Church Archaeology 17

Accurate, detailed descriptions of parish churches outside of academic publications are rare. Since 2000, a small team from the diocese of Southwell and Nottingham and the University of Nottingham, backed by volunteers and students, has been researching and web-publishing detailed descriptions of the history, archaeology, and fittings of churches in the diocese. Aided by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the project now has details of 384 churches and church sites in varying stages of completeness. The project has demonstrated the value of a flexible, internet-based approach for publishing church histories, and the techniques by which volunteers may be trained and managed to achieve a high quality product. It has also produced a great deal of new research, and some unexpected findings. Finally, it has provided the basis for comparative studies.

The hamlet of Hailes, Gloucestershire, is best known as the site of one of the last Cistercian monasteries founded in England. Yet, before the development of a house which would provide the mausoleum for the Earls of Cornwall and a shrine for a relic of the Holy Blood, Hailes was the site of a church and castle built by Ralph of Worcester during the tumultuous political climate of ‘the Anarchy’. Worcester’s church still stands today, immediately north of the main focus of abbey buildings, but the location of his castle has until now been uncertain. This paper reveals that the earthworks surrounding the 12th-century church are not the remains of Worcester’s castle, as has previously been believed. Instead, his fortification was probably inserted into the pre-existing Iron Age enclosure of Hailes Camp, around half a kilometre away. Together, church and castle formed a bipartite power base for the lord who had seized land from Winchcombe Abbey during a period when rights of land tenure were uncertain. While the castle occupation was short-lived, the church was later incorporated into the abbey, serving various parochial functions and perhaps even acting as an improvised gatehouse chapel.

This paper examines both the positive and negative evidence of Portable Antiquities Scheme data for medieval pilgrim souvenirs, to better understand pilgrimage in relation to three female saints’ cults: Our Lady of Walsingham, St Margaret of Antioch and St Winefride. In particular, distributional patterns of these data are analysed to examine issues of movement and variation in usage. For example, suggestions are given for the lack of material evidence for some cults, such as that of St Winefride, considering the possibility that a quantity of pilgrim souvenirs were either organic or were naturally occurring. Also discussed are broader cultural trends across the medieval religious landscape, as well as directions for future study.

This article is a summary of archaeological work at St Paul’s Cathedral, that is the present building of 1675–1711 by Christopher Wren. The cathedral is now 300 years old and has gone through several periods of change to its fabric and surroundings. During the 18th and 19th centuries St Paul’s assumed more and more of the role of the nation’s church, which had been enjoyed by its medieval predecessor. The most important 19th-century change, during the long Surveyorship of Francis Penrose, was an opening up of the access and surroundings so that St Paul’s is now the iconic architectural centre of the City of London. From day to day, the cathedral poses management questions just like any other.

Readers of the Society for Church Archaeology’s Newsletter will have seen the sad news reported there of Lawrence Butler’s death just before Christmas 2014. By way of tribute to SCA’s former President (Fig 1), the editor of this journal thought it appropriate to commission a short piece about one aspect of Lawrence’s work in particular. As readers will know, he was an important figure in many fields of medieval and post-medieval archaeology, and he undertook significant excavations on many classes of medieval monument, but these more general works have, perhaps, occluded his contribution to a more specific field of study, which Lawrence almost re-invented for the modern era: ‘minor’ monumental sculpture of the medieval period. This was the topic that first engaged him in archaeology, and it consumed him for a period of at least 15 years between the early 1950s and the mid 1960s. Following his period of intense work on the topic, not only was it more clearly defined, but Lawrence had begun a process of cataloguing these minor sculptures that has subsequently been taken up by other scholars in various areas of the country. This tribute attempts to locate Lawrence’s work in this field by first examining his predecessors, and thereby to put his own achievement into some context. A final section notes the work of a few of his ‘continuators’ and suggests that this topic still has much to offer as an important source of information about the upper echelons of medieval society.