By Andie Byrnes and Helen Anderson, August 4th 2023
The discovery in 1991
The Holt inscribed fragment, now in the Grosvenor Museum. Photograph by Dr Roger Tomlin, University of Oxford, with many thanks for allowing Helen to use it.
In 1991 artist and archaeology enthusiast Helen Anderson was driving over the Farndon-Holt bridge, about 11 miles (c.18km) south of Chester, when she noticed some activity and bare soil surfaces in the normally grassy nearby field associated with the Roman tile-works and its ancillary buildings overlooking the Dee. She had recently started to focus on Roman archaeology and to visit Roman sites, and although she had spent her childhood locally in Churton, she had only recently been reading about the Holt tileworks site for the first time. She had been intending to go and look at the site but hadn’t yet done so, and thought this might be an interesting opportunity to go and see it. She received permission from the landowner to walk over the newly-stripped surface of the field.
On the recently exposed soil surface that day, as well as sundry fragments of imbrex and tegula (roofing tiles), two of which were marked with cat and dog paw-prints and one with a finger print, she found the wonderful piece of inscribed brick shown in the photograph above right. Here is Helen talking about discovering the piece:
As I was walking through the field, which had been stripped for turf that was still being rolled and loaded, I saw a large piece of orange tile lying on the muddy surface, picked it up, turned it over and found what appeared to be writing on the underside. I could hardly believe my eyes – it was an extraordinary and quite eerie moment! My immediate thought was who I should tell about it. Later, gently cleaning it in the kitchen sink, the excitement of the incised letters appearing clearly as the soil washed out of them was something I will never forget. It felt a bit like time travel.
Aerial view of the farmland at Holt next to the River Dee where the tile-works were located
The piece was clearly broken, with a bit of the inscription missing. Helen returned to Holt a few days later, to show it the to the farmer and to see if the rest of the fragment was lying about in the field, but by then it had all been rotovated – if she hadn’t picked up the brick it probably would have been further damaged. She reckons the gods must have been with her that day!
This was six years before the establishment of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, so after after showing the find to the landowner, who gave Helen permission to keep the object, Helen sent photographs to the British Museum. The resulting correspondence offers a terrific insight into how an understanding of the significance of the object was reached. It emerged that the fragment of Helen’s brick on which the inscription was made was re-used as a form of notepad to make a quick record. At first it was thought that the fragment was a tile, but it is more likely to be a piece of lydion or sesquipedalis; these look rather like tiles because they are very thin compared with modern brickwork. Some of the letters have been sliced off at the far right, but what we are looking at is part of a coherent piece of text, a list with signatures. It was a small-sized record, containing only a few details. It measures 32cms, by 30cms, and is around 6mm thick.
Helen hard at work at the Rossett Roman Villa excavation in 2021. Photograph courtesy of Dr Caroline Pudney, University of Chester
The inscription is now recorded in various books and papers contributing to knowledge about Roman activities and everyday life in the Chester area. Although Holt is just over the Welsh border, the tiles and bricks were created for the Roman occupation in Chester.
Following very fine lunches at Pant Yr Ochain near Gresford and the White Horse in Churton, where we pored over both the artefacts and documents that Helen has assembled, including her original correspondence with Catherine John and Roger Tomlin, we decided to write a post about the inscribed fragment. Helen has now been investigating the Romans in the Chester area for three decades, and as her knowledge has grown she has excavated as a volunteer at Chester amphitheatre, the Heronbridge Roman settlement, and most recently the Rossett villa. All the documentation cited here has been provided by Helen.
First, a quick look at the Holt tile-works, which produced the inscribed brick.
The early 20th century discovery of the Holt Tile-works
The Holt brick and tile works site was recognized in the early 1600s when landowner Thomas Crue of Holt Hill suffered repeated damage to his plough and was forced to investigate. He discovered that his plough was encountering a series of fifty 2ft-tall posts, and his finding found its way into the book Roman Cheshire by W. Thompson Watkins (1886). This was noted by retired chemist and keen amateur historian Alfred Neobard Palmer who, in 1905, decided to hunt for the remains that Crue had found, accompanied by local vicar Jenkyn Jones, having sought permission from the landowner. A series of field-walking expeditions followed, uncovering plentiful fragments of Roman brick, roof tile and pottery over an area of some 20 acres.
Fold-out plan of the kilns at Holt, published by Grimes in 1930. (Scanned from my copy of “Holt, Denbighshire”)
Palmer was not an archaeologist, and the task of excavating the site was taken on by Wrexham solicitor and amateur archaeologist Arthur Acton. Work began in 1907 and continued until 1915. Although he delivered numerous lectures about the site, Acton never published his work. Fortunately a portion of his records survived, and he sold the excavation finds to the National Museum of Wales, where William F. Grimes used the data to compile a comprehensive report, complete with site plans, photographs and object illustrations. Work did not stop there, and during the 1970s Geoffrey Bevan conducted both field walking activities and an excavation, finding Roman material that filled dozens of boxes, which were donated, this time, to the Grosvenor Museum in Chester. Helen’s field-walking in 1991 added the inscription to the list of important finds, and in 2018 Holt Local History Society commissioned Archaeological Survey West to carry out a geophysical survey of the site, to fix the positions of the known buildings and, with luck, to identify any unexcavated and previously unknown structures. This demonstrated that the Holt complex was even bigger and more complex than Grimes, via Acton, had been able to determine. There is, of course, the potential for future field research, and recent work in Farndon, summarized on local historian Mike Royden’s website is beginning to expand the story over to the other side of the Dee.
What was the Holt tile-works like?
Site plan of the Roman tile and pottery work displayed in the Hidden Holt exhibition. Also in the excellent booklet accompanying the exhibition, full details in Sources below. The features shown in blue are unrecorded / unexcavated. Those in dark brown are the building locations fixed in 2018, and those in paler brown those estimated by Grimes based on Acton’s work. Click to see a bigger version with fully legible text. Source: Wrexham Heritage Service, 2021
The 20th Legion, Valeria Victrix, of the Roman army, was stationed at Chester, Roman Deva, from AD87, and the Holt works appears to have been established shortly afterwards to supply the fort and settlement at the legionary fortress. Holt’s industrial activities reaching their peak output at around AD135, and began falling out of use in the mid 3rd Century. The site was clearly a fully integrated operation combining industrial, public and domestic components.
A senior manager had his own house, complete with hypocaust (under-floor central heating), there was a public bath house, a series of kilns for the manufacture of tiles, bricks and pottery, and a barracks that may have housed workers, or alternatively a detachment of the Roman army based at Chester at this time.
The hypocaust below the drying shed. Source: National Museum of Wales
The main kiln plant at Holt, published by William Grimes in 1930.
The kilns formed two main units, a larger (139ft / 52m long, consisting of a row of six kilns) and smaller twin-kiln built on the natural bed-rock. Each kiln was rectangular and tile-lined with an arched stoke-hole for access. A round pottery kiln was also located on the edge of the main kiln complex. The oven floor consisted of a raised floor of tiles plastered with clay that were pierced with holes that acted as vents. The drying shed was provided with a hypocaust, of the same sort used in villas and bath houses. These, like the kilns, were stoked and kept hot to ensure that the tiles, pottery and bricks were dried through after firing.
Map marked by Helen to show the approximate findspot of the inscribed fragment
All of the output manufactured at the works was sent by boat downriver to Chester on the river Dee. It provided direct access to Chester, 12 miles / 19km away, passing the civic settlement at Heronbridge. The generally flat environment meant that building of roads, where needed, was not exceptionally laborious. —–
Helen wrote to the British Museum in April 1991 describing how she had found the fragment, and enclosing a high resolution photo in which the inscription could be seen clearly. The first person to reply to Helen’s letter to the British Museum was Catherine Johns F.S.A., at the time Curator of Roman Britain in the Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities in the British Museum in London. In a letter dated 18th June 1991, Catherine Johns begins “Thank you for your letter and the excellent photographs and drawing of the inscribed tile from Holt in your possession. This is an interesting and important find.” She goes on to explain that the inscription is in cursive Latin, “that it is to say, it is handwriting rather than formal lettering.” She was unable to translate the text, which is a specialist task, and sent it to Dr Roger Tomlin of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She warned Helen that the fragmentary nature of the text might impede translation. She finished by suggesting that Helen might consider presenting the piece to the National Museum of Wales, where most of the Holt material excavated in the early 20th century is held.
Helen then received a letter dated 25th June 1991, only a week after the letter written by Catherine Johns, from Dr Roger Tomlin. Dr Tomlin explained that it was by no means straightforward to decipher and transcribe the fragment, partly because of the several examples of handwriting inscribed, and the fact that it was clearly incomplete. He suggested that this was a record of expenses, with the star symbol indicating the unit of payment in denarii, and that several individuals were involved. He referred to the inscribed brick as “a welcome addition” to the corpus of Roman inscriptions in Britain. In a later letter, dated 1st July 1991, he thanked Helen for offering to take the the object to him in Oxford, for translation, whilst on a family break, and expressed the hope to meet up with Helen to discuss it. He suggested that the fragment was probably part of a lydion (or sesquipedalis), rather than a tile, a brick used for bonding-courses. When Helen met Dr Tomlin for coffee, he departed on his bicycle, in typical Oxford style, with the inscription propped up in the bicycle’s basket. ———
The inscription
The same photo of the inscribed tile found by Helen Anderson in Holt in 1996 as above, shown again so that you can review the cursive text Copyright Helen Anderson
The brick was inscribed in the still-soft surface of the wet clay before firing. The translation of the inscription by Dr Tomlin is a great example of the sort of scholarship and academic detective work that go into understanding a single object. The inscription was abbreviated, typical for this sort of note, where space was limited and standardized abbreviations were recognizable to all. As already noted, the slab was broken, possibly by ploughing, so parts of the inscription are missing, but this apparently presented few problems for Dr Roger Tomlin.
Just by looking at it, you can see that there is more than one person’s handwriting, and that’s because each person wrote his own signature. All three were men, named 1) Junius, 2) Maternus and 3) Bellettus. The final s is missing in each case due to the break. In the official transcription below, Tomlin has completed words where he knows them. The slab is a record of expenses they had incurred, but does not say how they were incurred. Junius was paid at least 4 denarii, probably more, but the break carried the other details away.
Notes about the inscription on the left, on the back of the photo above, followed ultimately by the publication of the inscription in Tomlin 2018, p.290
Front cover of Tomlin’s 2018 “Britannia Romana. Roman Inscriptions and Roman Britain.” Oxbow Books (see Sources below)
Dr Tomlin wrote about the inscription in the journal Britannia, vol.26, 1995, p.387, where it is numbered no.28 (and Helen’s role in the discovery is referenced in the footnotes). It was later included in Tomlin’s comprehensive Britannia Romana, published in 2018, which lists over 400 epigraphic inscriptions from Roman Britain. The inscription is listed on page 290 as number 11.14. Dr Tomlin observed that the three men listed were probably legionaries (although he does not rule out in the 1995 publication that they may have been auxiliaries). He says that two of the three names were commonplace Roman names, and the third, Bellettus, may have been a variant on the name Bellicus, which he describes as “popular in Celtic-speaking provinces.” All three signed their own names, meaning that they were literate.
Tomlin is particularly interested in the word sumtuaria, which is missing its p, and is the plural of the noun sumptuarium. The word is very rare, with the only example known by Tomlin appearing on a legionary pay-sheet in Masada, Israel, where it refers to food expenses. Tomlin speculates that this was a record of expenses that were to be reimbursed by headquarters at a later date, but he does question how this was supposed to work when the record took the form of a brick (which, after all, could not be divided between the three men!)
Roman soldier’s payslip from Masada, Israel. Source: Arkeonews.net
This find, recording something of the lives of three men who lived in Roman Holt, has something of the air of the Vindolanda tablets. The thin leaves of wood used at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall recorded many aspects of everyday life, also written in cursive. A selection of them are on display in London’s British Museum. One of them had a similar content to the Holt example, showing a list of people who owe money. Although it is incomplete and undated, it was possible to identify Vitalis the balniator or bath house keeper and Tagomas, one of a number of cavalrymen from northern Spain who appear on the list (also mentioning the latter’s contubernalis, or unofficial wife).
Text from vindolanda showing a list of people who owe money. Source: Vindolanda.com
————–
Publications mentioning the brick
The inscription became something of an emblem of local Roman social history, being referred to not only in academic publication, but also heritage newsletters and leaflets in Chester. Dr Tomlin suggested that it be included on the Roman Inscriptions of Britain website, and it has very recently been added to the site here, where it has been given the identifier Brit.26.28.
Here are two examples of publications aimed at the general public, collected by Helen, that mention the find and give a good idea of how it was regarded:
Source: Revealing Cheshire’s Past series: From Farms to Fortress leaflet, page 6 Industrial Activity. Cheshire County Council
Connecting with the past
The inscribed brick in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester. Copyright Helen Anderson
You can see the inscribed fragment today in the Grosvenor Museum in Chester, where it is on display in the ground floor Newstead Roman gallery, thanks to Helen requesting that it be displayed locally rather than in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. Not only would it have been difficult for local people to visit it easily in Cardiff, but the tile-works were directly connected with the legionary fortress in Chester, so this seemed like the perfect home for the inscription. Generations of local schoolchildren can have their imaginations fired by seeing the handwriting of several different Romans who lived here nearly 2000 years ago.
Helen explains that her own children were so excited and proud of her discovery of this piece of heritage that they somehow persuaded her that it should be on loan to the museum rather than donated, but she has since donated it outright, rightly deciding that it’s a piece of history that belongs to everyone.
If anyone wants to chat with Helen about the find, you can contact her via Twitter: @Helenus_. You can also contact Andie on the Contacts Page, via Twitter @BasedInChurton, or leave a comment (the Leave a Reply link is immediately under the title of the post).
Other posts on this blog about Roman Chester and Holt can be found here. ———-
Final Comments
The object that Helen found in a field in Holt, during a short window between when turf was removed and new grass sown, has multiple identities. Archaeologically and historically, it is one of a number of records of Roman Britain that together provide insights into Roman settlement and industry and particularly contribute to the narrative about the Holt tile-works. At another level it is both a clue about record keeping in Roman Holt, and an ephemeral glimpse into the everyday life of three literate Roman men who were working at the tile-works and were claiming expenses. Today, as well being a significant part of the Roman display in the Grosvenor Museum in Chester, it has made a claim for a position in Helen’s own family history. Not a bad set of achievements for one inscribed object found lost in a field. One wonders if the three soldiers ever did receive their expenses?———————
Sources:
Letters (in the private archive of Helen Anderson)
From Catherine Johns, Curator, Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities, British Museum. To Helen Anderson, dated 18th June 1991
From Dr Roger Tomlin, Wolfson College, University of Oxford. To Helen Anderson, dated 25th June 1991
From Dr Roger Tomlin, Wolfson College, University of Oxford. To Helen Anderson, dated 10th July 1991
Books and papers:
Grimes, W.F. 1930. Holt, Denbighshire: Twentieth Legion at Castle Lyons. Y Cymmrodor. Society of Cymmrodorion.
Tomlin, R.S.O. 1995. 11.14 Holt (? Bovium), in (eds.) B. C. Burnham, L. J. F. Keppie, A. S. Esmonde Cleary, M. W. C. Hassall, and R. S. O. Tomlin Roman Britain in 1994. Britannia, Vol. 26 (1995), p. 325-390
Tomlin, R.S.O. 2018. Britannia Romana. Roman Inscriptions and Roman Britain. Oxbow Books (Chapter 11, no.14, p.290-1)
The Thomas Becket ceiling boss in the Lady Chapel, Chester Cathedral. Photograph by Andie Byrnes
Introduction
Who was Thomas Becket?
The Becket Boss in the Lady Chapel of St Werburgh’s Abbey
Final Comments
Sources
Introduction
Chester Cathedral plan (annotated). Source: Wikipedia
In the 13th century, Abbot Simon de Whitchurch (1265-1291) began the construction of Lady Chapel in St Werburgh’s Abbey (which is today Chester Cathedral, and about which I have posted here, with visiting information including accessibility). It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In the ceiling, where the vaulting ribs meet, three round ceiling bosses high above the floor show religious themes. One shows the Holy Trinity and the second shows the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus. The third, shown above, shows shows the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, by four knights loyal to Henry II on 29th December 1170 in Christ Church Cathedral in Canterbury. It is one of only two Becket ceiling bosses known to survive in Britain; the other is at Exeter Cathedral (shown below left).
What these two busy little scenes in Chester and Exeter depict was a brutal and savage act of great violence. The murder of Becket was a violation one of England’s holiest precincts, a modern martyrdom, and an affront not only to the ecclesiastical hierarchy in England but to the papacy itself. All eyes turned towards Henry II. This was not the sort of attention that Henry wanted, and he spent the rest of his reign attempting to distance himself from the event.
The news of the murder spread swiftly and was deeply shocking to 12th century English and European society. The terrible events were captured by eye witness accounts, not least that of the clerk Edward Grim who attempted to intervene and protect Becket. Almost immediately miracles were attributed to Becket, and only three years later he was canonized by the pope, becoming St Thomas. His story was told in biographies of the saint, and his scenes of his life, martyrdom and miracles were rendered in wood, stone and paint, whilst relics were assiduously collected and displayed. In a world where martyrs and their deeds were factual events but remote, the real-time martyrdom of the head of the English church by representatives of the king was religious persecution in action, fresh and alarming in a way that past events might not be. It was unthinkable.
Document dating to around 1180, around a decade after the event, showing the murder of Becket, from an eye-witness account by John of Salisbury (Cotton MS Claudius BII f.341r). Source: British Library.
From the moment of his murder, people were attracted to Christ Church cathedral to commemorate Becket. His canonization made Christ Church Cathedral a formal and very desirable pilgrim destination. The shrine itself, completed 50 years after Becket’s death, became one of Europe’s top pilgrim sites.
The saint was still attracting pilgrims in the 16th century when Henry VIII, identifying the cult of Becket as a challenge to his absolute control over religious as well as secular matters, ordered that every image of the martyr should be destroyed. The systematic annihilation of Becket shrines and images contributed to the demise of Becket’s legacy, which was reinforced by further systematic defacements of Catholic artistic and architectural themes during the Reformation, including various monuments in Chester Cathedral, including the St Werburgh shrine.
Thomas Becket was the son of a Norman merchant who moved from Normandy (northwest France) to take up opportunities in London following the invasion of William I in 1066. Gilbert and his wife Matilda lived in commercial area of London called Cheapside. Gilbert rose to the position of sheriff, climbing several rungs on the social and political ladder. It is thought that Thomas Becket was born around 1118-1120.
Becket was was born into the period of civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda (mother of Henry II). He received a good formal education, first at Merton Priory (now in southwest London), and later at a school in London. In his late teenage years he went to Paris to study, in a Parisian heyday of scholarship and artistic endeavour. His studies included some of the most popular scholastic topics, including grammar, rhetoric and canon (church) law, which were essential tools for anyone wanting to make their mark on the world, but did not include any formal religious education. He returned to England in the early 1140s under the reign of Henry II, who was crowned as monarch on the death of Stephen in December 1154.
Seals of Archbishop Theobald and of Christ Church, Canterbury. Source: “Theobald. Archbishop of Canterbury” by Avrom Saltman via the Internet Archive
In the mid 1140s Becket was recommended to the Archbishop of Canterbury Theobold of Bec (c.1090-1116) and obtained a role as a clerk in the cathedral, a mainly administrative position which, however, offered opportunities for advancement. A cathedral is both the principal church of the diocese and the seat of the bishop and, as at Christ Church, often included a monastic establishment. Becket’s Paris education was probably attractive to Theobold, who had a number of similarly educated young men in his employ. Like most incumbents of the Canterbury archbishopric, Theobold was both a cleric and a diplomat, closely involved in crown matters, but had twice been exiled by King Stephen due to his intervention in political matters. He sent Becket to Auxerre in France and Bologna in Italy to study law. Law, divided into Church (canon) law and state law, was rapidly becoming an important topic in Medieval England.
Becket’s rise to power
The 12th-century Topographica Hiberniae (Topology of Ireland) by Gerald of Wales shows a rare contemporary image of the king. Source: Wikipedia
In 1154 Becket was promoted to the role of Archdeacon of Canterbury. As well as the financial rewards that enabled him to satisfy his love of luxury, his new position was sufficiently prestigious for Theobold to recommend Becket to the 21-year old Henry II as the new royal chancellor. Henry’s coronation at Westminster Abbey, following the death of Stephen, had taken place in the same year. Their professional relationship evolved into a friendship over a period of eight years as Becket flourished in a position of enormous responsibility. It was a mark of Becket’s success in this role that on the death of Theobold in 1161 Henry moved to appoint him Archbishop of Canterbury, to hold both positions simultaneously. Becket had no religious ambitions, had received no clerical training and consequently had never been ordained into the priesthood. In spite of these drawbacks, Becket was elected to the role by the monks of Canterbury and the bishops of southern England. Ordination was rushed through, and Becket was consecrated as Archbishop on 3rd June 1162. His appointment was confirmed by Pope, who sent him a pallium, a vestment that symbolized his new office and status.
Needless to say, the appointment was not universally celebrated. Quite apart from the fact that Becket had made enemies on his rise to power, decisions such as the appointment of an archbishop was one of the areas of conflict between Crown and Church. The Church thought that it should have complete autonomy over its own affairs, answerable only to the papacy and to God; but the Crown, conscious of the power and wealth wielded by the ecclesiastical institutions, wanted to exercise its own authority over the activities of the most important institutions, including Canterbury. The right to appoint the most senior ecclesiastical personnel, was only one bone of contention. The right of the Church to operate under its own canon law was another.
King Henry II and Thomas Becket arguing. Peter of Langtoft’s Chronicle, Royal 20 A II, f.7v. Source: British Library
There was no reason to think that Thomas Becket would not continue to remain completely committed and loyal to the Crown. It was therefore a very unpleasant surprise to Henry II when Becket began to take his new role seriously, resigning his position as chancellor to focus on promoting the rights of the Church and representing the authority of the papacy. From this point forward, Becket and Henry had opposing interests. Becket’s training in law put him in an excellent position for arguing that the Church, rather than the Crown, should be in charge of ecclesiastical justice, in which Church clerics who committed even violent crime would be judged not by secular courts but by the far more lenient ecclesiastical courts. There were many other disputes between the two, when Becket took a stand not only where ecclesiastical interests were involved, but in matters of state as well. Henry attempted to resolve the situation by imposing a set of “customs,” or rules adhered to in the era of Henry I, Henry II’s grandfather, assembled in the Constitutions of Clarendon to which he commanded that Becket and all the bishops defer. Although Becket at first refused to ratify the document, he and the bishops eventually submitted to pressure and signed. However, Henry was seriously annoyed and began to investigate Becket, finding grounds for ordering him to court to address a number of charges. When Becket refused first to accept the charges against him and then to reject the resulting sentence, he made the decision to flee to France.
The Abbey Church of the monastery of Pontigny. Photo by Mediocrity. Source: Wikipedia
Becket lived in exile at the Cistercian monastery of Pontigny in France from November 1164 until 1170. In exile he attempted to drum up support, but alienated Henry still further by excommunicating a number of his advisers. Pope Alexander sent papal legates to try to resolve the dispute instructing Becket to refrain from taking any more actions against the king and his court, but in April 1169 Becket excommunicated another ten royal officials. In 1170 Henry’s son Henry was crowned as the Young King, in a secondary role to Henry II order to settle any potential succession disputes. The coronation was presided over by the Archbishop of York, Roger de Pont L’Évêque. It was the right of the Archbishop of Canterbury to preside over coronations, and Becket responded to this insult by laying an interdict on England, with the pope’s permission. This forced Henry back to the negotiating table, and he came to terms with Becket on 22nd July 1170. Becket returned to England in the December of that year. One might have thought that Becket would count his blessings, but before he arrived he could not resist excommunicating the three individuals most closely associated with the coronation of the Young King, one of whom was the Archbishop of York. The three appealed to the king, who was in his Normandy territory, and it was at this point that Henry, in a rage, expressed his frustrations about Becket’s latest act of rebellion. What Henry II actually said is not recorded, but it spurred four of his knights to set off for Canterbury from Normandy. ———-
Murder in the cathedral
One of the earliest known representations of the murder of Becket (c.1175–1225). British Library Harley MS 5102, f.32. Source: Wikipedia
The knights rode from London to Canterbury. They left their armour and weapons outside the cathedral precinct, intending to arrest Becket and return him to London for trial. Becket was having none of it. Eye-witness accounts state unambiguously that Becket’s behaviour was that of a very angry man under serious threat, confronting the knights on the steps of the cathedral. Goaded by Becket’s verbal retaliation and refusal to back down, they retreated to put on their armour and retrieve their weapons, returning to slaughter the unarmed archbishop in rage. Blows of the sword to his head killed him relatively swiftly, producing an alarming amount of gore that spilled onto the floor around him. One of the swords struck him so powerfully that the sheer momentum carried it to the ground, snapping the end off the blade. Edward Grim, who attempted to intervene, was badly injured.
His murderers were Reginald FitzUrse, William de Tracy, Richard Brito (or le Breton) and Hugh de Morville. FitzUrse, whose name means “son of bear,” is often marked out on images of the murder with the image of a bear’s head on his shield. He is shown on both the Chester and Exeter bosses. Having committed the crime, the knights headed for Yorkshire where they remained for a year. Curiously, Henry made no move against them, but in 1171 Pope Alexander III excommunicated them, and 1172 they headed for Rome to seek absolution from the pope. It is thought that they were probably sent on crusade, and either died on their way, or in battle, although there are a number of unsubstantiated traditions about their ultimate fates.
The Christ Church was closed for nearly a year so that Pope Alexander III could be consulted on how to proceed so that the cathedral could be re-consecrated and returned to normal use, rejuvenated as a destination for pilgrims.
Miracles and legacy
Detail of the Canterbury Christ Church Cathedral miracle window, which shows some of Becket’s miracles. Source: Reverend Mark R Collins blog
Until his death, Becket had been a political creature, and a representative of ecclesiastical interests. He did not position himself as a man of the people, but as a newly inspired champion of the rights of the Church. This did not prevent the place of his death becoming a destination for pilgrims of all social scales, even before he was officially canonized. Curiously, Becket was not merely an emblem of devotion to the Church and a promoter of its rights in the face of opposition from the Crown, but a saint who produced miracles for the everyday person, becoming an unlikely saint to act on behalf of the general populace.
A reconstruction of the Thomas Becket shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. Source: Smithsonian Magazine
The first miracles reported following the death of Becket took place at his tomb. Hundreds of others soon followed, 703 being reported within the first 10 years, many recorded by Benedict of Peterborough. Within twenty years of the murder, no less than twenty biographies had been written about the saint including contemporary accounts including, for example, those by John of Salisbury, Edward Grim and Benedict of Peterborough, the latter listing many of his miracles. Images of him in various media appeared all over Europe, and his relics spread just as far. As the Oxford History of Saints comments laconically, “His faults were forgotten and he was hailed as a martyr for the cause of Christ and the liberty of the Church.” In short, Becket and the miracles associated with him went viral.
Fifty years after his death, a new shrine was opened with great ceremony, and St Thomas was moved into a new tomb within the shrine. It was a spectacle of gold and precious gems, and was surrounded by stained glass windows telling the story of his life and miraculous works. At the height of its popularity, it attracted over 100,000 pilgrims a year. In the Jubilee year of 1420 the shrine earned £360 for Canterbury Cathedral, which equates today to around £231,483, which could have purchased 83 horses or 620 cows (data from the National Archive’s Currency Convertor) or could have been used to build a new section of cathedral. Images and symbols of St Thomas were moulded into ampullae and badges for the hundreds of pilgrims who visited his Canterbury shrine. The shrine no longer survives; it was destroyed in 1538 under the orders of Henry VIII. ——–
The Becket boss at St Werburgh’s Abbey
The Lady Chapel
The Lady Chapel, Chester Cathedral
St Werburgh’s Abbey featured many architectural-sculptural elements which embellish the core structure of the building, providing focal points, colour and a hint of glamour. The Lady Chapel was built under Abbot Simon de Whitchurch (1265-1291). In Burne’s words, “He was evidently an outstanding character and under him the abbey flourished exceedingly.” It was a period of great prosperity for the abbey, with an income derived from, amongst other things, church pensions (a sort of tax), appropriated church tithes, gifts of houses and lands, and possibly pilgrimage to the reliquary-shrine of St Werburgh, although the new shrine to the saint was not built until the 14th century, and it is unclear how important it was as a pilgrim destination before then.
Although the earliest known Lady Chapel predates the Norman invasion, the Lady Chapel became particularly important in the 13th century when the Virgin Mary was undergoing a resurgence of devotion. The elegant, vaulted Lady Chapel St Werburgh’s was built in the 13th century. Like most Lady Chapels it was built to the east of the High Altar, projecting from the main building. Here clerics performed daily services to the Virgin Mary. It is easy to forget that most architectural elements would have been brightly painted, but the Lady Chapel in Chester Cathedral, restored to a typical colour scheme of green, blue, red and gold in the 1960s, provides an excellent example of how these components would have looked. The lancet windows at the end of the chapel date to 1869, when Gilbert Scott removed the later Perpendicular window to be more faithful to the 13th century vision.
The Holy Trinity, with God holding the arms of the crucifix in his hands
Some Lady Chapels are large and ornate, but in some cases they form smaller, more private and tranquil spaces than other chapels within a monastery or cathedral. The Chester example is delectable, its small footprint and relative height giving a sense of both intimacy and space. The reconstructed shrine of St Werburgh, a victim of the Reformation’s hostility to reliquaries and idolatry, is located at its east end, but according to Jessica Hodge was probably originally at the east end of the quire.
The ceiling bosses form a row across the centre of the chapel, from east to west. The east end was symbolically the most sacred, and it is at the east end of the chapel that the ceiling boss showing the Holy Trinity is located. In the centre is, the Virgin Mary is depicted, and at the west end is the Becket boss. The chapel was created during a period of great religious significance during the reign of Henry III, who had been crowned for the second time in 1220, the same year in which Becket’s remains were moved to a custom-built shrine on July 7th 1220, reinvigorating the already vibrant cult. The spectacular event was used by both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, and the king to help to heal the ongoing rift between the Church and the king. In 1225 Henry ratified the Magna Carta, granting the freedom of the Church. This was a momentous decade in the Church’s history and religious houses throughout Medieval England rode the crest of this remarkable period during the rest of the century with new architectural projects, rebuilding, expanding and celebrating. By 1260-1280 when the Chester Lady Chapel was built, it was the centenary of Becket’s death. It is possible that the Becket boss was installed to commemorate this event following an ecclesiastically bright start to the century.
The St Thomas ceiling boss
Ceiling bosses are both architectural and sculptural elements, usually circular or sub-circular, positioned in the ceiling where the vaulting ribs that form arches meets, either to hide the join, or acting as keystones to add structural integrity to the complex set of tensions and stresses. There can be much more to them than first glance suggests, and behind the decorated end, an undecorated portion of the boss may be inserted into the join. Examples on the floor of the cloisters provide a good idea of this, showing the decorated section that would face down, and the plain stump that would be inserted into the join.
Three relatively large stone vaulting bosses were provided at the point where seven or eight stone ribs of the slender vaulting meets, each carved and painted with a different aspect of Christian iconography. Smaller bosses were also added to at vault joins, where three or four ribs meet, sculpted into beautiful foliage, and gilded. Corbels, where the vaulting ribs begin, are also decorated with foliage. These carved stone features would all have been carved and painted prior to installation. The white painted ceiling and walls between the brightly coloured features are the perfect foil for them, providing them with reflected light and emphasizing the rich colours.
The Becket scene offers a sanitized version of the traumatic event on 29th December 1170, recycling a scene that bears only a passing resemblance to the terrible violence of reality, one version of a standardized formula for representing this event, an overstuffed and static little scene that looks rather like a posed portrait, with all of the protagonists shown full face, as though looking towards a camera. The composition is curious. Three knights dominate the scene. Sir Reginald FitzUrse is identifiable, as he is in the Exeter ceiling boss of this scene, by the bear’s head on his shield. One knight at the front strikes at Becket’s head. At the back of the group is clerk Edward Grim holding a cross and appears to preside over the scene. Becket is squashed into the lower right hand section of the scene, kneeling behind an altar, his hands held, palms outwards, in front of him. Behind him, even more squashed and barely visible, is the fourth knight, striking at Becket’s head, his sword converging with the sword of the knight in the foreground. In spite of all four swords, the most dynamic element of the scene is the way in which Becket’s hands are raised in front of him, either in prayer, supplication or in a gesture of surrender.
By contrast, the Exeter ceiling boss, which Burne says is about a century later, makes rather more compositional sense, placing Becket at the centre of the scene, looking out at the viewer with his hands raised, whilst the knights crowd in on him, intent on their deadly purpose while Grim does his best to ward them off. It has far more dramatic impact, and is easier to understand as a narrative. Both bosses share the same formulaic approach to the event.
When the chapel was built between c.1260 and 1280, over a century had passed since the martyrdom of Becket, and the detail of the real event had become less important than its symbolism and the theological narrative built around it. Becket shown praying in front of an altar conveyed the sense of Becket’s purity and holiness far more efficiently than the actual scene of anger, shouting and resistance that preceded the murder. Similarly, theGrim was not a cross-bearerclerk. However, there is an obvious dramatic advantage to showing him holding the cross as he confronted the knights in support of Becket. It remains a peculiarity of the scene that the knights and Grim are the central characters, whilst Becket is squeezed to the side.
Who was the intended audience?
Lady Chapel, Chester Cathedral
In the 13th century the eastern end of the abbey church was the exclusive domain of the abbey monks, and it is unlikely that the Lady Chapel was seen by anyone else. By the 14th century, the pilgrim status of Chester, with the miraculous holy rood in St John’s, and nearby pilgrim destinations at Holywell and St Asaph, lead to a reinvigorated interest in the Anglo-Saxon St Werburgh. A new shrine to St Werburgh was built in the 1300s and according to Jessica Hodge, was situated at the east end of the quire, presumably accessed via the nave and the north aisle. Pilgrims to the shrine would therefore have been granted access to the usually private east end, and they may have been shown the neighbouring Lady Chapel and the Becket boss as part of their pilgrimage. Some of them may have included a visit to the Nunnery of St Mary in their travels, which possessed a relic in the form of the girdle of Thomas Becket.
Lady Chapel corbel
When they were new, the monks would have been well aware of the subject matter of the ceiling bosses. As time went by they may have been repainted and repaired, but there will have been periods when they receded into the background. Even today, people don’t always look up, and even when they do, they are not always sure what they are looking at. Even if access had been generally available, the ceiling bosses are so high up that it is difficult to see the detail without either a telephoto lens or a ladder. When I was last there, I pointed the Becket boss out to a lady who asked what I was photographing, and the only way that she could make it out, even with her distance glasses on, was to see the enlarged image on the screen of my digital camera. Similarly, I only really got to grips with the subject matter on the other two bosses by photographing them and bringing them up on my computer screen later.
If one factors in the available lighting in the Middle Ages, which was confined to any light that passed through the stained glass windows, supplemented by candles, it is unlikely that these bosses were generally very visible from the ground. Compare them with those in the enclosed walkway (cloister), which are much closer to the ground and therefore much easier to appreciate.
Why were images of Becket purged during the 16th century?
The Becket boss prior to restoration. Source: Godfrey W. Matthews, The Becket Boss in the Lady Chapel, Chester Cathedral
Chester became a cathedral after the Benedictine monastery of St Werburgh was dissolved by Henry VIII. In spite of this lucky escape, it is possible that the ceiling boss was deliberately defaced at this time. Godfrey W Matthews, writing in 1934, described it as follows: “It is very badly worn, which is curious, as the two bosses to the east of it are in a good state of reservation. It is possible that some attempt had been made to deface it, for the figures suggest chipping.” Henry VIII imposed a policy of extreme prejudice against Becket, ordering all images of him to be destroyed. The tomb and pilgrim shrine in Canterbury were removed in 1538 and Becket’s mortal remains disposed of. Images throughout the country were removed.
Chester Cathedral also came under fairly savage review during the Reformation, when various architectural features and monuments were maimed or destroyed to remove overtly Catholic themes. Most of the survivors are in high places that were difficult to reach.
Are ceiling bosses works of art, or mere architectural flourishes?
Stonemason, artist and researcher Alex Woodcock, whose PhD focuses on Exeter stone sculptures, highlights how the bright colours and dark shadows at Exeter were contrasted to give reveal a sense of depth and to emphasise the three dimensional character of the bosses and corbels. This can be seen at Chester as well, where the depth of the three dimensional aspect of the sculpted forms provides a sense of theatre and allows simple shapes to be very skilfully highlighted. Woodcock points out that architectural sculpture “is often assumed to be secondary to free-standing sculpture, possibly because of its very architectural function” and that because the boss would have been there anyway, the images are seen less as art than mere decoration. As he points out, however, “in terms of the hours needed to complete the carving using hand tools, their production would appear almost prohibitive in terms of expense today.” Not all ceiling bosses and corbels are good art, but many of them are tremendous and well worth the time taken to appreciate them as stand-alone works.
Final Comments
The Lady Chapel in the 1870s. Source: Blomfield 1879
Most of us learned a version of the “turbulent priest” story at school. This was a man who stirred up hornets’ nests in his role as Archbishop of Canterbury, both within the royal court and within the cathedral. He divided opinion in his own lifetime, finding friends and making enemies. His immediate legacy was to generate a healthy income for Canterbury Cathedral, as pilgrims flocked to share in the wonders of the miracle-worker. Politically, he became an ongoing reminder of the conflict between royalty and the Church, a symbol not merely of spiritual martyrdom, but carried with him a morality tale about the dangers of the crown having absolute power over both the church and the people.
On a vaulting boss in Chester Cathedral, accompanied by the Virgin Mary and the Holy Trinity, Becket and his murderers look down on the visitor. Representing a scene of appalling violence, Becket, Grim and the errant knights are a reminder that throughout the early Middle Ages, the Church and the King were equally powerful, and serious conflicts ran the risk of monstrous outcomes.
After nearly 400 years of popularity, Becket and his legacy were terminally undermined by Henry VIII and the Reformation, destroying his images in cathedral, church, monastery and private residence. Queen Mary briefly restored both Catholicism and Becket’s status, but Elizabeth I followed her father’s lead. Although Becket is remembered today, the split from the papacy and the tidal wave of the Reformation swept away his significance and his popularity in Britain. Having said that, the lady I was chatting to in the Lady Chapel in Chester Cathedral told me that in the congregation of her Liverpool Anglo-Catholic church they follow the missal, and continue to commemorate the date of Becket’s murder. Although he survives mainly as a historical figure, Thomas Becket has not vanished from view.
Sources:
Books and papers
Bartlett, R. 2013. Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation. Princeton University Press
de Beer, Lloyd, and Speakman, Naomi 2021. Thomas Becket, Murder and the Making of a Saint. The Trustees of the British Museum
Burne, R.V.H. 1962. The Monks of Chester. The History of St Werburgh’s Abbey. SPCK.
Crouch, D. 2017. Medieval Britain, c.1000-1500. Cambridge University Press
Farmer, D. 2011 (5th edition). The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Oxford University Press
Guy, J. 2013. Thomas Becket. Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim. A 900-Year-Old Story Retold. Penguin
de Hamel, C. 2020. The Book in the Cathedral. The Last Relic of Thomas Becket. Allen Lane
Hamilton, B. 2003. Religion in the Medieval West. Arnold.
Hamilton, S. 2021. Responding to Violence: Liturgy, Authority and Sacred Places c.900-c.1150. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2021, 31 (202), p.23-47.
Hodge, Jessica 2017. Chester Cathedral. Scala Arts and Heritage
Jenkins, J. 2023. Who Put the ‘a’ in ‘Thomas a Becket? The History of a Name from the Angevins to the Victorians, Open Library of Humanities 9(1) https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/9353/
Luxford, Julian 2005. The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300-1540. A Patronage History. The Boydell Press p.21-27
Matthews, G.W. The Becket Boss in the Lady Chapel, Chester. Historic Society of Lancaster and Cheshire 86, 1934, p.41-46
Orme, N. 2017. The History of England’s Cathedrals. Impress
Schmoelz, M. 2017. Pilgrimage in medieval East Anglia. A regional survey of the shrines and pilgrimages of Norfolk, Suffolk, volume 1. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, June 2017
Webster, P. 2016. Introduction. The Cult of St Thomas Becket: An Historiographical Pilgrimage. In Gelin, M and Webster P. (eds.) The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the Plantagenet World, c.1170-1220. Boydell and Brewer.
Williams, Godfrey W. 1934. The Becket Boss in the Lady Chapel, Chester. Historic Society of Lancaster and Cheshire 86, 1934, p.41-46
Woodcock, A. 2018 (2nd edition). Of Sirens and Centaurs. Medieval Sculpture at Exeter Cathedral. Impress Books
Part 3: What we know about Bryn yr Ellyllon (and the Mold Cape)
Detail of the Mold Cape showing not only the embossed decorative themes, resembling beads, but also the holes at the top, by means of which a textile garment and/or reinforcing copper pieces could have been attached.
In Part 1 of this four part series, the early Bronze Age sites of Bryn y Ffynon (Brymbo) and Bryn yr Ellyllon (Mold) were introduced, the circumstances of their discovery described, and the two graves were set in the context of some of the early Bronze Age sites in northeast Wales. Part 2 discussed the Bryn y Ffynon (Hill of the Well) burial, probably better known as the grave of “Brymbo Man,” one of the star exhibits in the Wrexham County Borough Museum.
This third post follows a very similar format to part 2, and takes a detailed look at Bryn yr Ellyllon, sometimes referred to as “the gold barrow,” a grave that as well as the Mold Cape produced remains of what is thought to have been a second cape, as well as around 300 amber beads, some interesting bronze and copper objects and some traces of textile.
Unlike Bryn y Ffynnon at Brymbo, where some of the skeletal remains are preserved and provide important information about the individual and the burial rituals, the remains of the individual found under the big cairn at Bryn yr Ellyllon (Hill of the Goblins/Sprites/Ghosts) just outside Mold in the Alyn valley, were disposed of at the time of the grave’s discovery. This means that nearly all the focus is on the limited information available from the grave’s construction and, more helpfully, what the accompanying artefacts may reveal if they are to be considered in terms of knowledge rather than art.
Approximate location of Bryn yr Ellyllon just outside Mold, and just off the A541 to Chester (now no longer extant). Source: Coflein (annotated)
This post is structured as follows:
The grave, including both the primary and secondary burials
The grave goods
The skeleton
Funerary rituals
Dating
Who was the owner of the Mold Cape? Was he or she important?
How did the owner of the Mold Cape make a living?
Final comments on Part 2
The bibliographic sources for all four parts can be found at the end of Part 1.
The cairn, the primary grave and the secondary burial
Source: Frances Lynch 2003, table 3, p.28
The original the site of Bryn yr Ellyllon is in a field behind a row of houses just outside Mold and just off the A541. The river Alyn runs only a short walk away, at the end of the field. The cist (burial chamber) was concealed beneath a stone cairn (circular mound of stones), revealed when the stones of the cairn were removed for use as raw material to fill in a hole at the side of the road. A geophysical survey carried out in 2013 may have identified the original site of the cairn, suggesting that it was around 25m in diameter. The cairn was quite a large one, but according to Frances Lynch’s summary of cairns and barrows in the Flintshire and Wrexham areas (see table right), it is by no means the largest. Nothing is known about how the cairn was built. It is worth noting that the nearby and broadly contemporary Llong barrow was not merely thrown together but constructed in deliberate layers, and may have been expanded over time, subsequent to the initial burial. A sense of design is a frequent feature of the cairns and barrows built over cists, but the data here has been lost.
Unlike Bryn y Ffynnon at Brymbo, where any burial mound failed to survive, the Bryn yr Ellyllon site near Mold was marked by a burial cairn that performed the role of a conspicuous visual prompt, a device that connected the living, the dead and the landscape. The importance of this visual device was ongoing, as demonstrated by the later, secondary cremation burial also deposited in the cairn. Throughout northeast Wales and other regions, the sheer number of these sites suggest that it was important to broadcast ideas that were widely understood, perhaps in connection with both ancestry and territory.
Underneath the cairn it is thought that there was almost certainly a stone-lined cist, what landowner John Langford referred to as a “rough vault,” which contained the burial. This excerpt from John Gage’s 1835 report explains the doubts about the exact nature of the discovery:
I think, from the details set forth by Mr. Clough as to the state in which the things were found, that the chief deposit must have been protected from crushing weight. Is it not therefore natural to suppose that some of the large stones were so disposed that they formed something of a rude cistvaen, such as is frequently found in carns (sic), and that the labourers employed in levelling the mound, being unconscious of what they were about, did not remark it?
A rarely mentioned secondary burial appears to have been made within the cairn itself. The secondary burial is described as being two to three yards (6-9ft / 1.8 – 2.7m) “from the spot where he [the primary burial] lay.” As well as the distance from the cist within what is thought to have been a 25m diameter cairn (which puts it well within the cairn’s diameter), another reason for thinking that this urn burial was deposited in the same cairn is Reverend Clough’s comment that “examples of cremation and inhumation of human bodies are sometimes met within the same barrow,” implying that in this case too, both of the burials were contained within the same cairn.
To provide some sense of how cairns and barrows could have complex use-histories, this plan shows Barrow 1 at Trelystan, Powys, with its total of 6 burials in addition to the initial central inhumation (without grave goods). Source: Neal Johnson 2017, p.131, figure 90 (bibliography is in part 1)
In the Early Bronze Age, the re-use of a cairn for additional burials within the cairn itself is an important component of its use-history, and a common feature of Early Bronze Age cairns and barrows (see Trelystan Barrow 1, left). The second burial consisted of an urn, broken to pieces by the workmen, “and more than a wheelbarrow full of the remnants of burnt bones and ashes with it” (Gage 1835). The bones were identified at the time of the discovery as human by an experienced local surgeon. A general understanding of the term “urn” at the time included large and distinctively shaped vessels found in later Early Bronze Age and earlier Middle Bronze Age cremation burials, containing the cremated remains. The burnt wood was described as “like a sponge,” which “when pressed, discharged a black fluid”. As above, re-use may have been connected with ancestry, or with the continued importance of monuments as indicators of land-holdings. It is not known how many individuals were represented by this cremation.
The grave goods in the main burial
Confining comments to the primary burial in the cist, rather than the secondary urn cremation burial, the individual buried in the grave was accompanied by some spectacular grave goods, the famous gold cape, some additional gold pieces that may have been part of a second cape, around 300 amber beads, some bronze fragments and some fragments of textile.
Objects were not necessarily seen as passive by those that buried them, but as something containing meaning both individually and as an assemblage of artefacts by virtue of their links to the living. Often these links will have been positive, linking the deceased to the landscape and the multi-layered experiences of living. If, on the other hand, the meaning came to be perceived as dangerous or inappropriate, imbuing objects with a certain spiritual energy, then certain objects may have been seen as better off laid to rest with the dead, allowing new identities and ideas to emerge. Either scenario, as well as many others, is possible here.
The capes
When you see the Mold Cape at the British Museum or in photographs, you are looking at the outcome of tenacious conservation and restoration work. The cape was found in pieces of feather-thin crushed gold. On discovery, the landowner and the workmen divided it amongst themselves. The gold turned out to represent two objects. The first turned out to be an item of clothing, rather like a short, tight-fitting poncho, that was made from a single sheet of gold, beaten out from a golf-ball sized ingot, and punched with repeating motifs that appear, at first glance, to be thousands of gold beads of different shapes and sizes, all of which looked like multiple strings of necklaces. This is a sophisticated form of skeuomorph (an item made in one material to look like an item made in another material). Skeuomorphs often capture in a new form an older craft (for example basket designs on pottery) or an expensive object captured in a less costly material (for example pottery vessels imitating stone vessels). In this case, however, one of the most elite materials, gold, was used to capture and evoke the essence of other elite materials that made up bead necklaces (such as amber, jet, and even faience). It is an extraordinary piece of display.
The cape with holes in the top and bottom pointed out.
When the cist was uncovered, the finders made references to textile, “a coarse cloth or serge” or “braiding,” to which the cape could have been attached via the holes in top and bottom to make a much more complex garment than we see today, perhaps full-length. It has been suggested that the cape could have been lined with either leather or textile: “properly speaking, it is an ornament that was attached to the body garment beneath by means of holes pierced through the edges” (John Gage, 1835).
The extreme thinness of the gold represents an attempt to make this valuable material go as far as possible, and may have been reinforced with copper or bronze in key places to help it to maintain its shape. Reverend Clough observed that there were pieces of copper in the grave, “upon which the gold had been rivetted with small nails, and which had served as a stiffening or inner case of the armour.” This fragility means that the cape would probably have been used only for special occasions. Its design would have confined the upper arms to the side of the body, allowing only the lower arms to move. This again argues that it could only realistically have been used for special occasions, because the activities in which the wearer could participate would have been minimal. The British Museum’s Neil MacGregor likens the craftsman who made the cape to a Cartier or Tiffany, a world-class artisan, designer and producer of luxury goods.
The pieces of what are thought to have been a second cape, showing a different punched design. Source: British Museum
Pieces of gold sheet that were not part of the cape were also found, featuring a different, simpler punched pattern, and it is thought that these may have been part of another cape. Stuart Needham’s reconstruction above shows how one of these pieces might have been incorporated into a cape design. There is no suggestion that other parts of the cape would have been present in the grave to make up a second entire cape; they clearly were not. Recent studies of other incomplete objects in Early Bronze Age graves, particularly jet necklaces and ceramics, have led to suggestions that objects could be split between the worlds of living and dead, functioning in each case as heirlooms. This is discussed further in Part 4.
Other gold pieces belonging to one or other of the capes, as well as the only surviving amber bead. Source: British Museum
The gold in the main cape weighs 700g /1 1/2 lbs, which makes it the heaviest single gold object in Early Bronze Age Britain. The gold may have been mined and saved, or objects already in existence may have been melted down for recycling into the cape. Gold was found in rivers and streams in Wales and Ireland, but to collect this amount would have taken a considerable amount of time. Archaeologist and metallurgy specialist Stuart Needham attempted to locate the source of the gold employed in the the Mold cape. A potential location is the Afon Trystion and its tributary Nant-y-lladron in the Berwyn Hills, which produced low yields of panned alluvial gold. The highest concentration of panned gold was near the headwaters of the Nant-y-lladron, not far from a cluster of sites at Moel Ty-uchaf. In spite of the low yields, which may have been due to the exhaustion of the gold in prehistory, this remains the most probable source at the moment.
The beads
It is thought that around 300 amber beads were discovered when the grave was uncovered. Only one of those beads survives, and is now in the British Museum. Jewellery became more common in prehistoric graves during the Early Bronze Age, and bead necklaces made of different materials were popular in richer graves. Exotic materials became very desirable, including gold, jet and amber.
The only remaining bead, out of around 300, of a necklace of amber beads. British Museum 1852,0615.1. Source: British Museum
Amber has specific properties, apart from its colour and translucency, that were almost certainly of particular interest to those who assembled and worked into wearable ornaments. Although it looks hard, it is quite soft and easily worked. According to the Getty Museum:
It has a melting-point range of 200 to 380°C, but it tends to burn rather than melt. Amber is amorphous in structure and, if broken, can produce a conchoidal, or shell-like, fracture. It is a poor conductor and thus feels warm to the touch in the cold, and cool in the heat. When friction is applied, amber becomes negatively charged and attracts lightweight particles such as pieces of straw, fluff, or dried leaves. Its ability to produce static electricity has fascinated observers from the earliest times . . . . As a result of the action of oxygen upon the organic material, amber will darken: a clear piece will become yellow; a honey-colored piece will become red, orange-red, or red-brown, and the surface progressively will become more opaque.
Photograph of amber beads from Shaw Cairn, Mellor (Stockport, Greater Manchester), which show spacer beads, dividing the necklace into two strings, and showing how the necklace could be fastened at the back. This stringing of the necklace does not claim to show how it would have looked in prehistory. Source (and more details about the site and the necklace): Mellor Archaeological Trust
It is not known whether the number of beads originally found were the total number that made up the original necklace, or if the original necklace consisted only of beads. Early Bronze Age amber and jet necklaces often included beads of other shape. Strings were often divided by spacer plates and had devices to connect both ends at the back of the neck. Although the necklace shown left, from Shaw Cairn in Greater Manchester, does not claim to represent the original arrangement of the beads found in that grave, it does show some of the usual features of an amber necklace, including the spacer plates, which in this case divided the necklace into two strings. The approximately 300 Bryn yr Ellyllon amber beads might originally have been strung into rather more strands, not unlike the arrangement of the Llong jet necklace shown further below. The lack of spacer plates and end-piece may suggest that like the pieces of a possible second cape, the Bryn yr Ellyllon beads represent only part of another necklace, and that both parts, one remaining in the world of the living to be supplemented by new beads, the other in the world of the dead, each taking on an individual role.
The nearest source of amber was the Baltic, although it may have been available along the east coast of England too, brought from the Baltic by the ice sheets of the previous glaciation, from where it eroded out of coastal cliff faces on to beaches below. Like the cape itself, its burial in the grave withdrew it from the world of the living, confining it to the realm of the dead. The amber would have looked sensational, particularly under sunshine or firelight. Whether imported from the Baltic or the east coast of England, amber can be classified as a luxury good.
The bronze fragments
Bronze pieces from Bryn yr Ellyllon. Source: British Museum
The sixteen bronze fragments form another partial jigsaw. Bronze, an alloy of tin and copper, was almost never used for the manufacture of jewellery during the Early Bronze Age, and these are more likely to be knives or similar hand-held weapons or tools. As already mentioned, Clough also surmised that some pieces of copper nailed to bits of gold may have helped to reinforce the flimsy cape.
The copper required to manufacture the bronze was sourced from the Great Orme, the most important copper mine in Wales, and is thought to have been the largest copper mine in northwest Europe from 1800-1600 BC. although estimates vary, its vital statistics are always remarkable. In the 1990s, Andrew Lewis estimated that 12,600 tons were excavated from the tunnels and 28,000 from the open cast mine. More tunnels have been found since then, so these estimates will have risen. To make bronze, a coper-tin alloy, copper was combined with tin, all of which came from southwest England, particularly Cornwall, and was traded to various parts of Europe as well as other parts of Britain. The dependency of bronze on both southwest English tin and northeast Wales copper, argues for some long-used routes along the coasts of west Wales and southwest England.
Copper alloy pieces from Bryn yr Ellyllon. Source: British Museum
The pieces of bronze were fragmented, but some are thought to have represented the business ends of tools or weapons. Bronze was only very rarely used for making ornaments. In the British Museum photograph above they have been arranged to show how at least one set of fragments could represent a curved blade. It is not known whether or not the objects were broken prior to their addition to the grave, or whether they represent either normal decay or rough handling when they were discovered. If they were blades, they may have been broken deliberately prior to deposition.
It has also been suggested that some of these bronze fragments may have formed a reinforcing backing for the gold.
Other objects?
The metal and amber objects were taken from the grave by the workmen, but what about any other grave goods? Apart from the known but lost skeletal remains, pieces of gold (some of which were taken away at the time and made into rings and breast pins), and some textiles remnants, there is no record of anything else in the grave. Although there is no way of knowing for sure, it is entirely possible that objects that would have been archaeologically valuable but would have seemed mundane to the Victorian discoverers, such as stone tools and pieces of pottery, may have been disposed of in the same rough and ready way as the skeleton. It is clear that in the Early Bronze Age, burials were often accompanied by partial objects as well as whole ones, and this type of fragmentary data, such as pottery sherds, may have been rejected by the grave’s finders.
An example of Early Bronze Age textile from Over Barrow, Cambridgeshire. Source: Cambridgeshire Archaeology Unit, via Current Archaeology magazine
The loss of the perishable textile remains is particularly agonizing, partly because perishable items in British prehistory are so rare. Linda Hurcombe refers to this lost dataset as “the missing majority” because the greater percentage of objects and domestic building materials in prehistoric Britain would have been perishable. The textile would have added invaluable knowledge not just on Bryn yr Ellyllon but on the subject of both textile manufacture and ceremonial garments in general. It is difficult to imagine that any garment that was attached to the cape would have been anything other than remarkable. Only one of the few known textile items from Britain was made of cow hair; the rest were made of plant materials, including wild nettle fibre, which produces a soft and silky texture, and cultivated flax, which produces linen.
Nothing can be done with these thoughts, except to acknowledge that the manner in which the site was discovered may have left us without other objects that could have contributed additional knowledge. With all sites we are dealing with partial information, but this is particularly worth bearing in mind for sites that were plundered rather than excavated, like Bryn yr Ellyllon.
The skeleton
A skeleton was found in the grave under the cairn in 1833, described by the landowner who saw it as “the bones of a man,” although he cannot possibly have known whether the bones represented male or female remains, the description suggests components of a recognizable skeleton, even if only the skull and a few additional bones. Reverend Clough describes how the cape
contained within it a considerable number of small bones, vertebrae etc, but none of them longer than from two to three inches. The scull [sic], of no unusual size, lay at the upper end, but no bones of the extremities were noticed.
The skeletal remains were disposed of at the time, potentially meaning that an enormous amount of information has been lost. The British Museum apparently holds “small fragments of skull remaining after laboratory analysis” (museum number 1881,0516.2). Whether this refers to the skeleton associated with the cape, or the second burial found nearby is not stated, but it is implied by the entry for the skull fragments on the Museum’s database, which describes the cape rather than the bones. There is no indication of what the “laboratory analysis” may have been.
The questions that remain unanswered include: whether the skeleton was male or female; whether there were any congenital defects; if he or she had experienced any injuries or illnesses during life; how old the person was at the time of death; the cause of death; or how well-built or tall he or she was. There is also no possibility of any scientific analysis of the sort potentially available for Brymbo Man, such as radiocarbon dating, DNA testing or oxygen isotope analysis.
The cape being positioned on a woman to demonstrate how it would have looked on someone of her size, male or female, and demonstrating how the upper arms would have been pinned down, leaving only the lower arms free to move. Source: British Museum
The only remaining clue about the physical character and appearance of the owner of the cape is the cape itself. It was small (18ins/46.5cm wide x 9ins/23.5cm high) and could not have been worn by someone of, for example, Brymbo Man’s stature. Instead, it must have been worn by a woman, a teenager or a man who was small in stature and build. In an era where the average age of death was much younger than today and children were expected to participate in work (as demonstrated by some of the tunnels at the Bronze Age Great Orme copper mine, into which only a child could fit) a teenager, male or female, was likely to be a fully functional member of society.
We know that there was a secondary burial within the cairn in the form of a burial urn containing a cremation, but what about the possibility of other less obviously identifiable burials within the cairn?
Funerary rituals
A snapshot from the Geophysical survey report, showing a summary interpretation of major features. Source: Tim Young, 2013
Reverend Clough noted that whatever remained of the human bones, there were no signs of fire. He suggests that because no extremities of the skeleton were observed where they would have been expected, “the figure had been doubled up.” These are the only statements that Clough makes on the subject but both are consistent with an Early Bronze Age crouched inhumation. The inability to analyze the bones means that it is not known whether the body was laid facing east or west; how the bones were arranged in the grave; whether any bones had been excluded or deliberately removed at a later date; whether the bones were arranged in a particular way; how the artefacts were positioned in relation to the body; and whether there was any ritual treatment of the bones like excarnation or de-fleshing (such as in the case of the Brymbo burial).
It is certain that the deposition of such a remarkable collection of grave goods with the dead was accompanied by formal ceremonies in which both the person and the objects were transitioned from the world of the living into the world of the dead. Many of the activities connected with this transition could well have place elsewhere, with only the final stages taking place at the cairn itself, and this itself may have been subject to various spiritually inspired activities to prepare it for its role.
The first task, other than any ceremonies to prepare the ground, would have been to source the slabs making up base, sides and capstone (stone lid) or other form of lid of the cist (stone chamber), and dig the hole that these stones were to line. The dead person could then be laid to rest. In the Early Bronze Age the body would be typically crouched, with knees to chest, laid on his or her side. The dead may have been clothed or covered, but the perishability of textiles means that this remains speculation. Grave goods could then be deposited with the dead, before the grave was covered with a lid, if used. If a lid was used, this was probably wood or another perishable material, because there is no record of it in any of the contemporary documents. The cairn could then be built over the top, often to a particular plan with layers distinguished within the construction. Each one of these steps, including layering the cairn, could have been accompanied with activities to mark each stage of the transition. When the cairn was finished, and was a feature of the landscape, it would have stood out as a new element in the landscape for some time before becoming integrated into human memory as a component of the landscape of the past and present.
Early Bronze Age grave goods vary from grave to grave, but it would be idle to deny that those in Bryn yr Ellyllon were anything other than remarkable. Even today, the surviving metalwork yells wealth, luxury and status, particularly as it was taken out of social and economic circulation by being deposited in the ground with the dead. Once buried, and not retrieved, these goods could not be inherited, gifted or traded, or even melted down and re-used. This magnificent collection was lost forever to the living, confined to the realm of the dead. The burial of such a magnificent and rare piece was a statement, an important ceremonial act, and probably incorporated a series of ritual activities, themselves tools of transition.
Dating
Although bone did survive in the cairn the majority of organic remains were disposed of at the time. The British Museum records having a piece of skull in its collection (museum number 1881,0516.2), but although I have been unable to find out anything about it, it appears to have been the only survivor, and this was clearly not used for radiocarbon dating (which requires partial sacrifice of the sample). Instead, a date range of 1900-1600 BC has been proposed for the site by Stuart Needham, based on comparison with objects at other sites that have more secure dating material. In spite of the embossed decoration on the cape, which might suggest a later date, the presence of jet, amber and the composition of the gold itself, as well as the organization of the burial, suggest an earlier date, perhaps in the final Early Bronze Age. This date, however, is not secure and could be modified by the discovery of comparable sites that might also produce more secure radiocarbon dates that could help assign a more directly comparable time-range.
Who was the owner of the Mold Cape? Was she/he important?
The cape being modelled, showing how upper arm movement would have been restricted. Source: British Museum
The short answer is certainly yes. The loss of anyone in a tight-knit community would have been a blow to a community where each individual was an important contributor to health, wealth, communal knowledge and well-being. However, the discovery of something so beautiful and luxurious as the cape has led to a lot of speculation about who or what its owner may have been. Leadership roles, both secular (chief/prince/king) and religious (priest), have been proposed. In each case the cape and other objects were suggested as the prehistoric equivalent of symbols of power or badges of office. The burial of Queen Elizabeth II is a good example of how a community might mark the transition from living to dead of an individual representing a prominent hierarchical position. Does the deposition of the Bryn yr Ellyllon capes, beads and bronze items represent a comparable situation, suggesting that the relationship between the person and the capes was so fundamental that the two could not be separated in death? Was each so bound up in the identity of the other that the capes and other goods could not be inherited by, or transferred to another person in the community?
Although these ideas of individual importance and hierarchical significance are entirely plausible, emphasising the role of the individual in an important role in a way very that equates to ways in which European society is arranged with political, social and religious leaders this may be an over-simplification based on modern experiences and expectations of monarchies, political entities and religious authorities. Not all societies, however, particularly small communities, are organized along the same lines, particularly when there is an enormous amount of inter-dependence of skills and economic activities that are not centrally organized. As I suggested in Part 2, Early Bronze Age burials may have been about a lot more than a single person. Even when a single individual takes up the central cist, secondary burials may be made within the burial cairn, and the original individual may represent an anchor for ideas about territory, ancestry and memory. Again, in the case of Bryn yr Ellyllon, there is the question of why not only one cape but two are thought to have been represented.
Some items in history acquire a meaning and value all of their own which transcend the time-limited personality or role of any given individual. Instead, these items help to define their role in relation to others (people, social/religious structures and political institutions) and even to frame ideas about the future. Examples of such objects that transcend either an individual or a specific role but represent unity are the Olympic flame, the Remembrance Day poppy, or a national flag. Burying a symbol may say a lot about what was happening in the world at that time, and less about the specifics of who was lying there, particularly given that two capes suggest not just that more than a single identity was involved.
Detail of an ivory box lid, showing Tutankhamen receiving flowers from his wife Ankhesenamun. Source: Wikipedia
The relationship between a dead person, the objects and the living world are complex. An illustration of this sort of complexity is the burial of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt, who was also interred with objects of great richness and beauty, including exotic items unavailable locally, most of which were artistically characteristic of the preceding heretical Amarna period, of which Tutankhamen was the last male descendent. Even though Tutankhamen renounced his father’s heretical ideas, the king was tainted with his family’s recent past. The grave in which the king was deposited in a wadi (dry valley) reserved for royal burials was not the ambitious grave that Tutankhamen had been building for himself; that was appropriated by one of the officials who buried the king. Instead, the tomb in which he was buried was small, incomplete, very poorly decorated and vastly inferior to those belonging both to his ancestors and those who ruled subsequently. The highly distinctive Amarna style items that accompanied him may have been deposited with the king to dispose of them for good. It is very probable that many of the hastily assembled goods jumbled in the tiny tomb were inserted by those who wished to dispose of the discordant memories of the Amarna period with more speed than dignity. What are to us things of invaluable beauty so characteristic of the Amarna period were seen at that time as representing everything that the new governing elite wished to eliminate from history.
This is a very specific example, but it serves to illustrate how even very rich burials may have any number of themes running through them. Colin Harris and Adam Kaiser, for example, proposed in 2020 that some particularly rich burials may represent a form of conflict resolution, and offer a persuasive discussion, using Viking data as a test case.
Although it cannot be ruled out that the Bryn yr Ellyllon burial was of an important individual who had the cape made for herself or himself, it is by no means the only answer when the burying is done not by the dead but by the living according to criteria that has as much to do with the ideas incorporated in the objects themselves and their role in the community as a whole, of whom the dead might continue to be, or not continue to be a representative.
How did the owner of the Mold Cape make a living?
The Llong Necklace (a speculative recreation of the original design). Source: Curious Clwyd
Bryn yr Ellyllon was not the only site near Mold that produced exotic (non-local) and ornamental items. The nearby Llong grave near Bryn yr Ellyllon, where a multi-stranded necklace was found, this time made of jet (and some shale), contribute to the impression that this was an area where people could leverage their own resources to purchase luxury goods, and there may have been many aspects to their economic life to build such purchasing power.
Unlike Bryn y Ffynnon in Brymbo, which was on a hillside overlooking the valley of the river Alyn, Bryn yr Ellyllon sat in the river valley itself. This was a potentially good place for agrarian activity, but was also in easy reach of uplands that would have been ideal for livestock grazing. However, the investment in the cape, both in terms of acquisition of gold and particularly the specialized skill needed to work it argue that this was a high value item, and was the product of something other than localized farming activities. Similarly, the means to assemble 300 amber beads that were not available locally argues for considerable influence and resources that would enable negotiations to take place in trading transactions.
Looking around for a possible source of unusual wealth, the most obvious candidate to strike most writers is the Great Orme copper mining industry, and the networks that connected that industry to the world beyond north Wales. The copper mines were 40 miles (64km away), so not on the doorstep, which requires some form of explanation, but if the inhabitants of this area of the Alyn valley were also involved in agrarian and livestock management activities, aspects of both sedentism and mobility could have been incorporated into livelihoods that also included longer distance links.
Final Comments on Part 3
Both Bryn y Ffynnon (Brymbo) and Bryn yr Ellyllon have produced some unusual objects in association with primary cist burials in northeast Wales. These are not typical of the greater majority of sites in northeast Wales, but both serve to illustrate how disparate datasets offer different insights into the past. Without a skeleton, the cape still gives a sense of the dimensions of the wearer, but many other details have been lost. The objects themselves are so unusual that it is difficult to fit them into a general pattern of livelihoods and activities in northeast Wales, but they do represent substantially specialized skills and the ability to source unusual raw materials, both of which argue the ability of the community to accumulate a form of wealth. There are more questions than answers regarding the site, but although it appears to stand out, it must still be understood in the wider context of the Early Bronze Age of northeast Wales, which will be discussed further in Part 4 (upcoming).
Perhaps the biggest lesson of Bryn yr Ellyllon is that there are many reasons why rich objects may be buried in graves, and these are not all to do with the importance of an individual as a chief or priest, or other specific role. It is risky to draw conclusions of this sort, when there are many other possible explanations to consider.
The second important point that this site highlights is the importance of publication of any excavation activity. Excavation is by definition destructive, and what remains for posterity is the record of that excavation, which must be published in order to become available to researchers. Whereas Bryn y Ffynnon was subject to excavation by the National Museum of Wales, and published only a few years later in 1946, Bryn yr Ellyllon was ransacked in the early 1800s, not excavated. It it is only thanks to the Reverend Clough taking an interest that many of the grave goods were rescued, and to John Gage’s letter to Sir Henry Ellis, that we know what we do.
In the next and final part, part 4, some of the various strands are brought together, which discusses the sites in terms of key themes of the Early Bronze Age, and provides details of the museums where the objects from the two sites can be visited.
St Werburgh pilgrim badge, possibly 14th century, cast in lead alloy, purchased by the British Museum from a London dealer in curiosities, medals and coins. British Museum 1836,0610.73
Had you been a pilgrim in the middle ages, undertaking a journey to Chester to visit the miracle-performing shrine of St Werburgh, you might have been tempted to buy yourself a pilgrim’s badge to commemorate a job well done and to communicate your achievement to others. Most importantly, however, you would have had the opportunity to touch that badge to the saint’s shrine in order to absorb some of the saint’s divine power into the badge itself. That’s what you are looking at on the left – a pilgrim’s badge associated with the Abbey of St Werburgh, which would have been sold to pilgrims either as they arrived, or as they left via the gift shop. Badges like this were associated with many of the major shrines and could be added to an existing personal collection, representing the piety implied by many pilgrimages.
When I first came to live in the Chester area, just a couple of years ago, I knew the name St Werburgh and recognized that it was Anglo-Saxon, but it was a surprise to realize that she was a female saint, and that there was a pilgrim shrine dedicated to her in the former abbey (now the cathedral). Nor did I know that the pilgrims who came to visit the abbey might purchase a badge as a token of their visit, a pious badge of honour, sometimes the signal of the many discomforts or difficulties that had been overcome to enable a pilgrimage to be successfully completed.
Chester Cathedral, formerly St Werburgh’s Benedictine Abbey, from the east. Photograph by Stephen Hamilton.
What I particularly like about pilgrim badges is that there are so many threads to the story. An anonymous pilgrim once owned the above token of his or her journey to the shrine, now in the British Museum (albeit not on display). The British Museum purchased it in 1836 from a dealer in medals and coins called Harry Cureton. The story of this particular badge between the time of its manufacture to its purchase by a dealer before being accessioned into the British Museum’s collections is lost, but its story is embedded in other, much older histories, including the actions of the Anglo-Saxon queen who moved that saint from Staffordshire to Chester in the 10th century, and the subsequent centuries of pilgrim visits to the abbey to experience St Werburgh for themselves.
So who was the Anglo-Saxon saint, where was she from, why did she become central to Benedictine worship in Chester after her death, what is the geese-in-a-basket pilgrim badge all about, and what role did the shrine of St Werburgh play in the economic life of Chester’s abbey?
St Werburgh and her family
St Werburgh’s posthumous arrival in Chester
St Werburgh in the Benedictine monastery of 1093
The miracles of St Werburgh at the monastery
The 14th century shrine
Pilgrims to the shrine in the later Middle Ages – a nice little earner
How pilgrim badges were made, sold, worn and used
The Dissolution and subsequent events
The shrine in the 19th century
From Harry Cureton to the British Museum
Final Comments
Videos
Sources
St Werburgh and her family
Werburgh was born a Mercian princess in around AD650. Her father was Wulfhere, king of Mercia and her mother Ermengild, who became a nun on the death of Wulfhere, first at Minster-in-Sheppey and then at Ely, where she succeeded her mother Seaxburgh as abbess. Werburgh was educated at home by Chad, who became Bishop of Lichfield. Although St Werburgh is depicted in a couple of the stained glass windows in the cathedral, these are modern, romanticized visualizations. There are no contemporary depictions, and apart from having an idea of what she may have worn, her appearance is unknown. Medieval accounts of her life probably incorporate older material, and almost certainly include quite a bit of myth and conjecture.
Saint Æthelreda of Ely from the 10th century Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, illuminated manuscript in the British Library. Source: Wikipedia
On the death of her father, Werburgh went as a nun to the convent of Ely founded by her great aunt Æthereda (also known as Æthelthryth), who became its abbess. St Æthelreda was the daughter of Anna, king of East Anglia, sister of Seaxburgh and the virgin wife of Egfrith, the king of Northumbria. Werburgh’s father was succeeded by his brother Æthelred, Werburgh’s uncle, who eventually asked Werburgh to take charge of and organize nunneries in the Midlands, including Weedon in Northamptonshire, Hanbury in Staffordshire and Threckingham in Lincolnshire (or alternatively Trentham in Staffordshire). She was so pure and good that she could hang her veil on a sunbeam. She died at Threckingham / Trentham in around 700, and was buried at Hanbury, at her own request. Unfortunately, the nuns at Threckingham were unwilling to release the remains, and a delegation was sent from Hanbury to retrieve her.
Saints were not canonized by the papacy until the 12th century, but had to be verified by bishops. The miracle that caused Werburgh to be recognized as a saint was an unusual one. Although there are a number of versions of the story, the differences are minor. One version says that St Werburgh had enjoyed watching a visiting flock of geese in a neighbouring meadow of the convent in which she was staying. One of them was particularly large and had a black ring of feathers around his neck. She became fond of him and called him Grayking. The convent steward, Hugh, had also noticed Grayking but his interest had little to do with aesthetically pleasing plumage. Angry with the geese for devastating his field of corn, Hugh soon had Grayking in the pot. One version says that Werburgh was away when this happened, and when she returned the remaining geese formed a delegation to inform her of the event and ask for her help. Werbugh acted immediately, ordering that the bones and feathers of the carcass should be gathered up. When she commanded the bones of the dead goose to rise again, they assembled themselves and Grayking was reborn.
Late 14th century misericord in Chester Cathedral showing St Werburgh performing miracles. Photo by Stephen Hamilton. Source: Wikipedia
Dr Thomas Pickles (Senior Lecturer, Medieval History) recounts a slightly different version of the story in the video at the end of the post. He goes on to discuss why other similar stories in across Europe may have developed in response to sacrifices at the time of harvests, which may have became Christianized via labourers who worked the land belonging to religious organizations, giving the St Werburgh miracle story wider relevance.
Nine years after her burial, St Werburgh’s nephew Coelred, now King of Mercia, decided to move the saint to a less modest tomb in Hanbury. When she was removed from her coffin she was found to be “in whole and perfect form,” a certain mark of sainthood.
St Werburgh never visited Chester during her lifetime, and her arrival in the Anglo-Saxon burh (fortified settlement) in around 907, over 200 years after her death, requires another thread of history that starts, for the practical purposes of this post, with Alfred the Great, King of Wessex (848 – 899AD). Alfred’s daughter was the princess Æthelflæd who, at the age of around 15, was married for political reasons to Æthelred, king of Mercia. Æthelflæd grew up in a time of disruption and war, during the Viking incursions, and the associated competition for territory. She was also familiar with the arts of diplomacy and negotiation. She was well suited for the role of queen of Mercia. Although subordinate to her husband, with duties and responsibilities, she also had rights, privileges and a position of respect that she clearly built on, being recognized as partner to her husband in many of their joint enterprises, including the establishment of new burghs at Worcester and Gloucester, whilst improving existing towns such as Hereford and Winchcombe.
Æthelflæd’s father, Alfred the Great, died on 26th October 899, and was succeeded as King of Wessex by his eldest son, Edward the Elder, brother of Æthelflæd. Edward was forced to fight off a counter claim from his cousin Æthelwold. He was triumphant but was forced to address the situation again in 902 when Æthelwold unsuccessfully mounted another campaign against Edward. In the same year Æthelflæd’s mother died, probably in St Mary’s Abbey in Winchester, which she had founded, and a threat was made to the northwestern territory of Mercia at Chester. It was only now, when the vulnerability of the old town threatened the security of the kingdom of Mercia that it drew attention from Æthelred and his Æthelflæd. In the last decade of his life Æthelred suffered a recurring illness, and he had succumbed to a bout of this affliction when Chester came under threat. Æthelflæd assumed authority during the crisis.
Kingdoms in England in AD878, by Hel-hama. Source: Wikipedia
In the 890s Chester was described in the Anglo-Saxon Charters as “a deserted city in Wirral.” It still had much of its Roman walls, but the interior was in ruins. Mercia had been a much larger and more powerful kingdom in its past, but the Viking (Scandinavian) invasions had taken control of the eastern reaches of the former kingdom. In the south, Wessex was the most powerful kingdom, whilst in the northeast the king of Northumbria still held land on the east half of the island, extending well into present-day Scotland. The Dane-controlled land ran down much of the east coast south of Northumbria, and there was a significant Scandinavian presence in Ireland.
It was from Ireland that the threat to Chester emerged. In 902 the Irish kings formed an alliance to rid themselves of the Vikings, capturing Norse Dublin and forcing many to leave as groups of refugees in need of new lands to colonize. One of these refugees was Ingimund, who lead one of these ousted groups onto Anglesey. Forcibly ejected by the Welsh, they followed the Dee inland towards Chester. According to one source, they requested a meeting with the Mercian royalty. With Æthelred still sick, Æthelflæd met with Ingimund who proposed a peaceful solution to the dilemma. Æthelflæd was pragmatically willing to negotiate a home for them on the north of the Wirral peninsula, perhaps believing that they might provide a protective buffer against other Viking interests seeking to find new territory to colonize. Here they could have lived in peace by farming and trading via the sea routes, but they had been settled for only a few years when Ingimund broke faith with Æthelflæd and began to amass troops. Hearing of the threat, Æthelflæd assembled forces of her ow within the Chester walls. The town was besieged but the Mercians emerged triumphant.
Æthelflaed’s name (spelled Æþelflæd), in the B-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Cotton MS Tiberius A VI, f. 30r. Source: Medieval Manuscripts Blog
In 907 the Anglo-Saxon Charter says that Chester was “restored,” the work usually credited to Æthelflæd. With Æthelred temporarily restored to health, they couple established Chester as a new burgh within the 5m (16ft) tall walls encompassing an area of 26 hectares (65 acres). It was far bigger than their previous burhs, and represented a significant investment in the border town. At the same time, Æthelflæd took the decision to move the relics of St Werburgh from Hanbury to Chester. The timing was probably driven by the threat to the relics of St Werburgh at Hanbury by advancing Danish forces. This echoes Æthelflæd’s decision to move the relics of St Oswald from lands under Danish occupation, which took place under similar circumstances. The decision to move St Werburgh to Chester may have been motivated by the need to give Chester an authentic, stabilizing Christian focus with links back to a noble Mercian past. The creation of a prominent settlement in a vulnerable borderline position needed to attract people with the same features familiar from other towns.
According to St Weburgh monk Henry Bradshaw, writing in c.1513, but probably referencing much earlier sources, when the saint was removed to Chester, her body was found to be ‘resolued unto powder’, which was seen not in terms of decay or corruption of the remains, but as a divine miracle performed to protect the saint’s holy remains:
Lest the cruell gentils / and wiked myscreantes
With pollute handes full of corrupcion
Shulde touche her body / by indignation
Excerpt from Henry Bradshaw’s “The Life of St Wereburge of Chester,” originally 1513, re-edited and published 1887
Although there is no incontrovertible data to support the presence of a church on the site of St Werburgh’s Abbey, there is a tradition that a wooden church dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul had been founded there by Æthelflæd’s father Wulfhere, King of Mercia, which would have housed her remains. This church would have been rededicated to St Werburgh when the saint became resident. Archaeological excavations produced pre-Norman building materials, but it is not possible to assign an early 10th century date to them. Wherever the church was located, the patronage of the queen ensured the initial success, and it received additional grants throughout the 10th century, including one from King Edgar in 958. In the 1086 Domesday survey records the monastery and its possessions, indicating that the Anglo-Saxon St Werburgh’s was upgraded from church to monastery sometime before that date.
In 911 Æthelred died of unknown causes probably related to his recurring illness. He was buried in Gloucester. Many previous royal widows of the period had retired to a convent to live out the rest of their lives. There was plenty of precedent in Æthelflæd’s own family for monastic service. One great aunt was the founder of Ely Abbey, another was the founder of Minster-in Sheppey abbey, and Æthelflæd’s own mother had retired on the death of Wulfhere to a nunnery, eventually becoming abbess of Ely. Æthelflæd, however, took the reigns of the Mercian government into her own hands, ruling as myrcna hlæfdige, Lady of the Mercians. The church-monastery of St Werburgh continued to house the saint’s remains, and seems to have survived the military action that took place in and around Chester following the Conquest.
St Werburgh in the Benedictine monastery of 1093
Coat of arms of Hugh d’Avranche. Source: Wikipedia
In 1093, only 27 years after the Norman Conquest, the abbey was refounded as an Anglo-Norman Benedictine abbey by the notorious knight and magnate Hugh d’Avranches, also known as Hugh Lupus. Hugh and been granted Chester as Earl by William I, and was one of the most powerful men in England. His appointment followed William I’s vengeful retaliation against Chester for two rebellions, which had left the city in disarray. Hugh’s task was to ensure that the city remained docile after William departed, serving the crown as the northenmost marcher town, a buffer zone between Wales and England, and an increasingly important commercial port.
There were many possible reasons for landowners to found monastic establishments, including convention (it was often seen as the duty of the nobility to promote religious houses), political maneovering, simple piety, and fear of the ever-approaching perils of the afterlife. Hugh’s decision to refound the abbey was probably two-fold. Whilst making a conspicuous contribution to a deeply resentful city for which he was now responsible, and in which he needed to maintain the peace, he was also looking after his own spiritual interests. He managed to secure one of the most high status bishops in the country, Anselm to come and supervise the project, and Anselm left his clerk Richard to become the first abbot. Hugh endowed his shiny new monastery with rich and prosperous lands to ensure its self-sufficiency. These were not merely charitable acts. Hugh Lupus, for example, was heading perilously towards the end of a far from virtuous life. John Hicklin, writing in 1852, gives an evocative summary of the situation:
Hugh Lupus, following the example of most of his predecessors, lived a life of the wildest luxury and rapine. At length, falling sick from the consequence of his excesses, and age and disease coming on, the old hardened soldier was struck with remorse; and—an expiation common enough in those days—the great Hugh Lupus took the cowl, retired in the last state of disease into the monastery, and in three days was no more.
By founding a monastery and committing himself to a brief period as a monk at the last possible moment, Hugh attempted to provide himself with some after-life insurance. The logic of this is somewhat difficult to compute today.
The curvilinear Romanesque remains of the abbey financed by Hugh Lupus, seen through a later gothic arch.
Monks were considered to be closer to Heaven than any other human on earth, and their prayers were thought to be heard with undiluted clarity by God. The idea of pleasing God by founding a monastery, and then reaching closer to Heaven by being buried within the monastic cloister seems suspiciously like inducement today, and one would have thought that God would have been wise to such manoeuvring. Given the sheer number of wealthy men and women founding abbeys and priories, however, this aspect of the matter does not appear to have occurred to them. Matters had became much more contractual during the 11th, when the idea of purgatory was taught in the church. This intermediate area between heaven and hell allowed redeemable sinners to suffer a hell-like experience to work off their crimes against Christianity before eventually entering Heaven. From this time onward, substantial efforts were made to negotiate for reduced time spent in purgatory, including the buying of “indulgences,” and gifts from the lower echelons to monasteries.
After the original endowment, the abbey continued to receive many properties over the centuries from wealthy local landowners, and smaller gifts in the wills of those who were not quite as well positioned, all attempting to win the good will of the monks, and through them, the divine. Those with less purchasing power would not anticipate having the same negotiating power, but every contribution might help. In the process of all this human fear and negotiations to minimize the inevitable punishments after death, monasteries became substantially wealthy, some of the richest landowners in the kingdom. Land was not, however, their only form of income. Not all monasteries were lucky enough to secure the bones, blood or hair of a saint that might attract pilgrims, but the abbey of St Werburgh still retained the bones of St Werburgh after its rebuild in 1093.
The miracles of St Werburgh at the abbey in Chester
Neither Goscelin de St-Bertin writing in the late 11th century, nor William of Malmesbury, writing in the 12th century were able to provide many details about the earlier miracles that St Werburgh was supposed to have performed at Chester, but William of Malmesbury has the following to say: “The merits of this virgin are proclaimed at Chester and her miracles extolled. Although she is promptly favourable to the petitions of all, she is especially quick to give heed to the prayers of women and children.” Her girdle, held by the abbey, was apparently particularly popular with pregnant women.
Basingwerk Abbey today
In 1500 a monk at St Werburgh’s Abbey wrote a life of St Werburgh in which he credits her with a miracle on behalf of Richard, Earl of Chester in around 1120. Richard made a pilgrimage to St Winifrede’s Well at Holywell in around 1120 but attacked by hostile Welsh men, he was forced to shelter at nearby Basingwerk Abbey. Before William, Constable of Chester, set forth to search for the earl, he prayed to St Werburgh, who parted the river Dee because no boat was available, permitting William and his men to walk across the river bed and rescue the earl. In another story, St Werburgh intervened during an unexpected Welsh attack on Chester. She blinded the attackers, forcing them to retreat. This military aspect to the saint is underlined by the tradition of taking the shrine on procession around the city when it was considered to be under threat, setting her down briefly on parts of the city walls.
In the 15th century the Welsh poets Maredudd ap Rhys and Guto’r Glyn called there, the one to pray to ease the pains in his legs, which was apparently a successful visit, and the other to pray for the alleviation of the ills of a friend.
The 14th century shrine
The reconstructed shrine of St Werburgh at the west end of the Lady Chapel in St Werburgh’s Cathedral, Chester. It was reassembled in the 19th Century from broken -up parts, and it is impossible to say how closely it resembles the original 14th century shrine. The warm lighting is as it would have been seen by candle-light.
Nearly 250 years after Hugh’s foundation, in around 1340 (just before the Black Death) a new red sandstone shrine was built for the saint, an elaborate gothic affair around 7ft (2.1m) tall, built to look like a chapel. The new shrine, on two levels, contained whatever remained of the relics in the upper layer, whilst the lower half was provided with niches into which pilgrims could fold themselves to get even closer to the spirituality of the saint. The top was decorated with statuettes for former Anglo-Saxon monarchs, most of whom are missing their heads today. Little carved animals formed a line around the middle, images of the natural world that were as much part of God’s creation as people. Today, the only one of these natural world carvings left is a tiny dog, scratching his ear with a hind leg. The shrine was also, in all likelihood, bedecked with elaborate precious stones, its architectural details finished in gold.
Although today it is located in the 13th century Lady Chapel, it was originally located in the easternmost bay of the presbytery, behind the high altar. The relics of the saint were encased very safely within the very top of the shrine, but the spiritual power of the bones themselves emanated from the relics, permeating the stone, so that touching the shrine was equivalent to touching the saint’s essence. This was a powerful concept, and a vibrant presence in the monastery. This substantial monument was a permanent fixture. There would be no carrying the shrine through the town in times of threat or stress.
St Werburgh’s shrine showing the niches, the dog scratching it’s ear and gilded statuettes, some without their heads, of Anglo-Saxon kings. Click to enlarge
Pilgrims to the shrine in the later Middle Ages – a nice little earner
Monks needed to make a living. Monastic communities became more expensive as the centuries rolled forward, as the trappings of seclusion and self-denial fell away towards the 16th century. Guests, who were not expected to pay for their upkeep, were always a drain on popular monastic establishments, and alms to the poor still had to be paid. Expenses too accrued from the management of extensive estates, including wages for bailiffs and labourers, repairs to buildings and boundaries, and the costs involved in agricultural production. Churches appropriated by the monastery for their incomes still involved costs, including the provision of an incumbent priest. St Werburgh’s was often involved in legal disputes with Chester citizens, and this too was costly. After the stricter earlier middle ages, standards began to slip in Benedictine monasteries. Abbots rolled out ambitious extension plans for the monastic church, and required larger and more luxurious quarters, which included spaces where VIP guests could be lavishly entertained, costly vanity projects that formed part of their legacy. Provisions became more luxurious and more expensive. The upkeep of a vast monastic architectural complex could be eye-watering, even without the occasional devastating fire or flood. Balancing the books was a constant headache for monastic establishments.
By the later middle ages, when imaginative ways of generating income were increasingly critical to monastic wellbeing, pilgrims were a great way of generating income. Pilgrimages were usually journeys of meaning, sometimes deeply spiritual and personal, characterized by any number of aspirations including cures for illnesses and defects, expressions of penitence, a wish to feel the presence of something holy, and the urge to give thanks for a prayer answered; but pilgrimages could also be timed to enjoy feasts, fairs and markets, and as such were not merely pious and spiritual, but could be a sociable and enjoyable liberation from the mundane. When pilgrims visited shrines, tombs and reliquaries to satisfy personal needs, the monastery expected pilgrims to show their gratitude to the saint and to Heaven by gifting a contribution to the monastic coffers in the form of “altarage.” This was usually money, but sometimes it took the form of valuable gifts.
Clusters of shrines were good news for everyone. Pilgrims to a particular shrine would frequently do the rounds of all the other major religious sites and shrines in the immediate area, as well as those further afield in the region, soaking up all the divinity available. In Chester itself, St Werburgh’s shrine was in competition with the miracle-performing Holy Rood (a sculpture of Christ on the cross) in St John’s the Baptist’s Church (next to the amphitheatre), which was reputed to include a piece of the true cross, reputed to have been found by Helen, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. It was installed in around 1250. Although St Werburgh became a secondary attraction after this date, the rood at St John’s was far better known and carried more weight because the power of the crucifix of Christ himself was rather more compelling to pilgrims than an Anglo-Saxon saint. It was to the Holy Rood of St John’s that Edward I took the nobility of Gwynedd men to swear fealty before himself and God.
The glorious 15th century vaulting above the clear water of the inner reservoir of St Winifrede’s Well, Holywell.
Some shrines were more revered than others and had great pulling power, which could generate satisfying levels of income. The ownership of St Winifrede’s Well in Holywell (northeast Wales), for example, alternated between St Werburgh’s Abbey and Basingwerk Abbey just down the hill from the well, depending on whether the English or Welsh were in control of the area, and this represented a useful form of income for whichever abbey was in command of its resources. It is also probable that many of the pilgrims visiting Chester were en route to the Cathedral of St Asaph (Llanelwy), which contained the 6th century relics of the eponymous saint, renowned for his healing miracles, and St Winifrede’s sacred Well, enclosed by some superb gothic architecture. These were located 28 (45km) and 14 miles (22km) away from Chester respectively, and 16 miles (26km) from each other. The east-west pilgrim route between Holywell and St Asaph was well known by the later medieval period, making use of the Deva-Varis-Canovium-Segontium (Chester to Caernarfon) Roman road, which was crossed by Offa’s Dyke and took in the beautifully carved late 10th century Maen Achyfan cross, which still stands today. At St Winefrede’s Well, the nearby Cistercian monks of Basingwerk Abbey provided all the facilities that the pilgrims might need to make the most of the experience. The 7th century saint’s remains had actually been removed to Shrewsbury Abbey in 1138, but Holywell was the site of the miracle in which she died by beheading and was brought back to life, and was imbued with miraculous potency.
A selection of Medieval and post-Medieval pilgrim badges. Source: British Museum
Because pilgrims travelled to specific shrines, it is easy to think of pilgrimages exclusively in terms of destinations, but the act of making a pilgrimage was as much about the journey as the destination, and pilgrim routes could be both sociable experiences shared with like-minded individuals, and essential to the spiritual character of the undertaking. As pilgrim routes became fixed in the religious round, they became special places in the landscape, with identities of their own, and features that singled them out as part of the greater network of pilgrim experience.
Although St Werburgh’s Abbey would undoubtedly have preferred to be the most important of the local shrines, and would have done its best to attract pilgrims, it certainly benefited from the proximity of more fashionable and perhaps more relatable pilgrim destinations nearby, and the network of routes that connected them. The 14th century shrine was almost certainly built to jump on the bandwagon of pilgrim visits to Chester, and to provide a more impressive and inclusive experience for pilgrims, without losing the connection with the Anglo-Saxon past.
There are no records surviving from St Werburgh’s to indicate what sort of income the monastery derived from pilgrims, but nearby St John the Baptist’s Holy Rood was the second most important source of three primary sources of income for the church, amounting to in excess of £50.00 per annum in the 14th century (the National Archives Currency Convertor equates this, for 1350, to £29,361 in modern money or, for example, 72 horses or 135 cows. This is half the value of the nationally important Ethelreda’s shrine at Ely, which in 1408/9 earned £19 9s 10d, and is a drop in the ocean to what St Thomas Becket’s shrines could attract from both British and western European pilgrims: £120 in 1411 and a staggering £360 in the Jubilee year of 1420, which equates to day to around £231,483, which could have purchased 83 horses or 620 cows. St Winifrede’s Well earned an annual revenue by the time of the Reformation of £157 15s 2d, which probably included the sale of indulgences.
Altarage was also payable on saints feast days by anyone attending the celebration. For St Werburgh, this day was 3rd February. Again, we have no records for St Werburgh, but at Selby Abbey in Yorkshire, which held a shrine of St Germain, the festival of the Burial of St German on the 1st October in 1446-1447 earned the abbey 16s.8d., and the offerings for the festival of the Death of the saint on 31st July earned 6s. The money-box (stipite) of St Germain accumulated £9. 14s 10d for the year. Again, these were useful contributions to an abbey’s financial resources, amounting to £6790 in modern money, which would purchase 14 horses or 27 cows.
St Werburgh’s would have been a long way down the pilgrimage and altarage income scale, but the earnings would still have been valuable.
How pilgrim badges were made, sold, worn and used
St Werburgh’s pilgrim badges being made in stone moulds. Photograph by Colin Torode of Lionheart Replicas, with my thanks to Colin for sending it to me.
Before badges were available, pilgrims might collect earth from around a shrine, or chip of small pieces off the shrine itself. Small vessels could be used to carry holy water or oils. Low-cost badges were a far more satisfying and permanent memento of a pilgrimage successfully undertaken, and first appear during the 12th century. Decorated metal ampullae too, were manufactured to hold liquids, but in smaller numbers. Wealthier pilgrims might order a custom-made item, which might be made of a more expensive material, but the less expensive materials are by far the most frequently represented in museum and personal collections. By the 15th century they might cost as little as a penny for twelve. One of the appealing aspects of the pilgrim badges is that the majority that survive today were clearly made for those who did not have much surplus cash to spend on souvenirs.
The badges were cast in moulds, which would have required careful crafting. The mould was usually made of stone, preferably limestone. A liquid alloy was poured into it to set, usually comingling lead with either pewter or tin. Lead was locally available, and the other ores were inexpensive and could be imported. Once solidified, the object was removed from its mould, trimmed, polished and was then ready to sell. The photograph above shows one of Colin Torode’s stone moulds, in use for making St Werburgh pilgrim badges for Lionheart Historical Pewter Replicas, which sells many replica pilgrim badges (I have their lovely St Werburgh geese-in-the-basket). See the brief video by the Digital Pilgrims Project at the end of the post to see how some of these objects were made.
The pilgrim badges were sold at the abbey gates, or in stalls in town markets. If purchased before a visit to the shrine, the pilgrim badge could be touched to the shrine, so that it would permeate the badge itself with its spiritual energy. It could then be dipped into a liquid to be swallowed as a health cure or rubbed onto a wound as a salve. Given its portability, it could also be carried back to someone who was unfit to make the pilgrimage so that they could benefit from the power of the shrine.
The pilgrim badges were usually worn with great pride, sewn on to items of outer clothing like hats or coats, or on bags. Over time, as they became familiar and were transferred from old to new clothing, they probably became apotropaic lucky talismans, as well as items of religious meaning. Sometimes they were pinned to walls of homes.
The Dissolution and subsequent events
The opening page of the Valor Ecclesiasticus, the beginning of the Dissolution of the monasteries, showing Henry VIII presiding over the nation’s extaordinary religious shake-up. Source: Wikipedia
Although Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the abbey in 1536, its conversion into a cathedral saved it from wholescale destruction. Although it retained most of its key components, some features fell victim to reformers. Henry VIII’s withdrawal from the Catholic church was only realistically viable because of a movement in Europe that challenged what it saw as the papal hierarchy’s abuse of the core ideals of Christianity. In 1517, nearly 20 years before the Dissolution, Martin Luther at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, disgusted by the financial corruption of the papacy and the clergy, began to promote the emergence of a more honest, less moderated religion in which men and women could worship in their homes as well as in their churches and build a more direct relationship with Christ and God. The existence of Purgatory was rejected, the appeal to saints for their intercession was deemed idolatrous, religious images that had been the focal points of worship were condemned, and the role of the clergy as a bridge between people and God was challenged.
In England the reform movement was politically and socially necessary both to usher in Henry’s new era and to avoid the new religious house being labelled heretical. Using Martin Luther’s reforming as a launch pad, an older, purer version of religion was sought. As part of the process, effigies and saints were to be removed with extreme prejudice. Targets of this reforming zeal included emblems of the later Anglo-Saxon period as well as those of the medieval period. The 14th century shrine of St Werburgh really did not stand a chance. The shrine was dismantled and parts were used to build a tomb for the first bishop. Later, in 1635, elements were incorporated into an episcopal throne.
When some pieces of the shrine were rediscovered in the 19th century, Sir Arthur Blomfield attempted a reconstruction, which is what stands in the Lady Chapel today. The small statues of the Saxon kings do survive, but their heads are missing; of the little figures that adorned it, only a dog scratching its ear with a hind leg now survives. It was reassembled in the Lady Chapel.
Although St Werburgh no longer attracts pilgrims, the well of St Winefrede at Holywell, near Basingwerk Abbey on the north Wales coast, still does. Although more usual in Catholic parts of Europe than in Anglican Britain, pilgrimage continues to offer the option of a spiritual journey today, and pilgrim badges continue to be collected by those who make the journey. The gift shop at St Winifrede’s well contains a wide and colourful selection of religious memorabilia. See the Encountering a Pilgrim’s Medal video at the end of the post for comments on a modern pilgrim badge.
From Harry Cureton to the British Museum
There’s one last thread to the story. According to the British Museum’s records, in 1836 it purchased the badge at the top of this post from one Henry (Harry) Osborne Cureton who conducted his trade in London variously as a curiosity dealer, a medallist and coin dealer. In the February 1851 edition of the Athenaeum an advert was placed, announcing that Cureton’s entire stock was being sold off due to his retirement. The British Museum’s web page about Harry Cureton suggests that that after this he may have been employ in some capacity at the Museum. If the British Museum was one of the buyers of the collection advertised in the Athenaeum, Cureton may have been hired to catalogue the objects, of which the St Werburgh pilgrim badge may have been one.
Athenaeum no.1215, February 8th 1851 advert by Messrs S. Leigh Sotheby and John Wilkinson for the sale at auction of Harry Osborn Cureton’s stock of coins, medals and antiquities. Source: Google Books
The badge is not on display at the British Museum, which is a shame but not terribly surprising. As the British Museum’s Fact Sheet explains, it’s collection totals at least 8 million objects, of which roughly roughly 80,000 (1%) are on public display at any one time, the rest remaining in storage.
Just as one expects pilgrims to travel, one expects pilgrim badges to travel. Margery Kempe, early 14th century wife, mother of fourteen children, visionary and pilgrim, managed to fit in pilgrimages to the Holy Land via Italy, to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and to Danzig in Prussia. We have no idea where the owner of the St Werburgh badge might have worn it on his or her travels, but it is not at all surprising to find that it ended its travels in London.
Final Comments
1916 window in St Werburgh’s in the refectory, showing an imaginative, romantic view of the saint. Photograph by Wolfgang Sauber. Source: Wikipedia
This post started with an image of geese in a basket, an emblem of St Werburgh that was cast and sold to pilgrims as a totem of their enterprising pilgrimage to the shrine of a Mercian princess, St Werburgh, within the abbey at Chester. By exploring the connection between a 7th century saint who was buried in Staffordshire and a 10th century Mercian queen who translated (transferred) the remains of the saint to Chester, we encounter the Viking colonisation of Britain. The new shrine containing the saint’s relics in Chester was a powerful new emblem of Christian faith, using affinity to the earlier Anglo-Saxon past to provide meaning and reassurance in the very turbulent present.
In 1093, when Hugh Lupus, first Earl of Chester decided to put his stamp on Chester and, at the same time, pave his way to a comfortable afterlife by founding an impressive Benedictine monastery, the saint was provided with a new home, echoing Æthelflæd’s own intentions. St Werburgh’s original Anglo-Saxon shrine was built to evoke both the past and the present, using history to provide a sense of continuity and stability as Chester entered a new era.Some of this sense of the present being reinforced by the past was carried forward into the 14th century shrine as well. St Werburgh went on to generate income for the monastery throughout the middle ages.
Pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. John Lydgate’s Prologue of the Siege of Thebes c. 1457–1460: Royal MS 18 D II, f. 148r.Few pilgrimages would have been so comfortably and elegantly undertaken. Source: British Library
A pilgrim badge, even if it was mass-produced and relatively inexpensive, was an attractive symbol, and one to wear with pride, but was not merely an inanimate souvenir. By touching it to the shrine, it became a conduit of spirituality, transmitting the essence, goodness and potentially curative powers of the saint within. In an era in which Christ was universally accepted as being embedded in the Eucharist via transubstantiation, a Church-given reality, the idea of objects like pilgrim badges as agents of transformation was not a theoretical matter but another everyday Christian reality. Intrinsically the badge had an active, multi-functional role as a medium of the shrine’s essence, and as a symbol of hope, piety, charity, perseverance and / or status. The medieval period offered pilgrims a fluid, multi-layered religious existence in which, if they were deserving, the secular and spiritual could mingle in certain places under certain conditions. In a sense, whilst the shrine cannot be divided and shared, the pilgrim badge, the emblem of the shrine and sometimes the vessel holding the essence of the shrine, is a way of dividing the shrine infinitely amongst those who invested it with their beliefs and hopes.
Detail of St Werburgh’s shrine
The static 14th century shrine and the multiple, travelling pilgrim badges were firmly linked. The shrine, unmoving, connected to a long-lost Anglo-Saxon past, was rooted to its particular spot. The pilgrim badges, by contrast, were all about the here and now, both for the craftsmen who made them and for the visiting pilgrims who purchased them. The shrine would have existed without the pilgrim badges, but the badges were dependent on both the shrine and the pilgrims. Whilst the memory was alive, the badge containing the memory remained a connected to the shrine via the pilgrim. The shrine, acting as the anchor for such experiences, stayed firmly put, but its tendrils extended into the secular world via the tales told by the pilgrims who had visited, encouraging others to replicate the experience.
At some point, the pilgrim badge was parted from the pilgrim. Perhaps the pilgrim died and it was inherited by one of his or her children. Later in its history it encountered another point of departure and re-entered into the world of commercial transactions. Eventually, it found its way into the ownership of a dealer in portable objects, like medals and coins, and in the 1860s was accessioned into the collection of the British Museum, where it is now buried in storage. Perhaps one day it will emerge to perform a role as a piece of valued heritage, but for the time being, it is divorced from any of the realities that it once served.
Quite apart from looking great on my favourite black coat, my own replica St Werburgh’s badge (shown right) can be seen as an aspect of the St Werburgh shrine’s new identity. Today the shrine finds itself as part of the discussion about modern contexts, including conservation, tourism, academic research and local history, where current perspectives reinvent churches, cathedrals and shrines in many different, novel ways, and contribute to ongoing narratives. My newly purchased badge has become part of that ongoing story. It’s a nice thought. The reassembled shrine in the Lady Chapel does not contain St Werburgh’s relics, but the saint remains irrefutably embedded into the fabric of the cathedral and is central to its identity.
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Videos:
Why did St Werburgh of Chester Resurrect a Goose?
By Dr Thomas Pickles, University of Chester
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Video: Metal Casting – Pilgrim Badge
By the Digital Pilgrims Project
Video modern pilgrim token from Pilgrim Flask page
Piers Baker-Bates of the Open University talks about the value of his own pilgrimage memento
Burne, R.V.H. 1962. The Monks of Chester. The History of St Werburgh’s Abbey. SPCK
Clarke, C. 2011. Remembering Anglo-Saxon Mercia in late medieval and early modern Chester. In Clarke, C. (ed.) Mapping Medieval Chester: place and identity in an English borderland city c.1200-1500, p.201-218
Varnam, L. 2013. Sanctity and the City. Sacred Space in Henry Bradshaw,’s Life of St Werburge. In Clarke, C. (ed.) Mapping Medieval Chester: place and identity in an English borderland city c.1200-1500, p.114-130
Claassen, C. 2011. Waning pilgrimage paths and modern roadscapes: moving through landscape in northern Guerrero, Mexico. World Archaeology, vol.43, iss.3, p.493-504
Clarkson, T. 2018. Æthelflæd. The Lady of the Mercians. John Donald
Hahn, H.P. and Weiss, H. 2013. Introduction: Biographies, travels and itineraries of things. In Hahn, H.P and Weiss, H. (eds.) Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things. Shifting contexts of material culture through time and space. Oxbow Books
Hicklin, J. 1852. A History of Chester Cathedral with biographical notices of the Bishops and Deans. George Prichard
Jones, D. 1957. The Church in Chester 1300-1540. Chetham Society
Garland, L.M. 2005. Aspects of Welsh Saints’ Cults and Pilgrimage c.1066-1530. Unpublished PhD, Kings College London
Gilchrist, R. 2013. The materiality of medieval heirlooms: From biographical to sacred objects. In Hahn, H.P and Weiss, H. (eds.) Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things. Shifting contexts of material culture through time and space. Oxbow Books
Goscelin de St-Bertin 1974 (N. J. Munday, translator). The Life of St. Werburg by Goscelin. Friends of Chester Cathedral
Kempe, M. (translated with introduction by Windeatt, B. 1985) The Book of Margery Kempe. Penguin Classics
Locker, M.D. 2015. Landscapes of Pilgrimage in Medieval Britain. Archaeopress
Lynch, J.H. 1992. The Medieval Church. A Brief History. Longman.
Mason, D. 2007. Chester AD400-1066. From Roman Fortress to English Town. Tempus
Moreland, J. 2010. Archaeology, Theory and the Middle Ages. Understanding the Early Medieval Past. Duckworth.
Schmoelz, M. 2017. Pilgrimage in medieval East Anglia. A regional survey of the shrines and pilgrimages of Norfolk and Suffolk. Unpublished PhD, University of East Anglia
Tillotson, J.H. 1988. Monastery and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Selected Account Rolls from Selby Abbey, Yorkshire 1398-1537. The Boydell Press
Turner Camp, C. 2011.Inventing the Past in Henry Bradshaw’s ‘Life of St Werburge’,Exemplaria,vol.23, iss.3, p244-267
Webb, D. 2000. Pilgrimage in Medieval England. Hambledon and London
Whitehead, A. 2020. Mercia. The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom. Amberley
The Tailor’s Tale exhibition, at the Tŷ Pawb gallery in Wrexham, is on until September 24th 2022. It is a rare opportunity to see the mid-19th century “Tailor’s Quilt” without having to go to south Wales to see it in its usual home. The exhibition is showing at the same time as the exhibition Blanket Coverage, in the same gallery, about which I have already written here.
The Tailor’s Quilt was made by master military tailor James Williams of Wrexham (c.1818 – 1895). It is on loan from the St Fagan’s National Museum of History in Cardiff. The museum bought it in 1935 from Williams’s grandson during the economic depression, where it joined a national folk art collection, which now has over 200 examples of Welsh quilting and patchworks.
As well as the quilt itself, which is a complete joy, the exhibition features modern art works, including designer clothing and accessories by Sarah Burton (fashion house Alexander McQueen) and fashion designer Adam Jones; a range of items by Mark Herald, based on the quilt and commissioned by Tate Britain; and a set of four small pieces by Quilter’s Guild of the British Isles members Judy Fairless, Anne Gosling, Barbara Harrison and Helen Lloyd. It is one of the pleasures of The Tailor’s Tale, that 19th and 21st century approaches to patchwork and quilting by local textile specialists can be seen side by side, with all the implications of social and economic change that each implies. afdasfsd
The Tailor’s Quilt
First, a bit of terminology. A quilt is generally defined as at least two layers of fabric with padding, called wadding, between them, all stitched together either with straight lines crossing each other to form squares or diamonds, or in more elaborate designs. A patchwork consists of pieces of fabric sewn together. A patchwork quilt is a patchwork that has been provided with a wadding and backing, and has been sewn together at multiple places across the surface to connect all three levels, to form a patchwork quilt. The Tailor’s Quilt, technically, is a patchwork, because it is made up of different fabrics sewn together but is not sewn over to join all the layers together. It is made using the intarsia method, as described by Dr Clare Rose of the V&A: “This technique, also known as ‘cloth intarsia’, ‘mosaic needlework’, ‘inlaid patchwork’, ‘inlay patchwork’ and ‘stitched inlay’, involves cutting motifs out of wool cloth and stitching them directly to each other with no seam allowances and no backing fabric.” Features like the panther’s very smug smile, are picked out in silk thread.
James Williams, Draper, located opposite another draper and a boot maker at the gates to the church. Source: @Tiffypox on Twitter
As modern as it looks, and as imaginative as it is, the Tailor’s Quilt was crafted by James Williams in his downtime over a period of 10 years between 1842 and 1852, using leftover fabrics from the suits and military outfits that he made, as well as from textile sample books that were no longer of use. It is truly astounding for its scale, imagination and the splendid combination of representational scenes and abstract designs. The quilt is surprisingly huge, and framed behind glass it is a real presence.
It is thought that Williams was born in 1818. His name is listed in trade directories between 1850 and the year of his death in 1895. A photograph survives of his shop sign with the church in the background, which is supposed to show a shopfront on 8 College St., Wrexham. I went to have a look to see if the original building is still there. The view shown left, which shows a sign with the legend “J. Williams Draper,” cannot possibly be College Street, which approaches at a very awkward side angle to the church tower. This is without question Church Street. Perhaps Williams moved from one premises to another at some point in his business life.
A view down Church Street today.
The Tailor’s Quilt measures 2.34m high by 2m wide (7.6 x 6.5ft) and contains over 4,525 pieces of material. It is far bigger than I was expecting, even knowing the measurements. It uses a fairly limited but perfectly harmonized palette of colours, drawn from what Williams had to hand. It shows scenes from the Bible such as Adam naming the animals, Noah’s Ark, Jonah and the whale (fabulously, with only the legs showing out of the whale’s mouth), and Cain and Abel, with the sky filled with lightning. It also features motifs symbolizing Wales (a leek), England (a rose), Scotland (a thistle), and Ireland (a shamrock). Giving the composite scene a really modern twist, the Menai Suspension Bridge and Cefn Viaduct (with a steam engine and two carriages passing over it) are also prominently featured. The significance of the Chinese pagoda seems to escape most commentators, but perhaps (speculating recklessly) it was inspired by Chinese ceramics, which had become mainstream in 19th century Britain at the time. Part of the fun of the piece, with a huge, self-satisfied black panther dominating the composition, is looking for the vignettes and enjoying the details in each one.
The combination of abstract, symbolic and representational takes time to absorb, and it works perfectly both on the level of the detailed vignettes and as a complex composition that instantly creates an attractive and appealing impression. It is difficult to imagine how, over a 10 year period, Williams was able to keep hold of the compositional elements to create something so beautifully balanced and proportioned. As the Tŷ Pawb website puts it, “The quilt is now widely regarded as one of the best surviving examples of Welsh folk art.”
It was exhibited at the Art Treasures Exhibitionof North Wales in 1876 and the National Eisteddfod in 1933, both held in Wrexham, and in the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1925. Although its travels were put on hold for conservation work, it is now fit for travel once again, and was displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum’sQuilts 1700-2010exhibition in 2010, and was loaned to the Wrexham Museum for a temporary exhibition in 2017. Its return to Wrexham at Tŷ Pawb in 2022 is very welcome.
Modern Responses to the Tailor’s Quilt
One of the reasons that this exhibition is so appealing is that it explores how The Tailor’s Quilt influenced and inspired other artists working in the same medium.It offers an opportunity not merely to see a sublime example of the genre, but to see how modern textile artists have incorporated design elements of the quilt in their own work.
The most original of the contributions is that made by fashion designer Adam Jones, who was commissioned by Tŷ Pawb to make a quilt of his own to be displayed adjacent to the Tailor’s Quilt. It works superbly, because Adam Jones has a style that is quite unlike that of James Williams. His bright, often garish clothes are attention-grabbing and regularly make use of clashing colours, textual elements and pub-themed motifs to make often loud, sometimes kitschy and frequently humorous statements. Adam Jones is from Froncysyllte near Wrexham, but is now based in London. Although there are garments from Adam’s collection in the exhibition, to demonstrate some of his creative range, his quilt is particularly interesting in this context. It combines the inspiration of the Tailor’s Quilt with a unique vision of Wrexham, its football team and pubs, and has its own intense personality. The composition is set against a bright, shiny red background (Wrexham FC’s dominant colour), and is full of references to Wrexham, and in particular Wrexham Lager. Contrasting textures, like lace and towelling, and everyday objects like a butcher’s apron and a pair of gloves are intertwined with abstract geometric shapes inspired by the Tailor’s Quilt. Instead of all four nations, Wales is given pride of place with the dragon at its base. Flanking Jones’s quilt are huge photographs of the quilt with local people, one man sitting on it, another draping it around her shoulders, removing textile art from the clean walls of the gallery and taking it back to its spiritual home. Great fun.
fasdfs Painter and printmaker Mark Herald was commissioned by Tate Britain to create some pieces based on the Tailor’s Quilt for the Tate’s shop. Mark’s sketchbook is displayed here, together with some of the items that he created for Tate Britain (some of which are currently for sale in the Wrexham Museum, a short walk away). His pieces include pictures, mugs, plates and bags. He takes motifs and themes from the Tailor’s Quilt, gives them a bright hit of colour, and arranges them in harmony on the new surfaces. They work superbly, echoing the Quilt, the motifs unmistakeably lifted from its progenitor, but given a bright, modern twist on the surface of everyday objects. Although none of his other works are shown in the exhibition, a quick web search shows why Tate Britain chose him. His own artworks are similarly full of light, often referencing the animal world, full of bright colours and dynamic shapes.
The name that pops up repeatedly when you do a search on the Tailor’s Quilt is clothes Sarah Burton, Creative Director of the fashion house Alexander McQueen. Sarah Burton was inspired by the Tailor’s Quilt on a visit to St Fagan’s Museum, and incorporated its themes into her Autumn/Winter 2020 collection.
Her work provides yet another contrast. Just as the Tailor’s Quilt is the product of a professional tailor working in Wrexham, and Adam Jones’s quilt and clothing specifically reference the small town environment of the 70s and 80s that were part of his upbringing, Sarah Burton’s clothing is self-consciously aimed at the catwalk and is the product of the couture design world. Angular shapes and big panels of fabric are imprinted with motifs lifted directly from the Tailor’s Quilt, but given a new colour palette and an entirely new feel.
Four small pieces exhibited together are by Judy Fairless, Anne Gosling, Barbara Harrison and Helen Lloyd, who each made a piece as a response to the Tailor’s Quilt for the Llangollen Quiltfest in 2017.
From top left, clockwise: Ann Gosling “What a busy life I lead;” Helen Lloyd. “Jump,” Barbara Harrison, “The world around me,” and Judy Fairless, “All Stitched Up”
Although every exhibition has a curator and a team of skilled assistants, the general public does not often hear much about them. This exhibition was the brainchild of the lateRuth Caswell, to whom the exhibition is dedicated. She was a very remarkable and award-winning costumier, designer, artist and teacher, as well as a skilled curator of exhibitions, of which this was her last. The Tŷ Pawb website explains how she started out:
Ruth moved to London in the 1960s, when she met and married her husband actor Eddie Caswell. Ruth said: “When we married and moved to London, we had only £12.50 to our name so I made clothes in my back bedroom and sold them in Kensington Market on a stall next to Freddie Mercury’s. I delivered them on the 73 bus each Friday and they sold instantly.” Ruth’s clothes were photographed for Vogue and worn by model Jean Shrimpton.
There is a video in the exhibition showing Ruth talking at fascinating length about textile design, and her enthusiasm, eloquence and generosity of spirit are very evident. rewrwe
Final Comments
Quilting and patchwork, as craft activities, have a long tradition in domestic contexts, either for daily use or to mark special occasions from the Medieval period onwards. The Tailor’s Quilt, imagined and hand-stitched by a professional tailor, was very much the product of a professional skill, but was also created within a domestic context. The exhibition makes it clear how craft activities are now gaining traction in the fields of design and textile arts, featuring on catwalks and in art galleries. The liminal position held by textile arts for at least a century, is slowly being eroded, and textile is coming of age in a number of commercial contexts where they are recognized as both design and art.
It was a particular stroke of genius to organize The Tailor’s Tale and Blanket Coverage at the same time, and provide them with a single space to share. Whilst quite different in their content and their style of display, both raise questions about how textiles are regarded today, and what they bring to the world of art. Both of the exhibitions, the one exploring the impact of a single magnificent piece (the patchwork quilt) and the other exploring the multiple facets of a single genre (blanket weaving), work beautifully both in isolation and together.
With this new exhibition, the Tŷ Pawb gallery has again provided the perfect venue for bringing together modern art and local history, whilst also exploring more universal themes. The exhibitions The Tailor’s Tale and Blanket Coverage run at Tŷ Pawb until September 24th 2022 between 10am and 4pm Monday to Saturday. Entry is free of charge.
Chester’s role as an important Roman military headquarters surrounded by a growing settlement, known as Deva, is very well understood, but there is not a great deal to see on the ground. This means that Chester’s Roman legacy is largely preserved in excavated archaeological remains, some of which are on display in local museum spaces. There is a small gallery of Roman objects in the Grosvenor Museum in Chester showing a wide variety of artefact types, from elite pottery to drainage pipes, but to display some of the large number of Chester tombstones, a special exhibition space was was created for them in a dedicated room in the museum, showing them off to great effect.
The display opens with a Roman style couch under a canopy, setting the scene for a walk down a path between the tombstones, emulating one of the Roman roads heading out of Deva. The walls behind the tombstones capture the sense of the surrounding landscape, part military installation, part civilian settlement, and part rural vistas. The tombstones are organized either side of the “road,” each one facing out towards the visitor. Low level information boards, great for wheelchair users and children, show useful illustrations of key examples, together with translations of the texts.
In the discussion of tombstones below, each example is accompanied by an RIB (Roman Inscriptions of Britain) number. Each inscription in Britain has been given a unique number. When I was at university studying the Antonine Wall, the Roman Inscriptions In Britain were recorded in print, but this was obviously the sort of content that was best suited to a database, and one of the best online resources for Roman Britain is Roman Inscriptions in Britain online. As a resource it has been developed and expanded, and the user interface is excellent. If you want to know more about any of the tomb stones mentioned below, this is a great place to start, with translations, illustrations and further references all available.
Burials and memorials
Altar RIB 3149, found at the Chester amphitheatre
The Romans disposed of their dead in a variety of ways that included both inhumation (deposition in the ground) and cremation. Wealthier Roman inhumation burials in Britain were traditionally accompanied by this sort of memorial, and might include tomb stones and commemorative slabs. In terms of how they were used, tombstones are much like the grave stones and chest-like tombs found in Christian churchyard cemeteries today, but dedicated to different deities and with far more elaborate scenes depicting the owners of the graves engaged in activities that showed them in activities that they enjoyed, or which highlighted particular qualities.
Collectively, these memorials are a useful source of information about Roman life and death in Britain, but individual memorials also have the potential to tell their own stories about the owners, the way in which the owners wanted to be remembered and the ideas with which they wanted to be associated. Although the Grosvenor Museum’s display primarily features tombstones, there are some altars too. Altars could be found in similar contexts, but might also be found in homes, public buildings and at religious sites. The above example from the museum’s exhibit, RIB 3149, was found in a room behind the amphitheatre arena’s wall during excavations in 1966, and reads, in translation, “To the goddess Nemesis, (from) Sextius Marcianus, centurion, in consequence of a vision.”
Roman cemeteries
Roman Chester with modern roads superimposed (click to enlarge). Source: British History Online
The area around the fortress was under military control and the location of the cemeteries was decided by the Praefectus castorum (camp prefect), who decided where civilian quarters and various facilities were to be located. Roman law was very strict on the matter of refusing burial with in urban and residential areas. Roman cemeteries were built outside towns and cities, and depending on the size of the urban centre there might be a number of them. The earliest tombstones and altars were erected along the sides of roads, but more formal cemeteries would have been established over time. These will have been destroyed as Chester spread out in all directions during subsequent centuries. Most of the stones in the museum, sculpted or inscribed, or both, had therefore originally come from one or more Roman cemeteries, and were probably dumped somewhere together to make space for urban spread.
Plan of part of the Infirmary Field excavation. Source: Chester ShoutWiki
One cemetery was revealed during rescue excavations carried out between 1912 and 1917 by Professor Robert Newstead. It was located at Infirmary Field to the west of the fortress, the site of a planned new wing for Chester Royal Infirmary. The presence of a possible cemetery had been known since the mid 19th century due to the discovery of burials adjacent to the Infirmary in 1858 and 1863. During his excavations Newstead found that the cemetery contained men, women and children who, judging from the objects in graves, were both military and civilian.
The tombstones in the walls
Section of the Chester City walls thought to be Roman, sitting on bedrock above the canal.
The high sandstone walls that surround the city of Chester were originally established in the Roman period, but were built upon in subsequent periods to repair damage and to raise the overall height of the walls. There are only a few places where Roman phases can be clearly identified with confidence, such as that shown on the right. The repair of the walls over time incorporated both newly quarried stone, and whatever stone was lying around from earlier collapses.
Although tombstones and altars are known from various locations around Chester, most of the Chester tomb stones in the Grosvenor display are from a cache found incorporated into the Chester city walls, completely divorced from their original funerary context, but would once have come from one or more cemeteries. The re-use of ancient building materials is common the world over. In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh Horemheb re-used painted blocks from palace buildings of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten as rubble fill to create the thick walls of his monumental gateway at the temple of Karnak on the Nile. In both the Chester and Karnak cases, these items used as building materials have enormous historical value to us today as information about the past, but were simply unwanted rubbish when they were employed as building materials.
Plate A from Cox’s publication of his excavations in 1891
In 1883 the Chester City Surveyor Mr Matthew Jones was overseeing repairs to a section of the lower courses of stonework in the walls and the fill behind them near to Morgan’s Mount. As they prepared the site for the work he realized that he was looking at pieces of Roman stonework and that one was clearly part of a tomb stone, and he retrieved what he could see. Although no further investigations were carried out in1883, further repair work was required in 1887 between Northgate and the King Charles Tower, this time rather more extensive, and more Roman funerary pieces were found. Again, they had been used to repair the lower courses of the wall. So many were found this time that it was decided to extend the work and locate more of Chester’s Roman heritage. The Chester Archaeological Society, founded in 1849 (and still going strong today), was brought in to supervise the investigation of the wall to the west of the Northgate between 1890 and 1892. Taking all the finds from 1883, 1887 and the 1890-92 excavations, more than 150 stones were found, of which the Grosvenor exhibit is a tiny sample showing some of the best of the examples.
Key features of tombstones
Tombstone of Flavius Callimorphus and Serapion. RIB 558
The earliest tombstones and altars known from Chester date to the 1st century. For example, the tombstone of Flavius Callimorphus showing him with his son or nephew Serapion (aged 42 and 3 ½ years old respectively) was discovered at the Roodee in 1874, in situ over a grave, and was erected by Flavius’s brother Thesaeus (RIB 558). These are Greek names which may indicate that they were freedman and/or traders who had settled in Chester. Flavius is shown reclining on a funeral couch, and the elaborate nature of the decoration indicates that this was a wealthy family. Within the grave were two skeletons accompanied by a gold ring and a coin of the emperor Domition, dating to the latter half of the 1st Century A.D. Callimorphus and Serapion, the former lying on a couch with the latter in his arms, shown in the photograph to the left. On a small table in the foreground is a bird, which is a metaphor for the journey into the afterlife. Next to the table is an amphora that may or may not suggest that Callimorphus was an importer of wine. Although it is speculation that he was a wine importer, the family names indicate that they were of eastern Mediterranean origin, where Greek was preferred to Latin, and could well have been traders who settled locally. The name Serapion is of particular interest, as it refers to the god Serapis, who was venerated during the Ptolemaic (Greek) and subsequent Roman occupation of ancient Egypt.
Altar from Watergate Street. RIB 445. Source: British Museum BM 1836,0805.1.
Amongst other Roman finds, a 2nd Century A.D. stone altar was found in lower Watergate Street when Georgian terraces were built in 1778. It was dedicated to Fortuna Redux (Fortune, who brings travellers home safely, including soldiers and traders) and gods of healing and health Aesculapius and Salus. It was raised by freedmen and slaves of a Roman imperial legate, perhaps a provincial governor, who has the longest recorded name in Roman Britain: Titus Pomponius Mamilianus Rufus Antistianus Funisulanus Vettonianus. This is the only example shown here not on display in the Grosvenor Museum. It is now in the British Museum (BM 1836,0805.1; RIB 445)
Nearly all the memorials on display in the Grosvenor are made of red sandstone. The quality of the stone chosen was important, both for engraving scenes and text, and for durability. The raw material selected was not the most locally available sandstone, but according to Wilding was sourced some 8 miles away where better quality red sandstone was available.
The tombstone of Caecilius Avitus, RIB 492. On the left is the original as it was found. On the right is the replica with its bright paint, both on display in the museum.
The stones would originally have been brightly painted, which is a strange thought. A cemetery would have been a colourful place, new memorials brighter than older ones, creating a dazzling visual spectacle. At the entrance to the Grosvenor Museum exhibit there is a facsimile of one of the Chester grave stones showing how it might have looked in full colour, and when compared with the original unpainted version that is also on display, it is a completely different entity. It shows an optio (junior officer who was an accountant-adminstrator, second in command to a centurion) called Caecilius Avitus, wearing a cloak, a staff of office, a legionary sword and a writing tablet (RIB 492). It is like seeing the Lady Chapel in Chester Cathedral, painted to show how it would have looked in the Medieval period, or the glorious 17th century decoration of Rug Chapel at Corwen, near Llangollen, both of which are similar eye-openers, revising how we look at past objects and architecture. To modern eyes, so accustomed to seeing the past in subtle monochrome, the bright paintwork of Caecilius’s tombstone is almost shocking, but Roman life was anything but dull, either at work or at play, and the colours of the stones reflected this multi-hued existence.
Between the moment of death and the burial itself there were ceremonies, rituals and processions that marked the transition from this world to the next. For the very rich, this could be ostentatious and elaborate, involving music and theatrical performances, but for the poor it was a much more mundane affair. Often a Roman might provide for their funeral in his or her will, but if not the responsibility fell to the person who inherited the rest of the property of the deceased. When the deceased was buried, graves could be visited by the living, and at the end of February during the Feralia festival offerings were made to dead ancestors at their graves.
Tombstone of Curatia Dinysia. RIB 562, described below
Popular themes on the Chester tombstones are dedications to certain deities, symbolism surrounding the afterlife and depictions of the deceased lying along a banqueting couch. Reclining on a couch was a popular eating position used by wealthy Romans, and the couch represents a banquet in the afterlife, indicating eternal wellbeing. Some objects in scenes may hint at the profession of the deceased. Where an inscription is included, in Latin, the names can give an indication of the origins of the individual.
Text on tombstones is always highly abbreviated, which would not have been a problem for literate contemporaries (or for researchers today) because the abbreviations were standardized and the texts were highly formulaic. Many of the inscriptions begin DM, standing for Dis Manibus (To the spirits of the departed), and finish HFC, standing for Heres Faciendum Curavit (the heir had the stone made). The heir often adds his or her name and relationship to the deceased. Between these topping and tailing devices there may be additional information about who died including, for example, the name of the deceased, the age at which they died, who erected the stone in their honour, the place from which the person originated, the role that the person performed, a legion or auxiliary unit in which a soldier served and the number of years for which he served.
The Grosvenor Museum tombstones
Showing some of these features is a woman reclining on a couch, framed within two columns and an arch. She is shown in the photograph immediately above. Her name is Curatia Dinysia (perhaps a mason’s error for the name Dionysia), holding a drinking cup, with a three-legged table in the foreground (RIB 562). Sadly the head and face are damaged. She sits between two garlands or swags of ivy leaves, sacred to the deity Bacchus, each of which supports a dove, signifying the release of the soul. Above this scene, incorporated into the architecture of the arch, are two tritons (half men, half fish, like male mermaids, but sometimes shown with horse forelegs) blowing trumpets, representing the journey to the Isles of the Blessed where Bacchus resided. The drinking cup, probably filled with wine, may also reference Bacchus. As with Calimporphus and Serapion, the name Dinysia/Dionysia is thought to be Greek. The inscription reads, in translation, “To the spirits of the departed, Curatia Dinysia lived 40 years; her heir had this erected.”
The illustration on the right is by Dai Owen (Grosvenor Museum 2010)
Another woman is shown on a very worn tombstone, also cleverly recreated by illustrator Dai Owen (RIB 568). The woman’s name is damaged, but ends “-mina” She reclines on the banqueting couch with the familiar three-legged table in the foreground, a drinking cup in hand and a ring on the little finger of her left hand. Most remarkably, behind her, on the the high-backed couch, is a giant sea shell flanked by dolphins, again a reference to her journey to the Isles of the Blessed. Only part of the inscription has survived, with the DM of Dis Manibus (to the spirits of the departed) legend just beneath the three-legged table, and the end of the lady’s name just below that at far right.
Tombstones featuring women are usually found in this sort of military context, where many were wives, (more rarely mothers or daughters) of soldiers, and could communicate their own status alongside their husband’s, making statements about their own identity. It is good to have these as they are a distinct minority. Allason-Jones, for example, estimates that inscriptions dedicated to women make up only around 10% of the total inscriptions found in Roman Britain. These represent only the middle and upper echelons of those living in Roman areas. As with low status men, those women who could not afford any form of memorial have been lost.
The auxiliary cavalryman (equitis) Aurelius Lucius, who has a Latin name, but was probably not of pure Roman origins is an interesting case (RIB 552). Aurelius is shown with a moustache, beard and big hair. Again, he is reclining on a couch, and like Curatia Dionysia, he holds a drinking cup in one hand, whilst in the other he holds a scroll of paper that represents his will. Behind his legs are his plumed helmet and the top of his sword, and in the foreground is a small three-legged table and a boy holding a detached head. Auxiliaries were often recruited from conquered lands and were not Roman citizens. After 25 years in service they could apply for Roman citizenship. The uncharacteristic hair and the severed head, perhaps a war trophy, may refer to a background from one of these conquered regions, but Aurelius also chose to depict himself in a traditional Roman pose, with a traditional Latin inscription. Perhaps he had become a citizen, incorporating his career as a foreign cavalryman but opting for a Roman afterlife.
One of the most remarkable of the Grosvenor’s tombstones is this rider on a horse carrying a flying standard. It is thought to represent a a Sarmatian from an area now occupied by southern Ukraine and northern Romania. The Sarmatians were nomadic hunters and pastoralists, excellent horse breeders and riders and formidable warriors. No inscription survives, but he was almost certainly an auxiliary, as the Sarmatians were conquered in AD 175, and some are known to have been present in Britain. Although none are known from Chester, there were Sarmatians in a regiment deployed at Ribchester in Lancashire, and it is not unlikely that a detachment of that regiment was present in Chester when this individual died. The tall helmet is distinctive, and he holds a standard which he holds in both hands. If he was indeed Sarmatian, this would have been topped with a fearsome dragon’s head with brightly coloured fabric flying to its rear. When wind ran through the dragon’s jaws at speed, it made a terrifying noise to put fear into the hearts of the enemy. His sword is in its scabbard at his side.
Another cavalryman is depicted on a scene that has lost its inscription, other than the letters DM (Dis Manibus) (RIB 550). It is very worn, and the top of the head and the hand (and whatever it is holding) are missing but the scene is full of energy. The horse, with its bridle and a blanket serving as a saddle clearly visible, is galloping with its mane blown back, and the rider’s legs hold tightly to its flanks. The rider’s right arm is raised above his head, probably holding a spear, whilst his left hand, hidden from view, holds the rein or the bridle. Trodden beneath the hooves of the horse is a naked victim who lies gripping a six-sided shield that has demonstrably failed to protect him.
Marcus Aurelius Nepos and his wife. RIB 491
A rather more domestic scene is provided by Marcus Aurelius Nepos and his wife. The stone is right at the rear of the exhibit, and the inscription is difficult to see (it was not particularly clearly engraved in the first place) and is confined to the left, beneath the figure of Marcus Aurelius, centurion of the XXth Legion Valera Victrix, who died aged 50 years old. There is a space beneath the figure of his wife for an inscription, but for reasons unknown this was never added. As it was she who commissioned the stone, she was clearly still alive when the carving was made and may have left the space for an inscription of her own when she herself died, but perhaps she died elsewhere. Marcus Aurelius is bearded, carrying a staff and has a prominent belt, a cloak over his shoulders with a small brooch attached. His wife is holding a cup, and lefts the hem of her dress with one hand to reveal the skirt beneath. Not visible in the photograph is an engraving on the side that shows a mason’s hammer and set square and the words SVB ASCIA D[edicatum], meaning “dedicated under the axe,” perhaps a formula to deter vandals. The tombstone dates to the 3rd century AD.
RIB 560. Tombstone of the child slaves Atilianus, Antiatilianus and Protus
The tombstones with elaborate or contained scenes are plentiful, but are still a minority in the context of British funerary memorials, representing only the most wealthy purchasers. Some tombstones merely showed a little decorative work to accompany the text. This example (RIB 560), although still very fine, was provided with ornamental features but no elaborate scene. It was dedicated by a master to three young slaves. It reads, in translation, “To the spirits of the departed, Atilianus and Antiatilianus, 10 years old; and Protus, 12 years old. Pompeius Optatus their master had this made.” It is possible that the 10 year olds were twins. Although the thought of slavery always sits uncomfortably in today’s world, it should not be forgotten that in a period when slavery was the norm, it was by no means uncommon for masters and slaves to develop relationships of mutual affection and respect. Perhaps that is what we are seeing here.
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Final Comments
Architectural detail showing a male gorgon, with four snakes emanating from each side of his head.
The tombstones described above represent only a a small sample of the total number of engraved stones preserved from Chester. Of those that were not tombstones, some were pieces of altars and others were fragments of bigger pieces of architecture, many of which also came out the 19th century excavations in the Chester walls, some showing Roman deities. They are out of the scope of this post but, do watch out for those too in the display if you visit the museum.
The tombstones are particularly evocative and hopefully the small sample provided here gives an idea of what sort of themes were common, and how people like to have themselves depicted. Death in the Roman empire was an integral part of a soldier’s life, and in the military life of Chester, death had its own role and its own places, with its own objects and iconography. Most of the individuals represented here were of relatively high status, except for the slaves of their master Pompeius Optatus, but they came from a variety of backgrounds, all either stationed here or drawn here for commercial reasons by the military stronghold, and it is good to be able to see some of the variety that made up Deva society.
19th century illustrations from Chester Archaeological Society reports of the tombstones and other engraved stones excavated from the walls (click image to enlarge). Sources, left to right: de Gray Birch 1887, Watkin 1887, de Gray Birch 1888, Jones 1887, all in the Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society volume 2 (references below).
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For those who are interested in seeing something of Rome under foot in Chester, to supplement what can be found in museums, there are a number of guided tours available (some lead by Roman Centurions!). If you prefer a self-guided tour, the Royal Geographic Society’s “Discovering Britain” website provides one, which can be downloaded as a a PDF or as an app for your mobile device: https://www.discoveringbritain.org/activities/north-west-england/trails/chester-trail.html.
Sources:
Those that were of particular use for this post are shown in bold
Books and papers
Allason-Jones, L. 2012. Chapter 34, Women in Roman Britain. In (eds.) James, S.L. and Dillon, S. A Companion to Women in the Ancient World. Wiley
Cox, E.W. 1891. Notes on the sculptures of the Roman monuments recently found in Chester. The Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vols.43044, 1891-92, p.91-102
Eckardt, H. 2014. Objects and Identities. Roman Britain and the North-Western Provinces. Oxford University Press
Wilding, R. 2006. Graham Webster Gallery of Roman Stones at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester: Explore the Hidden Mysteries of the ‘lost’ Roman Gravestones.
Fragment at a bisque ware doll head with painted lips
One of the eeriest pieces that we have dug out of the garden is this fragment of a doll’s head. It was no ordinary child’s doll, but an expensively crafted item, its head and limbs made of bisque porcelain. It would have been dressed in opulent, often period-themed clothes, and its eyes may have opened and closed, via hinged eyelids, as it was tilted.
For anyone new to this occasional series on objects extracted from my garden during everyday gardening activities, see the History in Garden Finds page. These are not objects used in the garden, but objects, usually fragments, lost or disposed of in the garden and found during digging, troweling and planting.
Bisque ware dolls either appeal to you or don’t, and in my case they sit with clowns and golliwogs in the category of the downright unpleasant. We found a piece of china showing a golliwog in the garden too. The bisque ware dolls are collectors items today, and you can usually find a few examples on eBay. Bisque ware or biscuit porcelain is made in a mould, and fired but left unglazed, giving its surface a matte finish. When skilfully painted, it can look from a distance like human skin. Each colour is painted on to the surface and fired separately, building up the layers to create the skin-like effect. The head and limbs of the doll were formed in moulds. The unseen body of the doll, hidden by clothes, could be made of much less expensive materials. Limbs were sometimes articulated, so that they bent at elbows, hips and/or knees.
A doll head that gives some idea of what the rest of the garden fragment doll may have looked like. “Floradora” by Armand Marseille of Germany. Source: What The Victorians Threw Away
The bisque dolls were made from around 1860 to around 1915, although similar dolls were made from other materials before that date. The earliest were intended to represent fashionable women, and the child dolls only came in later, after around 1880. Their popularity spread initially in France during the 1880s, but the German market soon competed, making dolls that looked just as expensive but were far more reasonably priced. By 1900, Germany was dominating in the bisque doll market. Names like J.D. Kestner, Armand Marseille and the Heubach brothers are still popular in the collector market. The best known producers marked their dolls where they would not normally be seen, now of great value for collectors, but a head fragment like this would not have been marked.
There is an example of an elaborately kitted out Kestner doll at the end of the post, but to the right is the equally eerie head of another broken doll, from the What The Victorians Threw Away website, showing what the rest of the head of the fragment in my garden may have looked like. Although some dolls had mouths that moved when the doll was tilted, this one did not, and it does not looks at though the garden fragment did either. It has eyelashes like the ones on the one from my garden, but shorter.
There is little to say about the piece from the garden, other than it was made of a thin porcelain, carefully shaped in a mould. It was very skilfully painted, the cheeks a gentle rosy colour, the thin, bow-shaped lips a bright scarlet, with the ends of long dark eyelashes at top right. The clump of grey substance on the reverse side suggests that someone had made an attempt to repair the doll, presumably following a previous breakage. It seems to have been a very unlucky individual.
The fragment is at top left of this photo, shown with a few of the other garden fragments in an old printer’s tray, hung on a wall.
Looking at it, I cannot help but wonder what on earth happened to the rest of the doll and why this bit of it was isolated from the rest of its head and its body? It was found to the rear of a wide flower bed that was completely dug out, its soil disposed of and replaced due to a particularly virulent and un-killable form of grass, before being replanted. If the rest of the doll had been there, we would have found it, but there was no sign of anything remotely like it. Perhaps it was dropped, broke on the spot, and this fragment was lost at the time, with the rest of the doll picked up and disposed of elsewhere. Who knows :-). It is one of the few hints of any high quality pieces owned by previous householders that we have dug out of the garden. Most of those items are of domestic use, and very commonplace, although each has its own history as a representative of a certain type of object fashionable at the time of its production.
J.D. Kestner bisque doll with accessories (for sale at over $1000.00). Source: eBay
This satisfyingly chunky piece of glazed earthenware, featuring a roughly beaded rim, was once a fairly large, open vessel, probably a pot or a tall-sided bowl. Mocha ware, produced between the mid 1700s and the early 1900s, was relatively cheap and cheerful, pottery for using rather than admiring. Its defining features include its colouring, the linear decoration (usually combined with panels of colour or white background) and the “dendritic” design. “Dendritric” means “branching,” and in mochaware refers to a pattern consisting of a feathery fern-like tendrils, usually emanating from a main stem, typically coloured either black or blue. Vessels without the dendritic design are usually referred to simply as banded creamware or annular (ring-like) ware, in both cases due to the encircling bands of colour. It is only those vessels with the dendritic design that are supposed to be referred to as mochaware. We have found both in the garden, but the piece of mochaware is the most impressive, both in terms of solidity and distinctiveness.
The name mocha derives from an imported stone known as moss agate, which was also known as mocha stone due to its export from the port of Mocha (al Mukha) in Yemen, on the southwestern end of the Arabian peninsula. The stone is not actually found in that part of the world, and was imported from India and some parts of central Europe. Many of the first examples to find their way into western Europe were brought back by the East India Companies of Britain and the Netherlands. Although the appearance suggested to its European admirers that plant remains had been preserved in the stone, moss agate consists of quarts with mineral inclusions, usually manganese and iron oxides. It is not actually an agate at all.
In the 18th century the belief that the stone preserved plant remains indefinitely suggested that it had special health-preserving properties, providing good luck to the wearer. Many were accordingly turned into jewellery, particularly as polishing techniques improved, and they were often accompanied by gemstones in settings. The ability to cut the stone into thin sheets that could be polished encouraged its incorporation into various decorative objects. The Royal Collection Trust has in its collection a piece of sliced moss agate formed into the lid of a box, by Fabergé, which shows clearly how the pottery emulates the stone, and how it might be used in luxury goods. There are many similar examples.
The Greengates Works in Tunstall during the 1780s. Source: thepotteries.org
It is thought that the comparatively humble mochaware pottery was first made by William Adams of the Greengates factory, Tunstall, England (1745-1805). Production moved to the factory of his cousin, also William Adams, at Brickhouse, Burselm and later at Cobridge Hall in Cobridge. Many English factories were soon turning out large quantities of mocha, mainly in Staffordshire into the early years of the 20th Century. Other factories were set up in Bristol, Hull, Leeds, Glasgow, Swansea and Llanelly.
Annular and mochaware vessels usually combine a limited repertoire of colours. The concentric rings include yellow, yellow ochre, blue, black and and beige. More rarely some feature terracotta, orange and green bands. The background is usually cream or white, and the dendritic design is usually blue or black. In some cases the mochaware decoration remained purely abstract, but on some vessels the acidic solution is controlled to create images representing trees. Some examples of both abstract and more representational uses of the style are shown below.
Being so inexpensive, and at the same time so attractive, it became extremely widespread. It was often used to make pint mugs for pubs, marked with an imperial symbol confirming the correct volume, and ordinary domestic items like cups, mugs jugs, jars, lidded pots and mixing bowls, and even chamber pots. It was almost never used for flat items like dishes, plates or platters. Because the patterns made could be influenced but not precisely determined, each piece was unique. Mocha and banded creamware were exported in large amounts to the United States, which was soon manufacturing its own mochaware.
On the pottery, the tendril effect of the moss agate is achieved by dripping a dark acidic colouring (which could include urine, tobacco juice, lemon juice, ground iron scale, hops or vinegar) onto the alkaline slip (mixture of water and clay) of the pot, whilst still wet. The alkaline liquid splits, and the result was thought to resemble the moss agate. Here’s a description of the technique from the University of Toronto’s Physics department:
The original recipe involves a “tea” made by boiling tobacco, which is then colored with e.g. Iron oxide. The piece is first coated with a wet “slip” (very runny clay/water mixture). Then the tea mixture is touched onto the wet surface. The acidic tea reacts with the alkaline slip and the dendrites grow quickly from the point of contact. The dendritic pattern is clearly the result of a dynamic process in which the contact line between the two liquids, tea and slip, becomes unstable. The surface tension of the tea is less than that of the slip. The instability is probably driven by a combination of capillary and Marangoni (surface tension gradient) stresses, coupled somehow to the acid/base chemical reaction. Similar looking instabilities are known in surfactant driven flows.
A decisive contributor to the production of both mochaware and annular ware was the rose-and-crown engine-turning lathe, developed by Josiah Wedgwood. There was a hefty up-front cost, but it allowed a mechanized approach to the otherwise hand-applied concentric rings of coloured slip.
Experiments described by The Ceramic Arts Network website, explain how the techniques have been used to make modern mochaware in modern experiments:
Pint tankard with an imperial stamp. Source: 1stDibs
The mixture that is used to form the patterns is called “mocha tea.” It was originally made by boiling tobacco leaves and forming a thick sludge that was then thinned with water and mixed with colorant. However, nicotine solutions are only one form of mild acid; many others will work, such as citric acid, lemon juice, urine, coffee or vinegar, particularly natural apple-cider vinegar. One of these would be mixed with colorant. Most colorants work quite well, although carbonates and stains are usually better than oxides, since they are typically a physically lighter precipitate than oxides. Heavy materials such as black copper oxide, black cobalt oxide and black iron oxide do not work well, because the acid can’t adequately hold them in suspension. A ratio of about one heaping teaspoon of colorant to a quarter cup of mild acid is usually a good starting point. However, a good deal of individual testing has to be done to get the two liquids to work together to create significant dendritic formations or diffusions.
The Copeland (formerly Spode) pottery works in 1834. Source: Spode Museum Trust
The Colonial Sense website tells how Charles Dickens visited the Copeland Pottery Works at Stoke on Trent in the Potteries:
I am well persuaded that you bear in mind how those particular jugs and mugs were once set upon a lathe and put in motion, and how a man blew the brown color (having a strong natural affinity with the material in that condition) on them from a blow pipe as they twirled; and how his daughter, with a common brush, dropped blotches of blue upon them in the right places; tilting the blotches upside down, she made them run into rude images of trees.
Mochaware sherd from the garden
The sherd from my garden shows a band of yellow ochre on and beneath the rim with a beaded or rouletted design impressed into the surface below the rim, produced by using an embossed rouletting wheel. The beading was achieved by a simple cylinder attached to a handle and rolled onto the surface of the ceramic. It took a very steady hand. Some rouletting is very subtle and complex, but this is clearly not. Still, it is another decorative aspect to the vessel. A segment of black dendritic patterning is visible on a cream background, separated from the wide band of yellow ochre by a thin band of blue. It is a solid, utilitarian piece of earthenware, almost 1cm (a third of an inch) thick at the rim, narrowing into the body of the vessel. The vessel originally had a diameter of 25.5cm (10 ins), which makes it a fairly substantial object. Its walls show very little vertical curvature, unlike most mixing bowls, so it may have been a large pot of some description.
Yellow ochre reverse side (interior) and section of the sherd showing the fabric and glaze
Today,whole and undamaged items of mochaware attracts collectors on both sides of the Atlantic. My sherd, though part of a fascinating story, is of course worthless. As usual, apart from trying to find out information about the odds and ends in the garden, together these objects are combining to form a sense of who lived here before and what sort of livings they may have had.
There’s a truly illuminating video of dendritic mochaware being produced by a modern artisan on YouTube, showing how the acid reacts when it meets the alkaline, as follows:
For anyone new to this occasional series on objects extracted from my garden during everyday gardening activities, see the History in Garden Finds page. These are not objects used in the garden, but objects, usually fragments, lost or disposed of in the garden and found during digging, troweling and planting.
Sources:
Books and papers
Wright, K.F. 2021. Artifacts. In Loske, A. (ed.) A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry. Bloomsbury Academic.
It never occurred to me that I would find any politically incorrect objects in the garden, but this is certainly a contender. I dug it out of one of the flower beds when doing some planting last summer, and for a moment couldn’t figure out what it was I was looking at, partly because I was holding it upside down, but partly because it was so unexpected.
I remember that Robertson marmalade and other Robertson products were everywhere, with the distinctive Golliwog logo on their labels, with its bright clothing and crudely caricatured face. ln spite of the Golliwog’s big red smile, or perhaps because of it, I found it threatening. For others, however, it was (and still is) a cheerful and entertaining character, rather absurd but benign.
The Golliwogg as it first appeared in Florence Kate Upton’s “The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls” of 1895. Source: Wikipedia
The name “Golliwogg” (with the double g at the end) was invented by Florence Kate Upton, whose parents had emigrated from England to New York in 1870, and who had a black minstrel soft toy as a child, which was at the heart of many childhood games. When the family returned to England in the late 1880s, Upton began to illustrate children’s books to raise money to attend art school, with verses for the books written by her mother Bertha. The Golliwogg was introduced in their 1895 book The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls, complete with the shaggy hair, clown-like grin, bright clothes and bow tie. This was the first of fourteen very popular books that featured Golliwogg as a central character, a jolly, benevolent, and good-natured friend who embarked on international adventures.
The name and character invented by the Uptons were not copyrighted, and the character was incorporated into works by other authors. It became a popular home-made rag doll, but it soon went into production as a soft toy, mainly in Germany and Britain, marketed as a “Golliwog” (without the final g). The German Steiff Company became the first to mass produce them in 1908, going on to produce a female version of the doll.
Robertson’s Golden Shred Golly Badge, Pre-War Issue dating from 1937 commemorating the coronation of King George VI. Source: Portable Antiquities Scheme via Wikipedia
In the 1910 James Robertson and Sons (based in Droylsden in Greater Manchester) first adopted the “Golly” on its branding after James’s son John had seen them being played with on a trip to the U.S., and by the early 1920s had been rolled out to many of their products. In 1928, the company began to offer Golly brooches in return for tokens printed on product labels as a marketing gimmick. The first were a series of Gollies engaged in different sporting activities and the Golly became a runaway success for Robertson’s.
It was only in the 1960s when increasing issues surrounding attitudes to race and the growth of racism became dominant that the role and significance of the Golly became questionable, and began to seem like very bad taste, offensive to many, potentially encouraging unconscious bias in children. In some countries today the word, either in its entirety or split into “golly” or “wog” is categorized as a racial slur, and the image of the Golliwog has been banned from some of them. At the same time, Golliwog-themed items, particularly vintage ones, have become collectable. Indeed, the Robertson’s Golly was not actually retired until 2001. The BBC reported that it was to be replaced by characters from Roald Dahl books, illustrated by Quentin Blake. Robertson’s Brand Director Ginny Knox commented on the changeover:
We sell 45 million jars of jam and marmalade each year and they have pretty much all got Golly on them. We also sell 250,000 Golly badges to collectors and only get 10 letters a year from people who don’t like the Golly. Whereas we are concerned about those people and it’s not our intention to be offensive with the Golly, we have to look at what our research says and what the sales say. The feedback has consistently been that for the vast majority of people, the Golly is a positive thing that they like.
One wonders what, in particular, people said that they liked about the Golly.
The very battered sherd from my garden was probably part of a child’s teacup or similar. The fabric is just over 2mm thick, and the diameter is probably something a little in excess of 7cm diameter. This would be more accurate if this as a rim piece, which can be measured by laying the rim on a simple map of concentric circles, (a rim chart or radius chart) but even though this is just a body sherd, the curvature is obvious and it is unlikely that it will have been much wider at the top.
The head of the Gollywog is typical, with the big round eyes, spiky hair and wide red mouth. The bow tie is yellow and the waistcoat or jacket is blue, fastened with a big white button. Just visible across the base of the waistcoat/jacket is a splash of red, which could either be a jacket buttoned across the base of a waistcoat or the top of the trousers.
The eyes look slightly down to its left, which was a standard feature of the Robertson’s Golly. The most familiar Robertson’s Golly was usually shown with a bright yellow waistcoat, red bow tie, blue jacket and red trousers but there variants. In spite of making myself substantially uncomfortable by paging through dozens of images on specialist websites, as well as paging through Google Images, I have not found one that looks like the piece from the garden.
The paragraphs looking at the history of the Golliwog on this post were based on Dr. David Pilgrim’s detailed article The Golliwog Caricature on the Ferris State University / Jim Crow Museum website (dated November 2000, edited 2012), which includes a full bibliography. For the really fascinating, if often disturbing full story, with a useful discussion of the racism issue, see the link below. Dr Pilgrim is Professor of Sociology at the Ferris State University. https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/golliwog/homepage.htm
The above-mentioned story about the end of the Golly as a Robertson’s brand in 2001 is on the BBC website.
Updated 13th April 2023, Thursday: The Guardian newspaper reported that toy Golligwogs were being banned from eBay and Etsy “amid new evidence that more people now regard the toys as racist.” I’m amazed that it took so long:
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For anyone new to this occasional series on objects extracted from my garden during everyday gardening activities, see the History in Garden Finds page. These are not objects used in the garden, but objects, usually fragments, lost or disposed of in the garden and found during digging, troweling and planting.
Many thanks to Chester Archaeological Society for circulating the news that Dr Katherine Wilson (Associate Professor in Later Medieval European History, University of Chester) was inviting CAS members to see and handle medieval objects in Chester from the Grosvenor Museum’s collections at two pop-up events. Both were part of the Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries initiative. The first event was on the day that I attended, the 3rd March at the Garret Theatre in the Story House, and another on the 4th March. We were all greeted warmly by the team from Chester University, which included students who were seated in front of trays full of objects for us to go and investigate and learn about.
The format was very straightforward and worked perfectly. A number of trays containing the objects were organized on a u-shaped table layout, so that we could easily move between them without being on top of each other. In front of each tray was a University of Chester student, all of them helping us to explore the objects, encouraging discussions and real involvement with the objects in front of us and how they might lead us to understand more about the lives that left them behind. Each tray had a selection of very different objects, so in each case there was a lot to talk about. I didn’t catch the names of the students, but they were excellent.
Chester has a rich Medieval past, but as the team made clear, most people thinking about Medieval Chester focus almost exclusively in terms of the Cathedral and the half-timbered shop fronts, when there are not only other great buildings, like St John’s Church (Chester’s first cathedral), but there are also all the objects that have been excavated over the years, the items of every day life that people used, wore, carried with them or used in their daily work. These items bring to life, at least in the imagination, the people who owned them.
Each object has a knack of opening windows into other parts of Medieval life that are no longer easily visible or reproducible. The shoes were particularly evocative. The first tray at which I sat down contained fragments of a black material, some very thin, one rather thick. When I was asked what I thought they were, I said the first thoughts that came into my head: leather, protective, item of clothing. I guessed a hood, perhaps because I was drenched from rain 🙂 They were, of course, fragments of shoes. In the other boxes there were far more complete items, one sole with an additional patch of leather attached over the heel as a protective layer, much like a flat shoe today. All of them bore the signs of wear, most of them were marked by tiny holes where one piece had been connected to another, and there was even a fabulous child’s shoe with an open toe. These shoes, preserved in a waterlogged ditch just outside Chester, posed so many questions – how expensive were they (a goose, a sheep?), and in turn were they high status objects? Were they everyday wear or were they only worn for best? Where did their owners wear them? How far did their owners, wearing their leather shoes, travel for trade, as messengers, or on pilgrimage?
There were several keys, some of which had remarkably patterned and intricate ends or bits. For every huge key there must have been a vast door, opening into home or business premises, whole worlds within worlds. For every tiny key, each fascinating in its own complexity, there is a missing lock, a missing box and the missing contents to contemplate. Perhaps such keys, each either looped or perforated at the tops, were carried on a string, worn around the neck when small enough or tied to a belt or locked in a draw, along with other keys. Whilst the keys themselves were portable, and the small keys may have opened small and very portable chests, the big keys probably opened big doors, either room doors or cupboard doors, and whilst the keys themselves were portable, what they were opening was much less so.
The pieces of wheel-thrown pottery were impressively large and well made. There was no sign of glazing, so these were probably very practical, every day items. Being rim sherds, the diameters could be calculated to give an idea of the size of the pots. There were no bases, so it was not possible to see if there was any sign of the sort of charring that would be expected for cooking. Perhaps they were used for storage. They were solid and designed to be moved around, re-used and to do a reliable, practical job. A piece of handle probably belonged to an even bigger vessel, looking very like a Roman amphora handle, thick and ribbed, impressively chunky. The contents of the vessel must have been heavy to require such big handles, perhaps a liquid of some sort. If these items travelled, and were broken in the process, it was probably in the process of being shifted across a room or in the case of the thick-handled vessel, perhaps being carted from farm or port to market.
Medieval floor tiles seem like the antithesis of mobility or portability, but they too had travel tales to tell, as one of the students pointed out very vividly. Between the pattern designers, the clay diggers, the mould-makers, the artisans and those who laid the floors, these pieces passed from hand to hand until they were eventually laid on the ground. They are thick, about 3.5 cms from memory, and as the lady sitting next to me pointed out at one of the trays, there was little sign of inclusions in the fabric. This presumably made them less prone to cracking, more able to bear the weight of people walking over them. The tiles were splendid, the glazed ones with the indented moulded decoration capturing light as we moved them. In candle light, the images, lions and griffins, must have appeared to shift and shimmer, providing them with a type of dynamism beyond the pattern that the contributed to on the floor. I was looking at the Victorian floor tiles in Chester Cathedral last week, for which I have a guilty liking based on the hallways of countless terraced houses around the country, but when compared to the Medieval ones they seem very two-dimensional and glossy. The Medieval ones have a texture, luminosity and energy that are truly remarkable.
There was one piece, possibly a tile, that was neither rectangular or glazed, but perfectly round with a lion’s head looking out. The puzzle, the student told me, was that the rectangular ones were all mass-produced, because they would be laid on floor, just like modern ones, but round ones were most unusual. This was small, only about 10cm in total diameter, and deeper than the square ones. It was also, if memory serves, made of stone. The lion’s head was painted on, not moulded, and although the disk itself would have been fairly tolerant of feet, I wonder about that lion. A possibility is that it was the centre of a radiating design, but the radiating pieces would also have to be specially shaped, and if so, where are they? As he said, a puzzle, but a very nice one.
Some of the objects came from outside of Britain. A gorgeous little cross within a circle, just a few centimetres across, was from Siena in Italy, and was probably sewn on to a piece of clothing, and would have looked like a brooch. Other items may have worked their ways all the way down the Silk Road, eventually finding their way to Chester. One particularly startling piece, featuring a very austere male face, is a tiny St Thomas Becket flask for containing holy water, called an ampulla (ampullae in the plural), the ears forming little loops for string attachment to a belt or clothing. Its weight suggests that it was made of lead. Some of these long-travelled objects were moulded, and easy to mass produce, but owning them would still have been precious, often representing a serious achievement, something to which others might aspire, and making the owner visibly one of a circle of similar achievers, irrespective of birth or background. asdfasdfsd
In another tray was a tiny but highly decorative little piece of metal, a devotional token. It is in the face of a head, and was broken below the neck, so certainly had once been somewhat longer. It probably had something of a similar role to a pilgrim’s badge – the souvenir or, rather more importantly, an indication of pride, the sense of achievement with which a particular devotional religious task is associated. There was also a very, very thin copper ring on the same tray that had a wide section at the front, with tiny little carved symbols marking it, thought to have been different events in the owner’s life. In another tray was a silver spoon handle from Rome showing the face of St Peter and topped with a cockerel, representing Peter’s denial of Christ three times. These three items were so small and personal that they spoke of how people who made long journeys, perhaps people who did not have sufficient silver pennies to make many such journeys, valued these objects as emblems that declared numerous concepts – achievement, affiliation with an idea or an ideal, veneration of a religion or a preferred saint. One student (wish I had known any of their names) had on his own jacket a replica pilgrim’s badge of geese in a basket, the symbol of St Werburgh, whose remains were moved to Chester Abbey (now Cathedral) in the 10th century, attracting pilgrims.
Poppy worn by thousands of British people each year in memory of those lost and wounded in war. Photograph by Philip Stephens. Source: Wikipedia
Taking this a step further, people have been using objects to signify identity, nationality and membership since prehistory, and we still wear objects to communicate similar ideas. Examples are badges of membership of a particular association or society; shirts supporting a particular sporting team; sweatshirts declaring an affiliation to a particular university; handbags advertising how elite they are by displaying their designers’ logos; poppies on Remembrance Sunday expressing our debt to those injured in war and, just recently MPs in the symbol-laden House of Commons wearing Ukrainian flag ribbons. Today some of these icons and symbols travel the globe very easily, but travel was more difficult in the past, and some images that found there ways into Medieval society travelled from other parts of the planet via trade and pilgrim routes, copied and re-interpreted as they travelled. The emblems of association with guilds, religions and the signals of achievement must have had a much greater depth to them, and new images and their ideas must have been both challenging and fascinating.
Distributed through a number of the trays were coins, tiny silver pennies, so thin that they were terrifying to handle and difficult to read. One was a Henry VI penny, so beautiful and so subtle that it looked more like a piece of ornamentation than something one would do business with. The question of how one measures value came up. Many exchanges were done in kind, trading one set of skills or products for another in the form of services, foodstuffs and finished products but for assessing those who had coinage, the National Archives has a fabulous Currency Convertor, enables you to put in a year, a monetary value (like a penny, pound or £10, 3s, 1d and press a button to calculate how many horses, heads of cattle, sheep wool, days of labour etc you would get for your money. It goes back to 1270 and gives a vivid sense of what value something may have been in the past, and since I found it about 10 years ago has always made me think of historical coins in terms of what that would have purchased. If we plonk ourselves down somewhere in the middle of the king’s first reign, say 1440, when there were about 240 pennies to the pound, what would £1.00 have bought you? One horse, two cows or seven stones of wool. That also equates to 33 days of a skilled tradesman’s labour. All those little pennies added up to something very significant if only, just as today, you could save enough of them.
It’s amazing how one can get things so badly wrong. One object, with a very sharp point and spurs of different sizes, I speculated might have been a device for cleaning sheep hooves. I am a bit livestock-orientated, having specialized in livestock management in my own research. On rethinking, I thought that it might have been used for both piercing and shaping leather or other materials. Turns out that it was another key, presumably incredibly well worn 🙂 One of the great things about the object handling event was that there was absolutely no derision. All ideas were welcomed. Handling the objects, talking about them, thinking about them was a great way of bringing all that reading to life and imagining how people’s lives actually looked and felt.
Grosvenor Museum. Photograph by Dennis Turner. Source: Geograph via Wikipedia
There will be an exhibition based on a similar theme at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester beginning at the end of April. I used to volunteer there, working on finds during the 1980s. Dates and top-level details for the upcoming exhibition, which will probably be added to in the future as the exhibition nears, are at: https://events.westcheshiremuseums.co.uk/event/medieval-chester-retold/
Repeated thanks to Dr Katherine Wilson and her excellent team, who did such an excellent job of talking us through the objects on the trays in front of them. Thanks again too to Chester Archaeological Society for the email that told me that it was happening. A great couple of hours. For more about the Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries project, see the website at: https://mob.chester.ac.uk/ https://mobilityofobjectsacrossboundaries.wordpress.com/
I went for a second wander around the cathedral afterwards, and was lucky enough to catch the organ in full swing. Glorious. Although this is a 19th century organ, with bunches of pipes popping up everywhere, there are records of an organ in the abbey since before the Dissolution, perhaps contemporary with some of the objects that we were handling today. asdfsdfsdfsd
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