Palaces or minsters? Northampton and Cheddar reconsidered

Palaces or minsters? Northampton and

Cheddar reconsidered

JOHN BLAIR

Since their excavation in the 1950s and early 1960s, the palace buildings atYeavering (Northumberland) and Cheddar (Somerset) have exemplified the phys-ical impact of kingship on the Anglo-Saxon landscape. When, in 1980—2, massiveeighth- and ninth-century halls were found at the heart of Northampton, thetemptation to recognize a major residence of the Mercian kings was irresistible.Thanks to archaeology, the image of the king's tun as the one fixed point in a shift-ing, uncertain world, encouraged by poetic sources and adoptedin the firstdetailedstudies of Anglo-Saxon local organization,1 was assuming concrete reality.

The importance of royal vills is certain, but there are questions to be askedabout their stability. Both Yeavering and its successor at Milfield were short-lived: abandoned in the seventh century, when English settlement was still dis-persed, unstable and non-urban, they tell us nothing about the long-term impactof palaces on the developing human landscape.2 The other potential 'palace'sites recognized as cropmarks also seem to have had relatively short lives, endingbefore the Viking age. Northampton and Cheddar, by contrast, were stable fociwhich developed continuously from their Anglo-Saxon roots into high medievalmarket centres. Yet it is arguable that they have been misread: Northamptonbecause the buildings need not be a palace at all, and Cheddar because the palacewas a secondary and peripheral element within an initially monastic complex.

This paper, a detailed critique of the evidence from two key sites, is a steptowards a broader study of the relationship between royal vills, minsters andtowns.3 Here I make no assumptions regarding the normal character of villaeregiae, about which we know less than is often supposed; my aim is to show howclosely Northampton and Cheddar conform to the normal topography andplanning conventions of minsters, about which we are rapidly learning more.

1 K. Hume, The Concept of the Hall in Old English Poetry', ASE 3 (1974), 63-74; J. E. A.Jolliffe, Pre-Feudal England: the Jutes (Oxford, 1933), pp. 40 and 47-52.

2 B. Hope-Taylor, Yeavering: an Anglo-British Centre of Early Northumbria (London, 1977), esp. pp.276-7 and fig. 7.

3 For earlier statements of the general argument, see J. Blair, 'Minster Churches in theLandscape', Anglo-Saxon Settlements, ed. D. Hooke (Oxford, 1988), pp. 35-58, at 40-8; J. Blair,'Anglo-Saxon Minsters: a Topographical Review', Pastoral Care before the Parish, ed. J. Blair andR. Sharpe (Leicester, 1992), pp. 226-66, at 239-40, 242, n. 67 and (for the present view ofNorthampton) 261.

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NORTHAMPTON

Through the 1970s Northampton saw an intensive programme of excavations,which thanks above all to the efforts of John H. Williams were prompdy andefficiendy published.4 It is now clear that the Viking takeover at the end of theninth century was followed by substandal urbanization, overlying an earlierhigh-status setdement centred on the spectacular sequence of halls. It is thispre-urban phase which needs reassessment: not because there are any doubtsabout the remains themselves, but because they may add up to something ratherdifferent from the excavators' interpretation.

Northampton lies near the head of the catchment system of the Nene Basin,at the meeting of two branches of the Nene. It was thus the highest significantpoint on the main communication artery of Middle Anglia, which flows north-eastwards into the fens past the important minsters of Oundle, Castor andPeterborough.5 The core setdement occupies a tongue of Northampton Sands,surrounded by Upper Lias Clay and enclosed by the alluvial floodplain of theconfluence. The abandoned Roman town of Duston lies 3km westwards, andthe Roman road from Duston to Irchester must have passed throughNorthampton, probably along the main west-east axis of Marefair and GoldStreet (fig. 2).6 We now know that this sort of location, a bluff of well-drainedground in the bend of a river-confluence, was especially favoured for the sitingof Anglo-Saxon minsters:7 a predeliction which may explain, in the case ofNorthampton, the slighdy unusual decision not to re-occupy the Roman town.

St Peter's church and the excavated halls lie on the extreme edge of theNorthampton Sands, bordered south and west by clay sloping down to the riveralluvium; even today St Peter's is raised on a conspicuous bluff.8 Northwardsand eastwards, at a radius of some 400m from this centre, two concentric roadsform a continuous, curving line, a striking feature in the town plan (fig. 2). Thisis a classic case of intra-mural and extra-mural roads surviving on either side ofa lost boundary feature, and it has readily been identified as the line of the first

4 J. H. Williams, St Peter's Street, Northampton: Excavations 1973—1976 (Northampton DevelopmentCorporation, 1979);J. H.Williams, M.Shaw and V. Derftiam, Middle Saxon Palaces at Northampton(Northampton Development Corporation, 1985). The smaller sites are usefully summarized inthe fiche supplement to Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, An Inventory ofArchaeological Sites and Churches in Northampton (HMSO, 1985) (hereafter RCHM, Inventory). For astrong statement of the 'palace' hypothesis, see also J. H. Williams, 'From "Palace" to "Town":Northampton and Urban Origins', ASE13 (1984), 113-36.

5 For the Middle Anglian group of minsters, see S. Keynes, The Councils of Clofesho (the EleventhBrixworth Lecture, Vaughan Paper 38, Univ. of Leicester, 1994), pp. 40-6 and ill. 3.

6 RCHM, Inventory, maps in pocket; Williams, St Peter's Street, p. 4.7 See below, n. 50.8 The coloured frontispiece of RCHM, Inventory gives a good impression of this topography.

98

Palaces or minsters? Northampton and Cheddar reconsidered

TTT Upper Lias Clay,with sand & gravel

probable Romanroad

A i.L± 7th- to 9th-cenl. (

occupation

0 100 200 300

metres

FIG. 2 Northampton: the topography and archaeology of the core area. (Street-plan afterSpeed's map of 1610, transcribed onto O S 25-" 1st edn sheet XLV.13 (1887). Sites and

buildings mainly after RCHM* Northants.; geological data corrected from information suppliedby M. Shaw.)

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town rampart.9 Given the later expansion of the town there can be no reason-able doubt that the circuit represents the boundary of Northampton at somedate no later than the eleventh century,10 but whether the urban or pre-urbanboundary it is at present impossible to say. It could be seen as a proto-burghaldefence comparable to those now recognized at some eighth-century Merciancentres,11 or as a very large example of the sort of monastic enclosure which isdiscussed below in relation to Cheddar. It is equally possible that the circuit ispost-Viking (its survival to influence the road-pattern may suggest a later ratherthan an earlier date), and that the rectilinear street-pattern within it has obliter-ated any boundary that may have enclosed the eighth-century nucleus.

Within the enclosure, and essentially confined to the Northampton Sands, isevidence for activity in the pre-Viking Christian period.12 Ground-level timberstructures, sunken-featured buildings and gullys have been revealed by variousexcavations around the halls, on sites to the north and west of St Peter's, and furthernorth-west on the casde perimeter.13 These features are of a consistent character,and they add up to a well-defined horizon of seventh- to ninth-century activity. Theimpression is of relatively dense occupation on the southern and western edges ofthe sandy peninsula, fadingaway north-eastwards and eastwards.14

9 F. Lee, 'A New Theory of the Origins and Early Growth of Northampton', Arch] 110 (1953),164—74. Excavations between the two roads were inconclusive, though they encountered whatmight be interpreted as a ditch c. 15m wide which remained open into the post-Conquestperiod: RCHM, Inventory, fiche pp. 326—7.

10 Cf. Williams, St Peter's Street, p. 5.1' This is suggested for Northampton byJ. Haslam, 'Market and Fortress in England in the Reign

of Offa', WorldArchaeol. 19.1 (1987), 76-93, at 84-5.12 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 theSite of the Castle at Northampton', Associated Archit. Socs. Reports and Papers 15 (1879-80),204—10, at 204; R. G. Scriven, 'Some Additional Notes on the Earthwork on the Site of theCastle at Northampton', ibid. 16 (1881-2), 71-2; S. Sharp, 'Description of Antiquities found onthe Site of the Casde at Northampton', ibid. 16 (1881-2), 243-51, pi. 3, no. 1; RCHM, Inventory,fiche p. 326. The scramasax survives as Northampton Museum ace. 1960.209 (ex inf. RobertMoore). This burial could have been sixth- to seventh-century or Viking-age, but in either caseit implies that the castle re-used an existing earthwork.

13 Summarized in Williams, St Peter's Street, Williams et a/., Middle Saxon Palaces; and RCHM,Inventory, fiche. Full reports on the peripheral sites are: F. Williams, 'Excavations on Marefair,Northampton, 1977', Northants. Archaeol. 14 (1979), 38-79; J. H. Williams and M. Shaw,'Excavations in Chalk Lane, Northampton', ibid. 16 (1981), 87-135; and M. Shaw, 'Excavationson a Saxon and Medieval Site at Black Lion Hill, Northampton', ibid. 20 (1985), 113-38.

14 Excavations have concentrated in the St Peter's and castle areas. The few others within theprimary circuit are small, but probably do constitute negative evidence against mid-Saxonoccupation spreading much further: RCHM, Inventory, p. 49 (map) and fiche, pp. 383-96.Recent excavations in Woolmonger Street, to the east of St Gregory's, found tenth-centuryoccupation but none of the pre-Viking period (South Midlands Archaeology, 25 (1995), 40-1, andpers. comm. M. Shaw).

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Small-finds from the halls and peripheral sites are unhelpful as indicators offunction, with two important exceptions. The first is a circular setting with arelief design of interlace knots, almost certainly a mount from an eighth-century Irish house-shaped shrine, which was found (unstratified) near the eastend of the halls.13 The second is an eighth-century writing stylus, its triangularhead decorated with gilt chip-carved interlace, found in a late-Saxon context15m south of the east end of the halls.16 Middle Saxon styli have now beenfound on several sites which are certainly or highly probably ecclesiastical,notably Whitby, Hartlepool, Jarrow, Barking, Flixborough and Brandon.17

Outside such contexts they are rare if not unknown, so it is remarkable thatNorthampton has produced two more styli: one from the Greyfriars, outside theprimary town enclosure, the other (paralleled at Whitby) from the castle, some200-300m north-west of St Peter's.18 Viewed as a group, the shrine-mount andthe three styli are suggestive of an ecclesiastical presence, sharing the distinctivematerial culture of aristocratic minsters, in eighth- to ninth-centuryNorthampton.

Turning now to the heart of the complex, the halls lay immediately east of,and on a roughly similar axis to, the parish church of St Peter (fig. 3). They weremonumental in scale, but relatively simple in plan and sequence. The timber hallwas a large version of a standard type known from several, mainly seventh-century, sites: a rectangular nave with slightly narrower square annexes at eitherend.19 After its demolition, and on basically the same site and alignment, wasbuilt a gigantic hall of plain rectangular plan, with walls perhaps just under lmthick. Subsequendy two compartments (an annexe with a linking porch?), builtwith rougher foundations, were added to the west end.20 Dating depends largelyon radiocarbon determinations from samples associated with the destruction ofthe first hall and the building of the second. These 'give a weighted mean of AD840±60, but it has to be admitted that statistically the measurements do notform a group'.21 The maximum possible range is therefore rather broad, but itseems reasonable to conclude with the excavator that the stone hall was builtsome time around the second quarter of the ninth century, and the timber hall(which by its nature had a limited life) in the eighth century.

Both halls were exceptionally large buildings: the confident identification of

15 Williams, St Peter's Street, p. 254 and fig. 109. "' Ibid. p. 260 and fig. 112.17 Ibid. p. 260; The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture A.D. 600-900, ed. L. Webster

andj. Backhouse (London, 1991), pp. 86-7,90,100-1,140 and 142-3.18 Williams, Si Peter's Street, p. 260; J. Williams, 'Excavations at the Greyfrairs, Northampton, 1972',

Northants. Archaeol. 13 (1978), 96-160, at 149 and fig. 22, no. 4; Sharp, 'Description ofAntiquities', pi. 4, no. 7 (to be compared with Making of England, ed. Webster and Backhouse,pp. 142-3,no. 107d). " Williams et at., Middle Saxon Palaces, pp. 9-17.

211 Ibid. pp. 17-26. 21 Ibid. pp. 26 and 65.

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COWDERY'S DOWN building C12

NORTHAMPTON eighth-century phase,.---".-~.?":7f •"••">

• f"":* . . . i r - - i" - -• *• . — —

NORTHAMPTON ninth-century phase

JARROW

0 10 20 30 metres

FIG. 3 The Northampton halls (after Williams et al., Middle Saxon Palaces), compared withCowdery's Down building C12 (after M. Millett and S. James, 'Excavations at Cowdery's Down',

Arch] 140 (1983), 151-279, fig. 46) and the main domestic range of the late-seventh-centuryminster at Jarrow (after Cramp, 'Monastic Sites', fig. 5.14).

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the site as a royal palace stemmed largely from the assumption that somethingso grand could only have been lived in by a king. But can this assumption be sup-ported? The timber hall is at the top end of the range of known double-annexedhalls, closely resembling, for instance, hall A3(a) at Yeavering (which was onlyone component in a larger complex), but it is rash to assume that all of thevarious, mainly earlier, cropmark sites with buildings of this scale are royalpalaces.22 Thus building C12 at the rural settlement of Cowdery's Down(Hants.) is of a similar size to Northampton, apart from the smaller annexes (fig.3). The stone hall is altogether more exceptional, and has no close parallels inAnglo-Saxon archaeology. There is, however, one other case of a long, stone-built range on a west-east alignment, and this is not royal but monastic: the pairof main domestic buildings south of the aligned churches at the Northumbrianminster of Jarrow (fig. 3).23 These are separate structures with a narrow gapbetween them, and both have internal partitions, but in floor-space and overallmass they rank only slightly below the Northampton hall.

Jarrow is the only pre-Viking minster where the main domestic accommoda-tion has been excavated;24 and there are obvious reasons for thinking that it wasexceptional in its own day, at least a century before the Northampton stone hall.Even at Jarrow and Northampton we have no idea of the scale of the peripheraldomestic buildings, nor do we know how functions on monastic (or indeedroyal) sites were distributed spatially. Our knowledge, in short, is inadequate: wesimply do not possess a range of plans from royal, noble or ecclesiastical con-texts which could justify the assertion that halls of a particular size or type werepeculiar to kings.

The strongest case for the palace hypothesis, as stressed by Williams andmore recently by Richard Gem, rests on the similarity between theNorthampton stone hall and some second-rank Carolingian palaces, notablyFrankfurt (fig. 4) and Paderborn, where halls of a similar general scale are axiallyjuxtaposed with churches; St Peter's is thus seen as the secondary component,an appendage to an initially secular residence.25 But this argument is double-edged. Doubtless at Northampton we see royal patronage and Carolingianinfluence, just as we do (surely not coincidentally) at the near-contemporarychurch of Brixworth only six miles away; both reflect the initiatives in monu-

22 Ibid. pp. 28-31. Compare the useful analysis of size ranges in A. Marshall and G. Marshall,'Differentiation, Change and Continuity in Anglo-Saxon Buildings', Arch] 150 (1993),366-402.

23 R. J. C r a m p , ' M o n a s t i c Si tes ' , The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. D . M . W i l s o n ( L o n d o n ,1976), pp. 201-52, fig. 5.14.

24 For the evidence, written and archaeological, for the domestic buildings of minsters, see Blair,Topographical Review', pp. 260—4.

25 Williams et ai, Middle Saxon Palaces, pp. 31-6; R. Gem, 'Architecture of the Anglo-SaxonChurch, 735 to 870', JBAA 146 (1993), 29-66, at 39-40.

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mental building, under strong continental influence, which can be discerned inthe late eighth and early ninth centuries.26 The issue is not patronage or influ-ence, but function: should we expect the hall of a major royal minster, built bythe same team of masons with the same resources and expertise, to be signifi-candy different from the hall of a royal palace? I suggest that we should not,once we discard anachronistic expectations of something overdy 'monastic'.Carolingian influence on an English minster is most unlikely to have producedthe sort of proto-claustral layout favoured by monks or reformed canons, as atLorsch or Rouen.27 England was markedly impervious to the various continen-tal rules for the common life, and they can scarcely have had much architecturalimpact, except perhaps at such highly exceptional sites as Wulfred'sCanterbury.28 The Northampton stone hall, which is really no more than amonumental recreation of its Insular timber predecessor, is appropriate to thesort of religious community that we might reasonably expect at this place andtime. Built shordy after Alcuin found it necessary to ask what Ingeld has to dowith Christ,29 it makes an eminendy plausible setting for the social life of a royalminster under Coenwulf or his successors.

The overall layout of the site takes us further. The hall and St Peter's churchhave normally been regarded as the two halves of a bi-polar site, but in fact the halllay between two churches: St Peter's westwards and St Gregory's a litde furtheraway to the south-east. St Peter's is twelfth-century in its present form, though itincludes re-used blocks with late Anglo-Saxon interlace carving.30 Just east of itschancel, the excavation located the east wall of a building, contemporary with thehalls and lying more-or-less on their axis, with footings resembling those of thewestern annexes of the stone hall. This may well be the east end of an earlier phaseof the church, built or extended eastwards when the hall was enlarged, but it

26 Ibid. pp. 34—44. Gem puts Brixworth early in this sequence; for an alternative view, see E.Fernie, TheArchitecture of the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982), pp. 65-9.

27 C. H e i t z , L'architecture religieuse carolingienne (Par is , 1980) , p p . 4 3 - 4 ; B. G a u t h i e z , 'La r e - o c c u p a -tion planifiee de la cite de Rouen au Haut Moyen Age', Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeologyat Rouen, ed. J. Stratford (BAA Conference Trans, for 1986, 1993), pp. 12-19, at 16-17; J. leMaho, 'Le groupe episcopal de Rouen du IVe au Xe siede', ibid. pp. 20-30, at 24—5.

28 J. Barrow, 'English Cathedral Communities and Reform in the Late Tenth and the EleventhCenturies'', Anglo-Norman Durham, ed. D. Rollason, M. Harvey and M. Prestwich (Woodbridge,1994), pp. 25-39; N. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury (Leicester, 1984), pp.155—60. B. Langefeld, 'Regula canonicorum or Regula monasterialis vitae? The Rule of Chrodegangand 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.

29 Cf. P. W o r m a l d , ' B e d e , Beowulf and t h e C o n v e r s i o n o f t he A n g l o - S a x o n Ar i s toc racy ' , Bede andAnglo-Saxon England, ed. R. T. Farrell, BAR Brit. ser. 46 (Oxford , 1978), 3 2 - 9 5 , at 4 3 - 5 and53—4, for the social a n d cultural context .

30 RCHM, Inventory, pp. 57-9 and fiche pp. 371-8. Martin Biddle (pers. comm. 1995) also notesthat St Peter's contains 'megalithic' column-shafts which seem 'out of place as post-Conquest'.

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cannot be used to date the first foundation of a church on this site. The south-eastern church, St Gregory's, was demolished in 1840, but its site is known andthere is a record of a Norman arcade.31 More to the point, a group of orientatedburials found some 15m to its south gave three radiocarbon determinationscentred on A.D. 615,720 and 840.32 These were clearly not part of a continuouscemetery around St Peter's, and they strongly suggest that there was a churchsomewhere in the neighbourhood of St Gregory's by the eighth century.

Here then is another flaw in the Carolingian parallel: Northampton was not apalace complex with attached church, but a pair of churches with a hall (ofsimple plan if grand scale) sandwiched between them. Support for the palacehypothesis might still be sought at Yeavering, where the line of royal buildingshadpagan cult sites at both ends.33 However, there are much more obvious paral-lels in the numerous Anglo-Saxon monastic sites with two or more churches inlinear formation.34 Admittedly the Northampton layout is not strictly axial, butnor are several of the known minster complexes, where the churches wereloosely disposed in a broad west-to-east sequence: at Canterbury, for instance,the position of St Pancras's church bears comparison with that of St Gregory'sat Northampton (fig. 4).

In such monastic groups it is normal to find a main church with an apostolicdedication (most commonly St Peter, St Paul or St Andrew), associated with asubsidiary church or churches under the patronage of the Virgin or some lessersaint.35 At Northampton it is St Gregory, rather than the more normal St Mary,whose church is axially juxtaposed with St Peter's, though it may not be irrele-vant that a church of St Mary once existed only 100m to the north (fig. 2).36

Dedications to Gregory the Great can be expected to originate at the end of theseventh century or in the first half of the eighth, when the cult was at its heightin England, and they are recorded later at the minsters of Kirkdale (Yorks.), Wye(Kent), Sudbury (Suffolk) and Tredington (Warks.).37 More relevantly, a churchof St Gregory lay due west of St Paul's cathedral in London, the two formingcentral components in a longer alignment.38 Romanizing sentiment should31 RCHM,/»M?«/flr)>,fichep.379.32 Ibid, fiche p . 379; Wil l iams it at., Middle Saxon Palaces, p . 6 5 .33 H o p e - T a y l o r , Yeavering, pp . 7 0 - 8 5 and 9 5 - 1 1 8 .34 Blair, Topographical Review', pp. 246-58. 35 Ibid. pp. 249-55.36 Michael Shaw points out (pers. comm. 1995) that RCHM, Inventory mislocates St Mary's; its

correct site is marked as 'St. Mary's Burying Gd.' on Wood and Law's map (1847).37 W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 264-5; S. E.

Mosford, 'A Critical Edition of the \îta Gregorii Magni by an Anonymous Member of theCommunity at Whitby' (unpubl. DPhil dissertation, Oxford Univ., 1988), pp. xxv-xxvi. StGregory is certainly not one of the standard patrons of eleventh- and twelfth-centurychurches.

38 T. Tatton-Brown, The Topography of Anglo-Saxon London', Antiquity 60 (1986), 21-8, at 23;Blair, Topographical Review', fig. 10.4.

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SS. Peier & Paul;! , Si. Mary ;St. Pancras

CANTERBURY St. Augustine's

0

JNORTHAMPTON eighth-century phase

50

St. Gregory

graves

O o

o ••:

O o

St. Gregory

NORTHAMPTON ninth-century phase graves

FRANKFURT

FIG. 4 The seventh-century churches of St Augustine's minster at Canterbury (after Blair,Topographical Review', fig. 10.8), compared with the two phases of the Northampton

complex (after Williams et al, Middle Saxon Palaces, figs. 22-5) and the Carolingian palace atFrankfurt (ibid. fig. 16).

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come as no surprise in Offa's Mercia, but so specialized a dedication is mostlikely to occur in association with a mainstream one (St Pancras's at Canterburyis again a relevant parallel). There are thus grounds for thinking that the twin-ning of Peter with Gregory was planned from the start, to form an integratedreligious site encapsulating the hall. No other church group has yet been foundto include a domestic building, but this is hardly surprising given the transienceof Anglo-Saxon halls (in contrast to the standard practice of rebuildingchurches in situ); as already noted, Jarrow is so far the only pre-Viking minsterwhere the main domestic building can be located at all.

Written sources are only indirectly useful, for Northampton is unrecordeduntil after the destruction of the second hall. It is first mentioned, as a Vikingstronghold, in 913, and references up to Domesday Book suggest the normalgrowth of a late Anglo-Saxon town: an urbanization presumably reflected in thetenth-century activity over the site of the halls.39 By the mid-eleventh centuryNorthampton had emerged as the shire town, with commensurate administra-tive, judicial and fiscal functions. This is the normal history of a Viking-ageborough in a period when local government was increasingly centralized in theemergent towns, and tells us nothing about the kind of authority exercised inpre-Viking Northampton. There is therefore no historical evidence either for oragainst the previous existence of a royal palace.40

On the other hand, it is almost certain that St Peter's was a minster in the lateAnglo-Saxon period. The evidence is all post-Conquest, but points in the samedirection. First, the church housed the relics of a local saint named Raegner. Thenarrative of his inventio is late, and inspires no confidence beyond indicating athoroughly obscure cult which demanded explanation.41 It does, however, say ofBruning, the late-tenth-century priest who found the relics, that 'inter multasquas intra provinciam regebat ecclesias, etiam ecclesie Beati Petri Apostoli qui ineadem urbe sita est prefuit'. That the priest of St Peter's did indeed rule otherlocal churches is confirmed by the parochial subordination of Kingsthorpe andUpton into recent times.42 Episcopal acta of the 1160s vindicate not only the

39 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 913A: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 3: MS A , ed. J. M. Bately ( C a m b r i d g e ,1986) , p . 65 ; V.C.H. Northants. 3 (1930) , 1; Wil l iams et a/., Middle Saxon Palaces, p p . 4 3 - 4 .

40 J. H. Williams, 'Northampton's Medieval Parishes', Northants. Archaeol. 17 (1982), 74-84, at77-8, uses as evidence for the royal status of Northampton the fact that its parochial depen-dencies, 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 secularimportance.

41 Nova Ugenda Anglie, ed. C. Horstman, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1901) II, 727-31; D. H. Farmer, TheOxford Dictionary of Saints, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 1987), pp. 366-7; Williams, 'From "Palace" to"Town"', pp. 126—7.

42 Williams, 'Northampton's Medieval Parishes', pp. 77—8; M. J. Franklin, 'Minsters and Parishes:Northamptonshire Studies' (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Cambridge Univ., 1982), pp. 80-121,

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status of St Peter's as a baptismal and burial church for its chapelries, but also itsexclusive right to adminster judicial ordeals, and to accommodate the vigils andprayers of those about to undergo them, 'infra eandem villam vel infra parteseidem ville pertinentes'.43 It is hard to believe that this highly exceptional privi-lege was a post-Conquest acquisition. The correlation between pre-Viking min-sters and eleventh-century mother churches is by no means universal, but can bevery widely demonstrated:44 even if no remains had ever been found, therewould be grounds here for suspecting an early religious centre.

For what it is worth, then, there is written evidence for a minster atNorthampton but none for a palace. Arguably a palace is less likely than aminster to have left traces of its existence in such late sources. Nonetheless, amonastic explanation for the antecedents of the late Anglo-Saxon town is quiteadequate on its own, as shown by such burghal towns as Cricklade, Oxford andWareham where the nucleus can be identified as an important minster.45 Thearchaeology gives us a monumental hall best paralleled among Carolingianpalaces, but associated with a configuration of churches and an assemblage offinds best paralleled among Anglo-Saxon minsters. We are left with a balance ofprobabilities, and perhaps not everyone will agree with my own view that thebalance tips towards the monastic explanation. It must, however, be acknow-ledged that there is no clear or compelling case for Northampton as a ninth-century royal palace, nor, therefore, can it be used as independent evidence forwhat such a palace might look like.

CHEDDAR

The buildings which Philip Rahtz excavated to the north-west of Cheddarparish church46 avoid the ambiguities of Northampton, since they are conclu-sively documented as a royal residence between the tenth and thirteenth cen-turies. Here we confront a different range of problems: the minster status of thenearby church, the extent and boundaries of its original precinct and the rela-tionship, both spatial and chronological, between palace and minster (fig. 6).

Discussions of Cheddar, concentrating very naturally on the excavated palace

which gives grounds for thinking that Duston, Dallington and Hardingstone had also belongedto the mother-parish.

4 3 F. M . S t e n t o n , Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England ( O x f o r d , 1970) , pp . 1 6 9 - 7 0 a n d 177; Frankl in ,

'Minsters and Parishes', pp. 80—3.44 For a recent discussion, see J. Blair, 'Ecclesiastical Organization and Pastoral Care in Anglo-

Saxon England', EME4 (1995), 193-212.4 5 Asse r , in h is De rebusgestis JSlfredi (ch. 49: ed. W H . S t e v e n s o n (rev. ed., O x f o r d , 1959) , pp .

36—7), calls W a r e h a m a castellumbat identifies it as a monasteriumsanctimonialium. Fo r the o t h e r s ,

s e e j . Blair, T h e M i n s t e r s o f the T h a m e s ' , The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in

Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. J. Blair and B. G o l d i n g (Oxford , 1996), pp . 5 - 2 8 , at 1 8 - 1 9 and 20.46 P. Rahtz, The Saxon and Medieval Palaces at Cheddar, BARBrit. ser. 65 (Oxford, 1979).

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0

. • . • ' . ' • • ! • • " . •

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& Axbridge

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FIG. 5 Cheddar: topographical setting and water communications. LJ^fr from C. Saxton,Atlas of England and Wales (c. 1588); Uwer. after O S 1-" 1st edn sheet XIX (1817).

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area, have tended to forget that in proportion to the overall topography of thesettlement that area is tiny (fig. 6). As with Northampton, therefore, it seemsuseful to start by considering the general form of the place, and speculating onwhat its location, layout and other archaeological remains might have suggestedif the palace buildings had never come to light.

Cheddar stands on a peninsula of the glacially deposited, gravelly loamknown as 'Head', where the south slope of die Mendips runs down into the allu-vium of the Axe floodplain. The Cheddar Yeo, flowing southwards fromCheddar Gorge, skirts the east side of the village and then turns sharply west-wards, cutting across the Head in a straight and clearly artificial channel whichdiverts the water from its natural southwards course (figs. 5 and 6).47 The date ofthis cut is unknown, but all field-boundaries respect it and there seems noreason why it should not be ancient, possibly even Roman (in the light of theadjoining villa) or Anglo-Saxon (in the light of the canal excavated at nearbyGlastonbury).48 Before modern drainage the Yeo was swift and strong, and itsoutflow, now carried north-westwards along a canal, was direcdy into the Axe(fig. 5); there were wharves at the significandy named 'Hythe' until the lastcentury.49 Like Northampton, Cheddar occupies what can now be recognized asa classic minster site: on a dry peninsula at the boundary between hills and flood-plain, in proximity to a navigable water-course with wharfage, and associatedwith possible medieval water-management.50

In street and tenement layout, Cheddar divides into two halves (fig. 6). Thesouthern, between the curve of Station Road and Bath Street and the canalizedYeo, shows litde regularity and contains large open spaces, including the church-yard, vicarage and palace site. The northern half is organized for a higherdensity of setdement and is much more obviously planned, with a grid of twoparallel north-south streets linked by four west-east ones.51 This again is a form

47 Ibid. p. 29. .48 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.

49 R a h t z , Palaces, p . 32 ; M . Wil l iams, The Drainage of the Somerset levels ( C a m b r i d g e , 1970), pp . 6 3and 72—3; V. E. J. Russett, 'Hythes and Bows: Aspects of River Transport in Somerset',Waterfront Archaeology, ed. G. L. Good, R. H. Jones and M. W. Ponsford, CBA Research Report74 (London, 1991), 60-6, at 63 and 65.

50 For comparanda for all these features, see Blair, 'Topographical Review', pp. 227—31; J. Blair,Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud, 1994), p. 63; Blair, 'Minsters of the Thames', pp. 9-12. Itcannot, of course, be asserted that only minsters occupied such places, but more work needs tobe done on the siting of Anglo-Saxon settlements and monuments in relation to water. Cf.below, n. 86.

51 C. and N. Hollinrake (pers. comm. 1995) compare this layout with the village plans of Dundon,Shapwick, Carhampton and Hardington Mandeville, where fieldwork suggests origins duringthe tenth to twelfth centuries.

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KXI 200 300alluvium

FIG. 6 Cheddar: the topography and archaeology of the core area. (Street-plan from O S 25-"1st edn sheet XXVII.l (1886).)

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John Blair

of topography which can be recognized in the environs of many minsters,where it can be ascribed to the formation of a lay setdement on the periphery ofa pre-urban monastic zone.52 The analogies thus suggest an interpretadon forthe southern half: a large precinct containing both church and palace, boundednorth by the curving road-line which divides the two halves, west and east by thefloodplain and the natural course of the Yeo, and south by a canal which couldhave been dug for purposes of enclosure as well as navigation. The late medievalmarket cross might then be seen as perpetuating an entrance into this precinct, ameedng-place of the lay and ecclesiastical spheres.

Apart from the palace, the only significant archaeological data came from thevicarage garden immediately west of the church, where stray finds, trenchingand the plotting of parch-marks have defined a Roman villa. Roman materialspreads westwards and north-westwards from this nucleus, and was found insome quantities on the palace site. How far the villa buildings extend eastwardsunder the churchyard is unknown, but St Andrew's church (post-Conquest in itspresent state) lies direcdy on the axis of a Roman road, exposed further west,which was cut and overlain by late Anglo-Saxon ditches and structures.53 Theconformity of the church to the villa layout is unlikely to be accidental, andRahtz raised the question of Christian continuity from the late Roman period.54

This has been argued for other south-western minsters built over villas, andseems more plausible in Somerset and Dorset than elsewhere in England,though the deliberate re-adoption of monumental but abandoned Romanstructures was widespread through western Europe and remains a clear alterna-tive.55 Whether the siting of Cheddar church on a villa reflects real or createdcontinuity is not the issue here: what matters is that it shows a usage which isalmost exclusively religious, and which in this region at least is strongly associ-

52 Blair, 'Minster Churches in the Landscape', pp. 48—9 and fig. 2.3, notably Wimborne Minster,which bears a marked resemblance to Cheddar.

53 P. Rahtz, 'Cheddar Vicarage, 1965', Proc. Somerset Arcbacol. and Nat. Hist. Soc. 110 (1966), 52-84;S. M. Hirst and P. A. Rahtz, 'Cheddar Vicarage, 1970', ibid. 117 (1973), 65-*96; Rahtz, Palaces, pp.12—13 and 32—3. A Roman ditch, enclosures and cobbled surfaces have since been found wellto the west of the villa, beyond the railway embankment: J. Hawkes, 'Archaeological Evaluationat Kings of Wessex School, Cheddar, June 1991' (AC Archaeology, unpublished typescript,copy in Somerset SMR), summarized in J. Hawkes, 'Cheddar: Kings of wessex School', Proc.Somerset Archaeol. and Nat. Hist. Soc. 135 (1991) , 1 4 2 - 3 .

54 R a h t z , Palaces, p . 372 .55 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; S. M. Pearce, 'Estates and Church Sites in Dorset andGloucestershire: the Emergence of a Christian Society', The Early Church in Western Britain andIreland, ed. S. M. Pearce, BAR Brit. ser. 102 (Oxford, 1982), 117-38; P. H. Hase, 'The Church inthe Wessex Heartlands', The Medieval Landscape of Wessex, ed. M. Aston and C. Lewis (Oxford,1994), pp. 47-81, at 48-50; Blair, Topographical Review', pp. 235-46.

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Period I Period 2

I.-):••.••••'.•••] AC t r e n c h e s 1 9 9 1

0 25 50

' • 3 7 - ,

i"1"^..—., C

i-5ss^sî'._.s«-'s'Jr.'—•—

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FIG. 7 Cheddar: the layout and contours of the earlier phases of the palace. (After Rahtz,Palaces, fig. 6, with the addition of some of the trenches dug by AC Archaeology in 1991;

heights are in feet above O. D.)

ated with early and important minsters. The relationship creates zprimafacie like-lihood that the villa-church nucleus was important from early in the middle ages,as a primary focus of the Cheddar complex.

Some 250m north-west of the church lay the palace. The excavation was fullypublished and has been much discussed since, so here we need only consider thefeatures bearing most direcdy on the origins and early use of the site. Verybriefly, Rahtz's interpretation and phasing are as follows (cf. fig. 7).56

Ditch A: A ditch of very irregular width and profile, skirting the periphery of thesite on the north and north-west. Back-filled with dumped material and silts,dated on the basis of stratified finds to a span of c. 850-930.Period 1: A long, bow-sided hall aligned north-south, with four simple ancillarybuildings. Dated to before the earlier tenth century, with a preference for themid- to late ninth century: in other words, a life-span broadly contemporarywith the slow filling-up of Ditch A. This correlation between Ditch A andPeriod 1 is integral to Rahtz's dating, though there was in fact no stratigraphicallink between them.Period2: A completely different layout comprising a west-east hall, a chapel and

56 Rahtz, Palaces, pp. 44-67.

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minor structures, overlying the Period 1 buildings. An eastern boundary ditch-system with entrance-gates was created in this phase or the next; the same maybe true of the south and west boundaries, which remained stable thereafter. Theback-filled Ditch A was replaced by the smaller, butt-ended Ditch B, running onroughly the same line and forming the north boundary of the complex. Datedto around the mid-tenth century.Period 3: Various rebuildings in situ, maintaining the Period 2 layout. The chapelwas rebuilt on a larger plan, and Ditch B back-filled using material from the oldchapel. Dated to after 991 but probably before the Norman Conquest.Period4: Expansion, including the building of a large new hall and the abandon-ment of the eastern ditch-system. Dated to around the early twelfth century.

Some later accounts of the site have taken this chronology for granted, so it isimportant to stress that the problems of phasing and dating are severe. A highproportion of features cannot be linked stratigraphically, and their associationby phase depends on a series of independent dating arguments. Anglo-Saxonfinds are generally sparse, and swamped by residual Roman material. There isextremely litde pottery before the later tenth century, and the fabrics cannot bedated with any precision. The range of uncertainty narrows from the eleventhcentury onwards, but in earlier phases it is wide. All this is made very clear byRahtz, who puts forward his scheme with due caution as the best way of makingsense of the various options. It is therefore no denigration of his exemplaryreport to suggest a revised chronology for the earlier phases, influenced nodoubt by my own perceptions of the written evidence just as Rahtz's was influ-enced by his own rather different perceptions.

If there is any respect in which Rahtz's reasoning might be faulted, it is forundue reliance on a statistically small number of stratified Anglo-Saxon coins(only five in all before the late tenth century), and failure to note signs ofresiduality. This is especially crucial for Ditch A, where the protracted spanassigned to the fills depends on the following sequence: rapid silt; secondary silt;dump-layers including huge quantities of food-bones and a coin of c. 845; uppersilt including a coin of c. 870; and humus accumulation including a coin of c.930.57 Tempting though it is to take the coins at face value, they are seriouslycompromised by one object found in the same dump-layer as the penny of c.845: a badly worn tongue-shaped strap-end belonging to a familiar tenth-century series, and dated also by its ornament to around the beginning of thetenth century.58 Given the condition of this item, it seems impossible to believethat it was lost before c. 900 at the very earliest. The conclusion that the fill of

57 Ibid. pp. 71—3 and 85-6. It may be significant that the two earlier coins are both in a damagedcondition (ibid. p. 291 and pi. XVIII).

58 Ibid. p. 282 and fig. 95, item C.A.14. Leslie Webster (pers. comm. 1995) confirms that a date ofmanufacture earlier than c. 900 is extremely unlikely.

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Ditch A above the secondary silt is tenth-century, though containing residualmaterial, is therefore hard to avoid.

This has a fundamental impact on, in Rahtz's words, 'the establishment of achronology for Period 1 by reference to the coin sequence in Ditch A'.59 ThePeriod 1 buildings themselves have virtually no associated finds beyond a fewsherds of fabrics 'G' and 'A', which are so insecurely dated that they are virtuallyuseless for discriminating between the ninth and tenth centuries.60 A coin of c.870 was found beside a Period 1 building, but in a Period 2 context where it wasclearly residual.61 It remains possible to suggest that Ditch A was open during alife-time for Period 1 spanning c. 850—930, and was then used to dump materialfrom its demolition. There are, however, no real grounds for preferring thisninth-century date of origin to a tenth-century one.62

With Period 2 the possible range is narrower, but the evidence for dating therebuilding to around 940 is still fragile. The hall, the minor buildings and theboundaries provide very litde to go on.63 The best evidence comes from the firstchapel: its architectural details, an associated halfpenny of c. 945, and the factthat material from its demolition was used to back-fill Ditch B. But here againthere are problems. The basketwork technique of the window fragments con-tinued in use well into the eleventh century.64 The coin was found in an occupa-tion layer post-dating the construction of the chapel, but this layer and the onebelow it contained sherds of fabrics 'EE' and 'C (assigned dates in the late tenthto early eleventh centuries), as well as many residual Roman sherds: the likeli-hood that the halfpenny was residual too must be strong.65 The filling of Ditch59 Ibid. p . 53 .60 Fabric 'G': 'early 1 Oth or earlier', or 'may well be of 9th-century or earlier date'; Fabric 'A': 'early

10th to early 11th', but 'too generalised a fabric to be closely datable' {ibid. pp. 310 and314—15). Doubts about the dating of this pottery are reinforced by petrological analysis byChristopher Gerrard, who writes (pers. comm. 1995) that the material classified as 'A' and 'G'actually includes several different fabrics. For ninth- to tenth-century parallels for the bow-sided 'long hall', see G. Beresford, Goltho: the Development of an Early Medieval Manor (London,1987), pp. 12 and 38—47. There are grounds for suspecting that the Goltho hall also dates fromthe tenth century rather than the ninth: R. Higham and P. Barker, Timber Castles (London,1992), p. 56.

61 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.I 8).

62 Given the massive quantities of food-bones, the plausible alternatives are (1) that Ditch A wasfilled at the inception of the Period 1 buildings, using debris carted from the minster site; or (2),perhaps more likely, that it was filled during the life-span of Period 1, maybe a decade or twoafter its inception, using palace debris. 63 Rahtz, Palaces, pp. 146 and 168.

64 Ibid. pp. 202-3 and 228-34. For late use of the basketwork technique, see S. Heywood, TheRound 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.

65 Rahtz, Palaces, pp. 196, 203 and 310. Christopher Gerrard (pers. comm. 1995) states that fabric'C actually represents several different fabrics, mostly matched elsewhere from eleventh- totwelfth-century contexts, and that fabric 'EE' is similarly dated at Glastonbury Tor.

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B is only datable to after 991, and could have happened at any time up to themid-eleventh century.66 We are driven back to arguments based on probable life-spans, and on the increasingly reliable pottery chronologies of Period 3onwards.

A mid-ninth-century date for Period 1 remains a possibility which cannot beexcluded on the available evidence. However, to accept the likely residuality ofthe coins makes it at least as plausible that both Period 1 and Period 2 should bemoved forward by some decades, which would also have the advantage ofshortening the life-spans assigned to these earth-fast timber structures. DatingPeriod 1 to c. 910-80, and Period 2 to c. 980-1050, would be entirely compatiblewith the relatively secure twelfth-century span for Period 4. This would leaveunexplained the three ninth-century coins, and three probably ninth-centurysmall-finds, recovered mainly from the dumped material filling Ditch A.67 Butthere need be nothing surprising about stray pre-Viking material on the periph-ery of a minster, and given the Roman debris also found it is entirely possiblethat the villa/church nucleus was the original source of these objects.68

Although there is no reason to think that Ditch A had a long life-span beforethe tenth-century dumping episode,69 it may have some bearing on the earliertopography of the palace environs. Along the north side of the palace it formeda shallow, flat-bottomed channel c. 5m wide, petering away to nothing in an east-erly direction. At its west end it curved gently southwards into a broad, ovalpool, up to c. 17m wide and lm deep, and further trenching and survey in 1991showed that here too it petered out.70 Rahtz was surely right71 to interpret DitchA as a drain carrying storm-water away to the Yeo (or, as now appears, into alarge sump), and it is entirely plausible that it was dug to serve the needs of thePeriod 1 palace. Yet its configuration and alignment seem designed to embrace amuch larger area, and would make better sense as a reflection of some lost orunidentified boundary feature concentric with the gende curve of Bath Street,80m to the north.

66 Ibid. p. 89.67 Ibid. pp. 282-5 and 291-2, small-finds C.A.10, 21 and 90 and coins S.C.1-3. Daring of the

small-finds remains tentative; I am grateful to Leslie Webster for her advice on this point. Ditch• A also produced two possibly ninth-century glass fragments {ibid. p. 258, no. 7).

68 Cf. ibid. p. 290: The [Roman] coins are doubtless derived from the neighbouring Roman site atCheddar Vicarage.' Twenty-five Roman coins were found, five of them in the Ditch A fills; theninth-century objects could just as easily have come from outside the site.

69 Ibid. pp. 77-80 and 83-7, concluding that the ditch is unlikely to have undergone much scour-ing or maintenance before the rapid silting.

7(1 Ibid. pp. 78—81 and figs. 6, 8 and 20-4; Hawkes, 'Archaeological Evaluation'. It is an odd featureof the 1991 test pits (Trench 2) that they lay in the same area as Rahtz's Trenches 69—73, butfound much less clear evidence for Ditch A. The non-continuance of Ditch A in a south-west-erly direction'seems, however, to be proved by the 1991 Trench 4, and by the intact Roman fea-tures located by geophysical survey in this area. 71 Rahtz, Palaces, p. 83.

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At this point it is useful to return to the overall topography of Cheddar. Thechurch stands on the Roman villa, beside the main water-course: seen againstthe general background of Anglo-Saxon preferences in siting major churches,the conclusion that it was the primary feature of the complex is hard to resist.We have also seen that the road layout shown on the earliest maps suggests aprecinct or enclosure, focused on this villa/church nucleus. Monastic enclo-sures of this general shape and size, often in the bends of rivers, can now be rec-ognized in large numbers over much of north-western Europe, and it is anentirely plausible form for an early West Saxon minster.72 In this context DitchA can be interpreted as a drain hugging the periphery of an established precinct(whatever its relationship may have been to any so far unidentified boundaryfeature), and the location of the palace can likewise be characterized as periph-eral. As with a much more illustrious site uniting royal and monastic functions,Westminster itself,73 the topography suggests the slightly awkward intrusion ofa palace into the fringe of a religious zone.

I turn now to the written evidence, which (in contrast to Northampton) iscontemporary and much to the point. Cheddar first appears in King Alfred'swill, probably written c. 880 x 888, in a rather convoluted phrase embedded in alist of estates left to Edward the Elder:'. . . 7 at Wedmor, 7 ic eom fyrmdig to£>am hiwum ast Ceodre )?aet hy hine ceosan on J?a gerad pe we aer gecwedenhaefdon, mid }?am lande aet Ciwtune 7 ]?am pe J?asrto hyraS . . .' To make anysense, the phrase about Cheddar must be read parenthetically:'... at Wedmore(and I entreat the community at Cheddar to choose him on the terms which wehave previously agreed) with the land at Chewton and what belongs to it. . .'74

From this it would seem that royal control of Wedmore, to which Chewton wasevidently attached, involved some kind of acceptance of Alfred and his heir by'the community at Cheddar', a formulation which undoubtedly describes aminster.

The clause leaves it unclear whether or not this minster was itself part of theroyal property. It can reasonably be inferred, though, that its early history was insome way bound up with that of the great estate later known as 'Wedmoreland',

72 Blair, 'Minster Churches in the Landscape', pp. 48-50; Blair, 'Topographical Review', pp. 229and 231—5. A local parallel for Cheddar in form and scale, though not on a riverine site, is theGlastonbury enclosure proposed by Warwick Rodwell, 'Churches in the Landscape: Aspects ofTopography and Planning', Studies in Iâte Anglo-Saxon Settlement, ed. M. L. Faull (Oxford, 1984),pp. 1—23, 'circuit B' in fig. 9. For a recently explored example where the enclosure ditch can beclearly traced, see C. E. Lowe, 'New Light on the Anglian "Minster" at Hoddom', Trans, of theDumfriesshire and Galloway Nat. Hist. andAnt. Soc. 3 r d ser. 6 6 (1991) , 1 1 - 3 5 .

73 Blair, 'Minsters of the Thames', pp. 12-13 and 25 and fig. 1.2.74 F. E . H a r m e r , Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries ( C a m b r i d g e ,

1914), p. 17; translation after S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great (Harmondsworth,1983), p. 175.

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centred on a large island amid the boggy moors of the Axe and Brue valleys. Inthe 680s, if notes from lost texts can be trusted, King Centwine gave 70 hides atWedmore to St Wilfrid, who gave them to Glastonbury; such a hidage must havecovered territory at least as large as the later estate and mother-parish.75

Wedmore is not recorded again in Glastonbury's hands, and in 878 the cere-mony of unbinding Guthrum's baptismal chrism took place at a royal villthere.76 This is the only evidence that kings resided at Wedmore; Edward theConfessor gave it to Bishop Giso and the community at Wells, who held it(assessed at only ten hides) as a membrumoi Cheddar royal manor in 1086.7? Thename Wedmore probably means 'hunting-moor'78 and suggests aristocratic use,but the Glastonbury- interlude (assuming that it really happened) shows thatthere was no continuous royal residence. The fact that Alfred had to make'terms' with the Cheddar community over Wedmore suggests that the linkbetween the two places was an established one, and it is possible that Cheddarminster was originally founded on the Mendip edge of the Wedmore complex.By 1176 Wedmore church controlled five chapels;79 we do not know whether itwas itself an early minster, or whether its mother-parish was formed out of oneoriginally dependent on Cheddar. There is therefore a good deal of ambiguityabout the hierarchy of these two 'central places' (which are only four milesapart), though it is clear that by the 1060s Cheddar was the royal centre andWedmore the periphery.

Further transactions between the royal house and the Cheddar communityare reflected in a problematic charter of '978' (for 968), extant in English andLatin versions, which ostensibly confirms Winchester cathedral's rights atTaunton.80 The English text states that Winchester had previously surrenderedfour Somerset estates to Edward the Elder, who had then given two of them,ten hides at Compton and twenty at Banwell, 'to the community at Cheddar inreturn for the estate at Carhampton'. The phrase pan biivon at Ceodre is renderedin the Latin version as the more explicit famulis famulabusque Domini on Ceodredegentibus, indicating not merely a religious community, but a double minster ofmen and women on the pre-Viking pattern. Although the charter is a forgerythis account is so incidental and specific, and so closely bound up with the

75 S 1667 and S 1668, S 1674 (in references to Anglo-Saxon charters, S = P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-SaxonCharters: an Annotated Iîst and Bibliography, R. Hist. Soc. Guides and Handbooks 8 (London,1968), followed by the number of the document); H. Edwards, The Charters of the Early WestSaxon Kingdom, BAR Brit. ser. 198 (Oxford, 1988), 67-8.

76 Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 85 and 317.77 S 1115; Domesday Book, fols. 86 and 89v.78 E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1960), p. 503.79 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Dean and Chapter of Wells,

2 vols. (London, 1907-14) I, 534 (Mark, Blackford, Biddisham, Allerton, Mudgely).80 S 806 (A. J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 94 and 340).

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outcome of Alfred's bequests to Edward, that it seems likely to be based ongenuine material. In fact Carhampton was in royal hands already (it occurs inAlfred's will, without qualification, only three entries before Wedmore), so thislooks like retrospective compensation to the Cheddar community for landwhich the crown had annexed some decades earlier.

What these texts show us at Cheddar during c. 880-920 is not a palace but aminster. It may have been losing estates to the West Saxon crown, but Alfredand Edward chose to treat it with respect and it was still substantially endowedin Edward's reign. Thirty or forty years later, the emphasis is different.Assemblies were held in (perhaps) 940 in villam que caekbriat Ceodre... and in 956in palatio regis in Ceodre, while King Edmund's celebrated near-accident in theGorge occurred during a hunting expedition from his Cheddar residence.81 It ishard to avoid the conclusion that a royal hunting-lodge previously sited atWedmore had been relocated at Cheddar, which henceforth appears as a royalrather than a religious centre. The church is not even mentioned in DomesdayBook, though it kept into the twelfth century a residual two hides from its oldendowment.82 Only a grant in 1068 of 'set Ceoddor mynster viiii heordas',unique witness to a compound in line with other south-western names of the'Beaminster' and 'Iwerne Minster' type, implies continuing awareness ofCheddar's monastic character.83

Given the later history of the excavated site, its identity with the palatium regisof the 940s onwards must be regarded as proven. We have seen, however, thatthere is no need to date Period 1 any earlier than the beginning of the tenthcentury, in other words to Edward the Elder's reign or possibly the later part ofAlfred's. The foundation of a royal hunting-lodge within the periphery of theCheddar monastic enclosure no earlier than c. 900-20, perhaps in consequenceof the negotiations between king and community and linked to the dismantlingof the residence at Wedmore, seems the most promising of the various possiblesolutions.84 In short, the buildings excavated at Cheddar are best seen as thephysical signs of royal life encroaching in upon the fringes of monastic life, andeventually swallowing it up. This local restructuring of royal assets must be

81 S 511 (dots represent scribal omission) and S 611; Rahtz, Palaces, pp. 16-17. S 511 is of uncer-tain authenticity and involves severe dating problems (pers. comm. Susan Kelly).

82 H M C , Calendar of WellsMSS 1,439.83 J. Eat\e,A Hand-Book to the Land-Charters, andotherSaxonic Documents ( O x f o r d , 1 8 8 8 ) , p . 4 3 2 ; D .

A . E . Pe l t e re t , Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents ( W o o d b r i d g e , 1990 ) , n o .11. The south-western analogies support the reading of 'Cheddar-minster' as defining thewhole 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 zoneimmediately around the church from the palace complex.

M Cf. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, pp. 317-18, tending towards a similar conclusion asregards royal occupation of Cheddar.

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linked to the foundation of nearby Axbridge, first mentioned in the BurghalHidage and associated with Cheddar in Domesday Book.83 It is unclear why theborough was built 3km away rather than at Cheddar itself, unless it reflects awish to distance urban development from courtly recreation. At all events it wasthanks to this circumstance that Cheddar, in contrast to Northampton, failed todevelop as a major regional town.

SOME IMPLICATIONS

Northampton and Cheddar have produced material remains of very differentkinds, and the urbanization of Northampton from the tenth century onwardshas obscured its primary character more thoroughly. Yet in location and overalltopography they are not dissimilar. In each case the main church stands near theedge of a dry terrace above river-alluvium; in each case a large curvilinear enclo-sure is formed pardy by a river-bend, partly by a boundary feature defining theother two sides. In each case, too, this enclosure forms the nucleus of secularsetdement growth, initially around the periphery but then, especially atNorthampton, encroaching in upon the core.

Purely topographical comparisons cannot, in the last analysis, give definitiveexplanations of function. Yet the fact remains that this type of site can be rec-ognized in many cases where the monastic context is undoubted, and whereno royal presence is implied or suspected. Patterns in the siting of villae regiaeare at present less clearly defined,86 but Cheddar exemplifies what may turn outto be a large category of cases in which proximity to, or annexation of, aminster was the controlling factor.87 The wider context of the Cheddararrangements is the inexorable decline of English minsters from the ninthcentury onwards, as their resources were bent ever more closely to the finan-cial and administradve needs of secular powers.88 The community there mayhave been well satisfied with the accommodation which it reached withAlfred's family, but it comes as no surprise that over the next two centuries thepalace prospered while the minster faded. At Northampton it was defensiveneeds, and then urban and administrative ones, which took over: St Peter's mayhave begun as the nucleus of a complex monastic settlement, but by dietwelfth century it was merely the senior among several churches in a county

85 M. Aston, 'The Towns of Somerset', in Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England, ed. J. Haslam(Chichester, 1984), pp. 167-201, at 172—4; M. Costen, The Origins of Somerset (Manchester,1992), pp. 136-8; Rahtz, Palaces, p. 10; Domesday Book, fol. 86.

8(1 The high-status secular complex at Sprouston lies beside a river, but is not on a site of thepromontory or confluence kind so characteristic of minsters.

87 For other probable cases, see Blair, 'Minsters of the Thames', pp. 12-14.88 See, for instance, R. Fleming, 'Monastic Lands and England's Defence in the Viking Age',

EHR 100 (1985), 247-65; B. Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages (London and New York,1995), pp. 194-7 and 235-9.

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Palaces or minsters'? Northampton and Cheddar reconsidered

town. These cases show how a site with essentially religious origins couldcome to seem essentially secular.

Recent work on Anglo-Saxon rural settlement patterns has emphasized theirimpermanence and instability, and it has yet to be shown that royal villae wereexceptions.89 Doubtless if we could excavate Offa's Tamworth we would findgrand buildings in the Carolingian mould, and Asser wrote of Alfred's 'royalhalls and chambers marvellously constructed of stone and wood'.90 But wereally cannot assume that the ordinary run of villae regiae were so monumental orso permanent, at any rate before the tenth century. A related assumption, that inbi-polar complexes (with palace and church juxtaposed) the palace necessarilycame first,91 has been too readily transposed from the major towns of post-Roman Europe. Thepraetorium of the Gallic ciuitas, with its 'continuity of publicauthority . . . over a period which now extends for far more than one and halfmillenia',92 is not a useful analogy for Northampton or Cheddar. If the Cheddarsequence has a continental prototype, it is rather the suburban or rural'monastery-palace' of Charlemagne and his heirs.93

There is of course a point beyond which the distinction between royal palaceand royal minster becomes anachronistic. Yet the various strands of evidence dosuggest that topographically the major minsters really were different from villaeregiae in the pre-Viking period, above all in their stability: it is arguable that theywere the real fixtures in a shifting world, until secular institutions crystallizedaround them during the ninth to eleventh centuries. Future work on Anglo-Saxon settlement should at least keep this model of 'central places' in view,alongside the other models which have hitherto been more widely accepted.94

89 See esp. H. F. Hamerow, 'Settlement Mobility and the "Middle Saxon Shift"\ASE 20 (1991),1-17. Occasional royal centres (such as Benson (Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, pp. 26-7)) occurregularly in written sources between the pre-Viking period and the eleventh century, but thereare far fewer of these than is often supposed.

90 Keynes and Lapidge,A/fred tie Great, p. 101.91 For instance, Williams, 'From "Palace" to "Town"', pp. 127-30 and 134.92 C. R. Briihl, '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 426.93 Ibid. pp. 426-7, observing that under the Carolingians 'the ruler, on a visit to a civitas, no longer

necessarily resides in apalatium intramuraneum, but in a monastery outside the walls, where theruler from now on has at his disposal a domus orpalatium of his own'.

94 My foremost thanks are to the two excavators, Philip Rahtz and John Williams, for their helpfuland constructive responses. Earlier drafts were read by Mick Aston, Steven Bassett, MartinBiddle, Sarah Blair, Glenn Foard, Richard Gem, Nancy and Charles Hollinrake, Simon Keynes,Christine Peters, Michael Shaw and Barbara Yorke, and I am much indebted to their criticismsand advice. For information and help of various kinds I am very grateful to Bob Croft,Christopher Gerrard and Leslie Webster.

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