not of the first rank. Boniface’s family was first established in southern Hampshire to which they may have moved around the middle of the seventh century from another part of Wessex when the former mainland part of the Jutish province was taken over by the West Saxon kings. Subsequently, towards the end of the seventh century when Boniface was born, Boniface’s father was established in the vicinity of Exeter, probably as one of the first generation of Anglo-Saxons to move into this former Dumnonian territory.43 Rich female barrow burials in western Wiltshire, notably Swallowcliffe and Roundway Down, may be an example of similar strategy.44 Perhaps these women were the first of their families to die after establishing themselves in the area, or were wives of higher social position than their husbands, or who had brought land or prestige to their families by marriage to British landowners of significant rank.

It would be just possible to see the four hanging-bowl burials as representing pagan recidivists, but on the whole this seems unlikely – especially, one might add in the case of the Oliver’s Battery burial on the outskirts of Winchester which had been the seat of the West Saxon see since 660.38 Archaeological interpretation of Anglo-Saxon furnished burials has stressed for some time that they were more concerned with rank and status than with pagan belief, and the practice of including grave-goods with a burial was never officially condemned in Christian legislation.39 The four hanging-bowl burials would therefore seem to be of people who were particularly anxious to draw attention to their status by traditional means at a time when others of greater and lesser rank apparently no longer felt it was necessary to do

32

A. Boddington, ‘Models of Burial, Settlement and Worship: the Final Phase Reviewed’, in Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: a Reappraisal, ed. E. Southworth (Stroud, 1990), pp. 177-99; H. Geake, The Use of Grave-Goods in Conversion-Period England c. 600-c. 850, BAR British Series 261 (Oxford, 1997). 33 H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn. (London, 1991); B.A.E. Yorke, The Reception of Christianity at the Anglo-Saxon Royal Courts’, in St Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. R. Gameson (Stroud, 1999), pp. 15273. 34 Aldhelm: The Poetic Works, ed. M. Lapidge and J. Rosier (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 40-1, 47-9. 35 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 468-73: V. vii. 36 Ibid., pp. 472-3; The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, ed. and trans. F.L. Attenborough (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 36-7, ch. 2. 37 J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), pp. 228-45. 38 B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Dispersal or Concentration: the Disposal of the Winchester Dead over Two Thousand Years’, in Death in Towns, ed. S. Bassett (Leicester, 1993), pp. 210-47. 39 Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, pp. 51-65.

40

T.M. Dickinson and G. Speake, ‘The Seventh-century Cremation Burial in Asthall Barrow, Oxfordshire: a Reassessment’, in The Age of Sutton Hoo: the Seventh Century in North-Western Europe, ed. Martin Carver (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 95-130. 41 H. Williams, ‘Monuments and the Past in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, World Archaeology, 30 (1998), pp. 90-108, at 100-2; S. Semple, ‘Burials and Political Boundaries in the Avebury Region, North Wiltshire’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 12 (2003), pp. 72-91; S. Semple, ‘Polities and Princes AD 400-800: New Perspectives on the Funerary Landscape of the South Saxon Kingdom’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 27 (2008), pp. 407-29. 42 Attenborough, Laws, pp. 56-7, ch. 63: ‘If a nobleman moves his residence he may take with him his reeve, his smith, and his children’s nurse’; ibid., ch. 64: ‘He who has [a holding of] 20 hides shall sow 12 hides of land under cultivation when he means to leave’. 43 B.A.E. Yorke, ‘The Insular Background to Boniface’s Continental Career’, in Bonifatius. Leben und Nachwirken. Die Gestaltung des christlichen Europa im Frühmittelalter, ed. F.J. Felten, J. Jarnut and L.E. von Padberg (Mainz, 2007), pp. 23-38, especially 23-8. 44 Semple, ‘Burials and Political Boundaries in the Avebury Region’.

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THE OLIVER’S BATTERY HANGING-BOWL BURIAL FROM WINCHESTER, AND ITS PLACE IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF WESSEX had both British as well as Germanic roots. It is certainly of great potential interest that the manufacture of bowls may have continued after the British areas of the Avon valley had been incorporated into Wessex and that they may stand for examples of British and West Saxon interaction that is otherwise poorly evidenced. However, neither hanging-bowls in general, nor group B bowls in particular, are restricted to Wessex. One of the closest parallels for the Oliver’s Battery escutcheons is from Barrington in Cambridgeshire,49 and the Anglian areas of eastern England as a whole contain more hanging-bowl finds than Wessex.50 Hanging-bowls can be seen as part of a pan-Anglo-Saxon aristocratic culture. Helen Geake is surely right to suggest that it was not so much the British associations that appealed to the Anglo-Saxons as the Roman connotations of hanging-bowls.51 She sees them as part of a wider trend towards signalling Romanitas in the final phase of Anglo-Saxon furnished burials that also included the importation of bronze bowls and buckets from the Mediterranean.52

The significance of hanging-bowls Weapons had a long tradition in Anglo-Saxon society as signifiers of rank, but does any particular significance attach to the inclusion of hanging-bowls in these late furnished burials? There are two main aspects that can be considered here, the first relates to the question of the cultural associations of hanging-bowls, and the second to the vexed question of what they were used for. One of the distinctive features of hanging-bowls is that they were of Celtic and not Anglo-Saxon manufacture, and are descended from a class of Roman bronze bowls or basins.45 Techniques used in their manufacture such as the lathe-turning of metal bowls and enamelling were not in the repertoire of Anglo-Saxon craftsmen, and represented survival or re-introduction of Roman metal-working skills. The trumpet spirals that are such a distinctive feature of the Oliver’s Battery hanging-bowl and others of the B series, derived ultimately from RomanoCeltic decorative traditions and are found in a number of different decorative media in the late seventh and eighth centuries in the Celtic-speaking regions. It is likely that in the late seventh century bowls such as those from Oliver’s Battery and Lowbury Hill were being made in western Wessex. The discovery of an unfinished casting of a hangingbowl escutcheon in the River Avon at Seagry near Malmesbury (Wilts.), and other finds in the vicinity, has led to the plausible suggestion that the area was a centre for the production of bowls.46 This part of north-west Wiltshire has stronger evidence for British place-names and other elements of continuation of British culture than other parts of the shire.47 However, by the 680s at the latest this area was being incorporated into the West Saxon kingdom, one sign of which was the appointment of Aldhelm as abbot of Malmesbury, apparently in succession to the Irishman Maelduibh. 48

Further insight into why hanging-bowls were included in burials such as that of Oliver’s Battery must depend on reaching an understanding of how they were used in AngloSaxon society.53 There has been much debate on this issue, and it needs to be recognised that there is not just one possible answer to this conundrum as use may have varied according to context. A good example of how the bowls might be adapted for funerary use is provided by the Ford and Banstead Down burials in which the hanging-bowls contained food offerings.54 The Ford hanging-bowl contained two onions and four crab apples, and that of Banstead Down crab apples alone; in both cases there was evidence to suggest that the bowls had been covered with cloth that had been tied on to them with string.55 The bowls may also have had specific uses in British churches, and perhaps ultimately in Anglo-Saxon churches as well.56 Henry suggested that they

It might therefore be tempting to see the inclusion of hanging-bowls in prominent West Saxon burials of the late seventh century as recognition that the kingdom of Wessex

49

Youngs, Work of Angels, pp. 48-9; Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, p. 111, no. 11. 50 See maps in Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 23-7. 51 Geake, ‘Hanging-Bowls in Anglo-Saxon Graves’; see also Youngs, ‘Missing Material’, p. 169. 52 Geake, Use of Grave-Goods. 53 Finds of hanging-bowl fragments from Anglo-Saxon domestic sites, such as the escutcheon from Chalton in Hampshire and several examples from East Anglia, suggest their use in daily life of secular society: Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 31-2. 54 At Loveden Hill bowls were used as containers of cremations: Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 199-207. 55 Musty, ‘Ford’, p. 107; Barfoot and Williams, ‘Banstead Down’, p. 71. Traces of the linen survived at Banstead as well as the string that was still tied around the rim of the bowl. At Ford string was found with the other organic remains inside the bowl. 56 Henry, ‘Hanging-Bowls’; A. Liestøl, ‘The Hanging-Bowl, a Liturgical and Domestic Vessel’, Acta Archaeologia, 24 (1953), pp. 163-70; H. Vierck, ‘Cortina Tripodis: zu Auffrängung und Gebrauch Subrömischer Hängebecken aus Britannien und Irland’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 4 (1970), pp. 8-52.

45

Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 8-40; S. Youngs, ‘Missing Material: Early Anglo-Saxon Enamelling’, in Ædificia Nova. Studies in Honor of Rosemary Cramp, ed. C.E. Karkov and H. Damico (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2008), pp. 162-75, especially 165-9. 46 M. Jones, ‘Hanging Bowls: New Wiltshire Evidence’, Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, 74-5 (1979-80), pp. 190-4; S. Youngs, ‘Medieval Hanging-Bowls from Wiltshire’ (with a contribution by Bruce Eagles), Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, 91 (1998), pp. 35-41. 47 B. Eagles, ‘Anglo-Saxon Presence and Culture in Wiltshire c. AD 450 - c. 675’, in Roman Wiltshire and After. Papers in Honour of Ken Annable, ed. P. Ellis (Devizes, 2001), pp. 201-33. 48 M. Lapidge, ‘The Career of Aldhelm’, Anglo-Saxon England, 36 (2007), pp. 15-70; B.A.E. Yorke, ‘Aldhelm’s Irish and British Connections’, in Aldhelm and Sherborne: Essays to Celebrate the Foundation of the Bishopric, ed. N.P. Brooks and K. Barker (Oxford, 2009), pp. 164-80.

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BARBARA YORKE could have been hanging lamps filled with oil, but this seems unlikely as no traces of oil have been found in any surviving examples.57 Possibly they could have been used as reflectors of lamps to increase the amount of light given out. A passage in the Anglo-Latin poem De Abbatibus that relates the history of a Northumbrian monastery seems to provide support for such use.58 If it could be demonstrated that hanging-bowls were used in similar ways in British and Anglo-Saxon churches, that could be very interesting evidence for influence from British Christian culture on that of the Anglo-Saxons. However, there is no definitive evidence for their use in British churches, and it would in any case probably be impossible to distinguish British and Irish ecclesiastical use.

external base escutcheon displayed. One can visualise hanging-bowls when not in use being displayed in such a way in a secular hall, or even in a tent. One of the explanations for inclusion with male burials may be that, like weapons, hanging-bowls were eminently portable and could be used to proclaim the owner’s status in varied locations, even perhaps including while travelling from one place to another. The flat bases and internal base escutcheons, on the other hand, suggest the potential for the bowls to be laid on a flat surface with the intention that the interior should be seen.63 If they were filled with anything it is therefore most likely to have been a clear liquid. The largest of the Sutton Hoo bowls contained a fish on a central pedestal, which would therefore seem to be swimming in any liquid that the bowl may have contained.64 This Sutton Hoo bowl was exceptionally large and one could envisage it being used at a royal feast as a container for alcoholic beverages into which cups could be dipped. The more middling-sized hanging-bowls, like that from Oliver’s Battery, would have been too small to have been used in this way, and the form of the rim precludes them from having been used as drinking vessels. The most reasonable remaining explanation is that that they were used as bowls for washing.65 This might seem a rather prosaic use for such fine vessels, but one could envisage hand-washing at the beginning and end of a meal as being both a necessity and a significant feasting ritual – and therefore, the literature would suggest, one that primarily involved men.66 Possibly hand-washing was an etiquette with connotations of civilised behaviour from the Roman world that the Anglo-Saxons acquired through interaction with continental Germans who had moved into former areas of the Roman empire or from the British who were their neighbours and subjects.

The inclusion of hanging-bowls alongside weapons in burials like that of Oliver’s Battery seems to suggest that they had a particular function in burial ritual as part of the construction of male as opposed to female identity. Whole bowls are not generally a feature of final phase women’s burials though individual escutcheons may be included, and in some cases show a secondary use as jewellery fittings, as in the case of the burial of a woman at Bedhampton (Hants).59 Consideration of how hanging-bowls were used in everyday secular life may throw light on why they were included with certain male burials. Certain deductions about how the bowls were used can be made from their physical characteristics. It would appear that they were designed to function and to be seen in two different positions.60 On the one hand, they could be suspended by the hooked escutcheons on the rim, though chains or other means of suspension only rarely survive in the burials.61 The disposition of objects, including a hangingbowl, in the rich early seventh-century burial at Prittlewell (Essex) enabled the reconstruction of its funerary chamber.62 It is suggested that the hanging-bowl was hung from a nail (or similar) on the wall of the chamber with its flat bottom and

However, there is also one text that may hint at a further context for public hand-washing and a specific connotation for vessels in which this was done. It comes from some two hundred years after the time of the Oliver’s Battery and related burials, but may still be relevant to understanding the significance of including hanging-bowls in these burials. It is an extract from the document known as the Fonthill letter written in the reign of Edward the Elder (899-925) and describes a complicated and long-running dispute over the ownership of the Fonthill estate in Wiltshire. The passage of interest comes from an early stage of the saga in the reign of King Alfred:

57

Henry, ‘Hanging-Bowls’; for refutation of the argument that they were used as lamps, see Brenan, Hanging Bowls, pp. 27-41; BruceMitford, Corpus, pp. 31-2 58 Jones, ‘Hanging Bowls’, pp. 193-4; Æthelwulf, De Abbatibus, ed. A. Campbell (Oxford, 1965), pp. 50-1, lines 625-32.. 59 Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 130-1, no. 23. Parts of bowls might also be found in what are assumed to be amuletic collections, as at Orsett in Essex (no. 18). Only three burials with hanging-bowls listed in the Corpus were believed to be of women – no. 29, Cleatham (Humberside), no. 30, Garton (Humberside) and no. 42, Kingston (Kent); the two latter each had a child burial associated and there was some uncertainty about the sexing of the adult skeletons. It should be noted that for many of the bowls believed to have come from burials, nothing is known about the body they accompanied and no additional grave-goods have been recorded. 60 Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 30-3. 61 See Vierck, ‘Cortina Tripodis’, for arguments that the suspension rings functioned in conjunction with tripod stands. 62 Museum of London Archaeology Service, The Prittlewell Prince: The Discovery of a Rich Anglo-Saxon Burial in Essex (London, 2004).

‘Then Æthelm would not agree fully before we went into the king and told exactly how we had adjudged it and why 63

Bruce-Mitford, Corpus, pp. 31-3. Ibid., pp. 258-66, no. 88. See Harris and Henig (this volume), p. 31 65 Liestøl, ‘The Hanging-Bowl’. There were, of course, also various liturgical contexts in which bowls filled with water might have been used. And see Harris and Henig (this volume). 66 J. Bazelmans, By Weapons Made Worthy. Lords, Retainers and Their Relationship in Beowulf (Amsterdam, 1999). 64

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THE OLIVER’S BATTERY HANGING-BOWL BURIAL FROM WINCHESTER, AND ITS PLACE IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF WESSEX we had adjudged it; and Æthelm himself stood there with us. And the king stood [and] washed his hands in the chamber (bure) at Wardour. When he had finished that, he asked Æthelm why what we had resolved for him did not seem right to him, saying that he could think of nothing more right.67

business as washing. At other times the hanging-bowl may have been suspended on the wall of the chamber or hall, or in temporary accommodation in a tent, as a symbol of the owner’s status because of its inherent worth and its associations with the civilised behaviour of the great courts of present and past powers. Perhaps the British craftsmen who could produce such wonderfully decorated and polished bowls were above all royal craftsmen, and their bowls were bestowed by grateful kings on the nobles to whom they delegated control in their provinces. We can perhaps see them as desired commodities that could only be obtained through royal service, and which in turn symbolised status and proximity to the royal court.72

Here we have a scene reminiscent of later court levees in which a privileged group gain access to the king in his semiprivate chamber in order to get his judgement on a tricky case. The group’s presence in the chamber while the king washes his hands indicates their favoured status by being able to gain access to him while he undertakes this domestic activity, but at the same time it underlines their inferiority to him as they have to stand by and wait until the ritual has been performed. By such means did kings articulate their power and establish and control hierarchies at their courts.

Conclusion Martin and Birthe drew attention to the many Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in the vicinity of Winchester, and have used them to underpin an influential thesis for the continuing importance of Winchester as a seat of authority in the subRoman period. The burial from Oliver’s Battery seems to stand apart from these earlier cemeteries, for it appears to have been an isolated burial whose distinctive finds of class B hanging-bowl and seax with cocked-hat suggest burial in the late seventh century, or possibly even the early eighth. But in all probability it was a burial that was much concerned with authority and with demonstrating the claims and achievements of the individual buried there, and perhaps of his wider family as well. It was a burial made at the time of the last gasp of the tradition of furnished burial in AngloSaxon England, but at the beginning of the period in which the disparate territories of Geswissean warlords were becoming the more state-like kingdom of Wessex. The name of the man in the Oliver’s Battery burial may never be known, but, as may have been hoped by those who chose his prominent place of burial and furnished it with a fine hanging-bowl, he has not been forgotten. We may even be able to suggest something of his position in West Saxon society and to understand why his hanging-bowl would have been one of his most significant possessions.73

Is it possible to extrapolate anything from this example that will help us understand the significance of the inclusion of hanging-bowls in the Oliver’s Battery and related burials? In part, these burials belong to a well-established tradition of Anglo-Saxon ‘warrior’ burials which demonstrate how the rank of freeman, and above all that of nobles, was underpinned by the right to bear arms that also signified their obligation to fight when required by the king.68 By the latter part of the seventh century, royal service for many nobles entailed more than just fighting alongside their king. Kingship itself had become more than successful leadership in war and was increasingly concerned with the art of governing.69 Men like those whose burials are the subject of this paper were essential instruments of this government. Just as they adapted forms of burials which previously had been used by kings to help establish their ancestral rights,70 so also it is likely that their own local exercise of delegated royal powers was underpinned by adoption of royal rituals with which they had become familiar when attending royal courts. It is possible that this is what hanging-bowls both helped to articulate and also to symbolise. Like kings, locally-based nobles may have allowed a privileged few into a room with controlled access – perhaps the partitioned areas revealed in excavation of halls like those of Cowdery’s Down71 – and allowed them to present their concerns in a brief interlude in their busy days while they too went about such intimate 67

N.P. Brooks, ‘The Fonthill Letter, Ealdorman Ordlaf and AngloSaxon Law in Practice’, in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. S. Baxter et al. (Farnham, 2009), pp. 301-17, at 303 (my italics). 68 Härke, ‘Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite’. 69 B.A.E. Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1990), pp. 157-78. 70 H. Williams, ‘Monuments and the Past in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, World Archaeology, 30 (1998), pp. 90-108. 71 M. Millett and S. James, ‘Excavations at Cowdery’s Down, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1978-81’, Archaeological Journal, 140 (1983), pp. 151-279.

72

P. Grierson, ‘Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of the Evidence’, Trans., Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 9 (1959), pp. 123-40; Bazelmans, By Weapons Made Worthy; J.R. Maddicott, ‘Prosperity and Power in the Age of Bede and Beowulf’, Proc., British Academy, 117 (2002), pp. 49-71. 73 I would like to thank Winchester City Council and its Museums Service, especially Dick Whinney, for inviting me to speak on the Winchester hanging-bowl in the first place, for providing additional information and, above all, for the illustrations that accompany this paper.

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More Markets, Minsters, and Metal-Detector Finds: Middle Saxon Hampshire a Decade On Katharina Ulmschneider

In the early 1990s, liaising with metal-detector enthusiasts was still regarded largely as taboo. To co-operate with finders and recording their artefacts was often seen as implicitly to condone the disturbance and destruction of archaeological sites, if not positively to encourage looting. Those few who did record finds of their own accord (mainly numismatists, but also a growing number of archaeologists at local museums) inevitably encountered difficulties with find circumstances and artefact provenances, which served further to undermine confidence in the usefulness of metal-detected material. It was in this climate of scepticism that a first attempt was made to see whether these finds, if carefully considered together with more traditionally recovered material, and set against the physical landscape, could not significantly add to our understanding of economic and social matters in early medieval Hampshire. The resulting study owed much to the support and encouragement of Martin Biddle.1

Medieval Coin Finds (EMC), a national database of coins minted between 410 and 1180 was set up by Mark Blackburn, and second, the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) was established under the auspices of Roger Bland, and in 1999 was expanded to include Hampshire, with an online database of metal-detected finds of all periods.3 Taken together, the two databases now provide most of the information on metal-detector finds of the early medieval period in Hampshire.4 There is strikingly little overlap between the early medieval artefacts recorded by the two databases in Hampshire. Only four of the coins on the EMC database for this period were also found on the PAS site. This suggests that a large number of coins are still being brought directly to the attention of numismatists, almost certainly as a result of the longestablished links and climate of trust created between some of the finders and numismatists. Other reasons, however, may also be the relative ease of reporting (see the EMC Reporting Sheet), and, even more importantly, the authenticated and authoritative identification of the finds. This authentification can then be used by metal-detectorists and dealers for selling their coins, for example, on ebay, showing them to be genuine and therefore often achieving better prices.5 While the EMC encourages reporting to the PAS,6 the paucity of EMC coins on the PAS database shows that a considerable number of locally-made finds never come to the attention of the Finds Liaison Officer. A comparable situation has been highlighted by Sally Worrell for Iron Age coins reported to the Celtic Coin Index (CCI). She noted that finders had admitted to

So how has the experience of working with metal-detector finds changed since the early 1990s, and how are they affecting our understanding of the early medieval economy of Hampshire today?2 Finds recording In the early 1990s, obtaining information on early medieval metal-detected finds in Hampshire was fraught with difficulties. No overall collecting body existed for the county, finds being sporadically recorded by single archaeologists, museums and sometimes the Sites and Monuments Records (now also the Historic Environments Record). The resulting evidence was patchy, probably also a reflection of the uneasy relationship prevailing between finders and archaeologists at that point. Only coins were collected and published in any organised way, the yearly ‘Coin Register’ of the British Numismatic Journal being a case in point. This state of affairs changed dramatically during the latter part of the 1990s, thanks to two major initiatives: first, the Corpus of Early

3

http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/dept/coins/emc/; http://www. finds.org.uk/. 4 This obviously only includes the information voluntarily provided by finders, with a substantial number estimated to remain unrecorded. Also, the relatively late start of organised recording in Hampshire, and lack of an early museums database means that a number of older finds still await recording on the new databases. Some find are also recorded with the Hampshire (County Council) Museums Service and Winchester Museums Service. 5 For example a styca of Aethelred II, sold in May 2008 by a dealer on ebay with a ‘certificate of authenticity’ quoting that the find had been recorded ‘with the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University as EMC 2008.0156’. 6 See Report Form on http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ dept/coins/emc/emc_record.html.

1

K. Ulmschneider, The Archaeology of Middle Saxon England: the evidence of Lincolnshire and Hampshire Compared, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1998, published as K. Ulmschneider, Markets, Minsters, and Metal-Detectors: The Archaeology of Middle Saxon Lincolnshire and Hampshire Compared (Oxford, 2000). 2 The following discussion of finds (pre-1997) is based on the material collected and published in Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in note 1), Appendix 2, pp. 152-71, and Maps 18-31.

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Fig. 1. Roman and Prehistoric routes, rivers, and sites producing coin finds

selling their coins before the PAS was able to record them.7 The same may not necessarily translate to other artefact types however, especially where there is no specialist recording body available.

Finds recovery and distribution Before 1997, just under a hundred findspots of Middle Saxon date were known on the Hampshire mainland.8 Of these nearly 40% had been identified by excavations. Despite this seemingly small proportion, the excavated finds from major sites such as Hamwic, Winchester and Portchester were nevertheless providing the bulk of Middle Saxon material,

7

S. Worrell, ‘Detecting the Later Iron Age: A View from the Portable Antiquities Scheme’, in The Later Iron Age in Britain and Beyond, ed. C. Haselgrove and T. Moore (Oxford, 2007), pp. 37188, at 382.

8

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Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), Appendix 2.

MORE MARKETS, MINSTERS, AND METAL-DETECTOR FINDS: MIDDLE SAXON HAMPSHIRE A DECADE ON whether pottery, coins or strap-ends.9 Particularly interesting were the recovery circumstances of pins, with about 182 specimens known from Hampshire, but not a single one reported from metal-detecting, suggesting that there were strong biases in the type of material reported by finders.10 While excavations, such as at Hamwic, still supply a large amount of the post-1997 material (and the overwhelming majority of information on non-metallic artefacts), it is metal-detector finds that now provide the bulk of information on coins and other metalwork.11 Since 1997, eleven or more pins have been recorded through excavations, mostly from Hamwic, with one find from Portway Andover.12 In contrast, metal-detecting has produced nineteen new pins, from sixteen sites, most of them of copper-alloy, with one of silver.13 This suggests that the PAS is now picking up on formerly unrecorded material, providing a better-rounded picture of the range of finds made. However, the lack of any iron pins recorded among the metal-detected material (which in excavated assemblages are often plentiful) suggests that pins are still under-represented in non-excavated contexts.

central Hampshire and of great importance: Portchester, Hamwic and Winchester. Three new sites can now be added to these: Longparish near Andover, the first site in the northwest of the county, and Hursley, already formerly known from a coin find, as well as important new finds from Crawley, including, among others, two silver strap-ends and a silver hooked-tag. Of these, both Hursley and Crawley are located on or close to important routeways into Winchester, reinforcing the view of the central importance of the Winchester area (further discussed below). The body of new finds significantly adds, and in some cases completely reforms, our knowledge of distribution patterns. This is most pronounced for pins, which – as suspected – were much more common in Anglo-Saxon Hampshire than the earlier data indicated, with a wide distribution more akin to that in other counties. Similar observations can be made for coins, which have seen by far the largest changes in numbers of all the find groups, as well as new methods of interpretation (Fig. 1). Coinage: modes of recovery then and now

The situation for strap-ends / hooked tags has changed even more dramatically. Prior to 1997 the bulk of known strapends came from excavated sites, which also provided the majority of findspots.14 Excavated strap-ends / hooked tags now provide less than 10% of the 52 new finds and 29 new findspots.15 Among the new metal-detected finds, six silver strap-ends / tags in particular stand out. Formerly such highstatus finds were known on only three sites, all in south or

Excluding coins from hoards, which have different disposal mechanisms, a total of about 233 single coin finds of Middle Saxon date (i.e., c. 675 - c. 870)16 were known for Hampshire by early 1997 (Fig. 2).17 Of those that could be classified, the majority were silver sceattas, comprising 67.4% of the total, followed by pennies with 31.3% and other finds with about 1.3%.18 Some of the attributions of these coins and their numbers has been subject to change since then. Thus, for example, two sceattas of Series C2 from Twyford have now been shown to be the same coin, mistakenly recorded twice, as also were two pennies of Offa from Pitt, while others have been re-attributed (for example, the Series C sceatta from Tadley, now identified as belonging to Series R).19 The effect of these changes on the overall pattern of finds has, however, been small.

9

Ibid., pp. 58-60. Ibid., p. 51. 11 For example, M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Winchester: From Venta to Wintancæstir’, in Pagans and Christians - From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. L. Gilmour (Oxford, 2007), pp. 189-214, at 199, 208-12. 12 For Hamwic, see The Origins of Mid-Saxon Southampton: Excavations at the Friends Provident St Mary’s Stadium 1998-2000, ed. V. Birbeck et al. (Salisbury, 2005), pp. 30, 64, 114; Archaeology in Hampshire Annual Report, 2003, p. 34. For Andover, see N. Stoodley, ‘Changing Burial Practice in Seventh-Century Hampshire: The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Portway West, Andover, Hampshire Studies, 61 (2006), pp. 63-80, at 74. There may be many more unpublished finds from Southampton. 13 PAS; R. Entwhistle et al., ‘A Surface Collection Project and Finds from Metal-Detecting at Shavard’s Farm, Meonstoke, Hampshire’, Hampshire Studies 60, (2005), pp. 136-53, at 143. 14 Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), p. 51 (excluding the Isle of Wight). 15 For Hamwic finds, see Birbeck, Origins (cit. in n. 12), pp. 113114; M. Garner et al., ‘Excavations at St Mary’s Road, Southampton (SOU 379 and SOU 1112), Hampshire Studies 58, (2003), pp. 10629, at 125; for the Winchester District, see Archaeology in Hampshire Annual Report, 2000, p. 57; for Dundridge, see Archaeology in Hampshire Annual Report, 2001, p. 65. For metaldetected finds, see PAS; Entwistle, Meonstoke (cit. in n. 13), pp. 1403. 10

Since early 1997 a further estimated 117 Middle Saxon coins have been recorded (up to July 2008), adding 50% to the finds corpus and bringing the Hampshire total to around 350 finds (Fig. 3).20 Of these new finds, just under 68% are sceattas, 29% pennies, and just over 3% others. At a first 16

These numbers exclude pennies of King Alfred. Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), Appendix 2, pp. 152-71. They exclude finds from the Isle of Wight, which will be discussed separately elsewhere, and the coins which have subsequently been shown to have been recorded twice, see following discussion. 18 I.e. two Merovingian coins and an Islamic dirhem. 19 Twyford (EMC 1991.0098); Pitt (EMC 1991.0120); Tadley (EMC 1990.0170). 20 The coins have been collected from EMC and PAS up to July 2008. For the latest published finds from Hamwic, see M. Metcalf, ‘Coins’, in Origins, ed. Birbeck (cit. in n. 12), pp. 55-6, and pp. 1306. 17

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Fig. 2. Coin finds in Hampshire up to 1997

the majority of coins (81%) had come from excavated sites, with roughly another 6% represented by mostly nineteenthcentury chance finds. In the post-1997 dataset, by contrast, only around 21% were found during excavations, while chance finds were represented at just under 3%. Coins therefore clearly have been subject to the same changes in the mode of recovery as pins and strap-ends / tags, confirming the trend for metal-detector finds to be the most important new source of non-ferrous metalwork finds of the Middle Saxon

glance the relative proportion of sceattas to pennies and other finds made pre- and post-1997 therefore seem to be very similar, and echo the much lower find-densities of pennies generally observed for southern England.21 However, when looking at the find circumstances of the pre- and post-1997 groups, there are significant differences. In the earlier dataset, 21

M. Blackburn, ‘“Productive” Sites and the Pattern of Coin Loss in England, 600-1180’, in Markets in Early Medieval Europe. Trading and ‘Productive’ Sites 650-850, ed. T. Pestell and K. Ulmschneider (Macclesfield, 2003), pp. 28-38, esp. Fig. 3.6.

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MORE MARKETS, MINSTERS, AND METAL-DETECTOR FINDS: MIDDLE SAXON HAMPSHIRE A DECADE ON

Fig. 3. Coin finds in Hampshire up to 2008

period. Among the excavated finds,22 the pre-eminence of Southampton becomes immediately apparent. Of the four excavated sites producing coin finds pre-1997, the overwhelming majority of coins (97%) came from Hamwic. This was even more pronounced in the second (post-1997)

dataset, where all excavated finds originated from this trading place or emporium. Could the pre-eminence of Hamwic therefore skew our knowledge about the types of coins found in the Hampshire hinterland? Taking the excavated Hamwic coins out of the equation, the pre-1997 dataset contained 65% sceattas and 35% pennies (as opposed to 67.4% and 31.3% with the Hamwic finds), while the post-1997 dataset comprised 63% sceattas and 35% pennies (as opposed to 68% and 29% with Hamwic). At a first glance, the influence of Hamwic would

22

Archaeology in Hampshire Annual Report, 2000, pp. 55-6, refers to Anglo-Saxon sceattas reported to be of ‘copper-alloy’, and an AngloSaxon silver coin of ‘Merovingian tremissis type’. These identifications are unclear, and are left out of the following calculations.

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KATHARINA ULMSCHNEIDER therefore seem to be of little significance to the overall finds proportions. On closer observation, however, it is notable that in both the pre- and post-1997 datasets, sceattas were slightly less well represented (between 2.4% and 5%) when the excavated Hamwic finds were discounted, and pennies were more prominent (between 3.7% and 6%), hinting at the intriguing possibility that pennies may be more readily found in the Hampshire hinterland. If correct, the reasons for this will need some carefully scrutiny. One explanation may be that the strongly tradefocused emporium suffered ongoing decline during the penny phase, hence producing a lower percentage of pennies, which may not, overall, have been the case for other, less tradefocused hinterland sites. Another intriguing possibility, which is currently being explored, is the question of whether there may be differences in the types of coins recovered by metal-detection, i.e. are some types of coins more readily found than others? The overall number of coins is not yet large enough to ascertain whether the difference in their proportional representations is statistically significant. However, it could be a first pointer to a slightly better recovery rate of broad-flan pennies by metal-detectors, as compared to the smaller sceattas.23

To these a small but significant number of gold solidi can now be added, all recovered by metal-detecting. One of them, a Gallic solidus of Anastasius I (AD 491-518), looped for suspension, was found near Cheriton, the wider area of which has also produced four sceattas and other finds.26 Quite outstanding are four solidi of Honorius, Anastasius I, Constans IV, and Constantine IV, minted at Ravenna and Constantinople between the late fourth and late seventh centuries, found ‘in the same area, although not immediately adjacent to each other’ at Horndean.27 While Bland suggests that they may have come from a hoard, Abdy and Williams question this on grounds of the wide range of types, and raise the intriguing possibility that they could be single finds from a ‘productive site’.28 If they are indeed single finds rather than a hoard, such an early site would be entirely outstanding for the whole area. Whatever the site, it does not appear to have continued for long, with no further finds being known from the parish apart from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery (which also revealed Bronze Age and Romano-British burials nearby).29 The finds however do provide yet another example of an increasing number of outstanding Continental and Mediterranean imports reaching southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, indicating the early importance of this area.30

Coin circulation and mints

Sceatta phases: c. 675 - c. mid eighth century

So how do the finds of the last decade contribute to our understanding of coin circulation and the Middle Saxon economy in Hampshire (Fig. 3)?

In whatever way these gold finds are interpreted, they certainly begin to help fill in our understanding of coin circulation in the area. By 1997 virtually no coins of the earliest South-Eastern preliminary and primary sceatta phases were known from Hampshire, with, for example, only one sceatta of Series A found at Hamwic. However, recent excavations at the Football Stadium Site, Southampton, have

Post-Roman to c. 675 Knowledge of this period was for a long time solely dependent on the evidence from the Crondall hoard, deposited c. 645, which included 24 Merovingian / Frisian gold tremisses, 69 Anglo-Saxon gold thrymsas, three pseudocoins, three blanks, a forgery, one Byzantine coin of Phocas of Ravenna, and jewelled ornaments and a chain.24 The only other early coins known were two copper coins of Justinian I (AD 527-65), one of them from the Roman town of Silchester, the other a stray-loss or re-used find from Six Dials, Hamwic, both of them single finds and likely to be authentic early losses.25

Monnaies du Haut Moyen Âge découvertes en France, Cahiers ErnestBabelon 8 (Paris, 2003). I am grateful to Michael Metcalf for drawing my attention to this. 26 Ibid., p. 24, no. 15; Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), p. 155. 27 ‘Coin Hoards 1998’, The Numismatic Chronicle, 149 (1999), p. 298, no. 36. 28 Abdy and Williams, ‘Catalogue of Hoards’ (cit. in n. 48), p. 21, no. 15. 29 At Snell’s Corner, Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), p. 158. 30 See, for example, B. Eagles and B. Ager, ‘A Mid Fifth-Century to Mid Sixth-Century Bridle-Fitting of Mediterranean Origin from Breamore, Hampshire’, in Archaeological Essays Concerning the Peoples of North-West Europe in the First Millennium A.D., ed. M. Lodewicjks (Leuven, 2004), pp. 87-96. Note also the 6th-century bucket from the Eastern Mediterranean at Breamore: A. Harris, Byzantium, Britain and the West (Stroud, 2003), pp. 167-9; and similarly outstanding finds from the Isle of Wight, K. Ulmschneider, ‘Archaeology, History and the Isle of Wight in the Middle Saxon Period’, Medieval Archaeology, 43 (1999), pp. 19-44, at 25-6. An important recent survey of Hampshire archaeology has been undertaken by D. Hinton, ‘Anglo-Saxon Hampshire’, as part of the Solent Thames Research Framework 2008, published online: http:// www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/content/index.jsp?contentid=-86619020.

23

With few other excavated finds in Hampshire, these findings will have to be checked against other counties before such a difference can be more confidently proposed. A field study looking at the recovery rates of Anglo-Saxon, Roman, and other coins is currently underway: Ulmschneider, forthcoming. 24 For a recent discussion of the hoard, see R. Abdy and G. Williams, ‘A Catalogue of Hoards and Single Finds from the British Isles, c. AD 410-675’, in Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. AD 500-1250, ed. B. Cook and G. Williams (Leiden, 2006), pp. 11-73, at 18-19. 25 Ibid., p. 35, nos. 90 and 92. For a catalogue including comparative early Justinian losses in Gaul, see J. Lefaurie and J. Pilet-Lemière,

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MORE MARKETS, MINSTERS, AND METAL-DETECTOR FINDS: MIDDLE SAXON HAMPSHIRE A DECADE ON revealed two sceattas of Series BIB and BIA now, as well as a thin piece of silver with the impression of the obverse of another coin of Series B. These coins represent some of the earliest sceatta finds from Hamwic, and came from one grave (4202), dated by Michael Metcalf to c. 685 - 690.31 For the first time, Series B sceattas, and copies thereof, have now also been found in the wider Hampshire hinterland, with three (and perhaps as many as five) finds in total.32 Three of these, from ‘near’ Winchester (a BI copy), Micheldever (another BI copy), and Owslebury (BII), are located not far from Winchester, the latter two being along Roman roads leading into the town, while the East Meon find is in the proximity of an important prehistoric route, also leading to Winchester. With so few finds, the current cluster around Winchester may just be coincidental, though the ongoing centrality of the place has long been argued by Biddle.33 There is no evidence at present to believe that these coins represent grave finds. Both the ‘near’ Winchester and Micheldever coins were found together with a number of later sceattas, and the finders of the Owslebury and East Meon coins did not report any material indicative of cemeteries in the area to the PAS.

sites, with again a possible concentration along early routes in the Winchester area and surrounding chalklands, but only two finds from Hamwic.37 Not surprisingly, issues from the geographically more remote areas of East Anglia and Northumbria remain scarce in our area, though some rare finds are known, including a coin of Aldfrith of Northumbria from Hamwic, and two sceattas of series F from Otterbourne.38 Of clear significance is the cluster of seven sceattas of Series W in mid and southern Hampshire (eight, if the find from the Isle of Wight is counted).39 Since Metcalf has recently reviewed the evidence for Series W, only a few observations will be made here.40 His map of finds clearly places Hampshire at the centre of a distribution pattern focused on south Wessex, though a range of outliers, including finds from France, suggest that Series W was also carried by longdistance travellers. Despite the clear geographical attribution to the Hampshire Basin region, the exact location of what would have been the earliest mint in the area at present remains unknown. Possible contenders include the Isle of Wight, Winchester, and perhaps even Hamwic, though there are problems with the latter attribution.41

With previously no BI coins known from Wessex at all,34 and extremely few of BII, the concentration of this type in central and southern Hampshire seems significant. Most likely, the coins reached the area directly via the sea-route from Kent,35 or possibly along the Thames, and they again underline the early importance of the Solent region and immediate hinterland within southern England. As well as bringing forward dates for the development of the emporium at Hamwic,36 these finds indicate that general coin circulation in Hampshire is likely to have started earlier than previously envisaged. South-Eastern issues can now be seen to reach the area by the late seventh century, though no finds have yet been made of the earliest transitional (gold to silver) series.

Since 1997, a few more sceattas of the late primary or intermediary phase have been added to the corpus of finds, showing the steadily increasing flux of Continental coinage into the area from around the beginning of the eighth century or just before. The main body of finds belongs to the secondary sceatta phase though. This observation is in line with the general picture for southern and eastern England, which shows an ‘explosion’ of finds during the first half of the eighth century.42 By this time a mint was certainly operating at Hamwic itself, producing sceattas of Series H type 39, and the slightly later type 49. Still unknown, by contrast, is the mint origin of sceattas of Series H type 48. With very few finds to go on, and a wide area of distribution (unlike the rest of Series H), Metcalf thinks it more likely that the type was

The increasing influx of predominantly South-Eastern issues throughout the primary phase is further highlighted by the find of seven or more coins of Series C, which bring the total for Hampshire to eleven finds. Widely circulating in the Hampshire hinterland, they stem from at least six different

37

Three finds from ‘near’ Winchester (EMC 2006.0216, EMC 2008.0171, EMC 2008.0180), and one each from Micheldever (EMC 2007.0093) and Twyford (EMC 1991.0098). Three others are only known as ‘Hampshire’ (EMC 2006.0074, EMC 2007.0328, EMC 2006.0073). 38 Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), p. 160; Series F was initially attributed to a north-eastern mint place, though recent re-analysis now may point to a mint along the middle Thames, Metcalf, ‘Monetary Circulation’ (cit. in n. 34), esp. pp. 11-16. 39 M. Metcalf, ‘The First Series of Sceattas Minted in Southern Wessex: Series W’, British Numismatic Journal, 75 (2005), pp. 1-17. These include three from Hamwic (one of them from the secondary phase), two from or ‘near’ Winchester (EMC 2004.0084), and two reputedly from Warnford, Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), p. 169. 40 Metcalf, ‘Series W’ (cit. in n. 39), p. 4, Fig. 2. 41 Ibid., pp. 8-9. 42 Blackburn, ‘“Productive” Sites’ (cit. in note 21), p. 32, Fig. 3.6.

31

Metcalf, ‘Coins’ (cit. in n. 20), pp. 55-6. Micheldever (EMC 2008.0275); Owslebury (type BII) (EMC 2006.0132); ‘near Winchester’ (EMC 2008.0170); for the East Meon area, see PAS SUSS-295466 (apparently type B1A, but awaiting confirmation), as well as possibly Little Somborne (PAS HAMP3895, to be identified). 33 Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, Winchester (cit. in n. 11). 34 M. Metcalf, ‘Monetary Circulation in England c. 675- c. 710: The Distribution Patterns of Series A, B and C - and F’, British Numismatic Journal, 74 (2004), pp. 1-19, at 11, Map 5a. There in only one other find, from Sixpenny Handley, Dorset (EMC 2004.0137). 35 There are, as yet, no finds of this type from Sussex. 36 Now dated to the last quarter of the 7th century: see Origins, ed. Birbeck (cit. in n. 12), p. 195. 32

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KATHARINA ULMSCHNEIDER being produced at an – as yet unidentified – mint nearby on the south coast, perhaps ‘in the Portsmouth area’, while Morton has put forward a case for Hamblemouth.43 In Hampshire, two more sceattas of Series H type 48 have since been recovered from Hamwic, bringing the total up to five finds, further strengthening the association of this type with the Solent area, as are three more finds of type 48, reported from a new ‘productive site’ on the Isle of Wight.44

finds, all in close proximity to important ancient routeways, shows that Hamwic coins clearly circulated much more widely in the Hampshire hinterland than has been thought. On the whole, the finds are not plentiful enough though to challenge the overall distribution pattern for the series recognized through regression analysis. This shows that Hamwic coins were most heavily diffused westwards into Dorset and areas to its north, rather than into eastern and northern Hampshire, where they show a sharp drop-off.46

Wherever the exact location of this mint, the locally produced coins of Series H were certainly by far the most common finds to circulate in Hampshire during the secondary phase, making up 34% of all sceattas. However, there are significant differences between the pre- and post1997 datasets. Whilst before 1997 Series H accounted for nearly 41% of all finds, the proportion in the later sample is only just under 22%. This is mainly due to the overwhelming number of nineteenth and twentieth-century finds from Hamwic contained in the first dataset (92% of all Series H being found there), while excavated finds from the emporium (and in general) are much less pronounced in the second one (35%).

Much more intensive use of coinage during the first half of the eighth century (secondary phase), as well as its wider infiltration into the Hampshire hinterland, is also noticeable for other coin types. Unsurprisingly, the second most plentiful series to be found in the county are sceattas of Series E (‘porcupines’), minted mainly in the Rhine mouth area, and representing just under 19% of all sceattas.47 The number of finds made, however, can be seen to vary according to the place of recovery. Thus Series E sceattas are much more commonly recorded in the Hampshire hinterland (29% of all finds pre-1997, and 26% post-1997). At the emporium the percentage of Series E, in contrast, is only about 14%, indicating that Continental coins were regularly being reminted there. Similar to other areas in England, coins of Series E were the most widely distributed, known from perhaps as many as twenty sites in Hampshire now (formerly six). Pre-1997, finds of Series E, like Series H, were largely restricted to central and southern Hampshire. This pattern has changed now with finds appearing from sites in the north-west and north-east of Hampshire, around Winchester, along the Meon valley and east of the New Forest. However, just like Series H, regression analysis shows a significant drop-off in their proportions towards the northeast of Hampshire.48

Another major difference since 1997 is the much larger number of Hampshire sites from which Series H sceattas are now known. In the earlier sample, six finds were known from three sites in the area of the emporium. This early evidence was interpreted as showing a restriction on the flux of coins and commerce into the hinterland of Hamwic, with Series H being largely confined to being used within the emporium.45 Since then, however, metal-detecting has produced another eleven finds outside the emporium, bringing the total number of sites in the rest of Hampshire to at least twelve, and possibly more. While the earlier finds (Cheriton, Clausentum, ‘South Hampshire’) suggested an almost exclusive concentration of finds in the south of Hampshire, new sites are now known from north-east Hampshire (Alton, Wield), and the North-West (Wherwell). A comparatively large number of finds also seem to be emerging from the area surrounding Winchester. They include two or possibly three Series H coins from what looks like a new ‘productive site’ only just discovered ‘near Winchester’, as well as single finds from Winchester parish, the ‘Itchen Valley’, Morestead, Micheldever, and Stoke Charity. The concentration of these

Differences in coin find patterns between south-central Hampshire and the more northern and easterly areas are also apparent from Series X.49 These Danish sceattas, and their insular varieties, are the third most common Series at Hamwic, with sixteen finds, and appear only on three sites in the rest of the hinterland. Whether the Hamwic concentration points to the existence of special quarters for Danish merchants at the emporium unfortunately remains unknown.50 46

M. Metcalf , ‘Variations in the Composition of the Currency at Different Places in England’, in Markets in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Pestell and Ulmschneider (cit. in n. 21), p. 41, Fig. 4.1; updated in Metcalf, ‘Series W’ (cit. in n. 39), p. 2, Fig. 1. 47 14% of the pre-1997 coin finds, and 20% of the post-1997 ones. This includes both primary and secondary “porcupines”. 48 This is true both for the primary and secondary sceattas of Series E, see Metcalf, ‘Monetary Circulation’ (cit. in n. 34), p. 4, Map 1; M. Metcalf , ‘Single Finds of Wodan/Monster Sceattas in England and their Interpretation for Monetary History’, Nordisk Numismatisk Årsskrift, 2006, p. 123, Map 3. 49 Metcalf, ‘Wodan/Monster Sceattas’ (cit. in n. 48), p. 122, Map 2. 50 Metcalf, ‘Coins’ (cit. in n. 20), p. 131.

43

M. Metcalf, Thrymsas and Sceattas in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford, 3 vols (London, 1993-4), pp. 339-40; A.D. Morton, ‘Hamwic in its Context’, in Anglo-Saxon Trading Centres: Beyond the Emporia, ed. M. Anderton (Glasgow, 1999), pp. 49-53. For other finds of this type and a recent discussion, see Metcalf, ‘Series W’ (cit. in n. 39), p. 5 and note 11. 44 In Shalfleet parish: F. Basford, pers. comm. 45 B. Palmer, ‘The Hinterlands of Three Southern English Emporia: Some Common Themes’, in Markets in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Pestell and Ulmschneider (cit. in n. 21), p.48-60, at 60, for the idea of an ‘internal token’. For early distribution patterns, see Metcalf, Thrymsas (cit. in n. 43), p. 323, Map.

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MORE MARKETS, MINSTERS, AND METAL-DETECTOR FINDS: MIDDLE SAXON HAMPSHIRE A DECADE ON Among the remaining finds, South-Eastern issues again are most dominant, though there is now an increasing number of East Anglian coins, including at least five sceattas of Series R (still rare in southern England), three or more of them from Hampshire hinterland sites. Other rare finds, new to the area, include a sceatta of Series Q from Hunton, to the north of Winchester – possibly an ecclesiastical issue from a mint at Ely,51 though others prefer a more northerly mint place in Norfolk, perhaps associated with a wic.52 Less than a handful of these coins are known south of the Thames, and it is the first find of its type in Hampshire.53 Also not represented before, and very rare for the area, are an East-Saxon sceatta of Series S from Micheldever, and a sceatta of Series T from Hambledon, thought to be minted in the East Midlands, and the only one of its type known from the south coast so far.54

example, of the fifteen pennies of King Ecgberht of Wessex (803-39) known now from Hampshire, only four came from a Wessex mint, located at ‘Winchester or Southampton’,57 the bulk being minted in Kent (seven at Canterbury, four at Rochester). All of the (admittedly few) Hampshire finds of Ecgherht’s successors Æthelwulf (839-58), and Æthelberht (858-65) originate from Kent, and Metcalf has suggested that the Wessex mint would have closed around c. 840.58 A recent find of a Lunette penny of Æthelred (865-871) from Stanmore, however, may provide important evidence for the continued existence of a Winchester mint. In a first assessment Blackburn comments that “this coin provides evidence to suggest that there was a mint operating in Wessex, as well as Kent, in the mid-ninth century. The style is quite unlike that of the usual Canterbury coins. The moneyer Osric is otherwise not recorded for this reign, but he is known from a single coin of Æthelwulf (839-58), which is also in an unusual style. These two were probably struck at Winchester, an attribution supported by find provenance”.59

Mid eighth century to c. 870 (excluding King Alfred): the evidence from pennies Before 1997, 73 pennies where known from Hampshire in total. However, the vast majority of these came from the emporium at Hamwic (77%), with only seventeen finds being known from the hinterland. Since then, another 34 pennies have been added to the corpus, three of them old finds, two from excavations at Hamwic, the rest metal-detector finds, bringing the total to 107. The lower recovery rate of pennies as compared to sceattas is not unusual, and well documented for other areas of southern and eastern England.55 Despite a downturn in economic fortunes around the middle of the eighth century, sceattas probably continued in use until the later eighth century, when a new currency, based on the broad-flan penny was introduced. Among the earliest pennies to reach the area were those minted by King Offa of Mercia (currently eighteen coins), his wife Cynethryth (two coins), Archbishop Jaenberht with Offa, and an extremely rare specimen by King Beorhtric of Wessex (who married one of Offa’s daughters).56 Only one other coin of Beorhtric is recorded on the EMC / SCBI database, from Surrey, and it has been suggested that both finds may have originated from an - yet unidentified - mint at Winchester.

As in earlier periods, East Anglian issues remained comparatively rare in Hampshire in the ninth century. This echoes the situation in the rest of Wessex, where the bulk of coinage consisted of Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon coins, the latter perhaps showing a more localized function, slightly peripheral to the main trade axis of the Thames and Midlands.60 Even rarer are finds of ninth-century brass stycas from Northumbria, which appear to have been actively excluded from circulation in southern England.61 Not many finds of this type are made south of the Thames, and even fewer are recorded for Wessex. The discovery of three more stycas from Hampshire and the Isle of Wight is therefore worth noting, as is another one in the area from Chichester in West Sussex.62 These finds are widely dispersed, and of different dates around the mid-ninth century, suggesting that they 57

Metcalf, ‘Coins’ (cit. in n. 20), pp. 135-6. Ibid., at 136. 59 To be published by Blackburn; see comments on EMC 1999.0160. 60 M. Metcalf, ‘The Monetary Economy of Ninth-Century England South of the Humber: A Topographical Analysis’, in Kings Currency and Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the Ninth Century, ed. M. Blackburn and D.N. Dumville (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 167-98, at 195 and at 182-3, Tables 1 and 2. 61 Ibid., p. 182, and p. 178, Fig. 5. For the tenth century, see M. Metcalf, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Coin Finds, c. 9731086 (London, 1998), p. 55, Map 7. For the following, see also J.E. Pirie, ‘Finds of “sceattas” and “stycas” of Northumbria’, in AngloSaxon Monetary History, ed. M. Blackburn (Leicester, 1986), pp. 6790, at 72-3, Fig. 5.2. 62 EMC 2001.0521 (Old Basing, Hants.); PAS HAMP3376 (Damerham, Hants.); EMC 2001.0523 (Ryde, Isle of Wight); EMC 2001.0520 (Chichester, West Sussex). 58

Despite the possible existence of another local mint from the late eighth century onwards, the main bulk of the coinage circulating in Hampshire continued to arrive from mints in the South-East, in particular Canterbury and London. For 51

J. Newman, ‘Wics, Trade, and the Hinterlands - The Ipswich Region’, in Anglo-Saxon Trading Centres, ed. Anderton (cit. in n. 43), pp. 43-4. 52 M. Metcalf, ‘Determining the Mint-Attribution of East Anglian Sceattas through Regression Analysis’, British Numismatic Journal, 70 (2000), pp. 1-11, at 5. 53 See EMC; Metcalf, Thrymsas (cit. in n. 43), pp. 483-501. 54 EMC 2001.0022; EMC 1998.0071. 55 Blackburn, ‘“Productive” Sites’ (cit. in n. 21), pp. 28-38, and Fig. 3.6. 56 EMC 1855.0001, with further literature.

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KATHARINA ULMSCHNEIDER arrived independently. Perhaps not surprisingly, stycas are not recorded from the emporium at Hamwic so far, which by this time would have been in severe decline. While the Sussex and Isle of Wight finds are likely to have arrived via the coast, the Old Basing and Damerham stycas could also have reached the area via inland routes. Set in the context of other finds from Keevil (Wilts.) and near Sherborne (Dorset), the Wessex region clearly no longer remains an empty space for stycas, though there are, as yet, no concentrations of finds similar to Kent.63

to have been of early importance, though its status before the later 9th century remains unclear. Hase identified it as the site of an early mother church with parochia, while Klingelhöfer suggested that it might be the site of a ‘midSaxon valley unit’ or ‘archaic hundred’. More recently, Brooks has made a case for the existence of an early regio, perhaps even ‘a relic of a small folk unit of 300 hides such as we find in the Tribal Hidage’.67 Without knowledge of the exact location of the site, all that can be said at present is that it provides the richest assemblage of single coin finds to the north of Winchester. Located in the vicinity of the Roman road from Winchester to Silchester, this site may also turn out to provide an important link between central Hampshire and the London Basin, extending the Isle of WightSouthampton-Winchester axis to the North. Overall though, the Test valley remains sparse in terms of Middle Saxon finds, especially when compared to the Itchen and Meon valleys, despite much metal-detecting in its middle to upper reaches.68

Economy, metal-detecting, and the landscape Ten years on, excavations and metal-detector finds can be seen to have considerably filled in our knowledge of Middle Saxon Hampshire, and most particularly the Hampshire hinterland, where metal-detector finds now provide the bulk of new information on non-ferrous metalwork (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3). In terms of the overall distribution of finds a number of observations can be made. In the early, pre-1997 dataset, metal-detector finds were overwhelmingly reported in central areas, immediately to the south of Winchester, on either side of the Itchen, and to the East along the upper Itchen and Meon rivers.64 The importance of this central chalk area is borne out by the new finds made since then. Both the middle Itchen and upper Meon valleys have seen an increase in finds post-1997, with a particular focus in and around Winchester. Worrell interestingly has suggested that this may partially be a reflection of the PAS finds liaison officer being situated there, though the general wealth of this central region has been noted throughout other periods, including the Iron Age, Roman, Early Saxon, and Late Saxon periods.65 An increasing density of finds from the Meon valley, though important both for the Early and Middle Saxon periods, in contrast, is nowhere near as pronounced as that for the Iron Age, demonstrating that intensity of metal-detecting activity and recording, while likely to create some bias, cannot mask larger, underlying, variations in finds density.66

A small number of coins and metalwork has also been recorded from the North-East (Basingstoke - London Basin area) and eastern Hampshire (Alton area), though again on comparatively few sites. Patchy metal-detecting may partially account for a bias in distributions. However, the small number of finds recorded from those sites which have been producing metallic artefacts would seem to confirm a real difference in coin circulation and wealth during the Middle Saxon period. Already previously noted for their scarcity of finds, most of these areas are situated on more inhospitable soils, some of which were heavily wooded.69 In contrast to the rich metal-detected finds on the central chalk belt of the county, little additional information has been forthcoming for southern Hampshire. This is most noticeable for the New Forest. Though located mainly on infertile soils, the area nevertheless is known to have supported some, albeit probably very sparse, Middle Saxon settlement.70 Neither are woodland and heath conducive to metal-detection. What new sites have appeared, have been recovered along its western and eastern edges. Of these, coin finds from Marchwood and Eling Creek, Totton, are of particular interest, both of them located on the southern shore of Southampton Water, the former just upstream from

New areas with finds to appear since 1997 are the middle to upper Test valley, especially along its tributaries, and in the vicinity of the main Roman roads and prehistoric trackways. Similarly, a number of important sites are now also emerging along the Dever valley. Of these, the finds from Micheldever parish are of particular interest, comprising five sceattas, some of them quite rare (see above), a penny of Offa, as well as a hooked tag, ring, key, and Late Saxon brooch, many, though probably not all, from the same site. The area clearly appears

67

P. Hase, The Development of the Parish in Hampshire, unpubl. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1975, pp. 297-9; E. Klingelhöfer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Manors of the Upper Itchen Valley: Their Origin and Evolution’, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, 46 (1990), pp. 31-9. at 37; N.P. Brooks, ‘Alfredian Government: The West Saxon Inheritance’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. T. Reuter (Burlington, 2003), pp. 153-73, at 172-3. 68 Worrell, Iron Age (cit. in note n. 7), p. 384, Fig. 7: density of artefacts of all periods recorded by PAS. 69 See, for example, the East Hampshire Survey, discussed in Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), p. 45. 70 Ibid., pp. 37-8.

63

EMC 2001.1088 (near Sherborne, Dorset); Metcalf , ‘Monetary Economy’ (cit. in n. 60), p. 179. P. Robinson, ‘A Northumbrian “styca” from Wiltshire: The Problem with Southern Provenances of “Stycas”’, British Numismatic Journal, 71 (2001), pp. 160-1. 64 Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), Map 20. 65 Worrell, ‘Detecting the Later Iron Age’ (cit. in n. 7), p. 384. 66 See below; Worrell, Iron Age (cit. in n. 7), p. 383, Fig. 5; p. 384, Fig. 7; and pp. 384-5.

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MORE MARKETS, MINSTERS, AND METAL-DETECTOR FINDS: MIDDLE SAXON HAMPSHIRE A DECADE ON Southampton, the latter near the head of the estuary. Such sites contribute increasing evidence to the idea of a network of markets operating in the area, each seemingly bound to a major inlet.71

Biddle has pointed out, there may have been other, secular agents involved in stimulating activity in the area. Whatever provided the stimulus for activity, the wealth of the Winchester area is real, and not simply a reflection of it being a hot-spot for metal-detecting. This is particularly noticeable when compared to the upper Meon valley, identified by Stoodley as another focus of importance in the Early Saxon period. While fieldwork and intensive metal-detecting along the Meon produced new clusters of Middle Saxon finds, only a few of them have so far displayed the same density of finds reported from the middle Itchen.74 In general, evidence for Middle Saxon activity in the Hampshire hinterland is much stronger now, with many new sites added, especially in chalk areas. New settlement sites along river valleys have been forthcoming, and places of yet unknown importance, such as Crawley with its collection of silver finds, and the potentially new ‘productive site’ at Micheldever.

Apart from a number of finds from Southampton and ‘near Southampton’, few other new sites have been forthcoming since 1997. One reason for the lack of metal-detected finds from southern Hampshire is urbanism. Many major towns and built-up areas stretch along the Hampshire coastline and major inlets, much in contrast to the patchwork of fields and ploughing activity on the chalklands, a divide clearly visible to finders on Google Earth. Similarly, riverfronts have been subject to continual changes and alterations over the centuries, both natural and man-made. Taking into account these biases of recovery, what particularly stands out from the new evidence is the ongoing importance and centrality of the Winchester area, despite the paucity of excavated coins from the town itself. The evidence for Winchester as an important focus of activity in the Early Saxon period has recently been reviewed by Biddle, who, among other things, has drawn attention to the cluster of Early Saxon burials along the central parts of the Itchen. That the area continued to exercise its ‘pull’ is suggested by the increasing number of primary sceattas found in its vicinity and along its major routes (see above), and by the cluster of coin producing sites in its immediate surrounds.

While contributing greatly to our knowledge, the focus of metal-detecting on the chalklands has nevertheless not been able to challenge the idea of a ‘corridor of power’ between Winchester and Hamwic, nor the notion that the main economic importance of the area would have been concentrated in the southern parts of Hampshire. The central role of Hamwic in the economy of the region remains unassailed. And, as the reference to places like ‘Hamblemouth’, and the rare metal-detected coin finds from the south demonstrate, other economically important sites were located there and still await discovery.75

Who or what exactly would have exercised this ‘pull’ is still open to debate. The importance of the Church in stimulating trade and exchange has been discussed in detail elsewhere.72 On the Isle of Wight, for example, an argument has been made that the ‘near Carisbrooke’ ‘productive’ site may have been linked to the establishment of an early mother church in the area.73 For the Hampshire mainland, similar associations at present remain more difficult to attest. Most of the sites producing four or more coins, such as Andover, Micheldever, ‘near Winchester’, St Catharine’s Hill, or East Meon had early churches nearby. However, in most cases either the foundation date of the church or the exact location of the finds (and sometimes both) are unclear, making it difficult to explore links between them. As can be seen from the excavated window glass, imported stone, high-status metalwork, and occasional coin find, the building of Old Minster and the establishment of a bishop’s see at Winchester clearly had a major impact on the economy, although, as

A major southern coastal economic hotspot seems also to be borne out by coin regression analyses, and the location of early mints. Whether looking at Metcalf’s studies of the primary sceattas of Series A, B, and C; primary sceattas of Series E; Series W;76 or Series F;77 southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight repeatedly appear to provide a focus of activity on the south coast. Coins, it seems, were drawn in and needed here. This pattern is continued in the secondary phase. Sceattas of Series H,78 secondary ‘porcupines’, and even to a certain extent Wodan / monster sceattas of Series X dominate,79 though interestingly the focus of activity is now broadened towards the West and North-West, into what would have been the heartland of Wessex.

74

For example, Entwistle, ‘Shavard’s Farm, Meonstoke’ (cit. in n. 13). 75 Ulmschneider, ‘Unravelling’ (cit. in n. 71), p. 79, Fig. 7.3. 76 Metcalf, ‘Series W’ (cit. in n. 39), p. 4, Fig. 2. 77 Metcalf, ‘Monetary Circulation’ (cit. in note 34), p. 6, Map 2 for Series A, B, C; p. 4, Map 1 for primary Series E; p. 15, Map 7 for Series F. 78 Metcalf, ‘Series W’ (cit. in n. 39), p. 2, Fig. 1. 79 Metcalf, ‘Wodan/Monster Sceattas’ (cit. in n. 48), p. 123, Map 3, for secondary ‘porcupines’, and p. 122, Map 2, for Series X.

71

K. Ulmschneider, ‘Markets Around the Solent: Unravelling a ‘Productive’ Site on the Isle of Wight’, in Markets in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Pestell asnd Ulmschneider (cit. in n. 21), pp. 82-3, and p. 79, Fig. 7.3. 72 J. Blair, The Chuch in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005); Ulmschneider, Markets (cit. in n. 1), 87-99. 73 Ulmschneider, ‘Archaeology, History and the Isle of Wight’ (cit. in n. 30), pp. 29-38.

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KATHARINA ULMSCHNEIDER This hotspot of economic activity in the South Hampshire / Solent region is also underlined by the distribution of late seventh and early eighth-century mints. As discussed, the earliest mint in the entire region seems to have existed locally, producing primary Series W. Slightly later another mint can be seen to be operating at Hamwic, as would have another local one, producing Series H type 48. Finally, by the late eighth and ninth century, minting appears to have been underway at Winchester. The proliferation of mints in this one small area is striking, especially when viewed against the evidence from the wider south coast region. The impression is that though coin circulation in the primary phase was late and small compared to the South-East and East of England, the need for coinage was persistent in this area, and in the secondary phase extended well into the West Saxon heartland.

unequivocal proof of the importance of the Solent region not only within Hampshire, as already glimpsed in the earlier study, but also within the wider region. Despite these advances, in-depth understanding of the area in its interregional and international context is still somewhat hampered by the lack of information on what would have been two pivotal sites in the wider area: Hamblemouth, and Quentovic on the other side of the Channel. Given the cluster of economically important sites in the Solent area, which seems to have been outstanding for the whole southern coast, there can be little doubt now that the region was much more than simply the furthest outpost of North Sea trade routes or beneficiary of close Kentish connections with the Continent. Both written records and archaeological evidence point to direct early links to Northern France, where Barbara Yorke has drawn attention to the existence of Saxon colonies in the Bayeux area and the Boulogne by the late sixth century.84 It may have been through these links, which appear to have been under Frankish influence, that some of the outstanding Mediterranean and Frankish artefacts reached the southern Hampshire coast and Isle of Wight during the seventh century, and along these and other coastal routes, that travellers, pilgrims and coins moved in the eighth century, turning this area into the pivotal trading node of the south coast.

The importance of the conquest of the Solent area and Jutes for the evolution of the West Saxon kingdom has been discussed by many authors, as have been the early traderoutes, privileged access (possible monopolies), and links of this region with Kent.80 There can be little doubt that the area’s mints and ports would have served as important outlets for goods of the West Saxon hinterland, be it wool, agricultural products, or other resources, as well as facilitating merchants and travellers.81 This would have been particularly helped by the dense concentration of inlets, rivers, and harbours, including what is the biggest natural harbour on the south coast, the Solent itself. The outstanding economic activity of this area is highlighted and confirmed by the dense number of local trading posts, including an ‘emporium’, a mercimonium at Hamblemouth, as well as a number of other places,82 among them the largest ‘productive site’ on the south coast on the Isle of Wight, and what now appears to be the second largest ‘productive site’ in the southern region, newly discovered in the ‘Shalfleet’ area of the Isle of Wight.83

Acknowledgements I am very much indebted to Sally Worrell, Mark Blackburn, Frank Basford, and the PAS for providing me with details on sites and access to finds, and Michael Metcalf, Bruce Eagles and James Campbell for their excellent comments and references. Most particularly my gratitude goes to Martin Biddle, who initiated my interest in this area and provided much support and encouragement along the way. My thanks also to the Leverhulme Trust and German Industry, who have been and continue to support my broader research on metal-detector finds.

Thus, new evidence from metal-detecting, mint and regression analysis, not only confirms, but provides 80

For example, B. Yorke, ‘Gregory of Tours and Sixth Century Anglo-Saxon England’, in The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. K. Mitchell and I. Wood (Leiden, 2002), pp. 113-30; M. Welch, ‘Contacts Across the Channel between the Fifth and Seventh Centuries: A Review of the Archaeological Evidence’, Studien zur Sachsenforschung, 7 (1991), pp. 261-9; B. Yorke, ‘The Jutes of Hampshire and Wight and the Origins of Wessex’, in The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett (Leicester, 1989), pp. 84-96; I. Wood, ‘The Channel from the 4th to the 7th Centuries AD’, in Maritime Celts, Frisians and Saxons ed. S. McGrail (London, 1990), pp. 93-7. 81 P. Andrews, V. Birbeck, and N. Stoodley, ‘Concluding Discussion’, in Origins, ed Birbeck (cit. in n. 12), pp. 193-4; Ulmschneider, ‘Archaeology, History and the Isle of Wight’ (cit. in n. 30). 82 Ulmschneider, ‘Unravelling’ (cit. in n. 71), p. 79, Fig. 7.3. 83 This will be discussed elsewhere. For the possible existence of perhaps yet another wic along the Solent, see Metcalf, ‘Wodan/ Monster Sceattas’ (cit. in n. 48), p. 125.

84

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Yorke, Gregory of Tours (cit. in n. 80), at 119.

Food, Fasting and Starvation: Food Control and Body Consciousness in Early Anglo-Saxon England Sally Crawford

Bodies are not static – they change and develop over lifetimes, and social perceptions of the body, which are closely bound to issues of personal and community identity, change with them.1 Several forces are at work on the body. The body carries its own blueprint for development from conception to maturity, which is broadly universal across humanity, though there are genetic variations operating at racial and familial levels. However, the way in which a body changes over a lifetime will also be determined by environmental and cultural factors. Each body carries with it a record of the life lived by the individual – levels of disease, types of physical activity, and type and quantity of nutrition. Bodies may also be subject to deliberate manipulation and distortion to create a shape which conforms to, or transgresses, sociallydetermined norms, so as to convey messages about age, status and identity – tattooing, trepanation, mutilation, and removal of teeth, for example. Throughout the life of an individual, the physical actuality of the body is negotiated, manipulated and interpreted in an evolving interaction with other bodies, other lives, and other boundaries for categorising, limiting, or empowering the individual within their life course.2 Body and social identity are inextricably interwoven.3

even where there may be sufficient food available to all groups, the types of food to which an individual has access may be determined by the place of that person within the social hierarchy, and this will have a direct impact on rates of growth, adult size, strength, maturation and success in procreation. Generally speaking, higher status individuals with better access to food resources will mature more rapidly, will have greater success in producing children, and will successfully rear more children, and their own children will also have a higher status within the social hierarchy. A mother with poor nutritional health will have more peri- and postnatal problems; a child of a low status mother may have little access to food, leading to poorer health and growth prospects than other children, which in turn may diminish the adult's chance of negotiating a strong position for itself in terms of age or gender related social status.5 Both documentary and archaeological sources reflect the extent to which the ritual and social consumption of food and drink were integral to early Anglo-Saxon culture, articulating gender relationships, cementing social hierarchies, and marking significant social events – funerals, religious festivals and social contracts, for example.6 The treasures buried in the ship burial under Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, in the early seventh century offer an insight into the key images of power and prestige amongst the elite at a time when Anglo-Saxon England was undergoing conversion to Christianity, hand in hand with the emergence of kingdoms. Various expressions of power are symbolized by the treasures, such as warrior/military leadership; international contacts; and elite status. Equally prominent amongst the artefacts are objects associated with feasting and communal consumption of food and drink, exemplified by

Recent research in stable isotope analysis of human skeletal material has demonstrated that, in a very real sense, we are what we eat, and that what we eat is an aspect of the culture within which we live.4 Control of, access to, and availability of, food resources, are critical factors underpinning the structuring of human society. Within most human societies, 1

J. Sofaer, The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology (Cambridge, 2004); R.A. Joyce, ‘Archaeology of the Body’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 34 (2005), pp. 139-58. 2 R. Gowland, ‘The Social Identity of Health in Late Roman Britain’, in TRAC 2003: Thirteenth Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Leicester, ed. B. Croxford, H. Eckardt, J. Meade, and J. Weekes (Oxford, 2004), pp. 135-46. 3 R. Gilchrist, ‘Archaeological Biographies: Realizing Human Lifecycles, Courses and Histories’, World Archaeology, 31 (2000), pp. 325-8. 4 B. Hull and T.C. O’Connell, ‘Diet: Recent Evidence from Analytical Chemical Techniques’, in Oxford Handbook of AngloSaxon Archaeology, ed. S. Crawford, H. Hamerow and D. Hinton, (Oxford, in press); K.L. Privat, T.C. O’Connell and M. P. Richards, ‘Stable Isotope Analysis of Human and Faunal Remains from the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Berinsfield, Oxfordshire: Dietary and Social Implications’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 29 (2002), pp. 779-90.

5

For recent research on the relationship between diet, culture and health in the later medieval period, see e.g. P. Schofield, ‘Medieval Diet and Demography’, in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C.M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson and T. Waldron (Oxford, 2006), pp. 239-53; T. Waldron, ‘Nutrition and the Skeleton’, in ibid., pp. 254-66; M. Schweich and C. Knüsel, ‘Biocultural Effects in Medieval Populations’, Economics and Human Biology, 1:3 (2003), pp. 367-77; B. Bogin, Patterns of Human Growth (Cambridge, 1999), p. 385, for evidence for stress as a factor in limiting growth. 6 M. Brown, ‘The Feast Hall in Anglo-Saxon Society’ in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. M. Carlin and J.T. Rosenthal (London and Rio Grande, 1998), pp. 3-14; C. Lee, Feasting the Dead: Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Burial Rituals (Woodbridge, 2007).

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SALLY CRAWFORD horse as he says’.9 Similarly, the owner of a slave who was stolen and recovered was to be an additional sum ‘according to the ‘face value’ of the slave’.10 It might not seem unreasonable to value a horse or even a slave by physical attributes. Horses and slaves were an economic investment, and damaged goods required compensation. But why should a foundling child be valued according to their wlite, like slaves or horses?

the large cauldron, the maplewood drinking cups, the wine bottle, and the plates, bowls and buckets, which together articulate the central role of eating in the Anglo-Saxon élite world as an occasion at which to reinforce social bonds and obligations, to assert status, and to display power and wealth. The evidence offered by the artefacts associated with the burial at Mound One is echoed and reinforced in the later literature: so central was the hall and banquet to the ideal of Anglo-Saxon elite memory, that in the poem Beowulf, the sound of feasting in the hall is the cause of the monster Grendel’s provocation and downfall. Violence in Beowulf is punctuated by scenes in the hall at, before and during the banquet, and Beowulf, the epitome of masculine heroic strength, defines himself and his companions by their affiliation to the place of feasting. When first challenged to identify himself, his response is: ‘we are the companions of Hygelac’s table’.7 Feasting and physical strength were dual aspects of the social personae of princely males in text and archaeology.

This question is perhaps clarified when Old English lawcodes, frustratingly elliptical in content, are viewed within a wider British context. Early Irish law codes also use a phrase whose literal meaning is ‘face-value’: lóg n-enech. This was the term used for compensation for an assault.11 Any assault on a person, particularly one that left a mark, indicated that the assaulter did not respect the status of the person they had assaulted, and certainly did not respect their power, or the power of the kin group, to avenge the assault.12 In early medieval Irish society, physical appearance equated directly with social status: early Irish society sanctioned favouritism towards sons on the basis of physical appearance; ridicule and satire were a form of social control, and kings were excluded from ruling on the basis of a number of grounds, including physical deformity.13 Early Irish laws also offer a direct parallel to the problematic Old English code the sustenance to be given to foundling children, but with more detail:

By contrast, the documentary sources contain hints that diet and food restrictions on poorer members of society were implemented from an early age. One seventh-century law code promulgated by King Ine of Wessex offers some corroborative evidence that the deliberate withholding of food from lower status children was a concept embedded in the social code. This code on the maintenance of an orphan (be fundenes cildes fostre) asserted that a foundling child was to be maintained by set sums of money according to his age, up to four years, when maintenance was to be gauged be þam wlite (‘according to its appearance’).8 Having offered clear indications as to the sums of money required to maintain a child through the first three years of its life – six shillings in the first year, twelve in the second, and thirty in the third – the law code seems to have expected that the cost of raising a child from this point onwards would be open to discussion, and might be decided by physical criteria which are opaque to us, but which must have been sufficiently obvious to AngloSaxon society so as not to require any further mention in the legislation. It would appear that, after infancy had been passed, the foundling child’s future prospects depended upon its physical appearance. The full understanding of this code hinges on our interpretation of the phrase be þam wlite. This problematic expression crops up in a variety of Old English legal texts. In the early tenth century, with reference to indemnities for livestock, a horse was reckoned at half a pound, but ‘if it is less valuable, it shall be paid for according to the value suggested by its wlite, and what is approved by its owner, unless he can produce evidence that it is as good a

‘The food of them all is alike, until the end of the first/third year… stirabout porridge, made of oatmeal on buttermilk or water is given to the sons of the feni grades (farmers) and a bare sufficiency of it merely, and salt butter for flavouring. Stirabout made on new milk [is given] to sons of the chieftain grade, and fresh butter for flavouring, and a full sufficiency of it is given to them: and barley meal upon it. Stirabout made of new milk and wheat meal is given to the sons of kings, and honey for flavouring.’14 The consistently less nutritious diet of the lower class children would have had implications for growth and good 9

Ibid., p. 161: VI Æthelstan 6:3: ‘hors to healfan punde, gif hit swa god sy; 7 gif hit mætre sy, gilde be his wlites wyrðe 7 be þam þe se man hit weorðige þe hit age, buton he gewitnesse habbe, þæt hit swa god wære swa he secge’. 10 Ibid., p. 161: VI Æthelstan 6:1: ‘þæt him man yhte ufon on þæt be his wlites weorðe’. 11 See entries under enechlóg in the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (http://www.dil.ie/), Letter E, Column 134, Line 028. 12 N. Patterson, Cattle, Lords and Clansmen: The Social Structure of Early Ireland, 2nd edn. (London, 1994), p. 181; T.M. CharlesEdwards, ‘Enech’, in The Oxford Companion to Irish History, ed. S.J. Connolly, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2007), p. 181. 13 Patterson, Cattle, Lords and Clansmen, p. 211; T.M. CharlesEdwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), p. 495. 14 Corpus Iuris Hibernici, ed. D.A. Binchy, 6 vols (Dublin, 1978), p. 1759.38 ff.; Patterson, Cattle, Lords and Clansmen, p. 191.

7

Beowulf, ed. M. Swanton (Manchester, 1978), lines 342-3: ‘We synt Higelaces beodgeneatas’. 8 The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, ed. and trans. F.L. Attenborough (Cambridge, 1922), p. 45: Ine, cap. 26.

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FOOD, FASTING AND STARVATION: FOOD CONTROL AND BODY CONSCIOUSNESS IN EARLY ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND health, and one outcome of this dietary differentiation is that the significantly more calorific elite male diet – especially the provision of milk – will have been a tendency to greater adult size for the elite, compared to those brought up on a less nutritious diet.15 There are hints within the documentary sources that physical appearance indicated higher status: when the thane Imma was captured, Bede recorded that his captors ‘realized by his appearance, his bearing, and his speech that he was not of common stock as he had said, but of noble’.16 Here, the Latin vultus (face, appearance, look) is directly analogous to the Old English wlite. In addition to his way of talking and his comportment, there was something about Imma’s body, his physical shape, which set him apart from paupere vulgo.

indicated lower social status than those buried with weapons, with a concomitant impact on access to food resources. Conversion to Christianity, however, brought with it a realignment of ideas about food which was directly at odds with the secular equation of wealth, feasting and status. A small stone excavated by Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle and Martin Biddle at Repton, Derbyshire, illustrative of the mouth of hell, depicts a gaping mouth swallowing the head of two men.19 The stone fragment is almost certainly part of a memorial cross for Æthelbald (buried at Repton in AD 757), perhaps because of the association of Repton with St Guthlac.20 In this image, a link is made between eating and sin, an image which is also explored in the Latin and Old English Lives of St Guthlac.

Archaeological evidence suggests that those buried with weapons in the early Anglo-Saxon furnished inhumation cemeteries were taller than men without weapons, which raises the possibility that body size, or lack of it, helped to define social status.17 It is possible that this apparent height difference between those buried with and without weaponry in the early Anglo-Saxon burial ritual reflects an ethnic, rather than a diet-based contrast: comparisons of RomanoBritish skeletal heights with those of later Anglo-Saxon burials have indicated greater average heights for the AngloSaxon period.18 Whatever the ethnic origin of those buried without weaponry, their burial ritual appears to have

Several versions of Guthlac’s Life were written, including an arguably near contemporary Latin life by Felix; its later Old English prose translation; and the Old English poems Guthlac A and Guthlac B.21 Though the Latin Life and its successor Old English versions were modelled on a long hagiographical tradition which went back several centuries, the Life of Guthlac by Felix is recognised as a primary source, written within living memory of the life of the saint whom it commemorates.22 St Guthlac has been described by Eric John as ‘the perfect link between Bede and Beowulf’, and ‘an excellent example of what early English Christianity was about’, and as such the versions of his life provide a particularly useful path for understanding how the church sought to appropriate and reconfigure ideas about bodily difference and food control, to produce a new narrative of heroic starvation, and to create a place for the ascetic saint in early medieval England.23 The excessive fasting of the isolated Guthlac, living on only bread and water, which he ate only in the evening, forms a dramatic and potent mirror image of heroism to the consumption

15

Adult size is based on a complicated interplay between genes, environment, behaviour and nutrition – see e.g. K. Silventoinen, ‘Determinants of Variation in Adult Body Height’, Journal of Biosocial Science, 35.2 (2003), pp. 263-85. However, better nutrition will generally lead to improved growth and size – see for example I.A. Baker, P.C. Elwood, J. Hughes, M. Jones, F. Moore and P.M. Sweetnam, ‘A Randomised Controlled Trial of the Effect of the Provision of Free School Milk on the Growth of Children’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 34 (1980), pp. 31-4, for the impact of additional milk in the diet of lower social status children. 16 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969) (hereafter Hist. Eccl.), iv. 22 (p. 402) : ‘animaduerterunt, qui eum diligentius considerabant, ex vultu et habitu et sermonibus eius, quia non erat de paupere vulgo, ut dixerat, sed de nobilibus’. 17 H. Härke, ‘ “Warrior Graves”? The Background of the AngloSaxon Weapon Burial Rite’, Past and Present, 126 (1990), p. 39, table 4; C. Roberts ‘Did they Take Sugar? The Use of Skeletal Evidence in the Study of Disability in Past Populations’, in Madness, Disability and Social Exclusion: The Archaeology and Anthropology of ‘Difference’, ed. J. Hubert, One World Archaeology 40 (London, 2000), p. 51. 18 V. Evison and P. Hill, Two Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries at Beckford, Hereford and Worcester (Council for British Archaeology, 1996), p. 23, summarising Härke, ‘Warrior Graves’, and using M. Harman, T.I. Molleson and J.L. Price, ‘Burials, Bodies and Beheadings in Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries’, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Geology Series, 25 (1981), pp. 145–88, for information on Romano-British burials.

19

M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘The Repton Stone’, AngloSaxon England, 14 (1985), pp. 233–92 20 A. Meaney, ‘Felix’s Life of St Guthlac: Hagiography and/or Truth’, Proc., Cambridge Antiquarian Soc., 90 (2001), pp. 29-38, at 32. 21 Felix, ‘Vita Sancti Guthlaci’, in Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956) [hereafter VG]; C.0W. Goodwin, The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Life of St Guthlac, Hermit of Crowland (London, 1848) [hereafter OEVG]; J. Roberts, The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book (Oxford, 1979). See P. Dendle, Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature (Toronto, 2001), p. 161 n. 52, for a discussion of the relationship between Guthlac A and the Latin Vita, and for a discussion of whether Felix’s Vita was nearly contemporary with Guthlac’s life; see also J. J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, Medieval Cultures, 35 (Minneapolis, 2003), p. 121. 22 Meaney, ‘Felix’s Life’, p. 30. 23 E. John, Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 1996), p. 46.

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SALLY CRAWFORD patterns of Beowulf’s mighty, convivial excess, a reconfiguring of secular attitudes to diet which is mirrored in other saintly lives.24

evening, and then only eating bread. He, too, experienced a spiritual event and revelation, which manifested itself both physically, and in the form of visions. Saints Columba, Cuthbert, Fursey and Guthlac all removed themselves to isolated wastelands of one sort or another to battle with demons just as Anthony had done.

According to the sources, St Guthlac, an early eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Mercian nobleman, pursued a successful career as a warrior and war leader, until he gave up arms in his mid twenties in order to devote himself to a religious life. He entered the monastery at Repton under Abbess Ælfthryth in about the year 700. Excavations by the Biddles in the 1970s and 1980s revealed a number of structures belonging to seventh-century Repton, including a large timber hall and two masonry buildings in the vicarage gardens, one of which, with white plaster on its walls and glass in its windows, may well have been a church in which Guthlac would have worshipped while he was at Repton: its destruction can be dated to the early eighth century.25 The surviving fabric of the present crypt of the church, dating from the first half of the eighth century, might also have been known to Guthlac.26

There has been considerable discussion about the extent to which Guthlac’s Life is a biography, describing an eighth century Anglo-Saxon reality, rather than following the standard events and landscapes of the hagiographic genre.29 Repton and Crowland have a physical existence, as did some of the characters with whom Guthlac interacts, such as Æthelbald and Æthelthryth. It is plausible that Guthlac fought against the British at some point in his early life, given what is known about the politics of eighth-century England, and post-traumatic stress from his warrior experiences, rather than literary inevitability, has recently been proposed by Audrey Meaney as an explanation for Guthlac’s withdrawal from society and subsequent visions.30 Guthlac’s beorg – the mound or barrow in which he made his home – has a symbolic function in the narrative, but the description of it has enough corroborative detail to allow for considerable discussion of the kind of physical reality it might imply - a barrow or re-used bronze age burial mound, for example.31 Even Guthlac’s devils may reflect eighth-century politics as well as representing the temptations of the devil, not least because they speak British. As such, they seem to offer specific detail about the relationship between Mercia and the native British, about the possible survival of British enclaves in the Fenlands, and about aspects of Guthlac’s own life – he is able to understand them because, the Life informs us, he had spent some time as a hostage of the British in his warrior youth.32

Having spent some time within the monastic community, Guthlac strove for a purer life and closer communion with God by choosing to live alone at Crowland (Lincs.), at that time a ‘desert’ in the fens. Here, he pursued an austere lifestyle, was challenged by devils, and eventually died.27 Guthlac’s actions in withdrawing into isolation and fasting were almost certainly consciously modelled on the behaviour of the founding father of desert monasticism and asceticism, St Anthony.28 He, too, went to dwell amongst tombs, avoiding human contact, and eating only once a day in the 24

S. Downey, ‘Too Much of Too Little: Guthlac and the Temptation of Excessive Fasting’, Traditio, 63 (2008), pp. 89-127; see also A. Hall, ‘Constructing Anglo-Saxon Sanctity: Tradition, Innovation and Saint Guthlac’, in Images of Medieval Sanctity: Essays in Honour of Gary Dickson, ed. D. Strickland (Leiden, 2007), pp. 207-36, for detailed comparisons between the landscape and action in Beowulf and the Lives of St Guthlac, which do not, however, take into account the contrasting diets and physical shapes of the protagonists. For motifs of refreshment and provision in Beowulf and contrasts in saintly narrative poetry, see especially D. Hamilton, ‘The Diet and Digestion of Allegory in Andreas’, AngloSaxon England, 1 (1972), pp. 147-58. 25 M. Biddle, ‘Archaeology, Architecture, and the Cult of Saints in Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Anglo-Saxon Church: Papers in Honour of Dr H.M. Taylor, ed. L.A.S. Butler and R.K. Morris, CBA Research Report 60 (1986), pp. 1-31; H.M. Taylor, ‘St Wystan's Church, Repton, Derbyshire: A Reconstruction Essay’, Archaeological Journal, 144 (1987), pp. 204-45. 26 H.M. Taylor, ‘Repton Reconsidered: A Study in Structural Criticism’, in England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 351-89. 27 VG, xxv, xxx, xxxvi, l. 28 Meaney, ‘Felix's Life’, p. 29; M.L. Cameron, ‘The Visions of Saints Anthony and Guthlac’, in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. S. Campbell, B. Hall and D. Klausner (Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 152-8.

It is possible that both Saints Guthlac and Anthony before him experienced visions and physical trials as a result of illness, specifically ergotism, contracted as a result of their ascetic lifestyle.33 Living on bread alone, and drinking nothing but water, they would have been short of vitamin A (unlike 29

A. Meaney, ‘Felix’s Life of Guthlac: History or Hagiography?’, in Aethelbald and Offa: Two Eighth Century Kings of Mercia, ed. D. Hall and M. Worthington, BAR British Series 383 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 75-84. 30 Meaney, ‘Felix’s Life’, pp. 31-3. 31 See, for example, L. K. Shook, ‘The Burial Mound in Guthlac A’, Modern Philology, 58 (1960), pp. 1-10; S. Semple, ‘A Fear of the Past: The Place of the Prehistoric Burial Mound in the Ideology of Middle and Later Anglo-Saxon England’, World Archaeology, 30 (1999), pp. 109-26. 32 N. Higham, ‘Guthlac’s Vita, Mercia and East Anglia in the First Half of the Eighth Century’, in Aethelbald and Offa, ed. Hill and Worthington, pp. 85-90. 33 Cameron, ‘Visions’ (cit. in n. 28), in which he argues persuasively that the hallucinations experienced by both saints correspond directly with the recorded symptoms associated with ergotism.

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FOOD, FASTING AND STARVATION: FOOD CONTROL AND BODY CONSCIOUSNESS IN EARLY ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND their supporters, who had a more varied diet). A combination of severe calorie restriction and a diet of bread alone – and bread that was far from fresh at that – would make ergotism a strong probability.34

gigantism (and the swelling bodies of both the monsters and the hero.38 Tormenting demons in non-human form, however, were a standard part of early Christian hagiography. St Anthony’s devils in the deserts of Egypt appeared as wild beasts – ‘lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, wolves’.39 With much more corroborative detail, Guthlac’s Britishspeaking evil spirits seem to belong to this tradition, rather than to any physical reality:

Neither Guthlac nor Anthony necessarily deliberately made themselves ill, yet both, in search of spiritual ecstasy, consumed an optimum quality and quantity of food to promote the mental experiences they desired. Calculations based on the account of Guthlac’s diet suggest that his daily intake of one cup of barley meal would have had only 700 calories, 19 grams of protein, no vitamins A or C, and insufficient B vitamins (though his cup of muddy water might have added to the calorie and vitamin content of his intake).35

‘They were ferocious in appearance, terrible in shape with great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, filthy beards, shaggy ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horse’s teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, pigeon breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries’40

To renounce the life of a war-leader – a particularly English form of elite renunciation – was also, as Felix’s Life of St Guthlac makes clear, to specifically reject a secular model of a warrior society.36 It was this warrior society, epitomised by poems such as Beowulf, which had formed the basis of Guthlac’s childhood education, and which he replaced with a model of Christian monastic life as a warrior for Christ, which is both oppositional to, and analogous with, the warrior ideal. It is no coincidence, then, that the Vita Guthlaci and other early Anglo-Saxon Lives of Saints, such the Life of St Cuthbert and the Life of St Wilfrid, and heroic narrative poems such as Beowulf, share a range of vocabularies and imagery.37 Both have an emphasis in their themes and vocabulary on common motifs – travel, war, companionship, cleansing foreign lands, and food consumption. But Christian writers were seeking to replace a model of heroic, secular, physical masculinity with one of Christian aesthetic heroism; the journeys of Saints are spiritual as well as physical; they fight with the weapons of prayer and devotion rather than with swords; they have angels and God as friends, rather than human companions; they defeat devils rather than monsters; and they fast, rather than feast. These contrasts are explicitly visual in the bodies of the food-deprived Guthlac and his starving tormentors, compared to the emphasis in Beowulf on

The symbolic nature of Guthlac’s devils in this narrative has been variously interpreted. Jeffrey Cohen’s view of the ‘fragmented bodies’ of the devils was that the Britons were being portrayed as ‘nonsensical monsters, as demons whose identities do not coalesce into human shape’.41 Daniel Calder viewed them as projections of the natural world, but Jennifer Neville has argued that they had a metaphysical relationship with the landscape: ‘what seems most evident is the external nature of Guthlac’s attackers and their association with the natural world’.42 But is there a different contrast at play here, a contrast between saintly abstinence and secular starvation in other 38

Manish Sharma, ‘Metalepsis and Monstrosity: The Boundaries of Narrative Structure in Beowulf'’, Studies in Philology, 102 (2005), pp. 247-79. 39 Meaney, ‘Felix’s Life’, p. 30. 40 VG, p.102: ‘Erant enim aspectu truces, forma terribiles, capitibus magnis, collis longis, macilenta facie, lurido vultu, squalida barba, auribus hispidis, fronte torva, trucibus oculis, ore foetido, dentibus eq uineis, gutture flammivomo, faucibus tortis, labro lato, vocibus horrisonis, comis obustis, buccula crassa, pectore arduo, femoribus scabris, genibus nodatis, cruribus uncis, talo tumido, plantis aversis, ore patulo, clamoribus raucisonis’; OEVG XXI: ‘Hi wæron on ansyne egslice and hig hæfdon mycele heafda, and langne sweoran, and mægere ansyne: hi wæron fulice and orfyrme on heora beardum; and hi hæfdon ruge earan, and woh nebb and reðelice eagan, and fule muðas; and heora toþas wæron gelice horses twuxan; and him wæron þa þrotan mid lege gefylde, and hi wæron ongristlice on stefne: hi hæfdon woge sceancan, and mycele cneowu and hindan greate, and misscrence tan, and has hrymedon on stefnum.’ 41 Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, p. xxvi. 42 D. Calder, ‘Guthlac A and Guthlac B: Some Discriminations’, in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, ed. L. E. Nicholson and D. Warwick Frese (Notre Dame, Ind., 1975), p. 72; J. Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1999), p. 127.

34

Cameron, ‘Visions’. J. Kroll and B. Bachrach, The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics (London, 2005), p. 85. 36 C. Stancliffe, ‘Kings Who Opted Out’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies presented to J.M. WallaceHadrill, ed. C.P. Wormald, with D. Bullough and R. Collins (Oxford, 1983), pp. 154-76. 37 J. Hill, ‘The Soldier of Christ in Old English Prose and Poetry’, in Leeds Studies in English, new series, 12 (1981), pp. 57-80; Hamilton, ‘Diet and Digestion’ (cit. in n. 24); A.K. Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building’, Viator, 34 (2003), pp. 1-39. 35

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SALLY CRAWFORD men? In Guthlac A, the devils specifically warn Guthlac that he should leave their territory, because he will be unable to find or receive food - starvation, the devils warn, goes with the territory.43 But what do starving people look like?

Did the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon writer of Guthlac’s Life ever observe such extremes of starvation, and would his audience have recognised that the devils were emaciated? Given the evidence for periods of famine in Anglo-Saxon England, it is arguable that, such wasted bodies were part of the landscape of conversion-period England. However, the writer of Guthlac’s Life wanted to make a specific point about these devils - they were not any old devils, such as Cuthbert confronted and drove out from Farne Island; these were specifically British devils. Primo Levi interpreted his experience of starvation as being a process by which the prisoners were made monstrous, unmanned, reduced to beasts.49 Was the Anglo-Saxon link between starvation and the British coincidental, or was the hagiographer making a more specific point that Britons in eighth century East Anglia suffered food deprivation as consequence of low status?

In If this is a man, one of his accounts of his survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi offers several descriptions of starving prisoners.44 There are modern medical accounts of the physiological changes that take place in a starving person, but Levi's writing is particularly relevant here because it is the view of a non-medical observer, an everyman, describing what he saw and how those around him reacted to their particularly harsh environment. In particular, he noted the dehumanising effects of starvation on the body. In his narrative, he observed that hunger ravages and makes faces look unfriendly, that eyelids and cheeks swell and necks become thin, and that skin becomes corpse-like and receives impressions like wax.45 The effect of the water-based diet of soup was to cause ankles to swell and eyes to hollow, ‘conferring on all physiognomies a likeness of starvation’.46 A comparison of Primo Levi’s description of the effects of starvation on his own body, and that of the Anglo-Saxon writer describing Guthlac’s British devils, offers striking parallels. In one passage, Primo Levi grimly asserted that: ‘We know what we look like … we are ridiculous and repugnant … we have a swollen and yellow face … our neck is long and knobbly, like that of plucked chickens….and we smell’.47 The overlarge heads, sunken eyes, yellow skins, harsh voices, smell, long teeth, thick lips, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, and splayed feet of the Anglo-Saxon devils, all have their direct counterparts in Primo Levi’s observations of the distressing changes that extreme starvation brought about in the bodies of the author and his fellow prisoners.

Monks, too, however, practiced food deprivation through choice. The penitential use of food regulation was embedded in early Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical thought and practice.50 Bede recorded that Bishop Eadberht always spend the forty days before Christmas in ‘deep devotion, with abstinence, prayers, and tears’ on Holy Island, off the Northumbrian coast, and noted that St Cuthbert was ‘outstanding in his use of penitential abstinence’.51 Theodore’s Penitential recommended three times of fasting for laymen: Easter; Christmas; and Pentecost, while Bishop Cedd, trained in Irish monasticism, advised periods of abstinence to cleanse Lastingham, and the Life of St Columba records that he fasted two days in every week.52 Analyses of food restriction in religious contexts have drawn parallels between medieval fasting and modern anorexia, and there is evidence that fasting was taken to similar extremes by some Anglo-Saxon saints.53 Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert recorded that Cuthbert was miraculously able to grow barley on the island, and the acquisition of food plays a part in a number of Cuthbert’s miracles, but the Life indicates that starvation certainly contributed to his death. When questioned by a monk, the dying Saint Cuthbert coyly revealed five onions, one of which was marked by a few bites, which had been Cuthbert’s only food for five days.54 The starvation, minimal intake of fluids, old age and social

There is a case for suggesting, then, that the Anglo-Saxon writer’s description of the British devils was no random confusion of monstrosities, but a coherent list of the changes that extreme food deprivation makes on the human form. The very specific Guthlacian description of the British devils is without earlier parallels, though it was later echoed in the life of St Fursey, an Irish monk who lived in isolation in East Anglia, and whose devils also had ‘long extended necks and bronzed and swollen heads ... their bodies deformed and black and scrawny’, according to a twelfth-century account of his life.48

49

Levi, If This is a Man, p. 47. R. Meens, ‘Food Regulation and Penitentials’, Early Medieval Europe, 4 (1995), pp. 3-19. 51 Bede, Hist. Eccl., IV. 30 and IV. 28 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 444, 438). 52 B. Yorke, Religion, Politics and Society in Early Medieval Britain, 600-800 (Harlow, 2006), p. 221. 53 R.M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985); C. W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987); A.G. Carmichael, ‘Past Fasts: Medieval Saints with the Will to Starve’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 19 (1989), pp. 635-44. 54 Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 276-7. 50

43

Guthlac A, lines 274-5: ‘Ne þec mon hider mose fedeð, beoð þe hungor ond þurst hearde gewinnan.’ 44 P. Levi, If This is a Man (London, 1987), trans. P. Bailey; first published as Se questo è un uomo, 1958. 45 Ibid., pp. 54-5. 46 Ibid., p. 67. 47 Ibid., p. 148. 48 L. Dahl, The Roman Camp and the Irish Saint at Burgh Castle (London, 1913), p. 81.

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FOOD, FASTING AND STARVATION: FOOD CONTROL AND BODY CONSCIOUSNESS IN EARLY ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND and metaphorically a battleground for salvation’.58 In direct contrast to the well-fed companionable, muscular, weaponbearing masculinity of the heroic literature, the early church in Anglo-Saxon England offered a new ideal, of mental strength through physical isolation and abstinence. The bulging bodies of the monstrous adversary and the victorious ideal warrior of Beowulf are transformed in the Life of Guthlac into the starving bodies of the devils and the fasting body of the triumphant saint.

isolation recorded for Cuthbert are all significant contributory factors in modern examples of natural mummification: the absorption of body fat during life as a result of prolonged starvation is a particular component leading to post-mortem mummification.55 In Anglo-Saxon England, masculinity was defined, in both the furnished burial ritual, and in heroic poetry, by weaponry and prodigious physical strength, but in the Guthlac story, the saint rejects the physical sword for a spiritual one, and the muscular body for a fasting one. In Old English heroic poetry, the ‘monstrous and heroic bodies have much in common’.56 Beowulf, confronted by the monster Grendel who fights with bare hands, also fights with bare hands and superhuman strength. If an Anglo-Saxon listener to the Life of Guthlac was familiar, as seems plausible, with the physical results of starvation, then the Guthlac story fits within this same heroic framework, within which the hero and the monsters are two versions of a similar physical body. In Beowulf, Beowulf and Grendel are matched in muscularity, while in Guthlac, both the British and the Saint are confronting starvation. In Beowulf, superhuman strength in the monster is monstrous, and put to monstrous purposes, while Beowulf’s extraordinary strength is heroic and put to heroic purposes. The audience of Guthlac would also have been aware of the parallel with St Anthony, who, when he finally emerged from his isolation, ‘was neither fat, like a man without exercise, nor lean from fasting and striving with demons, but was just the same as they had known him before’.57 The British demons were transformed by starvation into monsters, but, just as saintly bodies remained uncorrupted after death, so the tribulations of life, including starvation, which would lead unholy men to become ‘other’, did not affect the bodies of starving saints. In direct contrast to the emphasis placed by the secular elite on feasting and on excess of food, the Conversion to Christianity brought with it the idea that controlling the diet – fasting – could also be an expression of strength. This perception of food control had an early development in Christianity; ‘amid the chaos and depravity of the collapsing Roman Empire in the west, asceticism came to occupy the moral high ground; the pinnacle of virtue was to be found in a life devoted to austerity, in which appetites of all kinds ... were vigorously repressed. The human body was both literally

55

For a case study, see C. Campobasso, R. Falamingo, I. Grattagliano and V. Francesco, ‘The Mummified Corpse in a Domestic Setting’, The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 30 (2009), pp. 307-10, and see also S. Hönigschnabl, E. Schaden, M. Stichewirth, B. Schneider, N. Klupp, E. Kremeier, W. Lehner, W. Vycudilik, G. Bauer and D. Risser, ‘Discovery of Decomposed and Mummified Corpses in the Domestic Setting – A Marker of Social Isolation?’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 47 (2002), pp. 837-42. 56 Cohen, Medieval Identity, p. 134. 57 Yorke, Religion, Politics and Society, p. 221.

58

D. O’Sullivan, ‘Space, Silence and Shortages on Lindisfarne: The Archaeology of Asceticism’, in Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain: Essays in Honour of Rosemary Cramp, ed. H. Hamerow and A. MacGregor (Oxford, 2001), pp. 33-52, at 33-4.

105

Bede and Roman Britain Michael Lapidge

testantur’.3 In fact there are three points in the Historia ecclesiastica where Bede comments in detail on RomanoBritish monuments which were visible ‘to this day’ (usque hodie); these are: (1) the defensive stakes on the river Thames (I. ii. 1); (2) the ‘Antonine Wall’ (I. xii. 2); and (3) ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ (I. xii. 3). I treat these monuments in order.

It is well known that the first book of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica is devoted to Roman Britain, to the period stretching from the invasions of Julius Caesar (55-54 B.C.) and Claudius (43 A.D.) up until the time that the Roman central government abandoned Britain in the early fifth century (the date is traditionally given as 410), and Britain was settled by various Germanic peoples, an event which Bede describes as the aduentus Saxonum and dates variously to 446, 447 and 449.1 It is equally well known that Bede’s account of the topography and history of Roman Britain is almost entirely derivative, being drawn from earlier sources such as the Elder Pliny, Solinus, Eutropius, Orosius, and Gildas. For this reason, Bede’s account is neglected by modern students of the subject, perhaps rightly.2 Yet there is some small amount of evidence to suggest that Bede had access to Romano-British sources which have not yet been identified, and which (perhaps) no longer survive. It is the purpose of the present essay to collect this evidence and to ask what light, if any, it can shed on our knowledge of Roman Britain.

Near the beginning of the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede described Julius Caesar’s second invasion of Britain (54 B.C.) and the defence offered by the British leader Cassivellaunus as Caesar and his troops made their way northwards to the river Thames: in particular a set of sharpened stakes fixed in the river bottom to deter attackers. The ultimate source for the existence of these defensive stakes was the war commentaries of Julius Caesar himself – source unknown to Bede – who had written that when he reached the river Thames, he saw that Cassivellaunus had drawn up his troops on the northern bank. Caesar noted that, although the river could be forded at this point, the northern bank was protected by sharpened stakes fixed in the river bed and lying beneath the surface of the water:

Eye-witness observation

ripa autem erat acutis sudibus praefixisque munita, eiusdemque generis sub aqua defixae sudes flumine tegebantur.4

In the first place, it should not be forgotten that much more of the Romano-British landscape would have been visible in Bede’s day than is visible in the twenty-first century. Thus in speaking of the lowland zone – that is, that part of Roman Britain lying south of the uallum or fortified ditch which runs parallel to ‘Hadrian’s Wall’, intra uallum … ad plagam meridianam – Bede remarks that the Romans built ‘towns, lighthouses, bridges and roads’ which can be seen ‘to this day’: ‘ciuitates farus pontes et stratae ibidem factae usque hodie

However, because the river was not deep at this point, and in spite of the stakes, Caesar’s infantry and cavalry charged across it so suddenly that they put the British forces of Cassivellaunus to flight. Five centuries later the Roman historian Orosius, writing his Historiae adversum paganos in the aftermath of the Goths’ sack of Rome in 410, took over Caesar’s account with minor embellishment, by stating that the river was fordable in only one place, and that the Britons had fortified this place by fixing sharpened stakes in the riverbed:

1

I quote Bede from my own edition: Beda: Storia degli Inglesi, ed. M. Lapidge, trans. P. Chiesa, 2 vols. (Milan, 2008-10). For the various dates which Bede assigns to the aduentus Saxonum, see Hist. eccl., I. xv. 1 (449), I. xxiii. 1 (446), II. xiiii. 1 (447), and V. xxiii. 7 (446). 2 Cf. the comments of Charles Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896), II, p. 12 (‘It is no part of my plan to discuss the history of Roman Britain; especially as Bede’s account of it is based almost entirely on second-hand authorities’), and of Nicholas Brooks, ‘From British to English Christianity: Deconstructing Bede’s Interpretation of the Conversion’, in Conversion and Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. C. Karkov and N. Howe, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Studies, 2 (Tempe, AZ, 2006), pp. 1-30, at 6 (‘Most of these chapters have, I suspect, been seldom read by modern scholars, since Bede was here conflating known written sources and is not himself a primary authority’).

in huius [scil. the river Thames] ulteriore ripa Cassouellauno duce immensa hostium multitudo

3

Hist. eccl., I. xi. 2 (ed. Lapidge, I, p. 56). Note that the wording of this sentence is Bede’s own, and is not lifted from an earlier source such as Orosius, whose narrative Bede has been closely following up to this point. 4 Caesar, De bello Gallico, V. xviii. 3: ‘the (far) bank had been fortified with fixed and sharpened stakes, and the fixed stakes of this sort were hidden beneath the surface of the water.’

107

MICHAEL LAPIDGE consederat, ripamque fluminis ac paene totum sub aqua uadum acutissimis sudibus praestruxerat.5

nineteenth century extended for a couple of miles along the Middlesex shore of the Thames, from Kew Bridge to Isleworth Ferry.10 I treat these two locations in order, beginning with Coway Stakes.

Bede in turn based his account of the episode directly on Orosius, whom he quoted verbatim (as above); but following the quotation from Orosius, Bede added what seems to be a personal observation about the nature of the sudes (‘stakes’):6 ‘traces of these stakes are visible to this day, and it strikes those who examine them that the individual stakes are as thick as a human thigh and encased in lead and fixed immovably to the river bed’:

The earliest recorded attempt to identify the site of the fortified river-crossing described by Caesar with the Coway Stakes was made by the Elizabethan antiquary William Camden (1551-1623) in his Britannia of 1586.11 (It is striking, however, that in the first edition of Britannia [1586], Camden made no mention of the relevant passage in Bede, an omission which was rectified in later editions of the work.12) But Camden presented no evidence in support of his conjecture, and doubts inevitably came to be expressed about the identification. In 1773, for example, a local lawyer and antiquary, Daines Barrington, was taken across the river in a boat for the specific purpose of examining the stakes, and he expressed doubts that the stakes were intended for defensive purposes;13 he noted in particular that the row of stakes was aligned at right angles to the riverbank, not in parallel with it (as one would expect in the case of defensive stakes). Given the alignment of the stakes, Barrington suggested that they were the remnants of a fishing weir. But against this supposition it was argued in the early nineteenth century that the river curves at the very point where the stakes were positioned, so that any crossing of the ford would have involved not one but two passages through the row of stakes.14 Later in the century, the Celtic historian Edwin

quarum uestigia sudium ibidem usque hodie uisuntur, et uidetur inspectantibus quod singulae earum ad modum humani femoris grossae et circumfusae plumbo immobiliter erant in profundum fluminis infixae.7 Unfortunately, Bede did not specify where these defensive stakes were located, and there has been much speculation about their location. Although there are several places where the Thames was fordable in pre-Roman times and which could in theory have been the point of Caesar’s crossing,8 only two of the fords in question are known to have been protected by defensive stakes: the Coway Stakes, which, until some time in the early nineteenth century, were to be seen in the river between Walton-on-Thames to the south and Lower Halliford to the north, about two miles upstream from Walton Bridge;9 and the Brentford Stakes (fourteen miles downstream from the Coway Stakes), which until the late

10

VCH, Middlesex, I, p. 65, and VII, p. 113. W. Camden, Britannia, sive florentissimorum regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio (London, 1586), p. 175: ‘Sed eo impetu Rom. flumen ingressi sunt, cum capite solo ex aqua extarent, vt Britanni sustinere non possint, quin ripas demitterent, fugamque capesserent. Hac in re falsus esse non possum, cum hic vix vi pedes flumen sit altum, cum Coway Stakes a sudibus hodie locus dicatur, cumque Cassiuellani fines a mari circiter millia passuum LXXX. faciat Caesar, vbi traiectum statuit’ (‘But the Romans charged into the river with such force, with only their heads above the water, that the Britons could not withstand them, and indeed abandoned the bank and took to flight. I cannot deny that the river is scarcely six feet deep here, that the place is today called Coway Stakes, and that Caesar had advanced about 80 miles to the border of Cassiuellanus’s territory, to where he decided to cross’). For the distance of 80 miles, see below, n. 24. 12 For example, in the quarto edition of 1594, where Bede’s sentence (‘quarum uestigia … fluminis infixae’) was inserted with the simple comment inquit Beda on p. 217, and again in the folio edition of 1607, where the same insertion with the same comment was made on p. 216. 13 D. Barrington, ‘Remarks on Caesar’s Supposed Passage of the Thames’, Archaeologia, ii (1773), pp. 141-58. 14 O. Manning and W. Bray, The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, 3 vols. (London, 1804-14), II, pp. 759 and 780. More recently, Rice Holmes has noted that river-crossings by armies are always made in a diagonal, upstream direction (he quotes as his authority a nineteenth-century military manual by Lord Wolseley), and hence that ‘stakes planted in the direction indicated by 11

5

Orosius, Historiae adversum paganos, VI. ix. 6 (ed. K. Zangemeister, CSEL v (Vienna, 1882), p. 378); trans. I.W. Raymond, Seven Books of History against the Pagans: The Apology of Paulus Orosius (New York, 1936), p. 282: ‘On the further bank, a vast host of the enemy had taken its position and had planted very sharp stakes under the water along almost the entire ford.’ 6 It is customarily assumed that this statement cannot represent Bede’s own observation, since he had allegedly never travelled to southern England. Cf. Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, II, p. 13: ‘There is no reason to believe that Bede had ever been in the south of England.’ Equally there is no reason to believe that he had not. 7 Hist. eccl., I. ii. 1 (ed. Lapidge, I, p. 32). 8 F.H. Baring, ‘Caesar’s Crossing of the Thames’, English Historical Review, xxii (1907), pp. 726-8, who mentions (in addition to the Coway Stakes and Brentford Stakes discussed below) crossings at East Molesey (Hampton) and Kingston. See also the balanced survey by W. Page and E.M. Keate, ‘Romano-British Surrey’, VCH, Surrey, IV, pp. 343-78, esp. 344. The standard historical commentary on Caesar’s De bello Gallico mentions crossings at Kingston, Sunbury and Brentford, but not the Coway Stakes at Walton: C. Iulii Caesaris Commentarii de Bello Gallico, ed. F. Kraner and W. Dittenberger, 18th edn., by H. Meusel, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1960), II, p. 40. The fullest account of the possible location of the crossing by a student of Caesar is T. Rice Holmes, Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1936), pp. 692-8 (‘Where did Caesar cross the Thames?’). 9 VCH, Surrey, III, p. 467.

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BEDE AND ROMAN BRITAIN Guest suggested that the stakes were not placed for the sole purpose of inhibiting a crossing, but rather to control the flow of river traffic for the purposes of extracting tolls.15 In spite of these arguments in favour of Camden’s identification, the author of the most recent account of the Coway Stakes (1972) suggested that they ‘were timber posts intended for the purpose of marking the line of a cattle track which ran more or less parallel with the north bank of the Thames’.16 A more authoritative opinion in the context of Romano-British studies is that of Sheppard Frere, who doubted Camden’s identification and suggested that Bede’s description would more appropriately apply to the pilings of a Roman bridge.17 But would it? Whereas stakes the thickness of a human thigh would provide a substantial obstacle to river traffic, they would scarcely be thick enough to serve as bridge pilings; and what would be the point of sharpening bridge pilings and encasing them in lead? The Coway Stakes date at least from the medieval period (they were the subject of a parliamentary petition in 1421 by Thames fishermen, who wished to have them removed), and may be older. Possibly the matter could be resolved by dendrochronology or radiocarbon dating of the few surviving specimens which were given at various times to the British Museum (see below).

observations provide interesting context for Bede’s remarks, but none of them amounts to proof that what Bede (or his informant) saw was the Coway Stakes. The first editor of Bede to associate Camden’s conjecture concerning the Coway Stakes with the passage in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica was John Smith (1722),21 and Smith was followed in more recent times by Charles Plummer22 and myself.23 On balance, however, a somewhat more convincing case can be made in favour of identification with the Brentford Stakes. In the early years of the twentieth century, Sir Montagu Sharpe drew attention to the numerous remains of pile fortifications at Brentford which then extended for a couple of miles along the Middlesex shore of the river, from Kew Bridge to Isleworth Ferry; he presented arguments, largely based on the supposed most direct route of Caesar’s advance from embarcation and encampment at Deal northwards to the Thames – a distance said by Caesar himself to have been 80 (Roman) miles24 – and then on to the citadel of Cassivellaunus at Verulamium, in favour of identifying Caesar’s crossing with the Brentford Stakes.25 The passage of the ford was in the centre of the river palisade, which must once have consisted of some two to three thousand stakes. There is no doubt that this many stakes would have represented a very considerable feat of engineering, and would have presented a serious obstacle to an army attacking from across the river. Unfortunately, none of the Brentford Stakes survives in situ, most having been removed in dredging operations in the early twentieth century; the site is now buried beneath railway embankments.26 A specimen of the stakes was given by Montague Sharpe to the British Museum; it was said to be ‘an oak sapling, three feet long, fifteen inches in circumference, roughly pointed at the lower end, and black as ink.’27 Unfortunately, the present curators both of the ‘Prehistory and Europe’ and ‘Roman Britain’ departments of

None of the original Coway Stakes remains in situ today (most of them were apparently removed during dredging operations and the cutting of the Desborough Channel during the years 1930-5). A sample of the stakes was extracted from the riverbed by the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks and presented by him to the British Museum in 1778.18 In 1807 a local fisherman named Simmons is recorded as having taken a number of stakes from the river; he described how the stakes stood in two rows, about nine feet apart and at intervals of about four feet across the stream; he added that he had found them ‘shod with iron and the wood so hard as to turn the blade of an axe’.19 One of these stakes was exhibited at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute in 1869, and was confirmed to be of oak.20 All of these

of one of the “Coway Stakes” by Mr. Brackstone’). The stake was drawn from the Thames on 16 Oct. 1777. 21 Historiae ecclesiasticae gentis Anglorum libri quinque, auctore sancto & venerabili Baeda, ed. J. Smith (Cambridge, 1722), p. 42n.: ‘sudibus: a quibus Vadum Cowy stakes iuxta Lalam Cambdeno appellatur’ (‘stakes: from which the ford is called Cowy Stakes near Lalam [i.e. Laleham] by Camden’). 22 Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, II, p. 13. 23 Hist. eccl., ed. Lapidge, I, p. 293. 24 Caesar (De Bello Gallico, V. xi. 8) describes this distance as having amounted to 80 (Roman) miles, which is very nearly the distance from Deal to Brentford. 25 M. Sharpe, Bregant-forda and the Han-weal. A Paper on the Passage of Julius Caesar across the Thames at Brentford (Brentford, 1904), pp. 19-28, and idem, ‘The Great Ford Across the Lower Thames’, Archaeological Journal, lxiii [2nd ser. xiii] (1906), pp. 2539. 26 Sharpe, ‘The Great Ford’, p. 27. 27 Ibid., p. 28; the stake is illustrated in Sharpe’s pl. III.

Barrington would obviously have obstructed the passage’ (Ancient Britain and the Invasions, p. 694). 15 E. Guest, Origines Celticae (A Fragment) and other Contributions to the History of Britain, ed. W. Stubbs and C. Deedes (London, 1883), II, pp. 384-5, 388 and 391-2. 16 J. Stonebanks, Coway Stakes at Walton-on-Thames, Walton & Weybridge Local History Society Papers, ix (London, 1972), p. 9. 17 S. Frere, Britannia. A History of Roman Britain, 3rd edn. (London, 1987), p. 26 n. 5. 18 The BM reference is: Joseph Banks, Esq., ref. 1778-1-9 – or at least it was in 1972, according to Stonebanks, Coway Stakes, who measured the stake in 1972, and found it to be 46 in. long and 3¼ in. across at the thicker end: roughly equivalent to the size stated by Bede (ad modum humani femoris grossae). Stonebanks includes a drawing of the stake which he measured. 19 Manning and Bray, History and Antiquities … of Surrey, II, p. 759. 20 ‘Proceedings at Meetings of the Archaeological Institute’, Archaeological Journal, xvi (1869), pp. 174-214, at 202-3 (‘A portion

109

MICHAEL LAPIDGE wall and running across the country in parallel to it.33 The second coast-to-coast fortification, the ‘Antonine Wall’, lies much further north in Scotland, and ran from Carriden on the Firth of Forth to Old Kilpatrick on the Firth of Clyde.34 We know from the Life of Antoninus Pius in the same Historia Augusta that it was during his reign (138-61), and probably in 142, that the ‘Antonine Wall’ was constructed,35 a fact which is similarly confirmed by inscriptions.36 But Bede was not in a position to know any of this. The Historia Augusta was completely unknown in Anglo-Saxon England at any date. In lieu of a written source such as this, Bede was obliged to make do with vague accounts of Romano-British fortifications in the writings of Orosius and Gildas, and to interpret their accounts in the light of his own personal knowledge. His (conjectural) reconstruction of the sequence in which the walls were built is wholly mistaken, and wildly misdated, but nevertheless represents a respectable feat of historical analysis.

the British Museum have been unable to locate any of these stakes in their collections.28 Again, some light on the question might be shed if the stakes could be located and subjected to either dendrochronological or radiocarbon analysis. We can only conclude that what Bede (or his informant) saw was either the Coway Stakes or the Brentford Stakes, with the balance of probability tilted slightly in favour of the latter.29 Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica also contains detailed personal observations on the nature of the two defensive fortifications which traversed Roman Britain from coast to coast. The first of these is that now known as ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ (which ran from Wallsend on the river Tyne in the east to Bowness-onSolway in the west).30 We know that Hadrian’s Wall was built by the emperor Hadrian (117-38) during his stay in Britain in 122, from an explicit statement in the Life of Hadrian in the late-fourth-century Historia Augusta,31 and this statement is confirmed by the discovery of inscriptions which name the Roman legions (whose presence in Britain during Hadrian’s reign can be verified from independent sources) responsible for the construction of various sections of the wall.32 ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ consists not only of the stone wall running across the country, fortified with frequent fortlets and mile-castles, but also of a massive ditch and rampart, known as the uallum, lying to the south of the stone

The literary tradition known to Bede begins with Eutropius, whose Breviarium of Roman history was dedicated and presented to the emperor Valens in 369. Concerning Septimius Severus (emperor 193-211) and the rampart which he supposedly constructed, Eutropius writes: novissimum bellum in Britannia habuit [scil. Severus], utque receptas provincias omni securitate muniret,

28

Mrs Alex Garrett and Dr Sonja Marzinzik kindly tried to locate these stakes for me. 29 Cf. the conclusion of Rice Holmes (Ancient Britain and the Invasions, p. 742): ‘the reader will have understood that I do not pin my faith to Mr. Sharpe’s theory: I only think that it is less feebly supported than any other.’ 30 For a modern account of the nature and construction of Hadrian’s Wall, see D.J. Breeze and B. Dobson, Hadrian’s Wall, 4th edn. (Harmondsworth, 2000), esp. pp. 25-87; and for a lavishly illustrated guide book, see D. [J.] Breeze, Hadrian’s Wall, English Heritage (London, 2006). There is a valuable recent account of how Hadrian’s Wall was constructed by P. Hill, The Construction of Hadrian’s Wall (Stroud, 2006). On the ways in which the wall was intended to function, see the brilliant short essay by J.C. Mann, ‘The Function of Hadrian’s Wall’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., xviii (1990), pp. 51-4; and for an account of how Hadrian’s Wall is to be understood in the context of late Roman imperial fortifications, see V.A. Maxfield, ‘Hadrian’s Wall in its Imperial Setting’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., xviii (1990), pp. 1-28. 31 Scriptores [recte Scriptor] Historiae Augustae, Vita Hadriani, xi. 2: ‘Ergo conversis regio more militibus Britanniam petiit, in qua multa correxit murumque per octoginta milia passuum primus duxit, qui barbaros Romanosque divideret’ (‘Whereupon, having directed his soldiers in the manner of a king, he set out for Britain, where he corrected many (deficiencies) and was the first to construct a wall 80 miles in length, which was to separate the Romans from the barbarians’). 32 For the inscriptions, see esp. C.E. Stevens, The Building of Hadrian’s Wall (Kendal, 1966), and Hill, The Construction, p. 112. The legions in question were the II Augusta, VI Victrix and XX Valeria Victrix.

33

On the uallum, see Breeze and Dobson, Hadrian’s Wall, pp. 56-9, and Hill, The Construction, pp. 35-6, who notes that ‘the earthworks [i.e. uallum] south of the Wall … are unlike frontier works anywhere else in the empire’. The uallum (which ran continuously from the river Tyne at Milecastle 4 to Bowness) was apparently built to ensure the security of the Wall from the rear (south); it consists of a flat-bottomed ditch 20 Roman feet wide and 10 feet deep, with two mounds, one on each side, 20 feet high. The area between the stone wall and the uallum, some 120 feet across, was thus a military zone to which access could be strictly controlled. 34 For the Antonine Wall, see esp. W.S. Hanson and G.S. Maxwell, Rome’s North West Frontier: The Antonine Wall (Edinburgh, 1983); and, for an invaluable guide book, A.S. Robertson, The Antonine Wall, 4th edn., rev. L. Keppie (Glasgow, 1990). The application to have the Antonine Wall included as part of a World Heritage Site called ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ (2003) was accompanied by a flurry of lavishly illustrated accounts of the monument, notably D.J. Breeze, The Antonine Wall. The North West Frontier of the Roman Empire, Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments: Scotland (Edinburgh, 2004). The application was approved in July 2008. 35 Vita Antonini Pii, v. 4: ‘nam et Britannos per Lollium Vrbicum vicit legatum alio muro caespiticio summotis barbaris ducto’ (‘for he conquered the Britains through the agency of Lollius Urbicus his legate, and, when he had driven back the barbarians, built another wall, of turf’). 36 See L.J.F. Keppie, ‘The Building of the Antonine Wall: Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, cv (1974), pp. 151-65 (the evidence of the ‘Distance Slabs’).

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BEDE AND ROMAN BRITAIN lieu of CXXXII,44 a figure which would more nearly describe the ‘Antonine Wall’ (37 miles) than ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ (80 miles). But certainty is impossible. The matter is probably insoluble, unless the source which Eutropius used for his account of Severus should come to light.

vallum per CXXXII milia passuum a mari ad mare deduxit.37 The source of this information in Eutropius is unknown, but a very similar account is found in the slightly earlier (c. 360) treatise De Caesaribus by Sextus Aurelius Victor.38 (The somewhat later Life of Septimius Severus in the Historia Augusta is apparently based on Aurelius Victor, at least for the detail of the wall.)39 The general similarity of the accounts suggests that they derive ultimately from a common (lost and hypothetical) source, probably the so-called ‘Kaisergeschichte’.40 But such a derivation will not explain where Eutropius derived his detail concerning the length of the wall, and one wonders if he had direct access to the (lost) autobiography of Severus.41 During his campaign in Britain, Severus is known to have extended some of the forts on Hadrian’s Wall, and to have constructed at least one legionary fortress (Carpow) in the vicinity of the Antonine Wall,42 but is not known from other sources to have been involved in the construction (or extension) of either wall.43 It is therefore unclear to which wall Eutropius is referring. The term uallum could pertain to either, but the figure of 132 miles is irrelevant to both. It may be significant that, according to the apparatus criticus of Droysen, two manuscript witnesses (D and P) read XXXII in

Bede was certainly familiar with Eutropius,45 but in fact he derived his discussion of the ditch and rampart from the Historiae adversum paganos of Orosius (written c. 416). Orosius in turn based his account on Eutropius, adding a number of details but retaining Eutropius’s figure for the length of the fortification (132 miles): Seuerus uictor in Britannias defectu paene omnium sociorum trahitur. ubi magnis grauibusque proeliis saepe gestis receptam partem insulae a ceteris indomitis gentibus uallo distinguendam putauit. itaque magnam fossam firmissimumque uallum, crebris insuper turribus communitum, per centum triginta et duo milia passuum a mari ad mare duxit.46 Note in particular that Orosius has altered Eutropius’s mention of a simple uallum to magnam fossam firmissimumque uallum (whether on the basis of additional information is unknown). Accordingly, when in his chronological account of Roman Britain Bede arrived at the reign of Severus (Hist. eccl. I. v), he simply repeated – against the year A.D. 189 – what he found in Orosius. But he in turn amplified Orosius’s account by adding an explanation of the difference between a wall (murus) and a rampart (uallum), and by deleting the statement (inherited by Orosius from Eutropius) that the ditch and rampart stretched 132 miles from sea to sea (Bede’s additions to Orosius are underlined):

37

Breviarium, viii. 19 (ed. H. Droysen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi, II (Berlin, 1878), p. 148: ‘His last war was in Britain and, in order that he might protect with all possible security the provinces which he had recovered, he built a rampart for a hundred and thirty-two miles from sea to sea’ (trans. H.W. Bird, Eutropius: Breviarium (Liverpool, 1993), p. 54). 38 Aurelius Victor, De Caesaribus, c. xx (ed. F. Pichlmayr, Sexti Aurelii Victoris Liber de Caesaribus, rev. R. Gruendel (Leipzig, 1966), p. 99): ‘His maiora aggressus Britanniam, quoad ea utilis erat, pulsis hostibus muro munivit per transversam insulam ducto utrimque ad finem Oceani’; ‘He … then protected Britain, up to the point where the country was useful, with a wall which he built across the island right up to the Ocean at both ends’ (trans. H.W. Bird, Aurelius Victor: De Caesaribus (Liverpool, 1994) p. 23). 39 Vita Severi, xviii. 2: ‘Britanniam, quod maximum eius imperii decus est, muro per transversam insulam ducto utrimque ad finem Oceani munivit.’ Possibly these vague words mean no more than that Severus restored parts of one of the pre-existing walls. 40 See T.D. Barnes, The Sources of the Historia Augusta, Collection Latomus, clv (Brussels, 1978), pp. 91-7. 41 For the existence of which, see A.R. Birley, Septimius Severus: The African Emperor (London, 1988), p. 203. 42 On the activities of Severus in Scotland, see (briefly) Breeze and Dobson, Hadrian’s Wall, pp. 139-41, and esp. Birley, Septimius Severus, pp. 170-87; on Carpow, see Hanson and Maxwell, Rome’s North West Frontier, pp. 206-10. 43 Note the comments of J.P. Gillam and J.C. Mann, ‘The Northern British Frontier from Antoninus Pius to Caracalla’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., xlviii (1970), pp. 1-44, at p. 44: ‘Either Severus is wrongly credited with any wall-building, or rebuilding, at all, or, it might be claimed, the reference is merely to the postulated third period on the Antonine Wall … it may be that in fact no extensive reconstruction on either Wall was undertaken by Severus.’

Victor ergo [scil. Severus] ciuilium bellorum, quae ei grauissima occurrerant, in Brittanias defectu paene omnium sociorum trahitur. Vbi magnis grauibusque proeliis saepe gestis, receptam partem insulae a ceteris 44

These two witnesses (one a late manuscript, of the 14th century, now in the Vatican, the other the lost exemplar used at Monte Cassino by Paulus Diaconus in the late 8th century) represent a less reliable branch of the tradition, so that the correction XXXII is not certainly authorial. On the transmission of Eutropius, see L.D. Reynolds, ‘Eutropius’, in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L.D. Reynolds (Oxford, 1983), pp. 159-62, esp. p. 161. 45 Eutropius is cited by name at Hist. eccl., I. viii. 2 (ed. Lapidge, I, p. 50). 46 Historiae, VII. xvii. 7 (ed. Zangemeister, p. 475): ‘The victorious Severus was drawn to the British provinces by the revolt of almost all his allies. Having recovered part of the island after a number of stubbornly contested battles, he determined to shut it off by a wall from the other tribes that remained unsubdued. He therefore constructed a large ditch and a very strong rampart extending from sea to sea, a distance of one hundred and thirty-two miles’ (trans. Raymond, p. 347).

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MICHAEL LAPIDGE indomitis gentibus non muro, ut quidam aestimant, sed uallo distinguendam putauit. 2. Murus enim de lapidibus, uallum uero, quo ad repellendam uim hostium castra muniuntur, fit de caespitibus, quibus circumcisis e terra uelut murus exstruitur altus supra terram, ita ut in ante fossa de qua leuati sunt caespites, supra quam sudes de lignis fortissimis praefiguntur. Itaque Seuerus magnam fossam firmissimumque uallum, crebris insuper turribus communitum, a mari ad mare duxit.47

By this point of his narrative, however, Bede had ceased to rely on Orosius, and had been obliged to turn to an even less reliable source, namely the De excidio Britanniae of Gildas (a work possibly of late fifth-century date).50 Gildas describes a situation in Britain where, in the years following the usurpation and execution of Magnus Maximus (which we know from other sources to be datable to 383 and 388 respectively; Gildas never supplies dates)51 – let us say c. 400 – the Britons appealed to Rome for assistance in defending the province from marauding Picts and Irish. According to Gildas, the Romans dispatched a legion and defeated the marauders, whereupon ‘the British were told to construct across the island a wall linking the two seas’ (De excidio Britanniae 15.3). The British, however, made the wall out of turf rather than stone; and not surprisingly, says Gildas, the rampart proved ineffective as a defence. Gildas, characteristically, gives no indication of where this turf rampart was constructed, or what were the two seas which it linked. Bede took over Gildas’s account of this turf rampart as follows (the wording of Gildas as preserved by Bede is underlined):

Bede’s additions to Orosius raise many problems. In the first place, it is not known who were the authorities (quidam) who thought that Severus had erected a wall (murus) rather than a rampart (uallum).48 Bede’s description of how to construct a uallum is taken nearly verbatim from the late fourth-century military manual of Vegetius.49 The most pressing question, however, is which of the two walls – Hadrianic or Antonine – Bede thought that Orosius was referring to. The matter only becomes clear from a later chapter of the Historia ecclesiastica, where Bede mentions, unambiguously and in succession, the structures which we call the ‘Antonine Wall’ (I. xii. 2) and ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ (I. xii. 3).

Quibus mox legio destinatur armata quae, ubi insulam aduecta et congressa est cum hostibus, magnam eorum multitudinem sternens, ceteros sociorum finibus expulit, eosque interim a dirissima depressione liberatos hortata est instruere inter duo maria trans insulam murum, qui arcendis hostibus posset esse praesidio;52 sicque domum cum triumpho magno reuersa est. At insulani murum, quem iussi fuerant, non tam lapidibus quam caespitibus construentes, utpote nullum tanti operis artificem habentes, ad nihil utilem statuunt.53

47

Hist. eccl., I. v. 1-2 (ed. Lapidge, I, pp. 36-8): ‘After having been victorious in the civil wars, which had afflicted him grievously, Severus was drawn to Britain by the desertion of almost all his allies stationed there. After fighting many great and serious battles there, he decided to separate that part over which he had regained control from the remaining unconquered tribes, not by means of a wall – as some people think – but by a rampart. For a wall is made of stones, but a rampart, fortified with camps in order to repel enemy attack, is made of turves cut from the earth and raised above it like a high wall, leaving a ditch in front of it from which the turves have been cut; the rampart is then surmounted by fixed stakes cut from hard wood. Thus Severus constructed a mighty ditch and a powerful rampart, fortified by many towers, from sea to sea.’ 48 In his De Caesaribus, Aurelius Victor had stated that Severus fortified Britain with a ‘wall’ (muro munivit: see above, n. 38), and Aurelius Victor was followed by the author of the Life of Severus in the Historia Augusta (above, n. 39). But there is no independent evidence that Bede was familiar with, or had access to, either of these works. 49 Epitoma rei militaris, i. 24. 1 and 4 (ed. M.D. Reeve (Oxford, 2004), p. 27): ‘caespites circumciduntur e terra et ex his velut murus instruitur, altus tribus pedibus supra terram, ita ut in ante sit fossa de qua levati sunt caespites … 4. supra quam sudes de lignis fortissimis, quas milites portare consueverant, praefiguntur’; ‘turves are cut from the earth and from them a kind of wall is built, 3 ft. high above the ground, with the fosse from which the turves were lifted in front … Above are fixed stakes of very strong wood, which the soldiers are accustomed to carry with them’ (trans. N.P. Milner, Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science, 2nd edn. (Liverpool, 1996), p. 24). A uallum so described was intended to provide temporary protection for a marching camp; the uallum alongside Hadrian’s Wall was of vastly different proportions (see above, n. 33), as even Bede must have realized.

50

Ed. T. Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi, XIII (Berlin, 1898), pp. 25-88; trans. M. Winterbottom, Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works (Chichester, 2002), pp. 13-79. 51 See J. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court A.D. 364-425 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 173-82, and P.J. Casey, ‘Magnus Maximus in Britain: A Reappraisal’, in The End of Roman Britain, ed. P.J. Casey, BAR British Series 71 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 66-79. 52 At a later point of the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede adumbrates this wording in describing Hadrian’s Wall at Hexham: ‘est autem locus iuxta murum illum ad aquilonem, quo Romani quondam ob arcendos barbarorum impetus totam a mari ad mare praecinxere Brittaniam, ut supra docuimus’ (III. ii. 2). 53 Hist. eccl., I. xii. 2 (ed. Lapidge, I, p. 58): ‘An armoured legion was sent to them straightway which, when they reached the island and engaged with the enemy, destroyed a vast multitude of them and expelled the remainder from the territories of the Britons. They then urged the Britons, freed from savage oppression for the time being, to construct a wall across the island between the two seas, which could serve as a fortification for keeping the enemy out; and thus the legion returned home in great triumph. But the islanders, constructing the wall not out of stone, as they had been commanded to do, but out of turves, inasmuch as they had no engineer knowledgeable in this kind of work, thereby rendered it useless.’

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BEDE AND ROMAN BRITAIN In the sequel to this passage, Bede remarks that traces of the rampart can be seen to the present day, and then specifies its location in such a way as to leave no doubt whatsoever that he is here describing what we now call the ‘Antonine Wall’. Although Gildas had given no indication of the location of the uallum which he described, Bede was presumably prompted to the identification by the fact that the ‘Antonine Wall’ consisted solely of a turf uallum and ditch.54

The final piece of evidence derived by Bede from personal observation concerns ‘Hadrian’s Wall’. In the paragraph following his description of the ‘Antonine Wall’, Bede returned to the narrative of Gildas concerning events in Britain in the early fifth century. Gildas had related (De excidio Britanniae, 16) that, after the failure of the previouslymentioned turf rampart, Britain was overrun by the old enemies (Picts and Irish), whereupon the Britons appealed a second time to the Romans for help (De excidio Britanniae, 17). According to Gildas, the Romans replied that they could no longer supply military aid to Britain, but in order to enable the Britons to defend themselves, they built for them a wall (murus) stretching from sea to sea, employing this time what Gildas calls the ‘normal method of construction’ (solito structurae more), that is to say, stone-work, using British labour and drawing on private and public funds (De excidio Britanniae, 18.2). As usual Gildas does not specify where this stone wall was located. When Bede came to adapt Gildas’s narrative, he identified this stone wall with the stone-work of what we call ‘Hadrian’s Wall’, and stated that it was built where ‘Severus had once constructed his uallum’ (once again, wording taken from Gildas is underlined):

Cuius operis ibidem facti, id est ualli latissimi et altissimi, usque hodie certissima uestigia cernere licet. Incipit autem duorum ferme milium spatio a monasterio Aebbercurnig ad occidentem in loco qui sermone Pictorum «Peanfahel», lingua autem Anglorum «Penneltun» appellatur, et tendens contra occidentem terminatur iuxta urbem Alcluith.55 This description evidently derives from personal observation. The monastery of Abercorn was established in 680 as the see of a bishopric by Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury; Trumwine was bishop there until 685, when he was forced to withdraw to the safety of Whitby following the defeat of King Ecgfrith by the Picts at the battle of Nechtansmere (now the village of Dunnichen, near Forfar). If the personal observation was Bede’s own, it would imply that, as a boy of twelve or less (he was born c. 673) Bede had visited Abercorn, perhaps in the company of his abbot. In any case, the account of the place-names seems also to imply local knowledge: in which case it may be significant that he sites the eastern extremity of the ‘Antonine Wall’ at Kinneil. We know from archaeology that the eastern extremity was in fact the fort at Carriden, two miles east of Kinneil on the Firth of Forth. Perhaps the two miles of ditch and rampart from Kinneil eastwards to Carriden were no longer visible in Bede’s day.56 In any case, if Bede had visited the area, he will have known that the statement in Orosius (inherited from a corrupt copy of Eutropius), to the effect that what we call the ‘Antonine Wall’ was 132 miles long, was nonsense; and this may be the reason why he suppressed the figure.

Quin etiam, quia et hoc sociis, quos delinquere cogebantur, aliquid commodi allaturum putabant, murum a mari ad mare recto tramite inter urbes, quae ibidem ob metum hostium factae fuerant, ubi et Seuerus quondam uallum fecerat, firmo de lapide locarunt. Quem uidelicet murum, hactenus famosum et conspicuum, sumtu publico priuatoque adiuncta secum Britannorum manu construebant, octo pedes latum et XII altum, recta ab oriente in occasum linea, ut usque hodie intuentibus clarum est.57 Crucial here is the statement that the stone wall (murus) was built ‘where Severus had once constructed his uallum’: that is to say, Bede did not realize that Hadrian’s uallum and wall were part of the one engineering work, but supposed that their construction was separated by two centuries. In any case, there is no need to doubt that the dimensions given by Bede derive from his personal observation: the stone wall which we know as Hadrian’s terminated at Wallsend, across the river Tyne from Jarrow and only two miles upstream. Although the original design was for a width of ten feet for the wall running west for 45 miles from Newcastle to the

54

Breeze and Dobson, Hadrian’s Wall, pp. 94-5. Hist. eccl., I. xii. 2 (ed. Lapidge, I, p. 58): ‘To the present day it is possible to see there the clearest traces of this earth-work, that is to say, of a wide and lofty rampart. It starts almost two miles to the west of the monastery of Abercorn at a place which is called Peanfahel by the Picts, but in the language of the English is Pennelton [nowadays Kinneil (Falkirk), some 2½ miles east of Grangemouth], and stretches westwards to the town of Alcluith [Dumbarton].’ 56 Nor are they visible today. See Robertson, The Antonine Wall, pp. 39-43 (‘no surface traces now remain’), and esp. G.B. Bailey and D.F. Devereux, ‘The Eastern Terminus of the Antonine Wall: A Review’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, cxvii (1987), pp. 93-104, at 98: ‘The last few miles of the Antonine Wall are amongst the most poorly preserved sections of the whole frontier and today the last visible length lies in the Kinneil Estate, some 4 km west of Carriden.’ It was apparently so in Bede’s day as well. 55

57

Hist. eccl., I. xii. 3 (ed. Lapidge, I, p. 60): ‘Moreover, because they decided to offer something of use to their allies, whom they were being compelled to abandon, they positioned a wall of firm stonework from sea to sea, on a direct line between the towns which had been built there out of fear of the enemy, where Severus had once built his (turf) rampart. From public and private funds, and with a co-opted British labour force, they constructed this wall, still famous and visible, to a width of eight feet and a height of twelve, in a straight line from east to west, as is evident to observers up to the present day.’

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MICHAEL LAPIDGE river Irthing,58 the later extension eastwards from Newcastle to Wallsend was built in the narrower gauge of eight (Roman) feet or less:59 precisely the figure given by Bede. The original height of the wall is less certain: it may have been designed to be fifteen (Roman) feet high, but where its original height can be measured (as, for example, at milecastle 48 at Poltross Burn), the height is twelve (Roman) feet:60 again, precisely what Bede says.

whose full name was M. Aurelius Antoninus.63 The work consists of 225 separate routes along roads of the Roman empire, and is thought to have been compiled for Caracalla’s planned progress to the eastern provinces in 214-15; in its surviving form, it contains materials of an earlier date, as well as later additions. The British section consists of fifteen separate land itineraries.64 Is it possible that Bede had access to the entire British section of the ‘Antonine Itinerary’ in some form, as his specific reference to the distance from Boulogne to Richborough would seem to suggest? In addition to this reference, Bede gives at various points of the Historia ecclesiastica the Latin names of a number of Roman civic territories in forms given by the British itineraries in the ‘Antonine Itinerary’.65 For example, Iter I sets out a route proceeding southwards from Bremenio (High Rochester, north of Hadrian’s Wall) to Praetorio (probably Brough on Humber), passing by way of Cataractoni (Catterick), Eburacum (York) and Derventione (Malton).66 Bede refers to Catterick as Cataractoni at III. xiiii. 3;67 to York as Eburacum at numerous points of the Historia ecclesiastica;68 and to the river Derwent (rather than the

To sum up Bede’s understanding of the sequence of wall construction: first, the uallum which runs parallel to the south of Hadrian’s Wall was constructed by the emperor Severus (Hist. eccl. I. v. 1); and Severus’s construction of this uallum is referred to again at Historia ecclesiastica I. xi. 2. Secondly, in the period shortly after the downfall of Magnus Maximus, c. 400, the Antonine Wall was constructed by the Britons, without Roman assistance. Finally, at a later period still (early fifth century?), and with Roman assistance, the stone-work of Hadrian’s Wall was constructed ‘where Severus had once constructed his uallum’. Lost or unidentifiable Romano-British literary sources At various points of the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede refers to the opinions of earlier writers whom he classifies broadly as quidam (we have already noted one such example at I. v. 1: ut quidam aestimant). A telling example occurs in the very first chapter of the work, where Bede quotes the words of Pliny the Elder to the effect that the port of Richborough lay across the English Channel separated from Boulogne by a distance of fifty miles.61 But at this point Bede adds a sentence to qualify the distance given by Pliny: siue, ut quidam scripsere, stadiorum CCCCL (‘or, as some have written, 450 stades’). The very precise figure of 450 stades indicates fairly clearly that Bede’s unspecified source here is the so-called ‘Antonine Itinerary’ (Itinerarium Antoninum), where the first section of the British itineraries begins with the following sentence: ‘a Gessoriaco de Gallis Ritupis in portu Brittaniarum stadia numero CCCCL’.62 The ‘Antonine Itinerary’ is apparently a compilation of the early third century AD. The ‘Antoninus’ in question is not the aforementioned emperor of that name who built the defensive uallum in Scotland, but more probably Caracalla (198-217), the son of Septimius Severus,

63

The attribution to Caracalla was first made by D. van Berchem, ‘L’annone militaire dans l’empire romain au IIIe siècle’, Mémoires de la Société nationale des Antiquaires, xxiv [= 8th ser., x] (1937), pp. 117-202, at 166-81. See also the more recent arguments of E.W. Black, ‘The Antonine Itinerary: Aspects of Government in Roman Briatin’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, iii. 3 (1984), pp. 109-21, who argues that the British itinera, in particular Iter V, could well be journeys undertaken during the expeditio Britannica in 208-11 by Septimius Severus and his sons (Caracalla and Geta). 64 Itineraria Romana, ed. Cuntz, pp. 71-5. There is an excellent account of the British section by A.L.F. Rivet, ‘The British Section of the Antonine Itinerary’, Britannia, i (1970), pp. 34-68 (see also the criticisms of this account by W. Rodwell, ‘Milestones, Civic Territories and the Antonine Itinerary’, Britannia, vi (1975), pp. 76101). Rivet’s discussion is incorporated in A.L.F. Rivet and C. Smith, The Place-Names of Roman Britain (London, 1979), pp. 15080, where each of the fifteen British itineraries is reprinted (from Cuntz) and discussed in detail. See also the brief account in I.D. Margary, Roman Roads in Britain, 3rd edn. (London, 1973), pp. 524-33. 65 See the excellent discussion by C. Smith, ‘Romano-British PlaceNames in Bede’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, i (1979), pp. 1-19. 66 Itineraria Romana, ed. Cuntz, p. 71; see also Margary, Roman Roads, p. 527 and Black, ‘The Antonine Itinerary’, pp. 112-13, with discussion and map by Rivet and Smith, The Place-Names, pp. 155-7 and Fig. 11. 67 At Hist. eccl., II. xiiii. 2, Bede refers to Catterick erroneously as Cataracta; but, as Smith notes (‘Romano-British Place-Names in Bede’, p. 5), the latter form probably results from interference with Latin cataracta (‘rapids’), referring to the rapids on the river Swale above Catterick. 68 Hist. eccl., I. v. 2, II. xiii. 4, II. xx. 2, IIII. xii. 3, IIII. xxi. 5, V. iii. 1 and V. xix. 7. An alternative (feminine) form – Eburaca (ciuitas) – is given at I. xxix. 2 and 3 (in a letter of Gregory the Great) and V.

58

Breeze and Dobson, Hadrian’s Wall, p. 28. Ibid., p. 85. 60 Ibid., p. 31. 61 Hist. eccl., I. i. 1 (ed. Lapidge, I, p. 22): ‘interposito mari a Gessoriaco Morinorum gentis litore proximo, traiectu milium L’ (from Pliny, Nat. Hist., iv. 16 (102): ‘Albion … abest a Gesoriaco Morinorum gentis litore proximo traiectu L’). 62 Itineraria Romana, ed. O. Cuntz (Leipzig, 1929), p. 71: ‘from Boulogne in Gaul to the port of Richborough in the British provinces, 450 stades’. 59

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BEDE AND ROMAN BRITAIN given throughout the ‘Antonine Itinerary’.73 In sum, the evidence suggests that Bede had access to some official record of the imperial or post-imperial period, similar (but not identical) to parts of the British section of the ‘Antonine Itinerary’, presumptively of Romano-British origin, but no longer extant. What this official record might have been can only be a matter of conjecture.74

settlement) as Deruentio at II. ix. 5. Iter II begins at Birrens (Blatobulgio), to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, and then proceeds southwards through the entire province, ending at Richborough (Ritupis) in Kent, passing by way of several Romano-British sites named by Bede:69 Luguvallo (Carlisle) mentioned by Bede as Lugubaliam at IIII. xxvii. 2,70 Cataractone (Catterick) once again, Eburacum (York) once again, Calcaria (Tadcaster) as at IIII. xxi. 3, and Camboduno (probably somewhere within the modern city of Leeds) at II. xiiii. 2. Of all these forms, Calcaria, Cataractone, Camboduno and Deruentio are not attested in any of the other classical sources known to Bede. The supposition that Bede had access to the British itineraries of the ‘Antonine Itinerary’ would help to account for the correct forms in which he gives these four names, and would help to confirm the striking evidence of his statement concerning the 450 stades’ distance from Boulogne to Richborough.

Unfortunately, the transmissional history of the ‘Antonine Itinerary’ does not throw any light on the problem. Although the work is preserved in a number of relatively early manuscripts, one of them dating from Bede’s lifetime, there is no evidence that it was ever known in the British Isles. The tradition has two branches: one headed by a late-seventhcentury uncial manuscript of Spanish origin, now in the Escorial,75 the other by two eighth-century uncial manuscripts of probable French origin, one in Vienna (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, lat. 181),76 the other in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 18248).77 Only the latter branch is relevant to Bede, inasmuch as the former branch (headed by the Escorial manuscript) lacks the British section altogether. However, there is no reason to think that Bede had access to a complete text of the ‘Antonine Itinerary’, but only to a fragmentary text which corresponded in some way to the British Itinera I and II. For these reasons, Colin Smith was no doubt right to suggest that Bede’s source was a Latin text of Romano-British origin made and preserved in Britain, but now lost.78

But there are problems in the supposition that Bede knew the British itineraries in the form in which they have come down to us. For example, Iter V begins at London and heads northwards to Carlisle, passing among others through Cambridge (Duroliponte) and Littleborough (Segeloci).71 Bede was apparently unaware of the Roman names of either of these places. He refers to Cambridge by its English name as Grantacaestir (IIII. xvii. 3: ‘quae lingua Anglorum Grantacaestir uocatur’), and Littleborough by its English name as Tiouulfingacaestir (II. xvi. 2: ‘in fluuio Trenta iuxta ciuitatem quae lingua Anglorum Tiouulfingacaestir uocatur’). An even more serious obstacle to the assumption that Bede had access to the British section of the ‘Antonine Itinerary’ in the form in which it has been preserved, is that he consistently and erroneously refers to London in the feminine form Lundonia,72 not Londinium, as it is correctly

The Historia ecclesiastica preserves traces of another lost Latin source, of late imperial date and possibly of Romano-British origin. In Hist. eccl. V. ix. 1, Bede describes the proposed journey of Ecgberht to continental Germany, and adds a note on the peoples (whom he calls Garmani, ‘Germans’) who inhabit these regions: ‘Sunt autem Fresones, Rugini, Danai, 73

E.g. in Itinera II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and IX. It has recently been suggested that Bede might have seen the lost portion of the ‘Peutinger Table’, but no remotely convincing evidence was offered in support of this suggestion: M.J. Ferrar, ‘The Venerable Bede and the Tabula Peutingeriana’, The Cartographic Journal, xlii (2005), pp. 157-67. On the ‘Peutinger Table’, see the brief but helpful remarks of Rivet and Smith, The Place-Names, pp. 149-50. 75 El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, R. II. 18, which is dated by E.A. Lowe to the late seventh century (s. viiex): Codices Latini Antiquiores, ed. E.A. Lowe, 11 vols. and Supp. (Oxford, 1934-71), XI, no. 1631. 76 Codices Latini Antiquiores, ed. Lowe, X, no. 1473. 77 Ibid., V, no. 673. The text of the ‘Antonine Itinerary’ is preserved as the lower script of a palimpsest; it was unknown to the most recent editor of the work, Otto Cuntz (see above, n. 62). 78 ‘Romano-British Place-Names in Bede’, pp. 5-6: ‘In the nature of things they [scil. the Latin forms Calcaria, Cambodunum, Cataractone, and Deruentio] came to Bede … not from some oral British source but in some Latin text or texts not now known to us; and since the names are those of relatively unimportant places and a less than major river, that Latin text is likely to have been a local one made and preserved within Britain.’

xix. 9 (in the witness-list to a Church council in Rome). The two exceptions suggest that the form used by the papal curia in the 7th century was Eburaca, but that, left to his own devices, Bede used the correct Romano-British form Eburacum. 69 Itineraria Romana, ed. Cuntz, p. 72; see also Margary, Roman Roads, pp. 527-8, and Black, ‘The Antonine Itinerary’, p. 113, with discussion by Rivet and Smith, The Place-Names, pp. 157-60 and fig. 12. 70 Note that, as in the cases of Eburaca and Lundonia, Bede has converted the transmitted Romano-British form into a feminine noun (Lugubalia). 71 Itineraria Romana, ed. Cuntz, pp. 72-3, and Margary, Roman Roads, pp. 529-30, with discussion by Rivet and Smith, The PlaceNames, pp. 162-4. 72 Hist. eccl., I. xxix. 2 (quoting a letter by Gregory the Great), II. iii. 1, III. vii. 4, IIII. vi. 2, IIII. xi. 1, IIII. xii. 1 and IIII. xx. 3. It is possible that Bede, out of reverence for Gregory the Great, simply adopted the erroneous form used by the pope in his letter to Augustine of Canterbury (cited in Hist. eccl., I. xxix); cf. his use of the feminine form for York (above, n. 68), and the remarks of Smith, ‘Romano-British Place-Names in Bede’, pp. 14-15.

74

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MICHAEL LAPIDGE debated by archaeologists in recent years.83 The focus of the discussion has been on towns which were inhabited both in Roman and Anglo-Saxon times, and which might therefore offer evidence of continuous occupation (notably Canterbury, Chichester, Cirencester, Colchester, Exeter, Gloucester, Leicester, Lincoln, London, Winchester, and York). Whereas an earlier generation of archaeologists was inclined to argue for continuous occupation of these towns,84 arguments against such continuity have recently been advanced with particular vigour:85 and, even more recently, that for continuity has been restated with equal vigour.86 It is not for a non-archaeologist to adjudicate in matters involving such complex evidence, but the debate is obviously of direct relevance to the question of continuity between the RomanoBritish and the Anglo-Saxon church, since continuity would offer a context for the transmission of Latin writings of the Romano-British church to Anglo-Saxon England. Christianity was established in Britain by the third century; and it is reasonable to assume that the establishment would have entailed the creation of bishoprics in the principal towns of the diocese, given that British bishops attended church

Hunni, Antiqui Saxones, Boructuari’. Although some of these peoples – Frisians (Fresones) and Old Saxons (Antiqui Saxones) – were contemporary with Ecgberht and Bede himself, others, notably the Rugini, Hunni and Boructuari, had long since ceased to have an independent existence, and had been swallowed up into larger Germanic polities. The Rugini are presumably identical with the Rugii mentioned by Tacitus (Germania, c. xliii) who once inhabited the Baltic littoral (first century AD), between the rivers Vistula in the west and Oder in the east (it is possible that the Baltic island of Rügen bears their name).79 After being driven out of their Baltic homeland by the expansion of the Goths (third century AD), the Rugii briefly established a kingdom on the Danube, where they were absorbed into the larger empire of the Ostrogoths. They are last heard of in 541, when they are mentioned by Procopius (Bellum Gothicum, iii. 2). The Huns (Hunni) were not a Germanic people, but were eastern nomads of Mongolian origin who burst on western Europe in the mid fifth century, reached their apogee under Attila (43453), but dispersed soon after his death.80 The Boructuari are probably identical with the Bructeri mentioned by Tacitus (Germania, c. xxxiii), who from the first century AD inhabited a territory in north-central Germany with its geographical centre in Münster.81 They are mentioned by Sidonius Apollinaris (Carm., vii. 324) as one of the tribes who attacked the Roman empire during the reign of Avitus (455-6), and appear in the historical record for the last time at the end of the fifth century (Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, ii. 9). In sum, Bede appears to have derived his information on the peoples of Germany from a document which dated from no later than the fifth century.82 Possibly, then, it is another of the imperial or post-imperial texts which came to Bede from somewhere in Roman Britain. What were the mechanisms by which texts could be transmitted from late Roman Britain to the early Anglo-Saxon church?

83

For an introduction to the debate, see Debating Late Antiquity in Britain A.D. 300-700, ed. R. Collins and J. Gerrard, BAR British Series 365 (Oxford, 2004). The case against continuity is put by Neil Faulkner, ‘The Case for the Dark Ages’ (pp. 5-12); that for continuity by Martin Henig, ‘Remaining Roman in Britain AD 300700: The Evidence of Portable Art’ (pp. 13-23). See also N. Faulkner and R. Reece, ‘The Debate about the End: A Review of Evidence and Methods’, Archaeological Journal, clix (2002), pp. 5976. 84 S.S. Frere, ‘The End of Towns in Roman Britain’, in The Civitas Capitals of Roman Britain, ed. J.S. Wacher (Leicester, 1966), pp. 87100, esp. 87: ‘They [scil. the towns listed above] might have been reoccupied after a period of emptiness … but it is perhaps more likely that they never ceased to be occupied.’ 85 M. Fulford, ‘Pottery Production and Trade at the End of Roman Britain: The Case Against Continuity’, in The End of Roman Britain, ed. Casey, pp. 120-32; D.A. Brooks, ‘A Review of the Evidence for Continuity in British Towns in the 5th and 6th Centuries’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, v. 1 (1986), pp. 77-102; idem, ‘The Case for Continuity in Fifth-Century Canterbury Reexamined’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, vii. 1 (1988), pp. 99-113; and N. Faulkner, The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain (Stroud, 2000). The case against continuity is adopted by Martin Millett, The Romanization of Britain (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 221-3. 86 See, for example, Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Winchester: From Venta to Wintancaestir’, in Pagans and Christians – from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Papers in Honour of Martin Henig, Presented on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. L. Gilmour, BAR International Series 1610 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 189214, esp. pp. 195 and 203 (‘After the collapse of the Roman administration in the early or mid 5th century, Winchester continued for centuries to be a centre for the exercise of authority and lordship over a surrounding territory’, etc.). The most thorough statement of the case for continuity is by Martin Henig, ‘The Fate of Late Roman Towns’, in The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, ed. S Crawford, H. Hamerow and D. Hinton (Oxford, forthcoming).

Continuity between Roman Britain and early AngloSaxon England: the Literary Evidence The question of continuity between Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England is one which has been intensely

79

See Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 35 vols. (Berlin and New York, 1973-2007), XXV, pp. 417-27, and J.G.C. Anderson, Tacitus: Germania (Oxford, 1938), p. 203. 80 Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, XV, pp. 246-61, and E.A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948). 81 Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, III, pp. 581-5, and Anderson, Tacitus: Germania, pp. 160-1. 82 As was first suggested by James Campbell in a book review in Studia Hibernica, xv (1975), p. 179; reiterated by J.M. WallaceHadrill, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1988), p. 181.

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BEDE AND ROMAN BRITAIN councils at Arles (314) and Rimini (359). It is a reasonable conjecture that there was a bishopric for each province of Roman Britain: one in London for Maxima Caesariensis; in Cirencester for Britannia Prima; in Lincoln for Flavia Caesariensis; in York for Britannia Secunda; and perhaps in Carlisle for Valentia.87 (Perhaps there were other bishoprics as well; if so, their location is unknown.) In none of these cases is it possible to trace the continuous existence of a bishopric from late Roman to Anglo-Saxon times: presumably a reflex of the discontinuity which archaeologists have remarked in Romano-British towns. Yet Bede himself provides evidence that, as late as the mid seventh century, at least two bishops of British sees were able to participate in the consecration of an Anglo-Saxon bishop (Chad): ‘et ab illo [scil. Wine, English bishop of Winchester] est uir praefatus [scil. Chad] consecratus antistes, assumtis in societatem ordinationis duobus de Brettonum gente episcopis.’88 It is unfortunate that Bede does not name the sees which these two British bishops represented. (From Hist. eccl. II. ii. 3 we learn that there were seven British bishops in post c. 600; but again, it is not possible to identify their sees.) Were these sees located in former Romano-British towns in western regions of the island which the advancing Anglo-Saxon settlers had not yet reached? One can only guess; possibilities might include Caerwent, a former civitas-capital (Venta Silurum),89 or smaller settlements such as Sherborne.90 The anecdote reveals that – in spite of the general tenor of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica – there was some sort of contact between the British and Anglo-Saxon churches. Through contacts such as this, Latin writings of Romano-British origin could have been transmitted to the Anglo-Saxon church.

late seventh century, a copy of the work was available in Canterbury, where it was studied and commented on in the school of Archbishop Theodore (668-90) and Abbot Hadrian.92 Gildas had drawn on other Romano-British texts, and these included a Passio S. Albani, probably a work of fifth-century date; in any event, this work had travelled to England where it was available to Bede at MonkwearmouthJarrow in the early eighth century.93 A work by Pelagius –an author known to be of Romano-British origin – namely his Expositiones .xiii. epistularum Pauli, was available in early medieval (seventh-century) Wales, whether or not it was composed there;94 by the eighth century it had travelled to Northumbria, where it was laid under contribution for the (unprinted) glosses to the Pauline epistles in a manuscript now in Trinity College, Cambridge.95 These few cases of textual transmission – and perhaps more remain to be discovered – provide a context for the transmission to Bede’s monastery of the fragmentary Romano-British itinera and other imperial and post-imperial texts whose existence I have surmised in the preceding pages.

There is a small corpus of such writings. First and most importantly, the De excidio Britanniae of Gildas, which was composed in the late fifth or early sixth century, in a church – probably a monastery – in some area of the lowland zone which had not yet come under Anglo-Saxon control.91 By the 87

Brooks, ‘From British to English Christianity’, pp. 2-4. Hist. eccl., III. xxviii. 2: ‘and the aforementioned man (Chad) was consecrated a bishop by Wine, who was joined for the ordination by two British bishops.’ 89 W. Davies, ‘Roman Settlements and Post-Roman Estates in South-East Wales’, in The End of Roman Britain, ed. Casey, pp. 15373, esp. 154 and 162 nn. 4-5. 90 See K. Barker, ‘Sherborne in Dorset: an Early Ecclesiastical Settlement and its Estate’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, iii (1984), pp. 1-33, who suggests that Sherborne, to which Aldhelm was appointed the first English bishop in 705 or 706, was an earlier British bishopric named Lanprobi. 91 R. Sharpe, ‘Martyrs and Local Saints in Late Antique Britain’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. A. Thacker and R. Sharpe (Oxford, 2002), pp. 75-159, who comments on the location of Gildas as follows (p. 108): ‘The British still controlled a substantial romanized area stretching from (say) Wroxeter in Shropshire down through Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and western Wiltshire into Dorset and the south 88

coast. Within that belt we may take our pick. The most plausible territory seems to me to be the area of towns and villas that includes Cirencester, Gloucester, and Bath, perhaps extending further into Somerset, which did not come under English control until the end of the sixth century or later.’ 92 See M. Lapidge, ‘The School of Theodore and Hadrian’, AngloSaxon England, 15 (1986), pp. 45-72, at 54-5. 93 R. Sharpe, ‘The Late Antique Passion of St Alban’, in Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art, and Archaeology, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, xxiv (2001), pp. 30-7. 94 D. Dumville, ‘Late-Seventh- or Eighth-Century Evidence for British Transmission of Pelagius’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, x (Winter 1985), pp. 39-52. 95 Codices Latini Antiquiores, ed. Lowe, II, 2nd edn. (1972), no. 133 (Cambridge, Trinity College, B. 10. 5).

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Questioning Bede James Campbell

Bede says nothing of his own family origins. The company he kept would suggest that his family was distinguished. His History was sent to king Ceolwulf for comment.5 He was on visiting terms with Ceolwulf’s cousin, Bishop Ecgberht of York, and could anticipate a long conversation with him.6 Particularly interesting is his account of a conversation with the great Bishop Wilfrid.7 Many of Bede’s records of conversations are staged accounts of what he thinks ought to have been said. This one is different and is on a matter of intimate royal importance. Bede says that he asked the bishop whether it was really true that Queen Æthelthryth had never gone to bed with her husband, King Ecgfrith. Wilfrid said he knew it was true, for the king had offered him treasure and land if he could get her to change her mind. Of course such involvements with the very great, though they could well indicate Bede’s own social standing, do not necessarily show more than the weight he enjoyed as an eminent man of God. The evidence which suggests that his status reflected more than that is a genealogical king-list for Lindsey.8 In this, Biscop son of Bede succeeds Bede son of Bubba. The compiler of the list can hardly have imagined that the Bede and Biscop known to us had been kings of Lindsey; and it seems unlikely, even if there are elements of artificiality in the list, that he inserted these important names, as it were at random. A fair guess seems to be that these were names associated with a particular family. If so, our Biscop and Bede were related and of very high birth. The value of this suggestive possible indication of status has been questioned by an important authority. Professor Brown maintains that there is ‘no evidence’ for Bede’s being ‘of noble even royal descent’.9 He brushes on one side the Lindsey king-list: ‘Since the text is late ninth-century and the author is acquainted with Bede’s work the genealogy may be invented’.10 However, Professor Dumville, in a careful analysis, maintains that the collection of genealogies certainly has a history going back to 787×796 and that it may well have originated in

It is over fifty years since I first met Bede and his Ecclesiastical History. Then, there was rather little to read about him and his book. Now there is a great deal, impressive in learning, daunting in bulk.1 Not so very long ago historians’ narratives of the history of the Church in early England consisted largely of paraphrase of Bede interspersed by warm expressions of great admiration for him. More learning has created a different intellectual climate. It is one in which the more one knows, the less one understands, but, paradoxically, the more one thinks one understands, the more one needs to know. The present paper does no more than raise some questions about Bede and his world. The moving, almost mesmeric, power of Bede’s prose is strong in his brief passage of autobiography.2 As often, it matters to take note of what he leaves out. He says ‘I have always been delighted to learn or to teach’, but does not here mention either a teacher or a pupil. It is reasonable to assume that he owed much to Ceolfrith. But the only teacher he names explicitly is Trumberht, a disciple of Cedd. Bede’s words describing him as ‘quidam de his qui me in scripturis erudiebant’ suggest that he was at some time at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, though there is no other evidence for this.3 Some of Bede’s pupils can be identified, but there is some doubt about possibly the most important of them. It is often, and plausibly, supposed that Ecgberht, afterwards archbishop of York, was one of his pupils. This would establish a crucial link between Bede and the school of York. But Henry Mayr-Harting warns us that the statement in the Life of Alcuin that Ecgberht was the pupil of Bede need mean no more than that he was ‘an avid student of Bede’s writings’, though that is not to say that the usual deduction lacks plausibility.4

1

For example J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005); G.H. Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge, 2009); S. Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600-900 (Cambridge, 2006); H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1972); P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600-800 (Cambridge, 1990); S. Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2006); P. Wormald, The Times of Bede. Studies in Early English Christian Society and its Historian, ed. S. Baxter (Oxford, 2006). 2 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, V. xxiv (ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 566-7). 3 Bede, Hist. Eccl., IV. iii (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 342-3). 4 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004), s.v.

5

Bede, Hist. Eccl., ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 2-3. Bede, Opera Historica, ed. C. Plummer, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896), I, p. 405. 7 Bede, Hist. Eccl., IV. xix (xvii) (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 3903). 8 D.N. Dumville, ‘The Anglian Collection of Royal Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, Anglo-Saxon England, 5 (1976), pp. 23-50, at 31, 33, 37. 9 Brown, Companion to Bede, p. 9. 10 Ibid., p. 9, n. 30. [Professor Brown rightly points out that in my article on Bede in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography I reversed the order in the king-list of Bede and Biscop.]. 6

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JAMES CAMPBELL Northumbria 765×779.11 The earliest manuscript comes from the early ninth century.12 Stenton had ‘no doubt that a series like this represents a genuine tradition’.13 Professor Foot has disproved Stenton’s dating of the last king on the list, so indicating the probability that he was earlier than Stenton had thought.14 She has also shown that some special features in the Lindsey list are attributable to accidents of manuscript transmission.15 In short, the list justifies the suggestion that a Bede and a Biscop might have been kings of Lindsey and strengthens the extent to which Bede’s high birth can be placed within the range of serious possibility.16

abbots; such appointments savoured of having two abbots in one monastery, something not acceptable to monastic thought of the time.22 The reason given for this by the ‘Anonymous’ is important. Biscop, he tells us, had frequently to be absent because the king needed his advice.23 We may recall Cedd’s summons by his king in the very midst of the ceremonies for the consecration of Lastingham.24 These episodes and also what we are told about Wilfrid’s relationship to kings suggests that rulers may have valued the services of such men as much or more as councillors than as counsellors.25

There is no doubt that Monkwearmouth-Jarrow had major royal and aristocratic relationships and involvements.17 Its major relationship to King Ecgfrith is plain and its very site near the border between Bernicia and Deira, with good water communication, may relate to the organisation of royal power.18 The founder-abbot Benedict Biscop and his successors Eosterwine (his cousin) and Ceolfrith were all aristocrats ‘well placed’.19 The high status of Eosterwine and Ceolfrith is brought out by the way in which Bede and the author of the ‘Anonymous’ life of Ceolfrith emphasise their participation in the life and work of their fellow monks.20 What is presented as humility has the ring of condescension.

Attention is drawn above to two of the points at which the emphases of Bede and the anonymous author of the life of Ceolfrith differ: the latter is more explicit on aristocratic dissension in the monastery and the nature of Biscop’s relationship to King Ecgfrith. Professor Wood has analysed acutely the likely significance of these and other divergences which suggest contrast between the attitudes of two different authors.26 Then, right at the end of his excellent account, he, as it were, turns on his heel, saying that maybe the ‘Anonymous’ and Bede were ‘one and the same person’, and then expresses doubt about this turn, reflecting on the likelihood of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow’s housing more than one ‘great intellectual’.27 My remarks are not made in any spirit of criticism. Professor Wood expresses precisely an inevitable state of being (to use a phrase of Shakespeare’s) a ‘hovering temporiser’ about the relationship between the ‘Anonymous’ and Bede. The nature of the difficulties illuminates possibilities. It has been more than once observed that the chief obstacle to attributing the Life of Ceolfrith to Bede is that he does not claim it for himself, but that its language and style provide a good case for his authorship. The language and style have been studied by Dr McClure; and she argues firmly for the Bedan case.28 Another work claiming to be by a Monkwearmouth-Jarrow author which can be plausibly attributed to Bede is Ceolfrith’s letter to Nechtan.29 Indeed there is only one work emanating from that monastery which is not demonstrably Bede’s work: viz.

Problems arising from aristocratic involvement are touched upon by both the anonymous author and Bede. The former says that Ceolfrith left the monastery for some time because of trouble with noblemen there.21 Both authors were concerned to give special explanations for the appointment of Eosterwine and Ceolfrith as what one may describe as sub11

Dumville, ‘The Anglian Collection…’, pp. 49-50. Ibid., pp. 24-5. 13 F.M. Stenton, ‘Lindsey and its Kings’, in Preparatory to AngloSaxon England, ed. D.M. Stenton (Oxford, 1970), pp. 127-35, at 128. 14 S. Foot, ‘The Kingdom of Lindsey’, in Pre-Viking Lindsey, ed. A. Vince, Lincoln Archaeological Studies no. 1 (Lincoln, 1993), pp. 124-40. 15 Ibid., p. 132. 16 For possible connections between Lindsey and Bernicia see B. Yorke, ‘Lindsey, The Lost Kingdom Found’, in Pre-Viking Lindsey, ed. Vince, pp.141-50, at 143. 17 I. Wood, The Most Holy Abbot Ceolfrid, Jarrow Lecture 1995 (n.p., n.d.), pp. 3-4. 18 I. Wood, ‘Monasteries and the Geography of Power in the Age of Bede’, Northern History, 45 (2008), pp. 11-26; Wood, Abbot Ceolfrid, pp. 5-6. 19 Wood, Abbot Ceolfrid, p. 6. 20 Bede, Historia Abbatum, in Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, pp. 36487, at 371-2; Historia Abbatum Auctore Anonymo, in Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, pp. 388-404, at 391-2. The ‘Anonymous’ indicates that Ceolfrith’s conformity to the monastic routine was not invariable. 21 Op. Hist., I, pp. 390-1. It is unclear whether the ‘Anonymous’ may have been Bede himself; see below. In references to the text I have called its author the ‘Anonymous’, but I accept the possibility that it may have been Bede himself. 12

22

Wood, Proprietary Church, p. 121. Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, p. 393. 24 Bede, Hist. Eccl., III. xxiii (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 286-7). 25 Ibid., III. xxv (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 296-7); The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 16-17. 26 Wood, Abbot Ceolfrid, esp. pp. 9-12. 27 Ibid., p. 18. That there were indeed other intellectuals of some weight at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow is hinted at, for example, by Bede’s introduction to his De Temporum Ratione in which he says that having written shorter works for his pupils, he is now writing at greater length for his fratres. Bedae Opera de Temporibus, ed. C.W. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1943), p. 175. 28 J. McClure, ‘Bede and the Life of Ceolfrid’, Peritia, 3 (1984), pp. 71-84. 29 Bede, Hist. Eccl., V. xxi (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 533-53); Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), II, p. 332. 23

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QUESTIONING BEDE Cuthbert’s description of Bede’s death.30 It is interesting that were it not for the cast-iron evidence that this description is not by Bede it could readily be attributed to him. He was at his dramatic best in the description of death-beds, often with free use of direct speech.31 It would seem that anyone who wishes to clinch the case for Bede as the author of the Vita Ceolfridi has to demonstrate not on transparently obvious ground, but on the basis of style, that Bede could not have been the author of Cuthbert’s letter.

Rule of St Benedict. The community should select one of their number distinguished by the virtue of his life and the wisdom of his learning. Susan Wood has shown us that such an election was not normal in this period.36 Nomination by a predecessor was a common way of succeeding to an abbacy, largely related to the basis of the tenure of an abbey’s lands. We may notice that there is no indication of election to the position of abbot, or quasi-abbot, of Eosterwine or Ceolfrith. Biscop’s appeal to St Benedict’s system has something of the air not of adherence to a norm but of resort to a means of avoiding what was normal. Biscop, so far as one can tell from the words put into his mouth by Bede, saw his brother’s succession as a serious and dangerous possibility.

It does look likely that there was a Monkwearmouth -Jarrow ‘house style’. If so, Bede’s Latin is a good tribute to it.32 Druhan sees Bede’s Latinity as essentially classical, with developments which could seem ‘natural’ but without those coarsenesses which he detects in the Latinity of such as Gregory of Tours. He finds Bede using Latin as ‘a truly living language’ (this may be related to the way in which it was spoken in his monastery).33 I am not competent to explore the possible origins of this Latinity. Could it have something to do with Monkwearmouth’s intimate relations with Rome, with the remarkable sojourn of John the Archchanter (perhaps with an entourage) at the monastery for a lengthy and, it may well be, influential stay, at about the time when Bede entered the community as a boy? John must have been a very important man and his English visit reflects a particularly close relationship with Rome, when it was important that English churchmen not only made pilgrimage there but also studied there.34

Bede’s homily on Biscop is, largely, on predictable lines; but there are elements in it which may deserve a little special attention.37 One is Bede’s judgement on Biscop’s having brought books and teachers, architects and craftsmen and, not least, papal privileges. Bede is pleased that the fruits of Biscop’s travels were such that it was no longer necessary to make such journeys. ‘We are able to repose within our monastery and in our secure liberty to serve Christ our lord’. This puts one in mind of what he says elsewhere about pilgrimage to Rome in a previous generation. ‘It was accounted a virtue in those days’.38 In relation to Biscop’s journeys Bede deploys a remarkable interpretation of the words in which Jesus says that anyone abandoning property and family ‘for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold’. Bede says that Biscop received the hundredfold when he went on journeys in Britain or abroad: ‘many people received him into their houses, desiring to supply him with the fruits of their lands. Many matrons tended the man of God as they would their own husbands and parents.’ One may doubt whether this was what Jesus actually had in mind; and suppose that here we have a reference to Biscop’s travelling in hospitable comfort (and not impossibly in some style).

Some of the circumstances, sometimes tense, of Bede’s monastery, emerge in what he says about its founder abbot, Benedict Biscop. His account of Benedict’s objurgations in his last days on succession to the abbacy is important.35 As Bede describes these, Benedict began by emphasising the necessity of not being guided by worldly rank in the choice of a new abbot; and in this he was plainly determined by detestation of the prospect of his own brother being elected. He would, he said, prefer that the site of the abbey should become a desert. He then went on to refer to, inter alia, the

In noting the extent to which the community at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow included noblemen (as did some others), one should weigh an important observation by Patrick Wormald: ‘Christianity had been successfully assimilated by a warrior nobility which had no intention of abandoning its culture, or seriously changing its way of life, but was willing to throw its traditions, customs, tastes and loyalties into the articulation of the new faith’.39 He exaggerated (as well he knew) in so far as Christianity plainly did lead to some aristocrats and others changing their way of

30

Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, pp. clx-clxiv. Plummer (Op. Hist., I, p. lxviii) observes that there are ‘no scenes in the whole of Bede’s history over which he lingers so lovingly as the holy deathbeds, some of them so like his own’. 32 W. Wetherbee, ‘Some Implications of Bede’s Latin Style’, in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England. Papers in Honour of the 1300th Anniversary of the Birth of Bede, Given at Cornell University in 1973 and 1974, ed. R.T. Farrell, BAR British Series 46, (Oxford, 1978), pp. 23-31, and the works there referred to at p. 29 n. 2; M. Lapidge, Bede the Poet, Jarrow Lecture 1993 (n.p., n.d.). 33 D.R. Druhan, The Syntax of Bede’s ‘Historia Ecclesiastica’, Catholic University Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Latin 8 (Washington D.C., 1938), pp. 212-13. 34 Bede, Hist. Eccl., IV. xviii (xvi), V. xxiv (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 564-5); Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, pp. 369, 391; Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), pp. 367, 370, 383. 35 Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, pp. 374-6. 31

36

Wood, Proprietary Church, pp. 127-39, esp. 137-8; cf. H. MayrHarting, The Venerable Bede, the Rule of St Benedict and Social Class, Jarrow Lecture 1976 (n.p., n.d.), p. 10. 37 Bede, Opera Homiletica, ed. D. Hurst, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 122 (Turnhout, 1955), pp. 88-94. 38 Bede, Hist. Eccl., IV. xxiii (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 408-9). 39 P. Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the AngloSaxon Aristocracy’, in Farrell, Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 32-90, at 57.

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JAMES CAMPBELL life. But he was certainly right in emphasising the importance of considering ‘Germanic’ cultural influences on religious and monastic communities. It is not entirely absurd to remind oneself that such a community in some ways resembled a comitatus such as that commemorated in Beowulf: a number of men, serving one leader, eating together and sleeping together. One may wonder how far pre-Christian ideas or ideals of sodality were transmitted into Christian contexts. Undoubtedly a religious community could be regarded as a kind of comitatus affected by some of the mores of such an association.40 Undoubtedly conviviality could play an important part in religious life and alcohol counted for a lot – alcohol consumed not as a modest commonplace Mediterranean drink of wine with a meal, but in quantities involving intoxication.41 Bede’s response to word that he had been accused of heresy at some dinner was fierce. He wrote of being attacked by men whom he describes as ‘wanton yokels in their cups’.42 William Hunt’s comment on this is thoughtful. ‘That such men should be talking about a book of chronology while sitting at their drink, illustrates the widespread interest which was taken by the monastic order in matters of learning’.43 One cannot but feel sympathy, however distant, with the victims of Bede’s diatribe against the guests at episcopal dinners, with their laughter, their jokes and their too many drinks, and wonder how far all the emphases of his virtue were acceptable to others, even pious others.44 Relevant is a contrast between what Bede says and what the ‘Anonymous’ (or Bede in a milder mood) says about Ceolfrith’s departure. The ‘Anonymous’ says that Ceolfrith said that the community were not to fast on the day of his departure but rather that they were to have maius convivium, and that some of those who were to accompany him abroad could linger to join in. There is nothing about convivium in Bede’s account of what happened on the departure day after Ceolfrith set sail: all we hear of is tears, prayers and psalms.45

Fundamental to the social ethic of a Germanic aristocracy was gift-exchange, and it was practised by the ecclesiastical as by the secular great. It was very important to Abbot Ceolfrith. The ‘Anonymous’ says that Ceolfrith gave only short notice of his intended departure, partly because he feared that some might give him pecunia (money or treasure) which he would not have time to repay. For he had the habit of a ‘bountiful mind’ such that he would not let any gift go unrequited but often gave the donor more than he had himself received. Bede’s account is substantially the same.46 Much though Bede says he admired Ceolfrith, he almost certainly did not share his views on gift exchange. This emerges strongly in his account of Aidan, of whom he says that he never gave pecunia to great men; on the contrary, pecunia which the rich gave him he gave either to the poor or to redeem those who had been unjustly enslaved.47 In other ways too, Bede shows Aidan as nonconformist in regard to the aristocratic mores of great churchmen in Bede’s own day. Aidan seldom dined with the king, and when he did, he left early to study and to pray.48 We should know nothing of Aidan were it not for Bede. He had probably been at considerable pains to piece together his powerful account of him. It is not clear when he did so. It is worth noticing that he says nothing of the Irish mission in his Greater Chronicle (c. 726).49 One cannot make too much of this since the work contains nothing on England between the mission of Paulinus and the despatch of Theodore. But it could be that Bede’s interest in Aidan belongs to the last years of his life and, together with the Letter to Ecgberht, reflects an intensification in his urgency for church reform. A major element in the life of the Church in Bede’s day, and in particular in the life of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, was wealth. Wealth lay behind the buildings whose scale and scope have been so brilliantly illustrated by Professor Cramp. The Codex Amiatinus was not the product of poverty. Biscop’s repeated visits to Rome were partly those of a buyer. Both Bede and the ‘Anonymous’ use interestingly commercial language in describing his activities. Benedict is religiosus emptor, buying books, placito praetio, returning from Rome merce … onustus.50 Manuscripts were among the most signal of his purchases. A fine manuscript could, in England, be regarded as a major treasure.51 Biscop secured some remarkable ones, not least the Codex Grandior of Cassiodorus. Even more ‘ordinary’ manuscripts could cost serious money, as Bede points out in the introduction to his

40

J. Campbell, ‘Elements in the Background to the Life of St. Cuthbert and his Cult’, in St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community, ed. G. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Stancliffe (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 3-20, at 13, reprinted in J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London and Rio Grande, 2000), pp. 86-106, at 98-9. 41 The Rule of St Benedict. The Abingdon Copy, ed. J. Chamberlain (Toronto, 1982), pp. 49-50, chapter 40, introduced by a quotation from St Paul in Corinthians I and advertising ‘emicam vini … per diem’. Contrast more extensive indulgences envisaged in religious institutions in Bede’s England: J. Campbell, ‘Elements in the Background to the Life of St. Cuthbert and his Cult’, in St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community, ed. Bonner, Rollason and Stancliffe, pp. 3-20, at 9-10, 12-13, reprinted in Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State, pp. 86-106, at 94, 96-8. 42 Bede, Opera de Temporibus, part 3, ed. C.W. Jones, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 123C (Turnhout, 1978), p. 617. 43 W. Hunt, The English Church from its Foundation to the Norman Conquest (597-1066) (London, 1901), p. 223. 44 Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, p. 407. 45 Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer) I, pp. 398, 382-3.

46

Ibid., pp. 395, 381. Bede, Hist. Eccl., III. v (ed. Colgrave and Mynors), pp. 228-9. 48 Ibid., III. v (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 226-7). 49 N.J. Higham, Re-Reading Bede. The Ecclesiastical History in Context (London and New York, 2006), pp. 67, 99-101, 117, 142-6. 50 Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer) I, pp. 368, 367, 393. 51 Ibid., p. 380. 47

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QUESTIONING BEDE commentary on Genesis.52 We should maybe see Biscop as in one way a sort of seventh-century Getty, using the wealth of a newer world to acquire the treasures of an older one.

are in quotations from the works of others (four in Wilfrid’s epitaph) and three relate to circumstances in which it is indicated that gold should not be used.59 Bede does not glory in golden treasures. Had he done so we might have learned something of the magnificence of the vasa, which he mentions in passing, as having been acquired for his abbey by Biscop and Ceolfrith.60 Enough church treasures survive from Ireland and Gaul to suggest the sumptuous scale of what there are likely to have been in Northumbria. A good example is that of a chalice which survives only in a seventeenthcentury engraving, from Chelles, a monastery not unknown to English princesses.61 It is of cloisonné gold and garnet, and is such as to make famous items in the same style from Sutton Hoo seem minor. And indeed they probably were minor compared to what would have been there to see at a great monastery such as Monkwearmouth-Jarrow.

Where did that wealth come from? It does look much as if the age of Bede was one of notable economic development.53 The first monastic age is also the age of the emporia. The earlier eighth century saw in some areas (though not in Bernicia) a circulation of silver coinage which may have equalled or exceeded that in any other period before the Conquest. This may have been related to foreign trade; certainly there was a serious involvement with Frisia, which had the same currency as England and a similar language. That the earliest English efforts at Continental mission were in Frisia must have connections with such other involvements there and is a reminder of how may other connections there may have been between economic and religious movements which can be traced but thinly if at all. The possibility that overseas trade was in basic goods is not to be excluded. But undoubtedly the slave trade played a part, and possibly a major one.54 One known incident may stand for many: the sale of a battle-captive to a Frisian merchant who took him away in chains.55 Not for nothing did Bede compare the appearance of damned souls at the mouth of hell to that of captives being jeered at as (presumably) they were being led into slavery.56 War brought rewards beyond slavecaptures: Bede importantly brings out how treasure could be acquired in war.57 In short, the wealth which lies behind Monkwearmouth-Jarrow may have owed something to generally beneficial (maybe revolutionary) economic conditions and something to Northumbrian gains in war (presumably diminishing after 685). One of the implications may for some be disagreeable but it is a serious one. The achievements of Bede may have been indebted to the slave trade, in some degree, and maybe even to a large degree.

Bede’s values and attitudes were not such as to lead him to glory in wealth and treasure. Still, that he had a little share in the wealth which sustained his monastery is shown by an episode during his last days. Cuthbert tells us that the dying Bede sent for his capsella and shared its contents among his friends.62 These contents included pepper and incense, luxury items which must have come from very far away and as such were to be included in the gift exchanges of great churchmen.63 One may wonder whether this episode may, like episodes in Bede’s own work, have something more behind it than appears on the surface. I have in mind an edifying episode in the Dialogues attributed to Gregory the Great. It relates to a monk called Justus.64 After his death Justus was found to have broken the rule against private property: he possessed and hid three gold pieces. So he was buried, unmourned, in a dunghill (with his gold pieces). Could it have been that Cuthbert was partly concerned to show that Bede did not fall into the Justus category?

We can glean just a little on Bede’s attitude to gold. Gold had a central importance for Anglo-Saxons through many centuries.58 Indications of such interest are the numerous references to gold in Beowulf and in the works of Aldhelm. The position in Bede’s works is different. Thus of the ten references to gold which the Ecclesiastical History contains, six

There is a general wish among scholars to think well of Bede, whom they tend to think of as one of themselves. There is much justification for this: Bede’s status as scholar and thinker is beyond dispute. On his descriptions of men and events, however, one may go too far in joining even one of the greatest of Bedan scholars, Charles Plummer, in seeing Bede’s ‘transparent good faith’ as ‘plain to everyone who reads his

52

Bede, In Principium Genesis … Libros iiii, ed. C.W. Jones, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 118A (Turnhout, 1967), p. 1. 53 Papers printed in Markets in Medieval Europe. Trading and ‘Productive’ Sites, 650-850, ed. T. Pestell and K. Ulmschneider (Macclesfield, 2003), pp. 1-167, introduce most of the problems and possibilities. 54 D.A.E. Pelteret, ‘Slave Raiding and Slave Trading in Early England’, Anglo-Saxon England, 9 (1980), pp. 99-114. 55 Bede, Hist. Eccl., IV. xxii (xx) (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 4003). 56 Ibid., V. xii (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 490-1). 57 Ibid., III. xxiv (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 288-91). 58 C.R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective (Manchester, 1982), esp. pp. 24-31.

59

P.F. Jones, A Concordance to the Historia Ecclesiastica of Bede (Cambridge, Mass., 1929) s.v. aurum. 60 Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, p. 329. 61 P. Lasko, The Kingdom of the Franks. North-West Europe before Charlemagne (London, 1971), p. 93. 62 Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, p. clxiii. 63 S. Bonifatii et Lullii Epistolae, ed. M. Tangl, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae Selecta, I, (Berlin, 1955) pp. 80, 128, 156, 191, 206 (nos. 49, 62, 74, 85, 90). 64 Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, ed. A. de Vogüé, trans. P. Antin, 3 vols (Paris, 1978-80), III, pp. 188-195.

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JAMES CAMPBELL narrative’.65 And by no means all Bede’s views are such as to recommend themselves to an enlightened modern mind.

patriarch’s blessing on Benjamin. ‘Benjamin shall ravine as a wolf; in the morning he shall devour the prey and at night shall divide the soil’.71 Bede clearly welcomed Old Testament views of war as expressive of divine favour and punishment.72 His judgmental harshness appears in another way, in his emphatic and eloquent accounts of the death-beds of men destined for hell, who had been given definite signs that it was too late for repentance.73 When a scholar praises Bede’s ‘saintly personality, a singular blend of humane sensitivity and humanitas’, it is not captious to wonder just how humane that sensitivity was.74

The religious culture in which Bede played so important a part was one which valued brutal violence in what was seen as a good cause. A leading example is St Boniface’s account of an example for Christians set by pagan Saxons on the Continent.66 How? In their treatment of women who committed adultery. Such women were flogged from place to place by other women and in the end left dead or almost dead. Another indication of an inclination towards violent punishment is this. The two earliest English law codes have little to do with Christianity, except in the first clause of Ethelbert’s ‘code’, which indicates the penalty for robbing a bishop. Another characteristic of these laws is that they have little to do with physical penalties, hanging and flogging. The two later ‘codes’ (those of Wihtred and of Ine, both dating from near the end of the seventh century) are very different. They are full of requirements for the observance of the rules of religion and they abound in physical penalties.67 Their climate is one of enforced piety and harsh punishment.

The greatest initial difficulty in judging Bede as an historian is that no one can have more than a notably foggy notion about the political and social circumstances which must form a densely complicated context for the events Bede describes. How about the strength and nature of ‘royal power’? In his account of conversions Bede implies much for the force of royal legislation. In his chronological summary he takes it for granted that conversion follows from royal authority.75 Sometimes he provides a little more detail. Æthelberht of Kent, he says, did not enforce conversion, but rewarded it.76 By contrast he says that later in Kent Earconberht (640-664) ordered the destruction of idols and the observance of the Lenten fast.77 Bede interestingly says that he was the first English king to order idols to be destroyed throughout the whole kingdom, thus suggesting the extent to which ‘conversion’ may have depended on royal commands, maybe a series of legislative acts, in other kingdoms. In Northumbria his account of Paulinus’s thirty-six days of baptising in the river Glen suggests conversion by royal fiat.78 The peasants whom he describes as grumbling bitterly because no one knew how the new religion was performed do not sound like men who had volunteered to join in.79 As often, Bede’s firm statements provoke difficult questions. Some relate to the great unanswerables about paganism; about all those relating to its organisation and endowment. Maybe paganism was rather rapidly destroyed through the impact of the royal power which Bede stresses. Bede shows notably little interest in the processes of conversion, except in regard to kings. The serious authority of kings in Bede’s day is indicated not only

Set beside the harshness of laws the familiar tale of Bede’s account of Augustine’s second meeting with the British churchmen. Most of them came from Bangor and they had been advised by a hermit to judge the archbishop by whether he rose to greet them. He did not do so.68 Some historians have been troubled by this. Thus Dr Colgrave observed that Augustine’s conduct ‘does not seem very tactful’.69 Augustine’s sitting had nothing to do with tact. He sat because he was sitting in judgement and to give a terrible warning. He told the Britons where they erred, and warned them that if they did not preach the way of life to the English they would meet death at their hands. So it proved. At the battle of Chester (?616) between British rulers and Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria, hundreds of monks from Bangor came to pray for a British victory. Æthelfrith attacked them first. It was said that about twelve hundred of these monks were killed and only fifty escaped. Bede records this slaughter without a word of sympathy but, rather, with satisfaction.70 Compare too his treatment of the pagan Northumbrian Æthelfrith, who conquered wide lands from the Britons, ‘exterminating or subjugating’ the inhabitants: Bede again betrays no shade of disquiet. Rather does Æthelfrith put him in mind of Saul, king of Israel, and of the

71

Ibid., I. xxxiv (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 116-17). J. McClure, ‘Bede’s Old Testament Kings’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society. Studies Presented to J.M. WallaceHadrill, ed. P. Wormald with D. Bullough and R. Collins (Oxford, 1983), pp. 76-98. 73 Bede, Hist. Eccl., V. xiii, xiv (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 499503, 502-5). 74 Wetherbee, ‘Some Implications of Bede’s Latin Style’, p. 23. 75 Bede, Hist. Eccl., V. xxiv (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, s.a., pp. 604, 627, 653, 655). 76 Ibid., I. xxvi (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 76-9). 77 Ibid., III. viii (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 236-7). 78 Ibid., II. xiv (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 188-9). 79 Two Lives of St. C.uthbert, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 162-5. 72

65

Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer) I, p. xlv, note. (Though Plummer, who did not miss much, noticed some difficulty in putting complete trust in Bede’s account of Wilfrid.). 66 S. Bonifatii et Lullii Epistolae, ed. Tangl, p. 150. 67 J. Campbell, ‘Some Considerations on Religion in Early England’, in Collectanea Antiqua. Essays in Memory of Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, ed. M. Henig and T.J. Smith (Oxford, 2007), pp. 67-74, at 69. 68 Bede, Hist. Eccl., II. ii (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 138-43). 69 Ibid., p. 140, n. 1. 70 Ibid., II. ii (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 140-3).

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QUESTIONING BEDE by the great dykes, some of which are presumably earlier than Offa’s Dyke, but also by the ‘false monasteries’ which have occasioned such interesting discussion. One thing which is plain about their foundation is that it shows the extent of royal power. Why else go to such pains to escape obligations to kings?

improbably before, the Germanic inhabitants of Britain had become not too different from the Irish in forming a cultural and in certain senses a political community, united, above all, by a common language, but also by extensive intermarriage between grand families in different kingdoms, by the wanderings of aristocrats driven by the compulsion of exile and the hope of gain, and, likely enough, by internal migration.

One can sometimes forget how little is known about English society in the period with which Bede is concerned. Everyone knows that no one knows how much of society was British. The people with whom the seventh-century ‘codes’ are chiefly concerned have wergelds which seem to put them in a class which one can anachronistically term as of gentlemen or yeomen. One can have no idea of how many others there were, such as the female grinding slaves of the third class, mentioned in Æthelred’s code, or the poor people who lay beside a ninth-century monastery trying to keep warm in the ashes discarded from its fires.80 Cemetery archaeology cannot give clear guidance as to the number of such people, for no one knows where or how they were buried.

This degree of English or Anglo-Saxon unity mattered in the development of the Church. The career of Ceolfrith is a good case in point. Presumably Northumbrian by origin, he spent periods of study both in East Anglia and in Kent.86 Our sources for his final (and fatal) journey are instructive. After crossing the Tyne he went south, and it is emphasised that he visited three provinciae (kingdoms) where he was treated with honour and veneration.87 We are told something interesting about the entourage (comitatus) which accompanied him. They were eighty strong and ‘gathered from various parts’.88 Compare what we are told of Oswine, king of Deira (644651). Noblemen came to serve him from almost every kingdom.89 Or, again, about Guthlac in his youthful days as a princely predator, when he gathered socii from various gentes and all directions.90

Another problem very germane to the study of Bede and his England is that of how far the people whom he calls gens Anglorum had a kind of social or cultural unified identity which transcended political divisions and significantly replaced an older categorisation into Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Theories on this matter, not all mutually incompatible, have blossomed. Patrick Wormald, for example, contended that the use of ‘Angle’ in a comprehensive sense originated in Gregory the Great’s usage, and was deployed by the papacy and by Canterbury.81 The theory is a serious one. But one then has to ask oneself why, if there was something particularly papal about the ‘Angle’ usage, the insular institution established at the gates of the Vatican by the end of the ninth century was the Schola Saxonum.82 And why should Pope Zachary have written of ‘Anglorum et Saxonum gens’ (note the singular)?83 Nicholas Brooks’s study has established that there was such a variety of usages that it seems plausible to conclude that there was frequent indifference, or anyway uncertainty, about whether to use ‘Angle’ or ‘Saxon’.84 The early Continental development of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the like is suggestive.85 It seems a reasonable conclusion that by the seventh century, and not

Obviously the element of Anglian, Anglo-Saxon, unity which Bede is so careful to stress in the introduction to his History was very important in the development of the Church. It is a question as to how far that unity was antecedent to conversion. It is not a question which can be answered decisively. But the possibility that the Germanic invaders had developed a common consciousness and sense of identity in their island home is serious and possibly important in explaining the speed and nature of ‘conversion’. The generally thin, if patchily strong, sources are full of surprises which can open delightfully doubtful vistas. In the whole of early Anglo-Saxon history there is no more astounding item than Aldhelm’s letter to ‘Acurcius’.91 It is not so much a letter as a treatise on various themes, its largest section (126 pp. in Ehwald’s edition) being devoted to Latin prosody. Experts agree that ‘Acurcius’ is Aldfrith, king of Northumbria 686-705. Aldfrith may indeed have become literate during his many years in Ireland: he is credited with the composition of Irish poems. But what was he doing with a literary by-name? Was he expected to read Aldhelm’s Latin

80

The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, ed. and trans. F.L. Attenborough (Cambridge, 1922), p. 5 (d. 11); Æthelwulf, De Abbatibus, ed. A. Campbell (Oxford, 1967), pp. 38-9 (accepting the translation suggested at p. 38 n. 1). 81 P. Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, in Ideal and Reality in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish Society, pp. 99-129, 124-9. 82 W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 40-1. 83 S. Bonifatii et Lullii Epistolae, ed. Tangl, p. 173. 84 N.P. Brooks, Bede and the English, Jarrow Lecture, 1999 (n.p., n.d.). 85 Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 92-3.

86

Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, p. 389. Ibid., II, p. 400. 88 Ibid., I, p. 401. 89 Bede, Hist. Eccl., III. xiv (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 256-9). 90 Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac., ed. and trans. Colgrave, pp. 80-8. 91 Aldhelm, The Prose Works, trans. M. Lapidge and M. Herren (Cambridge, Ipswich and Totowa, 1979), pp. 12-13, 31-47; Aldhelmi Opera, ed. R. Ehwald, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi, V (Berlin, 1919), pp.75-199. 87

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JAMES CAMPBELL commentary by Jerome, now at Würzburg.97 It contains an inscription of c. 700 showing that it was owned by an abbess, Cuthswith. This lady can be reasonably suggested to have been abbess at Inkberrow (Worcs.) on the evidence of two charters. Not only is the manuscript with its inscription a very rare survival; so too are such charters. More charters have survived from the cathedral archive of Worcester than from almost any other. It is they which reveal how very numerous were the monasteries of that diocese. By the end of the eighth century there were some fifty. The Jerome manuscript forms part of the evidence for the scale and depth of women’s learning in Bede’s England. It also forms part of the evidence (some of it very fragmentary) which has enabled Dr SimsWilliams, most interestingly, to sketch a picture of the intellectual life in the dioceses of Worcester and Hereford and painstakingly to indicate something of its nature and wide range of contacts. Such work is a reminder of how little is known of the religious and intellectual life of most of England. Thus no charters survive from East Anglia, and there all that can be said of such a figure as Botulf is that all we know of his learning is that he was well known for it; and all we know of his piety is that he came to be regarded as a saint to whom a good many churches were dedicated, though it is hard to say when. Even in Northumbria one has to ask what we would know of the intellectual resources of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow had there been no Bede, or of those of York had there been no Alcuin; possibly a good deal from the Codex Amiatinus about the one, but only on the assumption that the ‘Anonymous’ life of Ceolfrith is not by Bede or that the provenance of the Amiatinus could have been identified in the absence of that work. However, for York the disquieting answer is: just about nothing. One has to admit the possibility, even likelihood, of there having been more books, more learning, and a wider and deeper intellectual life in Bede’s England than can be directly demonstrated. This is one of the many aspects of likely largescale change brought about by conversion and Christianity, change amounting to transformation.

with any readiness? If so, not too many modern scholars can match him. Was it expected that he would be concerned to compose Latin verse according to the formal elaboration of the rules set out by Aldhelm? If not, what game was Aldhelm playing when he set out these thousands of careful words for ‘Acurcius’? One is left to boggle. But certainly Aldhelm’s mystifying ‘letter’ draws attention to the possibilities of lay literacy in the age of Bede. Here we may turn to another puzzling item, not so utterly puzzling as the Letter to Acurcius, but no less thought-provoking. This is the fourth chapter of Stephanus’s Life of Wilfrid.92 This tells how in about 653 Wilfrid went to Lyons where he was taken up by the archbishop, whom Stephanus believed to have been Dalfinus. (Dalfinus was probably the count of Lyons and the archbishop’s brother.) Dalfinus, says Stephanus, offered to adopt Wilfrid as his son, to marry him to his niece and to provide him with important secular authority. So, as Stephanus understood it, Wilfrid could be regarded at that time as a layman. We may reasonably suppose that he was, at that stage, literate, though Stephanus tells us no more than that he knew the psalter by heart.93 Stephanus tells us that later in Wilfrid’s career noblemen gave him their sons ad erudiendum so that if they chose they might become servants of God, or, if they wished, armed in the service of the king.94 It is a reasonable supposition that some, perhaps many, of those who took the second course may already have learned to read. In his account of a miracle of John of Beverley, bishop of Hexham and later archbishop of York, Bede describes him as accompanied by mounted iuvenes, mainly laici.95 What one must be seeing here has to do with the role of fosterage, of boys being at a fairly early age given into the family and household charge of someone of rank corresponding to that of their father, something which could establish a relationship resembling adoption. Such men as Wilfrid and John of Beverley were church noblemen and they took boys into their household and service on such a basis. Bede does not say that John educated these young men; but it seems likely that his was a household comparable to that of Wilfrid. In England, as in Gaul, there could have been a significant number of literate laymen.96

In this context ‘false monasteries’ deserve consideration. Bede’s denunciation of these is well known and often considered. It presents problems. It is not always noticed that there were two kinds of ‘monastery’ of which Bede disapproved, and it is not altogether easy to see how he distinguished them. One kind may be formally proper monasteries which had fallen into bad (but at least in form clerical?) hands; the other, alii (which he sees as worse) are in the possession of laymen who cloak their privileged tenure by recruiting ‘monks’ of dubious origin.98 More important is the question as to how far is Bede to be taken au pied de la lettre? Dr Sims-Williams has, valuably, pointed out both that Bede’s

Our knowledge of Bede’s England and not least of many aspects of the life and nature of its churches is fragmentary. The fragments are such as to open vistas which are sometimes surprising above all in indicating wide possibilities. One such fragment is the fifth-century Italian manuscript of a 92

Life of Bishop Wilfrid, ed. Colgrave (cited in n. 25), pp. 10-11. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 94 Ibid., pp. 44-5. 95 Bede, Hist. Eccl., V. vi (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 466-7). 96 Cf. Foot, Monastic Life (cit. in n. 1) pp. 146, 227; Wormald, ‘Bede, Beowulf, and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy’ (cit. in n. 39), p. 38. 93

97

P. Sims-Williams, ‘Cuthswith, Seventh-Century Abbess of Inkberrow, near Worcester, and the Würzburg Manuscript of Jerome on Ecclesiastes’, Anglo-Saxon England, 5 (1976), pp. 1-21. 98 Bede, Op. Hist. (ed. Plummer), I, pp. 41-6.

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QUESTIONING BEDE letter is in an ecclesiastical tradition of reformist denunciation and that Continental, in particular Spanish, evidence suggests ‘familial’ monasteries could nevertheless have serious religious purpose.99 We are much indebted to Dr Sims-Williams for bringing out and emphasising these considerations. It is not to question their value still to believe that there must be a good deal in what Bede says. To doubt the likelihood of aristocrats taking opportunities for fiscal evasion is to undermine belief in original sin. But the position may well have been more complicated, indeed even more creditable than is allowed by Bede’s ready capacity to see black or white but not grey. He would not allow for the extent to which family provision complicated the foundation of, and succession to, monasteries. What family arrangements may have been involved in Cuthswith’s monastery? One thing of which one can be certain is that by the time of Bede’s death the foundation of monasteries, good, bad, or indifferent, had been on a very large scale; that the impact of Christianity and of Christian learning had been great; and that that impact had had major consequences on land law and land tenure.

would have been produced by and for monasteries. We know that some monasteries were social and economic focuses and that some were engaged in metal-working. They may have needed coin not so much for – or by no means exclusively for – commercial purposes, but rather for the crucial processes of gift exchange and for general legal and political purposes.104 Such coins could be evidence for a pervasive religious consciousness in a world where there had come to be so very many abbeys, at least some of them surprising centres of learning, and where lay devotion may have become widely diffused. The puzzle of the coins with religious designs is one among many which tell us how complicated, one might even say sophisticated, was the world of Bede and how far he may mislead us about it. It is not so much that he is disingenuous (though he could be) as that the focus of his interests and the power of his mind and prose have tended to dominate and in important ways to simplify attitudes towards his environment. He was at least as much an advocate as a recorder. The struggle to understand Bede’s England is necessarily half doomed to failure. But at least one can try to be careful to avoid unconsciously minimising the complication, even sophistication, of Anglo-Saxon society and government, and with that the implications, impact and organisation of Christianity. The extremely fragmentary nature of our evidence can lead to a kind of oversimplification, almost patronising, and somewhat too knowing. Discussion in terms of ranges of possibility is inevitable.105

Something, very interesting, relating to what one might call the penetration of Christianity – and a considerable cause for wonder – has been put forward by Dr Gannon in a riveting book.100 It is a study of the designs of the abundant silver coins of the earlier eighth century. She demonstrates how dramatically interesting is their iconography. Some show developing interest in Romanitas. Those which most concern us are the no few which have a religious bearing and religious implications. Lord Stewartby and D.M. Metcalf have shown how one design is undoubtedly a reproduction of a Byzantine representation of Jesus Christ.101 One could brush such evidence on one side in a slightly dismal way as telling one more about numismatics than religion. Moneyers copied this coin or they copied that. But what about, for example, the sceatta which beyond doubt shows the man who was the symbol for St Matthew in a style which so closely resembles that deployed in the Book of Durrow as to suggest that the engraver had a very similar model before him?102 Dr Gannon says that ‘we can be sure that people handling the coins would have been familiar with complex exegesis as displayed and made available already in a variety of matching media’.103 Even if, faint-heartedly, one inserts ‘some’ before ‘people’, it seems likely that these coins carried religious messages, somewhat as Roman coins had carried political ones. Who instructed what kind of engraver to produce coins with messages? One can imagine circumstances in which coins

A large proportion of new knowledge will come from archaeology. Eternal gratitude is due to Rosemary Cramp for revealing so much of the physical reality – the expensive, distinctly Roman reality – of Bede’s monasteries. We lack such knowledge of any early English cathedral. The intense and scrupulous researches of Martin and Birthe Biddle will before long bear fruit in the publication of the full account of Old Minster at Winchester. Their work at St Albans and at Repton, notably enterprising in energy, thoroughness and sophistication, has already contributed vastly to knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon Church. Even more important will be what we are going to learn about Old Minster.

99

Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature (cit. in n. 1), pp. 126-31. A. Gannon, The Iconography of Early Anglo-Saxon Coinage Sixth to Eighth Centuries (Oxford, 2003). 101 Lord Stewart and D.M. Metcalf, ‘The Bust of Christ on an Early Anglo-Saxon Coin’, Numismatic Chronicle, 167 (2007), pp. 179-82. 102 Gannon, Iconography of Early Anglo-Saxon Coinage, pp. 26-8, Figs. 2.4 and 2.5. 103 Ibid., p. 187. 100

104

S. Bonifatii et Lullii Epistolae, ed. Tangl, p. 28 (no. 15), for an abbess sending fifty solidi to Boniface. 105 Many discussions in relation to this paper have been with my wife, Dr B. Brodt, and it owes a very great deal in more ways than one to her patience.

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Offa’s St Albans Rosalind Niblett the survival of fragmented and isolated late Romano-British elements.4

According to the St Albans monk, Matthew Paris, in 793 the Mercian king Offa discovered the bones of the late Roman martyr Alban ‘who had long lain humbly in an unknown place’1 and founded a church to house the saint’s relics. Today nothing is known of Offa’s church, but thanks to a series of excavations adjacent to the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban by Martin Biddle and Birthe KjølbyeBiddle we can point to an area a short distance to the south of the existing Abbey church as its probable site. What is still far from clear, however, is what sort of settlement was here at the time of Offa’s visit, and how this settlement developed in the later Saxon period.

Certainly there is an absence of fifth- and sixth-century Saxon cemeteries within 30 km of St Albans, and apart from very isolated finds, there is a corresponding dearth of early Saxon pottery and metalwork over a similar area. Writing in the early eighth century however, Bede refers to St Albans not just by its Roman-derived name, Uerlamacaestir, but also by the Germanic name Uaeclingacaestir (the settlement of the Waeclingas or Wacol’s people),5 implying that by now there was a significant Anglo-Saxon element in the population. Bede’s reference corresponds nicely with the first substantial sign in the archaeological record of the presence of Germanic settlers in St Albans itself. This comes from a small cemetery adjacent to the late Iron Age King Harry Lane cemetery to the south of the main road out of Roman Verulamium on the north-west, the so called Silchester road. Here 39 inhumation burials, accompanied by grave goods dating to the later seventh to early eighth centuries, were excavated in the late 1960s.6 Associated with two of the burials were simple, handmade jars in chaff-tempered fabric. Similar sherds were found in the primary silt of a re-cut of the late Iron Age ‘Wheeler’ ditch that runs along the top of the slope to the south of the cemetery, suggesting the boundary was redefined.7 Numerous sherds in the same fabric have also been excavated on the Oysterfields, a short distance south of the early Roman burial and temple site at Folly Lane, where it was contained in silt that had accumulated on the ‘Colchester’ road to the north-east of the Roman town. The road, which here had degenerated into a sunken hollow way following a slightly sinuous route up the valley slope, was flanked by four or five small rectangular post-built structures; the restricted distribution of the chaff tempered pottery sherds, all of which were adjacent to the buildings, implied a

Bede, writing some time before 731, refers to a RomanoBritish church ‘of admirable workmanship and worthy of the martyr’ which was not only still surviving in his day but remained a centre of pilgrimage and the site of miracles. This in itself suggests a Christian population, presumably descendants of the late Roman population, surviving here throughout the earlier Saxon period. As long ago as 1935, Wheeler postulated the existence of a Romano-British enclave in the central Chilterns, focused on Verulamium and persisting until the late seventh century.2 The dating of some of the Cambridgeshire cross ridge dykes to the fifth century,3 and the suggestion that they were the work of a British entity defending the central Chilterns from Saxon infiltration, have revived the argument. A detailed survey by John Baker of the archaeological, documentary and philological evidence indicates major variations in the density and distribution of Germanic elements in the Chiltern area as a whole between the late Roman period and the mid seventh century. It may be that rather than wholesale migration and colonisation, Germanic infiltration was piecemeal, taking place alongside 1

Gesta Abbatum Monasterii S. Albani, ed. H.T. Riley, 3 vols (Rolls Ser., 28, 1867-9), I, pp. 100, 191. This account can be reconciled with Bede’s record of a Roman church, still standing and visited only about 70 years earlier. It is possible that the Romano-British church was on the supposed site of the martyrdom, rather than the grave. Bede associates the church with the martyrdom but does not specifically mention the burial place. The most obvious place for the burial would have been in the adjacent late Roman cemetery, excavated by the Biddles. See M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘The Origins of St Albans Abbey: Romano-British Cemetery and AngloSaxon Monastery’, in Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology, British Archaeological Association Conference Trans., xxiv (2001), pp. 45-77. 2 R.E.M. Wheeler, London and the Saxons: The Chiltern Region, 400-700 (London: London Museum, 1935); K. Rutherford-Davis, Britons and Saxons (Chichester, 1982). 3 T. Malim, K. Penn, B. Robinson, G. Wait and K. Walsh, ‘New Evidence on the Cambridgeshire Dykes’ (forthcoming).

4

John T. Baker, Cultural Transition in the Chilterns and Essex Region, 350 AD - 650 AD (Hatfield, 2006). 5 ‘Uerolamium, quae nunc a gente Anglorum Uerlamacaestir siue Uaeclingacaestir appellatur’: Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, I. vii (ed. Colgrave and Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 34). See also E. Ekwall, Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names, 4th edn. (Oxford, 1960), p. 399. 6 B.M. Ager, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery’, in I.M. Stead and V. Rigby, Verulamium: The King Harry Lane Site, English Heritage Archaeological Report 12 (London: Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, 1989), pp. 219-39. 7 Evaluation report by Jonathan Hunn, held by St Albans District Council Planning Department.

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Fig. 1. Evidence of Post-Roman Occupation in and around Verulamium.

close connection between the two.8 In 1986 a very similar building was excavated flanking Watling Street half a kilometre outside the London Gate at St Stephens.9 Chafftempered pottery has also been recorded in pre-Norman contexts in the Biddles’ excavation on the south side of the abbey10 (Fig. 1).

The date of chaff-tempered pottery in this part of Hertfordshire is still a matter of discussion; it has been broadly dated to between the fifth and eighth centuries with later survival in some areas, although it has been argued that in the central Chilterns it was not introduced until the eighth century,11 and it may have persisted well into the ninth century or even later.

8

1982-3, Fraternity of the Friends of St Albans Abbey, Occasional Paper 2 (St Albans, 1984), p. 12. 11 Carolyn Wingfield, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Settlement of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire: The Archaeological View’, in Chiltern Archaeology: Recent Work. A Handbook for the Next Decade, ed. R. Holgate (Dunstable, 1995), pp. 31-43, at 37; Ager, in Stead and Rigby, Verulamium, p. 78.

R. Niblett, The Excavation of a Ceremonial Site at Folly Lane, Verulamium, Britannia Monograph 14 (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1999), pp. 95-9. 9 R. Niblett, publication forthcoming. 10 M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘England’s Premier Abbey. St Albans and its Medieval Chapter House’, Expedition, 23 (1980), pp. 17-32; The Origins of St Albans Abbey. Excavations in the Cloisters,

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OFFA’S ST ALBANS Apart from the odd pin or belt tag from the south side of the abbey (all of which could be seen as casual losses by visitors to the abbey rather than as evidence for occupation), the only other eighth- to ninth-century material from the town consists of a handful of Saxon sherds from the Forum and the Oysterfield, two loom-weights and a penny of Burgred, also from the Forum area, and a sceatta of c. 700 from somewhere in the Roman town.Excavation has yielded hints of postRoman occupation in the form of hearths, remnant surfaces and occasional post holes from the central area of the Roman town; but these are essentially undated. It is also likely that some at least of the stone-founded buildings in the centre of the Roman town remained standing, though no doubt adapted and used for different purposes. In theory there is no reason to suppose that massive structures like the Forum and Basilica complex could not have stood until deliberately dismantled – in itself a considerable undertaking. All that is certain is that the Basilica must have been substantially demolished by the time that St Michael’s church was built, some time in the late tenth or eleventh century (see below). The admittedly faint indications of settlement along the major Roman roads are also tantalising, as such a pattern would fit Rippon’s suggestion of conditions favourable to the early development of a villa regalis.12 One possibility is that parts of the Forum/Basilica complex survived and became a Saxon villa regalis, overlooked by Offa’s new church – a minster church – on the skyline on the opposite side of the river.

that Kingsbury, or the King’s Burh, was owned by the king and that its inhabitants were often in direct confrontation to the abbey; it was with the abbots’ efforts (ultimately successful) to suppress Kingsbury that Paris was concerned, rather than with its precise location or character. All that Paris tells us is that Kingsbury lay a short distance away from the abbey to the west, and the way to it was along a path on the top of the bank of a ‘large and deep fishpond to one side of Fishpool Street.’13 The area known today as Kingsbury lies half a kilometre north-west of the abbey, where an isolated deposit of glacial gravel forms a prominent hillock, bordered on the east and north-west by small valleys, now dry, and overlooking the river crossing at St Michael’s village. This looks an ideal site for a small defended settlement, and since 1855 it has been argued that this was the site of the Saxon ‘King’s Burh’. In 1905 the theory gained widespread acceptance following the publication of a paper, ‘Kingsbury Castle’, by the respected local historian, William Page,14 and it soon came to be regarded as an established fact. However, a careful reassessment of the evidence by Isobel Thompson has shown that although there was a considerable amount of Roman activity here, there is no convincing evidence for Saxon occupation.15 There are a number of early references to post-Roman chalk or clay banks on the north and east of the hillock, and although no bank has been seen in modern excavations, the possible existence of a bank or banks on one or more sides cannot be completely discounted. Whether these banks, if they do indeed exist, are Saxon in date, is another matter. On the east side of the hillock, excavations in 1976 revealed a substantial ditch running roughly northsouth.16 This had been re-cut at least once, but the date of the original earthwork is uncertain and it is possible that it was the later medieval Tonman ditch, which documentary evidence shows ran on this line and in this area in 1327.17 In thirteenth- to fifteenth-century records it was not unusual for St Michael’s Church (on the site of the Roman Forum) to be referred to as being in Kingsbury,18 while Kingsbury Manor (later Kingsbury Farm) lay 250 metres north, on the other side of the river, with lands to the north and west. In the

The fourteenth-century compiler of the later sections of the Gesta Abbatum Sancti Albani is quite clear about where the town was in Offa’s day: it was on the site of Roman Verulamium. He tells us this while recording a dispute with the townspeople at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt. The townspeople claimed that Offa had imported craftsmen to build his new church and had settled them in the town, giving them certain rights. This was vigorously denied by the monks, who insisted that the entire non-ecclesiastical population had lived in Verulamium. Although this suited their case, and is consistent with the tradition that the town was established on its present site by Ulsinus in the tenth century, it is possible that there was a small secular settlement, established somewhere in the area of the later town at the end of the eighth century.

13

Gesta Abbatum, ed. Riley, I, pp. 23-4. W. Page, ‘Kingsbury Castle’, Trans., S. Albans & Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Soc., new ser., ii (1903-6), pp. 14857. 15 R. Niblett and I. Thompson, Alban’s Buried Towns: An Assessment of St Albans’ Archaeology up to AD 1600 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 182-5. 16 C.J. Saunders and A.B. Havercroft, ‘Excavations in the City and District of St Albans, 1974-76’, Herts. Archaeology, 6 (1978), pp. 177, at 1-15. 17 Eileen Roberts, ‘St Albans’ Borough Boundary: A Study of the Historic Borough Boundary through Medieval and Later Times’, bound copy of a report to the County Planning Dept, held in SAHAAS library, 1981. 18 J. Hunn, Reconstruction and Measurement of Landscape Change. A Study of Six Parishes in the St Albans Area, BAR British Series 236 (Oxford, 1994), p. 82. 14

Kingsbury The archaeological evidence, such as it is, would present a fairly straightforward picture of continuing occupation in the Roman town in the ninth and tenth centuries, were it not for Matthew Paris’s references to Kingsbury. From Paris we learn

12

S. Rippon, ‘Essex, 700-1066’, in The Archaeology of Essex. Proceedings of the 1993 Writtle Conference, ed. O. Bedwin (Chelmsford: Essex County Council Planning Dept., 1996), pp. 117-28.

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Fig. 2. Saxon St Albans: A Possible Topography. FL=Folly Lane, SM=St Michael’s Church, SS= St Stephen’s Church, SP=St Peter’s church, AML=Abbey Mill Lane, RL= Romeland, TP=Tankerfield Place.

medieval and early modern periods, therefore, Kingsbury was seen as including St Michael’s village as well as the lower part of Fishpool Street and Kingsbury Manor (Fig. 2). Thompson therefore suggests that Kingsbury included – indeed, was centered – not on the hillock north of the river, but on the area around the Roman Forum.19

is by no means impossible that Paris’s propugnaculum was in fact the London Gate. Paris also tells us that the road between the King’s burh and the abbey was the Salipath (modern Fishpool Street), which ran alongside a large fishpond that provided the people of the King’s burh with an important resource. Today, as in Paris’s time, the upper (eastern) part of Fishpool Street runs north and west of the abbey; but it has long been suggested that its original line followed the easier gradient south of the abbey and continued to the east to join up with Sopwell Lane and the medieval road to London (Fig. 2). It may not have been until the Norman abbey and its precinct were laid out in the late eleventh century that Fishpool Street was deflected north. It has to be admitted that the road has not been found in the limited number of trenches that have been dug on the projected line south of the abbey, but erosion, later building and the extensive terracing to which the area has been subjected make this point inconclusive. It is interesting to note that when traffic congestion at the junction of Sopwell Lane and Holywell Hill led to the construction of the new London Road in 1790, Thomas Telford proposed that the most efficient route would run south of the abbey on

According to Matthew Paris, the King’s Burh was levelled at the abbey’s behest in the early eleventh century, apart from a small ‘propugnaculum’ or bulwark which continued to be occupied by the King’s retainers. This Paris describes as being more or less in the middle of the street that ran through the centre of the settlement, but which was a short distance to the east of Kingsbury itself. This position could apply to the second- or third-century London Gate, through which Watling Street entered the south of Verulamium, half a kilometre south-east of St Michael’s village and Kingsbury Manor. The probability that some Romano-British buildings in the town continued to stand for centuries after the collapse of the Empire in the west has already been touched on, and it 19

Niblett and Thompson, Alban’s Buried Towns, pp. 179-84 and 191-2.

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OFFA’S ST ALBANS precisely this line, linking Sopwell Lane with Fishpool Street; it was only pressure by local residents that thwarted his scheme.20

was established in some form, probably at the south-east end of the present lake. Fishpool Street (the Salipath or path lined with willows) led to the abbey church from the north and south while a pathway along the top of the dam gave alternative access from the propugnaculum in the London Gate, as shown on Fig. 2. In time, settlement spread along what is now Abbey Mill Lane, at the northern end of which lay the area later occupied by the Great Courtyard of the medieval abbey. North of this lies the triangular area known since the Middle Ages as Roomland or Romeland. This area was the open-air meeting place of the Hundred moot in late Saxon times,22 and later in the medieval period was the site of the annual fairs that were held just outside the Great Gateway into the abbey. It is tempting to see Roomland as the site of the tenth- or eleventh-century market place, which Paris tells us was established near the abbey by Ulsinus in the mid tenth century. Excavations by Saunders and Havercroft in 1978 on the north side of Romeland (Tankerfield Place) found no sign of any occupation prior to the thirteenth century,23 but it is possible that the original Roomland was rather larger than it was in the later Middle Ages, and that the thirteenthcentury building represents a medieval encroachment.

The Fishpond Again we are indebted to Matthew Paris for a description: Abbot Alfric I [c. 970] bought from King Edgar a large deep fishpond … This fishpond was called ‘Fishpool’ and was too close to the abbey and was causing a nuisance. For it was a royal fishpond, and the King’s servants and fishermen were a trouble and a burden to the monastery and the monks. They continually used their status as King’s men to behave in a rude and oppressive manner towards the servants of the monastery. When the abbot had bought the fishpond, he broke down part of its bank and drained it as much as he could, to prevent other kings in future from claiming back such a fine fishpool. The edges and the steep banks of this fishpool are still visible today, next to the road on the street leading to the west called Fishpool Street. Here the fishermen and the King’s servants used a path on top of the bank which was the usual way to go from the church and estate of St Alban to the royal borough called Kingsbury which was not far from the church.21

In 1968 a hoard of at least 46 Alfredian coins was excavated on the site of the Abbey primary school, approximately 275 metres east of Abbey Mill Lane. Examination of the original excavation records shows that the coins had been buried in what was probably a field bank, although they were subsequently disturbed by a later medieval clay pit.24 The indications are that they were concealed in what were probably backlands, some distance away from buildings. In the past it has been assumed that any Saxon development took place along Holywell Hill, but excavations (admittedly limited) on both sides of the street have so far failed to uncover any evidence of Saxon occupation. According to later tradition, Holywell Hill was not laid out until the later tenth century; in the ninth century the main access between the south end of Verulamium and the Abbey could well have been up Abbey Mill Lane. This is not a part of St Albans where Saxon occupation has been sought, and indeed there has been virtually no excavation in this area. Unfortunately the ground appears disturbed through gravel pits of postmedieval date, but nevertheless there are areas further up the slope, closer to Romeland, where excavation might yet yield evidence in support or demolition of this argument.

From this it is clear that the fishpond lay somewhere on the south-west side of Fishpool Street – wherever Fishpool Street was in the ninth century. The prominent bank known as the Causeway at the south end of the modern lake in Verulamium Park is generally assumed to be the Saxon fishpool dam, and although it has never been excavated, this is surely the bank with the path along its top that Paris described the fishermen as using in the early tenth century. Conclusions: a possible view of ninth-century St Albans It is quite possible that parts of the Forum/Basilica complex in the centre of the Roman town were still standing at the end of the eighth century and that they were the focus of continuing occupation, perhaps by a mixed community of Germanic and British elements. This could have been the nucleus of a villa regalis centred on Watling Street and including the former London Gate. At the same time occupation stretched along the former main roads leading into the town and including the area north of the river crossing around Kingsbury Farm. The threat of Danish invasion in the later ninth or early tenth century no doubt prompted the foundation of the burh, but it could well have been established on the site of an existing villa regalis or defended settlement, perhaps created by Offa. The fishpool

22

Information from Mr C. Saunders. Unpublished excavation. For a summary see Niblett and Thompson, Alban’s Buried Towns, pp. 280-1. 24 Niblett forthcoming. I am grateful to Marion Archibald for commenting on the coins and the possible circumstances of their deposition. 23

20

I am grateful to David Dean for this point. Gesta Abbatum, ed. Riley, I, pp. 176, 183-4 (trans. Robert Niblett).

21

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A Possible Commemorative Stone for Æthelmund, Father of Æthelric Michael Hare width of the carving on each face and to show that about 9 cm. of the carved pattern has been lost from the bottom of the present stone and about 5.5-6 cm. from the top. There was sufficient room for broad borders down the edges of the stone. Richard Bryant suggests that Face A, which had a full double-column layout using the smallest base-grid, is likely to have been the principal face of the cross-shaft. It seems likely that some 2 cm. has been lost from Face B so that the shaft, originally rectangular in plan, measured 59 cm. in length and 53.5 cm. in width.

This paper discusses an Anglo-Saxon cross-shaft in the church of St Mary Magdalene, Elmstone Hardwicke (Glos.). A date in the early ninth century is suggested for this monument. It is suggested that it may have been erected to commemorate the Æthelmund who is known to have been a patron of nearby Deerhurst and who was in all likelihood the ealdorman killed in battle in 802. Elmstone Hardwicke church and its cross-shaft The church of St Mary Magdalene, Elmstone Hardwicke (Glos.) (NGR SO 920261) lies a little less than three miles (4.5 km) north-west of the centre of Cheltenham. The church has a fine Perpendicular west tower, but is otherwise a modest structure of nave and south aisle with south porch and an aisleless chancel with a north vestry. The oldest part of the standing structure is the western part of the south nave arcade which is of Romanesque date. Under this arcade there is a sizeable piece of a former Anglo-Saxon cross-shaft, which retains spiral ornament on three faces (Fig. 1). The surviving fragment measures 70 cm. high, 57 cm. wide and 53.5 cm. deep. The shaft was subsequently cut down to a rather irregular octagon in plan and also chamfered off around a socket at the top. The date and purpose of the alteration are unknown, but Richard Bryant suggests that the octagonal shaft may have been used as the base for a wooden cross.1 The socket is 23 cm. square and 15 cm. deep and may well be an original feature of the stone rather than part of the later adaptation.

No information has been discovered about the provenance of the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft. The stone is first mentioned by the Revd George Forrest Browne (subsequently bishop of Bristol) in 1886.4 It is possible that it was discovered during the restoration of Elmstone Hardwicke church in the 1870s. The architect for at least part of the restoration seems to have been John Middleton.5 However, such limited parish records as survive refer only to dealings with the well-known local builder, Thomas Collins of Tewkesbury.6 Collins had carried out the restoration of St Mary’s church, Deerhurst in 1861-2 and, though no evidence has yet been found to establish the point, he was in all likelihood responsible for assembling the bowl and stem of the font in their present arrangement at Deerhurst c. 186970;7 Collins would certainly have recognised the similarity of the ornament on the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft to the Deerhurst font.

Three faces of the stone (Faces A, C and D) carry the remains of interlocking, opposed ‘bracketed-spiral’ ornament in shallow relief;2 the spirals and straight linking lines are carved to an even width. The carved faces bear clear signs of weathering. The square base grid on which the decoration is constructed is different in size on each of the decorated faces, ranging from 20.2 cm. on Face A to 22 cm. on Face D and a notably larger 28 cm. on Face C. Any ornament which once existed on the fourth face (Face B) has been lost.

4

‘Proceedings at the Meetings of the Society ... 22 November 1886’, Cambridge Antiquarian Soc. Communications, 6 (1884-8), p. ciii. 5 Middleton’s involvement is mentioned by D. Verey and A. Brooks, The Buildings of England. Gloucestershire 2: The Vale and the Forest of Dean, 3rd edn. (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 356-7. Alan Brooks tells me that the green-glazed borders to many of the windows are a Middleton characteristic. 6 Dealings between the parish and Thomas Collins are mentioned in Gloucestershire Archives, P 137 VE2/2 (Uckington Vestry minutes), D 2747/2 (minute book of the Feoffees of the Church Lands Charity) and D 843/4/1, pp. 282, 300 & 367 (Collins’s own volume with details of tenders). For Collins’s career, see D. Willavoys, ‘Thomas Collins, “A Workman that needeth not to be ashamed”’, Tewkesbury Hist. Soc. Bull., 7 (1998), pp. 15-19, and 8 (1999), pp. 46-9. 7 For Collins’s involvement in the restoration of Deerhurst, see Gloucestershire Archives, P 112 IN4/8 & 9; for the assembly of the font see Bryant, Corpus Western Midlands.

A more detailed description of the carving will be provided by Richard Bryant in the Western Midlands volume of the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, currently in preparation.3 He has been able to reconstruct the original

1

R.M. Bryant, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. The Western Midlands, in preparation. 2 The term ‘bracketed-spiral’ has been adopted to describe this ornament by Bryant, ibid. 3 Ibid.

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MICHAEL HARE

Fig. 1. The Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft. Top left: Face A. Top right: Face C. Bottom left: Face D. Bottom right: seen from above with Face B towards the viewer.

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A POSSIBLE COMMEMORATIVE STONE FOR ÆTHELMUND, FATHER OF ÆTHELRIC No precise parallels for the ‘bracketed-spiral’ ornament of the Deerhurst font and of the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft can be traced among surviving Anglo-Saxon sculpture; the closest parallel is provided by a complex pattern of interlocking and incised peltas on one panel of the eighthcentury slab from Bradford-on-Avon (Wilts.), now set as part of an altar frontal in the Anglo-Saxon chapel there.10 It seems fair to conclude that the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft was carved by the same hand that produced the bowl and the stem of the font. The fact that the three pieces have the same lithology may point in the same direction.11 The ‘bracketed-spiral’ ornament on the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft cannot on its own be closely dated, though a pre900 date is certainly indicated. However, the bowl and stem of the Deerhurst font have other ornament, for which a rather closer dating may be suggested. In the stem the panels of spiral ornament alternate with compositions made up of confronted or single creatures enmeshed in interlace; these panels are much weathered, but are well illustrated in drawings based on rubbings made by Steven Plunkett. As Richard Bailey has shown, the Deerhurst knotwork and animals represent a version of the interlace and animal decoration found in the ‘Colerne School’ across much of Wessex and south-west Mercia; a floruit for the ‘Colerne School’ of around 800 has been proposed, though some examples may date to as late as the tenth century. The bowl of the Deerhurst font is bounded above and below by continuous runs of well-executed scroll. Richard Bailey has argued convincingly that both the details of the scroll and its general organisation suggest a dating ‘in the decades around 800’.12

Fig. 2. The font at St Mary’s Church, Deerhurst.

The Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft and the Deerhurst font

Richard Bailey has also argued for a date in the first half of the ninth century for other sculpture at Deerhurst, namely the beast-heads, the angel in the apse and (in all probability) the Virgin above the central of the three arches leading through the west porch into the nave.13 These sculptures are integral to the Period IV building at Deerhurst, when the church was

The ‘bracketed-spiral’ ornament found on the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft is also found in identical form on the bowl and stem of the Deerhurst font (Fig. 2);8 Deerhurst is just under four miles (a little over 6 km.) to the north-west of Elmstone Hardwicke (Fig. 3). When Richard Bryant and I first discussed the Gloucestershire material for the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, we considered it likely that the bowl and stem of the font and the Elmstone Hardwicke shaft had originally all formed part of a single monument, the Elmstone Hardwicke piece perhaps being a stray which had made its way to its present location at some unknown date. Detailed study of the three pieces has convinced us that the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft cannot possibly have been part of the same monument as either the bowl or the stem of the Deerhurst font. It also seems likely that the bowl and stem of the font belong to different monuments. In other words, we have parts not of one but of three separate monuments.9

10

R. Cramp, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, VII: SouthWest England (Oxford, 2006), p. 205 and pls. 407-9. Other parallels will be discussed by Bryant in Corpus Western Midlands. 11 The two pieces of the Deerhurst font and the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft are of a sparsely oolitic, very shelly limestone with a grain-supporting sparry matrix. In other Anglo-Saxon sculpture in the area only one parallel can be found for the use of a shell detrital limestone with only sparse oolith grains. I am very grateful to Ted Freshney for allowing me to quote from his work in progress; final conclusions will be reported in Bryant, Corpus Western Midlands. 12 Steven Plunkett’s drawings are reproduced in Bailey, Anglo-Saxon Sculptures at Deerhurst, pp. 18-19. For the art-historical dating of the bowl and stem, see ibid., pp. 17-21. 13 Bailey, Anglo-Saxon Sculptures at Deerhurst, pp. 1-14.

8

There is a recent discussion of the font by R.N. Bailey, Anglo-Saxon Sculptures at Deerhurst, Deerhurst Lecture 2002 (Deerhurst, 2005), pp. 14-23. See Blair, this volume, pp. 154-7. 9 Bryant, Corpus Western Midlands.

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MICHAEL HARE

Fig. 3. Ecclesiastical parishes (including detached parts) and townships in the vicinity of Deerhurst and Elmstone Hardwicke. The ecclesiastical parish boundaries are shown as thick lines. Reproduced with permission from S. Bassett, The Origins of the Parishes of the Deerhurst Area, Deerhurst Lecture 1997 (Deerhurst, 1998), Fig. 1.

The major enlargement and decorative enrichment of Deerhurst church in the first half of the ninth century is likely to reflect the substantial lands granted to the community at Deerhurst under the testament of Æthelric son of Æthelmund in a document dated 804 (discussed more fully below). The information provided by this document about Deerhurst’s lay patrons in its heyday enables a context for the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft to be proposed.

heightened and enlarged to form what remains the core of the present building (Fig. 4).14

14

For the Period IV structure at Deerhurst, see P. Rahtz, L. Watts, H. Taylor and L. Butler, St Mary’s Church, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire: Fieldwork, Excavations and Structural Analysis, 1971-1984, Society of Antiquaries Research Rep., 55 (Woodbridge, 1997), passim, esp. pp. 166-75; R. Gem and E. Howe with R. Bryant, ‘The Ninth-Century Polychrome Decoration at St Mary’s Church, Deerhurst’, Antiquaries Jnl., 88 (2008), pp. 109-64; M. Hare, ‘The 9th-Century West Porch of St Mary’s Church, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire: Form and Function’, Medieval Archaeology, 53 (2009), pp. 35-93.

The parish of Elmstone Hardwicke In Domesday Book the parish of Elmstone Hardwicke was in the hundred of Deerhurst and comprised three manors.

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A POSSIBLE COMMEMORATIVE STONE FOR ÆTHELMUND, FATHER OF ÆTHELRIC

Fig. 4. Conjectural reconstruction of the Period IV church at Deerhurst seen from the south-east. Drawing: Maggie Kneen.

have included the site of the later church, and its tenure by Regenbald, who held the lands of a number of minsters, perhaps suggests that Elmstone already had an ecclesiastical character in 1086.18 The transfer of the two Deerhurst estates to the abbeys of Westminster and St-Denis is likely to have created a substantial volume of work for Regenbald and his colleagues in the royal chancery, and it may have been as a gift for services rendered that Regenbald received the one hide at Elmstone. Regenbald’s possessions (including Elmstone) were subsequently granted as a group by Henry I, c. 1133, to Cirencester Abbey, his foundation for Augustinian canons.19

Westminster Abbey held five hides at Hardwicke and one hide at Elmstone, while the abbey of St-Denis held five hides at Uckington.15 The division between the two abbeys reflects the division of the estates associated with Deerhurst after the death of Earl Odda in 1056. Odda’s own estate of fifty-nine hides went to Edward the Confessor’s favourite foundation of Westminster, while the lands associated with the church, comprising sixty hides, were given to St-Denis.16 The one hide at Elmstone was held of Westminster Abbey in 1086 by Regenbald, who had been a royal clerk (and in all likelihood chancellor) under Edward the Confessor and in the early years of William I.17 The Elmstone hide is likely to

In Domesday Book, Elmstone appears in the form Almundestan. In this form the name could derive either from

15

Great Domesday: A Facsimile, ed. R.W.H. Erskine (London, 1986) [hereafter GDB], fo. 166; Domesday Book: Gloucestershire, ed. J.S. Moore (Chichester, 1982) [hereafter DB Glos.], nos. 19.2 & 20.1. 16 A. Williams, Land, Power and Politics: The Family and Career of Odda of Deerhurst, Deerhurst Lecture 1996 (Deerhurst, 1997), pp. 7-10. 17 For Regenbald’s career, see S. Keynes, ‘Regenbald the Chancellor (sic)’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 10 (1988), pp. 185-222. The Beorhtric who held Elmstone in 1066 cannot be identified; it does not seem likely that it was Beorhtric son of Ælfgar, lord of Tewkesbury, who

is normally identified by his patronymic in the Gloucestershire folios of Domesday Book. 18 The ecclesiastical parish and the church were still regularly described simply as ‘Elmstone’ in the 19th century: see Gloucestershire Archives, P 137 VE2/2 (Uckington Vestry minutes), P 137a VE2/1 (Hardwicke Vestry minutes) and D 2747/2 (minute book of the Feoffees of the Church Lands Charity). 19 A.K.B. Evans, ‘Cirencester Abbey: The First Hundred Years’, Trans., Bristol & Glos. Archaeological Soc., 109 (1991), pp. 99-116, at 99-100.

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MICHAEL HARE ‘Ealhmund’s stone’ or from ‘Æthelmund’s stone’. However, as Smith has pointed out, later Middle English versions of the name are predominantly in Eil- and similar forms; forms in Eil- normally represent Old English Æthel-.20 The issue of Elmstone’s early history has been much confused by its identification with an Alchmunding tuun, which must lie somewhere in the vicinity and which is mentioned in two documents, one of 889 and the other of 899×904.21 All sources from Domesday onwards are consistent in indicating that the second element of Elmstone’s name is -stan rather than -tun; the suggestion that Alchmunding tuun became Elmstone depends on a change in name from ‘Ealhmund’s tun’ to ‘Ealhmund’s stone’ followed by Middle English forms which are at variance with this origin. In my view, the proposed derivation of Elmstone from Alchmunding tuun is a red herring; the evidence for the location of Alchmunding tuun is discussed further in Appendix 1.

an incomplete inscription with the word stan round an eleventh-century cross-head from All Hallows by the Tower, London.24 It is striking that Elmstone Hardwicke church contains a cross-shaft with decorative detail similar to the font at Deerhurst and that both cross-shaft and the two parts of the font are likely to belong to the first half of the ninth century, when Deerhurst’s lay patrons were Æthelmund and his son Æthelric. It is therefore legitimate to consider the possibility that the cross-shaft in Elmstone Hardwicke is itself part of ‘Æthelmund’s stone’. Such a monument could have been erected by Æthelmund himself. However, Æthelmund is probably the ealdorman killed in battle in 802, and the cross was perhaps erected to commemorate him after his death. The evidence for Æthelmund and his family will be discussed in detail at a later stage in this paper. The landscape setting of the Elmstone Hardwicke crossshaft

The place-name evidence thus indicates the likelihood that Elmstone derives from ‘Æthelmund’s stone’. A variety of words was used to describe crosses and crucifixes in the landscape,22 and the Old English word stān was evidently among them. A surviving example is the tenth-century Copplestone cross (Devon), erected at the junction of three parish boundaries and mentioned in the bounds of a charter of 974 as copelan stan;23 a further case is perhaps provided by

The parish of Elmstone Hardwicke consists of a low, barely perceptible, ridge, running from north-west to south-east; this ridge lies between two local streams, the River Swilgate (which forms the north-eastern boundary of the parish throughout its length) and the River Chelt to the south (which forms the southern boundary of Uckington and which runs roughly parallel to the southern boundary of Hardwicke).

20

A.H. Smith, The Place-Names of Gloucestershire, 4 vols., English Place-Name Society, 38-41 (Cambridge, 1964-5), II, pp. 81-2. For forms in Eil- deriving from Æthel-, see O. von Feilitzen, The PreConquest Personal Names of Domesday Book, Nomina Germanica, 3 (Uppsala, 1937), pp. 103-6. Additional forms for Elmstone in Eilunknown to Smith have been noticed in the course of the research for this paper, most notably in the 13th- and 14th-century Cirencester cartularies: The Cartulary of Cirencester Abbey, Gloucestershire, 3 vols., ed. C. D. Ross (vols. 1 & 2) and M. Devine (vol. 3) (London and Oxford, 1964-77), I, nos. 28, 144/102, 145/77, 152/84; II, nos. 403/426, 433/465; III, nos. 424, 425. 21 The identification of Alchmunding tuun with Elmstone was first proposed by W. St Clair Baddeley, Place-Names of Gloucestershire. A Handbook (Gloucester, 1913), p. 60. 22 A.R. Rumble, ‘The Cross in English Place-Names: Vocabulary and Usage’, in The Place of the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. C.E. Karkov, S.L. Keefer and K.L. Jolly, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies, 4 (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 29-40; the forms listed by Rumble do not include the word stān, as many examples of the word may refer to other types of standing stone, but he does note two examples of the appellative compound rōd-stān (rood-stone): ibid., p. 33. In addition Sir David Wilson has drawn my attention to the fact that forms in steinn are commonly used to denote standing crosses in Scandinavia. 23 Cramp, Corpus South-West England, pp. 82-3 and pls. 10-14, 31, 33. The charter is S 795 (BCS 1303). Anglo-Saxon charters are cited by their number in P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, Royal Historical Soc. Guides and Handbooks, 8 (London, 1968), abbreviated as S; editions of charters are cited from Cartularium Saxonicum, ed. W. de G. Birch, 3 vols.

There are two main settlements in the parish comprising separate tithings. Uckington is a nucleated village in the south-east corner of the parish, while Hardwicke is a rather more dispersed settlement in the western half of the parish.25 The church is located on the low ridge between the two streams just to the east of the boundary between the two tithings. The church now stands at a cross-roads, but it is unclear how far these roads follow early routes and how far they reflect the development of the parish church in later centuries. A ridgeway seems to have led west from the church, as witnessed by the name Rudgeway Farm in the north-west corner of the parish; this route would have led to Deerhurst

(London, 1885-93), abbreviated as BCS. A revised edition of Sawyer’s catalogue is accessible on the ‘Kemble’ website ; this website provides details of more recent editions in the British Academy series of some of the charters cited in this paper. 24 D. Tweddle, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, IV: SouthEast England (Oxford, 1995), pp. 221-3 and pls. 343-4. However, it is not certain that the word stan is self-referential in this case, as it is possible that it is the second element of a personal name (I am grateful to Dr David N. Parsons for advice on this point). 25 Victoria History of the County of Gloucestershire [hereafter VCH Glos.], VIII (London, 1968), pp. 50-60.

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A POSSIBLE COMMEMORATIVE STONE FOR ÆTHELMUND, FATHER OF ÆTHELRIC and to Tewkesbury.26 There is, however, no trace of a ridgeway to the east of the church, and it is unclear what route travellers from Cheltenham to Deerhurst and Tewkesbury would have followed before the creation of the turnpike road through Uckington in 1726. There is also a north-south route through the parish (now no more than a track), which passed immediately to the west of the church; to the south of the church, this was known in 1824 as the old Gloucester road.27 The north-south road could potentially have linked Gloucester with the important settlement at Bishop’s Cleeve, the site of a minster church.

Hwiccian forces in 802 which then did battle with the men of Wiltshire, a battle in which Æthelmund was killed. A relevant factor is the site of Æthelmund’s burial. Patrick Wormald suggested, on the basis of evidence to be discussed below, that Æthelmund is likely to have been buried at Deerhurst, and that would seem by far the most likely option; all that we know about burial practice at this period encourages us to believe that by 800 a senior member of the aristocracy would wish to be buried at a minster church where he would receive worthy commemoration.31 Nevertheless minster burial was by no means universal at this date, though evidence for high-status burials away from minsters declines after the early eighth century; it is, however, not beyond the bounds of possibility that the cross commemorated Æthelmund on the site of his burial. The location on a ridge (albeit a low ridge in an undramatic landscape) would be characteristic of many early burial sites.

What is striking about the situation of the church is the lack of any indication of settlement around it; even now there is no more than a scatter of modern houses. Writing of the church in 1803, Thomas Rudge commented that there was ‘no house’, though he may have been concerned primarily with the absence of any houses for the gentry and clergy.28 However, the pattern is strikingly confirmed by reference to the tithe award maps for Uckington and Hardwicke of 18389; these show one cottage in Uckington adjacent to the west side of the churchyard, with two adjoining cottages in Hardwicke just to the west of the north-south road which divided the tithings at this point.29 Recent metal-detecting activity in the vicinity of the church has confirmed this picture; the level of finds of all periods was very low.30

The evidence for early crosses away from minster sites is limited, but Eric Cambridge and John Blair have noted the occurrence of pre-Viking sculpture at various minor sites in northern England, most of which are best interpreted as belonging to monastic dependencies; evidence for crosses located in open countryside is almost non-existent, though this may reflect the fact that much sculpture of this type has later been removed to central church sites.32 In Gloucestershire, the Lypiatt cross now stands at a roadside location some distance from the minster at Bisley, but its provenance is very uncertain.33 Another interesting case in Gloucestershire is Abson, where fragments of a cross with ornament of the ‘Colerne School’, probably of ninth-century date, are built into the south wall of the nave of the church. Abson was a member of the large royal estate of Pucklechurch.34

The evidence would thus seem to indicate that the Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft stood in an isolated position well away from any settlement. If the cross was indeed erected either by Æthelmund or (more probably) to commemorate him, the reasons for the choice of this location must for the moment remain a matter for speculation. One possibility might be that it was at this point that Æthelmund mustered the

26

It is possible that it was along this ridgeway that Edward IV and his Yorkist forces made their way to the battle of Tewkesbury in May 1471. However, a route to the north of the Swilgate is also possible. The contemporary sources give no clear evidence. 27 On the evidence for roads in the parish, see VCH Glos., VIII, p. 51. 28 T. Rudge, The History of the County of Gloucester, 2 vols. (Gloucester, 1803), I, p. 167. The vicar, when resident, lived in Uckington: VCH Glos., VIII, p. 58. 29 Gloucestershire Archives, GDR/T1/79 (Uckington) and GDR/T1/78 (Hardwicke). The cottages may themselves have been relatively recent encroachments. In 1885 it was stated that ‘The remains of the moat, which surrounded the old manor house, are still visible near the church, but the manor house itself has disappeared’: Kelly’s Directory of Gloucestershire (London, 1885), p. 453. However, no trace of any such site has been reported by any other authority; it seems most likely that there has been confusion with the surviving moated site in Uckington, as suggested by VCH Glos., VIII, p. 53 n. 16. 30 Roman pottery has, however, been observed in abundance. I am very grateful to Rick Andrews for information about metaldetecting in the vicinity of Elmstone Hardwicke church.

31

P. Wormald, How do we Know so much about Anglo-Saxon Deerhurst?, Deerhurst Lecture 1991 (Deerhurst, 1993), p. 3; on the development of burial practice at this period, see J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), pp. 228-45. 32 E. Cambridge, ‘The Early Church in County Durham: A Reassessment’, Jnl., British Archaeological Assoc., 137 (1984), pp. 6585; Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, pp. 215-16, 227-8. 33 R. Bryant, ‘The Lypiatt Cross’, Trans., Bristol & Glos. Archaeol. Soc., 108 (1990), pp. 33-52. For the problem of the provenance of the Lypiatt cross, see H. M. Jones, Roman and Saxon Bisley (Bisley, 2007), pp. 18-50. 34 One of the two Abson fragments was published by D. P. Dobson, ‘Anglo-Saxon Buildings and Sculpture in Gloucestershire’, Trans., Bristol & Glos. Archaeol. Soc., 55 (1933), pp. 261-76, esp. 266, Fig. 3; both will be considered in Bryant, Corpus Western Midlands. The royal estate at Pucklechurch passed into the hands of Glastonbury Abbey at some point in the second half of the 10th century; the place-name Abson denotes ‘abbot’s tun’ and it is unlikely that the name was coined before Glastonbury acquired Pucklechurch: see L. Abrams, Anglo-Saxon Glastonbury: Church and Endowment, Studies

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MICHAEL HARE properly dedicated to St Mary Magdalen.39 The tradition reported by Benson may be simply an early modern attempt to explain the place-name, but it might just preserve a faint and confused reminiscence of the origin of the church in a commemorative stone. We must now turn to what is known of Æthelmund.

There is one other case in the area in which interesting sculptural links between an important early church and an outlying location may perhaps be discerned in a ninthcentury context. A carved fragment from Upton Bishop (Herefs.) with figures under an arcade has recently been recognised as Anglo-Saxon by John Hunt.35 The facial details on the Upton Bishop fragment show close similarities to the figure of Abraham on the ninth-century cross-shaft at Newent (Glos.), some five miles to the east, and it is possible that the two pieces were carved by the same hand.36 The early ecclesiastical development of this area of north-west Gloucestershire and south-east Herefordshire is obscure, but it all lay in the medieval diocese of Hereford. Significant early churches probably existed at Ross-on-Wye (Herefs.) and at Dymock and Newent (both Glos.). The county boundary is probably of eleventh-century origin in this area and may mask early ties; it is likely (but far from certain) that there was an early ecclesiastical relationship between Newent and Upton Bishop.37

Æthelmund and his family The name Æthelmund occurs in a Mercian context in various sources between 767 and 802. However, an account of ‘Æthelmund’ is by no means straightforward, as scholars are not in agreement that all these references relate to a single person. Only a summary of the complex evidence can be given here.40 We are first concerned with a pair of charters dated 767 and 770 (S 58 and S 59).41 Both charters are grants by Uhtred, a sub-king of the Hwicce, of five hides of land at Aston in Stoke Prior (Worcs.) to his faithful minister Æthelmund; both grants were made with the consent of King Offa of Mercia (757-96). However, the terms vary. Under S 58, Æthelmund had freedom to dispose of the land as he wished. By contrast, under S 59 Æthelmund did not have freedom of disposal, but could only leave the land to two heirs after him, with reversion to the church of Worcester. Patrick Wormald has considered the differences between the two grants and has made a cogent case that S 59 is in fact a forgery concocted in the early ninth century in connection with a dispute (to be discussed below) concerning the inheritance of Æthelric.42

Whatever its exact origins, Æthelmund’s stone was presumably the dominant feature of the site since it gave its name to Elmstone. The cross may well have been accompanied by a small (timber?) oratory or wayside shrine. Later, the site would have formed a natural focus for the development by the minster priests of Deerhurst of a parochial chapel to serve the nearby settlements of Uckington and Hardwicke.38 In his survey of the diocese of Gloucester, Bishop Benson (1735-52) noted that Elmstone Hardwicke church was thought by some to be dedicated to ‘St Almand’, but was

In both the 767 and the 770 documents, Æthelmund is described as the son of Ingeld, who in turn is characterised as having been an ealdorman of King Æthelbald of Mercia (71657). Ingeld is not recorded in any other source, but that need occasion no surprise given the scarcity of narrative sources for Æthelbald’s reign and the small number of surviving charters issued by Æthelbald with witness lists (especially for his later years).43

in Anglo-Saxon History, 8 (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 211-14; Smith, Place-Names of Gloucestershire, III, p. 71. 35 J. Hunt, ‘A Figure Sculpture at Upton Bishop, Herefordshire: Continuity and Revival in Early Medieval Sculpture’, Antiquaries Jnl., 89 (2009), pp. 179-214; I am most grateful to John Hunt for allowing me to see a copy of his paper in advance of publication. The Newent and Upton Bishop sculptures will also be included in Bryant, Corpus Western Midlands, where it is suggested that the Upton Bishop fragment may have come from a cross-base. 36 I owe this suggestion to Richard Bryant. 37 I am much indebted to Steven Bassett for discussing the evidence for early church development in this area with me. On the county boundary between Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, see H.P.R. Finberg, The Early Charters of the West Midlands, Studies in Early English History, 2, 2nd edn. (Leicester, 1972), pp. 226-7. 38 Such isolated situations are characteristic of parochial chapels developed by minster churches: for examples of isolated parochial chapels established by the minster church at Wootton Wawen (Warws.), see S. Bassett, ‘Boundaries of Knowledge: Mapping the Land Units of Late Anglo-Saxon and Norman England’, in People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300-1300, ed. W. Davies, G. Halsall and A. Reynolds, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 15 (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 115-42, esp. 124-5, 135.

After the grants of 767 and 770, there are no references to anyone by the name of Æthelmund until the 790s. In the

39

Bishop Benson’s Survey of the Diocese of Gloucester, 1735-1750, ed. J. Fendley, Gloucestershire Record Series, 13 (2000), p. 95. 40 I have a full prosopographical study in preparation under the provisional title ‘Deerhurst’s Earliest Patrons: Æthelmund and Æthelric’. 41 S 58 (BCS 202) and S 59 (BCS 203). 42 P. Wormald, ‘Charters, Law and the Settlement of Disputes in Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe, ed. W. Davies and P. Fouracre (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 149-68 and 262-5, at 152-7. 43 For charter attestations of laymen during Æthelbald’s reign, see S. Keynes, An Atlas of Attestations in Anglo-Saxon Charters, c. 6701066, ASNC Guides, Texts and Studies, 5 (Cambridge, 2002), Table VII.

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A POSSIBLE COMMEMORATIVE STONE FOR ÆTHELMUND, FATHER OF ÆTHELRIC intervening period the sub-kingdom of the Hwicce had come to an end; the last reference to a member of the dynasty occurs in the late 770s.44 The fact that we have no surviving references to any individual by the name of Æthelmund during the 770s and 780s does not mean that no one of that name was active during these decades; charters of this period rarely list lay witnesses who are not ealdormen.45

S 1187 is in the form of a nuncupative will on the part of Æthelric and is a composite document, reporting the proceedings of two synods separated by a few years, the first held at Clofesho and the second held at Aclea. It is unclear whether the date of 804 relates to the first or second of these two synods. Æthelric’s testament begins with a statement that he had been summoned to appear at a synod at Clofesho with the deeds of the estate at ‘Westminster’, which he had received from his kinsmen; ‘Westminster’ is evidently an alternative name for Westbury-on-Trym. At the synod it was acknowledged that Æthelric was free to dispose of the land and of the title-deeds as he wished; presumably there had been a challenge to his inheritance which was refuted. Æthelric then declares that he had entrusted the land and the associated title-deeds to his friends while he made a pilgrimage to Rome.51 Æthelric states that on his return, ‘I received back my land and repaid the price as we previously agreed, that we might be mutually at peace’. He then observes that a few years later, a further synod was held at Aclea and that he gave evidence as to how he wished to dispose of his inheritance.

We are next concerned with a pair of charters (S 139 and S 146) both issued by King Offa and dating to the period 793×6; both concern a large estate at Westbury-on-Trym (Glos.).46 S 139 is a grant by Offa of fifty-five hides at Westbury in favour of his minister Æthelmund; this charter has been accepted by all authorities as genuine and contemporary with the grant.47 However, under the terms of S 146, Offa granted to the church of Worcester the reversion of sixty hides at Westbury and a further twenty hides at nearby Henbury; the reversion was to take effect after the death of Offa and of his son Ecgfrith. No reference is made in S 146 to Æthelmund or his family. Patrick Wormald has argued that S 146 is an early ninth-century forgery produced in the same context as S 59 in respect of Aston in Stoke Prior, mentioned above.48

Æthelric’s detailed dispositions then follow, beginning ‘These are the names of those lands which I will give to the place which is called Deerhurst, for me and for Æthelmund my father, if it befall me that my body shall be buried there: Todanhom . 7 æt Sture . Screfleh . 7 Cohhanleh on condition that that community carries out their vows as they have promised me’. Unfortunately the vows made by the community are not specified, but there can be little doubt that they would have included worthy commemoration both for Æthelmund and for Æthelric. Patrick Wormald argued that the provisions implied not only that Æthelric wished to be buried at Deerhurst, but also that his father had already been buried there. It was suggested above that while burial at the site of the minster of Deerhurst is by far the most likely option, an alternative scenario might be envisaged under which Æthelmund was buried at Elmstone Hardwicke; if so, the vows made by the community could perhaps have included a duty to care for the nearby site of Æthelmund’s burial and to perform occasional liturgical services there.

If we discount references to the ealdorman called Æthelmund, we hear nothing further of Æthelmund during his lifetime. However, two further documents are concerned with the inheritance of Æthelmund’s son, Æthelric, and tell us much more about the family. The first (S 1187) bears the date of 804 and outlines the dispositions which Æthelric made after his father’s death;49 the second (S 1433) is an account of a dispute settlement in October 824 made after Æthelric’s own death.50 The bishops of Worcester and their community were the victors in the dispute settlement; the two documents which we have were evidently drawn up by the Worcester community and both are preserved in Liber Wigorniensis, the community’s early eleventh-century cartulary.

44

P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600-800, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 3 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 36-9. 45 The evidence is clear from Keynes, Atlas, Table X. 46 S 139 (BCS 274) and S 146 (BCS 273). 47 The fullest discussion is in A. Scharer, Die angelsächsische Königsurkunde im 7. und 8. Jahrhundert, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 26 (Vienna, 1982), pp. 274-8. 48 Wormald, ‘Charters, Law and the Settlement of Disputes’, pp. 152-7, where he suggests that the forgery could have been based on a genuine charter in respect of Henbury (p. 156 n. 30); Wormald, How do we Know so much about Anglo-Saxon Deerhurst?, pp. 2-7, 20-2. 49 S 1187 (BCS 313). 50 S 1433 (BCS 379).

It is unfortunate that no hidages are given for the four estates granted to Deerhurst. The evidence will be discussed in more detail elsewhere, but it seems probable that the endowment was substantial; a large part of the endowment was in the Stour valley, and at least part of the former holdings of the Deerhurst community in the Stour valley may be identified from the evidence of Domesday Book.52 Deerhurst’s later holdings in this area render it likely that Æthelric was indeed buried at Deerhurst and that his bequest took effect. 51

The context of Æthelric’s Roman pilgrimage has been fully explored recently by R. Gem, Deerhurst and Rome: Æthelric’s Pilgrimage c. 804 and the Oratory of St Mary Mediana, Deerhurst Lecture 2007 (Deerhurst, 2008). 52 Hare, ‘Deerhurst’s Earliest Patrons’.

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MICHAEL HARE After dealing with Deerhurst, Æthelric’s testament then leaves eleven hides of land at Bromsgrove and Feckenham to Wærfrith with reversion to Worcester. Æthelric next bequeathes a substantial estate of thirty hides at Over to the minster at Gloucester; this bequest is also mentioned in Gloucester’s own late medieval archives.53

swearing thirty days later at ‘Westminster’ (i.e. Westbury). Æthelric may have been dead for at least a year and perhaps longer by this time; the synod of 824 seems to have been the first held since 816, largely because of the bitter dispute over the Kentish minsters between King Coenwulf and Archbishop Wulfred of Canterbury, who was suspended from office for almost six years during this period.58

Æthelric then turns to the final part of his bequest, which he evidently expects to be less than straightforward. He leaves to his mother, Ceolburg, the land at ‘Westminster’ (i.e. Westbury-on-Trym) and at Stoke for her life with reversion to Worcester; it is unfortunately not clear whether the Stoke in this context is Stoke Bishop (Glos.), which at the time of Domesday Book was a member of Westbury-on-Trym, or Stoke Prior (Worcs.) which included the estate at Aston granted to Æthelmund in 767.54 Æthelric clearly expects that Ceolburg would experience trouble from the ‘Berkeley people’ (Berclingas), and he makes detailed provisions for his mother’s protection. The A-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contains an entry under 805 (recte 807) which relates that, ‘In this year King Cuthred died in Kent, and Abbess Ceolburg and Ealdorman Heahberht’.55 It seems likely that the Ceolburg mentioned in the annal is Æthelric’s mother;56 in all probability she had entered the religious life after Æthelmund’s death.

The account in S 1433 relates that at the synod, ‘a certain dispute was brought forward between Bishop Heahberht [of Worcester] and the community of Berkeley concerning the inheritance of Æthelric, son of Æthelmund, that is to say the minster which is called Westbury’. It is reported ‘that the bishop had the land with the title-deeds, just as Æthelric had ordered that it was to revert to the church of Worcester’. The synod confirmed Worcester in its possession of Westbury, and it was decreed that the bishop ‘was to swear the land into his possession with an oath of the servants of God, priests, deacons and many monks’. After giving the list of witnesses of the synod, S 1433 then lists the names of ‘the mass-priests who stood and were concerned in the oath’; a list of 56 names follows, comprising 3 abbots, 47 priests and 6 deacons. In Patrick Wormald’s words, ‘the bishop had evidently rustled up a fair proportion of his diocesan manpower in his own support’.59

Æthelric was indeed right to foresee trouble from the ‘Berkeley people’, as Patrick Wormald has pointed out, though since his mother seems likely to have predeceased him, the trouble apparently occurred after his own death rather than after his mother’s.57 S 1433, which is dated 30 October 824, is Worcester’s account of the proceedings at a synod in respect of the estate at Westbury. Like Æthelric’s testament, S 1433 is a composite document, for it describes both the judgement at the synod and a subsequent oath-

The forgeries S 59 and S 146 (respectively purporting to date from 770 and 793×6) have been argued by Patrick Wormald to have been produced in the early part of the ninth century, with the situation following Æthelric’s death in mind. He has also stressed how much of the background remains unclear, given that the surviving documentation is all from the Worcester archive; we do not, for instance, know the case put forward by the Berkeley community in support of their claims. We may now turn to the Æthelmund who appears as an ealdorman, seemingly the ealdorman who administered the territory of the Hwicce on behalf of the Mercian kings. From the first half of the 790s until his death in 802, Æthelmund is regularly recorded as an ealdorman in the witness lists of charters and of the remarkable series of synodal documents produced at this period;60 some of these documents are forgeries, but in all cases the forgers do at least seem to have had access to genuine witness lists of the period. The

53

Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestriæ, ed. W. H. Hart, 3 vols., Rolls Series, 33 (London, 1863-7), I, p. 104; additional references to the patronage of Æthelmund and Æthelric are at: I, pp. lxxiii, 4, 122; and II, pp. 110-11. 54 GDB, fos. 164v and 174; DB Glos., no. 3.1; Domesday Book: Worcestershire, ed. F. and C. Thorn (Chichester, 1982), no. 2.81. For differing viewpoints on the identity of Stoke in Æthelric’s testament, see Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 175-6; Wormald, How do we Know so much about Anglo-Saxon Deerhurst?, pp. 20-2. 55 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 805 A (= 807): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS A, ed. J. M. Bately, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: a Collaborative Edition, ed. D. Dumville and S. Keynes, 3 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 40 (text); The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: a Revised Translation, ed. D. Whitelock, with D. C. Douglas and S. I. Tucker, 2nd edn. (London, 1965), p. 39 (translation). 56 This point will be discussed in more detail in Hare, ‘Deerhurst’s Earliest Patrons’. 57 Wormald, ‘Charters, Law and the Settlement of Disputes’, pp. 155, 157; Wormald, How do we Know so much about Anglo-Saxon Deerhurst?, p. 3.

58

N. P. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury (Leicester, 1984), pp. 132-6; C. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils c. 650 - c. 850 (London, 1995), pp. 219-21. The autumn was in general favoured for the holding of synods: ibid., pp. 25-6. 59 Wormald, How do we Know so much about Anglo-Saxon Deerhurst?, pp. 3-4. 60 The texts witnessed by Æthelmund are S 136 (BCS 267), S 138 (BCS 264), S 139 (BCS 274), S 146 (BCS 273), S 132 (BCS 265), S 148 (BCS 278), S 149 (BCS 279), S 153 (BCS 289), S 155 (BCS 293), S 1186a (BCS 201). The evidence will be more fully discussed in Hare, ‘Deerhurst’s Earliest Patrons’.

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A POSSIBLE COMMEMORATIVE STONE FOR ÆTHELMUND, FATHER OF ÆTHELRIC attestations span the last years of King Offa (757-96), the short reign of his son, King Ecgfrith (July to December 796) and the early part of the reign of King Coenwulf (796-821). The picture of Æthelmund afforded by the witness-lists is of a middle-ranking ealdorman under Offa, perhaps achieving rather more senior status under Ecgfrith and Coenwulf.61 It is unclear when Æthelmund was first appointed as ealdorman. Most of the surviving witness-lists from Mercian documents of the 780s contain only a small number of laymen;62 it is possible that Æthelmund was appointed well before his earliest attestation in surviving witness-lists.

Thames border into Wiltshire should be seen in the context of the succession to the West Saxon kingdom.66 None of the sources discussed above provides an explicit link to demonstrate that (1) Æthelmund son of Ingeld, (2) Æthelmund father of Æthelric, and (3) Ealdorman Æthelmund are one and the same person.67 Æthelmund is not an uncommon name, and the possibility that there were two or even three individuals of this name cannot be excluded on the available evidence; the evidence may be construed in more than one way. However, if the beneficiary of Offa’s grant (S 139) of Westbury-on-Trym in 793×6 was not the ealdorman, this would involve positing a scenario in which there were two very powerful laymen by the name of Æthelmund, who were both active in the mid-790s in the territory of the Hwicce and who also died within a few years of one another. Such coincidences do arise often enough in early medieval history. The arguments will be discussed more fully elsewhere; I incline to the view that it is a more economical hypothesis to assume a single Æthelmund.68 Ingeld had been an ealdorman of King Æthelbald, so it would be hardly surprising if his son eventually achieved the same rank in the course of a long career.

Ealdorman Æthelmund was also the beneficiary of one of the charters which he witnessed (S 148).63 Under the terms of S 148, King Ecgfrith granted three hides at Huntena tun to his faithful princeps, Æthelmund. The use of the term princeps was often used to denote an ealdorman of senior status, and its use here would tend to support the evidence of the witness-lists.64 Ealdorman Æthelmund’s death is recorded in the AngloSaxon Chronicle – the only reference to him in a narrative source. The A-text annal for 800 (recte 802) reads as follows:-

Conclusion

In this year King Beorhtric and Ealdorman Worr died, and Ecgberht succeeded to the kingdom of the West Saxons. And that same day Ealdorman Æthelmund rode over [the Thames] at Cynemær’s ford [Kempsford]. And Ealdorman Wiohstan with the men of Wiltshire met him, and a great battle took place, and both ealdormen were killed and the men of Wiltshire had the victory.65

The case made in this paper for a commemorative cross for Æthelmund father of Æthelric at Elmstone Hardwicke is based on circumstantial evidence, combining art-historical, historical and onomastic evidence. The case may not in the last resort be regarded as more than plausible speculation. Recent art-historical study has tended to see the major period of construction and of artistic production at Deerhurst as lying in the first half of the ninth century. In his important study of the sculptures at Deerhurst, Richard Bailey drew attention to the fact that his proposed dating corresponded to the period at which Deerhurst received a very large landgrant and commented that ‘it would be appropriate that its architectural and liturgical sculpture should reflect the ambition and investment that grant no doubt brought in its train’.69 More recently Richard Gem has come much closer to associating work at Deerhurst with the patronage of Æthelmund’s family; he draws attention to the use of an iconography current in eighth-century Rome in the carving of

The annal does not expressly say that Æthelmund was ealdorman of the Hwicce, though it seems probable that this was the case, as S 148 (in respect of Huntena tun) shows him holding land which was almost certainly in the diocese of Worcester. The precise casus belli is unknown, but it seems highly probable that Æthelmund’s incursion across the

61

Keynes, Atlas, Tables X and XVII. Ibid., Table X. 63 S 148 (BCS 278). Worcester also preserved an earlier charter in respect of the same estate, S 63 (BCS 218). Æthelmund is listed as a witness to the surviving cartulary copy; however, as Anton Scharer has pointed out, the names of Æthelmund and of one other witness were probably added to S 63 in error by a Worcester scribe who had both documents in front of him: Scharer, Die angelsächsische Königsurkunde, p. 257. 64 A. T. Thacker, ‘Some Terms for Noblemen in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 650-900’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 2 (1981), pp. 201-36, at 203-5. 65 ASC 800 A (= 802); Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS A, ed. Bately, p. 40 (text); Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Whitelock et al., p. 38 (translation, quoted here with minor modifications). 62

66

The battle of Kempsford has received surprisingly little attention from historians and will be discussed in more detail in Hare, ‘Deerhurst’s Earliest Patrons’. 67 The late-medieval Gloucester sources cited in note 53 above do seem to equate Æthelmund son of Ingeld with Æthelmund father of Æthelric. However, the Gloucester material displays much confusion, and no confidence can be placed in such detail; it is not impossible that two individuals by the name of Æthelmund have been conflated. 68 Hare, ‘Deerhurst’s Earliest Patrons’. 69 Bailey, Anglo-Saxon Sculptures at Deerhurst, p. 23.

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MICHAEL HARE the Virgin and Child over the middle entrance arch at the west end at Deerhurst. He is inclined to see the use of this iconography as resulting from Æthelric’s pilgrimage to Rome, but sensibly recognises that such a specific association would be ‘a step beyond the evidence that has been brought forward’.70 It is possible that the evident desire of scholars to associate the major phase of work at Deerhurst with the patronage of Æthelmund and Æthelric will prove illusory, but the evidence set out here perhaps provides a hint that recent scholarship is heading in the right direction.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the parishioners of both Deerhurst and Elmstone Hardwicke for the ready assistance provided during the preparation of this paper. I am also indebted to Richard Bryant, Steven Bassett and Richard Gem who read this paper in draft form and made a number of useful comments; Richard Bryant also provided much help with the illustrations. Joy Jenkyns and David N. Parsons gave valuable assistance with the onomastic evidence, while Ted Freshney provided help with the geology of the sculptures. The stone was discussed at the annual seminar of the Corpus of AngloSaxon Stone Sculpture with useful feedback.

The ideas outlined in this paper may also contribute to the recent debate concerning the impact of minsters on the surrounding countryside in the pre-Viking period, an issue much illuminated by John Blair’s recent discussion.71 The argument in this paper is that the Elmstone Hardwicke crossshaft commemorated a specific individual, but even if it had a different function, it would seem likely that there was some form of early cult site here at a point well away from the surrounding minster churches: Deerhurst just under 4 miles to the north-west, Bishop’s Cleeve 2¾ miles to the north-east, Cheltenham 2¾ miles to the south-east and Gloucester 5½ miles to the south-west (Fig. 3). John Blair has also discussed in this context the rather meagre evidence for the use of early sculpture away from central minster locations.72 The Elmstone Hardwicke cross-shaft may be noted as an example where sculpture does indeed seem likely to have been deployed in the countryside at an early date.

Appendix 1 The location of Alchmunding tuun In 889 Bishop Wærfrith of Worcester, with the permission of the community of the church of Worcester, arranged for himself a lease for three lives from the community of five hides at Alchmunding tuun.74 The five hides had previously belonged to the minster at Clife (Bishop’s Cleeve), and the land was leased free of all dues except the yearly payment of church-scot to Bishop’s Cleeve. At a slightly later date, between 899 and 904, Bishop Wærfrith leased three of the five hides at Alhmunding tune for three lives to his (otherwise unknown) kinswoman, Cyneswith, with reversion to the minster at Bishop’s Cleeve for the bishopric.75 It was provided that the lessee was to pay three measures of wheat annually as church-scot to Bishop’s Cleeve. The remaining two hides of land, together with the ceorls and the snæd (an isolated wood or clearing in a wood), were to belong to Prestbury for the duration of the lease.

I would like to conclude this paper by referring to the close link between Æthelmund’s family and the Mercian royal house. Ingeld, in all likelihood the father of the Æthelmund commemorated at Elmstone Hardwicke, was an ealdorman of King Æthelbald (716-57). In 1979 Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle excavated outside the east end of the crypt at Repton (Derbys.) a damaged portion of a cross-shaft; the principal face of the shaft depicted the figure of a mounted ruler dressed in mail armour, wearing a diadem round his head, brandishing a sword in one hand and a small round shield in the other. Martin and Birthe have subsequently produced arguments to suggest that this stone was erected to commemorate King Æthelbald, who was buried at Repton.73 Deerhurst’s patron, Æthelmund, will surely have known the cross-shaft when it was standing. The suggestion that a cross was similarly erected to commemorate Æthelmund is thus a fitting contribution in a volume designed to many achievements of Martin and Birthe.

The minster at Bishop’s Cleeve is first mentioned in a charter of 777×9 issued jointly by King Offa of Mercia and Ealdred, subregulus of the Hwicce, granting land to the minster;76 the document is certainly not genuine in its present form, but there are grounds for thinking that it has an authentic core.77 By the time that Wærfrith’s documents concerning Alchmunding tuun were issued, Bishop’s Cleeve had evidently passed into the control of the see of Worcester, and it was to remain an episcopal manor until the sixteenth century.78 The

74

S 1415 (BCS 559). The lease is preserved in Liber Wigorniensis, Worcester’s early 11th-century cartulary. 75 S 1283 (BCS 560), also edited with a translation in Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A. J. Robertson, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 2831, 289-91 (no. 16). This lease is known only from an early modern edition based on a now lost original. 76 S 141 (BCS 246); this document is preserved in Liber Wigorniensis. 77 For a detailed discussion, see Scharer, Die angelsächsische Königsurkunde, pp. 243-5. 78 VCH Glos., VIII, pp. 2-25.

70

Gem, Deerhurst and Rome, pp. 19-27. Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, pp. 212-28. 72 Ibid., pp. 215-16. 73 M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘The Repton Stone’, AngloSaxon England, 14 (1985), pp. 233-92. 71

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A POSSIBLE COMMEMORATIVE STONE FOR ÆTHELMUND, FATHER OF ÆTHELRIC large minster parish with its several tithings remained substantially intact until the twentieth century.79

lost place-name somewhere within the parish of Bishop’s Cleeve. Possibly it was somewhere in the southern part of that parish not far from Prestbury; it is indeed possible that the two hides attached to Prestbury c. 900 remained part of Prestbury.

Prestbury lay to the south of Bishop’s Cleeve (Fig. 3). The evidence of Wærfrith’s lease of 899×904 leaves the status of Prestbury unclear, though it has been suggested that Prestbury is likely to have been an episcopal estate in the hands of the bishop of Worcester at this date.80 By the time of Domesday Book, Prestbury was in the hands of the bishop of Hereford.81 The bishop of Hereford’s eleventh-century holding at Prestbury is presumably connected in some way with the fact that in 803 an agreement was reached at a synod at Clofesho between the bishops of Worcester and Hereford about rights over the minster at Cheltenham (immediately to the south of Prestbury), which had long previously been granted to the church of Hereford.82 Cheltenham in its turn was a royal manor by the time of Domesday Book, and its church showed clear signs of minster status with one-and-ahalf hides belonging to the church being held by Regenbald, who held the lands of a number of minsters.83 It is evident that Cheltenham and Prestbury must have had complex estate histories which we cannot hope to unravel in the absence of further information. It is unclear whether the eponymous priests of Prestbury were the minster priests of Bishop’s Cleeve to the north or Cheltenham to the south or the priests of one or other of the cathedral communities of Worcester or Hereford! The importance of Prestbury in the mid-Saxon period is, however, confirmed by the recent discovery of a part of a small cross-shaft with diagonal fret ornament of eighth- or ninth-century date built into the south aisle wall of Prestbury church.84

It is worth noting that there are two other lost place-names in -tun in Bishop’s Cleeve. The charter (S 141) issued by Offa and Ealdred in 777×9 granted fifteen hides to the minster of Bishop’s Cleeve (Clife) at Timbingctun on the north side of Tyrl brook under the rock called Uuendlesclif; the estate adjoined the land of the minster. It is evident that Timbingctun lay close to the Cotswold escarpment; it may be, as Grundy suggested, that Cleeve was originally the name of the minster alone and that Timbingctun was the name of the adjacent settlement and of the associated land-unit.85 There are, however, several problems. The Old English bounds now appended to the text of the charter are of notably later date than the second half of the eighth century. Moreover these bounds seem to describe the whole parish, but the grant itself reads as if additional land is being given to an existing minster.86 A further complication is that a detached set of Old English bounds, which also describes the whole parish, mentions both a North Tyrl and a South Tyrl.87 It is not therefore possible to be certain as to the exact identity or location of Timbingctun. Another lost place-name in Bishops Cleeve is Sapletone, which was part of the manor in Domesday Book and was probably the ‘Saperton’ which had been the subject of leases by Bishop Oswald of Worcester in 969 and by Bishop Lyfing in 1045.88 It seems likely that Alchmunding tuun was another such lost name. Place-names in -tun with a first element deriving from the personal name of the owner or lessee of an estate were especially liable to change over time.89

Where then was Alchmunding tuun? The payment of churchscot to Bishop’s Cleeve must indicate that it was not far distant. On geographical grounds alone, Elmstone Hardwicke would be perfectly feasible. However, as noted above, the place-name evidence does not stand up to close examination. It seems more probable that Alchmunding tuun is in fact a

85

G. B. Grundy, Saxon Charters and Field Names of Gloucestershire, 2 vols. (n.p., 1935-6), I, p. 71. 86 On the bounds, see ibid., I, pp. 71-90. 87 S 1549 (Hemingi Chartularium Ecclesiae Wigorniensis, ed. T. Hearne, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1723), I, pp. 245-6). The bounds are preserved in an 11th-century addition to Liber Wigorniensis: N. R. Ker, ‘Hemming's Cartulary: a Description of the Two Worcester Cartularies in Cotton Tiberius A. xiii’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, W.A. Pantin and R.W. Southern (Oxford, 1948), pp. 49-75, at 55. The bounds are discussed in detail by Grundy, Saxon Charters, I, pp. 71-90; further work on the bounds of both S 141 and S 1549 is needed. 88 GDB, fo. 165; DB Glos., no. 3.7. Oswald’s lease is S 1324 (BCS 1239), and Lyfing’s lease is S 1397 (Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici, ed. J.M. Kemble, 6 vols. (London, 1839-48), no. 777). For the location of the places involved, see VCH Glos., VIII, pp. 2 n. 7 and 250 n. 10. 89 P. Sawyer, ‘Anglo-Saxon Settlement: The Documentary Evidence’, in Anglo-Saxon Settlement and Landscape, ed. T. Rowley,

79

S. Bassett, The Origins of the Parishes of the Deerhurst Area, Deerhurst Lecture 1997 (Deerhurst, 1998), p. 6. 80 Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature, pp. 139 n. 110, 157-8. I do not agree with his suggestion that the minster of Cheltenham is likely to have been located at Prestbury (p. 138). 81 GDB, fo. 165; DB Glos., no. 4.1. 82 S 1431 (BCS 309); Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, pp. 279-80. The agreement also concerned the minster at Beckford. 83 GDB, fo. 162v; DB Glos., no. 1.1. For Regenbald’s holding of minster estates, see Keynes, ‘Regenbald’, p. 196. 84 This fragment will be published in Bryant, Corpus Western Midlands. The fragment would tend to suggest that the focus of early Prestbury should be sought in the vicinity of the church rather than the moated site with the bishop of Hereford’s manor-house half a mile to the north. However, the point is not established beyond all doubt, for building materials were taken from the site of the manor-house to the church for repairs in 1698: VCH Glos., VIII, p. 72.

147

MICHAEL HARE In his study of the origins of the parishes of the Deerhurst area, Steven Bassett considered the early affiliations of Elmstone Hardwicke.90 Based on the traditional identification of Elmstone with Alchmunding tuun, he argued that Elmstone Hardwicke was originally in Bishop’s Cleeve’s parochia, but was transferred to Deerhurst’s parochia at some point in the late Saxon period. In the post-Conquest period, Elmstone Hardwicke’s mother church was Deerhurst, as he pointed out. The scenario painted by Bassett was entirely feasible. However, if Alchmunding tuun and Elmstone are separate entities (as argued here), then it is perhaps more likely that Elmstone Hardwicke formed part of Deerhurst’s parochia from the outset.

British Archaeological Reports, 6 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 108-19, at 114-15. 90 Bassett, Origins of the Parishes of the Deerhurst Area, pp. 6-7.

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The Prehistory of English Fonts John Blair The many ‘firsts’ and ‘onlys’ that the Biddles’ remarkable joint career has contributed to Anglo-Saxon archaeology include the one unequivocal example of a Continental-style baptistery (Winchester), and the only other English structure before the tenth century that can plausibly be called a baptistery at all (Repton).1 The present study deals with later and humbler material: the equipment used for infant baptism in ordinary English churches of the ninth to eleventh centuries. As an attempt – with more than half an eye on Scandinavia – to recover a lost group of artefacts through careful scrutiny of their replacements, it is offered as a tribute to a great academic partnership that has always combined intellectual boldness with precise observation.

are sensibly reviewed in the abbé Corblet's still-definitive account of 1881. Setting aside comical fantasies of frail old bishops lowering muscular adult catechumens with cranes, or tumbling head-first into pools, Corblet concludes from both written and physical evidence that the normal western rite before the thirteenth century was partial immersion. For adults, this involved immersion of the lower third or so of the body combined with affusion of water over the head. During the eighth to eleventh centuries, he argues, one-year-olds were held by the armpits and immersed up to the neck in straightsided containers, with a quick plunge of the head, whereas from the eleventh century the growing practice of baptizing new-born infants led to the use of wider, shallower, more bath-like containers. During the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, affusion gradually displaced immersion in northern climates.5

Baptism in late Anglo-Saxon England This paper investigates the form and function of containers for baptismal water, so we need to be as clear as possible how baptism was performed, and what kinds of water-holding vessels it required. Given the abundance of liturgical texts this might seem straightforward, but our evidence is frustratingly imprecise about what the physical actions really involved. The baptismal rite, like most liturgies, developed accretively, resulting in ‘a sometimes clumsy conglomeration of actions that had taken place over a long period of time’;2 in particular, the adaptation for infant baptism (presumably near-universal in eleventh-century England) of a ritual originally formulated for adults may mislead us. Even so straightforward a verb as mergere (‘to immerse’), for instance, could have been retained through formulaic inertia even if actual practice had changed.3

We have only two normative sources for specifically AngloSaxon practice.6 In 816 the Council of Chelsea directed that priests should not pour holy water on the heads of infants but should always immerse them in it7 – which looks like an assertion of the west European norm in the face of an English habit of affusion. Later but much fuller is the liturgical compilation, produced in the 1060s, which forms part of the Red Book of Darley. Its Latin rite is basically a Carolingian one, with some variants, but, exceptionally, rubrics in Old English are supplied. One of these, after the blessing of the font and at the point of the distribution of the water, reads: ‘The priest at this point should command that the child be covered with the holy water (helian þæt cild wið þæt halig wæter) and let the priest sprinkle himself and the people standing round.’8 This abnormal instruction is an elaboration of a standard rubric about aspersion, which is what helian

The rituals for blessing the water, and putting in oil and candles, could be performed in a vessel of almost any size or shape. The crux for us is the climactic moment when the candidate is ‘immersed’ three times in the hallowed fluid.4 This action raises questions of practicability and safety, which

5

Corblet, Histoire, I, pp. 223-35, and II, pp. 20-1. Note, however, that ‘Kristenrätt’, an Icelandic law of c. 1122, prescribes threefold dipping – face-on, head left, head right – with the whole body immersed each time: L. Tynell, Skånes Medeltida Dopfuntar (Stockholm, 1913-21), p. 125. 6 For English practice generally, see S. Foot, ‘‘By Water in the Spirit’: The Administration of Baptism in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Pastoral Care before the Parish, ed. J. Blair and R. Sharpe (Leicester, 1992), pp. 171-92; Gittos, ‘Is there any Evidence?’ 7 Chelsea 816, c.11 (Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, ed. A.W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1869-78), III, p. 584): ‘Sciant etiam presbyterii, quando sacram baptismum ministrant, ut non effundant aquam sanctam super capita infantuum, sed semper mergantur in ’. 8 R.I. Page, ‘Old English Liturgical Rubrics in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 422’, Anglia, 96 (1978), pp. 149-58, at 153; Gittos, ‘Is there any Evidence?’, p. 72.

1

B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Anglo-Saxon Baptisteries of the 7th and 8th Centuries: Winchester and Repton’, in Acta XIII Congressus Internationalis Archaeologiae Christianae, II (Vatican City and Split, 1998), pp. 757-78. 2 H. Gittos, ‘Is there any Evidence for the Liturgy of Parish Churches in late Anglo-Saxon England?’, in Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, ed. F. Tinti (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 63-82, at 70-1. 3 J. Corblet, Histoire … du Sacrement de Baptême, 2 vols. (Paris, 1881), I, pp. 224-5. 4 A good guide to the liturgy and its development in early medieval Europe is B.D. Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism (Aldershot, 2006), chapters 5 and 6.

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JOHN BLAIR must therefore mean in this context. Later, at the point of the threefold immersion (sub trina mersione) of the standard Latin rubrics, the priest takes the child and ‘dips’ it three times in the water (nime se preost þæt cild and dippe þæt cild on þæt wæter), after which ‘the priest relinquishes (forlæte) the child into the water, and the godfather brings the child up from the water.’9

These usages suggest that ecclesiastics, even scrupulous ones, were unconcerned about the form or material of the container, except possibly that it should protect the sacred water from undesirable interference.13 The water was of course what mattered, and in some local churches at this date its source – for example from a specific river or holy spring – could have been more important than the performance of the rite at an approved and fixed location within the church walls.14 A container of some kind was clearly essential, for reasons of safety as well as liturgy, but there is no indication that it should be immovable like a normal later font: indeed, if baptisms were performed next to the water-source, portability could have been a convenience.

For obvious reasons the last part of this action seems incompatible with total immersion, so it is probably right to take dippe as a weaker action than ‘submerge’, and to conclude that the infant was placed in something like a shallow bath that presented no risk of drowning. To qualify for immersion, we should presumably envisage something more than a puddle, and deep enough for at least a momentary dipping of the head. Corblet proposed containers of between 30 and 50 cm. in depth for baptisms of the newborn;10 my own experiments with a dummy the size of a newborn baby suggest a minimum plausible water depth in a fontsized container of about 15 cm., and thus (to accommodate displacement) a minimum internal depth for the container of about 20 cm. This of course assumes that the containers were made for use exclusively with new-borns. Baptism promptly after birth was enjoined throughout the Christian AngloSaxon period, but in practice it may often have been delayed;11 for a child of between, say, one and three, able to stand up in the water, a deeper, straight-sided tub might have been more appropriate, as Corblet suggests. In either case it seems likely that the vessel would have been accompanied by some ladle-like utensil for affusion.

The retention and disposal of holy water: fonts, stoups, piscinae and drains Medieval churches contained three types of fixed or semifixed receptacle for holy fluids: fonts, stoups and piscinae. The functions of these were very different: respectively to contain water for baptism, to contain water for crossing and blessing, and to drain away the dregs of communion wine and the water used to wash the chalice. As well as being subject to possible confusion by us, however, their physical similarities raise the possibility of common models, and even of some overlapping of use. A basic difference between piscinae and stoups is that the former always have drains whereas the latter do not; in the case of early fonts, however, drain-holes were present in some cases but not others.15 In a piscina the drain-hole is simply to emit the fluid poured away after washing the communion vessels, and so no bung is necessary. In a font, however, a drain could function in either of two ways: with a bung, to emit standing water from the stone bowl or its fixed metal lining; or, when the baptism was performed using a detachable bowl resting on top of the font, to dispose of the water from that. A drain is required in the former case, whereas its absence is not evidence against the latter, since the water could have been poured away elsewhere. But given the inconvenience of emptying fixed stone bowls lacking integral drains, absence of a drain carries some weight in favour of the second scenario.

Late Anglo-Saxon sources, like Continental ones, are entirely unspecific about what kinds of containers might have been used. Ælfric enjoins that oil is not to be put into the baptismal water (to þam fante) until a child is about to be baptised; his story of a woman who dips her hair on ðam fante to work magic against her own children illustrates one compelling reason why this powerful fluid should be stored safely and used swiftly. Here as elsewhere, the word fant refers to the actual water, not to the vessel containing it. Ælfric twice uses the compound fant-fæt (‘font-vat’), which could mean any kind of container, not necessarily a fixed one; it seems very significant that fant-stan (‘font-stone’) is only attested after the Conquest, precisely when stone fonts were apparently starting to become common.12

Baptism’, Mediaeval Studies, 63 (2001), pp. 143-92; Blair, CASS, pp. 459-62. 13 An apparently mid 11th-century text envisages the minster church of St Peter in Northampton having a baptiserium with water standing in it: ‘Inventio S. Ragenerii’ (Nova Legenda Anglie, ed. C. Horstman, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1901), II, pp. 729-30). 14 Cf. Blair, CASS, pp .462-3. For outdoor baptism in Ireland see the works by Whitfield and Ó Carragáin cited in note 42 below. 15 It is often hard to tell whether or not a drain is primary, though off-centre or crudely-cut drains which disrupt form or decoration can be taken as indicators that there was initially no drain. Probably the earliest attested drain-hole is the one through the stem fragment at Godalming, discussed below.

9

Page, ‘Old English Liturgical Rubrics’, p. 154. Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals, p. 129, notes the singularity of this action by the godfather in the Darley rite: ‘a dramatic symbol of spiritual ownership of the newborn from the womb of the font’. 10 Corblet, Histoire, I, p. 231. 11 Foot, ‘‘By Water in the Spirit’’, pp. 188-9; J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005) [hereafter Blair, CASS], p. 459n. 12 For the sources of this paragraph see: C.A. Jones, ‘Old English Fant and its Compounds in the Anglo-Saxon Vocabulary of

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS Pillar piscinae draining into under-floor sumps, which (as David Parsons has shown) became the norm in England around 1100,16 are similar, in functional terms, to fonts draining in the same way. As is argued below, one group of early English fonts probably derive from bowls on stands, and it is a reasonable suggestion that this tradition also provided the prototypes for pillar piscinae.

For present purposes these is a risk that some of the smaller early ‘fonts’ could have been made for use as stoups, but probably only a slight one. The Cornish group, where this risk would otherwise be greatest, all have apparently integral drain-holes (Fig. 6). The parallels which will be adduced with Scandinavian material should strengthen our confidence that even the seemingly more eccentric English fonts were indeed made for that purpose.

Stoups resembled fonts in being water-containers. On the whole they were smaller since they were used for dipping hands and sprinklers rather than dipping babies; it will be seen below that some font-bowls are remarkably small, but these tend to be broader and shallower in profile than stoups. Stone stoups fixed near entrance-doors occur from the twelfth century onwards, and occasional diminutive freestanding stone basins should probably be understood in this way.17 However, portable and relatively ephemeral stoups of wood, lead or pewter seem to have remained common through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is clear from the inventories of 1249-52 and 1297 for St Paul’s Cathedral’s churches in Essex, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, where the numerous holy-water containers listed are all of these materials;18 Westley Waterless had a lead font but no listed stoup in 1252, a wooden font and a lead stoup in 1297,19 suggesting that the old font had been recycled as a stoup. But if fonts could become stoups, the growing expectations of a fixed stone font make the reverse process much less likely.

Stone fonts: skeuomorphism and function Apart from the handful of lead fonts, all pre-1200 fonts surviving in England are of stone. This gives them a superficial appearance of homogeneity, as well as making them by definition non-portable: ‘the font’ is normally a fixed point in the church. This can cause us to overlook what is really a remarkable diversity of forms, sizes and internal profiles – a diversity already fully established in the early Norman Romanesque period. This cannot have been functionally necessary (at least, not unless performance of the rite varied decisively between individual churches), and is hard to explain unless it reflects a comparable diversity in now-lost objects that the stone fonts were copying. It is in fact quite clear that many of the earliest English fonts are skeuomorphs: that is, they display ‘meaningful stylistic or ornamental imitation in one material of an object typically made in another’.21 This was certainly a feature of insular stone-carving in other contexts, most strikingly the Irish high crosses which imitate both jewelled crosses made of precious metal and timber ones of complex mortise-and-tenon construction.22 At its simplest, skeuomorphism is the copying of expensive and socially prestigious objects in cheaper substances – for instance pottery imitations of precious-metal vessels in classical Greece23 – or the repetition of familiar forms and designs within new technologies. Both tend naturally towards obsolescence, as the first commentator observed: ‘The mental image of the skeuomorph, if unrenewed by constructional handicraft and unstimulated by utility, becomes increasingly fainter, the unrefreshed memory of a memory, until at last, the requirement of taste may be satisfied by a few meaningless chevrons or spirals.’24 More

Lockable lids on fonts were enjoined by English church councils from 1217×19;20 concerns about misuse of baptismal water were nothing new then, so these could have existed much earlier. Traces of locks or staples are therefore good evidence for use as a font. Many early fonts have a rebate around the inner edge of the rim, which is more ambiguous since (as will be shown later) this feature could have served equally well for seating a lid or for seating a portable bowl, but in either case it again points to use as a font. 16

D. Parsons, ‘Sacrarium: Ablution-Drains in Early Medieval Churches’, in The Anglo-Saxon Church: Papers … in Honour of Dr H.M. Taylor, ed. L.A.S. Butler and R.K. Morris, CBA Research Report 60 (London, 1986), pp. 105-20, at 110-11. 17 J.C. Cox and A. Harvey, English Church Furniture (London, 1907), pp. 235-9; F. Bond, Fonts and Font Covers (London, 1908), p. 71. For France, see l'abbé Barraud, ‘De l’eau bénite et des vases destines à la contenir’, Bulletin Monumental, 4th ser., 6 (1870), pp. 393-472, especially at 420-6, illustrating some bénitiers that look very like fonts. 18 Visitations of Churches Belonging to St Paul’s Cathedral, 1249-52, and Visitations of Churches Belonging to St Paul’s Cathedral in 1297 and 1458, ed. W. Sparrow Simpson (Camden Soc, new ser., 53 and 55, 1895): typical descriptions are vas aquarum stagneum, vas plumbeum cum aspersorio and vas ligneum. 19 Ibid., 1249-52, p. 9; 1297 and 1458, p. 7. 20 Salisbury I, c. 21 (Councils and Synods, II, ed. F.M. Powicke and C.R. Cheney, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964), I, p. 68).

21

Catherine Frieman’s phrase: C.J. Frieman, ‘Imitation, Identity and Communication: the Presence and Problems of Skeuomorphs in the Metal Ages’, in Lithic Technology in Metal Using Societies, ed. B.V. Eriksen (Aarhus, in press), pp. 33-44. 22 H. Richardson, ‘The Jewelled Cross and its Canopy’, in From the Isles of the North, ed. C. Bourke (Belfast, 1995), pp. 177-86; D. MacLean, ‘Technique and Contact: Carpentry-Constructed Insular Stone Crosses’, in ibid., pp. 167-75. 23 E.g. D.W.J. Gill, ‘Classical Greek Fictile Imitations of Precious Metal Vases’, in Pots and Pans: A Colloquium on Precious Metals and Ceramics, ed. M. Vickers (Oxford, 1986), pp. 9-30. 24 H. Colley March, ‘The Meaning of Ornament; or, its Archaeology and its Psychology’, Trans., Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Soc., 7 (1889), pp. 160-92, at p.186. For a Darwinian approach to

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JOHN BLAIR positively, skeuomorphism can perpetuate established and valued symbols of culture and ritual into new social, institutional and physical environments. The skeuomorphic fonts discussed below seem to embody, within a new technology and a new ecclesiastical ethic, traditional images of the kinds of containers that were in familiar use for infant baptism. Here these reminiscences will be scrutinised as ‘footprints in the snow’,25 left behind by a vanished group of objects. Conversely, this paper is not a classification or arthistorical survey of Romanesque font types, things that have already been done more than once.26 The artistically sophisticated fonts, executed within mainstream conventions of form and decoration, are the least likely to give clues to precursors: I am looking instead for archaisms perpetuated in retrospective work.

and parishes in many areas would have used fonts like those familiar at home. Thus Scandinavian stone fonts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may well be skeuomorphs based independently upon the same non-permanent prototypes as the English ones, and may offer valuable sidelights on details of construction. In Norway and Finland a tradition of wooden fonts actually survived through the Middle Ages, and Mona Bramer Solhaug’s recent important studies of the Norwegian material open up avenues that will be explored below.29 Anglo-Saxon stone fonts Morphological and functional questions, the main concern of this paper, are complicated by the chronological problem arising from the simplicity and rusticity of many fonts before the mid twelfth century: when, in fact, did monolithic fonts become widespread? Probably the first reference to a monolithic font in England occurs in the mid eleventhcentury ‘Life of St Rumwold’ set at Kings Sutton (Northants.), where the miraculous infant, rejecting the ‘urn or jar’ which his father offers for his baptism, pointed ‘to a hollow stone lying not far off in a certain hut in the marshy valley nearby, and ordered the servants who are standing around to bring it quickly and fill it with clean water.’30 If this story has any general message, it may be that portable baptismal vessels were in familiar use around the time of the Conquest, but were starting to be perceived as less adequate or less fitting than hollowed-out stone blocks.

These skeuomorphs copy functional objects, and function is a central theme of the present analysis. How exactly were our earliest extant fonts used: as vats for immersion; as basins holding water to be used for affusion or aspersion; or as stands for movable vessels that do not survive? Here it is crucial to consider not only the outsides of fonts, which have often been studied, but also the internal cavities, which are almost always ignored.27 The interiors of externally similar fonts can be treated in very different ways, ranging from vertical-sided vats with walls of even thickness like those of a bucket, through rounded, bowl-like forms, to saucer-like recessions only a few inches deep. In trying to envisage the forms and functions of the objects lying behind the English skeuomorphs, I shall seek analogies and directions from the Nordic world. Comparison with the northern and eastern European zones which preserved into modern times a wood-based material culture like that of the Anglo-Saxons is useful in itself, but the major role of English ecclesiastics in the eleventh-century conversions of Scandinavia, and especially of Norway, suggests a much more direct link.28 By the stage when they were mainly baptising infants, the Englishmen who established the first churches

Anglo-Saxon dates have been ascribed at various times to a very large number of English fonts, but can be sustained only in a small minority of cases. First we need to reject those which, as Francis Bond sensibly put it, ‘have been credited with undue antiquity owing to the rudeness or uncouthness of their ornament’: most of them are readily identifiable as rustic Norman Romanesque.31 Archaism and crudity are important for present purposes, but as reflections of lost models rather than as indicators of absolute date. Likewise to be excluded are the several cross-shaft fragments which have been re-worked as fonts later. The inscriptions on the fonts at Little Billing (Northants.), Partrishow (Brecon) and Potterne (Wilts.) have encouraged pre-Conquest ascriptions, but only in the third case is this convincing on epigraphic grounds. I am unpersuaded by the recent dating of the tub font in Wells

the evolution and transformation of initially functional elements in design, see P. Steadman, The Evolution of Designs (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 103-23. 25 Michael Vickers’s phrase. 26 Bond, Fonts and Font Covers, pp. 37-57; C.S. Drake, The Romanesque Fonts of Northern Europe and Scandinavia (Woodbridge, 2002). 27 Lead linings often mask the internal profiles of stone fonts, and make it impossible to detect modifications. In the present drawings, such indirectly-observed internal profiles are indicated by broken rather than solid lines. 28 L. Abrams, ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Christianisation of Scandinavia’, Anglo-Saxon England, 24 (1995), pp. 213-49; S. Brink, ‘The Formation of the Scandinavian Parish, with some Remarks Regarding the English Impact on the Process’, in The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns of Power in Early Medieval Europe, ed. J. Hill and M. Swan (Turnhout, 1998), pp. 19-44; Blair, CASS, pp. 423-5, 431-2.

29

M.B. Solhaug, ‘Norske Middelalderfonter av Tre’, Hikuin, 22 (1995), pp. 127-46; eadem, Middelalderens Døpefonter in Norge, 2 vols. (Oslo, 2001). 30 ‘Vita S. Rumwoldi’, c. 5 (Three Eleventh-Century Anglo-Latin Saints’ Lives, ed. R. Love (Oxford, 1996), pp. 100-3). The existing font at Kings Sutton (Fig. 9) is of unusual form: a big, squat block of irregular hexagonal plan, its angles cut away to leave lunettes reminiscent of cushion-capitals. It is tempting to wonder whether this was believed to be the font mentioned in the ‘Life’. 31 Bond, Fonts and Font Covers, pp. 139-43.

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS

a

b

c

d

Fig. 1. a Baptismal scene, historiated initial A in a 14th-century MS of ‘Jonsbók’ (Reykjavik, Árni Magnússon Institute, MS AM Gl.kgl.sm. 3269a 4o). b Baptismal scene, historiated initial A in a 14th-century MS of ‘Jonsbók (Skarðsbók)’ (Reykjavik, Árni Magnússon Institute, MS AM 350 fol.). c Stave-built tub, typical of those in recent vernacular usage in northern and eastern Europe (Vienan-Kemi Museum, Russian Karelia). d Replication of the scene shown in Fig. 1b with a three-month-old baby, using a recent vernacular trough on a joint-stool.

153

JOHN BLAIR

a

b

c

d

Fig. 2. a The baptism of Harald Bluetooth, as envisaged c. 1200 on the Tamdrup panel (Mackeprang, Danmarks Middelalderlige Døbefonte, Fig. 6). b Tub equipped with lid for use as font, c. 1100: Lillhardal, Sweden (after Granlund, ‘Ståndan från Lillhärdal’). c Deerhurst (Glos.): bowl only. d Bosbury (Herefs.)

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS Cathedral, with relief figures under an arcade, to the late ninth or tenth century; if that dating were sustained it would not, however, affect the present argument, but merely add one more case of an early tub skeuomorph.32

Later, but much more interesting for present purposes, are a pair of mid fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscripts of the vernacular legal compendium ‘Jónsbók’ (Figs. 1a-b).34 In each case the initial A which begins the section on ecclesiastical law is illustrated with a scene of baptism using wooden vessels, but the vessels themselves are entirely different. In one scene the priest raises a partly-grown child vertically over a typical stave-built tub with hoops, standing on the ground and probably some 70 cm. high, whereas in the other an evidently younger infant is being baptised in a shallow trough. Given that the manuscripts are so close in date and context, it seems likely that these images are not conventional, but firsthand representations of divergent practices in contemporary Iceland, which could in turn have been archaic survivals of earlier northern European practice; it is especially intriguing that they seem to support Corblet’s distinction between bathlike forms used for infants and tubs used for older children.

Examples accepted for the present discussion are: one exceptionally early tub form (Deerhurst); one openbottomed tub (Potterne); one composite pedestal form that has not hitherto been understood or been part of the discussion (Godalming); one monolithic pedestal form (Melbury Bubb); one rectangular form (Bingley); and one plain bowl which on stratigraphical grounds must be before the late eleventh century (Tintagel). These are all discussed below in their appropriate contexts, and in relation to comparable later material, but the general point to be made here is that, although the great majority of stone fonts must date from after c. 1080,33 they were sometimes made in preConquest England at various dates from (on the evidence of Deerhurst) the early ninth century onwards. This suggests that some completely plain fonts may also be early, even if it is impossible to know which. But it does not change the strong impression of a late eleventh-century watershed. Before then, the copying of non-permanent forms in stone was just one solution among others; afterwards, it became ubiquitous to the point where movable fonts in other materials were marginalised and eventually unacceptable.

Domestic stave-built tubs were ubiquitous in the northern world until modern times (Fig. 1c), and are now well attested in late Anglo-Saxon England by waterlogged finds.35 Still surviving at Lillhärdal (Sweden) is a tub of just this kind (Fig. 2b), fitted with a decorated lid which has yielded a radiocarbon date centred around 1100.36 The use of ordinary domestic tubs as fonts is very likely to lie behind the earliest stone fonts of tub-shaped form, and could have continued long after stone fonts started to become common. It was only from 1213/14 that English church councils encouraged stone fonts, and then only as a preference; as late as 1292 a ‘bucket’ was being used (in the face of episcopal disapproval) at a manorial chapel in Romney Marsh.37

Coopered tubs and buckets The ubiquitous stave-built tub or bucket, bound with hoops of withy or metal, is the most simple and obvious container for baptismal water. From the Carolingian period to the twelfth century, there are numerous retrospective depictions of adult baptism in which kings and nobles are shown standing half-immersed in giant tubs, buckets or cauldrons (e.g. Fig. 2a). No doubt this often actually happened as northern European courts and aristocracies were converted, but the iconographic topos quickly became conventional, and in any case has nothing to tell us about procedures once infant baptism became normal.

It is probably as a tub skeuomorph that we should understand the wholly exceptional font at Deerhurst (Glos.), by a long way the earliest datable monolithic font in England if not in northern Europe (Figs. 2c, 3). It is a squat and slightly splayed drum, hollowed out to a flat-bottomed profile, with walls of 34

Reykjavik, Árni Magnússon Institute, MSS AM Gl.kgl.sm. 3269a 4o; Jónsbók (Skarðsbók) AM 350 fol. I am grateful to Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir for advice on these images. 35 E.g. C.A. Morris, Craft, Industry and Everyday Life: Wood and Woodworking in Anglo-Scandinavian and Medieval York, The Archaeology of York, 17/13 (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2000), pp. 2224-30. 36 J. Granlund, ‘Ståndan från Lillhärdal’, RIG, 49 (1966), pp. 33-8; Solhaug, ‘Norske Middelalderfonter av Tre’, pp. 135-6, 139. Dr Solhaug points out to me that the radiocarbon determination is rather an old one, and that an original use of this tub as a font (rather than, for instance, a bridal chest) cannot be taken for granted. 37 Canterbury I, c. 31 (ed. in Councils and Synods, II, I, p. 31), following Continental prescriptions going back to the early 9th century (Blair, CASS, p. 461n); C.E. Woodruff, ‘Some Early Visitation Rolls Preserved at Canterbury’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 32 (1917), pp. 143-80, at p.151: the lady of Crawthorne’s chaplains ‘faciunt sibi fontem in uno buketto’. I owe the last reference to Brian Golding.

32

W. Rodwell, Wells Cathedral: Excavations and Structural Studies, 2 vols. (London, 2001), I, pp. 149-60, accepted by R. Cramp, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, VII: South-West England (Oxford, 2006), pp. 177-8. But the only features potentially distinguishing the Wells font from twelfth-century fonts with arcades enclosing figures are the fleurons in the spandrels. These are simple and rather undiagnostic; there are general parallels in the Peterborough group of Mercian sculpture, but also on the Romanesque font at Wansford (Northants). I am grateful to Jeffrey West, one of the joint authors of the original report, for his personal comment ‘I am not wedded to an Anglo-Saxon date’, and to Rosemary Cramp for further discussions. 33 Drake, Romanesque Fonts, p. xv, comes to this conclusion for northern Europe generally: ‘Almost no fonts survive which can safely be ascribed to the eleventh century’.

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JOHN BLAIR

Fig. 3. Fonts reflecting the forms of tubs and wellheads. (Internal profiles shown in broken line are masked by lead linings. Later plinths are omitted.)

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS only slightly tapering thickness. It stands on a probably original stem, giving the whole a (perhaps deliberately) chalice-like appearance. The present drain-hole is modern, replacing a hole crudely knocked through one side, apparently during secular use, so there was apparently no drain originally. Current scholars agree that it was made as a font (rather than being adapted from a cross-shaft), and also that the decoration of both bowl and stem – blocks of spirals framed by foliage scrolls – is of the early ninth century. It should therefore be associated with the lavish programme of enlargement and decoration probably carried out around the 810s, after a visit to Rome, by Æthelric son of Æthelmund.38 One wonders whether Æthelric was inspired by the baptisteries and stone well-heads of Italy, and also whether it is mere coincidence that this font was made at just about the time when English prelates, assembled at Chelsea in 816, were affirming the immersion rite.

A wooden tub has sides of slight and even thickness, and some stone fonts, for instance Deerhurst and – much later – Asthall (Oxon.), approximate to this (Fig. 3). More commonly, however, the deliberately tub-like exterior belies an interior profile of very different form, sometimes little more than a shallow, bowl-like recess. Functionally these are not really tubs, but resemble the raised bowls to be considered later, and the shallowest would scarcely have allowed even partial immersion of children older than new-borns. So whereas an actual wooden tub could have functioned as shown in the ‘Jónsbók’ picture, many of these English skeuomorphs seem to be assimilating ostensibly tub-like forms to a functional tradition, and presumably a liturgical tradition, involving the use of bowls. We will return to this tension between form and function.

If Deerhurst is a skeuomorph of the tub form in pre-Viking England, it opens the possibility that some of the many plain and undatable tub-fonts are also early: the block-like font of slightly oval plan at the important episcopal church of Bosbury (Herefs.) (Figs. 2d, 3) is one possible case among many.39 By at least the decades around 1100, fonts were reproducing not only straight-sided tubs, but also upwardstapered forms (e.g. Eyam, Figs. 3, 4a) and buckets (e.g. Tangmere, Figs. 3, 4b).40 The act of carving tubular hoops around a drum-shaped block tends to give the basic vessel a bulbous profile which the wooden prototypes do not in fact have (compare the late medieval wood-carving in Fig. 4d), an effect seen for instance at Bromyard (Herefs.) (Fig. 3), and on the probably mid to late eleventh-century font at Little Billing (Northants.) with its stately inscription WIGBERHTVS ARTIFEX ATQVE CEMENTARIVS HVIC FABRICAVIT … /

In those cases (known mainly, in a British context, from archaic survivals in Cornwall and Ireland) where churches or chapels were built directly over holy springs, baptism could have been performed in adjacent troughs or vessels, into which the living water flowed or was poured by bucket.42 One function of the earliest monolithic fonts, in their immovability and perhaps in their form, may have been to imitate such arrangements, creating the illusion that they were literally the fons et origo of the saving water. No AngloSaxon well-heads are known, but it is a reasonable guess that they could have been like more substantial versions of stavebuilt tubs. Gerda Boëthius has suggested that some recent Swedish timber well-heads, employing the substantial stave construction used for buildings (Fig. 5a), perpetuate the wooden prototypes of Scandinavian stone fonts carved with vertical stripes but no hoops.43 In England this motif is rare,44 but it occurs on the large and unusual tub font at West Hanney (Berks.) (Figs. 3, 5b), where plain vertical stripes alternate with narrower recessed ones embellished with lines of small rosettes. Given that such rosettes were part of the Anglo-Saxon decorative repertoire as well as the Romanesque one,45 an early date is possible; West Hanney could conceivably hint at a tradition of well-head prototypes.

Well-heads

QVISQVIS SVVM VENIT MERGERE CORPVS PROCVLDVBIO

3, 4c).41 Such profiles merge ambiguously into the bulbous forms derived from wood-turning, discussed below.

CAEIT… (Figs.

38

R.N. Bailey, Anglo-Saxon Sculptures at Deerhurst, Deerhurst Lecture 2002 (Deerhurst, 2005), pp. 14-21; R. Gem, Deerhurst and Rome: Æthelric’s Pilgrimage c. 804 and the Oratory of St Mary Mediana, Deerhurst Lecture 2007 (Deerhurst, 2008); K. Jukes, R. Bryant and M. Hare, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, XI: The Western Midlands, forthcoming. I am very grateful to Richard Bryant, Carolyn Heighway and Michael Hare for meeting me at Deerhurst to discuss their latest discoveries, which support the idea of a lavish embellishment at around this date. See also Hare, this volume. 39 Jukes, Bryant and Hare, Western Midlands: this rather irregular font, of a gritty stone with rather coarse vertical tooling, was found in 1844 at the west end of the nave under its successor of c. 1200. I owe my knowledge of this to Richard Bryant. 40 For French examples see Drake, Romanesque Fonts, pp. 61-2, and Corblet, Histoire, II, pp. 20-1. 41 E. Okasha, Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 97-8.

42 Blair, CASS, pp. 374-9; E. Tyrrell Green, Baptismal Fonts (London, 1928), pp. 10-12; N. Whitfield, ‘A Suggested Function for the Holy Well?’, in Text, Image, Interpretation, ed. A. Minnis and J. Roberts (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 519-37; T. Ó Carragáin, ‘The Architectural Setting of Baptism in Early Medieval Ireland’, Peritia, 21 (2009, forthcoming). Cf. Cramp, South-West England, pp. 38-9, and (for the Continent, especially Germany) G. Binding, ‘Quellen, Brunnen und Reliquiengräber in Kirchen’, Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters, 3 (1975), pp. 37-56. 43 G. Boëthius, ‘En Brunn i Stavkonstruktion och Primitiva Dopfuntstyper’, Fataburen (1930), pp. 141-50. 44 For French examples, especially at Perpignan, see Drake, Romanesque Fonts, pp. 61-2. 45 Cf. for instance the crosshead at Cattistock (Dors.), dated to the 9th or 10th century: Cramp, South-West England, pp. 98-9 and ill. 46.

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JOHN BLAIR

a

b

c

d

Fig. 4. a Eyam (Derbs.). b Tangmere (Suss.). c Little Billing (Northants.). d Fourteenth-century misericord at Ludlow (Salop.), illustrating how carved depiction of a hoop-bound tub can produce an inaccurately bulbous profile.

A stronger witness to such a tradition is the unique and wellknown font at Potterne (Wilts.) (Figs. 3, 5c).46 This has a smooth-dressed, undecorated surface, but around the projecting rim is inscribed the familiar baptismal text from Psalm 41.2, + SICVT CERVVS DESIDERAT AD FONTES AQVARVM ITA DESIDERAT ANIMA MEA AD TE D(EVS) AMEN: + (‘As the hart panteth after the fountains of water, so my soul panteth after thee O God, Amen’). John Higgitt’s careful account of the epigraphy argues tentatively for ‘a dating in the ninth or tenth century rather than the eleventh’, and calls this

‘the only surviving inscribed font to which a pre-Conquest date can be ascribed with some certainty’.47 Most remarkably, this font has no bottom (a cut-down millstone has been inserted later to provide one) but is an open-ended, slightly cone-shaped tube, rebated on the lower as well as the upper edge. It has been plausibly argued that the Potterne font was moved into the present parish church (where it was in turn buried 47

46

Ibid., p. 226. I was unduly sceptical about the date of the font – though not of the church – in Blair, CASS, p. 461.

Cramp, South-West England, pp. 224-8 and ills. 472-84.

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS

a

b

c

d

Fig. 5. a Stave-built well-head at Mora, Sweden (Boëthius, ‘En Brunn i Stavkonstruktion’, Fig. 1). b West Hanney (Berks.): detail of decoration. c Potterne (Wilts.). d Late Anglo-Saxon lead tank from Westley Waterless (Cambs.) (Engraving in Cambridge Antiquarian Soc. Reps. & Communications, 4. iii (1881), plate opp. p. xv.).

under its later medieval replacement) from a small timber church nearby, excavation of which revealed an annexe or ‘baptistery’ with a hole of appropriate size sunk into its floor.48 But even this use was probably secondary: the timber church cannot have been built much before c. 1100, and the well-finished exterior of the font scarcely suggests that it was meant to be half-buried. In that case its primary setting – whether in a church or elsewhere – is unknown, and the

treatment of its upper and lower rims raises some difficult questions. If the upper rebate was to take a wooden lid, was the lower one to take a wooden base? If so, could the font have remained watertight for very long? Did it have a fixed metal lining, or a movable bowl set in the upper rebate? Or was it set into a base or floor through which the water would seep away slowly? Alternatively, could it have functioned as an actual well-head, set above some holy spring? While the inscribed text certainly refers to the baptismal rite,49 the

48

N. Davey, ‘A Pre-Conquest Church and Baptistery at Potterne’, Wilts. Archaeol. Mag., 59 (1964), pp. 116-23 and Pl. VIIb; cf. Blair, CASS, pp. 460-1.

49

This is demonstrated by John Higgitt in Cramp, South-West England, pp. 226-7.

159

JOHN BLAIR exception, a trough-shaped tank to be discussed later, they take the form of squat drums. They are between 40 and 60 cm. in diameter – so distinctly smaller than either the Roman tanks or the later fonts – and usually have pairs of iron staples for lifting-rings driven into the tops of vertical ribs or lugs. Dates seem to range between the eighth and eleventh centuries, though a very small example from the Medway (perhaps a holy-water stoup?) bears what looks like Romanesque decoration. The extant tanks are mostly plain, or bear simple roped and geometrical patterns (Fig. 5d). Three have decoration including elongated triangles (‘vandykes’), a detail which surely looks back to the buckets with decorative copper-alloy vandykes known from early Anglo-Saxon graves.54 None of them displays explicitly Christian symbolism; the only one with figural ornament, the recent find from Cottingham (Northants.), has vandykes decorated alternately with paired griffins above interlace and a sword-wearing man above a quadruped.55

image of a hart panting after fontes aquarum is equally appropriate to living water.50 There is a distinct possibility that Potterne represents the architectural formalisation of a holy well as a source for baptismal water. Cylindrical lead fonts Drum-shaped tubs formed by bending and soldering thin sheets of lead are similar in form to stave-built wooden tubs. They could also be similar in function, though they offered the additional possibilities of cooking or boiling over a fire. Among surviving English fonts, lead tubs made in this way are the only alternative to stone; indeed, they represent a notable Romanesque artistic genre, and one that seems to have originated in England and spread to northern France.51 Given that Britain has abundant supplies of lead this is eminently plausible as an originally insular tradition, and the ease with which lead can be recycled encourages the view that lead fonts were once far more common.

The very poor finish of most of the known examples suggests that their purpose was utilitarian. They occasionally bear signs of use, including burning and sooting, and some of them seem to have been incapable of retaining fluid; Cowgill suggests that these may have been measures for dry goods such as grain. The contemporary terms for them, as attested in Old English texts, would have been al-fæt – ‘fire-vat’ in the sense of cooking-pot – or simply leaden-fæt.56 Vessels of this general kind would also, however, have been suitable for ritual purposes. One such is the placing of concoctions under altars during medical and magical procedures, as described in the late Anglo-Saxon charms and leechdoms.57 Another is the judicial ordeal by hot water, or ‘kettle (ceac) ordeal’, where the accused had to plunge his hand into water which was heated to boiling-point ‘whether the alfæt be of iron or brass, lead or

Nonetheless, the extant lead fonts are all of c. 1150 onwards, and their (often elaborate) decoration is of a mature Romanesque kind that offers no clear links to a more archaic repertoire. Given that roped lines formed by actual ropes or strings pressed into the casting-sand are a standard feature of both Romano-British and medieval leadwork, the use of cable-mouldings on early stone fonts could be a throwback to lead prototypes; it is, on the other hand, a standard element in English Romanesque design. The strongest pointer – intriguing, but tantalisingly indirect – to an earlier tradition is the resemblance between these fonts and two earlier groups of lead tanks: one from the late Romano-British period, the other from the mid to late Anglo-Saxon. Unique to late Roman Britain is a group of squat, drumshaped lead tanks, ranging between 46 and 97 cm. in diameter, which bear overt Christian symbolism, most commonly the Chi-Rho but in one case an apparent scene of baptism. Although a baptismal use is thus highly likely, the tanks are too small for adult immersion; they could have been used for affusion, foot-washing or infant immersion. Most of them have been found in watery places, and it seems clear that they were placed there as part of a wider tradition of deliberate ritual deposition.52

Flixborough, c. AD 600-900: The Artefact Evidence, ed. D.H. Evans and C. Loveluck (Oxford, 2009), pp. 267-77. See also: C. Fox, The Archaeology of the Cambridge Region (Cambridge, 1923), pl. XXXV; Weaver, English Leadwork, pp. 20-2; K. Steedman, ‘Excavation of a Saxon Site at Riby Cross Roads, Lincolnshire’, Archaeological Jnl., 151 (1994), pp. 212-306, at 267-71; P. Boyer, J. Proctor and R. Taylor-Wilson, On the Boundaries of Occupation (Pre-Construct Archaeology Ltd. Monograph 9, London, 2009), pp. 73-9. The newly-found and much more elaborate tank from Cottingham (Northants.) is currently being conserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and I am grateful to Mark Norman and Helena Hamerow for photographs. Thanks too to Leslie Webster for sharing with me her preliminary notes on these objects. 54 J.M. Cook, Early Anglo-Saxon Buckets (Oxford, 2004), pp. 34, 40, 117-20. 55 Jane Kershaw points out to me that the griffins closely resemble those on a Winchester-style die from Sporle-with-Palgrave, supporting a 10th- to 11th-century date for this tank. 56 Toronto Dictionary of Old English, on-line corpus, s.vv. 57 K.L. Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England (North Carolina, 1996), pp. 148-9; A. Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2007), pp.126-7.

The Anglo-Saxon tanks, of which some twenty examples are now extant, are becoming rapidly better-known and have recently been discussed by Jane Cowgill.53 With one 50

As suggested by Whitfield, ‘Suggested Function’, p. 507. L. Weaver, English Leadwork: Its Art and History (London, 1909), pp. 1-22; G. Zarnecki, English Romanesque Lead Sculpture (London, 1957). 52 D. Petts, Christianity in Roman Britain (Stroud, 2003), pp. 96-9, 124-7. 53 J. Cowgill, ‘The Lead Vessels Housing the Flixborough Hoard’, in Excavations at Flixborough, 2: Life and Economy at Early Medieval 51

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS clay’.58 What most strongly suggests that the extant tanks had some meaning beyond the purely practical is that they seem to have been deliberately deposited in rivers, meres and ditches, sometimes containing hoards of iron tools or scraps. The distribution of the finds even bears some resemblance to that of the Roman tanks, though concentrated much more heavily on the river-routes and confluences of the east coast, notably the south side of the Humber estuary.59 Recent work has highlighted the continued ritual immersion of objects, including weapons ‘killed’ by bending, through the late Anglo-Saxon period and even beyond.60

(Figs. 1b, 1d).61 Stone fonts of elliptical plan occasionally occur, such as Bosbury and some Cornish fonts including Morwenstow (Figs. 3, 6). However, round, squat bowls with shallow profiles are more common. Buscot (Berks.: Figs. 6, 8a), is an especially clear case, with a profile that strongly recalls the products of wood-turning. A notable group of eight twelfth-century Herefordshire fonts in polishable reddish-brown breccia have shallow, rounded forms and footrings;62 despite their massive scale, a reminiscence of turned bowls again seems likely. In this context a plain bowl-shaped font excavated at Tintagel (Cornw.) in 1991 is doubly interesting (Fig. 6).63 Its external profile approximates closely to the forms of lathe-turned domestic bowls (though the internal profile is more sharply angled), and this resemblance is heightened by the presence of a simple foot-ring, enclosing a slightly recessed base area: this feature (the rarity or otherwise of which is imponderable, since the undersides of most fonts are concealed) is produced naturally by the turning process, and is very common on the wooden analogues.64 This font also has a conclusive stratigraphical context: its broken-up remains were re-used in the footings of a small chapel in Tintagel churchyard. While the proposed dating of this chapel to the tenth or eleventh century is less than conclusive, it remains fair to say that a date much after the early twelfth is unlikely.65 Thus the font which was incorporated into its foundations can hardly have been made significantly after the Conquest, and may well be earlier: it shows that the replication of plain round bowls as stone fonts, attested by many undatable examples, began no later than the eleventh century.

Was it simply the abundant native supply of lead that stimulated the independent production of drum-shaped ritual tanks in the fourth, eighth to eleventh, and twelfth to thirteenth centuries? Did finds of Roman examples, with their obvious Christian symbolism, stimulate either of the later phases? Or should we envisage a continuous background tradition of utilitarian lead tanks of which these three special groups are reflexes? While we cannot show that any of the extant Anglo-Saxon cylindrical tanks was used for holy water or baptism (and I agree with Cowgill that their roughness causes problems for such a view), it is at least reasonable to suggest that lead tanks of a kind that were already associated with solemn rites invoking the divine must have seemed appropriate containers for baptismal water. On the whole, then, it is likely that the twelfth-century lead fonts owe something to smaller and more portable predecessors that served comparable functions. Treen bowls and troughs

Ablution-stands and font-stands

Single-piece vessels made by hollowing or turning were widespread in pre-industrial northern societies. One of the Icelandic baptismal scenes employs what looks like a standard oval domestic trough, of the kind ubiquitous for kneading and washing and presumably represented by the trogas among the manorial equipment in the late Anglo-Saxon text ‘Gerefa’

We hardly ever know whether a font originally stood on the floor, requiring the officiating priest to stoop awkwardly, or was raised higher. The second seems more likely, but the plinths and stems of early English fonts are so commonly lateor post-medieval as to raise the suspicion that early supports

58

S. Larratt Keefer, ‘Ðonne se Cirlisca Man Ordales Weddigeð: The Anglo-Saxon Lay Ordeal’, in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. S. Baxter et al. (Farnham, 2009), pp. 353-67, at 355-6. 59 Here I differ from Cowgill’s suggestion that they were deposited with a view to recovery: they surely belong to the well-known and much broader category of ritual deposits in watery places, a view supported by the ritual interpretation of deposited smiths’ hoards in G. Thomas, ‘The Symbolic Lives of Late Anglo-Saxon Settlements: A Cellared Structure and Iron Hoard from Bishopstone, East Sussex’, Archaeological Jnl., 165 (2008), pp. 334-98. 60 J. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud, 1994), pp. 98-9; D. Stocker and P. Everson, ‘The Straight and Narrow Way: Fenland Causeways and the Conversion of the Landscape in the Witham Valley, Lincolnshire’, in The Cross Goes North, ed. M. Carver (York, 2003), pp. 271-88. M.J. Green, ‘Vessels of Death: Sacred Cauldrons in Archaeology and Myth’, Antiquaries Journal, 78 (1998), pp. 6384, argues for a continuous tradition of ritual cauldron deposition from late prehistory to the early Middle Ages.

61

Morris, Craft, Industry and Everyday Life (cit. in n. 35), pp. 2273-5. R. Halsey, ‘Eight Herefordshire Marble Fonts’, in Romanesque and Gothic: Essays for George Zarnecki, [ed. N. Stratford] (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 107-9. 63 Now in the store of the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro. I am very grateful to Jane Marley for providing access, and also to Charles Thomas for meeting me there to discuss it at first-hand. 64 Morris, Craft, Industry and Everyday Life, pp. 2165-71. 65 J.A. Nowakowski, Grave News from Tintagel (Truro, 1992), pp. 14-21; C. Thomas, Tintagel: Arthur and Archaeology (London, 1993), pp. 105-10. Stratigraphical dating is inconclusive, and the proposition that the chapel would not have co-existed with the 12th-century parish church nearby, and therefore pre-dates it, is questionable (cf. Blair, CASS, pp. 200-1, 397-9). It is also unclear from the published plan whether this was indeed a one-cell chapel, or rather the chancel of a standard two-cell church of c. 1100. 62

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JOHN BLAIR

Fig. 6. Fonts of baluster and bowl form. (The internal profile shown in broken line is masked by a lead lining.)

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS

a

b

c

d

Fig. 7. a Ablution-stand by the hearth of a Karelian house: detail from R.W. Ekman, ‘Kreeta Haapasalo Playing the Kantele in a Peasant Cottage’, 1868 (Ateneum, Helsinki). b Domestic tub on legs (Estonian Folk Museum, Tallinn). c Old Radnor (Rad.). d. Askim, Norway.

were made of less durable materials such as timber.66 However it was done, the small scale of many examples does indeed suggest that they must have had plinths of some kind, making

them look to modern eyes like bird-baths, but perhaps to early medieval ones like ablution-stands. In some recent peasant cultures, for instance those of Karelia and north-western Russia, a water-filled wooden tub for personal ablution, raised on legs or a base, would stand beside

66

Deerhurst, with its chalice-like form, is again sui generis. Otherwise, the massive font at Kings Sutton (Northants.) (Fig. 9), where the bowl, stem and base have similar tooling and look integral, is a rare exception before the later 12th century.

163

JOHN BLAIR the main domestic hearth (Fig. 7a).67 It is unknown whether the Anglo-Saxons had such things, but it does not seem inherently unlikely. Famously, King Alfred stood washing his hands in his chamber at Wardour before giving guidance on the case of the kleptomaniac Helmstan – surely a glimpse of the ritual at a royal feast or leveé.68 One pictures Alfred having a sumptuous metal basin filled with warm water placed before him on a stand or table, whereas his humbler subjects might have used four-legged wooden tubs on the Karelian pattern. Here are two potential models for the equipment used by Alfred’s priests to wash away spiritual rather than material filth.

illustrates. Is this, like the coopered tub in the other Icelandic picture, an archaic reflection of older mainstream practice? Some English fonts are, in terms of the proportion of total volume to size of cavity, more pedestal than font. As already noted, these include some ostensible tub fonts. Good examples in Fig. 3 are Eyam (Derbs.), West Hanney (Berks.), and – an extreme case – Poltimore (Devon) (also Fig. 8b). The last of these is externally an unexceptional tub 63 cm. high, with a double band suggesting withy bindings, but internally a saucer-like cavity only 12 cm. deep. Cases like this (perhaps more common than we know, given that the interiors of fonts could easily have been hollowed out later, and are usually concealed from inspection by lead linings) suggest a tension between function – a shallow bowl raised up to waist level – and symbolic form – a skeuomorphic tub.

A compelling skeuomorph of the second type is the gigantic font at Old Radnor (Figs. 7c, 9), on the Welsh border. This is monolithic, but shaped to look like a squat cylindrical tub on four stubby legs, which have been delineated by cutting two transverse recessions in cruciform formation into the lower surface of the block. Whether or not this echoes a carpentry technique of using saw-cuts to produce a four-legged table or stool from a single section of tree-trunk,69 it surely reflects a wooden object of some kind. This becomes still clearer when Old Radnor is compared with the stampfonter (‘stump-fonts’) such as that at Askim (Fig. 7d), clustered in an area south-east of Oslo, which are evidently based on tubs with three or four staves extended downwards as legs,70 a method used into recent times for domestic vessels such as the Estonian example shown in Fig. 7b.

Other forms with cavities of comparable size are more overtly pedestal-like. The squat drum of the elaborate Romanesque font at Crick (Northants.) (Fig. 9) is raised on the shoulders of three crouching Atlas-figures, though in its solidity it still belies the saucer-like 15-cm. cavity recessed into it. Tall, slender fonts, both columnar and of hourglass/ baluster shape, are more common, and most closely resemble the Scandinavian wooden fonts to be considered shortly.71 The simple hourglass form – like a cylinder with a medial band constricting the waist72 – is illustrated by the examples with roped bands at Morwenstow (Cornw.), Stogursey (Som.) and Lustleigh (Devon), the last exceptionally small (Fig. 6). While there may be some influence from bulbous tub forms with hoops, it is probable that these, like the wooden hourglass fonts of Norway and indeed the stone balusters of AngloSaxon architecture, derive ultimately from lathe-turned wooden balusters.73 The diminutive font from Lulsley (Worcs.; now at Alfrick) (Figs. 6, 8c) comprises a baluster 48 cm. high, on a moulded base in a slightly different stone which may or may not be original. The cavity, flat-bottomed with sloping sides, is only 7 cm. deep and makes no sense as anything other than the socket for a larger movable container of wood or metal, which was presumably either bucketshaped or had a deep foot-ring to hold it in place. As Figs. 8c and 8d illustrate, it is strikingly similar, on a smaller scale, to the late medieval wooden font at Hauho (Finland) which (with a modern brass pan) still functions like this today.

The other suggested type, a portable bowl or basin on a stand, needs closer analysis which may begin with another peripheral witness, the second of the two fourteenth-century images in the Icelandic ‘Jónsbók’ manuscripts (Fig. 1b). Here a priest grips by the shoulders an infant crouching within a shallow oval trough, raised to the level of the priest’s knees on a stool or stand with simple gothic piercings. The trough has a rounded bottom, resting freely on the stand, and both parts are evidently of wood; the scene could readily have been replicated using ordinary domestic equipment, as Fig. 1d 67

Actual examples of such coopered wooden washing-tubs, but standing on four integral legs, are displayed besides the fireplaces of houses at the Kizi Rural Life Museum in western Russia. 68 S. Keynes, ‘The Fonthill Letter’, in Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies … Presented to Helmut Gneuss, ed. M. Korhammer (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 53-97, at 73-5 (compare especially Einhard’s reference to Charlemagne giving judgements while dressing); N. P. Brooks, ‘The Fonthill Letter’, in Early Medieval Studies (cit. in n. 58), pp. 301-17, at 310, 315. I am sceptical of the idea that Alfred was making a symbolic, Pilate-like gesture to wash his hands of Helmstan and his problems. 69 Compare the Scandinavian tradition of one-piece kubbestolar, cut from tree-trunk sections: B. Salin, ‘En Arkeologisk Bagatell’, Fornvännen, 11 (1916), pp. 63-75. 70 Solhaug, Middelalderens Døpefonter, I, pp.140-1 and map 9; cf. the traufonter, ibid. pp. 138-40. S.A. Hallbäck, Medeltida Dopfuntar in Värmland (Karlstad, 1965), pp. 33-6, makes similar suggestions.

71

The common re-use of Roman altars and Anglo-Saxon cross-shaft sections as fonts is inherently undatable, but at least shows that blocks of this columnar shape were considered suitable for the purpose: see list in D. Stocker, ‘“Fons et Origo”: The Symbolic Death, Burial and Resurrection of English Font Stones’, Church Archaeology, 1 (1997), pp. 17-25, at 25. 72 Cf. Bond, Fonts and Font Covers, p. 47. 73 Probably derivative from similar models is a group of Romanesque biconical lamps: M. Redknap and J.M. Lewis, A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales, 1 (Cardiff, 2007), pp. 551-2.

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a

b

c

d

Fig. 8. a Buscot (Berks.). b Poltimore (Devon). c Lulsley (now Alfrick, Worcs.). d Hauho, Finland.

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Fig. 9. Fonts with bowls raised on supports.

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS The shallow, bowl-like fonts such as those at Buscot and Tintagel parish church, already noted, can readily be understood as the top components of shafts or balusters that are now missing. What seems to be a distinctive Cornish group – from Rialton, at Sithney and from the chapel on Tintagel island – resemble, in their squatness and small scale, the capitals of columns (Fig. 6);74 these too could reflect a bowl-turning tradition. The cavities are again extremely shallow, at Rialton only 12 cm. deep; either these were for affusion only, or they are in fact stands into which larger detachable bowls were fitted.

The two Anglo-Saxon carved fragments at Godalming (Surr.) are a peg on which to hang the foregoing argument, so they must be described in some detail (Figs. 10c, 10d, 11). These pieces, with two others now lost, were recovered from the fabric of the eleventh-century two-cell church and its early twelfth-century enlargement; they could have been brought as rubble from the former minster at Tuesley, a mile or so outside the town.76 This account follows Dominic Tweddle's recent catalogue entries, amplified by observations made when I was able to handle the fragments in 2008.77 The major piece is unique among extant Anglo-Saxon sculpture: a monolithic ring, 50 cm. in maximum diameter and 17 cm. thick, of rectangular cross-section. Its edges, both external and internal, taper slightly upwards. The internal edge has a substantial chamfer to the upper surface and a small rebate to the lower. The external edge is punctuated by four beast-heads at the cardinal points, separating four rectangular panels bearing interlace, foliage and animal ornament. Tweddle tentatively dates the decoration to the ninth century.

Some of the potential ‘bowl-stand’ English fonts, such as at Crick, are clearly twelfth-century; Lulsley could be earlier, but is too simple to be pinned down. There are, however, two examples of pedestal form whose carved decoration points to the later Anglo-Saxon period. The font at Melbury Bubb (Dors.) is notable for its unique, bestiary-like frieze dominated by four large quadrupeds (Figs. 10a, 11). As currently positioned this is upside-down, and the font is usually interpreted as a re-used cross-shaft. Recently, however, Rosemary Cramp has set out a persuasive argument that the scene refers to resurrection, salvation and the conquest of evil; the stag in particular, recalling (like the Potterne inscription) Psalm 42.1, seems apposite to a baptismal setting.75 A round-shafted cross on this scale would be very unusual in Wessex, and the flared rim, which is integral, is functionally appropriate to a font. I therefore agree that this is probably a font or font-stand, tapering upwards towards a small flared top, which has been inverted to provide a larger surface area into which has been cut a secondary bowl (still only 15 cm. deep).

The smaller fragment derives from a slightly tapering cylindrical drum, its smaller horizontal face flat-dressed (with criss-cross tooling), the other broken. Around the circumfrence is a frieze of stylised foliage arranged as a fret pattern, 7 cm. wide and framed by plain raised borders. The drum was 45 cm. in diameter at the level of the extant dressed face, and a round hole 4 cm. in diameter was drilled vertically through its centre. This last crucial detail (not noted by Tweddle) makes it hard to interpret this as anything other than the shaft of a font, incorporating a drain of the kind that would later be ubiquitous.

One further observation at Melbury Bubb may be relevant. The font as currently positioned has a plain circular plinth, and probing shows that it does not merely stand on this but is recessed into it: in other words, the surface of the plinth is rebated within a narrow, up-standing rim (Fig. 10b). Given the weight of the main block this seems an odd and unnecessary thing to do, but it would make more sense if the plinth were in fact a neck-ring for the font in its original, preinversion state. This suggestion is impossible to confirm or disprove without lifting the font, and it might be too speculative to be worth making were it not for the survival of just such a ring in a less ambiguous case.

As Tweddle observes, this fragment ‘matches [the ring] very closely in reconstructed diameter, is made of the same material, and (to judge from its decoration) must belong to the same period. It is, therefore, possible that this piece formed part of the base’. When the form of the ring – clearly the top of some composite structure – is considered in conjunction with the evidence of the drain-hole, this possibility becomes a near-certainty. The taper of the drum must have run upwards, to fit into the internal 39-cm. diameter of the underside of the ring, from which it follows that the extant dressed face was up-facing; it can therefore be inferred that the drum comprised two (or possibly more) blocks, the surviving piece being from the top of the lower block. The top end of the drum must have fitted into the rebate on the lower internal edge of the ring. The internal

74

Here I am deeply grateful to Charles Thomas for his help during my visit in 2008, and for providing a draft article on Cornish fonts and several drawings; it should be made clear that the present interpretation is not his. The Rialton font, found in a garden there, is now in the Royal Cornish Museum. 75 Cramp, South-West England, pp. 104-6 and ills. 71-81. (But I do not believe that the structure from which a hyena pulls a corpse in British Library, MS Add. 11283, fo.5, is ‘a font-like object’: it is surely a tomb shown end-on.)

76

J. Blair, Early Medieval Surrey (Stroud and Guildford, 1991), pp. 97-9. 77 D. Tweddle and others, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, IV: South-East England (Oxford, 1995), pp. 144-6 and ills. 81-94. I am very grateful to the then rector, the Revd Canon John Ashe, for going to considerable trouble to open the glass case for me, and to Alan Bott for his interest.

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a

b

c

d

Fig. 10. a Melbury Bubb (Dors.). b Melbury Bubb: detail of junction between font and current base (proposed neck-ring). c Godalming (Surrey): larger fragment. d Godalming (Surrey): smaller fragment.

edge of the ring – following the configuration of the whole monument – also tapers upwards, so can scarcely have acted as an orifice or container as seen from above; rather, it should be understood as a kind of cylindrical socket or mortise into which the rebated top of the drum slotted like a tenon. These considerations point towards the reconstruction proposed in Fig. 11.

a very strange handling of stone and is surely skeuomorphic: it must derive from a carpenters’ repertoire using turned components, or natural round-wood of different diameters, such as might for instance be applied to making large wooden candlesticks. It is an unlikely way of constructing a container meant to hold water, and the cavity in the top of the Godalming object was evidently very shallow (even though we cannot say whether or not the upwards-projecting stub of the drum was hollowed). This is therefore better interpreted as a stand for a bowl than as a bowl in itself.

Tweddle compares the Godalming ring to the metal rims of wooden cups and drinking-horns, and it could well reflect large-scale applications of the mixed-media techniques known to us from small precious objects. The ring-and-socket construction at Godalming, and possibly at Melbury Bubb, is

Lulsley, Melbury Bubb and Godalming may thus be ‘footprints in the snow’ for a lost category of Anglo-Saxon

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS

Fig. 11. Fonts of pedestal and quadrangular form. (The internal profile shown in broken line is masked by a lead lining.)

169

JOHN BLAIR wooden font-stands, of various pedestal- or baluster-like forms, that would have carried portable vessels of various kinds. Returning to Scandinavia with this in mind, it is instructive to find that late medieval Denmark and Sweden had a tradition of copper-alloy baptismal ‘kettles’, either cast whole or made of riveted sheets (Fig. 16b), which fitted into the cavities – often with internally rebated edges – of conventional-looking stone fonts.78 Still more suggestive is the later medieval Norwegian material studied by Solhaug: the wooden hourglass or baluster-shaped ‘fonts’, and some stone ones, were in reality stands for round-bottomed soapstone bowls which rested in their shallow upper cavities (Fig. 12a-b, d).79 One especially striking resemblance is between the stone font from Lilstock (Som.; now at Stogursey) and the Norwegian wooden font-stand at Veggli (Figs. 11, 12c-d).80 The Norwegian soapstone bowls, with their rounded forms and edge mouldings, look very like wood-turners' work: soapstone, abundantly available and widely used, was the natural material in which to copy prototypes of wood or lead. Late though they are, the congruence of the Norwegian wooden and soapstone fontsets with the arrangements just adduced from the AngloSaxon fragments may point to wooden forms that were familiar in tenth- to eleventh-century England, and that English missionaries to Norway replicated once infant baptism became general there.

portable baptismal ‘kits’, the other elements resembling the wash-stand sets recorded in the later Middle Ages.83 Quadrangular forms Fonts of cubic or inverted trapezoidal shape, their geometry emphasised by corner shafts and shafted bases, are one of the main twelfth-century types in England and northern Europe generally. Since quadrangular forms in vernacular materials do not lend themselves to the retention of liquid, these are readily understood as products of Romanesque design without reference to older font types. Even here, though, there are grounds for envisaging a vernacular tradition, and one that the Scandinavian material again reflects. First, there is one plausible case, at Bingley (Yorks.), of a preConquest quadrangular stone font (Figs. 11, 13a).84 This is a shallow block, almost square in plan, of trapezoidal form externally but inverted trapezoidal form internally: in other words the outer faces and the faces of the cavity splay in opposite directions. The cavity is well cut, and accurately follows the form of the block, so is either original or a very careful adaptation; it retains traces of an edge rebate. The drain-hole has been drilled roughly through one corner, and is clearly secondary. Three of the four sides are carved with loose interlace, the fourth with an odd pseudo-runic inscription which has resisted all attempts to read it. The latest assessment concludes that the decoration is of preConquest rather than ‘overlap’ type, and dates the piece to the tenth or eleventh century.85

What sorts of vessels the Anglo-Saxon stands carried is impossible to know, though it is a reasonable guess that they ranged in quality from sumptuously decorated metal bowls to ordinary tubs, buckets and troughs. It has been suggested, plausibly enough, that some wooden buckets from early Ireland with highly decorative metal coverings were used for baptism.81 If affusion played a part there must have been ladles or ewers for pouring; a seventh- or eighth-century copper-alloy skillet from the Isle of Wight, decorated with a prominent cross, has been interpreted in such a light.82 It may be that we should envisage the stands as just one element in

Interpretations of this item have ranged between a font, an ossuary and a cross-base. The last option is strengthened by the fact that it has evidently been split horizontally from a deeper block, leaving a ragged bottom edge to all four faces: if the original piece was two or three times the present height, its proportions would have resembled those of a cross-base. On the other hand the cavity is certainly not of an appropriate shape or size to take the end of a cross-shaft, so it would have to have been re-cut, of which there is no sign. An ossuary, or even an ossuary re-used as a font after the translation of the relics inside, is certainly a possibility (and would have an intriguing parallel in the rather similarlyshaped ossuary of St Machutus at Maughold in the Isle of Man (Fig. 13b), which was already by the late twelfth century

78

M. Mackeprang, Danmarks Middelalderlige Døbefonte (Copenhagen, 1941), pp. 65-7 (note that one of these bowls was fitted into the normal-looking font at Nr. Kirkeby illustrated as Fig. 492); Tynell, Skånes Medeltida Dopfuntar, pp. 152-4. 79 Solhaug, ‘Norske Middelalderfonter av Tre’; Solhaug, Middelalderens Døpefonter, I, pp. 207-21, 326-33, and II, pp. 147, 156, 178, 181, 187. 80 Solhaug, ‘Norske Middelalderfonter av Tre’, pp. 128-30; Solhaug, Middelalderens Døpefonter, II, pp. 100, 178. It must be acknowledged that the internal cavity of the Lilstock font is considerably deeper, but the lead lining makes it impossible to assess whether this results from modification. 81 Whitfield, ‘Suggested Function’, pp. 510-11. 82 F. Basford, ‘An Early Christian Baptismal Skillet from Shalfleet, Isle of Wight’, Current Archaeology, no. 203 (May-June 2006), p. 567. Teresa Hall points out to me a scene of affusion with a ladle on a late Anglo-Saxon cross at Durham: R. Cramp, Corpus of AngloSaxon Stone Sculpture, I.ii: County Durham and Northumberland (Oxford, 1984), plate 44.

83 For instance Cogges Priory (Oxon.), 1324, a lotorium cum pelvi worth 12 d.: J. Blair and J.M. Steane, ‘Investigations at Cogges’, Oxoniensia, 47 (1982), pp. 37-125, at p.107. I am very grateful to Barbara Harvey for the following two references from Westminster Abbey: (i) 1396-7, the apartment of Richard Exeter contained a pelvis cum lavatorio; (ii) 1400, the effects of John Canterbury, occupying the sacrist’s chamber, included four basin-and-ewer sets (Westminster Abbey Muniments, 18883A, 6603). 84 E. Coatsworth, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, VIII: Western Yorkshire (Oxford, 2008), pp. 43, 101-2, and ills. 64-8. 85 Ibid., p. 102.

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS

a

b

c

d

Fig. 12. a Nore, Norway. b Vestby, Norway. c Lilstock (now Stogursey, Som.). d Veggli, Norway.

171

Fig. 13. a Bingley (Yorks.). b Maughold (Isle of Man), ‘Ossuary of St Machutus’. c Lead tank from Willingdon (E. Sussex). d Soapstone trough from the font shown in Fig. 12a.

JOHN BLAIR

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS being used as the trough for a holy well86). But given the evidence offered below for trapezoidal fonts in other materials, it is perhaps simplest to see Bingley as an early skeuomorph of a rectangular trough-shaped form.87 Plain and undatable stone fonts of this shape are not uncommon,88 and some of them could be early.

appear to have been executed by impressing actual coarse string, 3 or 4 mm. in diameter, into the casting-sand. On the base are a hole plugged roughly with melted lead, and several dents and scrapes; one of the iron staples was apparently reset. This damage points to wear and tear, whereas two slashcuts across one of the vandyke panels (Fig. 16d) are clearly deliberate.

The rectangular trough form could have originated in containers for dry substances, such as grain-bins or mangers, but it can easily be executed in lead, as illustrated by the vats used for boiling Droitwich salt89 or by the linings of later butter-making troughs (Fig. 16a). A unique90 late AngloSaxon lead tank, found near Willingdon (Suss.) in 1847 while cutting a branch railway through the Pevensey Levels, is indeed a small-scale version of this form (Figs. 13c, 14, 16cd).91 It is almost square in plan, 31 by 30 cm. at rim level, and is 16 cm. high, with short faces that splay very slightly outwards to produce a trough-like profile. It seems to have been cast flat as a single sheet and then bent and soldered along the vertical corner seams, which bear cloth impressions internally. On each short face is a pair of slender lead cones enclosing, and apparently bent around, the (now broken or extracted) ends of an iron staple 6 cm. wide (Fig. 16c). The cast decoration comprises: on each long face, a vandykeshaped panel containing a small equal-armed cross amid interlace, flanked by vertical roped lines (Fig. 16d); on each short face, two saltire crosses formed of roped lines. The lines

This object can be dated to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period on the basis of the interlace panels, which resemble some early eleventh-century manuscript ornament.92 Although deposited in a similar location to the cylindrical tanks, it has some important differences. One, obviously, is its shape: although only two-thirds of the size, it is of similar form and proportions to the internal cavity of the Bingley font. Another is that this tank alone has explicitly Christian imagery, namely the small crosses. A third is that whereas some of the other tanks have attachments for ring-handles, the broad iron staples indicated here suggest some different system. While the staples could have served as handles for gripping, it is also possible that they held a lockable draw-bar to secure a lid: in 1538 there survived in the chapel of Temple Balsall (Warw.) ‘a fauntstone of tymber lyned with lede, with a small berr of iron over’.93 Ælfric would have approved of such a safeguard against the wrong hands gaining access to holy water. If use as a font or stoup is only a tentative possibility for the other tanks, it seems decidedly stronger in this case.

86

Jocelin of Furness says that a sarcophagus hollowed from stone, in which the saint’s bones were said to rest, was in his day the source of a spring in Maughold churchyard, and that this stone had miraculously resisted all attempts to lift it: ‘Vita S. Patricii’, xv. 134 (ed. in Acta Sanctorum, Mar. II (1668), pp. 540-80, at 570). The ossuary-like object shown in Fig. 13b, which has the channel for a water-overflow cut or worn across one corner, is presumably what Jocelin saw. I owe my knowledge of both the text and the monument to Daniel Jeavons. 87 It is perhaps relevant here to note the resemblance in plan between Bingley and another west Yorkshire font, at Cawthorne, which is undoubtedly post-Conquest but also undoubtedly a font: Coatsworth, Western Yorkshire, ills. 809-13. 88 E.g. Creeksea (Essex): W. Norman Paul, Essex Fonts and Font Covers (Baldock, c. 1986), p. 65. 89 J.R. Maddicott, ‘London and Droitwich, c. 650-750’, Anglo-Saxon England, 34 (2005), pp. 7-58, at 33, 37-8; A Multi-Period Salt Production Site at Droitwich: Excavations at Upwich, ed. J.D. Hurst (CBA Research Rep. 107, York, 1997), pp. 23-7. 90 Another possibly survives, re-used as a bone-box, but currently it is not accessible for examination: W.A. Scott Robertson, ‘St Eanswith’s Reliquary in Folkestone Church’, Archaeologia Cantiana, xvi (1886), pp. 322-6; Weaver, English Leadwork, pp. 65-6. I am grateful to Tim Tatton-Brown for his advice. 91 M.A. Lower, ‘On an Ancient Leaden Coffer found at Willingdon’, Sussex Archaeologcal Collections, 1 (1848), p. 160. A good drawing, showing it in perhaps better condition than now, is in W.R. Lethaby, Leadwork, Old and Ornamental and for the Most Part English (London, 1893), p. 52. This is now at Lewes, Barbican House Museum, A0005.213: I am very grateful to Sally White for providing access, and as always to Christopher Whittick for his help.

The appropriation of the quadrangular form as a vehicle for Romanesque design hampers the search for further archaisms on English stone fonts. A possible reflection can, however, be seen in the Bohuslänfonter, a small and distinctive group in the south-easternmost corner of Norway and the adjacent part of Sweden (bordering, as it happens, the zone where stampfonter occur). These are blocks of inverted-trapezoidal shape, sometimes elaborately carved; the examples at Norum, Kareby and Harestad, which bear small crosses framed by decoration, may be compared with the main motif on the Willingdon tank (Fig. 15). This group is generally agreed to be one of the earliest Scandinavian font types, and an English origin for the design has been suggested more than once.94 Remarkably, we have what looks like a reflection of the missing link between lead tanks like Willingdon and the Bohuslän group in the late medieval wooden font at Nore to the west of Oslo (Figs. 12a, 13d). This comprises a portable trough of soapstone, of the same distinctive shape and with a projecting flange around the rim, fitted into a plank-built box

92

I am grateful to Richard Gameson for this opinion. Bond, Fonts and Font Covers, p. 77. 94 J. Roosval, Dopfuntar i Statens Historiska Museum (Stockholm, 1917), pp. 7-10; S.A. Hallbäck, Medeltida Dopfuntar i Bohuslän (Vänersborg, 1961), pp. 15-19; Solhaug, Middelalderens Døpefonter, I, pp. 136, 190, 333 and map 6. 93

173

Fig. 14. Lead Tank from Willingdon (Suss.): drawing showing the object in its original, undistorted state.

JOHN BLAIR

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS

Fig. 15. Two Bohuslänfonter. (After Roosval, Dopfuntar, and Hallbäck, Bohuslän; not to scale.)

raised on a wooden stand.95 The trough bears a general resemblance to Willingdon (compare Figs. 13c and 13d), and if Nore can rightly be seen as an archaism, it may reflect earlier soapstone copies of lead prototypes.

Godalming commissioned a complicated translation of a wooden stand into stone. Both these churches were minsters, and their possession of stone fonts is one sign of the more metropolitan culture which, before 1000, distinguished minsters from emergent local churches. The same cannot be said of Potterne, Bingley or Melbury Bubb, whose fonts must be seen either as the exceptionally precocious accoutrements of new churches, or (not a wholly remote possibility) as items handed down from more important establishments. In any case we should think of stone, at this stage, as one material among several that could be used to make fonts, not the normal and natural material. If baptismal vessels and their stands could be of wood, lead or copper-alloy, or a combination of them, it is not surprising that occasional wealthy churches opted for stone. Although we may be failing to recognise early examples among the plain stone fonts, the Anglo-Saxon love of decorating significant objects suggests that that argument should not be pushed too far: probably this was an exceptional elite practice and a minority taste until the critical changes of c. 1050 onwards.

Conclusion: the late eleventh-century transformation The main message of this survey – not a surprising one, in some ways – is that the baptismal vessels of late Anglo-Saxon local churches were examples or adaptations of a range of utensils used in ordinary domestic and agricultural life: tubs and troughs, lead cooking-vats and butter-vats, buckets and wash-stands. Probably they were often smaller than their stone successors, and they were portable as those could never be. Whether of bare wood or brightly painted and decorated, they would have looked very unlike fonts as we know them. They illustrate what to us might seem the oddly domestic atmosphere of local parochial ritual: a world where churches looked physically little different from houses, where laity had to be restrained from eating and drinking in church and priests from wearing weapons at the altar, and where sods of turf could be carried into church to be blessed during masses.96 The font in which a village priest baptised infants may have been perceived – at least by him – as part of his personal equipment rather than as an inalienable fitting of the church. This need not mean that fonts were used irreverently (even if canonical injunctions on the subject suggest that they sometimes were), but it would be compatible with a more flexible boundary between sacred and secular than the post-Gregorian Church could accept.

These changes were partly to do with architecture and technology, partly with ideology. The Romanesque principles of greater monumentality, and of the precise cutting of fresh ashlar derived from the rapidly-expanding quarries, would have encouraged the production of font-sized blocks, and the training of specialist craftsmen to turn them into fonts: to that extent, the fashion was one aspect of the ‘Great Rebuilding’.97 But the move to stone had consequences, both practical and symbolic. The infant St Rumwold may have ordered his father’s servants to fetch a convenient hollow stone, but monolithic fonts cannot have been heaved around to suit every baptism: they must have had fixed sites. There they were less likely to be used for secular purposes, or even

How then do we explain the few early stone fonts that do undoubtedly exist? At Deerhurst the early ninth-century community, or its patron Æthelric, produced a precocious skeuomorph of a wooden tub; two or three generations later, 95

Solhaug, ‘Norske Middelalderfonter av Tre’, pp. 128-31; Solhaug, Middelalderens Døpefonter, II, pp. 67, 147. 96 Blair, CASS, pp. 390-2, 456-8, 484.

97

R. Gem, ‘The English Parish Church in the 11th and early 12th Centuries: A Great Rebuilding?’, in Minsters and Parish Churches, ed. J. Blair (Oxford, 1988), pp. 21-30, especially 25.

175

Fig. 16. a Recent butter-making trough with lead lining (Cogges Manor Farm Museum, Witney, Oxon.). b Detachable copper bowl from the font at Nr. Kirkeby, Denmark (Mackeprang, Danmarks Middelalderlige Døbefonte, Fig. 37). c Willingdon lead tank: detail showing settings for staple. d Willingdon lead tank: detail showing vandyke panel and slash-marks.

JOHN BLAIR

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THE PREHISTORY OF ENGLISH FONTS for different liturgical purposes: they were monumental, stable, dedicated in function, and up to a point inviolable.

Acknowledgements As well as those who provided help with individual fonts, and who are acknowledged in the footnotes, I should like to thank: Catherine Frieman for introducing me to the theory of skeuomorphism and for references to works on it; Helen Gittos for advice on liturgical matters; Mona Bramer Solhaug for discussing her work on the Norwegian material and for supplying several photographs; Harriet Sonne de Torrens and Miguel de Torrens for discussions and for sharing their database of fonts; Heli Tissari for help with Fig. 1d; Niamh Whitfield and Tomas Ó Carragáin for copies of their papers on Irish evidence; and Rosemary Cramp and Christopher Whittick for their comments. My greatest thanks are to Kanerva Blair-Heikkinen, who translated so much material from Scandinavian languages and who visited so many fonts with me, mainly during the summer of 2008. Edward's and Ida's contentment in ecclesiastical environs made life easier than it could have been: I hope that Edward will remember how he enjoyed clambering on pews and pulpits, and that Ida will be glad to have posed for colour Fig. 1d.

All this must have militated in favour of the more uniform and less casual behaviour that late eleventh-century reformers were urging. One aspect was the principle that discarded baptismal vessels should be placed permanently outside secular use.98 The first demonstrable English case of this is Tintagel, where the incorporation of the smashed font into chapel footings of perhaps c. 1050-1100 looks purposeful. By the later Middle Ages it was common to bury old fonts directly beneath their up-to-date successors, and at least one of these, at Bassingham (Lincs.), seems to have been ritually ‘killed’ by knocking a hole through the base.99 The slashes on the Willingdon tank (Fig.16d) can perhaps be interpreted in the same light, though they remind us that the practice has a broader, older and far from exclusively Christian context.100 Another aspect was that the rite was now anchored to a special place within the church walls, separated from natural water-sources and also perhaps more separated from other liturgical actions. A portable font could have been brought out from a corner or a store when needed, and set up in a prominent position.101 But a fixed font is almost inevitably the focus of its own space – capable of being perceived as a baptistery – which was often in a westerly location within the church, set apart from the liturgy to the east.102 This apparently closer approximation to the layout of great churches since early Christian times is one among several signs that the quasi-vernacular local churches of tenthcentury England were aspiring to a more mainstream institutional identity.103 Encouraged by the materials that they study, liturgists tend to lay great stress on uniformity. From a liturgists’ perspective this paper is rather iconoclastic, proposing as it does a high degree of diversity and informality in English local practice during the ninth to eleventh centuries. By the same token, it highlights the transformative character of changes during c. 1050-1150 when, as local churches came to constitute the basis of a new parochial order, they also acquired some of the stability and formality of the old minsters.

98

Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals, p. 150. Stocker, ‘Fons et origo’ (cit. in n.72). 100 Above, note 60. 101 In such a situation, might the sacrarium drain by the altar (Parsons, ‘Sacrarium’, pp. 114-15) have been used for disposal of the baptismal water? 102 Blair, CASS, pp. 379, 460-1. 103 Ibid., pp. 456-8, 462-3. 99

177

Architecture, Music, and Time in Wulfstan’s Verse David Howlett

Sancti Aðeluuoldi.4 As the Old Minster was dedicated to God in honour of Saint Peter, it will have seemed appropriate that Æthelwold died on 1 August, which was Lammas and the feast of Saint Peter ad Vincula. The date for that translation of Æthelwold’s body, 10 September, which in the year 996 fell on a Thursday, may have been chosen because it was forty days after the anniversary of his death.

With Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, and Oswald, bishop of Worcester, Æthelwold, abbot of Abingdon and later bishop of Winchester, was one of the men responsible for the renewal of English monastic culture through the Benedictine reform of the tenth century. Æthelwold directed a school in Winchester from which emerged the literary form of late Old English that survived as a national standard written language till the Conquest.1 He also encouraged the cult of Saint Swithhun and undertook the reconstruction of Winchester Old Minster, which he began but did not live to see complete.2 A child oblate named Wulfstan, born not later than AD 957, who was present at the translation of Swithhun’s body to the Old Minster in 971, became a pupil of Æthelwold and later cantor of Winchester.3 Twelve years after Æthelwold’s death on 1 August 984, to mark the translation of Æthelwold’s body in the completed Old Minster on 10 September 996, Wulfstan published the Vita

In the text of the Preface to the Life that follows, capital letters and punctuation marks in boldface represent features of London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius D. iv, part 2, folio 121va. I have arranged the text per cola et commata ‘by clauses and phrases’, suggested rhymes with italics, and marked rhythms of the cursus with acute and grave accents. To the right of the text, columns indicate the line-numbers, the rhyme scheme, and the numbers of words, syllables, and letters in that line.

ÍNCIPIT PRAEFÁTIO DE VITA GLORIOSI ET BEATI PATRIS AÐELUUÓLDI EPÍSCOPI . CUIUS SACRA MEMORIA CELEBRATUR IN KALÉNDIS AUGÚSTI : QUA DIE FELICITER AD REGNA MIGRÁVIT CAELÉSTIA . 1 24 64 144 POSTQUAM MÚNDI SALuàtor Xpístus . humano generi per aulam uirginalis uteri incarnátus appáruit : et expleta suae pietatis ac nostrae salutis ineffabili díspensatióne ad paternae maiestatis sedem cum triumpho glóriae èst regréssus : Multa per uniuersum orbem diffudit apostolicorum luminária doctórum . qui euangelicae fidei inlustratióne perfúsi . caecas ignorantiae tenebras ab humanis córdibus èffugárent : et credentium mentes igne superni amóris inflammárent . et elongata diuturnae mendicitátis esúrie . populorum turbas aeternae uitae épulis sàtiárent . Ex quorum collegio beatus pater et electus Dei póntifex Àðeluuóldus . uelut lucifer inter astra coruscans — suis tempóribus appáruit : multorumque coenobiórum fundátor — et ecclesiasticorum dógmatum ìnstitútor . inter omnes Anglorum pontifices solus singuláriter effúlsit . De cuius ortu . gestis . et obitu scire cúpiéntibus — aliqua narrare dígnum dúximus .

5

10

15

a b c a d e f f c f a b g g b a a

4 8 9 9 8 5 7 7 5 6 10 8 3 4 7 8 4

9 24 27 21 26 18 21 19 18 18 25 22 12 15 21 18 11

28 53 60 55 60 39 52 47 37 43 58 53 30 36 53 40 26

1

Helmut Gneuss, ‘The Origin of Standard Old English and Æthelwold’s School at Winchester’, Anglo-Saxon England, 1 (1972), pp. 63-83. 2 The Cult of St Swithun, ed. Michael Lapidge et al., Winchester Studies, 4, pt. ii (Oxford, 2003). 3 Wulfstan’s obit is recorded in an early 11th-century calendar from Hyde Abbey, Winchester, as 22 July, but without a specific year.

4

Wulfstan of Winchester The Life of St Æthelwold, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1991), reviewed in Early Medieval Europe, 1 (1992), pp. 84-5.

179

DAVID HOWLETT et ne tanti patris memoria penitus obliuioni traderetur ea quae praesentes ípsi uídimus . et quae fideli seniorum relatióne didícimus . in his scedulis . summátim perstrínximus . illius sanctis confisi suffragiis . hoc et nóbis qui scrípsimus et eis qui lecturi uel audituri súnt profutúrum .

20

24

ÉXPLICIT PRAEFÁTIO .

a a a a d

13 6 5 9 8

33 18 12 20 17

75 38 34 53 40

2 7 17 179 496 1171

The editors normalized the spelling of the name Æthelwoldi 1 and Ætheluuoldus 12 and the title Christus 2, and despite remarking on the ut of et ut 9 as ‘apparently superfluous’ they retained it in their text.5 Here the manuscript spellings Aðeluuoldi 1, Aðeluuoldus 12, and Xpistus for manuscript are preferred and the otiose ut deleted. One observes that Wulfstan retained in all positions the diphthongs ae and oe of Classical Latin: praefatio 1, caelestia 1, suae 4, nostrae 4, aeternae 11, coenobiorum 14, and an unassimilated consonant in inlustratione 7. His orthography and his cursus rhythms are faultless.

the number of the elect, as stated in Apocalypse vii, 4, in the regna caelestia, to which Wulfstan believed that Æthelwold had migrated. The twenty-four words may represent the number of elders, as stated in Apocalypse iv, 4. The number 153 may represent the number of fishes in the net, as reported in John xxi, 11.7 From | De vita to De cuius ortu gestis et obitu scire | cupientibus there are exactly 984 letters and spaces between words, coincident with the number of the year in which Æthelwold died, AD 984. Including cupientibus, there are exactly 996 letters and spaces between words, coincident with the number of the year in which Wulfstan published the Life, AD 996.

From the fifth century onward, Insular Latin writers incorporated into their compositions both error-detection and error-correction programs, devices by which a reader could determine whether what he was reading was what the author had written, and, if not, restore what the author had written. One of these devices was to fix texts incrementally, so that the number of one sort of element in one part signalled in advance or confirmed in retrospect the number of another sort of element in another part.6 Here, as a prefiguring device, the number of words in the Incipit, 24, signals the number of lines in the entire Praefatio, 24, and as a summary device the number of letters in the Explicit, 17, confirms the number of words in the Praefatio proper, 153, which is the triangular number, 1+2+3 … 15+16+17. The 144 letters of the Incipit may represent the number of cubits in the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, as stated in Apocalypse xxi, 12, part of

In 1988 François Dolbeau published from Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS II 984 (VDG 3290), folios 30v-36v, the Breuiloquium de Omnibus Sanctis, the Prologue of which the editors of the Life reprinted.8 The text of the Prologue and Epilogue is sound but for a few details that may be corrected from internal evidence. As Dolbeau prints meae 19 and supernae 707, one infers that elsewhere for Dolbeau’s e and e caudata, Wulfstan wrote ae, in aegris 3, tuae 5 and 6, laetantur 7, caeli 9, quae 17, loquelae 19, animae 20, meae 20, quaecumque 699, praestantur 700, praepete 701, praestat 702 and 705, aeuum 702, uitae 707, caelum 714, and praemia 715. One infers also that Wulfstan wrote Xpiste 13, Xpisti 690, and Xpistus 716, and that Dolbeau’s can 691 should read cantV.

7

For an indication of the importance of the number 153 in the architectural design of Old Minster see Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘The 7th Century Minster at Winchester Interpreted’, in The Anglo-Saxon Church: Papers on History, Architecture, and Archaeology in Honour of Dr H.M. Taylor, ed. L.A.S. Butler and R.K. Morris, Council for British Archaeology, Research Report 60 (1986), pp. 196-209, at 203-7. 8 François Dolbeau, ‘Le Breuiloquium de omnibus sanctis, Un poème inconnu de Wulfstan chantre de Winchester’, Analecta Bollandiana, 106 (1988), pp. 35-97; Lapidge and Winterbottom, Wulfstan, pp. xviii-xix.

5

Lapidge and Winterbottom, Wulfstan, pp. 2-3. 6 David Howlett, ‘Synodus Prima Sancti Patricii: An Exercise in Textual Reconstruction’, Peritia, 12 (1998), pp. 238-53; idem, Caledonian Craftsmanship, The Scottish Latin Tradition (Dublin, 2000), pp. 1-5, 40-51, 76-102, 111-15, 131-42, 146-55, 185-7, 192; idem, Muirchú moccu Macthéni’s ‘Vita Sancti Patricii’ Life of Saint Patrick (Dublin, 2006), pp. 167-80; idem, ‘Computus in HibernoLatin Literature’, in Computus and its Cultural Context in the Latin West, AD 300-1200, ed. Immo Warntjes and Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (Turnhout, 2009, forthcoming).

180

ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE BREVILOQUIUM DE OMNIBUS SANCTIS Vota serena, tibi Ihesu bone, reddere uoui; Offero nunc eadem uota serena tibi. Vita beata meis, rogo, crescat in actibus aegris, Moribus ac uigeat uita beata meis. Legis amore tuae mihi da mala spernere certa Da bona cuncta sequi legis amore tuae. Fulgida castra poli tecum laetantur in astris Et mihi succurrant fulgida castra poli. Sint memores miseri, quibus est habitatio caeli; Quem peccata grauant sint memores miseri. Te mihi propitium faciant in tempore mortis Iudiciique die te mihi propitium. Auxiliare tuo peto, Xpiste benigne, misello Seruoque in cunctis auxiliare tuo. Nomen habere bonum lauacri cui in fonte dedisti, Annue et in caelo nomen habere bonum. Versibus ecce cano scriptis quae tradita legi Et Dominum in sanctis uersibus ecce cano. Soluite uincla meae, sancti, rogo, tarda loquelae, Post mortemque animae soluite uincla meae. Nunc quia permodicum Xpisti iuuamine carmeN Versifico soliti finiuimus ordine cantV Nec mora mellifluum Domini laudabile nomeN Concentu parili pariter ueneremur et illuC Egregiaque fide pleno et properemus amorE Tuta ubi libertas ubi pax et perpes habundaT. Implentur iubilo gaudent ibi lumine sanctI Nec quicquam nisi summa boni patet undique numeN. Aurea prata uirent et balsama nectare gratA Et quaecumque uelit sibi mens optata uenirE, Votis continuo sanctis praestantur in ictV, Voce iubente Dei parent et praepete cursV. Munus et ipse Deus praestat bona cuncta per aeuuM. Dic Domino totis iubilans, o lingua, medulliS Et noua dulcisonis fer cantica uocibus illI, Omnia dispensat qui solus et omnia praestaT, Gaudia qui sanctis tribuitque benignus et illuD Regni perpetui, uitae et diadema supernaE, Aure nec audiuit, quod nec conspexit ocellO, Tradidit aut animo quisquam mortalis et exuL. In cuius sacra modulans tu laude resultA Ac meditare pio grates persoluere cantV, Sitque salus illi reboans et gloria perpeS. Aurea porta poli nobis reseretur apertA, AMEN Munere et altithroni tribuatur mansio caeluM, AMEN Et miserante Deo succedant praemia uitaE, AMEN Nosque polo iungat Xpistus de lumine lumeN. AMEN

181

34 29 39 28 5 37 31 39 33 40 10 35 37 28 36 29 15 40 30 39 34 40 20 36 696 690 38 35 37 37 36 695 37 37 41 37 37 700 37 35 41 37 37 705 37 41 35 36 38 710 34 34 36 34 +4 39 +4 35 +4 716 36 +4 994+16

DAVID HOWLETT Anglorum,16 or Frithegod of Canterbury’s Breuiloquium Vitae Beati Wilfredi,17 if that was conceived as the verse counterpart of Eddius Stephanus’s or Stephen of Ripon’s prose Life of Bishop Wilfred.18 Like many earlier writers in the Insular tradition Wulfstan followed Sulpicius Seuerus, whose Vita Sancti Martini contains two prologues.19 So at the very beginning of the Anonymous of Whitby’s Vita Beati Gregorii one reads In primis Proemium and Finit Praefatiuncula.20 The Anonymous of Lindisfarne began his Life of Cuthbert De prohemio oboediendi and De praefatione scribendi.21 Adomnán of Iona began his Life of Columba with a Praefatio and a Secunda Praefatio.22 Tírechán began his Collectanea with one statement in the third person and another in the first person.23 Muirchú moccu Macthéni began his Life of Patrick with a Great Prologue in the first person and a Little Prologue in the third person.24 Aediluulf of Bywell began the account of his cell with a Praefatio in hexameters and a Praefatiuncula in prose before his Salutatio uatis in elegiac couplets in chapter I, balanced by his Salutatio et precatio uatis in elegiac couplets in chapter XXIII, surrounding the intervening twenty-one chapters in dactylic hexameters.25 So Lantfred began his prose work with an Epistola and a Praefatio,26 and Wulfstan began his poem with an Epistola Specialis ad Ælfhegum Episcopum in elegiac couplets introduced by hexameters and an Epistola Generalis ad Monachos Veteris Coenobii in hexameters introduced by an elegiac couplet.

Wulfstan reveals himself as a writer within the Anglo-Latin poetic tradition, following Aldhelm, Wynfreth/Boniface, Bede, Alcuin, and Aediluulf by composing, in varied forms, a Prologue of epanaleptic elegiac couplets and an Epilogue of dactylic hexameters.9 Wulfstan followed his Anglo-Latin predecessors further in composing acrostics and telestichs, signing himself in the Prologue in the initials of the first lines of the ten couplets VVLFSTANVS, and forming from the first letters of the lines of the Epilogue the acrostic NVNC ET IN AEVVM DEO GRATIAS AMEN and from the last letters of the lines the telestich NVNC ET IN AEVVM SIT DEO LAVS AMEN. Evidence of Wulfstan’s fine art as a poet, published elsewhere, need not be rehearsed.10 Here it suffices to note that the Prologue contains twenty lines of verse and 133 words, 347 letters in the first ten lines and 349 letters in the last ten lines, together 696, signalling the number of lines in the poem after the Prologue (716-20=696), and that the Epilogue contains 994 letters. As Dolbeau concluded that ‘les années 994-996 représentent pour ce dernier ouvrage un terminus post quem indiscutable’,11 one may suppose that the number of letters confirms the year of composition, AD 994. Wulfstan is an idiosyncratic writer, as before him Aldhelm, Bede, Boniface, and Alcuin had been, and after him Goscelin of Canterbury and William of Malmesbury were to be. Verbal parallels between Wulfstan’s signed verse and the poem that modern scholars have entitled Narratio Metrica de Sancto Swithuno make Wulfstan’s authorship of the latter indisputable. He may have composed the work as a contrafact, the verse counterpart to Lantfred of Winchester’s prose Translatio et Miracula Sancti Swithuni,12 part of an opus geminatum in prose and verse, like Aldhelm’s twinned versions of De Virginitate13 and Bede’s of the Vita Sancti Cuthberti,14 more like Alcuin’s Versus de Patribus Regibus et Sanctis Euboricensis Ecclesiae,15 if that was conceived as the verse counterpart of Bede’s prose Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis

16

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1982). 17 Breuiloquium Vitae Beati Wilfredi et Wulfstani Cantoris Narratio Metrica de Sancto Swithuno, ed. Alistair Campbell (Zürich, 1950), pp. 1-62. 18 The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927). 19 Sulpice Sévère Vie de Saint Martin, ed. and trans. Jacques Fontaine, 3 vols, Sources Chrétiennes 133-5 (Paris, 1967), I, pp. 248-55. 20 The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great By an Anonymous Monk of Whitby, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (University of Kansas, 1968), p. 72; David Howlett, British Books in Biblical Style (Dublin, 1997), pp. 135-7. 21 Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, pp. 60-5. 22 Adomnán’s Life of Columba, ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1991), pp. 2-7. 23 The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh, ed. and trans. Ludwig Bieler, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 10 (Dublin, 1979), pp. 124-5. 24 Howlett, Muirchú’s Life of Saint Patrick, pp. 40-5. 25 Æthelwulf De Abbatibus, ed. and trans. A. Campbell (Oxford, 1967), pp. 2-5, 62-5; Howlett, British Books in Biblical Style, pp. 210-25. 26 Lapidge, Cult of Swithun, pp. 252-9.

9

David Howlett, ‘Early Insular Latin Poetry’, Peritia, 17-18 (20034), pp. 61-109, at 97-108. 10 David Howlett, ‘Numerical Play in Wulfstan’s Verse and Prose’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, 31 (1996), pp. 61-7; Lapidge, Cult of Swithun, pp. 341-64. 11 Dolbeau, Breuiloquium, p. 44. 12 Lapidge, Cult of Swithun, pp. 217-333. 13 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Rudolfus Ehwald, Auctores Antiquissimi 15, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Berlin, 1919), pp. 209-471. 14 Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 141-307; Vita Sancti Cuthberti Metrica, ed. W. Jaeger (Leipzig, 1935). 15 Alcuin, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, ed. and trans. Peter Godman, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1982).

182

ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE There is little doubt about the date of Wulfstan’s poem.27 As the poet refers to Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury (992-4), as being present at the rededication of the reconstructed Old Minster, the lines that refer to him in the present tense must have been written before his death on 28 October 994. But as Wulfstan reports two miracles that occurred, one before and one after the translation of Æthelwold’s body in the Old Minster on 10 September 996, accounts of the same miracles recurring in chapters XLII and XLIIII of the Life, the poem must have been written by 994 and revised in 996.

one sees clearly in the evidence adduced above from both the Vita and the Breuiloquium. Though demonstration of Wulfstan’s text-fixing phenomena was published seven years before publication of the most recent edition, the editor made no use of it. Let us see what happens if we heed it. Let us infer from the Preface to the Vita and from the Prologue and Epilogue to the Breuiloquium, and particularly from the spellings infixed in the acrostic and telestich, that Wulfstan retained the Classical diphthongs ae and oe. But let us not impose the diphthong ae everywhere mechanically.

Wulfstan’s poem has survived to our time in two manuscripts, London, British Library, Royal MS 15 C.VII, ff. 51-124v and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F.2.14 (S.C. 2657), folios 1-50. The former was written in Winchester not later than about the year 1000, and the latter, copied from it later in the eleventh century, was perhaps at Sherborne by about 1100. The most recent editor has written of the Royal manuscript:28

The name Aðeluuoldus is spelled in the Vita with A, not Æ. In the spellings of the names Ælfstan Æþelgarus rursumque Ælfstanus et Æscuuig 77 Ælfheah Æþelsinus hic et Adulfus erant 78 hunc Ælfstanus ouans alter comitatur et Ælfstan 223 Ælfheah adest Ordbirhtus adest Uulfsinus et Ælfric 225

There are … three places in R where the text is clearly in error: i. 1068 (quam R, for quem), ii. 309 (heros R, for herus), and ii. 386 (uir added after pariter). The first two are trivial slips, and could have been made by the author himself. The third, however, indicates that R was copied from an exemplar in which uir was added as an interlinear gloss: R: clamantes pariter, ‘uir hic inculpabilis est, est’ (ii. 386) .i. uir exemplar: clamantes pariter, ‘hic inculpabilis est, est’ The line as transmitted by R is unmetrical; and the error can most easily be explained by assuming that an interlinear gloss in the (hypothetical) exemplar was copied unwittingly into the text of R, thereby destroying the metre. This demonstration has the implication that R, though its text is nearly impeccable, is not Wulfstan’s autograph. … I have also followed R closely in matters of orthography, even though its representation of, for example, the spellings ae, e, and tagged –e (which I represent invariably simply as e), is seemingly inconsistent. … In any event, there are no grounds for normalizing variants to ae or e, nor have I done so. The punctuation and capitalization are modern (but note that I have, wherever feasible, broken up Wulfstan’s seemingly interminable runon sentences into more manageable units).

the names Aðelredus and Aðeluuold(us) begin on syllables metrically short, in which Æ would entail false quantities.

The last sentence implies an intention to reform the work of a more-than-competent writer, as distinct from accepting the work on the poet’s own terms. One observes that following R ‘closely’ does not mean ‘exactly’, as the manuscript readings ælfegum 2 and ælfhego 7 are printed Ælfegum and Ælfego. Pace the editor, solid grounds do exist for normalizing variants, as

Here, as in Wulfstan’s other compositions, one notes unassimilated consonants, inmaculatum 111, subportat 141, conlustrat 341, inretitus 372, adgressique 502.

all the names spelled with Æ begin on syllables metrically long; only Adulfus is spelled with A, and it begins on a syllable metrically short. In the following lines Quod quondam renouauit ouans antistes Aðeluuold Regis Aðelredi uisu cernente modesti praesul Aðeluuoldus corde benigniuolus idem pastor ouans ac saepe notandus Aðeluuold noster Aðeluuoldus pastor pater atque magister

35 67 74 83 273

Let us infer from the three spellings in the Royal manuscript that Wulfstan spelled the name Ælfheah, according to the correct etymology, with two hs. Let us infer that in two places ultimus Anglorum seruulus ymnicinum et simul ymnisona fratrum coeunte corona

12 241

Wulfstan spelled ymnicinum and ymnisona without h, despite hymnis in lines 101 and 103, in order to avoid making the last short syllables of seruulus and simul long by position by beginning the next syllable with a consonant.29

29

In both lines 101 and 103 the h might be understood to lengthen the preceding syllable, but Wulfstan may have been more punctilious at line 12 because he referred to himself there.

27

Ibid., pp. 336-7. 28 Ibid., pp. 364-7.

183

DAVID HOWLETT In their edition of Wulfstan’s Life of Æthelwold, Lapidge and Winterbottom wrote:30 ‘The scribe of Royal 15.C.VII on the whole avoids the use of intrusive p, and we have accordingly normalized the spelling of our text by omitting it’. Lapidge did not omit it from his edition of Wulfstan’s poem. Yet from the spellings somnis 290 and alumnos 449, and from domnum 1 (again 334) – where, as we shall see below, spelling without epenthetic p is fixed by a letter count – one ought to delete p from promtum 75, sollemnia 85, sollemniter 103, contemnendo 428, damna 438, promti 494, and diremtae 564.

All the evidence above reinforces the estimate of Wulfstan as a fine Latinist and a consummate metrist, and it encourages the reader to attend to his composition respectfully and sensitively. The text that follows differs from that of the most recent edition in that it restores Wulfstan’s preferred orthography; it restores the headings from arbitrary editorial displacement that obscures the proportions of sections to the positions they occupy in the Royal manuscript;31 and it renumbers the lines.

INCIPIT AD DOMNUM SPECIALIS EPISTOLA PATREM ÆLFHEGUM UUENTA RESIDET QUI PRAESUL IN URBE DE SANCTI PATRIS SUUITHUNI INSIGNIBUS ET DE BASILICA PETRI RESERAT QUI LIMEN OLIMPI Domno pontifici Uuentanam principe Xpisto qui regit ecclesiam prospera cuncta canam Conferat Ælfhego regni caelestis honorem qui dedit hunc omni pontificem populo ipse tibi pacem tribuat sine fine perhennem est qui sanctorum gloria pax et honor hoc cupit ore pio cupit hoc animoque benigno ultimus Anglorum seruulus ymnicinum Sit licet aegra mihi sine dogmatis igne loquela nec ualeam tanto scribere digna uiro hoc tamen exiguum quod defero munus amoris commendare tibi magne pater studui in quo perstrinxi quae fecit rector Olimpi Suuithuni meritis caelica signa patris per quem magna suis miracula praebuit Anglis milia languentum corpora saluificans Haec etenim cecini magnalia paupere cantu praesumendo boni de bonitate Dei grandia de minimis est qui pensare suetus suscipiens uiduae bina minuta libens qua non paupertas sed erat pensata uoluntas quae uictum spreuit et sua cuncta dedit Haec igitur commendo tibi munuscula patri quae uoui Domino reddere corde pio ut tua dignetur haec corroborare potestas haec et ab infestis protegere insidiis dignus apostolica resides qui praesul in aula instruis et populum dogmate catholicum hocque monasterium uariis ornatibus ornas intus et exterius illud ubique leuans quod quondam renouauit ouans antistes Aðeluuold sollicitudo cui nocte dieque fuit Xpisticolas augere greges atque ore paterno hos cum lacte soli lacte nutrire poli qui struxit firmis haec cuncta habitacula muris ille etiam tectis texit et ipsa nouis et cunctis decorauit ouans id honoribus hucque dulcia piscosae flumina traxit aquae 30

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Lapidge and Winterbottom, Wulfstan, p. clxxxviii.

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These headings are reported correctly in Campbell’s edition.

ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE secessusque laci penetrant secreta domorum mundantes totum murmure coenobium Istius antiqui reparauit et atria templi moenibus excelsis culminibusque nouis partibus hoc austri firmans et partibus arcti porticibus solidis arcubus et uariis addidit et plures sacris altaribus aedes quae retinent dubium liminis introitum quisquis ut ignotis haec deambulat atria plantis nesciat unde meat quoue pedem referat omni parte fores quia conspiciuntur apertae nec patet ulla sibi semita certa uiae Huc illucque uagos stans circumducit ocellos Attica Dedalei tecta stupetque soli certior adueniat donec sibi ductor et ipsum ducat ad extremi limina uestibuli Hic secum mirans cruce se consignat et unde exeat attonito pectore scire nequit Sic constructa micat sic et uariata coruscat machina quae hanc matrem sustinet ecclesiam quam pater ille pius summa pietate refertus nominis ad laudem celsitonantis Heri fundauit struxit dotauit et inde sacrauit et meruit templi soluere uota sui

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DE DEDICATIONE MAGNAE ECCLESIAE Regis Aðelredi uisu cernente modesti in regni solio qui superest hodie illum pontifices sequebantur in ordine plures complentes sanctum rite ministerium quorum summus erat uultu maturus et actu canicie niueus Dunstan et angelicus Hunc sequebatur ouans Anglorum lucifer idem praesul Aðeluuoldus corde benigniuolus Post alii septem quos nunc edicere promtum est carmine uersifico cum pede dactilico Ælfstan Æþelgarus rursumque Ælfstanus et Æscuuig Ælfheah Æþelsinus hic et Adulfus erant Post alii plures aderant proceresque ducesque gentis et Anglorum maxima pars comitu quos e concilio pariter collegerat illo quod fuerat uico regis in Andeferan idem pastor ouans ac saepe notandus Aðeluuold sicut ei Domini gratia contulerat et celebrant cuncti sollemnia maxima templi plaudentes Domino pectore laudifluo laetanturque bonis super omnibus ille benignus quae statuit cunctis praesul opima dari Fercula sunt admixta epulis cibus omnis habundat nullus adest tristis omnis adest hilaris Nulla fames ubi sunt cunctis obsonia plenis et remanet uario mensa referta cibo pincernaeque uagi cellaria saepe frequentant conuiuasque rogant ut bibere incipiant Crateras magnos statuunt et uina coronant

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DAVID HOWLETT miscentes potus potibus innumeris Foecundi calices ubi rusticus impiger hausit spumantem pateram gurgite mellifluam et tandem pleno se totum proluit auro setigerum mentum concutiendo suum sicque dies alterque dies processit in hymnis et benedixerunt omnia corda Deum Omnibus expletis tandem sollemniter hymnis quos in honore Dei uox sonuit populi unusquisque suas alacer repedauit ad oras in Domino gaudens pectore et ore canens Numquam tanta fuit talisque dicatio templi in tota Anglorum gente patrata reor qualis erat Uuenta celebrata potenter in urbe in sancti Petri Coenobio Veteri quod Deus omnipotens sic protegat inmaculatum ut iuge dignetur ipse habitare in eo et quicumque humiles hoc ingrediuntur asilum exultent plenae participes ueniae

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DE ORIENTALI PORTICU His super antistes Sacro Spiramine plenus adhibuit Domino plurima uota suo nam fundamen ouans a cardine iecit Eoi porticus ut staret aedificata Deo erexitque nouum iacto fundamine templum ne tamen expleret raptus ab orbe fuit pro meritis superam digne translatus in aulam quorum multiplices nec numerantur opes altithronum primo quibus exhilarauit ab aeuo donec Xpisto animam redderet ipse suam Vestra cui statim successit in arce potestas et coeptum uigili pectore struxit opus

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DE CRIPTIS Insuper occultas studuistis et addere criptas quas sic Dedaleum struxerat ingenium quisquis ut ignotus ueniens intrauerit illas nesciat unde meat quoue pedem referat Sunt quibus occultae latitant quae hinc inde latebrae quarum tecta patent intus et antra latent introitus quarum stat clausus et exitus harum quas homo qui ignorat luce carere putat nocte sub obscura quae stare uidentur et umbra sed tamen occulti lumina solis habent cuius in exortu cum spicula prima resultant lucifer ingrediens spargit ubique iubar et penetrat cunctas lucis splendore cauernas donec in hesperium sol ruat oceanum machina stat quarum sacram subportat et aram sanctorumque pias ordine relliquias multiplicique modo manet utile culmen earum exteriora gerens interiora tegens

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ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE DE ORGANIS Talia et auxistis hic organa qualia nusquam cernuntur gemino constabilita solo Bisseni supra sociantur in ordine folles inferiusque iacent quattuor atque decem Flatibus alternis spiracula maxima reddunt quos agitant ualidi septuaginta uiri brachia uersantes multo et sudore madentes certatimque suos quique monent socios uiribus ut totis impellant flamina sursum et rugiat pleno kapsa referta sinu Sola quadringentas quae sustinet ordine musas quas manus organici temperat ingenii Has aperit clausas iterumque has claudit apertas exigit ut uarii certa Camena soni considuntque duo concordi pectore fratres et regit alphabetum rector uterque suum suntque quater denis occulta foramina linguis inque suo retinet ordine quaeque decem Huc aliae currunt illuc aliaeque recurrunt seruantes modulis singula puncta suis et feriunt iubilum septem discrimina uocum permixto lyrici carmine semitoni inque modum tonitrus uox ferrea uerberat aures praeter ut hunc solum nil capiant sonitum Concrepat in tantum sonus hinc illincque resultans quisque manu patulas claudat ut auriculas haudquaquam sufferre ualens propiando rugitum quem reddunt uarii concrepitando soni musarumque melos auditur ubique per urbem et peragrat totam fama uolans patriam Hoc decus ecclesiae uouit tua cura Tonanti clauigeri inque sacri struxit honore Petri

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DE TURRIS AEDIFICIO Insuper excelsum fecistis et addere templum quo sine nocte manet continuata dies Turris ab axe micat qua sol oriendo coruscat et spargit lucis spicula prima suae Quinque tenet patulis segmenta oculata fenestris per quadrasque plagas pandit ubique uias Stant excelsa tolis rostrata cacumina turris fornicibus uariis et sinuata micant quae sic ingenium docuit curuare peritum quod solet in pulchris addere pulchra locis Stat super auratis uirgae fabricatio bullis aureus et totum splendor adornat opus Luna coronato quotiens radiauerit ortu alterum ab aede sacra surgit ad astra iubar Si nocte inspiciat hanc praetereundo uiator et terram stellas credit habere suas Additur ad specimen stat ei quod uertice gallus aureus ornatu grandis et intuitu Despicit omne solum cunctis supereminet aruis

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DAVID HOWLETT signiferi et Boreae sidera pulchra uidens Imperii sceptrum pedibus tenet ille superbis stat super et cunctum Uuintoniae populum imperat et cunctis euectus in aera gallis et regit occiduum nobilis imperium Impiger imbriferos qui suscipit undique uentos seque rotando suam praebet eis faciem turbinis horrisonos suffertque uiriliter ictus intrepidus perstans flabra niues tolerans Oceano solem solus uidet ipse ruentem Aurorae primum cernit et hic radium A longe adueniens oculo uicinus adhaeret figit et aspectum dissociante loco quo fessus rapitur uisu mirante uiator et pede disiunctus, lumine iunctus adest Plura quid his addam Tota uirtute laboras ut decores totum undique coenobium

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DE EIUS DEDICATIONE Cuius nuper erant encenia rite peracta et celebrata satis ordine mirifico octo quod egregii Domino sanxere ierarchi quos simul hic pietas fecit adesse Dei Primus erat quorum Sigericus onomate pulchro uictor honore potens uictor in arce nitens ante retroque micans habitu uenerandus et actu cuius ab eloquio dulcia mella fluunt quem Deus e caelis tueatur ubique supernis Anglorum populis seruet et incolumem Hunc Ælfstanus ouans alter comitatur et Ælfstan pontifices ambo plenus uterque Deo Ælfheah adest Ordbirhtus adest Uulfsinus et Ælfric splendentes cuncti iure sacerdotii incipiuntque omnes modulata uoce canentes Pax sit huic domui pax sit et hic fidei pax fiat intranti pax et fiat egredienti semper in hocque loco laus sit honorque Deo Sic in laude Dei resonant noua moenia templi omnis et in Domino lingua resultat ouans Hinc adstant proceres pueri hinc iuuenesque senesque et celebrant sancti gaudia coenobii Sic optata diu data nunc memoranda per aeuum uotis plena piis fulsit in urbe dies in qua promeruit sua gaudia cernere pastor officioque sacro reddere uota Deo Hinc te pontifices circumdant inde ministri te totum cinxit hinc honor inde fauor et simul ymnisona fratrum coeunte corona quisque tuum uotum qua ualet arte canit Cimbalicae uoces calamis miscentur acutis disparibusque tropis dulce Camena sonat insuper et cleri iubilat plebs omnis et infans et deitatis opem machina trina tonat laetitiae augmentum quoniam cumulatur in omni istius antiqui parte monasterii

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ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE laetanturque cibis omnes epulisque refecti potibus et uariis omnibus atque bonis Sic huius sancti nituit celebratio templi nomine apostolico sanctificata Deo Haec est aula pii fulgens in onomate Petri qui solet excelsos claue ligare polos qui praestante Deo soluitque ligamina mundo et reserat cunctis caelica regna piis Haec quoque Paule tibi committitur aula tuenda qui mundi cunctos ore domas populos existatis ut hic speciales ambo patroni est quibus unus apex gloria parque polo exaudire Deum rogitetis et omnipotentem dignanter populi uota precesque sui quisquis ut hoc templum beneficia poscere quaerit impetret a Domino gaudia plena pio qua uir apostolicus iacet almus et ille Birinus has lauacro gentes qui lauit occiduas Signipotens in ea pausat quoque demate Suuiðhun qui precibus cunctum subleuat hunc populum In medio templi fulgent Byrnstanus et Ælfheah iure sacerdotii cultor uterque Dei summus et antistes patriae decus altor egentum spes peregrinorum splendor honorque patrum noster Aðeluuoldus pastor pater atque magister cuius in aeterna luce coruscat apex cuius in Anglorum micat omni limite nomen inque monasteriis pluribus inque locis quae uouens Domino construxit eique sacrauit centenos in eis accumulando greges qui inter pontifices minimus nullatenus extat cuius doctrinae splendet ubique iubar inter apostolicos sed lucet in axe ierarchos per quem signa facit iam manifesta Deus illustrans oculos tetra caligine mersos et reuocans neruis languida membra suis ad cuius sacrum ueniunt quicumque sepulchrum cum precibus plenam percipiunt ueniam quique fide pleni quaerunt beneficia Xpisti munera quae cupiunt caelitus inueniunt Comperit hoc nuper quidam uir nobilis Ælfhelm in somnis tumbam iussus adire sacram cuius erant oculi nimio glaucomate clausi nec ualuit Phoebum cernere nec radium qui mox huc ueniens sanctus mandauit ut idem percepit clarum luminis intuitum et nullo ducente redit miratur et in se qualis erat ueniens qualis et hinc rediens Sic etiam quaedam nimis infirmata puella ducitur ad tumulum matre gemente sacrum Protinus obdormit uigilans sanissima surgit incolumisque domum cum genitrice redit Talia quid mirum rutilant quod signa per illum et quod post mortem clarus in aethre micat cuius uita fuit uirtutibus undique plena qui iugiter studuit corde placere Deo

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DAVID HOWLETT temporibusque suis clara atque exempla futuris praebuit altithronum semper amando Deum Multiplici iubilo gaudens feliciter unde exultat Xpisti nobilis ecclesia Est quoniam Dominus mirabilis et metuendus qui facit in sanctis signa stupenda suis Sunt alii plures etiam hinc inde locati de quibus est scriptum quod canit ecclesia corpora sanctorum sunt hic in pace sepulta et uiuunt eorum nomina in aeternum quorum facta sequens et dicta fideliter implens sedulus iniunctum perficis officium Lumen apostolicum populis tua lingua ministrat et uerbum Domini te reserante patet Pauperibus uictum nudis largiris amictum diuidis et miseris munera larga pius ut commissa tibi duplicata talenta reportans introeas Domini gaudia uera tui Suscipe quaeso tibi quae defero munera patri atque ea quae meritis debita soluo tuis Haec tibi uita diu rogo prospera cuncta ministret luxque futura tibi prosperiora ferat Hic Domino multos soluas pia uota per annos ut tibi commissae multiplicentur oues et subeas regnum grege te comitante supernum cum sanctis semper laetus in arce poli quod tibi concedat qui cuncta elementa gubernat unus ubique potens in trinitate Deus Amen

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INCIPIT AD CUNCTOS GENERALIS EPISTOLA FRATRES QUI BAIOLANT INIBI SUAVE IUGUM DOMINI Fratribus aeternae crescant augmenta salutis omnibus in magna Xpisto famulantibus urbe nomine quae proprio Uuintonia dicitur et quae conlustrat turrita suos hinc inde colonos omnibus Occiduis caput et Saxonibus extat clauigeri in Petri degunt qui principe Xpisto Coenobio Veteri uitam sectando beatam quam pius ille pater sanctissimus atque magister instituit toto Benedictus in orbe coruscans Vita salus pietas splendor pax gloria uirtus multiplicetur eis per eum qui trinus et unus continet imperium super omnia regna per aeuum Magna pii fratres miracula caelitus acta finibus in cunctis Europae nota patescunt quae Deus omnipotens hominum sator atque redemptor gentibus Anglorum direxit ab arce polorum mirificare suum uoluit quo tempore sanctum Suuithunum innumeras sanans a clade cateruas Sed reor indignum beneficia tanta latere aetatem uentura foret quae in margine saecli

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ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE unde mihi quantum Dominus concesserit ipse eloquar et modico percurram magna relatu et licet extremus hominum, atque abiectio plebis sim quia sermonis me nulla scientia fulcit nec misero meritum probitas mihi conferat ullum de Xpisti pietate tamen confisus et almis sanctorum nitens precibus parendoque uobis hinc canere incipiam uelut et de gurgite stillam marmoris exiguam sic ista canendo restringam Quapropter Dominum prius inuoco mente supernum quatinus ad meritum miseri non tendat iniqui sed magis affectum uelit ut pensare iubentum Vos quoque uos seruo precibus succurite uestro ne flatus per falsa queat me fallere fallax inretitus enim curis et deditus imis haud animus quicquam poterit dinoscere ueri ni prius errorem tetrae caliginis omnem expulerit sanctus donorum spiritus auctor et quia permodicum sapit haec quae uoluitur aetas de uariis signis et de uirtutibus illis quae sacer hic precibus uiuens in corpore gessit scribendi studio quamuis neglecta fuissent articulum reuocemus ad haec caelestia quae sunt eius post obitum miracula saepius acta non solum quo sancta iacent sua busta sepulchro uerum etiam multis Anglorum gentis in oris Idcircoque pias accessimus edere causas huius et insignis laudes euoluere patris est quoniam laudare Dei beneficia dignum hisque ea qui ignorant laudando edicere iustum et reticere eadem contra atque silendo negare est impium et indignum multilatoque ordine stultum Quin etiam natura animi sic condita constat ut si sanctiloquos peragrauerit ordine libros auditu sacros patrumque didicerit actus inspirante Deo cordis peruersa relinquat execret et rabiem lacerat quae uulnere mentem et flexus uitam ducat pietatis amicam secteturque humilem uirtutum mente magistram quae per descensum solet altum scandere caelum

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EXPLICIT AD CUNCTOS GENERALIS EPISTOLA FRATRES QUI DOMINO UUENTA FAMULANTUR IN URBE VENUSTA INCIPIT EXIGUI PRAEFATIO STRICTA LIBELLI Parua canens sed magna tamen mysteria tangens de facili pietate tulit qua carnea Xpistus membra lauans totum sacro baptismate mundum restaurans et eum fuit unde expulsus in hortum Omnibus est notum quadri per climata mundi gentibus ac populis sacro baptismate lotis catholicam quicumque fidem sectantur et illam mente tenent atque ore docent ac moribus implent quanta pius misero Xpistus beneficia mundo contulit et quantum cunctis impendit amorem

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DAVID HOWLETT qui in Dominum credunt qui condidit omne quod extat cuius et ingentem sapientia circuit orbem nomine qui trinus colitur deitate sed unus qui licet angelicos stabiliret in aethre ministros ante coaeternus fierent quam saecula patri et daret humanum genus ut subsisteret omne conderet ac totum nullo de semine mundum humana tamen in specie est dignatus adesse corpore uirgineo suscepit et infima terrae nostra sibi socians sua nec tamen alta minorans quatinus humanam caeli de sede repulsam naturam liuore suo sanaret et illam perpetuae mortis soeua de fauce redemptam in paradysiacum surgendo reduceret hortum rursus ut amissae repetat primordia uitae possideatque iugem regni caelestis honorem quem prius amisit uetiti dulcedine pomi contemnendo bonus statuit quae iussa Creator qui postquam nostrum de uirgine sumpsit amictum sex quasi lustra gerens placidam Iordanis ad undam uenit ut acciperet dare quod uenit ipse lauacrum in se iustitiam sic et compleret ut omnem Ternis hinc annis post plurima signa uolutis sponte crucem subiit patiens ac probra pependit humano generi uitam conferret ut inde unde necem mortis soeuissimus intulit hostis et lucra perpetuae nobis daret inde coronae damna repentinae demon dedit unde ruinae arbore uita homini sic et reseraret Olimpum arbore mors homini sicut reserauit Auernum Post cuius sanctam nostrae parcendo saluti sustinuit quam sponte crucem lux tertia surgit inde quater denis uoluit quos uisit ymeris Bethaniae post arua petens coramque beatis qui tantum meruere uiris spectare triumphum nubibus assumptus subit aurea sidera uictor maiestate quibus numquam uel numine deerat Ad dextram Patris ipse sedet totumque gubernat et regit aeterno moderamine cum Patre mundum aequalis deitas quibus est eademque potestas Denique septenas sol postquam uertit ymeras septies et typicum compleuit in orbe recursum Paschalis festi Xpistus quo uincula rupit mortis et inferni destruxit claustra profundi illuxit uotiua dies mortalibus in qua fit concessa reis optata remissio legis quae numero sacratur eo quo deluit olim inclitus ille Dauid sua crimina psalmicen et rex sed potius nunc sancta nitet quam consecrat Almus Spiritus aethereae ueniens a finibus aulae et replens fulgore locum quo territus omnis coetus apostolicus latuit munimine clausus Iudaica feritate pauens exire nec audens quorum compleuit tunc corda carismate tanto Spiritus ille opifex ut tempestate sub ipsa omne ibi linguarum pariter modulamen adesset

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ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE omnibus et linguis diuersa uoce disertis sufficeret uox una loqui magnalia Xpisti continuoque uiris ignito corde refertis conclusae patuere fores patefacta remansit ianua proclamant pulsa formidine linguae affirmant regnare Deum super aethera Xpistum quem dudum clausi fuerant uocitare nec ausi auribus et uulgi tonitrus ceu territat orbem uoce prophetarum sic mystica uerba resultant Primus apostolico sistens et in agmine Petrus plebis apostaticae constans senioribus infit Dicite nunc populi seniores dicite quid sit iustius ante Deum uobis parere Deumque linquere Non enim quae uidimus acta silere possumus aut tacitis caelare audita loquelis Displiceat placeat numquam reticebimus illum est qui uera salus ac certa redemtio mundi quem cruce fixistis cui maxima probra dedistis Vidimus en ipsum calcata uiuere morte uidimus hunc etiam super omnes scandere caelos Victor ubique tonat caelum terramque gubernat Gentibus hunc canimus toto uenientibus orbe quo trepidat cunctus uentura Iudice mundus hic bona digna bonis mala digna malisque rependet Talibus ardebant uerbis et amore calebant nec metuunt ullam constantia pectora poenam aspera nec facilem minitantia uerbera mortem omnia dira pati Ihesu pro nomine promti insuper atque necem gratis sufferre parati Ast ubi se turbae sic expauere feroces eloquio torrente premi pars credula quaedam credidit in Xpistum pars impia soeuit et illi Nec mora uitantes inimicae gentis alumnos sancta salutiferi complent praecepta magistri bissenas sortique datas sparguntur in oras adgressique omnes aequo discrimine gentes humano generi reserant pia dogmata regni et mundant totum Xpisti baptismate mundum Posteritas quorum post plurima saecula tandem sparserat Anglorum caelestia semina genti qui prius ignari deitatis ubique potentis delubra falsorum coluere maligna deorum iactantes mutis fumantia tura metallis sed crescente fide baptismi in gurgite loti idola demonii penitus spreuere maligni felices et amare Deum coepere supernum Felices ideo quos praedico nomine recto audito quoniam diuini dogmate uerbi suscepere fidem Xpisti sine sanguine fuso doctorum qui illos solo sermone domabant quod gentes aliae nusquam fecisse leguntur multiplici quae strage suos strauere magistros difficilemque uiam paucis credentibus ultro repperit alma fides quoniam respersio multa sanguinis in toto maduit crudeliter orbe nullus ut ignorat ueterum qui scripta peragrat

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DAVID HOWLETT Anglorum gentes fidei sed amore calentes elegere piam tanto moderamine uitam ut quas nec uires hominum nec bella domabant ora sacerdotum per lenia uerba ligarent ferratas acies et quae strauere feroces colla iugo Domini certarent subdere mites Quapropter Dominus genti concessit eidem sanctos e propriis quo consequeretur alumnis innumeros uirtute Dei qui caelitus omnes sanaret aegros in cunctis finibus eius Sit iugiter nostro laus et benedictio Xpisto suscepit fragilem qui nostrae carnis amictum nos et ab inferni subtraxit fauce profundi quem quondam Primogenito ferus intulit anguis ut genus humanum post comperit omne per orbem qui similis uirtute Deo dum quaereret esse factorique suo considere culmine caeli cum foret angelicis praelatus in aethere turmis atque creaturis ingenti lumine cunctis pulsus in igniuomae praeceps ruit ima Gehennae cunctarumque miser rerum uilissimus extat Pro meritis ululatque suis ac trusus Auerno ignea pestiferi soluit tormenta ueneni dentibus insanis sese manditque trahitque et dolet humanum caelo genus esse locandum quod uidet inferius fore se re prorsus in omni utpote corporeum limoque parente creatum uermibus aequandum fragilique putredine tectum quodque superba sibi tulit extollentia regnum id possessurum Xpisto tribuente per aeuum Post cuius sacram de uirgine natiuitatem quam tulerat sexta ueniens aetate caduca carnis participem carnis sed labe carentem nec mora nongentos sol transuolat aureus annos adnectens uolucri bisseptem cardine lustra bisseptemque suos indictio uerterat orbes Cancer et in medio se uoluerat aestifer anno imperium regni tenuit quo tempore magnus Eadgar et inuictus sublimia sceptra gubernans omnibus Anglorum feliciter imperitando gentibus Arcturi quae uertice sidera cernunt moribus eloquiis habito uarioque diremtae insula quas pelagi cingens hinc continet atque hinc Albio quam ueteres uocitare didicimus Anglos Haec cum felici uolitarent tempora cursu ipse Dei genitus lux uera nitorque perhennis aurea caelestis dignanter munera lucis gentibus Anglorum direxit ab aethre polorum Suuiðhuni per magna patris suffragia sancti huius amatoris huius pastoris et urbis sunt data millenis per quem medicamina turmis omnia depulsis sanantia corpora morbis Nam postquam fuit euectum uenerabile corpus illius argentum pretio quod uincit et aurum prisca salus aegros tot restituebat et ipsos concedente Deo fecit procedere sanos

194

125

525

130

530

135

535

140

540

145

545

150

550

155

555

160

560

165

565

170

570

175

575

ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE sancta uiri quo membra iacent tumulata sacello 180 580 cernere quot nemo uiuens in corpore quiuit nec sacris elementa legens ediscere libris nec audire auidas rumore uolante per aures unius ad sancti curatos esse sepulchrum post nec Apostolicos quos Lucas retulit Actus 185 585 quorum umbra infirmos quotquot tangebat abire fecerat incolumes sanctus uelamine quisquam corporis indutus fragili dinoscitur usquam 188 reddere corpoream totiens animaeque salutem EXPLICIT EXIGUI PRAEFATIO STRICTA LIBELLI DE FACILI PIETATE TULIT QUA CARNEA XPISTUS 590 MEMBRA LAUIT TOTUM PROPRIO QUI SANGUINE MUNDUM

A B C D D' C' B' A'

The first four hexameter verses contain 146 letters, coincident with the alphanumeric value of the name VVLFSTANVS, 20+20+11+6+18+19+1+13+20+18 or 146. Wulfstan refers to himself for the first time as seruulus ymnicinum 12. From the first of the elegiac couplets the 108th syllable is the middle of seruulus, coincident with the alphanumeric value of the name VVLFSTAN, 20+20+11+6+18+19+1+13 or 108. Just as John the Evangelist incorporated his name into the structure of his Gospel,32 so Wulfstan incorporated his name into the structure of his poem, twice, at the very beginning.

2 4 5 23 24 28 31 31

residet qui praesul in urbe Petri domno | minimis bina minuta | Domino apostolica resides qui praesul in aula.

The sentence about the widow’s two mites in lines 21-6 contains thirty-seven words, which divide by sesquialter ratio 1½:1 or 3:2 at 22 and 15, at bina minuta | 24. The first twenty-two words divide again by the same ratio at 13 and 9, at | minimis 23. One sees here two phenomena: first, the use in composition of the ratios of cosmic and musical theory at places in which words for numbers illustrate the values of the ratio;35 second, repeated use of the same ratio in diminution.36 In his profession as cantor Wulfstan, with every schoolboy instructed in music theory, would have understood well the importance of diminution in the architectural design of structures, as well as in the composition of musical and literary texts.

He did something similar with the name of his city. From | Uuenta … urbe 2 to Uuentanam | 5 there are 122 letters, coincident with the alphanumeric value of UUENTA URBE, 20+20+5+13+19+1+20+17+2+5 or 122. Wulfstan marked some internal divisions of his composition with stated and restated diction arranged in parallel and chiastic patterns. Dolbeau alluded to Wulfstan’s ‘autocitations’,33 and Lapidge has observed that Wulfstan ‘recycles – perhaps too frequently! – lines used earlier in the poem’.34 The recycling is an element of Insular Latin style in general and of Wulfstan’s style in particular, and not to be depreciated, since it is systematic and purposeful, as one sees from the beginning of the poem:

35

For other examples of division by a ratio at a word that plays on the name of the ratio see David Howlett, ‘Busnois’ Motet In hydraulis: An Exercise in Textual Reconstruction and Analysis’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 4.2 (1995), pp. 185-91; idem, ‘The Verse of Æthelweard’s Chronicle’, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 58 (2000), pp. 219-24; idem, ‘A Miracle of Maedóc’, Peritia, 16 (2002), pp. 85-93; and idem, ‘Insular Inscriptions and the Problem of Coincidence’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 56 (2008), pp. 75-96, at 84-6. 36 For examples of repeated diminution see Howlett, Celtic Latin Tradition, pp. 116-20, 213-16, and as above n. 35, ‘A Miracle of Maedóc’, pp. 85-93, and CMCS, pp. 84-6.

32

David Howlett, The Celtic Latin Tradition of Biblical Style (Dublin, 1995), pp. 45-9; idem, British Books in Biblical Style, pp. 79-83. 33 Dolbeau, Breuiloquium, p. 43. 34 Lapidge, Cult of Swithun, p. 337.

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DAVID HOWLETT Among Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle’s many discoveries, an arresting deduction – and one with far-reaching implications – is that Old Minster was designed in the seventh century as a modular composition on a base square, so that the ratio of the nave from east to west and of the porticus from north to south was 1:1; the ratio of nave length to nave width was 2:1; and the ratio of nave length to east porticus was 3:1, ‘a simple plan, easy to lay out and pleasing to the eye’.37

duple ratio 2:1, as the west end of the westwork related to the west end of the seventh-century church by 66:33, duple ratio 2:1. This passage contains five distinct parts, the address to Ælfheah, the description of the structure of the church, its dedication, the eastern porticus, and the crypts, each of which has its own shape, so that the poetic description of the building is modular in composition, as the building itself was modular in design and construction. The headings of these parts, marked correctly in the apparatus of Campbell’s edition, have been arbitrarily repositioned in Lapidge’s edition, obscuring the structure of Wulfstan’s composition, in which first there should be four lines of introductory hexameters, 1-4. Second, there should be sixty-two lines of address to Ælfheah and description of the structure, 5-66. Third, there should be forty-eight lines about the first dedication on 19-20 October 980. Wulfstan states that the celebrations occupied two days, sicque dies alterque dies processit in hymnis 101, and accordingly relates them in fortyeight lines of verse, 67-114, one for each hour of the two days. Fourth, there should be twelve lines about the eastern porticus, 115-126. Fifth, there should be eighteen lines about the crypts, 127-144. Correctly disposed the number of lines in the part about the porticus relates to the number of lines in the part about the crypts by extreme and mean ratio (30=18+12), and together they relate to the number of lines in the part about the dedication (78=48+30), another example of diminution by the same ratio.

More arresting still, she deduced that the unit of measurement was the Long Roman or Drusian or Carolingian foot (0.33 m.), the side of the base square being sixteen and one half Drusian or Carolingian feet long, a rod, ‘an Anglo-Saxon unit of measurement used for instance in the charter of Edward the Elder c. 904, granting land to New Minster’.38 She presented a table that ‘shows how all principal dimensions of the 7th century church, laid out in the Drusian foot, appear using a 16½-foot unit system against the Pythagorean musical ratio 3:4:5’.39 In the seventh-century church the north and south porticus were sixteen and one half Carolingian feet long and sixteen and one half feet wide; the eastern porticus was twenty-two feet long and twenty-two feet wide; the nave was thirty-three feet wide and sixty-six feet long; and the entire church was eighty-eight feet long. She concluded that ‘the dimensions of the Winchester church were perhaps based upon the sum of the dimensions of the Temple of Jerusalem: 110’.40 Æthelwold and Ælfheah understood perfectly the design of the seventh-century church, for the constructions begun by the former and completed by the latter, while increasing the dimensions, preserved the original proportions. Their tenthcentury westwork measured from north to south sixty-six Carolingian feet. Wulfstan also understood all this perfectly. He begins by addressing Ælfheah in sixty-six lines, 1-66, in which he refers for the first time in the elegiac verses to the Old Minster at hocque monasterium uariis ornatibus ornas, in line 33. He continues to describe the structure in the next 111 verses, 33-144, concluding with the verses about music, De Organis at line 176, the eighty-eighth couplet. The Specialis Epistola continues to Amen 333, where we encounter the same numbers again in the lines De eius Dedicatione, eighty-eight lines about the dedication, the saints buried in the Old Minster, and the two miracles performed at Æthelwold’s tomb, 213-300, and the final thirty-three lines of address to Ælfheah, 301-33, these last thirty-three lines relating to the first sixty-six lines of address to Ælfheah by

Wulfstan unified the entire passage with stated and restated diction arranged in a parallel and chiastic pattern, beginning at the first letter of ornas, the thirty-third letter of the thirtythird line.

37

Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘The 7th Century Minster’, p. 200. Ibid., p. 207. 39 Ibid., pp. 207-8. 40 Ibid., p. 209. For another, later attempt, in the poem about Swithhun’s bridge over the river Itchen, to associate the city of Winchester with the city of Jerusalem both earthly and celestial see Howlett, Insular Inscriptions, pp. 94-8. 38

196

ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE A B C D E F1 F2 G1 G2 G3 H I J K L M N O1 O2 O3 O4 P P' O'1 O'2 O'3 O'4 N' M' L' K' J' I' H' G'1 G'2 G'3 F'1 F'2 E' D' C' B' A'

33 ornas 34 intus 34 exterius 40 tectis 43 secessusque laci 50 introitum 51 ignotis 52 nesciat unde meat quoue pedem referat 53 conspiciuntur apertae 54 nec patet 56 Dedalei 65 struxit 66 meruit 66 templi 66 uota sui 69 pontifices 69 sequebantur 73 Anglorum 74 praesul Aðeluuoldus 74 corde 74 benigniuolus 75 post alii septem 79 post alii plures 80 Anglorum 83 idem pastor Aðeluuold 86 pectore 87 benignus 113 ingrediuntur 115 antistes 116 uota suo 119 templum 121 meritis 126 struxit 128 Dedaleum 130 nesciat unde meat quoue pedem referat 132 occultae latitant 133 patent 133 introitus 134 ignorat 139 cauernas 143 culmen 144 exteriora 144 interiora 144 tegens

In the passage De Organis, that begins at line 145, the twelfth word is bissenis | 147, after which the tenth word is decem | 148. Line 148, inferiusque iacent quattuor atque decem, contains fourteen syllables. The couplet in lines 149-50, flatibus alternis spiracula maxima reddunt quos agitant ualidi septuaginta uiri, contains seventy letters. From the space before Talia 145 to the space before Sola quadringentas musas 155 inclusive, there are 400 letters and spaces between words. The sentence in lines 145-54 contains fifty-five words that divide by sesquialter ratio 3:2 at 33 and 22, at | flatibus

In the second couplet of the second part of the chiasmus, quos e concilio pariter collegerat illo quod fuerat uico regis in Andeferan 81-2, Wulfstan varies the phenomenon observed above concerning the place-name of Winchester in play with the place-name of Andover, from British onn + dobra ‘(place by) the ash-tree waters’. There are sixty-five letters and spaces between words before | Andeferan, coincident with the alphanumeric value of ANDEFERAN, 1+ 13 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 17 + 1 + 13 or 65.

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DAVID HOWLETT

alternis. The second word of line 159 is duo, and from |

In the passage De Turris Aedificio, beginning at line 177, the fifth line begins | quinque, after which follow five words. In line 182 the fourth syllable is the last of quadrasque, after which follow four words. Wulfstan unified this passage also with parallel and chiastic disposition of diction and ideas.

conseduntque duo 159 the fourteenth word is quater denis | 161, there being ten words from | denis 161 to decem | 162. Line 161 suntque quater denis occulta foramina linguis contains forty letters. In line 165 there are seven syllables before | septem, which is the seventh word from the end of the couplet.

A1 A2 A3 B1 B2 B3 C1 C2 D1 D2 E F E' D'1 D'2 C'1 C'2 B'1 B'2 B'3 A'1 A'2 A'3

Wulfstan further unified the passage with diction disposed in parallel and chiastic patterns. A B1 B2 C D E F F' E' D' 1 D' 2 D'3a D'3b D'4 D'3'a D'3'b D'2' C' B'1 B'2 A'

145 talia organa 154 rugiat 155 musas 158 soni 161 foramina 162 retinet 163 huc aliae currunt 163 illuc aliaeque recurrunt 164 seruantes 164 puncta 165 feriunt 165 iubilum 165 uocum 168 semitoni 167 tonitrus 167 uox 167 uerberat 169 sonus 171 rugitum 173 musarumque 175 hoc decus

177 insuper 177 addere 177 templum 179 sol 179 oriendo 180 et spargit lucis spicula prima suae 186 pulchris … pulchra 187 stat super 188 aureus 188 adornat 190 astra 191 si nocte inspiciat hanc praetereundo uiator 192 stellas 194 aureus 194 ornatu 196 pulchra 198 stat super 205 solem 205 ruentem 206 aurorae primum cernit et hic radium 211 plura 211 addam 212 coenobium

In the passage De eius Dedicatione, Wulfstan begins with praise of a single man, Sigericus the archbishop 217. The couplet that describes the two Ælfstans ends at line 12 (224), containing twelve words, that divide by duple ratio at | ambo. The first or major part divides by symmetry at alter |. The second or minor part divides by the same ratio at | uterque. Wulfstan mentions next two pairs of bishops, Ælfheah adest Ordbirhtus adest, Uulfsinus et Ælfric 225, then the two apostolic patrons of the Old Minster, Petrus and Paulus 253ff., later two pairs of West-Saxon bishops, Birinus 265 and Suuiðhun 267, and Byrnstanus et Ælfheah 269. He concludes, as he began, with praise of a single man, Æthelwold, but gives accounts of two miracles that occurred at his tomb, which relate to each other by duple ratio, the story of Ælfhelm occupying eight lines, 289-96, and the story of the sick girl occupying four lines, 297-300.

Note that semitoni 166 occurs at a mid-point, three words after uocum 165 and three words before uox 167. From the beginning of the passage De Organis, from | Talia 145 to | clauigeri inque sacri struxit honore Petri 176, there are 180 words, coincident with the number of days in an ordinary solar year from 1 January to Saint Peter’s day, 29 June. In the couplet Hoc decus ecclesiae uouit tua cura Tonanti clauigeri inque sacri struxit honore Petri there are twenty-nine syllables before | Petri. Recollecting that the seventh-century church dedicated to God in honour of Saint Peter was eightyeight Carolingian feet long, and that this is the eighty-eighth couplet, one observes how many phenomena — arithmetical, musical, calendrical, and architectural — Wulfstan wove into a single passage, at once smoothly and unobtrusively, without detracting from his narrative, and without drawing attention to what he was doing.

The sentence that begins at line 245 contains thirty-five words, that divide into thirds at | trina 246. From | unus 260 to centenos | 278 there are 110 words, fifty-five from | unus to

198

ARCHITECTURE, MUSIC, AND TIME IN WULFSTAN’S VERSE | in medio 269 and fifty-five from | in medio to centenos |.41 In the sentence 319-22 the twenty-two words divide by duple ratio at duplicata | 321. The 120 lines of the entire passage divide by sesquioctave ratio 11/8:1 or 9:8 at 63.5 and 56.5, at in medio templi |.

ten letters before | denis. There are fifty lines of verse before Denique septenas sol postquam uertit ymeras septies et typicum compleuit in orbe recursus, Wulfstan’s account of Pentecost, the fiftieth day from Easter. In the sentence that begins Nec mora 499 the twelfth word is bissenas | 501.

The Generalis Epistola ad Fratres extends from the incipit in the elegiac couplet 336-7 through the hexameters 338-97 to the explicit in the couplet of hexameters 398-9, 2+60+2 or 64 lines. Wulfstan plays a variation on the theme of the alphanumeric value of the name of his city. From the beginning of the Generalis Epistola at | Fratribus 338 to Uuintonia | 340 there are 118 letters and spaces between words, coincident with the alphanumeric value of UUINTONIA, 20+20+9+13+19+14+13+9+1 or 118. Observing a widespread tradition of addressing patrons or members of an audience at a point determined by sesquioctave ratio 11/8:1 or 9:8,42 Wulfstan divided his sixty lines at 32 and 28, at | Vos quoque uos seruo precibus succurite uestro.

Wulfstan fixes his own time precisely. From the beginning of the Praefatio Stricta at | Parua canens 1 (401) to the couplet beginning with line number 153 (553), which represents, as observed above, the triangular number 17 and the number of fish in the net of John xxi, 11, Post cuius sacram de uirgine natiuitatem quam tulerat sexta ueniens aetate caduca in which the sixth syllable of line 154 is the last of sexta, there are exactly 970 words. After caduca | the ninth word is nongentos | 156 (556), after which the seventh word is | bisseptem 157 (557), and after bisseptem | the seventh syllable is the second of bisseptemque 158 (558). After nongentos | there are in sol transuolat aureus annos adnectens uolucri bisseptem cardine lustra 156-57 (556-57) seventy letters and spaces between words, bisseptem lustra equalling 14x5 or 70. The fourteenth indiction, bisseptemque suos indictio uerterat orbes 158 (558) is correct for AD 971, as is the half-year additional to 570, Cancer et in medio se uoluerat aestifer anno 159 (559). From caduca | to Cancer | et in medio se uoluerat aestifer anno there are 183 letters and spaces between words, coincident with the number of days from 1 January to Saint Swithhun’s day, 2 July.

In the Praefatio Stricta there are four lines before line 404 in which the word quadri is fourth from the beginning and fourth from the end. Wulfstan refers to the age of Christ at baptism in the Jordan, 30, as sex quasi lustra gerens placidam Iordanis ad undam, sex lustra 6 x 5 equalling 30, which he writes in line 30. Ternis hinc annis post plurima signa uolutis bring one to the age of 33, which he writes in line 33. Wulfstan refers to the Resurrection on the third day from the Crucifixion, lux tertia surgit 42, then to the forty days till the Ascension, Inde quater denis uoluit quos uisit ymeris 43, in which the fourth syllable is the last of quater, and there are

This analysis, incomplete as it is, suggests that further examination may reveal learning deeper and wider and artifice more complex than anyone has yet suspected in the works of a remarkable poet, computist, and musician. It is offered as inadequate but heartfelt thanks for the friendship, hospitality, and generosity of a remarkable couple who illuminate every subject they study and share their deep and wide learning joyously.

41

For a long tradition of play on this word see David Howlett, ‘Medius as “Middle” and “Mean”’, Peritia, 13 (1999), pp. 93-126. 42 For examples of reference to authors and patrons at places determined by sesquioctave ratio and one-ninth and eight-ninths see David Howlett, ‘Some Criteria for Editing Abaelard’, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 51 (1993), pp. 195-202, at 198-9; idem, ‘Aldhelm and Irish Learning’, ibid., 52 (1994), pp. 37-75, at 70; idem, ‘Two Works of Saint Columban’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, 28 (1994 for 1993), pp. 27-46, at 29; idem, ‘Numerical Play in Wulfstan’s Verse and Prose’, pp. 63-4; idem, ‘Busnois’ Motet In Hydraulis’, pp. 5, 15-17, 28-30; idem, ‘The Polyphonic Colophon to Cormac’s Psalter’, Peritia, 9 (1995), pp. 81-90, at 83; idem, ‘Seven Studies in Seventh-Century Texts’, ibid., 10 (1996), pp. 1-70, at 36, 46; idem, ‘Rubisca: An Edition, Translation, and Commentary’, ibid., pp. 71-90, at 89; idem, Celtic Latin Tradition, pp. 84, 115, 119, 129, 132, 181, 215, 222, 227-8, 259, 267, 272, 354, 371-2, 378, 384, 394; idem, The English Origins of Old French Literature (Dublin, 1996), pp. 25, 45, 61, 66, 73, 88-90, 95, 98, 104, 109, 11718, 122-3, 127, 142, 145-6; idem, British Books in Biblical Style, pp. 240, 246, 540, 611-12; idem, Cambro-Latin Compositions (Dublin, 1998), pp. 20 n. 5, 42-3, 62-3, 73-4, 107, 112, 137, 140, 152; and idem, Caledonian Craftsmanship, pp. 18, 22, 90, 95, 106, 160, 184.

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“Knights” before the Round Table: Cnihtas, Guildhalls and Governance in Early Winchester Derek Keene

Cnihtas and guilds

Æthelhelm (whose role would in later centuries probably have been described as that of the alderman of the guild), appears at the end of a list of witnesses to a land transaction, immediately after ‘those dwelling within the city’ (ingan burware, perhaps meaning ‘within the city walls’), who are headed by one Æthelstan.3 A group of cnihtas was associated with a thegns’ guild in early eleventh-century Cambridge, which was concerned with peacekeeping and perhaps served a society of the leading men of the county. These cnihtas were subordinate to their lords, but were also capable of participating fully in guild meetings if they paid the same dues as the thegns, whose ranks they may thereby have joined.4 At about the same date it was asserted that after three trading expeditions overseas a merchant (massere) was entitled to the rank of thegn, suggesting that cnihtas were often merchants.5 The best known of the associations of cnihtas comprised the men of the Ænglisce cnihte gilde whose rights and laws – as in the days of Kings Edgar (d. 975), Æthelred II and Cnut – were confirmed by Edward the Confessor in a writ of 1042x1044 addressed to the portreeve and all those who dwelled in London (burhware).6 As in Canterbury and Cambridge, these London cnihtas seem to have been an important group within a larger or more generalised body of responsible city-dwellers.

This essay pursues a line of thought which originated in Winchester more than thirty years ago, during the exciting discoveries and stimulating exchanges of ideas that accompanied the preparation of the edition and discussion of the ‘Winton Domesday’.1 It recalls a fruitful collaboration with Martin and Birthe Biddle and honours the memory of the other principal partners in that enterprise, Frank Barlow and Olof von Feilitzen. The argument focuses on the cnihtas and guildhalls of eleventh- and twelfth-century Winchester, their role in the economic, social and political organisation of Winchester at that time, and their contribution to the longer-term development of its civic and communal government. At the same time it compares these institutions to those in other towns, most notably Canterbury and London, where similarities to Winchester in the eleventh century appear – perhaps as a result of royal intervention over the century following the Norman Conquest – to have resulted in different patterns of development during the twelfth. The Old English word cniht, source of the Middle English and modern word ‘knight’ (translated into Latin as miles), is one of those terms which, like ‘thegn’, initially denoted a person of junior or subordinate status but eventually became the title of a person of some standing. Well-attested meanings in the eleventh century and earlier include ‘young man’, ‘servant’, ‘attendant’, ‘follower’ and ‘soldier’ (carrying a sword). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s record of the lay notables who attended William the Conqueror’s crownwearings lists them hierarchically as earls, thegns and cnihtas.2 As a group or institution in English towns, cnihtas are first recorded in connection with mid ninth-century Canterbury, where a guild of cnihtas (cniata gegildam), headed by one

In discussing the London cnihtas, Stenton suggested that they had originated as the servants of magnates owning property in the city appointed to provide their lords with goods available in the markets there, and that eventually they

3

P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968), no. 1119 (BCS 515); N. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (Leicester, 1984), pp. 28-9. 4 B. Thorpe, Diplomatarium Anglicum Ævi Saxonici (London, 1865), pp. 612-13; English Historical Documents c. 500-1042, I, ed. D. Whitelock, 2nd ed. (London, 1979), pp. 603-5; D. Keene, ‘English Urban Guilds, c.900-1300: the Purposes and Politics of Association’, in Guilds and Association in Europe, 900-1900, ed. I. A. Gadd and P. Wallis (London, 2006), pp. 3-26, at 6. 5 Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903-16), I, pp. 458; English Historical Documents, ed. Whitelock, pp. 468-9; cf. P. Wormald, The Making of English Law : King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999), p. 461. 6 F. E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs (Manchester, 1952), no. 51.

1

F. Barlow, M. Biddle, O. von Feilitzen and D.J. Keene, Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, ed. M. Biddle (Winchester Studies, 1: Oxford, 1976). 2 s.n. cniht in: An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth, ed. T. Northcote Toller (Oxford, 1898); T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth, Supplement, with Revised and enlarged Addenda, by A. Campbell (Oxford, 1921 and 1972). See also J. Gillingham, ‘Thegns and Knights in Eleventh-Century England: Who was then a Gentleman?’, Trans., Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 5 (1995), pp. 129-53.

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DEREK KEENE became independent traders.7 The degree of dependency, however, may always have been negotiable, in a relationship which resembled that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries between the king or great landlords and merchants whom they described as ‘theirs’ but who also traded extensively on their own account.8 The connection between cnihtas and trade is made explicit in a record of a transaction, datable to 1093×1109, by which the monks of Canterbury Cathedral acquired from the cnihtas of the Canterbury merchant guild (cepmannegilde) land inside the walls of the city in exchange for land outside. The first references, in Latin, to merchant guilds in other English towns belong to about the same date or earlier, although the distinction between the guild and a larger body of burgenses or cives was not always clearly drawn. There cannot be much doubt that a good number of towns had merchant guilds during the reign of William the Conqueror; moreover, some merchant guilds in the twelfth century claimed that their customs went back to before the Norman Conquest.9 The Canterbury merchant guild, which held property within the city walls in the 1160s, presumably descended from the cepmannegilde, but subsequently lost its identity and seems to have become known as the ‘borough guild’.10 This disappearance of the merchant guild is foreshadowed in Henry II’s charter to Canterbury granted between 1155 and 1161, whereby mercantile privileges, including freedom from tolls, were accorded along with other privileges simply to the body of cives without any mention of merchants. This charter was almost identical to, and presumably modelled on, that granted to the citizens of London within those years.11 London also lacked a formal

merchant guild from that time onwards and probably from earlier in the twelfth century.12 The London cnihtengilda shared with the Canterbury merchant guild a role as an owner of urban property and the confirmatory grants of both William Rufus (in 1087×1100) and of Henry I (in 1100×1103) to the men of the London guild gave them their guild, the lands pertaining to it (or to the men of the guild) and the customs they had enjoyed under King Edward (d. 1066).13 Why the London guild was described as one of ‘English’ cnihtas, and why that designation appears to have been dropped by 1100 and revived later, is not clear. Perhaps when first established, or by the time of King Edward, it was for native merchants – as distinct from foreign ones, who were certainly present in eleventh-century London.14 The potential for upward social mobility of cnihtas may explain the attribution of nobility to the families of leading twelfthcentury Londoners. A mid twelfth-century miracle story, concerning a highly skilled dressmaker in the city who worked for aristocratic clients, described her as matrona nobilis.15 An account of an event in 1125, compiled at a later date and possibly even after 1400, describes a group of fifteen London burgenses from families associated with the cnihtengilda as ex illa antiqua nobilium Militum Anglorum progenie.16 The account relates how these burgesses, most of family interests in both places, may have been involved in drafting them (cf. Urry, Canterbury, pp. 56-7). 12 For a mistaken or confused reference to a London merchant guild in 1252, see C. G. Crump, ‘London and the Gild Merchant’, English Historical Review, 18 (1903), p. 315. 13 The Cartulary of Holy Trinity Aldgate, ed. G.A.J. Hodgett (London Record Soc., 7, 1971) nos. 873-4. The earliest texts of these charters, derived from registers at the priory and c.1400 copied into the City of London’s Letter Book C (see below, n. 16), leave it unclear whether the lands confirmed were those of the individual members of the guild or those of the guild itself: Calendar of LetterBooks preserved among the archives of the Corporation of the City of London: Letter-Book C, circa A.D. 1291-1309, ed. R.R. Sharpe (London, 1901), pp. 218-19. 14 But caution is necessary over attributing to the 11th century, rather than the 12th, the list of foreign merchants in the record concerning the ‘Billingsgate tolls’ commonly associated with the laws of Æthelred II: D. Keene, ‘Text, Visualization and Politics: London, 1150-1250’, Trans., Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 18 (2008), pp. 69-99, at 93-4. 15 Ailred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita Edwardi Regis’, in R. Twysden, Historiæ Anglicanæ Scriptores X (London, 1652), cols 409-10; cf. The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster, ed. F. Barlow, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1992), pp. 158-9. 16 Cartulary of Holy Trinity, ed. Hodgett, no. 871 (p. 168). The cartulary was compiled between 1425 and 1427. About 1400, and certainly before the date of the cartulary, this account was copied, along with other documents relating to the priory’s rights in London, on to blank leaves in the City of London’s 13th- and early 14th-century ‘Letter Book C’ (Letter-Book C, ed. Sharpe, pp. 21625; pp. 219-20 for the account), where on fos 134v-135 it was later

7

F.M. Stenton, ‘Norman London’, in his Preparatory to AngloSaxon England, ed. D.M. Stenton (Oxford, 1970), pp. 23-47, at 323. 8 D. Keene, ‘Wardrobes in the City: Houses of Consumption, Finance and Power’, in Thirteenth-Century England, VII, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnell and R. Frame; (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 6179; D. Keene, ‘Cultures de production, de distribution et de consummation en milieu urbain en Angleterre, 1100-1350’, Histoire Urbaine, 16 (2006), pp. 17-38. 9 W. Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings (London, 1967), pp. 126-31; Earldom of Gloucester Charters: the Charters and Scribes of the Earls and Countesses of Gloucester to A.D. 1217, ed. R.B. Patterson (Oxford, 1973), nos 42-4; British Borough Charters, 10421216, ed. A. Ballard (Cambridge, 1913), pp. 202-7; C. Gross, The Gild Merchant, 2 vols (Oxford, 1890), ii, pp. 21-3, 28-9, 136, 146, 244; H.E. Salter, Medieval Oxford (Oxford Historical Soc., orig. ser., 100, 1936), pp. 33-5. 10 Urry, Canterbury, pp. 126-31, 241, 284, 290, 307, 385. 11 The Historical Charters and Constitutional Documents of the City of London, ed. W. de G. Birch (London, 1887), pp. 5-6 (translation into English, apparently from an earlier transcript of the original); Calendar of Charter Rolls, II, p. 462 (Latin text of Canterbury Charter from an inspeximus of 1267). The unparalleled similarity between the two charters for different cities suggests that Gervase of Cornhill, the royal justice and sheriff who had strong business and

202

“KNIGHTS” BEFORE THE ROUND TABLE: CNIHTAS, GUILDHALLS AND GOVERNANCE IN EARLY WINCHESTER whom can be identified in other sources as being active in London about 1125, met in the chapter house of the priory of Holy Trinity within Aldgate and gave to the priory the land and soke which was called de Anglissh Cnithegilda, evidently equivalent to the later ward of Portsoken. In return the priory received the donors and their predecessors (presumably their predecessors as members of the guild) in fraternity. The donors confirmed this transaction by laying King Edward’s and other charters on the altar. King Henry I, whose first queen, Matilda, had founded the priory, confirmed this gift, as did his successor, King Stephen. In effect the ancient guild seems to have ceased to exist in 1125, being probably transmuted into a fraternity of laymen associated with the priory, which had been supported by the women of the city from the beginning and was presumably attractive to the citizens on account of its royal associations. This fraternity, or a looser association, perhaps continued to serve as a body which articulated the common interests of leading city families, for the fifteen burgenses included members of families which had been prominent in the city since the eleventh century, and of families which were to be prominent in city government later in the twelfth. Among these were the Cornhill family and the father and uncle of London’s first mayor, Henry fitz Ailwin, whose ancestors probably included an eleventh-century thegn and who was buried in the entry to the chapter house of the priory in 1212, and whose grandfather, Leofstan, had probably been associated with the foundation of the priory and may have been the last alderman of the cnihtengilda.17

Seen in this context, the Winchester cnihtas and the bodies which appear to have succeeded them, especially as recorded in the early surveys of the city, make a distinctive contribution towards our understanding of the evolution of urban society and institutions during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These surveys provide detailed overviews of the city and its suburbs at three successive dates. The earliest was undertaken late in Edward the Confessor’s reign, probably c. 1057, and was limited to land in which the king had an interest. Its findings were incorporated within a subsequent survey, also concerned with the king’s estate, which was undertaken c. 1110 for King Henry I. The third, undertaken for the bishop in 1148, was more comprehensive and appears to record all land holdings in Winchester outside the royal and religious precincts. In or soon after 1148, the survey of c. 1110, incorporating information from the time of King Edward, was copied, along with that of 1148, into the handsome volume now known as the ‘Winton Domesday’. In about 1057 two Winchester cnihtas had houses on the north side of High Street, Winchester’s ‘market street’. One of them, Ailward, occupied a prominent position probably on the east corner of the present day St Peter Street or a little further east. His house adjoined the king’s timber cage or ‘balk-house’ (balchus) where thieves were imprisoned, which by c. 1110 a later owner had taken into the property.18 This site was among the butchers’ stalls and was almost opposite one of the entries to the precincts of the New Minster and the royal palace and the site of the later city guildhall. This was close to the heart of commerce and authority in the city. The other cniht, Godwin, had a house about 60 m to the west, which by c. 1110 had come into the possession of Herbert the chamberlain, by then probably the treasurer of King Henry I.19 Most of the land between these two houses comprised the estate (predium) which in 1012 King Æthelred II had granted, with exceptional liberties, to his queen Emma, who subsequently married the Danish King Cnut. For most of the time until her death in 1052, Emma resided in Winchester, but probably within the royal palace or a rural manor nearby rather than in her High Street property, which is more likely to have served as a source of income and as a commercial and artisanal establishment for the supply of her household, in a manner comparable to that of the London ‘wardrobes’ of later English queens. Such a site would have been of special interest to cnihtas, some of whom may have been involved in running it. Before she acquired it this property in High Street may already have had some official role in the administration of Winchester, for by 1012 a reeve of the city named Æthelwine had built a church on a part of it. Emma bequeathed the greater part of the property to the Old Minster, a gift confirmed by her son, King Edward. In King Edward’s time the property was known as, ‘Ælfric’s

noted that the account was derived from Book A and Book B in the custody of the prior, neither of which now survives. These documents, of which several are acceptable as copies of eleventh- and twelfth-century originals, include at least one which is clearly a fanciful compilation of c.1300 or later (Cartulary of Holy Trinity, ed. Hodgett, no. 871 (pp. 167-8); Letter-Book C, ed. Sharpe, pp. 21618); the cartulary refers to the main group of them, including the account of the event in 1125, as being ‘enrolled’ at the end of Letter Book C (Cartulary of Holy Trinity, ed. Hodgett, nos. 871-5; LetterBook C, ed. Sharpe, p. 221 n. 1). These texts were probably added to Letter Book C because it contains, at fo. 48v, a copy of a purported charter of Henry I granting extensive privileges to the priory (cf. Cartulary of Holy Trinity, ed. Hodgett, no. 998) written, probably in 1300, into the book of memoranda which came to form part of Letter Book C; a schedule sewn to this folio contains the texts of two genuine grants to the priory, one copied in 1304 or soon afterwards and the other c.1400. 17 Cartulary of Holy Trinity, ed. Hodgett, nos. 875, 1005; LetterBook C, ed. Sharpe, pp. 220-1. D. Keene, ‘Henry fitz Ailwin (d. 1212)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online edn, http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue, accessed 23 Sept 2009. Stephen’s confirmation of the priory’s possession of the land of the cnihtengilda stated that it should be as the guild had held it in the time of kings William I, William II and Henry I, and ‘in the time of Leofstan’. The story that pious women of the city supplied the priory with bread until it had acquired a sufficient endowment is recorded only in the chronicle which forms part of the 15th-century cartulary: Cartulary of Holy Trinity, ed. Hodgett, no. 10.

18 19

203

Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 37 (no. 19), 234. Ibid., pp. 38 (no. 24), 75 (no. 52).

DEREK KEENE

Fig. 1. Cnihtas and Guildhalls in Eleventh- and Twelfth-century Winchester. Adapted from Barlow et al., Winchester, Fig. 26. The numbers denote the following sites: Before 1066: 1, Chenictahalla; 2, Chenictehalla (later Chapmen’s Hall); 3, houses owing rent to the Easter Guild (later the land of the merchant guild) After 1066: 4, City Guildhall; 5, Hantachenesele; 6, St John’s Hospital; 7, Guildhall.

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“KNIGHTS” BEFORE THE ROUND TABLE: CNIHTAS, GUILDHALLS AND GOVERNANCE IN EARLY WINCHESTER mentioned in 1254 and probably situated nearby.22 Although the Chenichtahalla of c. 1057 appears later to have passed into private hands, the guildhalls which seem to have occupied its site or vicinity in the thirteenth century suggest a continuity of assembly there.

good yield’, a name which suggests its high value and that it was in mercantile use. The remainder of the property was still identified as ‘the house of Queen Emma’ in c. 1057 and c. 1110, when King Henry I’s chancellor and chief justice had a substantial rent from it.20 The neighbourhood of these two Winchester cnihtas late in the reign of King Edward suggests that they were merchants and entrepreneurs who perhaps had connections with the royal household and possibly some association with the governance of Winchester. And it is striking that after the Norman Conquest at least one of their houses, along with others nearby, came into the possession of men with leading roles in royal government and finance.

The other Chenichtehalla in c. 1057 was in the lower part of High Street, some 200 metres east of the cniht Ailward’s house. The cnihtas held it freely from King Edward and drank their guild there (Fig. 1, no. 2). The Paganus de la Medehalla, who at that time held a neighbouring house, perhaps arranged and supplied the guild drinkings. Communal drinking – reinforcing solidarity, mutual support and endeavour – was an essential element in early medieval guild life, especially that of merchant guilds whose members faced considerable personal and financial risk in their journeys to distant markets. Subsequently, this Chenichtehalla came into the full possession of the king and Henry I granted or confirmed it to Godwin Prison (sic) and Godwin Grenessone who held it c. 1110 and had the king’s writ to prove it. At that time others had rent there and on the site there was a church held by one Chiping, who seems to have held it by grant from the king and who may have been the ‘Chiping the rich’ recorded elsewhere in the city. There seems to have been a grouping of moneyers in this neighbourhood, indicating commercial wealth. Both Godwin Prison and Chiping are likely to have been moneyers and a nearby property had been held by a moneyer in the time of King Edward.23 To judge from the sequence of entries in the surveys, this Chenichtehalla was identical with the later Chapmen’s Hall, a large establishment in the lower part of High Street, from which by 1129-30 the king was receiving a farm of twenty marks a year. Chapmen’s Hall was not named in the 1148 survey, but is identifiable as the seld (probably a covered market) where linen cloths were sold, held along with other houses by one Sewi, who rendered twelve marks a year to the bishop of Winchester for it. In addition, Alwin Bierd (possibly a moneyer) and Peitewinus had small rents from the property, which was said to be on the king’s fee. It appears that the bishop, who enjoyed a position of exceptional authority in Winchester in 1148, had appropriated a part of the rent twenty marks rent due to the king from the property. By the early years of Henry II’s reign the Crown’s interest, in the form of the twenty-marks farm, had been fully restored. In 1156 Godfrey of Winsor and Ulfwin accounted at the royal exchequer for an old debt and Godfrey and Alwin Bierd owed the farm for the current year; Osbert the linendraper accounted in 1158 and Godfrey and Edwin in 1162-3. Thereafter the sheriff of Hampshire accounted for the farm. Early in the reign of Henry II, repairs to the property, paid for out of the farm, indicate that it included selds or shops, while

Halls of the cnihtas, and the Chapmen’s Hall No other Winchester cnihtas are known by name, but in c. 1057 groups of cnihtas had two halls on the north side of High Street, lying to the east and west of Ailward’s and Godwin’s houses. The simplest interpretation is that these were two guilds of cnihtas, each with its own meeting place. One was in the upper part of High Street, perhaps 45 metres to the west of Godwin’s house, where cnihtas held la Chenichtahalla freely of King Edward (Fig. 1, no. 1). This was a valuable property, held c. 1110 by the father of a future earl of Cambridge and earl of Lincoln. The hall may have been associated with a church, since it was in a neighbourhood which was known as ‘at the three minsters’, mentioned in the next entry of the survey. The identity of these minsters (which were it not for the location might be identified as the three great monastic churches of Winchester) remains uncertain, but one was probably the later parish church of St Peter Whitbread, which in the thirteenth century was associated with a block of property belonging to the abbot of Hyde. By c. 1110, according to the survey entry immediately before that dealing with the Chenichtehalla, a market had been established close by on the land of the abbot of Hyde and that of Herbert the chamberlain.21 In the late thirteenth century there was a private property known as la Gialde close to the church of St Peter Whitbread, probably the nova Gyhald granted to Hyde Abbey in 1257 and to be distinguished from the vetus Gialda

20

A.R. Rumble, Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester: Documents relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman City and its Minsters (Winchester Studies, 4.iii: Oxford, 2002) pp. 215-22; Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 37-8 (no. 23), 46 (no. 75), 74 (no. 42); Keene, ‘Wardrobes’. 21 Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 39 (nos. 33-4), 40 (no. 35). The locality known as the ‘three minsters’ is also mentioned in 1139, in connection with property lying west of St Peter Whitbread: Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 72 (no. 26, note), 73 (nos 32-4). The term ‘minster’ (monasterium) could denote a parish church in Winchester: D. Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester (Winchester Studies, 2: Oxford, 1985), p. 494 (no. 60).

22

Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 477-8 (nos. 27, 32-). Rents and abutments recorded in the grant of 1257 strongly suggest identity with properties recorded in 1148. 23 Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 34-5 (nos. 10-12).

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DEREK KEENE it was also described as a market. If the identification of Chapmen’s Hall with the earlier Chenichtehalla is correct, then the church held by Chiping c. 1110 was identical with the later church of St Mary of the Linen Cloth, otherwise first recorded in the late thirteenth century.24 Later holders of this property exercised control over the market in linen and canvas, on which they collected dues. In twelfth-century London the import of linen was a luxury business, involving both fine and unbleached linen, probably along with silk, spices and other ‘mercery’, arriving via Mainz, a major node in trans-continental trade which connected the eastern Mediterranean with northern and western Europe.25 Later linen merchants were often described as chapmen (although in the twelfth century and earlier the term probably often simply meant ‘merchant’) or mercers, a French and thus a superior term.26

Minster, Old Minster and probably a part of the royal precinct (from which Kingsgate may have taken its name) on the way. This street would have conducted overseas traders coming from Southampton directly to the heart of the city and to its wealthiest consumers. After the enclosure of the minsters it became much less significant, providing access only from High Street into the New Minster precinct. The other Chenichtahalla in High Street – if correctly located – was opposite Gold Street (now Southgate Street), which led from High Street to the city’s South Gate, which was probably re-established in the late ninth century as part of King Alfred’s re-ordering of Winchester. After the enclosure of the minsters, Gold Street became the direct means of access to High Street for travellers approaching the city from the south. The more westerly Chenichtahalla, therefore, may have been founded as a result of, or may have been stimulated by, this redirection of traffic approaching High Street. The street entering the city through Kingsgate is likely to have been in use before King Alfred’s time, when it perhaps extended north of the line of High Street. Thus the site of Chapmen’s Hall may have had a commercial significance in relation to élite demands from long before the late ninth century.

Thus it seems likely that the Chenichtehalla of c. 1057 became the Chapmen’s Hall of 1130 and that the group of cnihtas associated with the hall in the eleventh century was a guild of those prominent in the linen trade, over which they may have had regulatory powers – as the chapmen probably did by 1130. The site was held from the king, who between c. 1057 and c. 1110 appears to have intervened in its management, perhaps both to increase revenue and to regulate an increasingly international trade with the aim of securing supplies for the court and the great minsters in the city. Early in the early thirteenth century, rights in this property were granted to royal favourites, including one who supplied the king with clothing, and then it descended by inheritance and purchase, so that Chapmen’s Hall became privatised. It seems possible that the history of this as a site for luxury trade began long before the 1050s, for it occupied a position opposite an important early street which, before the enclosure of the three Winchester minsters during the 960s, led directly from High Street to Kingsgate, following the line of the Roman street on the east side of the forum insula and passing New

Two charters which King Henry II granted to the citizens of Winchester in either 1155 or 1158 throw light on the development of the collective identity of merchants in the city, perhaps especially during the years of Stephen’s reign when Winchester suffered much disturbance and destruction. One charter confirmed the citizens in the possession of the liberties and customs they had enjoyed in the time of Henry I (d. 1135), while the other granted those Winchester citizens who belonged to the guild of merchants freedom from toll and other dues throughout the king’s lands. This, the first known explicit reference to the Winchester merchant guild, implies that it had come into existence since the time of Henry I. It seems likely that the guild derived ultimately from the eleventh-century associations of cnihtas and more directly from the merchants of Chapmen’s Hall, whose organisation seems to have been disrupted during the 1140s but had been restored by the beginning of Henry’s reign. The ‘hall’ at Chapmen’s Hall may have been the place where the guild of merchants met (although it could have denoted no more than the building where the linen market was held). At the beginning of the new king’s reign the merchants of Winchester had good reason to seek a charter clarifying their status, and the king himself may have favoured them, since their premises and goods had been destroyed by the Londoners when they had assaulted the forces of his mother Matilda in the city during the siege of 1141. Henry II issued many charters in favour of his English towns at this time, including those which acknowledged the existence of merchant guilds and granted freedom from tolls, but the Winchester charter is the only case known where the merchants had a charter of their own. Other charters granted freedom from tolls simply to the

24

Barlow et al., Winchester, p. 77 (no. 69); Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 517-20; although the surviving forms of the name contain the spelling ‘-man(n)es’, the plural ‘merchants’ is probably to be understood, cf. Barlow et al., Winchester, p. 236. 25 M. Bateson, ‘A London Municipal Collection of the Reign of John’, English Historical Review, 17 (1902), pp. 480-511, 707-30, at 499-50; M. Weinbaum, London unter Eduard I. und II., 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1933), II, pp. 31, 41-2; Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, pp. 673-4; Keene, ‘Text, visualisation’; D. Jacoby, ‘Venetian commercial expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, 8th-11th centuries’, in Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th centuries: the Archaeology of Local, Regional and Interregional Exchange, ed. M.M. Mango (Farnham, 2009), pp. 371-91. 26 Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 319-21; D. Keene, ‘Changes in London’s economic hinterland as indicated by debt cases in the Court of Common Pleas’, in Trade Urban Hinterlands and Market Integration c.1300-1600, ed. J.A. Galloway (London, 2000), pp. 59-82, esp. 74-6; A.F. Sutton, The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130-1578 (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 1-66.

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“KNIGHTS” BEFORE THE ROUND TABLE: CNIHTAS, GUILDHALLS AND GOVERNANCE IN EARLY WINCHESTER burgenses or cives of the town or jointly to burgesses and a guild of merchants. The distinctive character of the Winchester charter suggests that at that time there was some uncertainty about the status of city’s guild of merchants, which had good reason to seek the privilege on its own account.27

In 1985 I suggested that the Hantachenesele may have occupied the same site as the later hospital of St John the Baptist (Fig. 1, no. 6), which stood on the north side of High St on its east corner with Buck Street and opposite St Mary’s Abbey, the precinct wall of which occupied the south frontage of High Street. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the site was within the city ward or aldermanry of Colebrook Street.31 The areas of the aldermanries, however, were subject to change as their populations contracted, and so in 1148 there need not have been any administrative connection between land at the corner of High Street and Buck Street and the area known as Colebrook Street. During the thirteenth century the administrative area of the city lying to the east of Buck Street lost a considerable extent of land as a result of the formation of the Black Friars’ precinct and this may have caused the remaining part of Buck Street (possibly earlier an aldermanry on its own account) and nearby houses on the north frontage of High Street to be assigned to the aldermanry of Colebrook Street.32 Moreover, a reconsideration of the order of entries in the 1148 survey suggests that the final group of properties listed under Buck Street occupied the High Street frontage between East Gate and High Street and so would have included the later site of St John’s Hospital.33 The hospital is first recorded in 1219, when it was described as ‘the hospital of Winchester in High Street’, a phrase which suggests an association with the citizens. It was probably founded in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, at about the time that the commune and mayoralty of the city emerged (the latter being first recorded in 1200).34 Recent investigations of the surviving fabric of the hospital suggest that its earliest elements may date from that period.35 The civic association is more clearly apparent in the 1240s, when the brothers of the hospital gave property to the Black Friars with the consent of the mayor and the citizens, evidently the patrons of the hospital. Later evidence indicates the importance of the hospital’s role in civic life: the thriceyearly burhmote or ‘common congregation’ of citizens usually

The Hantachenesele There were also other guilds and meeting places in eleventhand twelfth-century Winchester. One was described in 1148 as the Hantachenesele, where the ‘good men’ (probi homines) of Winchester had been accustomed to drink their guild (Fig. 1, no. 5). This hall (sele) remained in the king’s hands, but was described as having formerly stood on (or possibly adjoining) a property then belonging to St Mary’s Abbey. The site was close to East Gate, well away from the main focus of trade in the city, and presumably to the south of the gate since it was listed with properties in Colebrook Street, most of which belonged to St Mary’s Abbey. The meaning of the first element of the name (Hantachene-) cannot be determined and is most unlikely to refer to a guild (hanse), to Hampshire (Hamtunscir, Hamtesira) or to cnihtas.28 The guildhall of the ‘good men’ resembled those of the cnihtas in that it appears to have been held of the king and in 1148 was in his hands. The guilds of cnihtas had apparently ceased to exist by c. 1110, while the cessation of that of the ‘good men’ can be dated only to 1148 or earlier. Since the survey of c. 1110 was concerned only with properties where the king possessed or had possessed rights, and so did not include a section dealing with Colebrook Street, the Hantachenesele may have existed by then, but it is also possible that it came into existence at a later date. The ‘good men’ were presumably leading and most responsible citizens of Winchester, and probably equivalent to the 86 ‘better burgesses’, who had been required by the king in c. 1110 to state on oath what King Edward had owned in the city before they conducted the survey of the present city.29 They may have been superior rather than inferior to the city’s cnihtas or merchants,30 and thus equivalent to ‘those dwelling within the walls’ of ninth-century Canterbury or even to the thegns of eleventh-century Cambridge. Alternatively, they may have been successors to the defunct guilds of cnihtas, establishing a new site near East Gate at which to drink their guild. They perhaps lost that meeting place as a result of the 1141 siege.

31

Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 813-22 Ibid., pp. 822-5. 33 Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 116-20 (nos 667-707). Of these properties, no. 687 was later in the northern part of the friars precinct (Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 825 (no. BF 9). 827-8) and nos 691-2 and 695 were said to be next to the city wall or to East Gate, suggesting that here the surveyors were moving from north to south near the city wall and that subsequent properties occupied the north side of High Street. Any one of, or combination of, nos 692, 693, 700 or 705 was said in slightly later source to be a house next to East Gate (see also The Cartularies of Southwick Priory, ed. K.A. Hanna, 2 parts (Hampshire Record Series, 10, 1988), I, p. 124). 34 Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 814-22; Furley, City Government, p. 14. 35 M. Gomersal and R. Whinney, ‘The Hospital of St John the Baptist, Winchester’, in Hampshire Studies 2007 (Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club, 62), pp. 83-108, where the archaeological observations are not clearly described. 32

27

Borough Charters, ed. Ballard, pp. 180-91; Gross, Gild Merchant, II, pp 244-5; City of Winchester, Calendar of Charters, ed. J.A. Herbert (Winchester, 1915), pp. 7-8; J.S. Furley, City Government of Winchester (Oxford, 1923), pp. 70-1, 178-9; K.M.E. Murray The Constitutional History of the Cinque Ports (Manchester, 1935), pp. 231-5. For the siege, see below, n. 43. 28 Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 120 (no. 712), 237-8. 29 Ibid., p. 33. 30 But cf. Furley, City Government, pp. 71-2.

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DEREK KEENE took place in the hospital and the chest containing the civic records was kept there.

special affection. In 1537 the abbess was a member of the fraternity of St John which met at the hospital and had become coterminous with the merchant guild.41

While it now seems unlikely that the Hantachenesele and St John’s Hospital occupied the same site, there may have been an indirect connection between them, the ‘good men of Winchester’ of before1148 evolving into the citizens under their mayor of the thirteenth century. There may also have been a continuing topographical link in the neighbourhood of Buck Street and East Gate. Godwin Prison and Godwin Grenessone – the two men who c. 1110 held the former eastern hall of the cnihtas in High Street (probably the later Chapmen’s Hall) – also held properties close to each other in Buck Street at that date.36 By 1148 Prison’s former property in Buck Street had been acquired by St Mary’s Abbey, which had united it with an adjacent property held by Ulf c. 1110. Both Prison’s and Ulf’s properties had been held in the 1050s by priests or possibly by the same priest.37 At least one man later associated with Chapmen’s Hall, Godfrey of Winsor, also had property in Buck Street in 1148.38 Godfrey’s Buck Street property probably lay to the north of the site of St John’s Hospital as it was in the fourteenth century and in the 1240s could have been close to or part of a property, presumably a part of the hospital precinct, which the brothers of the hospital then granted to the Black Friars; this property was on the north side of another, in private hands and also acquired by the friars, which was said to adjoin the hospital itself.39 There seem to have been links of ownership and physical proximity between cnihtas in High Street, Chapmen’s Hall, Hantachenesele, St Mary’s Abbey, properties in Buck Street, a priest or priests there, and the later St John’s Hospital. As elsewhere in the city, the priest or priests in Buck Street in the 1050s may have been associated with a chapel there, perhaps on the site of the hospital but more likely the church of All Saints, which later was within the hospital precinct and seems to have been its parish church.40 It may be that the property-holding and devotional interests of the High Street cnihtas in Buck Street encouraged their successors to establish the Hantachenesele there and an association with St Mary’s Abbey. Later in the twelfth century, following the demise of Hantachenesele, there may have been descendants of this group in the merchant guild and among the citizens who founded St John’s Hospital and contributed land towards the hospital site. Later still the abbey had close links with the citizens, who regarded it with

Other Guildhalls There was at least one other guildhall in twelfth-century Winchester. Three entries in the 1148 survey refer to what seems to have been a single guildhall within a group of properties belonging to the bishop on the south side of High Street and in the neighbourhood of the former royal palace (Fig. 1, no. 4).42 The bishop probably came into possession of the site of the palace in the later 1130s. During the siege of 1141 he had a castle there, where he was besieged by the forces of the Empress Matilda, who themselves were assailed from outside Winchester by a powerful army of Londoners, who then pillaged the houses and cellars of the city. The former royal palace and a large part of Winchester suffered serious damage. The bishop was in possession of the palace site for some time after the siege and was said to have demolished buildings there and to have used the materials for his own residence. Other palace buildings were presumably remodelled as this damaged area of the city was brought back into use during the years following the siege. The three properties in question seem to have adjoined the block on the western side of the palace site later known as The Constabulary, because by 1212 it had been assigned to the constable of Winchester Castle. In 1148 John son of Ralph – probably the man of that name who was sheriff of London in 1154-5 and also, in association with Gervase of Cornhill, between 1155 and 1157 – had an interest in all three properties associated with this guildhall, but nowhere else in Winchester. John’s interest in the guildhall may have been as a royal or episcopal official acting as reeve of Winchester and it is possible that he was a Londoner and had come to Winchester with the army in 1141.43 According to the first reference to the guildhall, John paid the bishop 7s. rent de B. pro gihald’.44 At the next, John appears to have devolved payment of 8s. rent due to the bishop on to his tenant Atscelina and himself received 10s. rent de gihald’. At the third, concerning one of a run of seven upper rooms, probably over the preceding properties at ground level where the guildhall is mentioned, from each of which the bishop had an identical rent of 5s.. 81/2d., John paid that rent to the bishop and had 28s. rent [de] gihall’ .

36

Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 62-3 (nos 228, 233, 238). Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 62-3 (numbers 228-9), 118-19 (number 690). The priest(s) were named as Godman Helteprest and Haliprest. 38 Barlow et al., Winchester, p. 118 (no. 686). 39 Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 823-4 (nos. BF 5, 6). 40 Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, p. 813; for apparent coincidences of priests and churches in the 12th-century surveys, to which the case of Buck Street should be added, see Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 330, 394-6

41

Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 129, 388-9, 817-19, 856. 42 Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 82-3 (nos 140, 143, 155). 43 Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 297-302, 305; Gesta Stephani, ed. K.R. Potter, with new introduction and notes R.H.C. Davis (Oxford, 1976), pp. 126, 128-37. It is unlikely that John son of Ralph was identical with the man of that name who was reeve of Winchester after 1168: see n. 42. 44 The meaning of de B., a term applied to many of the bishop’s rents in the city in 1148, is not clear: Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 19-25.

37

208

“KNIGHTS” BEFORE THE ROUND TABLE: CNIHTAS, GUILDHALLS AND GOVERNANCE IN EARLY WINCHESTER craft guilds may have existed informally.48 Craft guilds seem to have been inferior to, and outside, the civic forms of association represented by the cnihtas, merchants, ‘better burgesses’ and ‘good men’ of Winchester. At least one suburb, however, had a guild comparable to the civic associations within the walls. Outside West Gate about 1057 a group of houses owed customs to the king and 35d. to the men of the destre gilda, an ‘Easter Guild’ so-called on account of the close association between the suburb and Winchester’s Palm Sunday liturgy. The land was said to have belonged at that time to ‘the men outside West Gate’, indicating that the Easter Guild in some way represented the inhabitants of the western suburb as a whole. This property seems to have been in Atheling Street (now Upper High Street) and was within or close to one where by 1330 the merchant guild of Winchester owned a croft (Fig. 1, no. 3). Not far away was another property, in 1297 formerly occupied by the guild of Palmers, which at an even earlier date may have had some connection with the Palm Sunday procession through the suburb. The croft belonging to the merchant guild was close to the parish church of St Leonard, which perhaps earlier had been associated with the Easter Guild.49

These references suggest that the guildhall had formerly been larger than it was in 1148, when probably only the first of the properties where it was mentioned served in that role. This property adjoined one said a few decades later to have been on the south side of High Street, and so it probably occupied the same site as the structure fronting on to High Street to the west of St Lawrence’s church where in the later thirteenth century the king’s court of the city met and which in the fourteenth century was commonly known as the Guildhall.45 That building was probably also known as the Guildhall in 1219, when a seld in High Street was said to be opposite the Guihaud.46 The thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century guildhall was small, measuring about 10 metres by 5 at ground level and 10 metres by 8 at first floor level, where it oversailed a passage leading from High Street towards the cathedral cemetery. Before 1141 the passage had probably served as an entry into the royal palace precinct. The three guildhall properties recorded in 1148 probably together occupied an area at least twice the size of the later guildhall on the site, with a correspondingly larger room at first floor level. When did this larger guildhall come into being? And when was it reduced in size? It was probably accommodated within the northern end of a two-storey range running south from High Street constructed as part of the Norman extension to the royal palace from about 1070 onwards. This part of the range, facing the commercial heart of the city, may have been intended from the beginning as a guildhall to house the court later known as the halimote along with other elements of the administration of the city supervised by the king’s reeves. The other elements may have included a prison, as was the case with the thirteenth-century guildhall. It may have been here that the probi homines, perhaps themselves constituting the halimote, met to give judgement as necessary, while they drank and feasted at the Hantachenesele near East Gate.47 The most likely date for the reduction in size of the guildhall is after the disused palace came into the possession of the bishop or after the siege of 1141 when buildings were adapted for new purposes.

A notable feature of the early administrative structure of Winchester was the multiplicity of institutions and sites involved: a guildhall or courthouse at the focal point of the city’s commercial life; halls of cnihtas or merchants in High Street to the east and west of this hub; a hall for gatherings of a civic élite, the probi homines, near East Gate; and a guild for at least one of the suburbs. This complex topography and hierarchy of association is also apparent, in an evolved form, in the city custumal written down in the 1270s. At that time, the body of citizens as a whole appears to have been known as the commonalty or commune (commune). It presumably included the plus prudeshomes e … plus sages de la vile, from which was chosen a body of twenty-four, the role of which was to counsel the mayor. The body of twenty-four had perhaps originated in the 1260s but, by analogy with London, may have dated back to the years following the establishment of the mayoralty. In the 1260s there had been strife between the twenty-four and the commune over the management of collective resources; the running of the city court, in which the twenty-four had interfered; the election of the bailiffs, the successors to the reeves of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and responsible for those aspects of city governed which derived from the right of the Crown; and admissions to the merchant guild. By describing procedures intended to resolve these conflicts of interest, the custumal throws light on earlier

Guilds were not the sole preserve of the burgesses within the city walls. In the tenth century priests and deacons in Winchester each had their own guild. By 1130 the weavers and fullers of Winchester had guilds recognised by the king, to whom they made substantial annual payments, and other

45

Barlow et al., Winchester, p. 83 (no. 139); Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 593-5 (no. 186). 46 Southwick Priory, ed. Hanna, I, pp. 123, 125. The site of the seld cannot be identified with certainty, but the Osbert the mercer who held it also had a substantial block of property lying between St Peter Street and Parchment Street, a short distance to the north (Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, p. 687 (no. 313)), suggesting that the seld was opposite the city courthouse rather than any other guildhall in High Street. 47 Barlow et al., Winchester, pp. 292-5, 422-6.

48

Barlow et al., Winchester, p. 427; cf. Keene, ‘English Urban Guilds’ (cit. in n. 4). 49 Barlow et al., Winchester, p. 50 (nos. 105, 107); Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 931-3 (nos. 707-8, 711). Properties in this neighbourhood are difficult to locate precisely, on account of the early depopulation of the suburb and consequent amalgamation of holdings.

209

DEREK KEENE structures and practices, some of them perhaps dating back to the twelfth century. With regard to the hierarchy among citizens, however, continuity probably resided in ad hoc application of the principle that some of them, whether probi homines or meliores burgenses, were superior to the rest – by virtue of their seniority, wealth or some other source of influence – rather than in the perdurance of formal structures. Concerning membership of the merchant guild, the custumal states that when it was intended to drink the guild inquiry was to be made among the crafts to find men worthy to be admitted and that those entrants were to be allotted to the four houses of the guild, as had been the custom previously. Significantly, the custumal made no reference to citizenship, perhaps because by then it was equated with membership of the guild. The four houses of the guild still had distinct identities during the second half of the fourteenth century, when each was headed by an alderman and a lawman, sometimes called bagmen, who paid the guild receipts to the mayor. By that date membership of the guild was certainly equivalent to citizenship, and the guild probably had 150 or more members.50 Since the city had been much larger during the thirteenth century, membership then, and also in the twelfth century, may have been around 300, each of the four houses having seventy or more members. The four houses may reflect earlier local associations within the city, such as those of the cnihtas and chapmen in High Street and the guild outside West Gate, which came together to form the merchant guild. One of the two halls of the cnihtas in High Street may have evolved in Chapmen’s Hall while the descendant of the other may have been a guildhall in use until about 1300. There may have been a comparable guildhall in Calpe Street (now St Thomas Street) which appears to have been in use in the mid thirteenth century but was demolished soon afterwards (Fig. 1, no. 7).51 That would make four sites which may once have been meeting places for the houses of the guild. All four sites included or were close to parish churches, which may have been founded by local groups of merchants who came to form the houses of the guild. The city guildhall in High Street, as the centre of the king’s justice and administration of Winchester, was in a category of its own, as was the Hantachenesele, which may have served the larger body of citizens (or an élite group of them), as did the later Hospital of St John.

and political processes. The textual sources, for the most part bureaucratic records of landholding compiled for the purpose of assessing revenue, offer little description or explanation of such processes.The approach resembles that of archaeology in allowing the construction of series of interlinked hypotheses which suggest narratives and explanations, but stops short of certainty, except of a limited, positivistic kind concerning the evidence itself. Such hypotheses provide the only path towards constructing a better understanding of the social and political life of towns at a crucial stage of their development in medieval England. New ideas and new evidence may alter that understanding. For the time being – and by way of a conclusion – the hypotheses suggest for Winchester an overview of the structure of civic association and administration between the tenth century or earlier and the thirteenth, together with a narrative concerning change and turning points over that period. Some aspects of the story are apparent in other English cities, but others seem to reflect the distinctive experience of Winchester. The cnihtas are a good place to start. In Winchester and other cities they disappear from view by about 1100, but they suggest links back to the tenth century or earlier and links forward to the institutional formations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their association with Winchester High Street and their probable link with the chapmen of Chapmen’s Hall reinforce other indications of their mercantile character. At least one group of them may have originated before the 960s and so may be of comparable antiquity to their counterparts in Canterbury and London. The positioning of their meeting-places in High Street indicates a response to the markets with which they engaged and perhaps to royal patronage and to changes in the pattern of trading which arose from the creation of the monastic precincts. Royal patronage, evident from the way in which they held their halls freely of the king, presumably promoted their coherence as groups which contributed to the governance of the city and its trade, as was also the case in London. Between the 1050s and the early twelfth century the Winchester cnihtas ceased to exist as formal institutions and the king assigned their halls to new owners, in one case probably to a group of chapmen responsible for supervising the linen trade. These changes almost certainly took place in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, which had a profound impact on the buildings and physical layout of the city and is likely also to have affected its institutions and governance. The likely longer survival of the London body of cnihtas may reflect the greater mercantile and military strength of that city. In both cities, however, there are indications of an informal continuity from the cnihtas to later civic institutions, the merchant guild and commune of the Winchester citizens and the commune of London, in each case perhaps assisted by association with a religious house, St Mary’s Abbey in Winchester and the priory of Holy Trinity Aldgate in London. Some of these changes, however, were perhaps more sociolinguistic than structural, as English was

Conclusion The argument of this paper is largely circumstantial, using coincidences of time and place concerning individuals, groups, sites and buildings to suggest social, administrative 50

J.S. Furley, The Ancient Usages of the City of Winchester (Oxford, 1927), pp. 26-9, 38-9; Furley, City Government, pp. 63-9, 73-4; Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 75-82. The custumal does not record what was thought to constitute citizenship. 51 Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, pp. 878-81 (nos. 620-1) and Fig. 104.

210

“KNIGHTS” BEFORE THE ROUND TABLE: CNIHTAS, GUILDHALLS AND GOVERNANCE IN EARLY WINCHESTER replaced as the language of administration and higher commerce by French and Latin. Other important changes in the administrative arrangements for Winchester after the Conquest probably included the establishment of a guildhall, adjoining High Street at the northwestern corner of the extended royal palace, to serve as headquarters for the king’s reeve’s administration of the city and as a meeting-place for the city court. It is not clear where that administration had been housed before the Conquest, but since its concerns would have been included public order and the settling of trading disputes it is likely to have been nearby or in the private house of the reeve. The guildhall may even have taken over the role of the king’s ‘balk-house’ prison, which before the Conquest had been on the opposite side of the street. Following the siege of 1141 this guildhall was reduced in size. Another post-Conquest innovation, perhaps promoted by royal initiative and associated with a reorganisation of the cnihtas, seems to have been the establishment of the Hantachenesele as meeting-place for the ‘good men’ of the city. By 1148 that hall gone out of use, but it may have initiated a practice of civic assembly in the vicinity of East Gate and St Mary’s Abbey which led to the regular meetings of the ‘common congregation’ of citizens at St John’s Hospital and the feasting there of the civic fraternity of St John.

211

Winchester in Domesday Book Julian Munby the subsidiary entries relating to urban property. Interesting patterns are emerging from a close examination of these texts that have been held to be so confused and ‘disappointing’. Apart from the attempt to identify likely sources for different categories of information, it has been found that patterns of arrangement and reporting do markedly reflect the different Domesday circuits. No matter what central editing took place at the final stages of production, the interests and concerns (or just as often, lack of concern) of those gathering the circuit returns do form a pattern.5 Thus the Domesday borough entries have first to be understood and explained in the immediate context of their neighbouring counties in the circuit before wider comparisons and contrasts can be deduced. In speculating on the contents of the blank Winchester folio it is necessary to look up to Berkshire, and eastwards to Surrey, Sussex, and Kent. But first to the folio itself.

Winchester is famously omitted from the Domesday Book; or is it? Like so many Domesday questions the answer is rarely simple. The city is represented by a blank folio in Domesday, but occurs in scattered references elsewhere. There is good reason to suppose that Domesday Book itself, – the first volume or ‘Great Domesday’ – was known as the ‘Liber Winton’;1 and that may mean that it was compiled or kept there. It is indeed odd that one of the chief cities of the realm should receive a lesser treatment than Dover or Ipswich. And yet Winchester is also described in the ‘Winton Domesday’, a volume with two twelfth-century surveys that include pre-Conquest material and use the same language as the great survey of 1086. An exemplary edition of these texts formed the first volume of Martin Biddle’s Winchester Studies in 1976.2 With characteristic thoroughness this brought all possible aspects to bear on a full analysis of the manuscript, from its writing and binding, the names of the inhabitants of Norman Winchester, and the understanding of the later city gained from Derek Keene’s Survey of Medieval Winchester.3 These publications, like so much work of the Winchester Research Unit, established a new standard for the multi-disciplined study of medieval towns which has provided an inspiration and guide for others to follow.

Blank folios in Domesday The most intriguing folios of Domesday must be the (almost) blank sheets that precede the counties of Hampshire (f. 37) and Middlesex (f. 126). Most of the counties in Great Domesday [GDB] commence with a description of the county town or of the royal boroughs in the county, and the lack of information on London and Winchester is strikingly anomalous. Although this simple fact has been doubted, a quick consideration of the make-up of Domesday will show that these are indeed the only such blanks in GDB, and there is every reason to assume that these were at some point intended for material relating to London and Winchester.6

It may well be supposed that little remains to be said on this topic, and indeed a paper devoted to a blank folio must necessarily be a short one, except that Domesday Book itself has undergone an explosion of research interest in recent decades, arising from the preparation of two modern editions and the celebration of the 1986 anniversary.4 There has been a return to the central themes of the compilation and editing of the Domesday text, and the date and circumstances of the collection of materials on which it is based. One of the offshoots from this has been a renewed interest in Domesday boroughs, and the vexed question of the manner in which the county towns are presented in the manuscript. The writer has in hand an edition of the full Latin text of the Domesday Borough entries, together with a commentary on these and

Blank folios preceding counties in GDB Kent: f. 0 - First leaf of first Kent quire Starts with borough entry. Sussex: f. 15 - Last leaf of second Kent quire; Starts with a part blank column, but has borough entries within the text. Hants.: f. 37 - First leaf of first Hants. quire (ruled; cols ac blank, and col. d has the county list of landholders);

1

At folio f. 332c, the Yorkshire holdings of Robert de Brus appear in a later hand and are stated to have been added ‘after the liber de Wintonia was written’; see F. and C. Thorn, ‘Writing of Domesday Book’, in Domesday Book, ed. E. Hallam and D. Bates (Stroud, 2001), pl. 16. 2 F. Barlow, M. Biddle, O. von Feilitzen and D.J. Keene, Winchester in the Early Middle Ages. An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, Winchester Studies, ed. M. Biddle, I (Oxford, 1976). 3 Keene’s survey, inspired by the pioneering (but unfinished) Survey of Oxford by H.E. Salter, was published in 1985 as Winchester Studies II. 4 The bibliography is immense, and growing (see Appendix below).

5

A paper outlining these preliminary findings was presented at the Battle Conference at Gregynog in 2009, and will appear in a forthcoming volume of Anglo-Norman Studies. 6 The matter has been readily apparent since the appearance of [H. Jenkinson], Domesday Rebound, PRO Handbooks no. 2 (London, 1954), but has often been misunderstood – most oddly by H.C. Darby, whose remarks on this topic in Domesday England (Cambridge, 1977), p. 291, are wholly misleading.

213

JULIAN MUNBY Hants. has no borough entry until Southampton on f. 52, the first leaf of the third Hants. quire. Berks.: f. 55 - Last leaf of third Hants. quire. Starts with borough entry on f. 56b. Wilts.: f. 64 - First leaf of Wilts. quire (blank on f. 64r, and commences on f. 64v); Wilts. starts with shortened borough entries. Cornwall: f. 119 - Last leaf of Devon (mid-quire). There is no borough entry. Middx.: f. 126 - First leaf of Middx. quire (ruled; cols a-c blank and col. d has the county list of landholders). There is no borough entry. Herts.: f. 131 - Last leaf of Middx. quire. Starts with borough entry. Cambs.: f. 188 - Last leaf of Herefs. quire. Starts with borough entry. Staffs.: f. 245 - Last leaf of Warwicks. quire. Starts with borough entry. Salop: f. 251 - Last leaf of Staffs. quire Starts with borough entry. Cheshire: f. 261 - Last leaf of Salop (mid-quire). Starts with borough entry (on 262v). Derbys.: 271 - Last leaf of Cheshire/Lancs. The borough entry for Derby is given in Notts. Notts.: f. 279 - Last leaf of Derbys. Starts with borough entries. Yorks.: f. 297 - First leaf of big county section. Starts with borough entry. Lincs.: f. 335 - Last leaf of Yorks. (mid-quire) Starts with borough entry.

Berkshire in the same circuit, the text starts in the second column (b) while the first is occupied only by the list of landholders. The Hampshire and Middlesex folios are not in fact wholly blank, since in both instances the fourth column (d) includes the list of landholders (Fig. 1), a feature that always occurs within the text and not outside of it. The folios are both ruled as if text were planned, and the conclusion seems inescapable that full-page entries for London and Winchester were being allowed for, taking up to 3½ columns. For comparison, the longest of the borough entries, those for Lincoln and York (with all their extraneous material) are no larger than this. London and Winchester could have had generous entries, whose contents we can only guess at, though in the case of Winchester there is a solid basis for some of the guesswork. The Liber Winton The magisterial publication of the Liber Winton in 1976 combined an exhaustive analysis of the texts with a detailed study of the history and topography of the Norman City and an onomastic study of the inhabitants. The manuscript contains two surveys, one of c. 1110 and the other of c. 1148: the first, a survey of the royal estate, regularly refers back (in correct Domesday form) to the situation TRE, but can hardly be regarded as a Domesday ‘satellite’, although it has much to tell us about the borough entries in Domesday. The first survey was the result of an attempt to recover the customary royal revenues of the pre-Conquest period. The detailed information presented for the total of almost 300 properties implies a remarkable recall of the situation 35 years previously, or, perhaps more likely, the survival of earlier records. Landgable rolls of the properties owing customary royal revenue were to be a feature of many borough archives (especially when enfranchised boroughs ended up collecting it themselves), and there is every reason to suppose that these continued from pre-Conquest examples.9

It is readily seen that most blank folios preceding county texts are the last leaf of the preceding quire, and so are quite unrelated to the county ‘booklet’, and need detain us no longer. In three counties (Cornwall, Cheshire and Lincoln) blanks do occur in the same quire, but these are where the county shares the same quire with the preceding county, and a gap is left between them to provide space. Two of the three have a borough entry immediately following, and the third is Cornwall, which is indeed anomalous, but it may have had no borough.7 Two precede large counties, one at the beginning of Domesday as bound (Kent) and the other at the beginning of Domesday as compiled (Yorks.), and each of these is followed by the borough entry. Both circuits belong to the earlier, more relaxed phase of compilation, and may have been planned as blanks.8 That leaves only Middlesex and Hampshire with a true blank as part of the county quire or booklet. Sussex appears to be an oddity, starting with a partly blank column that has often been claimed as a space for Hastings. It is not clear why Hastings should have been privileged over Chichester and Lewes, which appear elsewhere, and it is more pertinent that in Sussex, like

Thus the Winchester survey, while it must be regarded as an important survival and a remarkable resource for such a significant place, is hardly likely to have been unique. Indeed, Domesday Book provides other examples and indications that this was so. One of the few constants in the variable and much maligned Domesday ‘borough entries’ is the provision of a summary account of the properties paying royal custom, and a variety of attempts to account for losses and alienations from the number of those properties. These figures, which no doubt derived from records held by the borough reeve, were quite separate from the enumeration of properties held by county tenants-in-chief, which were often, but not necessarily, free of ‘custom’.

7

Bodmin (with burgesses), or Launceston are the obvious candidates but appear in the main text, DB Corn. f. 120d; 4, 3 and f. 121d; 5, 1.22. 8 See F. and C. Thorn, ‘Writing of Domesday Book’, pp. 42-5.

9

M. De W. Hemmeon, Burgage Tenure in Mediaeval England (Cambridge, Mass., 1914), remains the standard work on this topic.

214

WINCHESTER IN DOMESDAY BOOK

A

B Fig. 1. The county lists on the verso of the otherwise blank folios: A, f. 37v (Hants) and B, f. 126v (Middlesex).

Godgifu, Goldwine, Manstan, Sigeweard, Stanheard, Svertingr;

Borough surveys in other counties The most famous (though curiously neglected) parallel for the Winchester survey is the Domesday account for Colchester.10 This comprises a list of 276 ‘burgesses of the King who pay custom’, that is followed by a more usual schedule of the holdings of county tenants. This remarkable list, which seems not to have been subjected to onomastic analysis as has been done for Winchester, contains a spread of English, Germanic and Scandinavian names. It is perhaps more likely to be a rental than a roll-call, though its route through Colchester cannot be known.11 The repetition of names, while no doubt providing an indicator of popular forms, could also show recurring ownership by the same individual, as would be expected in a topographical listing:

Names occurring three to ten times: Aelfwine (8), Blaecstan (4), Eadric (4), Eadwine (7), Goda (6), Goding (3), Godric (8), Leofgifu (5), Leofstan (3), Leofsunu (3), Leofric (3), Manwine (8), Sprot (4), Wulfstan (5), Wulfric (5); Names occurring more than ten times: Aelfric (12), Godwine (11), Leofwine (13), Wulfwine (15).12 A much shorter list occurs in the Domesday account of Oxford, where after the main schedule of county tenants there is another list of 40 (mostly English) names of people holding mansiones, with no clear indication of their status.13 The context (and the following note on the burgesses’ pasture on the Port Meadow) suggests that these are burgesses holding ‘mural mansions’ that owed wall-repair as part of their custom. The list is perhaps too short to be a rental (though several names are repeated), while as a burgess roll it

Names occurring twice: Aelgar, Aelfsige, Aelfstan, Alric, Alstan, Aelfgifu, Alweard, Beorhtric, Brunwine,

10

Little DB, ff. 104-106, for which see the introduction by Pamela Taylor, Little Domesday Book: Essex (Alecto, 2000). Round seems to have taken little notice of it. 11 I am pleased to recall my conversation on this topic with a native of Colchester, Geoffrey Martin, one of several over the years on the Domesday boroughs.

12

The names have been regularised after the forms used in O. von Feilitzen, The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book (Uppsala, 1937). 13 DB Oxon., f. 154b.

215

JULIAN MUNBY compares well with the 63 members of the ‘commune’ of Oxford who witnessed the 1191 charter.14 If nothing else, the Colchester and Oxford lists show the survival of a substantial body of English pre-Conquest burgesses still holding urban property twenty years later.

chapters, as was done in Sussex for Chichester and Lewes.18 The schedules were usually given approximately in hierarchical order (King, Church, Nobles, others), but not necessarily following the exact order of the county landholders’ chapters.

Even in the absence of detailed property listings, there are several instances in Domesday of the borough entries containing a shadow of some other documentation with a topographical ordering. At Wallingford, a classic late-Saxon borough laid out four-square in the manner of Cricklade and Oxford,15 the schedule of landholders is given in four different sections (three of which are headed by the King’s houses). These are likely to relate to the four quarters of the town (just as Oxford had four wards separately surveyed in the Hundred Rolls, 1279). Matters were more complex in Cambridge, where the Domesday account describes ten wards (curiously omitting the sixth one),16 and simpler in Huntingdon, where four ‘ferlings’ are described, though the town plan does not readily divide into four, and even the location of the pre-conquest town is not certain.17 In these examples, it would seem that the Domesday schedules followed the order or the format of existing borough listings, typically of the king’s houses, or those paying custom, and perhaps in topographical order. There must have been many instances of urban surveys approximating to the Winton Domesday, even if they were most often reduced to a single paragraph enumerating the King’s houses and his rights to custom.

The lost Winchester entry In the event the Winchester properties were left in the county chapters and not brought together in a borough entry; they have been listed and mapped, demonstrating their wide distribution over central and northern Hampshire.19 It may here be noted that the word haga, the preferred term for the Winchester properties (rather than domus or other terms), is a word uniquely used in Domesday Circuit I, and is a good example of distinctive circuit usage. It might be objected that there are too few properties listed for such a major city, but the numbers approximate to those discernible in the Winton Domesday survey of 1148. The ‘seven great fiefs’ identified in 1148 (the King, Bishop, Prior of Old Minster, Abbot of Hyde, and Abbesses of St Mary’s, of Wherwell and of Romsey) are recognisable in the tabulation of Domesday holdings in Winchester, though it is apparent that their immediate urban precincts are not accounted for.20 But while aspects of these urban landholdings might have been mentioned in a longer Winchester entry, it was rarely the purpose of the Domesday inquest to do more than report what landholders offered. It was different with the King’s land, and an entry for Winchester would most likely have commenced with a summary of the royal properties in the time of King Edward the Confessor (TRE) and King William (TRW). The Winton Domesday Survey I of c. 1110 supplies just this information, with a total of 251 tenements in the King’s fief, of which 33 had ceased to pay custom since 1066; another 12 had been taken into the site of the King’s palace, and 41 ‘on the lands of the barons’ were mostly not paying custom. It is interesting to note that the King’s fief was largely intact in

Schedules of county landholders The most typical borough entries in Domesday include a listing of urban properties held by county landholders, the tenants-in-chief. Only very rarely are there to be found hapaxlegomena – names on the list that are not also identifiable tenants or sub-tenants and that derive from no obvious county land holding. Where there is no trace of some other survey document, the general impression from a study of the borough entries is that the information in these urban schedules had been collected with the returns for the rural properties, and was then (as part of the editorial process) rearranged to make the schedules. The type of information found in a typical schedule, like those of Southampton or Wallingford (Berks.), is little different from where the urban properties were not drawn together but left in the county

18

As pointed out by A. Ballard, The Domesday Boroughs (Oxford, 1904), pp. 11ff., and map at p.14. The contribution of Adolphus Ballard (1867-1915) to Domesday studies has been unjustly denigrated on account of his pursuit of the ‘garrison theory’ (now once more returning to fashion), and perhaps also because he was, at the time of his sudden demise, the Town Clerk of Woodstock rather than an academic; but his many other publications show how much he had to offer medieval legal history had he lived. He is not in ODNB, but my great-uncle wrote an appreciation of his friend: R.V. Lennard, in A.E. Levett, The Black Death on the Estates of the See of Winchester [etc.], Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. P. Vinogradov, V (Oxford, 1916), pp. ix-xi. 19 They are listed and mapped in Winton Domesday, pp. 382-5, Fig. 20. 20 These omissions are discussed in Winton Domesday, pp. 383 and 384 note 1.

14

R.H.C. Davis, ‘An Oxford Charter of 1191 and the Beginnings of Municipal Freedom’, Oxoniensia, xxxiii (1968), pp. 53-65. 15 M. Biddle and D. Hill, ‘Late Saxon Planned Towns’, Antiquaries Journal, li (1971), pp. 70-85. 16 DB Cambs., f. 189. 17 DB Hunts., f. 203; Paul Spoerry, ‘The Topography of AngloSaxon Huntingdon’, Proc. Cambridge Antiquarian Soc., lxxxix (2000), pp. 35-47.

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WINCHESTER IN DOMESDAY BOOK 1148, when Survey II records 262 houses on the King’s fief and 816 of other landholders.21

(Herts. to Beds.) and Circuit VII (East Anglia). Only in Circuit VI (Hunts. to Lincs.) was there an interest in the names of the pre-Conquest predecessors of urban holdings, providing another valuable group of nominal data; while the commissioners in Circuit VII took great interest in urban churches – not repeated elsewhere, though Circuit I did often mention churches.

The missing Winchester entry would certainly have included an account of the city’s annual render to the Exchequer, and indeed the lack of this information is unfortunate since the sums are unknown and the borough farm (in comparison with other leading cities) is hard to determine. From careful consideration of later evidence, however, it has been shown that Winchester was certainly one of the three or four most highly ranked towns.22

One source of information frequently collected in Hampshire which included Winchester material was the evidence of local juries, which supply some of the most entertaining passages in Domesday.24 Two examples of county and hundred jury verdicts do in fact refer to Winchester. A suburban property in Winchester dependent on Basingstoke was claimed by Geoffrey the Chamberlain, though ‘neither the sheriff nor the hundred has ever seen the King’s seal for this’.25 The manor of Alton was said by testimony of the county to have been received ‘unjustly’ by New Minster in exchange for land on the site of the King’s palace in Winchester.26 These are not unusual instances in Circuit I, and others refer to the testimony of townsmen, perhaps in a special session of the portmoot. We find the men of Sandwich recalling the number of herrings they owed to the Archbishop before 1066,27 while at Dover the burgesses recited the preConquest ownership of a manor of St Martin’s church.28 The men of Southwark gave elaborate testimony on riparian tolls, while in Wallingford the burgesses denied knowledge of a landowner’s possession.29

Then there would, as previously discussed, be some kind of schedule of the property of major county landholders in the City. David Roffe has even proposed a text for such an entry: The following have the customary dues from their houses in Winchester by grant of King William: the King 13, the Bishop of Winchester 8, Archbishop Thomas 1, St Peter of Westminster 1, Romsey Abbey 14, the Church of Wherwell 31 and a mill worth 48s, Earl Roger 1, Hugh de Port 1, Ralph de Mortimer 8, Bernard Pauncvolt 1, Hugh fitzBaldric 1, Miles the Porter 1, Odo of Winchester 8, the sons of Godric Malf 1.23 The account of the King’s holding, the borough farm, and some account of the interests of other landholders would have made an average borough entry in several circuits. But what other material might have been included?

Even without the direct reporting of jury verdicts, the recitation of borough customs found in Canterbury, Dover and Wallingford implies a process of gathering information directly from burgesses. This kind of information, if collected for the Winchester entry, is indeed a sad loss, and the somewhat prosaic Winchester custumal from a much later period does not quite make up for the immediacy of the Domesday accounts.30

Winchester and its Domesday circuit The other counties in Circuit I may have something to tell us about what information an entry for Winchester might have contained. First, there would have been a proper borough entry, like those for Kent, Surrey and Berkshire. It was otherwise in Circuit II (for the south-west), where the compilers seem to have been at a loss to present any coherent account of the boroughs. We can briefly turn aside to consider what the entry would in all probability not have contained. The detailed treatment of borough customs is a matter that peculiarly interested the commissioners in Circuit V, where for Hereford, Shrewsbury and Chester this aspect dominates the entries in a manner not found elsewhere, and excludes much else. Customs were reported for Dover, Canterbury and Wallingford in Circuit I, but in a different manner. The reckoning of the borough in terms of hides or hundreds was of interest in Circuit III

24

Robin Fleming, Domesday Book and The Law (Cambridge, 1998), has collected all the relevant texts (here referred to with her F nos). 25 DBB Hants., f. 39; cap. 1, 42; F594. 26 DB Hants., f. 46; cap. 6, 1; F611; Winton Domesday, p. 292. 27 DB Kent, f. 3; cap. 2, 2; F906. The herring has finally received due recognition in James Campbell, ‘Domesday Herrings’, in East Anglian History: Studies in Honour of Norman Scarfe, ed. C. HarperBill et al. (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 5-17. 28 DB Kent, f. 13, cap. 9, 9; F939. 29 DB Surrey, f. 32; cap. 5, 28; F500; Berks, f. 56; B,1; F75. 30 Mary Bateson, Borough Customs, I (Selden Society, xviii, 1904), lvi; the French text is printed in J.S. Furley, City Government of Winchester (Oxford 1923), pp. 167-77, and the Middle English translation in English Gilds, ed. T. and L.T. Smith, Early English Text Society, Orig. Ser., 40 (1870), pp. 349-69.

21

Winton Domesday, p. 11, Table 2. It is instructive (when considering the problems of Domesday statistics) just how hard it is to make such a simple numerical statement based on one table, that is both correct and unambiguous. 22 Winton Domesday, pp. 487, 499-500, and Table 53. 23 D. Roffe, Domesday Decoded (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 119.

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1987). David Roffe, Domesday: The Inquest and the Book (Oxford, 2000), gave a revisionist view of the whole Domesday process, extended in his Decoding Domesday (Woodbridge, 2007), while a conference held at the PRO in 2000 summarised the new thinking that had emerged since 1986: Domesday Book, ed. E. Hallam and D. Bates (Stroud, 2001).

That there was an intention to provide space for Winchester (and London) entries in Domesday Books seems incontrovertible. How much data was collected for Winchester is unknown, but some of it remained in the county text, while the ‘Winton Domesday’ surveys demonstrate the kind of material that was available from before the Domesday inquest. Consideration of what might have been in a Domesday entry throws into relief the information that we do have about Norman Winchester, and highlights the varied character of the Domesday borough entries, and the particular characteristics of individual circuits. Appendix Domesday Book: A bibliographical note Editions: The Phillimore edition of accessible translations, inspired by John Morris, was intended as much to provide materials for a new edition rather than to present a full apparatus, and appeared between 1975 and 1986 (the present writer edited Hampshire in 1982). The Phillimore edition included important index volumes of Persons, Places and Subjects, edited by J.McN. Dodgson, J.J.N. Palmer and J.D. Foy (Chichester, 1992), and it has also formed the basis of the Domesay Explorer CD-ROM project with fully searchable indexing and mapping (ed. J.J.N. Palmer, M. Palmer and G. Slater, 2000). A revised and corrected version of the whole edition (except Yorkshire) is also available online at the UK data Archive (UKDA, SN5694). The Alecto Historical Editions facsimile and county editions, edited by R.W.H. Erskine, A. Williams and G.H. Martin, appeared between 1986 and 2000, and comprised a new translation and introduction (the Hampshire introduction was by B.J. Golding, 1989). The Alecto translation has been used as the basis for the Penguin (2002) and Folio Society (2003) editions (both omitting all marginalia), while the valuable material in the general introduction Domesday Book Studies (1987) has been reprinted in book form as The Story of Domesday Book, edited by R.W.H. Erskine and Ann Williams (Chichester, 2003). Finally, with the completion of the Little Domesday facsimile for East Anglia, the whole work has appeared in a CD version, Digital Domesday Book (2002). Secondary studies: David Bates, A Bibliography of Domesday Book (Woodbridge, 1985), provides coverage of the older literature. New studies that appeared around the 1986 novocentenary included Domesday Book: A Reassessment, ed. P.H. Sawyer (London, 1985) and Domesday Studies, ed. J.C. Holt (Woodbridge, 218

The Romanesque West Front of Winchester Cathedral John Crook Introduction

Antiquarian Evidence

One of the most memorable images from the Winchester Excavations directed by Martin Biddle in the 1960s is that of the great charnel pit at the west end of the site of Old Minster.1 A vast robber trench, created in 1093-4, when the tenth-century westwork of the Saxon church was demolished and its foundations robbed, had served first as the foundation trench for its replacement, the west front of Bishop Walkelin’s cathedral, and then as a mass grave for over a thousand bodies disturbed by the Norman building work.

It is clear that until the 1880s rather more above-ground evidence for the Romanesque western massif was visible than is the case today. Thus, in the late sixteenth century William Camden noted ‘old ruined walls’ (parietinæ antiquæ) near to the present west front, which he interpreted as part of an early fifth-century monastic college – a fantasy typical of the so-called ‘legendary history’ of Winchester, which claimed that Christianity had reached the city with the conversion of the mythical ‘King Lucius’ several centuries before the mission of St Birinus to Wessex. Camden concluded, ‘For those old walls that may be seen, so massive and solid, at the west door of the cathedral seem to be the remains of this college’.4 In the mid eighteenth century Thomas Warton thought the ‘ruinous Walls of flint, near the West End of the Church’ might have formed part of Old Minster, and observed that ‘the height of the ground hereabouts demonstrates the Demolition of some considerable Pile’.5 These dubious traditions were summarised by that industrious Winchester antiquary, John Milner, who then provided his own account of the remains still visible: ‘not far from the porch, on the south side, is seen a rugged wall, composed of flint and hard mortar’.6 His analysis continues with an entirely distinct description of the ruins of the thirteenth-century charnel chapel further west; with a sense of architectural chronology fifty years ahead of his time,7 he correctly attributed the ‘rugged wall’ to the time of Bishop Walkelin, Winchester’s first Norman prelate, and the ‘chapel

Of the Norman western massif,2 whose deep footings were exposed in 1969, only the base of its south wall survives above ground level as a mass of flint corework with chalk levelling courses, in pink mortar. This forms part of the boundary wall on the south side of the Cathedral’s forecourt (Fig. 1). The rest of the Norman massif was replaced in the fourteenth century by Bishops Edington and Wykeham, and the final stages of those works are perhaps indicated by a monastic account roll noting a payment made in 1398-9 when 120 cart-loads of flints were carried from the west end of the Cathedral to re-pave the street next to the hospital known as the Sustren Spital and a yard forming part of the hospital itself.3 Yet the fragmentary remains of the Romanesque western massif have been investigated in a more or less scientific way from time to time since the 1840s, and based on this evidence I have been able to advance a few tentative suggestions as to its design, which will find expression in an analytical plan to be published in Winchester Studies, volume 4.i. The purpose of the present paper is to set out the evidence and rehearse the arguments on which my forthcoming paper reconstruction is based.

4

W. Camden, Britannia, here cited from the edition of 1607, p. 191: ‘Huius autem collegii parietinæ illæ antiquæ quæ tanta crassitie et firmitate ad portam occiduam cathedralis cernuntur reliquiæ esse videantur’. The fact that the walls are said to be ad portam occiduam must disqualify the notion that he might have been referring to the walls of the carnary chapel, considerably further west. 5 [T. Warton], A Description of the City, College, and Cathedral of Winchester ... (London, [c. 1760]), p. 77. Cf. a nearly identical passage in [idem], The History and Antiquities of Winchester..., 2 vols. (London, 1773), I, p. 84. For Warton’s authorship of these books, see J. Crook, ‘Early Historians of Winchester Cathedral’, Hampshire Studies, 58 (2003), pp. 226-41, at 233-4. 6 J. Milner, The History ... and ... Antiquities of Winchester, 2 vols. (Winchester, 1798-9), II, p. 88. 7 So late as 1845 Edward Cresy was pointing out to members of the British Archaeological Association the ‘Saxon’ features of Winchester Cathedral, in blithe ignorance of the rebuilding under Walkelin. ‘Winchester Cathedral’, in Transactions of the British Archaeological Association at its Second Annual Conference, Held at Winchester, August 1845 (London, 1846), pp. 355-400. The Archaeological Institute had recently broken away from the BAA, and thus two rival meetings were held in Winchester that summer.

1

M. Biddle, ‘Excavations at Winchester, 1969. Eighth Interim Report’, Antiquaries Jnl., 50 (1970), pp. 277-326, plate La, and discussion at p. 317. 2 This neutral term avoids the precision of ‘westwork’, ‘west front’, and the like. 3 Compotus Rolls of the Obedientiaries of St Swithun’s Priory Winchester, ed. G. W. Kitchin, Hampshire Record Society (London and Winchester, 1892), p. 422: In cxij carectis petrarum silicum et alterius materiei a fronte ecclesiæ in cimiterio usque supradictum Hospitale ... The Sustren Spital was, as its name suggests, a hospital run by Benedictine nuns and administered by the priory almoner. Its site was in the angle between what are now College and Kingsgate Streets.

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Fig. 1. Flint and chalk corework from the interior of the south wall of the Romanesque western massif, surviving as part of a boundary wall.

and carnary’ to a century later. The latter remains need not detain us here.

significant, for it could imply that Carter really did observe these intermediate walls; otherwise he would surely have drawn the walls as aligned to the arcades, creating three equal compartments. Furthermore, Willis’s drawing suggests that Carter was able to see not only the thick footings of the partitions between the three cells but also evidence for, or remains of, the actual walls built upon them, indicated by additional thin lines. Drawn arrowheads (barely visible beneath the hatching) show that it was these wall faces, rather than the foundations, that were 36 ft. apart. Willis makes it quite clear that his ‘light tint’ (grey hatching) indicated the area of Carter’s investigations, and although Carter may not have excavated the whole of that area to any depth he evidently saw enough to be able to make these precise dimensional observations. Furthermore, he recorded a different category of evidence, namely the upstanding remains at the south-west corner of the western massif, shown in solid black. Willis describes these remains as a ‘mere mass of rubble’ forming, as already noted, a boundary wall. But the plan uses the same shading convention for what looks like a wall returning northwards at right-angles to the boundary, suggesting that remains of the west wall of the massif were also visible above ground level in the 1840s, extending as far as the point marked ‘d’ on Willis’s plan. Such masonry cannot have protruded far above ground level, however, as it is not obvious in any of the numerous late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings and drawings of the present west front (e.g. Fig. 3). One other caveat should be made here. The west end of the Cathedral as shown on

The first serious attempt at establishing the plan of the west front was made by Professor Robert Willis in the seminal exposition of the Cathedral’s historical development that he delivered to members of the newly formed Archaeological Institute during their Winchester meeting in September 1845. He relied on the findings of Owen Browne Carter, a local architect, artist and antiquary, who had undertaken a private research excavation in the Cathedral Close a few years previously. The precise extent of Carter’s excavation is unclear, but Willis states that he had ‘traced the foundations, which are shewn in a light tint in my plan, and which I have copied from a sketch, for which I am indebted to the kindness of that gentleman’. Unfortunately Carter’s sketch is not known to have survived, but Willis’s reworking of it as part of his general plan of the Cathedral preserves at least some of the information (Fig. 2). What is shown are the foundations of a structure comprising three compartments: Carter’s investigation was presumably the first to reveal the now familiar plan of the footings, subsequently republished many times. The compartments to north and south projected beyond the line of the aisle walls. The central compartment was wider than the other two, being square on plan, and was separated from the others by footings that were not quite aligned to the main nave arcade but were more widely spaced. This lack of alignment is 220

THE ROMANESQUE WEST FRONT OF WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL

Fig. 2. Robert Willis’s drawing of the footings of the Romanesque western massif (east at top), based on excavations by Owen Browne Carter.

Fig. 3. Richard Baigent’s view of the west front in the mid 19th century, before Dean Kitchin’s ‘Churchyard Improvements’ of 1885-6.

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JOHN CROOK

Fig. 4. Excavated plinth of the north-east corner of the Romanesque western massif, as excavated by Owen Browne Carter.

belief that they were the remains of a portion of the church said by tradition to have been built by the ubiquitous King Lucius in Roman times.8

Willis’s plan was intended as a reconstruction of the Romanesque western massif rather than a record of the archaeological evidence alone, so the upstanding masonry shaded in black is rectilinear, giving the impression that Romanesque internal and external ashlar occurred on the plan’s cut-line; whereas what Willis refers to at the points marked ‘d’, ‘e’ and ‘f’’ on his plan – surviving today only as the south wall – was unfaced corework: ‘a mere mass of rubble stripped of ashlar’. There is no evidence – either physical or documentary – that Carter excavated down to surviving ashlar over the whole area, though he may possibly have seen facing masonry at the point marked ‘d’ on Willis’s plan, reexamined in 1992-3 as noted below.

Importantly, Carter also furnished Willis with an elevation of the surviving Romanesque masonry at the north-east corner of the western massif (marked ‘c’ on Willis’s plan), where he had evidently exposed facing masonry immediately below ground level (Fig. 4). As we shall see, this area was reexcavated by Martin and Birthe Biddle in the 1960s. In 1845 Carter observed and recorded a double chamfered plinth, above which were four courses of ashlar blocks. Either Carter or Willis attempted to relate the level of these features to the floor level in the north transept, presumably considered (wrongly, in the light of recent excavations beneath the nave floor) to be a more reliable guide to the Romanesque floor level than that of the nave.9

The extent of the survival of the corework on the west side of the western massif was recorded by Dean Kitchin, who in 1885-6 landscaped the Outer Close, removing most of the gravestones in the face of local protest. In particular, he graded the approach to the west front, as described in his account for The Hampshire Chronicle:

Modern investigations of the evidence In 1969 the footings were brought to light again by Martin and Birthe Biddle (Figs. 5 and 6). Comparison with O.B. Carter’s drawing shows that the four courses of masonry excavated in the 1840s had been removed down to the top of

At the west front [...] the ground is more or less uneven, giving the appearance to the path as if it had been cut through the soil to receive its present level, whilst some curious remains of walling opposite the west front had a buried look plainly telling of the rising of the ground. This aspect is no creation of recent years, for it was noted at the beginning of the last century by Dr. Milner, who spoke of the ruins referred to, to refute the then asserted

8 9

222

The Hampshire Chronicle, 20 February 1886. See below, p. 233-4.

THE ROMANESQUE WEST FRONT OF WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL

Fig. 5. Plan of the north side of the Romanesque western massif, as excavated in 1966-9. Winchester Studies 4.i (forthcoming), Fig. 32.

Fig. 6. Section and elevation of the footings of the north side of the Romanesque western massif. Winchester Studies 4.i (forthcoming), Fig. 63.

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JOHN CROOK

Fig. 7. Excavated evidence for foundations of the Romanesque western massif (left) and west end of cathedral nave (right). Cross-hatching indicates surviving Romanesque masonry, either upstanding or revealed in excavations, the dates of which are indicated in italics. The footings shown with dotted shading are those suggested by Owen Browne Carter (who is, however, unlikely to have excavated the whole area),

the upper plinth, presumably in 1886 when the ground level here was reduced. The narrow trench dug by Carter is apparent in the Biddles’ section (Fig. 6, F337).

a height of 650 mm. above the Romanesque concrete strip foundations. It was ‘formed of flint rubble in a very hard buff mortar with ashlar facing set in a hard sandy orange mortar’.10

In 1992-3 a three-metre length of the west face of the western massif was observed in an archaeological evaluation trench, in the area close to Willis’s point ‘d’. The actual wall survived to

10

‘Report on Archaeological Investigation at the Winchester Cathedral Visitor Centre, March 1992 - July 1993’, unpublished report by Archaeology Section, Winchester Museums Service,

224

THE ROMANESQUE WEST FRONT OF WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL Finally, the top of the corework was revealed in 2006 when a disability ramp was created. A combination of all this data provides the plan shown as Fig. 7. In this plan the position of the wall faces and other features shown by Willis have been slightly adjusted to agree with measurements taken during the twentiethcentury excavations (it is a credit to Willis’s accuracy that little such modification was required). Evidence above ground level Despite the replacement of the western massif by Bishops Edington and Wykeham, some further evidence survives, either as Romanesque fragments or as anomalies in the fourteenth-century fabric.11 The latter appears to comprise three main phases. Initially (Phase 1) a triple porch was constructed, perhaps against some elements of the east side of the Romanesque massif together with, one may conjecture, a temporary wall across the nave. After a pause, manifested by straight joints and a development in style, the main elevation of the west front was built (Phase 2), together with one bay of the south nave aisle and two of the north nave aisle. Finally the main nave elevations were remodelled (Phase 3) and finally both the main vessel of the nave and its aisles were vaulted.12 In a previous paper Professor Kusaba and I attributed Phase 2 to Fig. 8. West end of north nave aisle roof space, looking south-west. Scar left by Bishop Wykeham c. 1371;13 I am now inclined removal of facing masonry of the east wall of the north tower (vertical joints and to attribute it to Bishop William of Edington medieval marking-out lines above the arrow), and (right) Romanesque corework (1345-66), who left money in his will for projecting beyond the wall face. continuing ‘the work on the nave that he had begun’, a phrase that is applicable only with years at the outside, but I see no reason why this should not difficulty to the porch alone. The hiatus between Phases 1-2 have been possible given that Edington was already resident might be attributed to the Black Death. Admittedly this in Winchester (as Master of St Cross Hospital) at the time of requires the demolition of the western massif and the his appointment to the bishopric, and might have entertained construction of the porch to have been achieved within four the idea of rebuilding the massif even before he became bishop. undated, p. 6. The site archive is preserved as Winchester SMR No. 1110 (site codes CC 90, 92). 11 The evidence was examined in an independent study in 1992-3 by Philip McAleer, some of whose conclusions tally with my own: P. McAleer, ‘The Romanesque Façade of Winchester Cathedral’, Proc., Hants. Field Club and Archaeol. Soc., 49 (1993), pp. 129-47, and 50 (1994), pp. 153-68. 12 It is possible, as Dr John Hare argues, that Phase 3 should be subdivided, the break being marked by the change from recutting to refacing the piers and a change in the size of the corbel heads on the string course above the arcade. 13 J. Crook and Y. Kusaba, ‘The Perpendicular Remodelling of the Nave: Problems and Interpretation’, in Winchester Cathedral: 900 Years, ed. J. Crook (Chichester, 1993), pp. 215-30, at 227.

At the west end of the roof space over the north aisle of the nave (i.e. within what would have been the gallery storey of the Romanesque nave before the great Perpendicular remodelling), the junction of the east wall of the demolished western massif and the rear of the main elevation of the nave is represented (Fig. 8) by remnants of three courses of its alternately-coursed toothing just below the present roof timbers – and west of this junction is Romanesque corework, cut through by the present entrance from Edington’s stair vice into the roof space. The thickness of this corework proves that the projecting elements did not derive from a mere pilaster buttress, like those articulating the main

225

JOHN CROOK Romanesque masonry, but at the extreme west end the line of the toothing of the east wall of the western massif is again apparent from the precise alignment of alternate vertical joints at the former junction – an alignment that is too consistent to be accidental. On the south side of the Cathedral the vestiges of the return wall are less obvious, but remains of the aligned toothing of three alternate blocks are visible in the aisle roof space in an equivalent position to the evidence on the north side (Fig. 10). Above the aisle roof, the area between the west front and the first of Wykeham’s clerestory windows consists of fourteenth-century refacing, albeit formed of re-used Romanesque blocks of Quarr limestone. Within this refacing, which steps out at the west end in the form of a wide pilaster which is visible both above and below the roof, Edington created a low, narrow doorway that was evidently intended to lead, via a short passage and a few steps, from his stair vice to the aisle roof – the latter being designed at a lower level than eventually built, as is clear from a weathering course on the west wall of the roof space, just above the present vaulting. The doorway was later crudely widened, and its sill lowered, in order to form the entrance to the roof space. Consequently, a large area of Romanesque corework, which Edington had refaced, is again visible in the short passage leading from the vice to the roof space (Fig. 10).

Fig. 9. North nave clerestory, westernmost bay, with present west front on right. Evidence for the removal of the east wall of the north-west tower, represented by the vertical joints of alternate blocks of dark coloured Romanesque Quarr limestone and pale 14th-century Beer stone (exactly above the left-hand jamb of the doorway, on the line indicated by the arrow). The upper half of the wall was totally rebuilt in the 14th century, and the evidence ceases at the level of the top of the window label stop.

McAleer noted one highly significant detail at higher level: a passage leading from Edington’s stair vice on to the leads of Wykeham’s south nave aisle roof retains a short length of primary Romanesque fabric, including an impost moulding (Fig. 11). As argued below, this appears to be a continuation of the nave clerestory passage passing through the east wall of the western massif.

Regrettably, any evidence that might have survived at still higher level, in the roof space above the main nave vessel, has been concealed by the refacing of the main elevation wall – an intervention necessary in the early fifteenth century in order to straighten the bowed walls before the new nave vault was inserted.

elevation within the gallery storey, but from a massive wall returning northwards from the outer face of that elevation and exactly aligned to the excavated remains of the footings of the north end of the same wall.

I have left until last the most complex evidence and its interpretation, which are best treated together. This is the Romanesque masonry surviving in the respond at the west end of the present south nave arcade. As Professor Willis was the first to point out, considerable amounts of the Norman

It has not been previously observed that this evidence continues further upwards, i.e. on the same wall above the roof space (Fig. 9). The external elevation of the present north nave clerestory preserves a significant amount of 226

THE ROMANESQUE WEST FRONT OF WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL

Fig. 10. West end of south nave aisle roof space, looking north-west. The return of the east wall of the massif is indicated by the aligned vertical joints in three alternating courses above the arrow. At centre, the remains of Edington's doorway on to the aisle roof as originally planned (also evidenced by the remains of the weathering course to the left of the opening). The doorway was subsequently crudely widened to provide access from the stair vice to the roof space, thus exposing Romanesque corework once again.

fabric were retained when the nave was remodelled by Bishop Wykeham, and the first seven piers on the south side of the nave, working eastwards, were simply recut into new profiles after the removal of nook-shafts. Later, when work continued on the eastern half of the south nave arcade and the whole of the north arcade, possibly after a pause (as argued by Dr John

Hare in a lecture delivered at the Society of Antiquaries in March 2006), a different technique was employed: the Romanesque corework was refaced in new Beer stone, with the result that there is no comparable evidence in the northwest corner of the nave. All this was ingeniously depicted by Willis in the drawing reproduced as my Fig. 13, where 227

JOHN CROOK Normally one would expect a respond to resemble one-half of a pier, but in this case there is a complete Norman shaft and dosseret: in other words, Romanesque masonry continues west of the mid-line. Could the respond originally have been a freestanding pier? The distance between the east face of the western foundations and the south-west nave respond would accommodate such an interpretation, and a theoretical reconstruction may be drawn in which the respond becomes another pier, a second pier is placed at the correct bay distance to the west, and the arcade finishes in a correct respond resembling one-half of a pier against the western wall (Fig. 14). But the obvious lack of alignment between such an arcade and the excavated footings renders this interpretation highly unlikely. The arcade would not sit on the centreline of the east-west intermediate foundation walls, and if the southwest respond were interpreted as a pier, it would scarcely be supported on the footings at all. Most importantly, if the respond had in fact been a Romanesque pier it would surely have been too slender to support the corner of a tower whether central or lateral. Both at Ely, with its western transept, and Durham, with twin towers flanking a continuation of the nave, the relevant piers are of greater dimensions than the normal piers of the nave arcade; and at Winchester, when the decision was made to add towers at the end of the transepts, the corner piers – identical to those of the nave – were fattened up in anticipation of the extra weight. The key evidence here is the location of three straight joints, indicated by the arrows in Fig. 15. Here, ‘A’ is a joint between the fourteenthFig. 11. Remains of the north side of a tunnel leading from the south-west vice century internal masonry of the west front (Phase to the former nave clerestory. To the left, Edington’s masonry (large pale 2) and the surviving Romanesque fabric. It blocks) is tooled into 12th-century masonry. The tunnel was blocked by suggests that Edington toothed his new west Wykeham’s re-used Romanesque ashlar (right) when it was converted into an front into the Norman masonry at a point where access stair to the aisle roof. there was already a series of joints. ‘C’ is on the equivalent position on the south side of the respond, but here the Romanesque masonry is represented by narrow courses, and junction is between Edington’s Phase 2 masonry (cyma fourteenth-century masonry by wider ones – for even in the mouldings, fillets, hexagonal bases) and Wykeham’s work case of the recut piers a certain amount of refacing was (simplified hollow chamfers and octagonal bases). Finally, ‘B’ required, notably in areas where the Romanesque arches had is a junction between Wykeham’s refacing and surviving been removed in the alteration from a three-storey to a twoRomanesque fabric. storey elevation. The location of ‘B’ is particularly important. It is aligned to As Philip McAleer argued at some length, the profile of the footings of the east wall of the Romanesque massif and surviving Norman masonry on the north side of the souththe junction evidenced in the roof space above. There can be west nave respond is identical to about two-thirds of a no doubt that the east face of the wall joined the respond ‘standard’ Romanesque pier as recut in the fourteenth here. There can therefore never have been Romanesque ashlar century (as in the first seven piers on the south side). shafts between ‘B’; and ‘C’, and the best explanation of the 228

THE ROMANESQUE WEST FRONT OF WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL

Fig. 12. The south-west respond of the nave arcade, from the north-east.

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JOHN CROOK

Fig. 13. Engraving of Robert Willis’s drawing of the remodelling of the nave, showing (right to left) original, present, and intermediate states. After R. Willis, Winchester Cathedral, Fig. 34. The taller courses of the piers in their ‘present’ state represent refacing after the removal of the Romanesque main arcade.

230

THE ROMANESQUE WEST FRONT OF WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL

Fig. 14. Conjectural prolongation of south nave arcade and the relationship of the hypothetical piers to the excavated footings of the western massif. This interpretation is rejected in this paper.

Wykeham masonry is that it replaced a short-lived feature of the Edington Phase II masonry, namely a vertical band decorated with pairs of foiled panels similar to that surviving on the south aisle wall opposite. Until Wykeham revaulted those aisles, such bands appear to have continued around the spaces in front of the windows. They were introduced in order to compensate for the longer western aisle bay that was ultimately (as Kusaba and I argued) a result of the way in which Edington constructed his porch against surviving Romanesque masonry.

higher level than it is today, and facing masonry may have survived just below the contemporary ground surface. A reconstruction of the Romanesque western massif A number of interpretations of the ground plan are possible, but the extreme positions are either (1) that the three-cell footings represent an axial tower flanked by transepts, or (2) that they represent two towers flanking a central structure which prolonged the nave. Robert Willis recognised this, and commented with typical circumspection:

To summarise the position so far: the vertical joints between the surviving Romanesque masonry of the south-west respond and that of Edington’s west front are consistent with the notion that the present south-west respond was also a respond in its Romanesque form, continuing westwards as a wall on the line of the arcade, and abutted, on its south side, by a cross-wall terminating the Romanesque south aisle, as shown in Fig. 15.

These foundations must either have belonged to two west towers, or to a kind of western transept; and this construction, whatever it was, having been in all probability either left unfinished or threatening ruin, Edington was induced to take it down, and replace it by the present west front. Peers and Brakspear came down firmly on the site of the first interpretation in their discussion of the Cathedral in the Victoria County History: for these authors, the evidence ‘has often been explained as a front flanked by two western towers, but it is much more likely that the square is the base of a single tower in the middle of the front, flanked by shallow western transepts.’14 They cite Ely and Bury St Edmunds as parallels, and refer to the documentary record of

Indeed, the existence of a solid east-west wall between the central and flanking compartments of the Norman western massif was postulated by Willis, and presumably previously by Owen Browne Carter, for Willis’s plan clearly indicates the wall-face, approximately 300 mm. inside the main foundations. Carter presumably had some reason for asserting that the walls of the central compartment were 36 ft apart, and he may well have seen physical evidence for this: at the time of his observation, prior to Dean Kitchin’s landscaping works in the Outer Close, the ground was at a

14

C.R. Peers and H. Brakspear, ‘The Cathedral’, in VCH Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, vol. 5 (London, 1912), p. 52.

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Fig. 15. Interpretation of straight joints (arrowed) of the present respond at the west end of the south nave arcade. Thin lines: Edington’s 14th-century profiles. Thick lines: Romanesque profiles. Broken lines: foundations. Hatched: Wykeham’s refacing, associated with aisle vaults.

Such towers would of course have found a neat parallel at Winchester in those that were belatedly planned (never to be completed) at the ends of the transepts, though those towers were to occupy just the corner bays rather than protrude beyond the aisle walls. The transept towers were to have been three-storeyed like the main elevations: the first floor would simply have been a continuation of the gallery storey (possibly used for processions), whilst at clerestory level each tower would have had an upper chamber with large openings into the church. A fragment of the springing of the groin vault below the proposed floor at clerestory level survives in the north-east corner of the north transept.

a tower’s completion in 1200. As I have shown elsewhere, however, the latter annal seems to relate to a slight heightening of the Cathedral’s main crossing tower that is apparent in the masonry today.15 Sir Alfred Clapham also espoused the western transept theory.16 Perhaps the most obvious indication of the more probable alternative is the thickness of the foundations. Both the entire north side of the massif and, crucially, the internal angle of the north-east corner were excavated in the 1960s, showing that the foundations here reached a maximum thickness of 4.52 metres. For the measurement of the thickness of the intermediate walls that would have formed the north and south walls of the putative tower we are dependent on Willis, who shows footings some 3.50-3.55 metres thick. The fact that the central cell has thinner walls than the outer ones militates against its having been a central tower; rather, the thickness of the outer cells suggests that they comprised the footings of two flanking towers.

The western towers might presumably also have been storeyed, though this would have involved vaulting over a wide space (about 10.7 by 7.5 metres). But by the 1090s, perhaps two decades before the completion of the Winchester western massif, the choir at Durham Cathedral was built with a rib-vault measuring about 10.36 by 6.1 metres and, as McAleer has pointed out, the groin vault over the nave at Speyer, contemporary with Walkelin’s works, was 13.85 metres wide; so the spanning of such distances was not beyond the technology of the day.

15

J. Crook, ‘New Findings on the Tower of Winchester Cathedral’, Winchester Cathedral Record, 61 (1992), pp. 15-17. 16 A.W. Clapham, English Romanesque Architecture after the Conquest (Oxford, 1934), p. 31.

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THE ROMANESQUE WEST FRONT OF WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL vault 10.85 metres wode would be only 3.30 metres above pavement level, compared with the 5 metre springing of the main Romanesque nave arcade.

The design of the central cell The most difficult question that now requires addressing is the design of the central cell. In my view the ‘western transept’ hypothesis must be abandoned. The evidence that has been adduced above suggests that the Romanesque nave arcades continued westwards as solid walls forming the inner sides of the towers, and that solid walls forming the east side of the towers closed the west end of the nave aisles, abutting what are now the western responds of the remodelled arcade.

Doorways I have shown just one central portal into the west end of the cathedral church. The notion that there might have been a western doorway into each tower was disqualified on archaeological grounds. The ground level of the area corresponding to the west wall of the south-west tower is now, at 37.23 metres above Ordnance Datum (hereafter aOD), nearly a metre above the likely level of the Romanesque nave floor (discussed below). Prior to Kitchin’s levelling, the corework rose even further, and had there been a west portal into this tower a gap in the corework would have been apparent, corresponding to the position of the opening. The entrances to the tower at ground level must therefore have been from within the church.

But did the nave simply continue westwards between the towers to the end of the western massif, with a screen wall at the western facade? This is, admittedly, what happened at Saint-Etienne, Caen (an example cited by McAleer), but in that case the western towers are small by comparison with Winchester, being the same width as the nave aisles and only one bay from east to west. Those at Winchester occupied nearly twice the area. It is possible however that the end bays of Winchester Cathedral’s exceptionally long nave boasted something altogether more sophisticated, namely a western tribune platform – and this is what I have suggested in my reconstruction, whilst recognising that physical evidence for such a structure is entirely lacking. It is an illustration of a possibility. Here the obvious precedent is within the building itself, namely the terminal platforms that still survive at the ends of the transepts. These, however, occupy only a single bay. It is clear that a platform at the west end of the nave could not have occupied two bays. The main evidence is the great engaged shaft on the north side of the south-west respond, similar to those that are found facing the central vessel on all the nave piers and continuing – alternately, as Willis observed – up to the foot of the clerestory or the wallhead. In the case of the south-west respond, Romanesque masonry continues to the full height of the nave elevation, showing that no transverse arch ever bridged the nave at this point.

Floor levels and other evidence revealed in 1967 It is possible to relate the levels of excavated elements of the western massif to the existing fabric rather more accurately than Willis’s ad-hoc comparison with the floor level in the north aisle. Modern survey shows that the floor level in the north transept averages 36.28 metres aOD; in the south transept the level is around 36.25 metres. Archaeological observations made in November 2004 when new uplighters were installed in the north-west corner of the nave showed that fragments of the Romanesque plinth survived against the north nave aisle wall, and this indicated that the present floor is about 20 mm. above its Romanesque level, assuming that the plinth was the same height above the Norman floor as it is still in the transepts where the floor level has not changed.18 The present floor is uneven, but averages 36.33 metres aOD in the westernmost bay of the nave; the slightly lower Romanesque floor would have been at around 36.31 metres aOD. This agrees with the level of the top of the lower of the two chamfered plinths of the western massif, measured at its north-east corner, which is at 36.31 metres aOD. It seems likely therefore that external and internal ground levels were similar when the Cathedral was first built, i.e. at around 36.31 metres aOD. The lower floor levels in the transepts result from subsidence, and those levels are unreliable.

In fact, the parallel with the transept is closer if a terminal platform occupied only the westernmost bay. My initial theoretical reconstruction, based on the tribune platforms at the ends of the Winchester transepts, and comprising two bays half the width of the nave and supported on a central pillar, was abandoned, in that it would necessitate a double portal separated by the respond of the transverse arch between the two vault cells. Such an arrangement is indeed to be found at Saint-Sernin, Toulouse,17 but such a far-flung example is scarcely justification for rejecting the simpler solution, namely a single vaulted cell measuring 10.85 by 6.50 metres. Such a vault would in fact be rather smaller in area than those proposed for the tower floors. The springing of a

When the area at the north-east internal angle of the putative north-west tower was excavated in 1967, ‘the upper faces and internal edges of a series of large, undressed but roughly 18

J. Crook, ‘Report on an archaeological watching brief maintained during the installation of four uplighting units beneath the pavement of the westernmost bay of the north nave aisle, 8-9 November 2004’, unpublished archaeological report dated 17 January 2005.

17

See the 1:200 scale plan of Saint-Sernin by Patrick Roques, dated 1998, published as a special insert in Mémoires de la Société Archéologique du Midi de la France, lxi (2001).

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JOHN CROOK

Fig. 16. Conjectural reconstruction of the plan of the Romanesque west front (dotted shading). Romanesque fabric, upstanding or known from archaeological investigations is hatched. The italicised dates are those of archaeological works. The western platform is, needless to say, highly speculative.

the likely Romanesque floor level within the tower. It was therefore not possible to ascertain whether there was any kind of internal wall finish within the tower.

rectangular stones forming the upper course of the foundations’ were discovered.19 The top of these foundations was at 36.16 metres aOD, which is therefore 150 mm. below 19

Martin Biddle, pers. comm.

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THE ROMANESQUE WEST FRONT OF WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL Trinité at Caen, which as first built possessed a western structure (soon reconstructed), somewhat similar to that which we have postulated at Winchester Cathedral, so on comparative grounds the western platform must remain a possibility.

Design at higher level There is not much evidence for the design of the upper parts of the towers. One interesting piece of evidence provides a small indication of the arrangement at clerestory level. This is the short length of walling already noted that runs from the south stair turret towards the east-north-east before being blocked by a fourteenth-century wall in order to convert it into part of a short flight of stairs leading to the aisle roof leads. At the head of this fragment of wall is an impost with quirk and hollow chamfer and Romanesque tooling; this appears to be in-situ twelfth-century masonry. At the foot of the fragment of walling a floor-line is discernible, which matches the floor level of the Romanesque clerestory passage as evidenced in the transepts. What appears to have survived, therefore, is the north wall of a tunnel leading roughly westsouth-west from the Norman clerestory passage through the east wall of the south tower. It is just possible that it led to a stair vice in the north-east angle of that tower, i.e. in roughly the same position as Edington’s vice, but this is unlikely as could not have been lit from the exterior. It is more likely that the tunnel continued through the tower wall, emerging within the tower and therefore was intended to provide access to an upper floor at this level.

Acknowledgement Martin Biddle, who supervised my Oxford D.Phil. thesis on the architecture of saints’ cults, has been a constant inspiration throughout my career. I am grateful to him for encouraging me to study the west front of Winchester Cathedral in the context of Winchester Studies. My thanks also to Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle for many stimulating discussions about Winchester matters, and to them both for their friendship and hospitality.

As for the Romanesque stair vices, a position in the west walls is perhaps to be preferred, as this would have allowed the stairways to have been lit by narrow windows from the exterior, a similar lighting arrangement to that found in the present fourteenth-century vices. There can not have been a vice at the south-west angle of the south tower, as the corework is solid here, so the most likely position is at the north-west angle of this tower and the corresponding position of the north tower, as shown. Conclusions Martin Biddle’s identification of the western massif as comprising flanking towers appears to be justified by the surviving evidence, fragmentary though it is. Such a structure would have provided an element of visual continuity with the great westwork of Old Minster, the predecessor church. It is possible that, as with Old Minster, there was a western tribune platform similar to those in the Romanesque transepts, but spanning the entire westernmost bay rather than being subdivided. At the least, such a platform would have provided a link between the galleries to north and south of the nave, thus assuring a complete circuit all around the church – though this in turn implies that the western towers were also storeyed. If conceived from the outset, the platform might have been intended to play a part in royal ceremonial, notably the annual Easter crown-wearing ceremony – though this had ceased by the time the western massif was completed. Here, however, we are deep in the realm of conjecture. Yet the designer of the Norman cathedral at Winchester would undoubtedly have been familiar with churches such as La

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Reflections on Tithes and the Formation of Parishes Christopher Brooke ‘No one can serve God without Mammon’: thus Walter Map summarised his satirical assault on the White Monks.1 The formation of parishes in English villages and towns between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries could be written as a gloss on this doctrine. It was indeed part of a much wider movement affecting much or most of the western Church; the English story had its own peculiarities, which must always be studied with the wider background in view. But it is with English evidence that I am mainly concerned, and I start by reflecting on some of the charters of the founder of one of the Cistercian houses that Map particularly attacked, Byland abbey:2 Roger de Mowbray and his family.

much so that in MC no. 196 Samson pretends to give the seven churches to Newburgh, but to reserve most of them to himself and his son Roger during their lifetimes, with only a modest pension to Newburgh. It makes careful provision for the young Roger while he is a minor, but makes clear he is eventually to be rector of – regere – five of them. It reads rather like a later grant in use (to X for the use of Y); but in its twelfth-century context it was clearly an ingenious way to evade the rules against hereditary benefices. And that helps to explain one of the oddest features of these documents: for Roger de Mowbray, having given these churches – or rather, confirmed Samson’s grant of them to Newburgh – c. 1145, proceeded in the mid-1150s to give three of them to York Minster, where they formed the prebend of Masham – the most valuable of York’s prebends until the last years of Henry VIII, when the king gave much of its revenues to Trinity College, Cambridge.5 The first prebendary was Roger d’Aubigny, and thus Samson’s efforts to provide for his son were amply rewarded. Newburgh were the losers, and evidently challenged their loss and appealed to the pope.6 But they accepted a measure of compromise; and indeed their appeal is a little puzzling, since the documents make clear that Roger de Mowbray and Samson d’Aubigny were, in effect, joint founders of the priory, and Samson himself (if still alive) was a canon of Newburgh.7 The only thing certain about Samson is that he was a man of great wealth; he not only was rector of the seven churches that he

In a long career as a leading baron stretching from 1138 to 1188, Roger was the founder of two religious houses, the Cistercian Byland and the Augustinian Newburgh. The fascinating story of how their foundations fitted into the political story of Roger’s adventures during the reign of Stephen has been reconstructed by Janet Burton.3 I am now chiefly concerned with the endowment of Newburgh. It is broadly true that Roger endowed Byland with land, Newburgh with churches; and the evidence for both is laid out with admirable precision and clarity by Diana Greenway in her Charters of the Honour of Mowbray.4 If MC no. 203 were genuine, he granted Newburgh sixteen churches; but, as Professor Greenway pointed out, it is at best an interpolated text. Furthermore, nos. 196-7 seem to make clear that the seven churches of Roger’s original gift were not his to give. They had been granted by Roger’s father to their kinsman Samson d’Aubigny, who was a leading clerk in Roger’s entourage. Roger was overlord; Samson was in possession: so

5

D.E. Greenway, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066-1300, VI, p. 87; C. Cross, ‘From the Reformation to the Restoration’, in A History of York Minster, ed. G.E. Aylmer and R. Cant (Oxford, 1977), pp. 193232, at 196-7. 6 Roger’s second gift seems to have led to litigation and compromise, in which it appears that Newburgh failed to establish its case: it lacked an archiepiscopal confirmation of the grant of these churches (thus Pope Alexander III in a letter to Roger archbishop of York, Suggestum est auribus nostris, in Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, ed. P. Jaffé, G. Wattenbach, S. Loewenfeld et al., 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1888), no. 13882 – copied in a number of decretal collections, culminating in Decretales Gregorii IX, 3.38.20). Alexander’s bull seems to make clear this was not a fictitious suit. The grant of these churches was not included in St William’s confirmations (English Episcopal Acta − henceforth EEA – V, nos. 95-6). But in Mowbray Charters, no. 199, Roger de Mowbray specifically asks for the three churches later effectively given to York Minster to be confirmed by Archbishop H(enry Murdac) (1147×53). Either this is a forgery or, more probably and simply, the archbishop refused or failed to confirm. A Cistercian archbishop might well have had qualms about Samson’s arrangements. 7 For Samson as canon of Newburgh, see Mowbray Charters, p. lxvi, and no. 178 (in or after 1161).

1

Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and trans. M.R. James, C.N.L. Brooke and R.A.B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1983), pp. 92-3. At the outset of this brief act of homage to Martin Biddle I would particularly like to recall something of the debt I owe to Martin and Birthe for the insight they have given me − over forty years’ friendship − of the rich and fundamental contribution the historical archaeologist makes to our vision and understanding of the medieval church. 2 Map, De Nugis, pp. 108-9. 3 Janet Burton, ‘Fundator noster: Roger de Mowbray as Founder and Patron of Monasteries’, in Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000-1400, ed. E. Jamroziak and J. Burton (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 23-39. I laid out some of the argument which follows in a review of Religious and Laity in History on Line (June 2007) (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/brooke.html). 4 Charters of the Honour of Mowbray, 1107-1191, ed. D.E. Greenway, British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, I (Oxford, 1972); henceforth Mowbray Charters or MC.

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CHRISTOPHER BROOKE gave, or pretended to give, to Newburgh about 1145, but also gave two churches and a chapel in Warwickshire to Kenilworth priory.8 Yet as he both arranged the foundation of Newburgh Priory and became a canon there, we may surmise that he was also a man of piety – more than an old age pension seems involved.

master, Roger de Mowbray. It had been Roger’s father, Nigel d’Aubigny, who originally gave Samson his quiverful of churches; and his hold over them – and use of them – depended on Roger’s support. But Samson’s wealth lay primarily in tithes, and could only have been amassed by collaboration between a priest – for the clergy alone could legally demand tithes13 – and a lord powerful enough to claim traditional proprietary rights which survived in the twelfth century as rights of patronage.14 Superficially, it seems puzzling that Samson and Roger both seem to be granting the churches to Newburgh; in practice, however, this was of the essence: the priory could not have prospered without the support of them both.

At first sight we seem to be back in the days of Edward the Confessor, when great royal servants such as Regenbald and Ingelric could acquire or buy the remains of the estates of dormant minsters, and found chapters of secular canons − which in their turn provided patronage for the royal servants of the next generation.9 Samson seems to have been collecting and dispensing patronage like theirs, only on a slightly more modest scale. We also seem to be in the world before the papal reform, when a clerk possessioner could expect to pass on his benefices to his son. But this would be a superficial view of the case. The development of canon law and increasing enforcement in the twelfth century undoubtedly made hereditary succession more difficult. The devices which Samson adopted to make it possible bear eloquent witness to the difficulty. But he succeeded, at least for one generation. Hereditary succession became increasingly difficult among the higher clergy at least; yet clerical marriage survived, eventually to become legal in the days of Mrs Cranmer and respectable in the age of Mrs Parker – though Elizabeth I managed to prevent the fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges marrying; nor could they till 1860, and much later in many colleges.10

But it may have been equally true that Samson’s schemes depended on the support of the priory. Roger de Mowbray was a dedicated crusader – he was to die in the Holy Land in 1188; but long before that he was one of the few English lords to join the Second Crusade in 1146-7.15 It may have been partly Roger’s absence that inspired Samson with the idea of putting his churches under the protection of Newburgh Priory. But in the early 1150s Roger’s military adventures in Yorkshire led to his excommunication, and his gifts to York Minster seem to have begun as an act of penance.16 Samson evidently arranged this penance for his overlord in such a way as still to provide for his own son. In Roger de Mowbray we see a military leader who combined landholding and warfare, and even (in 1174) rebellion against the king, with notable acts of piety: he founded the Cistercian abbey of Byland, helped in the foundation of the Augustinian house of Newburgh and embarked twice on crusade. In a similar way Samson devoted his life both to God and to mammon. He helped Roger in his benefactions, making long-term provision for at least two houses of canons regular, in later life retiring to Newburgh as a canon himself. We need not doubt the genuine nature of his piety; we cannot doubt his wealth. And this must have been based on his ability to administer tithe.

In the context in which Samson d’Aubigny was brought up, however, it was common; and in the chapter of St Paul’s cathedral in London, from which sprang Thurstan, the archbishop of York of Samson’s youth, it was the norm. Eleven members of the Beaumais or Belmeis family held offices in St Paul’s in the twelfth century; and at least two archdeaconries and eleven of the thirty prebends passed from father to son in the early decades of the twelfth century.11 St Paul’s is uniquely well documented; but we have no reason to suppose that it was exceptional, in this, the heyday of the Gregorian reform. In the same generation as Thurstan, in the cathedral precinct at Paris, Canon Abelard could marry, and the niece of another canon, Heloise, could enjoy as good an education as a man.12

In this story the forces of tradition and ‘reform’ are constantly mingled, just as in the history of parishes and tithes genuine devotion and financial gain were inextricably interwoven. The manner in which tithes were administered is extremely obscure, partly because some of the practices involved – such as brokerage of benefices – savoured of simony and had to be conducted confidentially. We can be

But there were undoubtedly special features in Samson’s wealth more specific to his age and context. His control over so many churches depended on his alliance with his lord and

13

Lay control of tithes was condemned in numerous councils of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, and innumerable grants of tithes by laymen to religious houses etc. survive from this period. For discussion, see Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in Western Europe (Oxford, 2006), ch. 15. 14 Ibid., esp. pp. 510-12. 15 Mowbray Charters, p. xxvi and n. 6 and no. 155 and note. 16 Ibid, nos. 322-4 – of much the same date as his major grant of churches, nos. 325-6.

8

Mowbray Charters, nos. 175-8. 9 John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2005), p. 364 and references. 10 C.N.L. Brooke, A History of Gonville and Caius College (corr. repr., Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 68-9, 224-6, 307. 11 C.N.L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989), pp. 84-8. 12 Ibid., pp. 89-92.

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REFLECTIONS ON TITHES AND THE FORMATION OF PARISHES mid-eighth century, possibly from the School of York.21 They do not, like later edicts and canons, emphasise the compulsory nature of tithes, but rather seem to assume a system in being – defining the date of tithe-giving and to whom they may legally be given; also that ‘a priest is not compelled to give tithe’, which seems to assume that tithes were compulsory for laymen. But however it may have been in eighth-century Northumbria, there was no secular legislation in eighth- or ninth-century England to compare with the Carolingian royal edicts of the period. It is generally accepted that England lagged behind its Continental neighbours in effective enforcement of tithes, and that the legislation of the tenth century provided the crucial foundation for later English practice. Of special interest is Edgar’s elaborate edict of 960×2, which confirmed that tithe was to go ‘to the old minster, to which the parish belongs’, but that if a thegn had a church on his bookland with a graveyard, then a third of his own tithe goes to this church.22

sure of two things: that the distribution of tithes among religious houses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries involved major administrative problems, and could hardly have been achieved without the presence of skilled ‘arrangers’ like Samson d’Aubigny; but also that the enforcement of tithes as a universal tax was only possible because parishes were relatively intimate units, presided over by a parson whose livelihood depended on the regular inflow of the tithes of his parish. If we look at the broader canvas, the period between the tenth and the twelfth centuries saw the dissolution of the old minsters – or their conversion into effective communities, secular or regular – and the formation of local parishes.17 It was an exceedingly complex process, with many local variations: thus the large ‘parish’ of many villages survived in the north-west, whereas in parts of East Anglia villages were divided into several parishes, sometimes with two or three churches in a single churchyard; and what happened in the towns is a different story to which we shall return.18 But this variety need not obscure the fundamental effect of the rise of the parishes: in the vast majority of villages there came to be a single church and a single parson, a fact which in the practical world of medieval agriculture was probably of more importance in the establishment of tithe as an effective tax than royal edicts or canons of church councils – or even the prescriptions of Leviticus. For in earlier times tithe had been owed to minster centres sometimes relatively remote from many of the villages and farms whose mother churches they were, and so infinitely more difficult to enforce and to gather.

This seems to be the first step on the path which led to the very different disposal of tithes in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, when Norman customs came to join the traditions of the English Church, and lords reckoned to be free to dispose of tithes in large measure as they wished. 23 Meanwhile the transformation of the English Church from a network of minsters to a network of village churches and small parishes was fully under way – a transformation much more visible to the English folk than the Gregorian reform, however profound that may have been in its longer-term consequences, however instrumental in compelling Samson d’Aubigny to find ingenious devices to pass on his wealth in tithes to his son.

It has often been doubted whether tithes were compulsory levies in England before the tenth century. When King Edgar revised his rules governing tithes about 963 he attributed the recent outbreak of plague above all to the failure of his subjects to pay tithes;19 and while we may observe that his episcopal advisers had seized a useful argument with both hands, it may be deduced – as has long been assumed – that payment of tithes had hitherto been more honoured in the breach than the observance; and this is strongly confirmed by the absence of all reference to them in early Anglo-Saxon law codes. But that is not quite the same thing as saying they had been voluntary, for the duty of Christians to hand over one tenth of all their income from whatever source was reckoned to have a solid biblical basis – even if the many relevant texts in the Old Testament left plenty of room for interpretation and argument.20 But some of the earliest references to tithe in England occur in a version of Theodore’s Penitential of the

Edgar’s law indicates already the link between the thegn and the parish; and in recent discussions this has dominated efforts to explain how so great a change in the structure of local parishes could have been effected. That lordship and the interests and aims of lords great and small played a crucial part in the story cannot be doubted. The thirty-six examples recorded in Norfolk in which two or three churches were built in one churchyard must reflect a world in which villages

21

The references to tithe occur in the version known as U, and are conveniently gathered in Constable, Monastic Tithes, p. 25 n. 1. On this version see T. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Penitentiary of Theodore and the Iudicia Theodori’, in Archbishop Theodore, ed. M. Lapidge (Cambridge, 1995), esp. pp. 141-2 note, referring to a suggestion by Wilhelm Levison that the teachers of the Disciple who composed U were at the School of York. 22 CS, I, i, pp. 97-8; for commentary see Blair, Church, pp. 442-4. 23 See Wood, Proprietary Church, chapter 15, esp. pp. 510-12; Blair, Church, ch. 8, esp. pp. 447-51. It may well be that payment of tithes was not universally accepted before the Conquest; but by the early twelfth century it was being freely disposed of, largely by the new Anglo-Norman landowners – especially their domain tithes – over most of the land (M. Brett, The English Church under Henry I (Oxford, 1975), pp. 224-6).

17

See esp. Blair, Church, chs. 6-7. See below, p. 240. 19 Councils and Synods with Other Documents relating to the English Church (henceforward CS), I, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C.N.L. Brooke (Oxford, 1981), part I, pp. 105-6. 20 See summary of them in G. Constable, Monastic Tithes from their Origins to the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1964), ch. 1. 18

239

CHRISTOPHER BROOKE were divided in allegiance to two or three lords.24 This is not to exclude the influence of the communities of these parishes, which is most vividly recorded in the Domesday account of churches in Norwich which belonged to groups of Indeed, the proliferation of urban parish burgesses.25 churches – specially marked in England and (to a slightly lesser extent) in northern France and the Low Countries – is only intelligible if townsfolk in great numbers aspired to worship in tiny, intimate churches.26 In the city of London the parish boundaries seem to have been particularly changeless – there is only evidence of very minor changes between 1200 and the the Great Fire of 1666.27 Some, perhaps many, urban churches may have started their careers as proprietary churches, almost private chapels, of landowners. All Hallows Gracechurch Street, granted by Brihtmaer of Gracechurch to Christ Church, Canterbury, between 1052 and 1070, was the property of a city magnate, the alderman of a ward, a business man, very likely a moneyer, and not a landlord from the countryside.28 There was doubtless great variety in the patronage of city churches. But the shape of the London parishes, with their jagged edges clearly following property boundaries, and their centres in roads and cross-roads, makes it abundantly clear that the parishes comprised groups of neighbours.29

relatively remote, and so evidently had the clergy. The contrast with what followed is that in the constant rebuilding of later centuries churches grew larger and less intimate, chancels became more distant, chancel arches were filled with screens, priests and people grew apart – not necessarily in the everyday intercourse of the village community, but in the symbolic liturgies of the parish church.30 The tiny church, the intimate relation of priest and people, is a dramatic reflection of the religious aspirations of many sectors of the population, from peasants to lords of the manor – and the proliferation of these parish churches over so wide an area is a vivid demonstration of a popular religious movement as fundamental to our understanding of these centuries as the Gregorian reform itself.31 The spiritual aspirations of countless folk, great and small, in these centuries were fully as essential to the understanding of the spread of parishes and building of innumerable tiny parish churches as the enforcement of tithes. But tithes mattered, too. Regular provision for the support of these churches – to pay for the clergy, support the fabric, relieve the poor – came from tithes and offerings. That is evidently a major reason why the growth of parishes in England appears to come a hundred or two years later than in much of France: effective enforcement of tithes in England had to wait for the tenth and eleventh centuries.32 But when it came, an alliance could be formed between a network of parish clergy close enough to the land to supervise the gathering of tithes, and the entrepreneurs who saw to it that a proportion of these tithes went to bishops and cathedrals and collegiate communities and – increasingly – to monasteries, as well as into their own pockets. This represented a major realignment of resources, a major inducement to enterprising men to exploit the riches thus released. We may assume that it was unthinkable without a network of parish priests as the basic agents for tithe collecting and re-distribution. But it seems likely that the entrepreneurs – the men like Agatha Christie’s Mr Robinson who were the ‘arrangers’ of eleventh- and twelfthcentury England – and who doubtless prospered themselves in the process of spreading a measure of prosperity about the clergy of the land – were even more crucial in the process of

Few changes ot the landscape of England between the tenth and the twelfth centuries made a deeper impact than the provision of these tiny parish churches in almost every village in the greater part of the kingdom. The contrast with what went before is that churches had previously often been 24

P.Warner, ‘Shared Churchyards, Freemen Church Builders and the Development of Parishes in Eleventh-Century East Anglia’, Landscape History, 8 (1986), pp. 39-52, esp. 39-41; Blair, Church, p. 398, and, for the wider context, 397-401; and R. Morris, Churches in the Landscape (London, 1989), ch. IV. 25 Domesday Book, II, fos. 116r-v, 117r; cf. J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), p. 146; Blair, Church, p. 404 n. 139; C.N.L. Brooke, Churches and Churchmen in Medieval Europe (London, 1999), pp. 79-80; Wood, Proprietary Church, p. 648. 26 Cf. Wood, Proprietary Church, pp. 646-7, citing Brooke, Churches and Churchmen, pp. 86-9, 104-5. 27 Brooke, Churches and Churchmen, p. 102 and nn. 27-8; C.N.L. Brooke and G. Keir, London 800-1216 (London, 1975), ch. 6. 28 Brooke and Keir, London, p. 368; cf. ibid. pp. 135, 155 n. 1; Blair, Church, p. 403. Brihtmaer may have been the moneyer Brihtmaer who had a ward named after him – evidently as an early, presumably eleventh-century alderman – among the early ward names in a list of St Paul’s cathedral properties of c. 1127 (H.W.C. Davis, ‘London Lands and Liberties of St Paul’s, 1066-1135’, in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. A.G. Little and F.M. Powicke (Manchester, 1925), pp. 45-59, at 55-9); cf. Brooke and Keir, London, pp. 166-7, 169-70, suggesting an eleventh-century date for the wards. 29 C.N.L. Brooke, Time the Archsatirist (London, 1968), pp. 20 ff.; Brooke and Keir, London, ch. 6, esp. p. 133; Brooke, Churches and Churchmen, p. 85; cf. Morris, Churches in the Landscape, p. 207.

30

This was the theme of my ‘Religious Sentiment and Church Design in the Later Middle Ages’, in Brooke, Medieval Church and Society (London, 1971), ch. 8; cf. Brooke, Churches and Churchmen, ch. 4. 31 For ‘Endowment and the “Great Rebuilding”’ in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, see Blair, Church, pp. 407-17 and references, esp. (for the architectural evidence) to H.M. and J. Taylor, AngloSaxon Architecture, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1965-78); R. Gem, ‘The English Parish Church in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries: A Great Rebuilding’, in Minsters and Parish Churches: the Local Church in Transition, 950-1200, ed. J. Blair (Oxford, 1988), pp. 2130; cf. also E. Fernie, The Architecture of the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1983), pp. 162-73; idem, The Architecture of Norman England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 208-25. 32 Blair, Church, p. 422 and references; cf. above, p. 239.

240

REFLECTIONS ON TITHES AND THE FORMATION OF PARISHES enforcing and collecting tithes. Of this process Samson d’Aubigny was an outstanding example – a man who would have understood what Walter Map had in mind when he satirised the Cistercian monks of his day: ‘No one can serve God without Mammon’.

241

Henry of Blois, the Cluny Connection and Two Ivories in the Victoria and Albert Museum Pamela Tudor-Craig No one who has been swept away by Martin Biddle’s exposition of a lost or buried monument could fail to recognise how fully he is endowed with both scholarship and imagination, or how generously he shares them. Another area, where the imagination has to walk nearly alone, is the study of inventories, none more tantalising than the list of gifts that Bishop Henry of Blois made to his Cathedral of Winchester.1 If we may take two of the sixty-three items, numbers 51 and 54:

the fragment of a figure of the Crucified Christ found in Worship Street in the City of London.6 Despite having been buried for hundreds of years, the surface of the Winchester ivory is no more abraded than that of many ivories which have survived overground. These enduring powers of ivory carvings complicate attempts to trace their history. The same is true of the triangular fragment of an ivory box lid, possibly part of the ‘roof’ of a very small reliquary, with two flying angels, which was found in the garden of a house called ‘Landour’ near St Cross in Winchester.7 The hospital of St Cross on the outskirts of Winchester was founded by Henry of Blois in 1137. Unless they have never left their treasuries, ivories have passed among collectors, or lain underground. Only in the latter case is there any evidence of original provenance. Being longlived, eminently portable, and exquisite, they are frequently suspended in a historical vacuum. An English Recusant fleeing his country to a French monastery could have filled his pockets with them. A collector – and there were wealthy Englishmen among them – travelling in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars needed only his hand luggage to assemble a powerful collection. Wrested from their original contexts, pre-Gothic ivories can be subject to alarming swings of interpretation. In the AngloSaxon exhibition of 1984 cited above, the little ivory gable with flying angels was dated by Leslie Webster to the ‘late tenth century’. In the English Romanesque exhibition, of the same year, it was described (no. 190) by Peter Lasko as ‘early twelfth century’. Even the proximity of St Cross does not establish from which of three Winchester monastic establishments it came. It could have been dropped in 1141 by someone attempting to flee the ravages of Winchester with a little reliquary of his favourite saint wrapped in his cloak. Its presence, and that of the carved loincloth and chippings in Winchester, do hint at the existence near the multiple religious establishments in Winchester of an ivory-carving workshop, perhaps established by Bishop Æthelwold in the glory days of his episcopate, 960-84, and possibly still continuing, or revived, in the time of Henry of Blois.

Baculi episcopales iiii Pixis eburnea in qua ponitur Corpus Domini in Parasceve… Four bishops’ crooks? And he had a fifth, for its beast’s head terminal was found in his tomb, and is now in the triforium Museum at Winchester Cathedral.2 It was catalogued as ‘late eleventh century’, on the assumption that the tomb before the High Altar under a plain Purbeck slab housed the remains of King William Rufus (d. 1100). The alternative attribution of the tomb to Henry of Blois (c. 1096-1171), now generally favoured, makes a later date more likely.3 ‘An ivory pyx in which to place the consecrated Host at Easter…’ Was ivory carved in Winchester in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? Consider the fragment of the loincloth of the Crucified Christ found in 1970, along with chippings of ivory carving, near the New Minster on the site of the cloister which Henry of Blois would have known.4 It has been dated to the late tenth century by comparison with the Sherborne Pontifical (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 943) and the ‘Ramsey’ Psalter (British Library, MS Harley 2904). Compare also the Reliquary Crucifix with an ivory Crucified Christ on a hollow gold cross with enamels5 and 1

Edmund Bishop, Liturgica Historica: Papers on the Liturgical and Religious Life of the Western Church (Oxford, 1918), pp. 392-400, esp. 398-400. 2 Acq. 823; cat. no. 100 in the display Winchester Cathedral, Triforium Gallery: Sculpture, Woodwork and Metalwork from Eleven Centuries (Winchester, 1989), p. 60. 3 See Artefacts from Medieval Winchester: Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester, Winchester Studies, ed. M. Biddle, 7. ii (Oxford, 1990), pp. 486-8 and p. 477 n. 63. 4 See Winchester Studies, ed. Biddle, 7. ii, pp. 760-1, illus. 5 Victoria and Albert Museum, reg. no. 7943-1862; see The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art, ed. Leslie Webster (London: British Museum, 1984), cat. no. 118, by L. Webster, and pl. XXVI.

6

English Romanesque Art, 1066-1200, ed. G. Zarnecki and J. Hayward (London: Arts Council, 1984), p. 221, no. 200, and p. 211, cat. by Peter Lasko. 7 See Leslie Webster, in Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art, p. 115, cat. no. 114, illus.

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PAMELA TUDOR-CRAIG

Fig. 1. Ivory crozier, c. 1150, carved with scenes of the Nativity and the Life of St Nicholas. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, reg. no. 218-1865.

masterpieces. Did they all come from one or two French collections?

There is another clue towards the possibility of a Winchester ivory workshop. The ivory Crucified Christ on a gold Cross mentioned above came to the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1862. By that year we know that the two most spectacular ivories ever associated with Winchester, the crozier with scenes of the Nativity and of St Nicholas (Fig. 1), and the pyx carved with scenes hitherto misunderstood (Fig. 2) were in the hands of John Webb, the most important dealer of his time and friend of Henry Cole.8 In the previous year, 1861, Webb had sold the Gloucester Candlestick to the South Kensington Museum (7649-1861). Webb had acted for the South Kensington Museum in acquiring the Eltenberg Reliquary from the collection of Prince Soltikoff in that same 1861.9 The crozier came to the Museum in 1865 (Victoria and Albert Museum, 218-1865), the pyx in 1867 (Victoria and Albert Museum, 268-1867). In Webb’s list of 1862 they had been separated by only three items. The early 1860s saw a dramatic change of taste on the part of Henry Cole. Previously he had leant towards the Renaissance, but now he was turning to the Middle Ages. No more recent admirer of the Romanesque could have gathered in a few years so choice an array of

There remains the evidence of the carvings themselves, where study of the handling of draperies, architectural features, foliage and so on has led great scholars to varied conclusions. If, as Paul Williamson now believes, the crozier may have been made in the Île de France, the focus is no sharper.10 Crozier carved with intertwined scenes of the Nativity and of the Life of St Nicholas (Victoria and Albert Museum, reg. no. 218-1865) As Paul Williamson has described it, the terminal of this crozier is in the form of ‘a tendril springing from a stem’. The suggestion of structural and living forms is a favourite device of Anglo-Saxon and Romanesque illumination. Shepherds’ crooks were of wood. Again and again the bishop’s crozier is represented as of green or living wood. The ivory crozier of Bishop Ulger (1145-8) in the Treasury at Angers Cathedral is studded, like a pussy-willow twig, with buds.11 The enamelled crozier of the late twelfth century belonging to Poitiers

8

For Webb, see Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior (New Haven and London, 1989), p. 45. 9 Victoria and Albert Museum, reg. no. 7650-1861; see The Medieval Treasury: The Art of the Middle Ages in the Victoria and Albert Museum, ed. P. Williamson (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986), p. 144 illus.

10

Here I must express my most lively gratitude to Paul Williamson. Hearing that I was working on two ivories for this book, he has most generously shown me his entries for his forthcoming definitive catalogue. Generosity could go no further. 11 See Les Trésors des Eglises de France (Paris, 1965), p. 139, cat. 260 and pl. 50.

244

HENRY OF BLOIS, THE CLUNY CONNECTION AND TWO IVORIES IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM Cathedral terminates in a spreading palmette leaf.12 Two crozier heads thickly emmeshed in foliage13 were compared by Beckwith with the mid twelfth-century ‘tanglewood’ initials in the Winchester Bible.14 The sequence carries through to the brilliant fourteenth-century silver-gilt Crozier of Saint Aldegonde at Mauberge, embowered in foliage.15

back than 1765 is no hurdle to an ancient origin. White Bird Featherless, one of the most beautiful and mysterious of all riddles, first occurs in print in Lydius’s Sermones Conviviales of 1643, but that is not the age of it.19 There is a Latin version in a Reichenau MS of the early tenth century. Such is the strength of oral tradition in this context. In the case of Husha-bye baby it has been suggested that ‘tree top’ was originally the Saxon ‘green boh’, pronounced ‘boc’, which would rhyme with rock. The lullaby certainly refers to the widespread and ancient custom of rocking babies by wind power.

If the curve of ‘our’ crozier head be to the right, then the tendril is upheld by an angel, supporting a miniature Agnus Dei, beside whose (missing) head a tiny cross is cut into the stem. The Agnus Dei was a popular theme for a crozier, recalling its original function to catch by the leg a straying sheep. Here the Agnus Dei is also the Ram caught in a thicket, type of the Christ Crucified. The angel supports the ‘thicket’ where he lies. As Abraham took his knife to slay his son, ‘an angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven … Lay not thy hand upon the lad … for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes … and behold behind him a ram caught in the thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son’ (Genesis xxii, 10-13). The angel blessed him.

The lowest part of the stem on this side carries the Annunciation to the Shepherds. Two men look up in astonishment towards the angel sweeping upon them. The third shepherd, a lad, blows his horn. Three of their five sheep lift their heads from grazing. All gaze at the angel, who blesses as he flies towards them. Beside his knee is a star worthy of the Kings. The word ‘Angelus’ immediately below the blessing hand of the angel identifies a figure needing no identification. However, an ancient custom of prayer is called ‘the Angelus’. Whenever you hear the bells of the nearest church ring nine times in three triples across the fields at noon, you are in a Catholic country. You are meant to stop and say the simplest and shortest of Offices, consisting of three versicles and responses, with Ave Marias and a collect (perhaps added later for good measure). Nowadays the first Versicle opens with:

On the other side of the crozier, in the lowest part of the loop, lies the Virgin, her hands crossed on her lap. Above her the tendril carries, behind the lamb, her swaddled babe cradled in the curve of the branch. The supporting angel now faces away, and behind him now appears a pendant lamp and the heads of the ox and ass. The combination of tendril/bough and cradle speaks of the most disquieting of lullabies:

The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary To which the Response is: And she conceived of the Holy Ghost…

Hush-a-bye baby, on the tree top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock; When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, Down will come baby, cradle and all.16

This devotion in honour of the Incarnation is so simple that it is seldom written down, and is everywhere known by heart. The antiquity of the Angelus is lost in the mists of monastic time, but in 1246 canon seven of the Council of Béziers encouraged its general use.20 The bringing into wider observance of practices previously monastic was typically Franciscan, and a variant of this custom was commended to the faithful by St Bonaventure in 1269. Although the Angelus only became generally familiar in the thirteenth century, it would have been commonly known among monks and choir boys in Henry of Blois’ time. The calling of the shepherds was specially emphasised in the Anglo-Saxon liturgy for Christmas. Not only were they the first chosen witnesses of the Incarnation, but it was clear that they had understood the measure of what they had seen.21

As Paul and Iona Opie clearly demonstrated, ‘Nursery Rhymes’ did not originate in the nursery, but were preserved there.17 Lullabies go back at least to Roman times.18 Not being able to trace Hush-a-bye baby in printed records further 12

Ibid., pp. 186-7, cat. 346, and pl. 67. One in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, for which see J. Beckwith, Ivory Carvings in Early Medieval England, 700-1200 (London, 1974), pp. 82-3 and pl. 54, the other in the Museo Nazionale at Florence, Carrand no. 45, ibid., pp. 84-5 and pl. 54. 14 For which see f. 304, the opening of the Book of Job; illus. by Michael Kauffmann, English Romanesque Art, 1066-1190, Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, vol. 3 (London, 1975), p. 120, cat. 63. 15 Trésors des Eglises de France, p. 9, cat. 17, pl. 144. 16 Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1951), pp. 61-2, nos 21-2. 17 Ibid., pp. 3-4 and 7. 18 Ibid., p. 6. 13

19

Ibid., pp. 81-82, no. 47. See F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1997), p. 64. 21 M. Bradford Bedingfield, The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 28. 20

245

PAMELA TUDOR-CRAIG The rest of the crozier carries three scenes from the life of St Nicholas. If it is reversed again, so the Lamb of God appears in the curve of the Crook, the base of the ivory is carved with a scene of the baby Saint. His mother draws back a curtain to reveal the swaddled infant in an elaborately draped cot. In the scene above, the infant Nicholas is refusing the breast, as was his wont every Wednesday and Friday. Mother bends protectively over her strange child, while anxious father gestures towards them through a ‘window’ in the curving stem. The third scene occupies the top of the arch. Three girls share a bed. One of them, wearing a necklace, sleeps peacefully, her head cradled in her sister’s arm. That sister is awake and sitting up. Her head is now missing. Like her sleeping sister, she too is ready for matrimony. The third daughter, sits disconsolate, her head in her hand, mourning her bleak future. The family was poor, there were no dowries for the girls, destitution awaited; but a mysterious stranger has already thrown dowries for the elder pair through the window, and succour is at hand for the third. The saint himself, stretching half way up the stem, holds out a bag of gold towards the eagerly outstretched palm of the half-naked father, while the veiled mother plunges down the crozier towards the Saint. The versatility with which these five narratives are twined around the central stem suggests a consummate artist. Expressive gestures of this eloquence, innovation of this boldness, can only be matched in the Utrecht Psalter on the one hand, and the Winchester Bible on the other. However, the dramatic possibilities of long lean figures defined by subtly patterned clinging draperies are exploited by all Romanesque art of the first half of the twelfth century. In low relief it is the hallmark of Moissac and Souillac; with more substance it characterised the tympanum of Vézelay, and that of Cluny itself. Cistercian art, spare and austere and in deliberate criticism of the luxury of all things Cluniac, could not escape this poignant language, and the contortions that fitted twisted figures into the shape of a letter (or a crozier). Three initials of this type from a Cistercian manuscript of Pope Gregory’s Moralia in Job dated 1111, from Cîteaux itself, demonstrate the idiom.22 Manuscripts where the English version of what has been called the ‘damp fold’ style of drapery reaches its highest levels, are associated with Winchester, in the psalter thought to have belonged to Henry of Blois23 and in the earlier work in the Winchester Bible.24 Very close comparisons with

figures like St Nicholas stretching up the crozier to give his golden gift to the poor family appear in the entwined figures in the Bible attributed to the Master of the Leaping Figures.25 St Nicholas was believed to have died in 342 and to have been buried as its archbishop at Myra.26 Always highly esteemed in the Orthodox church, he has long been patron saint of Russia. In the West he was not popular much before 1087. In England interest stirred around the time of the Norman Conquest. 380 churches in England are dedicated to him, but only one of them is from before 1087: St Nicholas Acon in London, documented in 1084.27 The best indicator of the growth of his cult here is the pair of publications by Francis Wormald, English Kalendars before 1100 and English Benedictine Kalendars after 1100.28 In the pre-1100 list he appears occasionally as a minor feast. Only the Winchester manuscript, British Library, MS Arundel 60, of c. 1060, gives Nicholas a major feast, but he has a major feast in all post1100 calendars. Nicholas figures in three later eleventh- or twelfth-century compilations of lives of saints from English sources.29 Again we have a measure of his popularity here after 1087 in the names of abbots and priors.30 There are eight in relatively minor houses before 1200, but after 1200 among the higher clergy his name became legion. In the thirteenth century St Nicholas is a conspicuous altar dedication, often linked with a claim to relics, as at Westminster Abbey31 and at Glastonbury Abbey (held in plurality with Winchester by Henry of Blois).32 Inventories of Christ Church, Canterbury, compiled in 1315 and 1321,

25

First isolated by Walter Oakeshott, The Artists of the Winchester Bible (London, 1946), pp. 4-5, and pls 1-11. 26 W. de Gray Birch, ‘The Legendary Life of St Nicholas’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, xlii (1886), pp. 185-201. 27 See C.N.L. Brooke and G. Keir, London 800-1216 (London, 1975), pp. 92 and 138. 28 English Kalendars Before AD 1100 and English Benedictine Kalendars After AD 1100 (Henry Bradshaw Society, lxxii, lxxvii and lxxxi, 1934-46). 29 British Library, Cotton MSS Nero E. i and Tiberius B. v and MS Arundel 91, ff. 227 et seq. 30 See David Knowles, C.N.L. Brooke and V.C.M. London, Heads of Religious Houses, England and Wales, 940-1216, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1972), s.v. Index of Heads. 31 See relic-lists for Westminster Abbey: (a) History of Westminster Abbey by John Flete, ed. J.A. Robinson (Cambridge, 1909), pp. 74-5 (John Flete’s list of altar-indulgences); (b) 1520 relic-list, Westminster Abbey Muniments MS 9485, printed by H.F. Westlake, Westminster Abbey (London, 1921), II, pp. 499-501, appx. 4. 32 W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, vol. I (London, 1655), p. 5. A seal matrix of Gedney in Somerset was found on 29 June 1754 in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey; it shows St Nicholas resurrecting the boys from the tub. It was given to the Society of Antiquaries by Sir John Evelyn in 1755 (Minutes, vol. vii, p. 207).

22 See J. France, The Cistercians in Art (Stroud, 1998), pls. 24, 37 and 124. 23 British Library, Cotton MS Nero C. iv, subject of a monograph by Francis Wormald, The Winchester Psalter (London, 1973), of a study by Michael Kauffmann, in his Romanesque Manuscripts 10661190 (cit. in n. 14), and a further monograph, by K.E. Haney, The Winchester Psalter: An Iconographic Survey (Leicester, 1986). Kauffmann pointed out that the Calendar included two abbots of Cluny, St Hugh on 20 April and Maiolus on 11th May, suggesting Henry of Blois’ personal engagement with the manuscript. 24 Winchester Cathedral Library; see Michael Kauffmann in English Romanesque Art, ed. Zarnecki and Hayward, cat. nos. 64 and 64a.

246

HENRY OF BLOIS, THE CLUNY CONNECTION AND TWO IVORIES IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM described four reliquaries containing bones of St Nicholas.33 There cannot have been much left of him in Bari.

Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, near Paris, and again at Châlons-enChampagne and Metz.39

The watershed in Western Europe for the popularity of St Nicholas was the abduction of his relics from Myra, and their transport to Bari on 9 May 1087, as recorded by Odericus Vitalis. This was the responsibility of the famous Abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino, virtually head of the Benedictine Order, affiliated to Cluny, rebuilder of his great abbey with the help of marblers from Constantinople and classical loot from Rome. Among the side chapels at Monte Cassino was a ‘short but very beautiful chapel with a curved wall to St Nicholas’.34 The remains of St Nicholas reached Bari on the very day that Desiderius was consecrated Pope Victor III at Monte Cassino by Odo, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, himself a Cluniac monk. Odo would succeed Desiderius on the papal throne as Urban II.35 The burgeoning cult of St Nicholas was resisted at first at Cluny itself on the grounds that his liturgy was non-scriptural and carried unfamiliar melodies. There is a legend from the Cluniac house of the Blessed Mary de Caritate.36 The monks begged their superior to be allowed to use ‘the honeyed words’ of the Office of St Nicholas. He refused, on the grounds that the lectionary was not scriptural. Thereupon the saint appeared to him in a dream, and literally beat the new Office into him. There was a chapel dedicated to St Nicholas off the northeast transept of Cluny III, consecrated in 1098. Popes in favour of St Nicholas tended predominantly to be Cluniac. His popularity spread like summer lightning. A copy of his complete liturgy with music occurs in the late eleventhcentury manuscript, British Library, MS Arundel 91. The earliest miracle plays include the story of St Nicholas and the three impoverished daughters.37 The Fleury Playbook that was kept for a long time in the library at Saint-Benoît-surLoire, includes a play for the Massacre of the Innocents and four plays of the Miracles of St Nicholas.38 Among motifs carried along Cluniac pipelines were representations of scenes from the life of the Saint, especially his abstinence from his mother’s breast on Fridays and Wednesdays. This was preached as a striking exposition of the essentially monastic virtues of chastity and abstinence. The subject is carved on a column figure of the mid twelfth century at the abbey of

St Nicholas took to Bari the custom of selecting a boy to impersonate him during his festivities. In Western Europe this practice encountered the tradition of the Tridium, the custom whereby the three feasts immediately after Christmas are portioned out between the deacons (St Stephen), the priests (St John the Evangelist) and the singing-boys (the Innocents). At St Gall in the tenth century there had been a famous song school. King Conrad I heard so much about their Tridium or Tripudia that he went to St Gall at Christmas 911 to observe it. At Vespers on the Eve of the Holy Innocents the king was so impressed by the gravity of the procession of children that he told his attendants to roll apples down the aisles. The boys were not to be deflected. A special role for the boys over the Christmas season appears to have a place in the context of the Tridium in virtually all European liturgies by 1100. John of Avranches, bishop of Rouen, who died in 1070, referred to it, and so did Honorius Augustodunensis, in the early twelfth century.40 The season of the Boy Bishop grew during the twelfth century, expanding back from the Holy Innocents (December 28th) to the feast of St Nicholas on 6 December. In Winchester by the thirteenth century there were two boy bishops, one at Hyde Abbey, who held his feast on December 6th, and the other at the Cathedral, who held his on Holy Innocents’ Day. By then there is evidence of the boy bishop, the little St Nicholas, in every major monastic church and cathedral in Western Europe – wherever there were choirboys.41 A statute of before 1221 in York gave the boy bishop and his acolytes the duty of finding rushes for the Christmas and Epiphany feasts. They would raise money by singing their way round the diocese. In exchange, they scattered largesse, which was surely treasured by children, and so frequently lost, and now occasionally found. Stuart Rigold published many St Nicholas tokens of the later Middle Ages from the neighbourhood of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, but the earliest, thirteenth-century, token was found in Hampshire. It shows a mitred child carrying a crozier between a star and crescent moon (so he visited by night) and on the verso a shield with the emblems of SS Peter and Paul, titular saints of Winchester Cathedral. An inscription reads ‘Behold I make all things new’.42 A parallel has been in the Winchester Museum since 1967, and there

33

J. Wickham Legg and W.H. St John Hope, Inventories of Christchurch Canterbury (Westminster, 1902), pp. 83, 84 and 93. 34 See E. Holt. Documentary History of Art, I (New York, 1957), pp. 8-17. 35 See Charles W. Jones, St Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan (Chicago, 1978), and The St Nicholas Legend (Berkeley, Calif., 1963). 36 Recorded in the later 11th-century MS, Paris, Bibl. nat. de France, lat. 12601. I take it that the author refers to La Charité sur Loire, dedicated to the Virgin – a Cluniac house, consecrated in 1107. 37 See British Library, MS Add. 22414, of the late 11th century; possibly from Hildesheim. 38 Orléans, Bibl. Municipale, MS 201.

39

See Paul Williamson, cat. no. 83 in his forthcoming catalogue. There is a Cluniac antiphonal from Saint-Maur-des-Fossés: Paris, Bibl. Nat. de France, MS lat. 12584 . 40 See E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1903), I, chapters 13 and 14, and P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), p. 192. 41 See C.H. Evelyn-White, ‘The Boy Bishop (Episcopus Puerum) of Medieval England’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, New Ser., xi (1905), pp. 30-48, 231-56, and numerous other studies. 42 S.E. Rigold, ‘The St Nicholas or Boy Bishop Tokens’, Proc., Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, 34 (1977-9), pp. 87-101.

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PAMELA TUDOR-CRAIG are examples with Lombardic lettering from the sites of Rievaulx (Cistercian) and Welbeck (Premonstratensian).

whithersoever he goeth. These were… the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb…’47

The first records of episcopal regalia for the boy bishop are thirteenth-century. A pre-1221 inventory of Old Sarum mentions a gold ring for the ‘Feast of Boys’.43 St Paul’s records an increasingly popular celebration. In 1225 John de Belemains, prebendary of Chiswick, presented to St Paul’s a small mitre. Had he worn it himself as a child? In the St Paul’s inventory of 1245 the small mitre is listed, accompanied by rich vestments and a fine pastoral staff for the boy bishop. The popularity of his ceremonies at St Paul’s waxed in the thirteenth century, to the point that in the 1260s Dean Godfrey de Feringes had to hold the child’s election in the Chapter-house, so great was the press of people.44 The inventory of Westminster Abbey of 1388 includes a mitre with silver and gold plates and gems, inscribed Sancte Nichole ora pro nobis, and a crozier for the boy bishop with images of SS Peter and Edward the Confessor.45 This does not mean that the Abbey had been tardy in adopting the ritual. In that year they also put aside an older mitre, a pair of gloves and a ring, that were old fashioned and worn out.

In his account of the Nativity, the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacobus de Voragine turned not to his own Founder, St Dominic, nor to St Francis, who had introduced the custom of the Crib, but to Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny from 1122 to 1157. According to the Golden Legend: ‘We read in a book by Peter of Cluny that the night before the birth of the Lord the blessed Virgin appeared to St Hugh, holding her son in her lap and playing with him, and the Child said: You know, Mother, that the Church celebrates my birthday with great praise, feasting and dancing…’48 St Hugh, abbot of Cluny from 1049 to1109, their saint, was hinting to his successor that celebrations around Christmas would not come amiss. As we saw, the Cluniac Order had had initial reservations about the cult of St Nicholas (who alone among saints celebrates his feast on his birth and not his death day) and the irresistible custom of the boy bishop that came with him – despite the Cluniac affiliations of the two popes who transported the saint’s body to Italy. This vision typifies the setting aside of such hesitations.

It would seem that our St Nicholas Crozier, agreed to be of about 1150, is earlier than any written record of vestments or episcopal appurtenances intended for a child’s use within Christmastide. However the conjunction here of the Nativity, the shepherds and St Nicholas speaks clearly of the days between December 6th and the Feast of the Innocents. The ceremony closing the ‘reign’ of the boy bishop on the Eve of the Holy Innocents is most fully described at Rouen. There the boy bishop led his attendants to the altar of the Innocents, where he blessed the people. He sang the Offertory at the Mass. Vespers followed, and at the words in the Magnificat, He hath put down the mighty from their seat, he gave up his staff.46 The St Nicholas crozier includes, beside the infant Christ in his cradle, the Lamb of God. The scriptures appointed for the feast of the Holy Innocents include a passage from the Apocalypse xiv, 1-5 :

I would claim that the St Nicholas Crozier was made in about 1150 for the use of a boy bishop. Who could have commissioned it? A prominent abbot, with Cluniac affiliations, a connoisseur of all things beautiful, interested in the cult of St Nicholas, and in the beginnings of liturgical drama… Paul Williamson’s new suggestion that the crozier might have been made in the Ile de France does not inhibit the field. The great churchmen of the twelfth century were almost as well travelled as businessmen today. Peter the Venerable of Cluny, prompted in his dream by St Hugh, could have purchased a crozier in Paris, had he been so minded. However, unlike standard fourteenth-century ivories showing the Virgin and Child under a tabernacle flanked by scenes of the Nativity and Passion – which by then could be bought from shops in Parisian streets – ivories like the pair under discussion are a web of intricate, learned and unique subject matter. They could have been produced only in the closest and sustained collaboration between artist and exceptional patron. By 1150 Peter the Venerable was a man haunted by the financial disarray of his Abbey. The other potential patron, Henry of Blois himself, was as familiar with Paris as was his friend Peter, and would not have hesitated to commission there if he

‘And I looked, and lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand … And they sang as it were a new song before the throne…These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb

43

Evelyn-White, ‘The Boy Bishop (Episcopus Puerum)’, at pp. 27-38. Ibid. 45 J. Wickham Legg, ‘Inventory of the Vestry at Westminster Abbey taken in 1388’, Archaeologia, lii (1890), pt. 1, pp. 195-286, at 198, 221-2 et seq.; Ralph Tom or Tonworth gave three grey ‘almaces’ for the boy bishop. 46 Evelyn-White, ‘The Boy Bishop (Episcopus Puerum)’. 44

47

The feast of the Holy Innocents sheds further light on the motif of the swaddled baby cradled in the bough. (‘For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?’: Luke xxiii, 29 and 31); ‘When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall…’ 48 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. W.G. Ryan (Princeton, 1993).

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HENRY OF BLOIS, THE CLUNY CONNECTION AND TWO IVORIES IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM Scheldt in Belgium.52 The members of the Tournai trade guild, La Charité St Christophe, were granted specific permission to do business in Winchester in the 1160s.53 Two fonts are adorned with scenes from the life of St Nicholas. One, of stone, is in St Nicholas, Brighton – a church belonging to the Cluniac priory of Lewes. This, the first Cluniac establishment in England (founded in 1077) was certainly in close contact with Henry of Blois.54

saw evidence of superb workmanship – and if he was at leisure to explore. He was a Norman who had spent his formative years as a Cluniac monk at Cluny itself until appointed abbot of Glastonbury in 1126. He was back in Normandy in 1136-7, in France in the autumn of 1140. He spent the winter of 1143-4 in Cluny. In 1148 and 1149 he was in Rome, and, failing in his political negotiations, spent his time collecting Classical antiquities to stock his newlybuilt Wolvesey Palace.49 He returned to Winchester in 1149 via Santiago da Compostella and Cluny. At Cluny he discovered financial disaster, so he made loans without interest and gave great gifts. The record of this transaction may be in Henry’s hand. In addition to the thousand gold ounces which he lent outright to the abbey’s monks, he made careful provision for the removal, to meet debts, of the five hundred ounces of gold and jewels which he had given to adorn their Great Cross – but with the proviso that they should be replaced at the annual rate of 60 ounces. The inventory of Henry’s gifts at Winchester opens with another Great Cross, new and large, studded with jewels.50 In 1154 Peter the Venerable was visiting his ally Henry in Winchester, again seeking his financial help. Stephen, king of England and Henry’s brother, died in October that year, and Henry of Blois could not leave until he had arranged the succession of Henry II, son of the Emperor, and seen him crowned in December 1154. Then in 1155 he sent Peter the Venerable back to Cluny with much treasure, and followed him. He stayed for two years at Cluny, supporting the entire monastery singlehandedly for one of them. He sorted the tangled accounts of his mother-house, and was beside Abbot Peter when he died on Christmas Day 1156. He then administered the house until Peter’s successor was elected in 1158. He was at Cluny again in April 1161, when Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, died. He had to return to England to orchestrate the election of Thomas Becket, towards the repayment of whose debts as Chancellor he offered 2,000 marks. 1164 was the last year he left Winchester. What with his activities at Glastonbury and at St Martin le Grand, he had never been for long at Winchester, or anywhere else save Cluny, but now he was going blind. He died at Winchester in 1171.

The other St Nicholas font is the Tournai marble one in Winchester Cathedral itself. Infant Baptisms must have been rare in monastic cathedrals, but fonts played an essential role in the Christmas and especially the Easter ceremonies. Pixis eburnea in qua ponitur Corpus Domini in Parasceve (Victoria and Albert Museum, reg. no. 268-1867) The twelfth-century pyx in the Victoria and Albert Museum showing three monastic scenes has defeated elucidation, both as to what it so specifically represents, and as to its time and place of origin. The strong similarity between its figures and the descending angels triangle – especially in their slender, high-arched feet and large expressive hands – has brought it within the Winchester orbit. Their dates, therefore, have hesitated together. Sandy Heslop found a connection with the dramatic incident of the Maries coming to the Tomb woven into the ceremonies for the first Mass of Easter Day and described in the Regularis Concordia.55 The Regularis Concordia was drawn up at the Council of Winchester summoned by King Edgar to consolidate the reforms largely instigated by St Dunstan of Glastonbury and Canterbury and St Æthelwold of Winchester between the 970s and 984.56 As Allan Doig has emphasised, the Regularis Concordia is only a series of prescriptions, of ideals, and it is a very short text.57 Alas, it does not detail all the liturgies performed around the four critical days, Maundy Thursday till Easter Sunday. 52

See G.C. Dunning, ‘The Distribution of Black Tournai Fonts’, Antiquaries Journal, xxiv (1944), pp. 66-8. 53 Ibid. 54 St Nicholas is also the titular saint of churches in Old Shoreham and in Bishops Sutton, where Henry had a house. 55 T.A. Heslop, ‘A Walrus Ivory Pyx and the Visitatio Sepulchri’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xliv (1981), pp. 157-60. 56 See Allan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture, from the Early Church to the Middle Ages (Aldershot, etc., 2008), pp. 152-3, and esp. 154, where the instructions for the Visitatio Sepulchri are printed and two ivories from Metz (undoubtedly showing the Maries coming to the tomb) are identified. 57 The text of the Regularis Concordia was edited and translated by Dom Thomas Symons: Regularis Concordia Anglicae Nationis Monachorum Sanctimonaliumque. The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation (London and New York, 1953).

So to the question: which great Cluniac, abbot or bishop, was in a position in c. 1150 to be looking out for a crozier for a boy bishop: Henry or Peter? The answer must be Henry. Did he show interest in children, or in St Nicholas? One of his acts of munificence was the provision of fonts. There is a cluster of Tournai fonts within the Winchester diocese,51 all within easy reach of water transport, as were the quarries near 49

For this, most famous of his artistic activities, see Jeffrey West, ‘A Taste for the Antique? Henry of Blois and the Arts’, Anglo-Norman Studies, vol. 30, Proceedings of the Battle Abbey Conference 2007 (2008), pp. 213-30. 50 Bishop, Liturgica Historica (cit. in n. 1), p. 398. 51 At St Mary Bourne, at East Meon, St Michael’s Southampton, Christchurch Priory and Romsey Abbey.

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PAMELA TUDOR-CRAIG eighth centuries.65 In the Gelasian Sacramentary, the seven penitential psalms were recited by the bishop and priests, prostrated before the choir doors before they escorted the penitent to the west door and expelled him. All that is given for the return of the Prodigal on Maundy Thursday is the instruction that the ceremony of Ash Wednesday should be performed in reverse order. Peter Claussen made a special study of the importance of the West Front and its porches as the scene of public penance.66 This aspect of liturgical practice is stressed by Margrete Syrstad Andås.67 and Kristina Krüger has pointed out that the monastic churches, St Philibert Tournus, Paray le Monial, Notre Dame Dijon, Vézelay, Cluny II and Cluny III (all Burgundian), have, or had, important west ends preceded by separate structures, internally of two stories, of several bays, and two flanking west towers.68 Alas, that the twelfth-century west front of Winchester Cathedral remains unexcavated!

Ironically, too, a ritual that was an integral part of Maundy Thursday, and which does in every detail match our pyx, is not described. At Prime on Maundy Thursday all the monks made their confessions, to which the abbot responded by prostration and asking pardon of the brethren.58 According to the Concordia (it is mentioned nowhere else), the abbot then went round drinking the health and kissing the hand of each of the brethren. Perhaps this was a custom peculiar to Winchester. The washing and kissing of the feet of poor men was preceded by the washing of the pavement by the monks, and of the altars by the priests. However, there was another ceremony that of its nature, while it remained within the monastic enclosure, was occasional.59 ‘A brother that is accused, no matter for what reason, by the abbot or by one of the senior officials, shall prostrate himself before speaking …’60 The beginning of a formal ritual whereby an erring brother could do his penance and be reconciled goes back to the Rule of St Benedict itself: ‘One who for serious faults is excommunicated from oratory and table shall make satisfaction as follows … Let him lie prostrate before the door of the oratory, saying nothing, but only lying prone with his face to the ground … And let him continue to do this until the Abbot judges that satisfaction has been made. Then, when he has come at the Abbot’s bidding … let him be received into the choir.’61 St Benedict appears to have expected these prostrations to be repeated at the (canonical?) hours until the abbot blessed the sinner and said ‘It is enough’.

The provision for such an elaborate structure, with its upper chapel, was made by Odilo, abbot of Cluny from 1027 to 1048. He was familiar with the Easter Homily of Heiric of Auxerre, the ninth-century theologian:

‘…if we are longing to share in the highest glory…we have to pass solitarily from sin to justice, from worldliness to God, from vice to virtue, from lowness to heaven in our spirits, so that we may merit to behold our Creator freely from face to face in galilea…’69 (underlining mine)

From the tenth century, according to the Blickling Homilies,62 the period of penance was formalised, wherever suitable, to run from Ash Wednesday till Maundy Thursday. Bishop Wulfstan of Worchester (d. 1095) wrote an Ash Wednesday Sermon to this effect.63 The norm in AngloSaxon monasteries was for the errant monk to be expelled with due ceremony from the church by the abbot and community on Ash Wednesday, with words from the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve. He remained without the church, but within the monastic enclosure, until Maundy Thursday.64 This period of penance, corresponding with the season of Lent in non-monastic churches as well, was first mentioned in the Gelasian Sacramentary of the seventh-

The scene on the back of the pyx describes a tonsured monk fully prostrated before another, who leans over him, hands open, in a gesture of welcome (Fig. 2a). The event takes place outside a building with a tall arched opening, and a narrow tower carrying a low spire, perhaps of the helm shape exemplified at Sompting in Sussex and in many churches in south Germany. The central part of the tiled roof is damaged. The prone monk lies athwart a curved flight of steps. This scene I read as showing a penitent monk prostrate outside the west front before his abbot. Going in a clockwise direction, behind the penitent is the representation of a chapel under a decorated arch, from which hangs a lamp (Fig. 2a). The

58

Ibid., chapter III. And presumably for that reason, was omitted from the Regularis Concordia. 60 Regularis Concordia, ed. Symons, p. 17. 61 English translation in RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict, in Latin and English, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1981), pp. 245, 247, ch. 44 (adapted, following a 17th-century translation; and with my italics). 62 The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, ed. Richard Morris, Early English Text Society, Orig. Ser. 58, 63 and 73 (1874-80). 63 See D. Bethurum, ‘Archbishop Wulfstan’s Commonplace Book’, PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), 57 (1942), pp. 916-29. 64 See Bedingfeld, Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England (cit. in n. 21), pp. 82-4. 59

65

See Sarah Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 900-1050, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, New Ser., 20 (Woodbridge, Suff., and Rochester, New York), p. 69. 66 P. Claussen, Chartres - Studien Zu Vorgeschichte, Funktion und Skulptur der Vorhallen (Wiesbaden, 1975), pp. 55-8. 67 Margrete Syrstad Andås, ‘Art and Ritual in the Liminal Zone’, in The Medieval Cathedral of Trondheim, ed. M.S. Andås (Turnhout, Belgium, 2007), pp. 47-126. She could have said more about the role of friars in the 13th-century development. 68 Kristina Krüger, ‘Architecture and Liturgical Practice: The Cluniac galilea’, in The White Mantle of Churches: Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millennium, ed. N. Hiscock (Turnhout, 2001), pp. 139-59. 69 Ibid., p. 151 and notes 54 and 55.

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HENRY OF BLOIS, THE CLUNY CONNECTION AND TWO IVORIES IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM square-topped altar is bare. This structure apparently next to the west front may refer to the upper western chapel within that west front, so frequently discussed of late, and named with reference to the complex meanings attached to Christ’s use of the term ‘Galilee’: ‘After I am risen again, I will go before you into Galilee’ (Matthew xxvi, 32). This chapel was particularly associated with penitential rites, and with the commemoration of departed monks. If this sanctuary shown on the pyx did refer to a second chapel at a high level within the west front, it would account for the gestures of the two figures in the next scene (Fig. 2b). As they embrace in reconciliation, the one on the right points backwards towards the chapel. They are indoors, under a less ornate arch, and it appears he is referring back to the chapel now behind them. In the first scene the monk had been lying athwart a flight of steps (Fig. 2a). Such a staircase is unusual outside a west front, unless, as at St Paul’s Cathedral, there was a crypt the whole length of the nave, or the church was built on a hill, as at Monte Cassino. However, as Krüger has shown, such a flight within the west front gave access to the Galilee Chapel.70 Throughout Lent the sinner has been deprived of the Eucharist. Now he is welcomed back to the altar. The last scene shows the climax of the ceremonies for Maundy Thursday, the taking of the Consecrated Host from the main altar to the altar of repose in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre (Fig. 2c). The Epistle to the Hebrews, vv. 2-4, gives a concise description of the double sanctuary of the original Temple: ‘And after the second veil the Tabernacle which is called the holiest of all; which had the golden censer, and the Ark of the Covenant…wherein was the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tables of the Covenant…’ Here we have a censer and the pot that held manna, an eloquent prefiguring of the Blessed Sacrament, behind the ‘second veil’.71 ‘To him that overcometh will I give the hidden manna’ (Revelation ii, 17). A single monk, probably the abbot, his hands covered by a sudarium (indicating that the chalice which he carries contains the consecrated Host), approaches a veiled altar with a candlestick upon it, and hidden beyond the veil, what could suggest ‘the golden pot that had manna’.

a

b

This ivory is itself a pyx, so its purpose is to carry the consecrated Host, usually to the bedside of the sick or dying. Yet in the carving upon it the priest carries a chalice. The rubric for Maundy Thursday is strict: enough bread must be consecrated for every monk to partake of it at the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified on Good Friday. On that occasion, therefore, in a major monastery a pyx such as this would not be large enough. Among the items described in the document of his gifts and loans to Cluny, Henry of Blois described ‘the golden cup set with gems in which the body of our Lord is

c Fig. 2. Ivory pyx, c. 1130s, carved with scenes showing three scenes from the ritual of Maundy Thursday: a A penitent monk prostrate before his abbot, and behind him a chapel, probably within the west front, associated with penitential rites. b Two monks, presumably the Abbot and Penitent, embracing in reconciliation. c The taking of the cobsecrated Host to the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, reg. no. 268-1867.

70

Ibid. ‘To him that overcometh I will give the hidden manna’: Revelation ii, 17. 71

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PAMELA TUDOR-CRAIG contained’.72 On Good Friday the Body, the Consecrated Host, is retrieved from the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. Each Host is dipped in unconsecrated wine and administered in silence. Thus the Church acts out the separation of body and blood on the Cross, and foreshadows its reunion at the Resurrection.

The only twelfth-century Holy Sepulchre in England appears to be the one erected to the north of the High Altar at Winchester by Henry of Blois. Its architectural form in no way echoes the Holy Sepulchre itself, other than in being constructed in two bays, but its purpose is declared by painted representations of the Deposition and Entombment immediately over the altar.78

The ivory pyx appears to carry a reference to the actual Tomb of Christ, as embellished by Constantine. Slightly off centre in the final scene of the carrying of the Host to the Altar of Repose, is a shell niche. Such a classical form would be extremely rare, if not unknown, in twelfth-century architecture. Yet, as Martin Biddle has demonstrated, it was a striking feature of the outer chamber of the Holy Sepulchre itself, as furbished by Constantine and as shown on the Narbonne model, probably of the fifth century,73 and reflected, for example, in a medallion of c. 600 in the Württembergisches Landemuseum at Stuttgart.74 As Biddle deduced, this shell niche over the entrance to the inner tomb chamber must have been supported by columns, missing in the Narbonne model, but present on the pyx. The pyx departs from its model in showing the shell reversed, instead of upright. This might suggest that the artist was working from a verbal description, which would explain other aspects of the architectural features on this object. Another detail of the settings that are so carefully described on the pyx may relate, again, to the Old Temple. All Holy Sepulchres, of whatever form, size or date, should be to the north of the High Altar. In the Old Temple animals were sacrificed on the north side of the great altar.75 Here the shell niche, which should be over the main altar, is shown to the right of the Priest. He is about to place the Host on a shrouded tomb/altar to the north of the baldacchino. For this ritual, an enactment of the burial of the Body of Christ in a special Easter Sepulchre, there is ample liturgical evidence from the tenth century if not before – evidence that escalated after the First Crusade.76 The copy of the Tomb of Christ consecrated at Fulda in 822 and the tenth-century one at Constanz may have been life size. The ones as Eichstätt, Santo Stefano, Bologna, Neuvy-St-Sépulchre, Cambrai, Piacenza and Paderborn, could all have been used in the Passiontide ceremonies.77

There are, within the diameter of this little oval box, 6.5 cm. high and 6 cm. wide, three liturgical scenes and two sanctuaries furnished with appropriate fittings. So, while this pyx and this crozier may have been carved for any abbot of deep learning and a close involvement in the liturgical practice of his time – and so, surely, a Cluniac – neither could have been realised without close interchange between the thought of the patron and the invention of the sculptor. I would suggest that the pyx, like the angel gable from St Cross, could be a work by an older artist of the 1130s. The large hands, the cushion bases of the columns, recall the late eleventh century. The crozier, with its echoes of the Master of the Leaping Figures – who could even have drawn it out – is maybe fifteen to twenty years later. They are both entirely original works, with no immediate comparisons. Henry of Blois was the wealthiest and keenest patron in Europe over the long span, 1129-71, during which these beautiful objects were surely made. He built, in the south transept of Winchester Cathedral – the only true stroke of Cluniac architecture in England – a treasury in which to house in perpetuity his magnificent bequest. The matter is not capable of objective proof, but in my view Henry of Blois is surely a contender as the originator of both crozier and pyx. This exploration of the evidence of two small ivories, occasionally touching upon material which Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle have made entirely their own, is offered to a great team. Their brilliant and fruitful work over many years will ever remain a testimony to the most creative of partnerships. The field of medieval scholarship has not seen their like.

72

See P. Williamson, ‘Ivory Carvings in English Treasuries Before the Reformation’, in Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture Presented to Peter Lasko, ed. D. Buckton and T.A. Heslop (London: British Museum, 1994), pp. 187-202, esp. 188. 73 M. Biddle, The Tomb of Christ (Stroud, 1999), p. 21. 74 Ibid., Fig. 19. 75 See Robin Griffith-Jones, The Gospel According to Paul (San Francisco, 2004), p. 60. 76 See Veronica Sekules, ‘The Tomb of Christ at Lincoln and the Development of the Sacrament Shrine: Easter Sepulchres Reconsidered’, in Medieval Art and Architecture at Lincoln Cathedral, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, VIII (Leeds, 1986), pp. 118-31. 77 This list is greatly extended by Biddle, The Tomb of Christ, pp. 2-3.

78

Cluniac interest in the appearance of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is reflected in the carving of the Three Maries coming to the Tomb on the 12th-century font from the Cluniac Priory at Lenton (Notts.): see Biddle, Tomb of Christ, Fig. 42.

252

Credits for Illustrations

Steven Bagshawe, p. 136; Richard Bryant, p. 137; John Crook, pp. 220, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229; Brian J. Gilmour, pp. 62, 63, 64; Anthea Harris, pp. 33, 36; Grahame Saxby-Soffe, p. 30; Cologne, Römisch-Germanisches Museum, pp. 15, 21; Edinburgh, National Museums of Scotland, p. 2; Helsinki, Ateneum, p. 163 (Fig. 7a); London, Trustees of the British Museum, pp. 5 (Fig. 2a), 12, 16 (Fig. 9a-b), 19, 31; London, Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, pp. 244, 251; Milan, Soprintendenza Archaeologica della Lombardia, p. 11; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, pp. 14, 17; Oxford Archaeology, pp. 65, 66, 67; Reykjavik, Άrni Magnusson Institute, p. 153 (Fig. 1a-b); Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, p. 29; Tallinn, Estonian Folk Museum, p. 163 (Fig. 7b); Winchester City Council, pp. 78, 79, 80; Winchester Excavations Committee, p. 223 (Figs 5 and 6).

253

Index Please note: locators for photographs and line drawings are shown in italics.

  Abelard and Héloïse 238 Abercorn (West Lothian, Scotland), monastery 113 ablution-stands see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon ablutions see also bowls; hand/foot-washing; hanging bowls domestic/ecclesiastical 38 late Roman vessels 30 Abson (Glos.) 141 Adomnán of Iona, Life of Columba 182 adventus Saxonum 107 Aediluulf (Æthelwulf) of Bywell 182 Ælfheah (Alphege), archbishop of Canterbury 196 Ælfthryth, Abbess 102 Æthelbald, King of Mercia 142, 145, 146 Æthelberht, King of Kent 95 Code 124 Æthelfryth, King of Northumbria 124 Æthelmund and family 138, 142–5, 146 his stone 139–40, 141, 142 Æthelred II, King 95, 201, 203 code 125 Æthelric, son of Æthelmund 138, 142, 143, 146 Æthelthryth, Queen 119 Æthelwine (reeve) 203 St Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester ivory workshop 243 The Life of see Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St Æthelwold reforms 249 Æthelwulf (Aediluulf) of Bywell 182 Æthelwulf, King 95 Africa, late-Roman dishes 10 St Aidan 122 Ailward (cniht) 203 Aksum basins 37 Alchmunding tuun (Bishop’s Cleeve), location 146–8 Alcuin 126 Versus de Patribus, Regibus et Sanctis Euboracensis Ecclesiae 182 Aldfrith, King 93, 125 St Aldhelm, Abbot 83, 123 De Virginitate 182 letter to Acurcius 125–6 Alfred, King 84, 164 Alphege (Ælfheah), archbishop of Canterbury 196 Alton (Hants.), coin find 94 Alwin Bierd (renter) 205 St Ambrose of Milan 21, 22, 26 Anastasius I, Emperor 92

Andås, M.S. 250 Andover (Hants.), coin finds 89, 97 Andrew, A.J. 77 Andrew, Bishop 13 Angelus, the 245 Angers Cathedral, Treasury 244–5 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 144, 145, 201 Anthologia Palatina 12 St Anthony 102, 103 Antioch treasure 8, 13–14 Apostle spoons 13 Chalice 13–14, 14 Antonine Itinerary 114–15 Antonine Wall 107, 110–13, 114 Apostle spoons 13 Aquincum (Hungary) 4 Arbeia fort (South Shields) 60 Arles, Council of 117 Askim (Norway), font 164 Asthall (Oxon.) 82, 157 Aston (Worcs.) 142, 143 Attila 116 St Augustine of Canterbury 36 St Augustine of Hippo 21, 23, 27 Auschwitz 104 Avitus, Emperor 116 Avon River 83 Bailey, R. 137, 145 Baker, J. 129 Bangor-is-y-Coed (Bangor-on-Dee), monastery 124 Banks, Sir Joseph 109 Banstead Downs (Surr.), grave-goods 80–1, 83 baptism Anglo-Saxon practice see under fonts, late AngloSaxon development 37 New Testament 26 Baratte, F. 8, 10–12, 13, 17 Bari (St Nicholas relics) 247 Barlow, F. 201 Barrington (Cambs.) 83 Barrington, Daines 108 Bartlow Barrows (Essex) 28, 29 St Basil of Cappadocia 26, 28 Basingstoke (Hants.), coin/metal-work finds 96 basins see bowls; hanging bowls Bassett, S. 148 Bassingham (Lincs.) 177 255

INDEX bathing practices 32 Beaumais/Beaumeis family 238 Becket, St Thomas 249 Beckwith, J.G. 245 Bede Greater Chronicle 122 Historia ecclesiastica 182 and his world 119–27 attitudes to wealth 122–3 coinage 127 false monasteries 126–7 family origins 119–20 gift exchange 122 harshness 123–4 lay literacy 125–6 monastic life 120–2, 126–7 political/social context 124–5 range of understanding 119, 127 teachers/pupils 119 and Roman Britain 107–17 Antonine Wall 107, 110–13, 114 continuity with Anglo-Saxon period 107, 116–17 Hadrian’s Wall 107, 110, 111, 113– 14 lost literary sources 114–16 Romano-British monuments visible 107–14 Thames defensive stakes 107–10 on St Albans 129 Letter to Ecgberht 122 Vita Sancti Cuthberti 25, 28, 182 Bede, son of Bubba 119, 120 Bedhampton (Hants.), burial 84 Belemains, John de 248 Bellum Gothicum (Procopius) 116 St Benedict see Rule of St Benedict Benedict Biscop 120, 121, 122–3 Benson, Bishop Martin, Survey 142 Beorhtric, King 95 Beowulf 100, 103, 105, 122, 123 Bernicia 120, 123 Berthouville treasure 9 Béziers, Council of 245 Bianchini collection 5 jug 15, 16 biblical scenes 2, 3, 14–16, 15, 16–17, 16, 17, 18–21, 19, 21 see also Old/New Testaments iconography 19–21 Biddle, M. 22, 87, 146, 237n, 243, 252 see also Kjølbye-Biddle, B. on cult and belief 48 on Lundenwic 49, 53, 58 Repton excavation 101, 149

St Albans, excavations 129, 130 Tomb of Christ 252 on topographical context 39n Winchester 149, 222–5, 223, 224, 235 Winchester excavations 25, 77, 85, 93, 97, 127 ‘Winton Domesday’ 201, 213, 214 Bingley (Yorks.), font 155, 170, 172, 175 St Birinus 219 Biscop, son of Bede 119 see also Benedict Biscop Bishop’s Cleeve (Glos.) 146–8 Black Death 225 Blair, J. 141, 146 blessings, Latin 13 Blickling Homilies 250 Bloodmore Hill burials 73, 75 Blunsdon Ridge bowl 30, 31 Bobuslänfonter 173, 175 body consciousness see food control and body consciousness, early Anglo-Saxon culture Boëthius, G. 157 Bologna, Santo Stefano, Tomb of Christ 252 Bol’shoi Kaménets jug 4, 7, 16–17 St Bonaventure 245 St Boniface, archbishop of Mainz 82, 124 Bosbury (Herefs.), font 161 Boscoreale cups 10, 12 bourgs 53 bowls see also hanging bowls Blunsdon Ridge 30, 31 cista 30 Cologne 8 Hohensülzen 6 treen see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon Viminacium 17 boy bishops 247–8 Bradford-upon-Avon (Wilts.) 137 Bradley, R. 71, 76 Brakspear, H. 231 Braun, J. 8 Breviarium (Eutropius) 110–11, 113 Brighton, St Nicholas 249 Brihtmaer of Gracechurch 240 Britannia (Camden) 108–9, 219 British Numismatic Journal, Coin Register 87 Bromyard (Herefs.) 157 Brooks, N.P. 96, 125 Broomfield burials 81 Brown, G.H. 119 Browne, Revd George Forrest 135 Bryant, R.M., Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture 135, 137 burgh foundations 42, 47–8 Burton, J. 237 Buscot (Berks.), font 161, 165, 167 256

 

INDEX cabochon pendant 56, 57 Caedwalla, King 82 Caen La Trinité (monastery) 235 Saint-Etienne (monastery) 233 Caerleon, Castle Baths 32 Caerwent 117 Caesar, Julius 107, 109 Caius Vestorius Priscus 9 Calder, D. 103 Cambrai, Tomb of Christ 252 Cambridge, E. 141 Cambridge, Trinity College 237 Camden, William, Britannia 108–9, 219 Canterbury 125 burial 28 Christ Church Cathedral 32, 202, 240, 246–7 continuity of occupation 116 St Augustine’s abbey 32 swords 60 Caracalla, Emperor 114 Caritate, Blessed Mary de, (monastery) 247 Carlisle 117 Carpow (Perthshire), fortress 111 Carter, Owen Browne 220, 221, 222, 231 Cassiodorus, Codex Grandior 122 Cassivellaunus 107, 109 Catterick (Yorks.) 114–15 Cedd, Bishop 104, 119, 120 cemeteries and settlements, Anglo-Saxon 71–6 background 71 conclusion 75–6 early period 71–2 mid/late periods 72–5 Centwine, King 82 Ceolburg, mother of Æthelric 144 Ceolfrith, Abbot 119, 120, 123, 125 ‘Anonymous’ Life of 120–1, 122, 126 letter to Nechtan 120 Ceolwulf, King 119, 122 Cesana plate 28 Chaourse (Aisne, France) 4 Chelles (near Paris), monastery 123 Chelsea, Council of 149–50 Cheltenham 146, 147 Cheriton (Hants.), coin finds 92, 94 Chester, battle of 124 Chi-Rho monogram 7 Chichester 95, 116, 216 Christianity Anglo-Saxon conversion 101–4, 105 boy bishops 247–8 continuity from Roman era 116–17 Holy Sepulchre 252 impact (swords) 69–70 Jesus Christ, hand/foot-washing 25, 26–7, 35–6,

37 liturgy 21, 26–7, 27–8, 32 origins (Gloucester) 39 parish formation 237–41 Chrysostom, St John 9 churches, cisterns with 32 Cicero 8 Cirencester (Glos.) 116, 117 cista (bowl) 30 Cistercian houses 237, 241 Cistercian style 246 cisterns, with churches 32 Clapham, A.W. 232 Clausentum, coin finds 94 Claussen, P. 250 Cluny (France) St Nicholas cult 247, 248–9 style 246, 252 II and III (monastic churches) 250 cniht/cnihtas in English towns 202 in London 201, 202–3 meaning 210 in Winchester see under Winchester Cnut, King 201, 203 Codex Amiatinus 122, 126 Codex Winton see Winton Domesday Coenwulf, King 144, 145 Cohen, Jeremy 103 coin finds, Hampshire pennies as evidence 95–6 post-Roman 92 recovery modes 89–92, 90, 91 Roman/Prehistoric 88 Sceatta phases 92–5 Coin Register, British Numismatic Journal 87 Colchester 116 in Domesday 215–16 Cole, Sir Henry 244 Colgrave, B. 124 Collins, Thomas (builder) 135 Cologne bowls 8 St Severin sarcophagus 20 tombstone 28 St Columba 102, 104 Conçesti amphora 18 Conrad I, King 247 Constans IV 92 Constantine I 21, 252 Constantine IV 92 Constantinople, lists of relics 37 Constantius II 9, 11 Constanz, Tomb of Christ 252 Constanza, Tomb of the Banquet 28 coopered tubs/buckets see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon 257

INDEX Coptic bowls 37 Corblet, J. 149, 150, 155 Corbridge lanx 9 Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture (Bryant) 135, 137 Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds (EMC) 87 Council of Chelsea 149–50 Coway Stakes 108–9 Cowgill, J. 160, 161 Cramp, R. 122, 127, 167 Crawley, near Winchester 89 Crick (Northants.), font 164 Crowland (Lincs.) 102 Croydon (Park Lane) cemetery 61 crozier, Henry of Blois and 244–9 Crusade First 252 Second 238 Curle, A.O. 7, 18 St Cuthbert 25, 28, 103, 104–5, 120–1, 123 Cuthswith, Abbess 127 Cutler, A. 35 Cybele cult 9 cylindrical lead fonts see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon Cynethryth, Queen 95 St Cyril of Jerusalem 26

background 213 circuit 217 conclusion 218 Liber Winton 201, 213, 214 lost entry 216–17 Domnos, ‘property of’ 13 Droitwich salt 173 Druhan, D.R. 121 Dumville, D.N. 119–20 Dunnichen, near Forfar 113 St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury 179, 249 Durham Cathedral 232 Durham Priory 34 lavatorium 32 Dymock (Glos.) 142 Eadberht, Bishop 104 Ealdred, subregulus 146 Earconberht, King 124 East Anglia 126 East Meon (Hants.), coin finds 93, 97 Eastern Wessex hanging-bowl burials see under hanging bowls Ecgberht, Bishop 115–16, 119 Ecgberht, King 95 Ecgfrith, King 113, 119, 120, 143, 145 Eclogues Nemesianus 17 Vergil 12, 17 Edgar, King 201, 239, 249 Edington, Bishop William 219, 225, 226, 228, 232 Edward the Confessor, King 139, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 238 Edward the Elder, King 84, 196 Egeria 27 Eichstätt, Tomb of Christ 252 Elizabeth I, Queen 238 Elmstone Hardwicke (Glos.) cross-shaft 135–48 Alchmunding tuun (Bishop’s Cleeve), location 146–8 cross-shaft 135, 136 and Deerhurst font 135, 137–8, 137, 143–4, 145–6, 147 landscape setting 140–2 parish 138–40 parishes in vicinity 138 placename 139–40 St Mary Magdalene church 135 Eltenberg Reliquary 244 Ely, mint 95 EMC (Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds) 87 Emma, Queen 203, 205 Engemann, J. 8, 13 Eosterwine, Abbot 120, 121 Esquiline treasure 7, 30 eulogia 13

Dalfinus, Archbishop 126 Daphne (Syria) 4 d’Aubigny, Nigel 238 d’Aubigny, Samson 237–8, 239, 241 De Abbatibus (poem) 84 De Caesaribus (Sextus Aurelius Victor) 111 De excidio Britanniae (Gildas) 112–13, 117 De Rossi, G.B. 18 De Virginitate (St Aldhelm) 182 Deerhurst (Glos.) 135, 137–8, 137, 139, 142, 143–4, 145–6, 146, 147 font 154, 155, 157, 175 Delos dish 9 Derrynaflan (co. Tip., Ireland) hoard 31–2 Desborough Channel 109 Desborough necklace 56 Desiderius, Abbot of Monte Cassino 247 Dever valley (Hants.), coin finds 96 Dido’s banquet 28, 29 Diehl, C. 13 Dijon, Notre Dame (monastic church) 250 Doig, A. 249 Dolbeau, F. 180 Domesday Book 139–40, 147 bibliographical note 218 blank folios 213–14, 215 borough surveys 215–16 county landowners’ schedules 216 Norwich churches 240 Winchester in 213–18 258

 

INDEX Eutropius, Breviarium 110–11, 113 Exeter 116 Expositiones xiii epistularum Pauli (Pelagius) 117 Eyam (Derbs.), font 159, 164

Gildas 39, 48, 107, 110 De excidio Britanniae 112–13, 117 Glastonbury Abbey 246, 249 Gloucester Cathedral 34, 146 Gloucester road 141 Gloucester topography burgh foundation/modification 42, 47–8 burial alignments 46 cemeteries 43–4 and christian origins 39 continuity of occupation 116 development 41 fig forum 39–40 Kingsholm burials 44–6, 48 Old Minster (St Peter’s) 43, 46–7, 48 river crossing 39, 47 St Mary de Lode church 42–3, 44, 46, 47 St Michael’s church 40 St Oswald, New Minster of 42, 43 St Peter’s Minster 43, 46–7, 48 7th-9th cent. 47 temples 40 west gate 40, 42, 48 western suburb 42 Wotton Pitch 43 Godalming (Surr.), font 155, 167–8, 168, 175 Godfrey de Feringes, Dean 248 Godfrey of Winsor 205, 208 Godwin (cniht) 203 Greater Chronicle (Bede) 122 Greenway, D. 237 Gregory the Great, Pope 27, 123, 125 Moralia in Job 246 Guest, Edwin 108–9 St Guthlac 101–4, 105, 125

Faversham (Kent), hanging bowl 31 Feilitzen, O. von 201 Fleury Playbook 247 Flixborough (Lincs.) burials 75, 76 Flixton (Suff.) cemetery 72 fluted bowls/basins 30–1, 30 font-stands see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon Fonthill Letter 84 fonts 37 late Anglo-Saxon 149–77 ablution stands/font-stands 161, 163, 167–8, 170 baptismal practice 149–50 coopered tubs/buckets 155, 157 cylindrical lead fonts 160–1 11th cent. transformation 175, 177 Holy Water, retention disposal 150–1 illustrations 153-175passim quadrangular forms 170, 173, 175 Romanesque 151, 152, 170 skeuomorphism 151–2, 157 stone fonts 151, 152, 155 treen bowls/troughs 161 types of container 150 well-heads 157–60 Tournai 249 food control and body consciousness, early Anglo-Saxon culture conversion to Christianity 101–4, 105 general relationship 99 height significance 101 integral nature 99–100 law codes 100–1 penitential regulation 104–5 starvation 104 Foot, S. 120 Ford (Wilts.), grave-goods 80–1, 83 Frend, W.H.C. 7, 22 Frere, Sheppard 109 Frisia 123 St Fursey 102, 104

Hadley, D. 76 Hadrian, Abbot 117 Hadrian’s Wall 107, 110, 111, 113–14 Hagenbach cup 6 Hamblemouth (Hants.) 94 The Hampshire Chronicle 222 Hampshire, in Domesday 213–14 Hamwic (Southampton), coin finds 89–98passim Six Dials 92 hand/foot-washing see also ablutions; bowls; hanging bowls Graeco-Roman cultures 25 late Antiquity/early Middle ages 25–8 archaeological evidence 28–37 Old/New Testaments 25, 26, 35, 37 summary 37–8 hanging bowls 30–2, 56 see also bowls Eastern Wessex burials 81–5 see also Oliver’s Battery (Winchester) burial

Gallumanu hoard 7 Gamlingay (Cambs.) cemetery 74–5, 74, 75, 76 Gannon, A. 127 Geake, H. 75, 83 Gelasian Sacramentary 250 Gem, R.D.H. 145–6 Germania (Tacitus) 116 Germanus, Bishop 22–3 Gibbs, James 49, 53 259

INDEX interpretation 81–2 regional context 80–1 significance 83–5 Harald Bluetooth, King of Denmark, baptism 154 Hardwicke (Glos.) 139, 141, 142 Hare, J. 227 Hauho (Finland), font 164, 165 Heahberht, Bishop 144 Heiric of Auxerre, Easter Homily 250 Helmstan 164 Henry of Blois, Bishop, ivories 243–52 background 243–4 conclusion 252 crozier 244–9, 244 pyx 249–52, 251 Henry, F. 83–4 Henry fitz Ailwin 203 Henry I, King 139, 202, 203, 205, 206 Henry II, King 202, 205, 206, 249 Henry VIII, King 237 Hereford 126, 142 bishop of 147 Heslop, T.A. 249 Hezekiah, King 35 Historia Augusta 110, 111 Historia ecclesiastica see Bede, Historia ecclesiastica, and Roman Britain Historiae adversus paganos (Orosius) 107–8, 110, 111– 12, 113 Hohensülzen bowl 6 Holy Grail 13 Holy Sepulchre 252 Holy Thursday liturgy 26–7, 27–8, 32 Holy Water see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon Honorius Augustodunensis 247 Honorius, Emperor 92 Hoxne (Suff.) treasure 5 St Hugh, of Cluny 248 Humber estaury 161 Hunt, J. 142 Hunt, W. 122 Hursley, near Winchester 89 Hush-a-bye baby (lullaby) 245 Hwicce, the 142, 145, 146 Hyde Abbey, Winchester 205

Isle of Wight 95, 96, 97, 98, 170 Itchen area 97 ivories see Henry of Blois, Bishop, ivories Jacobus de Voragine 248 Jaenberht, Archbishop 95 St Jerome 25–6, 126 Jesus Christ, hand/foot-washing 25, 26–7, 35–6, 37 John the Archchanter 121 John of Avranches, Bishop 247 St John the Baptist 26, 36 St John of Beverley 126 John, E. 101 John son of Ralph (probably Mayor of London) 208 Jónsbók compendium 155, 157, 164 jugs 4 and washbasin 28, 29 Justinian I 92 Justus (monk) 123 Kaiseraugst treasure 10 Kaper Koraon treasure 5, 7, 8 Kaufmann-Heinimann, A 8 Keene, D. 213 Kenilworth priory (Warws.) 238 Kerch dish 9, 11 Kerr, J. 25 al-Kind[i-], Ya‘q[u-]b 60–1 Kings Sutton (Northants) 152 Kinneil (Falkirkshire) 113 Kitchin, G.W., Dean of Winchester 221, 222, 233 Kjølbye-Biddle, B. 22, 146, 196, 252 see also Biddle, M. Repton excavation 101, 149 St Albans excavations 129, 130 Winchester excavations 77, 85, 127, 149, 196, 222–5, 223, 224, 235 ‘Winton Domesday’ 201 Klimova treasure 18 Köln-Braunsfeld vessel 20, 21 Komini cups 6 Krüger, K. 250, 251 Kusaba, Y. 225 labra (bowls) 32 lakan (mandatum tank) 34, 36 Lakenheath (Suff.), cemetery 71–2 Lambousa treasure 15–16, 17 Lampsacus treasure 10–12, 12, 13 Lantfred of Winchester, Translatio et Miracula Sancti Swithuni 182 Lapidge, M. 184, 195 Lasko, P. 243 Lastingham (Yorks.), consecration 120 Latin blessings 13 lavabo 32, 33

iconography 19–21 If this is a man (Levi) 104 Ile de France 248 Illerup (Denmark), bog deposits 60 Ine, King 82 law code 124 Ingeld, ealdorman 142, 145, 146 Ingelric (royal servant) 238 Inkberrow (Worcs.) 126 Isle of Man 170, 172, 173 260

 

INDEX lavatoria 32, 34, 38 lead fonts see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon Leicester 116 Leofstan 203 Letter to Ecgberht (Bede) 122 Levi, Primo, If this is a man 104 Liber Wigorniensis 143 Liber Winton 201, 213, 214 Lichfield Cathedral 33, 34 Licinius 7 Life of Columba (Adomnán of Iona) 182 The Life of St Æthelwold see Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St Æthelwold Lillhärdal (Sweden), tub 155 Lilstock (Som.), font 170, 171 Lincoln 116, 117 St Paul in the Bail, grave 31 Lindisfarne, Anonymous of, Life of Cuthbert 182 Lindsey, kings of 119 Little Billing (Northants.) 152, 157, 158 liturgy 21, 26–7, 27–8, 32 Llyn Cerrig Bach, Anglesey 60 London see also Lundenwic; St Martin-in-the-Fields; St Paul’s Cathedral All Hallows Gacechurch Street 240 in Bede 115 city parish boundaries 240 cniht/cnihtas in 201, 202–3 continuity of occupation 116, 117 Covent Garden cemetery 57 in Domesday 213, 218 Mithras see Mithras Temple parish boundaries 240 St Bride’s church 54 St Nicholas Acon 246 Transport Museum 57 Victoria and Albert Museum 244 Worship Street 243 Longparish, Andover (Hants.) 89 Lowbury Hill (Berks.), grave-goods 80–1, 83 Lucius, King 219, 222 Ludlow (Salop) misericord 158 lullabies 245 Lulsley (Worcs.), font 164, 168 Lundenwic see also London; St Martin-in-the-Fields identification 49 Saxon settlement 57–8 Strand area 49, 50, 57–8 Lupus, Bishop 22–3 Lustleigh (Devon), font 164 Lycurgus cup 6 Lydius, Sermones Conviviales 245 Lypiatt Cross (Glos.) 141

McAleer, J.P. 226, 228, 232, 233 McClure, J. 120 Macrobius 10 Maelduibb, Abbot 83 Magnus Maximus 114 Malmesbury Abbey (Wilts.) 83 Man, Isle of 170, 172, 173 mandatum (foot-washing) 32, 34, 37 Map, Walter 237, 241 Marchwood (Hants.), coin finds 96–7 St Martin of Tours 25 St Mary Magdalene 27–8 Matilda, Empress 208 Maunday Thursday liturgy 26–7, 27–8, 32 Mayr-Harting, H. 119 Melbury Bubb, font 155, 167, 168, 175 Meon valley (Hants.), coin finds 96, 97 metal-detector finds, early medieval Hampshire background 87 coins see coin finds, Hampshire economy and landscape 96–8 recording of 87–8 recovery/distribution 88–9 strap-ends 89 Metcalf, D.M. 93, 127 Micheldever (Hants.), coin finds 93, 94, 95, 97 Middlesex, in Domesday 213–14 Middleton, John 135 Mildenhall treasure 17–18 Milner, John 219 miqveh bath 37 Mithras Temple (London) bowls 30 caskets 6 monasteries, foot/hand-washing 32–4, 37–8 Monastery of the Syrians (Wadi Natrun) 34 Monkwearmouth-Jarrow 119, 120–3, 126 Monte Cassino (Italy) 247, 251 Mora (Sweden), well-head 159 Moralia in Job (Gregory the Great) 246 Morestead (Hants.), coin find 94 Morris, R. 75 Morton, A.D. 94 Morwenstow (Cornw.), font 161, 164 Mosaic command 26 Mowbray, Roger de 237–8 Much Wenlock Priory (Salop) 32, 33 Mucking (Essex) cemeteries 71–2 Muirchú moccu Macthéni, Life of Patrick 182 Mundell Mango, M. 13, 14 Narbonne model (Holy Sepulchre) 252 Narratio Metrica de Sancto Swithuno (Wulfstan) 182 Nash, John 49 Nechtansmere, battle of 113 Nemesianus, Eclogues 17 261

INDEX Neuvy-St-Sépulchre (Indre, France), Tomb of Christ 252 Neville, J 103 New Forest, coin finds 96–7 New Minster of St Oswald 42, 43 New Testament see also Old/New Testaments baptism 26 hand-washing 26 Newburgh Priory (Yorks.) 237–8 Newent (Glos.) 142 St Nicholas 246–8 boy bishops and 247–8 Nicosia lavabo 32 Niederemmel cup 6 Nigel d’Aubigny 238 Nore (near Oslo) 171, 173–4 Norfolk/Norwich, parish tithes 239–40 Norman Conquest 202 Northumbria 126 nursery rhymes 245 Nydam (Denmark), bog deposits 60

Oxford, in Domesday 215–16 Paderborn (Germany), Tomb of Christ 252 Page, W. 131 Painter, K. 31 palm cup 56 Parabiago dish 9, 11 Paray le Monial (Saône-et-Loire, France) (monastic church) 250 Paris, Matthew 129, 131, 132, 133 Paris Psalter 35 parish formation, tithes and 237–41 Parsons, D. 151 Partishow (Brecon) 152 PAS (Portable Antiquities Scheme) 87–8, 89, 96 Passio S. Albani 117 pastoral scenes 17–18 pattern-welded swords see also Saltwood swords Roman Britain 60 Paulinus 122, 124 pedilavium 27–8, 33, 34, 38 Peers, C.R. 231 Peitewinus (renter) 205 Pelagianism 21–2 Pelagius, Expositiones xiii epistularum Pauli 117 Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny 248, 249 Petronius, Satyricon 9 Pevensy Levels (Suss.) 173 Piacenza, Tomb of Christ 252 Pitt, near Winchester 89 Pliny the Elder 107, 114 Plummer, C. 109, 123–4 Plunkett, S. 137 Poltimore (Devon) 164 Poltross Burn 114 Pontius Pilate 26 Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) 87–8, 89, 96 Portchester (Hants.) excavations 89 Porto Baratti amphora 10 Portway, Andover (Hants.) 89 Potterne (Wilts), font 152, 155, 158–60, 159, 167, 175 Prestbury (Glos.) 146–7 Prittlewell (Essex) grave 37, 81–2, 84 Procopius, Bellum Gothicum 116 Projecta casket (Esquiline treasure) 30 Pucklechurch estate (Glos.) 141 pyx, Henry of Blois and 249–52

Odda, Earl 139 Odericus Vitalis 247 Odilo, abbot of Cluny 250 Odo, Bishop 247 Odyssey 25 Offa, King 95, 96 see also St Albans, when visited by Offa charter 143, 145, 146, 147 Offa’s Dyke 125 Old Radnor (Herefs.), font 163, 164 Old Sarum (Wilts.), inventory 248 Old/New Testaments see also biblical scenes hand/foot-washing 25, 26, 35, 37 relationship 20–1, 22 Oliver’s Battery (Winchester) burial 77–85 background 77 conclusion 85 enclosure 78 Fig, hanging-bowl 78, 79–80, 79–80, 82, 83, 84, 85 see also hanging bowls, Eastern Wessex burials site/excavation 77–9 skeleton 78 Opie, P. and I. 245 Orosius, Historiae adversus paganos 107–8, 110, 111–12, 113 Orton Meadows, Peterborough 60 Osbert (linendraper) 205 Osric of Hwicce 42 Osric, moneyer 95 St Oswald, Bishop 179 Oswine, King 125 Owlesbury (Hants.), coin find 93

quadrangular forms 170, 173, 175 Ramsey Abbey Psalter 243 Regenbald (royal official) 139, 147, 238 Regularis Concordia 249–50 Rhodes, J. 48 Rialton (Cornw.), font 167 262

 

INDEX Richborough (Kent) 114, 115 Rievaulx (Yorks.) abbey 248 Rigold, S.E. 247 Rimini, council 117 Roffe, D. 217 Roger de Mowbray 237–8 Roman African dishes 10 Romanesque ivories see Henry of Blois, Bishop, ivories late Anglo-Saxon fonts 151, 152, 170 Winchester see Winchester Cathedral, Romanesque West Front Rome Catacombs of Peter and Marcellinus 30 S. Maria Maggiore (church) 19–20 S. Sabina (church) 20 Schola Saxonum 125 Romney Marsh 155 Ross-on-Wye (Herefs.) 142 Rouen Cathedral 248 Roundway Down, Wiltshire 82 Rubens vase 6 Rudge, Thomas 141 Rule of St Benedict 28, 121 bathing practices 32 penance 250 St Rumwold 152, 175 Ruthwell Cross 36

burial sites 55–6, 56, 57 cabochon pendant 56, 57 glass-bead 55, 55 graveyard 52–3, 53 mud bricks/oven 54–5 National Schools building 50, 54, 55 19th cent. refurbishment 49–50 pre-Roman finds 50–1, 52 Roman activity 51–5 rubbish pits 55, 56 sarcophagi 52, 52 Saxon activity 55–6 site of fieldwork 50, 50 site origins 49 tile kiln 51, 53–4, 54 St Mary’s Church, Deerhurst font 135, 137–8, 137, 142, 143–4, 145–6, 147 reconstruction 139 St Paul’s Cathedral 238 boy bishops 248 crypt 251 St Severin sarcophagus 20 Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, library 247 Saltwood swords see also swords basic quality 67–8 cemetery site for 59 design peak 68–9 diagrammatic reconstructions 62–4 fine quality Frankish blade 65 highest quality 61, 65, 66 identification 60–1 impact of Christianity 69–70 lesser quality 65–7 pattern-welding techniques 59–60 Samson d’Aubigny 237–8, 239, 241 San Lorenzo in Lucina 34 Sardis basin and jug 34–5 Saturnalia 10 Satyricon (Petronius) 9 Seagry (Wilts.) 83 Sermones Conviviales (Lydius) 245 Servius, On Aeniad 25 settlements see cemeteries and settlements, Anglo-Saxon Seuso jugs 5–6, 5 treasure 4, 10, 13 Severus, Bishop 23 Severus, Septimius, Emperor 60, 110–11, 113, 114 Severus, Sulpicius 25 Vita Sancti Martini 182 Sevso/Seuso treasure 30 Sextus Aurelius Victor, De Caesaribus 111 Shalfleet area, Isle of Wight 98 Sharpe, R. 39 Sharpe, Sir Montagu 109

Šabac bowls 17 Sages spoons 13 St Albans 22–3 see also Verulamium at time of Offa 129–33 fishpond 133 Fishpool Street 132–3 Holywell Hill 133 Kingsbury 131–2 9th cent. view 133 Roomland 133 St Michael’s Church 131, 132 Saxon settlement 132 post-Roman occupation 129–31, 130 Forum/Basilica 131 Germanic presence 129, 133 London Gate 130, 133 Oysterfields 129, 131 Psalter 37 St Augustine Gospels 36 St Bishoi church, lakan 34, 36 St Catherine’s, Sinai 37 St-Denis, abbey 139 St Gall monastery 32 St Machutus, Maughold (Isle of Man) 170, 172, 173 St Martin-in-the-Fields, excavations background 49 263

INDEX shepherd scenes 18 Sheppard, Dick (Revd H.R.L.) 50 Sherborne (Som.) coin finds 96 continuity 117 Pontifical 243 Sidonius Apollinaris 116 Silchester (Hants.) 92 Silistra, fresco 28, 30, 31 Simmons (fisherman) 109 Sims-Williams, P. 126–7 Sisak (Croatia) 4 Sithney (Cornw.), font 167 skeuomorphism 151–2, 157 Smith, John 109 Smith, Reginald A. 77 Soba (Sudan) 34, 35 Solent area, conquest 98 Sompting (Suss.) 250 South Shields swords 60 Southampton coin finds 91, 92–3, 97 in Domesday 216 mint 95 Southwark Cathedral 54 Speyer (Germany) nave 232 Spong Hill (North Elmham, Norf.) cemetery 72 Stansted (Essex) burials 28 Stenton, Sir F.M. 120, 201 Stephanus, Life of Wilfrid 126 Stephen, King 203, 206, 249 Stewart, Sir B.H.I.H (Lord Stewartby) 127 Stogursey (Som.), font 164 Stoke Bishop (Glos.) 144 Stoke Charity (Hants.), coin find 94 stone fonts see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon Strand (Lundenwic) 49, 57–8 strap-ends 89 Strozzi jug 15, 16 Stuttgart, Württembergisches Landemuseum 252 Sulpicius, Severus see Severus, Sulpicius Sutton Hoo hanging bowl 31, 31, 81–2, 84 Mound One, excavation 100 Swallowcliffe (Wilts.) 82 swords 60 see also Saltwood swords Syrian liturgy 21

Test valley, coin finds 96 Thames River, defensive stakes 107–10 Theobald, Archbishop 249 Theodore, Archbishop 113, 117, 122 Penitential 104, 239 Theodosius missorium 9 Theosophy, the 14 Thompson, Isobel 131 Thurstan, Archbishop 238 Timbingctun (Bishop’s Cleeve) 147 Tintagel (Cornw.), font 155, 161, 167, 177 Tírechán, Collectanea 182 tithes, parish formation and 237–41 Tomb of Christ 252 Totton (Hants), coin finds 96–7 Tournai fonts 249 Tournus, St Philibert (monastic church) 250 Translatio et Miracula Sancti Swithuni (Lantfred) 182 Traprain Law jug biblical scenes see biblical scenes date 5–7 description 1, 2, 3, 4 discovery 1 form 4–6 function 7–17, 38 iconography see under biblical scenes manufacture place 7 pastoral scenes 17–18 significance in Britain 22–3 treen bowls see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon Trier bishop of 23 treasure 4, 13 troughs see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon trulleum (washbasin) 28, 29, 30, 34 Trumberht 119 Trumwine, Bishop 113 Tweddle, D. 167–8 Twyford (Hants.) 89 Uckington (Glos.) 139, 141, 142 Uhtred, sub-king 142 Ulfwin (debtor) 205 Ulger, Bishop of Angers 244 Upton Bishop (Herefs.) 142 Urban II, Pope 247 Utrecht Psalter 246 Varro 8 Veggli (Norway), font-stand 170 Venice bucket 6 Vergil, Eclogues 12, 17 Vergilius Romanus 28, 29 Versus de Patribus, Regibus et Sanctis Euboracensis Ecclesiae (Alcuin) 182 Verulamium 109

Tacitus, Germania 116 Tadley (Hants.) 89 Tangmere (Suss.), font 158 Taraneš jug 4, 6–7 Telford, Thomas 132–3 Temple Balsall (Warws.) 173 La Tène tradition 60 264

 

INDEX see also St Albans Vestorius Priscus, tomb 28 Vézelay (monastic church) 250 Victoria County History 231 Viminacium bowls 17 Vince, A. 49 Vita Beati Gregorii (Anonymous of Whitby) 182 Vita Sancti Cuthberti (Bede) 25, 28, 182 Vita Sancti Martini (Sulpicious Severus) 182 Votadini 1

Chenictehalla/Chapmen’s Hall 205–7, 210 Hantachenesele 207–8 historical development 201, 210–11 occurrence 203, 204, 205 other guildhalls 208–10 coin finds 89, 93, 94, 96, 97 continuity of occupation 116 Council of 249–50 grave 31 hanging bowls burial see Oliver’s battery burial hospital of St Cross 243, 252 Hyde Abbey 205 jug (Grange Road) 28 mint 95 St Peter Whitbread 205 Tomb of Christ 252 Tournai fonts 249 Winchester Cathedral gifts to see Henry of Blois, Bishop, ivories Romanesque West Front above ground evidence 225–8, 225–30, 231 antiquarian evidence 219–20, 220, 221, 222, 222 background/summary 219, 235 central cell design 233 charnel pit 219 doorways 233 floor levels 233–4 modern investigations 222, 224–5, 234 reconstruction 231–2 upper part design 235 unexcavated west front 250 Winton Domesday 201, 213, 214 Witham hanging bowl 31 Wood, S. 121 Worcester 126, 143 see 146–7 Wormald, F. 246 Wormald, P. 121, 125, 142, 143, 144 Worrell, S. 87–8, 96 Wroxeter 39 Wulfred, Archbishop 144 Wulfstan (Cantor) of Winchester, Narratio Metrica de Sancto Swithuno 182 Wulfstan (Cantor) of Winchester, The Life of St Æthelwold 179–99 background 179 composition of text 183–4, 195–6, 197–9 date 183 error detection/correction programs 180 manuscripts 179, 183 poetic tradition 182 verse text 179–80, 181, 184–95, 197, 198 St Wulfstan of Worcester, Bishop 250 Wykeham, Bishop William 219, 225, 226, 231, 232

Wadi Natrun 34 Wadi-esh-Shemmarin 36 Wæfrith, Bishop 146, 147 Walkelin, Bishop 219, 232 Wallsend (Northumb.) 113–14 Warton, Thomas 219 washbasin (trulleum) 28, 29, 30 Water Newton (Cambs.) bowl 30–1 jug 5, 5 treasure 4, 7–8, 22 Watts, D. 22 Webb, John 244 Welbeck (Notts.) abbey 248 well-heads see under fonts, late Anglo-Saxon Wessex (Eastern) hanging-bowl burials see under hanging bowls West Hanney (Herts.), 157, 159, 164 West Heslerton (Yorks.), cemetery 72 Westbury-on-Trym (Glos.) 143, 144, 145 Westley Waterless (Cambs.) 159 Westminster Abbey 54, 139, 246 boy bishops 248 Wheeler, R.E.M. 129 Wherwell (Hants.), coin find 94 Whinney, R. 77, 78 Whitby 113 Anonymous of, Vita Beati Gregorii 182 White Bird Featherless (riddle) 245 Wight, Isle of 95, 96, 97, 98, 170 Wihtred’s code 124 St Wilfrid, Bishop of Hexham 103, 119, 120, 123, 126 William I, King 139, 201, 202 William II (Rufus), King 202, 243 William III, King 28 Williamson, P. 244, 248 Willingdon (Suss.), tank 172, 173, 174, 176, 177 Willis, Prof. Robert 220, 221, 222, 226–7, 230, 231 Winchester see also Lantfred of Winchester; Wulfstan of Winchester Bible 245, 246 boy bishops 247 Chapmen’s Hall 205–7, 210 cniht/cnihtas 265

INDEX Xanten, site 48 Yarnton (Oxon.), burials 73, 75 York 114, 117 Minster, prebend of Masham 237 Zachary, Pope 125 Zhiga’lovka jug 18

266