Palaces or minsters? Northampton and Cheddar reconsidered

Anglo-Saxon England

Volumn 25, Issue , 1996, Pages 97-121

  Blair, John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 24944486861     PISSN: 14740532     EISSN: 14740532     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0263675100001964     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. K. Hume, 'The Concept of the Hall in Old English Poetry', ASE 3 (1974), 63-74
2. J. E. A. Jolliffe, Pre-Feudal England: the Jutes (Oxford, 1933), pp. 40 and 47-52
3. B. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering: an Anglo-British Centre of Early Northumbria (London, 1977), esp. pp. 276-7 and fig. 7
4. For earlier statements of the general argument, see J. Blair, 'Minster Churches in the Landscape', Anglo-Saxon Settlements, ed. D. Hooke (Oxford, 1988), pp. 35-58, at 40-8
5. J. Blair, 'Anglo-Saxon Minsters: a Topographical Review', Pastoral Care before the Parish, ed. J. Blair and R. Sharpe (Leicester, 1992), pp. 226-66, at 239-40, 242, n. 67 and (for the present view of Northampton) 261
6. J. H. Williams, St Peter's Street, Northampton: Excavations 1973-1976 (Northampton Development Corporation, 1979)
7. J. H. Williams, M. Shaw and V. Denham, Middle Saxon Palaces at Northampton (Northampton Development Corporation, 1985)
8. The smaller sites are usefully summarized in the fiche supplement to Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, An Inventory of Archaeological Sites and Churches in Northampton (HMSO, 1985) (hereafter RCHM, Inventory)
9. For a strong statement of the 'palace' hypothesis, see also J. H. Williams, 'From "Palace" to "Town": Northampton and Urban Origins', ASE 13 (1984), 113-36
10. For the Middle Anglian group of minsters, see S. Keynes, The Councils of Clofesho (the Eleventh Brixworth Lecture, Vaughan Paper 38, Univ. of Leicester, 1994), pp. 40-6 and ill. 3
11. RCHM, Inventory, maps in pocket
12. Williams, St Peter's Street, p. 4
13. F. Lee, 'A New Theory of the Origins and Early Growth of Northampton', ArchJ 110 (1953), 164-74
14. Cf. Williams, St Peter's Street, p. 5
15. This is suggested for Northampton by J. Haslam, 'Market and Fortress in England in the Reign of Offa', World Archaeol. 19.1 (1987), 76-93, at 84-5
16. A perplexing find, to be assessed in a future paper, was a small barrow containing a burial with a scramasax which stood on top of the north castle bank: R. G. Scriven, 'The Earthwork on the Site of the Castle at Northampton', Associated Archit. Socs. Reports and Papers 15 (1879-80), 204-10, at 204
17. Full reports on the peripheral sites are: F. Williams, 'Excavations on Marefair, Northampton, 1977', Northants. Archaeol. 14 (1979), 38-79
18. J. Williams, 'Excavations at the Greyfrairs, Northampton, 1972', Northants. Archaeol. 13 (1978), 96-160, at 149 and fig. 22, no. 4
19. Sharp, 'Description of Antiquities', pl. 4, no. 7 (to be compared with Making of England, ed. Webster and Backhouse, pp. 142-3, no. 107d)
20. Williams et al., Middle Saxon Palaces, pp. 9-17
21. Compare the useful analysis of size ranges in A. Marshall and G. Marshall, 'Differentiation, Change and Continuity in Anglo-Saxon Buildings', ArchJ 150 (1993), 366-402
22. R. J. Cramp, 'Monastic Sites', The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. D. M. Wilson (London, 1976), pp. 201-52, fig. 5.14
23. For the evidence, written and archaeological, for the domestic buildings of minsters, see Blair, 'Topographical Review', pp. 260-4
24. R. Gem, 'Architecture of the Anglo-Saxon Church, 735 to 870', JBAA 146 (1993), 29-66, at 39-40
25. Gem puts Brixworth early in this sequence; for an alternative view, see E. Fernie, The Architecture of the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982), pp. 65-9
26. C. Heitz, L'architecture religieuse carolingienne (Paris, 1980), pp. 43-4
27. B. Gauthiez, 'La ré-occupation planifiée de la cité de Rouen au Haut Moyen Age', Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Rouen, ed. J. Stratford (BAA Conference Trans. for 1986, 1993), pp. 12-19, at 16-17
28. J. Barrow, 'English Cathedral Communities and Reform in the Late Tenth and the Eleventh Centuries', Anglo-Norman Durham, ed. D. Rollason, M. Harvey and M. Prestwich (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 25-39
29. N. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury (Leicester, 1984), pp. 155-60
30. B. Langefeld, 'Regula canonicorum or Regula monasterialis vitae? The Rule of Chrodegang and Archbishop Wulfred's Reforms at Canterbury', see above, pp. 21-36 of this volume, argues that the Rule of Chrodegang was unknown in England before the tenth century
31. Cf. P. Wormald, 'Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy', Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R. T. Farrell, BAR Brit. ser. 46 (Oxford, 1978), 32-95, at 43-5 and 53-4, for the social and cultural context
32. RCHM, Inventory, fiche p. 379
33. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering, pp. 70-85 and 95-118
34. W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 264-5
35. S. E. Mosford, 'A Critical Edition of the Vita Gregorii Magni by an Anonymous Member of the Community at Whitby' (unpubl. DPhil dissertation, Oxford Univ., 1988), pp. xxv-xxvi. St Gregory is certainly not one of the standard patrons of eleventh- and twelfth-century churches
36. T. Tatton-Brown, 'The Topography of Anglo-Saxon London', Antiquity 60 (1986), 21-8, at 23; Blair, 'Topographical Review', fig. 10.4
37. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 913A: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 3: MS A, ed. J. M. Bately (Cambridge, 1986), p. 65
38. V.C.H. Northants. 3 (1930), 1
39. J. H. Williams, 'Northampton's Medieval Parishes', Northants. Archaeol. 17 (1982), 74-84, at 77-8, uses as evidence for the royal status of Northampton the fact that its parochial dependencies, Upton and Kingsthorpe, were Domesday royal manors and later hundredal manors. This seems to me to underline its ecclesiastical importance, but to say nothing about its secular importance
40. D. H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 1987), pp. 366-7
41. Williams, 'From "Palace" to "Town"', pp. 126-7
42. Williams, 'Northampton's Medieval Parishes', pp. 77-8
43. M. J. Franklin, 'Minsters and Parishes: Northamptonshire Studies' (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Cambridge Univ., 1982), pp. 80-121, which gives grounds for thinking that Duston, Dallington and Hardingstone had also belonged to the mother-parish
44. F. M. Stenton, Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1970), pp. 169-70 and 177
45. Franklin, 'Minsters and Parishes', pp. 80-3
46. For a recent discussion, see J. Blair, 'Ecclesiastical Organization and Pastoral Care in Anglo-Saxon England', EME 4 (1995), 193-212
47. For the others, see J. Blair, 'The Minsters of the Thames', The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. J. Blair and B. Golding (Oxford, 1996), pp. 5-28, at 18-19 and 20
48. P. Rahtz, The Saxon and Medieval Palaces at Cheddar, BAR Brit. ser. 65 (Oxford, 1979)
49. C. and N. Hollinrake, 'The Abbey Enclosure Ditch and a Late-Saxon Canal: Rescue Excavations at Glastonbury, 1984-1988', Proc. Somerset Archaeol. and Nat. Hist. Soc. 136 (1992), 73-94
50. Rahtz, Palaces, p. 32
51. M. Williams, The Drainage of the Somerset Levels (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 63 and 72-3
52. J. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud, 1994), p. 63
53. Blair, 'Minsters of the Thames', pp. 9-12. It cannot, of course, be asserted that only minsters occupied such places, but more work needs to be done on the siting of Anglo-Saxon settlements and monuments in relation to water
54. Blair, 'Minster Churches in the Landscape', pp. 48-9 and fig. 2.3, notably Wimborne Minster, which bears a marked resemblance to Cheddar
55. P. Rahtz, 'Cheddar Vicarage, 1965', Proc. Somerset Archaeol. and Nat. Hist. Soc. 110.(1966), 52-84
56. For the range of arguments, see: R. Morris and J. Roxan, 'Churches on Roman Buildings', Temples, Churches and Religion: Recent Research in Roman Britain, ed. W. Rodwell, BAR Brit. ser. 77(i) (Oxford, 1980), 175-209
57. S. M. Pearce, 'Estates and Church Sites in Dorset and Gloucestershire: the Emergence of a Christian Society', The Early Church in Western Britain and Ireland, ed. S. M. Pearce, BAR Brit. ser. 102 (Oxford, 1982), 117-38
58. P. H. Hase, 'The Church in the Wessex Heartlands', The Medieval Landscape of Wessex, ed. M. Aston and C. Lewis (Oxford, 1994), pp. 47-81, at 48-50
59. Rahtz, Palaces, pp. 140 and 147. The coin was found in West Hall context 84/18A, with a tenth-or eleventh-century sherd (M.P.18)
60. For late use of the basketwork technique, see S. Heywood, 'The Round Towers of East Anglia', in Minsters and Parish Churches: the Local Church in Transition, 950-1200, ed. J. Blair (Oxford, 1988), pp. 169-77, at 170 and fig. 63
61. A local parallel for Cheddar in form and scale, though not on a riverine site, is the Glastonbury enclosure proposed by Warwick Rodwell, 'Churches in the Landscape: Aspects of Topography and Planning', Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon Settlement, ed. M. L. Faull (Oxford, 1984), pp. 1-23, 'circuit B' in fig. 9
62. For a recently explored example where the enclosure ditch can be clearly traced, see C. E. Lowe, 'New Light on the Anglian "Minster" at Hoddom', Trans. of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Nat. Hist. and Ant. Soc. 3rd ser. 66 (1991), 11-35
63. F. E. Harmer, Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1914), p. 17
64. translation after S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 175
65. H. Edwards, The Charters of the Early West Saxon Kingdom, BAR Brit. ser. 198 (Oxford, 1988), 67-8
66. E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1960), p. 503
67. HMC., Calendar of Wells MSS I,439
68. J. Earle. A Hand-Book to the Land-Charters, and other Saxonic Documents (Oxford, 1888), p. 432
69. D. A. E. Pelteret, Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents (Woodbridge, 1990), no. 11. The south-western analogies support the reading of 'Cheddar-minster' as defining the whole settlement nucleus (as distinct from such outlying zones as 'Cheddar-cliff or 'Cheddar-combe'), though the alternative possibility exists that it was coined to distinguish the zone immediately around the church from the palace complex
70. Cf. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 317-18, tending towards a similar conclusion as regards royal occupation of Cheddar
71. M. Aston, 'The Towns of Somerset', in Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England, ed. J. Haslam (Chichester, 1984), pp. 167-201, at 172-4
72. M. Costen, The Origins of Somerset (Manchester, 1992), pp. 136-8
73. See, for instance, R. Fleming, 'Monastic Lands and England's Defence in the Viking Age', EHR 100 (1985), 247-65
74. B. Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages (London and New York, 1995), pp. 194-7 and 235-9
75. See esp. H. F. Hamerow, 'Settlement Mobility and the "Middle Saxon Shift"', ASE 20 (1991), 1-17
76. Occasional royal centres (such as Benson (Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, pp. 26-7)) occur regularly in written sources between the pre-Viking period and the eleventh century, but there are far fewer of these than is often supposed
77. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, p. 101
78. C. R. Brühl, 'The Town as a Political Centre: General Survey', European Towns: their Archaeology and Early History, ed. M. W. Barley (London, 1977), pp. 419-30, at 426