Peer (SaTiniete a ines PURCHASED. THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Volume 79 1985 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE VOLUME 79 (1985) ISSN 0262 6608 © Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society 1985 Hon. Editor: Christopher Chippindale Hon. Natural History Editor: Marion Browne Change of ‘Title ‘The journals issued to volume 69 as parts of The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine (Part A Natural History; Part B Archacology and Local History) were from volumes 70 to 75 published under separate titles as The Wiltshire Natural History Magazine and The Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine. With volume 76 the magazine reverted to its combined form and title. Contributions for the Magazine are always welcome, whether longer contributions to be printed as papers, or shorter items — equally valuable — to be printed as notes. ‘There is no fixed maximum length, but space is always at a premium, so contributors should try to use no more words than they need. All contributions and proposals should be sent to the editor at, in the first instance, The Museum, 41 Long Street, Devizes, Wiltshire SN1IO INS. The editor is happy to advise and discuss with intending contributors at any stage during the preparation of their work. The style for footnotes, references and so on should be that found in this number. Produced for the Society by Man Sutton Publishing Limited, Gloucester. Set in Janson by Alan Sutton Publishing Limited Printed by Redwood Burn Limited ‘Trowbridge THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY The society was founded in 1853. Its activities include the promotion of archaeological and historical work within the County and the study of natural history; the issue of a Magazine, and other publications; excursions to places of archaeological and historical interest; and the maintenance of a Museum, Library, and Picture Gallery. OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY (1984-5) TRUSTEES C.E. Blunt, Esq., OBE, FBA, FSA The Right Hon. The Lord Devlin, Pc, FBA E.G.H. Kempson, Esq., MA B.H.C. Sykes, Esq., MA PRESIDENT AND CHAIRMAN OF COUNCIL B.H.C. Sykes, Esq., MA VICE-PRESIDENTS Professor S. Piggott, CBE, FBA, FSA C.E. Blunt, Esq., OBF, FBA, FSA Mrs C.M. Guido, FSA COUNCIL Ex-Officio K.H. Rogers, Esq., BA, FSA (Wiltshire County Archivist) R.C.S. Blackledge, Esq. MA, FSA, (Chairman, Salisbury & South Wiltshire Afuseum) P.R. Saunders, Esq., BA, FMA (Curator, Salisbury Museum) R.G. Hurn, Esq., Jp (Hon. Treasurer) Mrs P.M. Slocombe, BA (Chairman, Amenity & Conservation Mrs S. Phillips, JP (representing Kennet District Council) Mrs N. Steele, BA (Wiltshire Record Society) Elected D.J. Williams, Fsq., MA, 1979 Mrs J. Hodge, 1980 Committee) Mrs M. Knott, 1980 D.J. Bonney, Esq., BA, FSA (Chairman, Archaeological Research P. Manley, Esq., 1980 Committee) A. Stephenson, Esq., OBF, MA, 1980 Mrs P.Q. Treloar, 1980 T.K. Maurice, Esq., OBF, DL, 1981 R.C. Hatchwell, Esq. (Hon. Keeper of Prints and Drawings) J.F. Phillips. Esq. (Chairman, Natural History Committee) Mrs J. Friend (Hon. Publicity Officer) R. Bradley, Esq., BA, PSA, 1981 C.R. Chippindale, Esq., BA (Hon. Editor, WAM) M.G. Rathbone, Esq., ALA, 1981 C. Shell, Esq., ph.p, 1982 HH. Seymour, Esq., BA, 1982 Mrs D. Clarkson, 1983 P. Cray, Esq., phb, 1983 KE. Bradby, Esq., MA, 1984 E.R.A. Sewell, Esq., Mc, 1984 E. Elliott, Esq., FBPS, BSc. 1984 Nominated J.-L. Wall, Esq., (representing Wiltshire County Council) R.L. Pybus Esq., MA, FLA (Director, Library & Museum Service, Wiltshire County Council) Lt Cdr P.A. Whitehead (representing Wiltshire County Counci!) Mrs P. Rugg (representing Wiltshire County Council) OFFICERS CURATOR: F.K. Annable, Esq., BA, FSA, FMA SECRETARY: Major J.N. Duxbury, Mc, TD, MA M. Heath, Esq., MA (from 1 July 1984) ASSISTANT CURATOR: P.TI. Robinson, Esq., Ph.pd, FS CURATOR NATURAL SCIENCES: SANDELL LIBRARIAN: aaa bee Caen Se Mrs P. Colman HON. ARCHITECT: H1.D. Spencely, Esq., MA, ARIBA, JP HON. SOLICITOR: : H.G. Awdry, Esq. MA HON. ACCOUNTANT: W.L. Searight, Esq. CONTENTS The Long Mounds of the Avebury Region by C.T. BARKER The Excavation of Amesbury Barrows 58, 61a, 61, 72 by PAUL ASHBEE A Bell Barrow in Clarendon Park by PJ. FASHAM with JANET HENDERSON, JENNY COY, and WENDY J. CARRUTHERS Excavations at Potterne, 1984 by CHRISTOPHER GINGELL avd ANDREW J. LAWSON The Excavation of an Anglo-Saxon Cemetery (and Some Prehistoric Pits) at Charlton Plantation, near Downton by SUSAN M. DAVIES with ANNE-MARIE BOJKO, ELISABETH CROWFOOT, PHILIP HARDING, and JANET HENDERSON The Roads of Anglo-Saxon England by DAVID A.E. PEL TERET The Tisbury Landholdings Granted to Shaftesbury Monastery by the Saxon Kings by R.H. JACKSON Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Stonehenge Bluestones by AUBREY BURL Widow Hyde of Heale by JENNIFER MILLER The Building History of Urchfont Manor by ALAN T.C. SLEE The School Welfare Provision in Salisbury 1908-18 by JAYNE WOODHOUSE Small Rodents in Wiltshire: Dormouse by MARION BROWNE Some Fungi of Southwest Wiltshire by J.B. HINDLEY Gideon Mantell in Wiltshire by J.B. DELATR and DENNIS R. DEAN 164 178 184 192 201 206 i) N wn Notes DDS) A Handaxe from West Kennet by ROBIN HOLGATE and JOYCE TYLDESLEY 225 Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Sites in the Chippenham Area by JOLIN Hl. TUCKER 226 An Open-work Brooch of the British La Tene Period trom Cold Kitchen Hill by RICHARD EYEE ET 228 Roman Silver Rings from Wiltshire by M. HENIG 231 Preliminary Report on Excavations at Castle Copse, Great Bedwyn, 1983-4 by FE. HOSTETLER 233 The Saxon Charters of Bradford-on-Avon and Westwood by ROBERT LIARVEY 235 Medieval Timberwork at Bull Bridge, Wilton by BRUCE N. EAGLES and PETER J. WOODWARD — 237 \ Medieval Gold Ring from Hill Deverill, near Warminster by JOLIN CLIERRY 238 A Find of Silver Spoons from Marlborough — the Problem of the Concealment of “Preasure Trove’ by PAUL ROBINSON — 238 A Puzzle from the Electoral History of Devizes by EDWARD BRADBY 241 George Howell, Pipemaker of Warminster by MARTIN NORGATE 243 Barrows Excavated by William Stukeley near Stonehenge, 1723-4 by RJ.C. NUKINSON 244 The Fox ‘Talbot Calotypes in Devizes Muscum by RE. LASSAM 247 The William Butterfield Font from Amesbury Church fy THOMAS COCKE 248 The Library of the Vicars of St Mary’s, Marlborough by £.G.H. KEMPSON — 250 John Britton’s ‘Celtic Cabinet’ in Devizes Museum by CHRISTOPHER CLIPPINDALE = 250 Wiltshire Archaeological Register for 1983 254 259 Stull Building Victoria’s Monument a review article on volume XII of the Victoria County History of Wiltshire by THOMAS COCKE Reviews 259 Salisbury and South Wiltshire Muscum new galleries (CHRISTOPHER CHIPPINDALE) 262 Danebury, an Iron Age Hillfort in Hampshire: an Acrial Photographic Interpretation of its Environs, by R. Palmer (D.R. WILSON) 263 The Southern Feeder: the Archaeology of a Gas Pipeline, edited by P.D. Catherall, Marion Barnett, and Heather McClean (ROBIN HOLGATE) 264 Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England, edited by Jeremy Haslam (CATHERINE, LILES) Rolls of the Fifteenth of 1225 and the Fortieth of 1232, edited by F.A. and A.P. Cazel (C.R. ELRINGTON) The Register of John Chandler, Dean of Salisbury 1404-17, edited by T.C.B. Timmins (WILLIAM SMITH) 266 Cocklebury: a Farming Area and its People in the Vale of Wiltshire, by ; nn Book of Trow ree by Kenneth Rogers (KENNETH HUDSON) 268 \ Mile for the Milk, by Alison Hartfield (PEGGY GUIDO) 269 Frank Sawyer, Man oP a Riverside, by Frank Sawyer and Sidney Vines (MARION BROWNE) 270 Minding Our Manors, by John Goodyere 270 265 Avice R. Wilson (K.11. ROGERS) 268 Shorter notices (CHRISTOPHER CHIPPINDALE) 272 Obituaries Dis Major John Noel Duxbury Norris Paul Thompson Dies) Index THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE ‘The Magazine is issued free to members of the Society. For information about the availability of back numbers and of other publications issued by the Society, application should be made to the Society’s Secretary at The Museum, 41 Long Street, Devizes, Wiltshire, SN10 INS. THE SOCIETY'S MUSEUM AND LIBRARY, 41 LONG STREET, DEVIZES The Curator is Mr F.K. Annable, the Librarian Mrs P. Colman. The Museum contains many objects of great local interest, and the Library a rich collection of books, articles, prints, drawings and notes about the history of Wiltshire. Old printed material and photographs of W iltshire buildings or other objects of interest will be welcomed by the Librarian at the Museum. The repository for records, e.g. ‘old deeds, maps, plans, etc., is the Wiltshire Record Office, County Hall, Trowbridge. THE WILTSHIRE RECORD SOCIETY This Society was founded, under a slightly different name, in 1937 to promote the publication of the documentary sources for the history of Wiltshire. It is now one of the leading societies of its kind in the kingdom and is required by its rules to publish one volume in respect of each year’s subscription. Thirty-nine volumes have already appeared; the thirty-ninth, was published in 1984; nine others are in preparation. An annual meeting is held each year with an address and discussion, usually at some place of historical interest in Wiltshire. The annual subscription is £10.00. New members are most urgently needed. Full particulars about membership may be obtained from Dr John Chandler, 27 Park Street, Trowbridge BAI4 OAU. THE WILTSHIRE BUILDINGS RECORD The Wiltshire Buildings Record was inaugurated in May 1979 to study and record Wiltshire buildings of all types and periods. A central record, open to the public, is housed at the Public Library, Sheep Street, Devizes, and contains a collection of photographs, drawings and reports and an index of information held elsewhere. To date, about 4000 buildings have been wholly or partially recorded. The Society issues a newsletter and offers members opportunities for active fieldwork in their own area. The annual subscription is £4.00 for individual members, £8.00 for institutions, £6.00 for families, and £3.00 for pensioners and students on request. Membership forms are obtainable from Vhe Secretary, Wiltshire Buildings Record, c/o The Museum, 41 Long Street, Devizes. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 7-38. The Long Mounds of the Avebury Region by Cle BARKERS The neolithic long mounds of the Avebury region lie in the frontier zone between the Cotswold—Severn chambered mounds and the Wessex non-megalithic long barrows. With both megalithic and non-megalithic elements, they offer valuable comparisons with both groups. An inventory lists 38 recognized sites: 17 ‘chambered tombs’ (1.e. with stone elements of construction), of which 5 are doubtful; 11 unchambered barrows, of which 4 are doubtful; and 10 miscellaneous sites. Their characteristics are explored, and compared with the Cotswold-Severn and Wessex groups; and the place of the Avebury mounds in the range of long-mound variability is examined. CONTENTS Introduction 7 Inventory Chambered tombs 80 Other long barrows 18 Miscellaneous 24 Discussion Stone-chambered long barrows 27 Non-megalithic long barrows 31 The relationship between the two classes 33 Acknowledgements 37 Bibliography 37 ABBREVIATIONS BLO Bodleian Library, Oxford DM Devizes museum GM = Gough maps (Bodleian) OSR Ordnance — Survey site record — card, Southampton INTRODUCTION Increasingly researchers are accepting the validity of a more insular interpretation for the development of prehistoric cultures in Britain (Masters 1981: 163). Nowhere is this more true than in the study of Neolithic chambered tombs and non-megalithic long mounds. Since Thurnam first differentiated between ‘chambered’ and ‘unchambered’ long barrows (1868: 161-244) these two forms of long mound have been studied, to a large extent, independently. Both involved collective burial in a restricted area beneath one end of an elongated mound; following the realization that timbered structures had existed within some ‘unchambered’ long barrows (Atkinson 1965: 126-33; Piggott 1966: 381-93) attention once more has been given to the relationship between these two classes of long mound. a 23 High Street, West Bromwich, West Midlands, B70 6p]. Several attempts have been made to explore this relationship — in southern Britain — by consideration of the provided by the Cotswold—Severn group of chambered tombs and the Wessex group of non-megalithic long barrows (Corcoran 1969: 75-7, 80-2; Whittle 1977: 208-21; Darvill 1982: 68-70). Geographically these two groups lie adjacent, and in the Avebury region their areas of distribution overlap. Potentially at least, the Avebury region offers insight into the influence of one group on the other, but to date this opportunity has not been fully exploited, and the mounds have figured only as outliers in studies of their respective groups (Daniel 1950; Corcoran 1969; Ashbee 1970; Darvill 1982). The long mounds of the Avebury region form a well-defined NW_ Wiltshire chalk plateau. The clear gap on all sides between this group and other long mounds would seem to be a true break in distribution and not an artefact resulting from the destruction of other examples. Included below is an inventory of the long mounds, denuded burial cham- bers, destroyed and doubtful sites in the region, together with all the significant information about them, published and unpublished, that the author has been able to trace. Regrettably, at this point an incursion into the well-trodden minefield of typological classification is necessary. Such classification is the means by which order is brought to a mass of data by grouping together structures of a similar appearance. While this facilitates study it is essentially an invention of convenience, and may be of little archaeological significance, especially when applied to sites separated by time and distance. Classification can blur variation between superficially similar monuments, blinker insight and delay the advance of archaeological theory. Even intricate systems of classification can be undermined by sites that refuse to ‘fit’. Mention has been made of the distinction drawn central evidence cluster on the 8 THE WILTSHIRE ARCIIXEOLOGICAL AND NAXPEORAL PISTORY MAGAZINE between the ‘chambered’ and ‘unchambered’ long mounds. By considering the nature of the mound a further division can be made — between. cairns, consisting of piled-up stone, and barrows, formed predominantly from earth or chalk. All the long mounds in the Avebury region have, by custom, been called ‘barrows’, although excavation has now revealed that several are partially cairn in construction. For this reason, and with apologies to the purists, the terms ‘barrow’ and ‘mound’ will be used synonymously when applied to the sites under consideration. With regard to chambered tombs, the modular approach to their structure avoids some of the pitfalls of the older, more rigid tomb typologies. This approach considers the individual tomb as the sum of a number of individual components — mound, chamber, fore- court, ete. — with there being several alternative styles for each component available in the architect’s repertoire (Fleming 1972; Kinnes 1975). Certainly it has proved easier to suggest sources for the individual elements in such a scheme than it has to trace convincing progenitors for entire |» monuments (Corcoran 1969: 73-104; Whittle 1977: 208-21; Darvill 1982: 17). The Avebury region presents problems whichever system of classification is favoured. Many of the long mounds cannot, with any confidence, be assigned to either the ‘chambered’ or ‘unchambered’ class of mound, and few of the chambered tombs can be sately allotted to one of the ‘recognized’ groups of chamber type (listed by Darvill 1982: 7-8). ‘The order in which the sites have been considered below has been determined largely by the inventories in previous surveys. However, reappraisal of the available evidence has necessitated the reclassification of several of the sites, and for this purpose the following mound-types will be distinguished in the discussion: Stone-chambered: mounds in which the chamber was made from stone, with no distinction being made between those of megalithic construction and those made of drystone walling, or of combinations of the two. Timber-chambered: mounds in which the ‘chamber’ was made from timber, with additional turf/stone. Unchambered: mounds in which no provision was made for the inclusion of burials. Present research is indebted to the many antiquaries who have recorded the sites in the Avebury region during the last three centuries. Their field observations can be of considerable value, despite the often fanciful conclusions that they drew from their studies. Perhaps the antiquary of greatest significance was William Stukeley. As will become clear in the course of the following inventory, his original notes still form an indispensable source of information. Figure | shows the distribution of the 38 sites under consideration. Uhe inventory examines the sites in this order: first, the mounds accepted by Daniel (1950: 227-31) as chambered tombs, together with those on the enlarged list prepared by Corcoran (1969: 293-5); second, the remainder of the mounds listed as long barrows by Grinsell (1957: 137-46); third, a miscellany of other likely sites. Where the common name differs from the Grinsell inventory name, both are given. In the case of the chambered tombs, the county number (Corcoran 1969: 293-5) is also included. INVENTORY: CHAMBERED TOMBS 1) West Kennet long barrow SU 10466774 (wiL 4/Avebury G 22) This well-known stone-chambered long barrow lies on a ridge of land some 2000 m S of the Avebury henge. The barrow, trapezoidal in shape, is 330 feet! in length and is oriented E—-W. It has been excavated on two occasions — by Thurnam in 1859 (1860b: 405-21) and by Piggott and Atkinson in 1955-6 (Piggott 1962). The documentary history of the barrow has been well covered by Piggott (1962: 1-7), but recent work has revealed a few interesting points. Piggott’s doubt (1962: 1-3) over the identification of the third barrow in Aubrey’s undated sketch (BLO, MS ‘Top. Gen. 25, fo.57) as West Kennet is well founded. Stukeley’s indicates the former existence of a smaller barrow 1500 m WSW of the West Kennet long barrow (no. 32 Beckhampton Plantation, below), which was probably Evidence from manuscripts the subject of Aubrey’s drawing. Stukeley’s records and drawings of the monument have been of considerable value. It would seem that at the time of his visits some drystone walling was visible in the region of the fagade — “The South long barrow cast end is composed entirely of stones pil’d one upon another like a pyramid without any apparent order only a fence of flat and broad stones set around the outside but probably they were laid as a foundation for a cove’ (Stukeley BLO, GM 231, fo.48). The ‘lost reference’ (Piggott 1962: 4) has been traced to Gough Maps 231 fo.32v (BLO). Thurnam’s excavations were visited by Long on 26 September 1859. Fle wrote, ‘On ‘Tuesday morning | 1. A mixture of metric and imperial measure is used, according to the original sources in each case. THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION 9 Kilometres Fi ee pe Below 150 150-180 180-210 Above 210 Windmill Hill ~ HEIGHTS IN METRES ABOVE SEA LEVEL Figure 1. Long mounds of the Avebury region nO Knap Hill 62-~ ; Sites previously listed as 19 Beckhampton Road chambered tombs 20 Bromham G 3 1 West Kennet 21 Calne Without 2 East Kennet 22 Horslip 3 Adam’s Grave 23 Kings Play Down 4 Manton Down 24 Lambourne Ground 5 Devil’s Den 25 Lockeridge 6 Temple Bottom 26 Longstones 7 Millbarrow 27 Roughridge Hill 8 Shelving Stone 28 South Street 9 Old Chapel Miscellaneous 10 West Woods 29 Avebury G 30a 11 Avebury Down 30 Avebury village 12) Oldbury Hill 31 Beckhampton Penning 13. Shepherd’s Shore 32 Beckhampton 14 Easton Down Plantation 15 Horton Down 33 Bishops Canning G 23 16 Kitchen Barrow 34. Bishops Canning G 81 17. Monkton Down 35 SBurze lil Sites previously listed as 36 Horship 2 earthen long barrows 37 Roundway G Sab 18 Avebury G 21 38 =Waden Hill 10 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAROLOGICAL AND NATURAL EISTORY MAGAZINE accompanied Dr Thurnam to this barrow to see the results. of the investigation which had begun the previous day. Two holes had been opened. ‘That most towards the E produced a few small bones of animals and decided indications that this end of the barrow had been originally chambered. In the hole under the large stone (the last towards the W) were found the bones of a female horse and dog’s bones, 2 or 3 pieces of British pottery with the zig-zag mark and two other pieces of pottery which appeared to be unqstestionably Roman. On my recommendation a hole was opened at the western extremity of the barrow, but it yielded noth- ing’ (1858b: 37, added note in DM copy). A brief account of the main features revealed by the latest excavation (Piggott 1962) is necessary for the purposes of the later discussion. The section cut into the barrow, in the region of the ‘waggon drive’ (Long 1858a: 343), revealed the mound to consist of a core of sarsen bounders, laid directly on the old ground surface, with a capping of chalk rubble derived from the flanking side-ditches. Beneath the barrow, and on the old ground surface, were found a number of sherds of Windmill Hill ware. In the excavated cutting an offset of six sarsen stones was found to run off at right angles from the axial cairn, This may be the equivalent of the sub-divisions recog- nized in other chambered tombs and non-megalithic long barrows, and which are thought to be partitions used during the bay-by-bay construction of the mounds (Smith and Evans 1968: 138-42; Selkirk 1971: 9; Selkirk 1983: 109). The N ditch was found to be irregularly cut. Although there were no finds from the primary silt, Peterborough-style pottery and a barbed-and-tanged flint arrowhead were recovered from the secondary silt. While the excavator accepts the existence of a cart- track across the mound, the excavated section shows disturbance only on the S side. Corcoran (1969: 88) suggested that the depression may mark the junction between a primary mound and an added ‘tail’, but only further excavation can reveal whether the mound is of multi-period construction. The five burial chambers open symmetrically (one terminal chamber with two lateral pairs) on to an axial passage. Upright sarsen slabs, with drystone work between, form the walls, while sarsen corbels and capstones form the roof. From the stonehole of one of the passage stones were lifted sherds of a Windmill Hill pot. The passage opens on to a shallow concave forecourt lined by orthostats. Flanking fagade settings run N-S on both sides of the forecourt, the orthostats here linked by oolitic drystone walling. One of the uprights of the S fagade is set at right angles to the line -of the facade; from another of the stone-holes came yet more Windmill Hill pot-sherds. No evidence of a peristalith was found in trenches placed along the N edge of the barrow. All these structures would seem to have been built in a single phase, each part dated by the existence in primary context of Windmill Hill ware. The W chamber was cleared by Thurnam, who found six inhumations (of which four skulls survive in the Duckworth Laboratory, Cambridge), together with many animal bones, flints and sherds of pottery. The skeletal remains of over 40 bodies have been recovered from the floors of the four intact chambers; sherds of Windmill Hill pottery and a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead were also found on the chamber floors. Almost all the burials were incomplete or dis- articulated, and some had been charred. It would appear that successive inhumations were made over a prolonged period with intact bodies being introduced into the chambers. There was no evidence of excarn- ation. Previous burials were pushed to one side and ‘tidied’. From the relative paucity of both skulls and long bones it has been inferred that ritual abstraction of these bones must have occurred. After a considerable period of time all five chambers and the passage were filled from floor to roof with coarse chalk rubble. Throughout this filling were found animal bones, worked flints, pottery, bone tools, beads of stone, bone or shell, and other artefacts. The pottery styles represented included Peterborough, Grooved and Beaker wares. At the same time a ‘false entrance’ of twin uprights, following the lines of the passage, was erected. The area between these uprights and the curving walls of the forecourt was blocked by the insertion of large sarsen boulders. The erection of three large sarsen slabs, joining the two portions of facade, completed the closure of the forecourt. The blocking of both forecourt and chambers was either a single act or a continuous series of acts over a short period. This is demonstrated by the discovery of sherds of the same vessel in both the forecourt blocking and the filling of more than one chamber. The two cremations that overlay earlier inhumations in one chamber may have been a deposit associated with the secondary chamber filling. No radiocarbon dates are available for the barrow. Indeed, in the face of evidence for the removal of bones from the chambers, it is difficult to be sure that any of the burials found were truly ‘primary’. At present the only indicator for the date of construction of the barrow is the presence of undecorated Windmill Hill ware (and Tike LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION its slightly more devolved forms) in primary contexts and its absence from secondary filling or contexts. Such pottery is comparable to that from primary contexts at Windmill Hull causewayed these contexts a date of 2580 + 150 b.c. (BM-74) has been obtained, and it date the construction of West Kennet to about the same period. To estimate the length of time during which the tomb was used is a difficult task, and it is here that the application of radiocarbon dating to the skeletal material may be most productive. Certainly by the time the interior of the tomb was finally closed all the characteristic late Neolithic pottery styles were in use. enclosure. For would seem fair to 2 East Kennet long barrow SU 11636686 (WIL 5/East Kennet G 1) This classically shaped, tree-covered mound sits on the NE slope of the down to the S of East Kennet village, 1500 m SE of West Kennet long barrow. A prominent landmark, it was recorded by both Stukeley (1743: 46) and Colt Hoare (1821: 8), and is shown on the 1815 2-inch OS map. The mound is 99.0 m long, approximately 30.0 m broad, has a maximum height of 4.2 m at its southern end, and is SE-NW (OSR, 1974). Its regularly sloping sides suggest that the mound may originally have had a longitudinally ridged appearance. The barrow seems relatively undisturbed, with only a small depression at the NW and a slightly larger one at the SE visible. None of the small sarsens previously recorded in this SE hollow (Smith 1885: 179-80; Grinsell 1957: 140; Corcoran 1969: 293) are now to be seen. This disturbance is probably the result of the digging reported by Merewether (1851a: 98): ‘the occupier of the surrounding land . . . caused a hole to be dug at the east end for the purpose of obtaining flints; but... he soon found that it was made up of generally flat sarsen stones, which came tumbling so about the men that they gave up the work’. It is possible that this is also the intrusion ‘by the Rev. Mr Conner of East Kennet’ mentioned by Long (1858a: 343). While the reference to sarsen stones might indicate the character of the mound structure as a whole, it is more likely that these stones were part of a revetment cairn supporting the (presumed) burial chamber, simi- lar to the one at West Kennet (Piggott 1962: 17). The mound is probably of mostly chalk construction, quar- ried from the side-ditches, the existence of which is indicated by darker patches of grass on each side of the barrow (Grinsell 1957: 140). Only Lukis (1864: 155), in a brief reference to ‘a stone chamber’, claims knowledge of a burial chamber oriented in this barrow. Naturally the mound — invites comparison with the near-by West Kennet long barrow. It is likely that East Kennet also contains a terminally stone-built chamber, which Corcoran (1969: 293) suggests might be transepted. Rev. Smith (1885: 179-80) wrote of the barrow, ‘though the labour would be very great, a thorough exploration of this great barrow would probably repay placed, the enterprising investigator’. As then, so today. 3 Adam’s Grave long barrow SU 11246339 (WIL 6/Alton G 14) This splendid long barrow is situated prominently on the summit of Walker’s Hill, 800 m WSW of Knap Hill causewayed enclosure. It was mentioned in the Saxon land charters, in which it was called ‘Woden’s Barrow’ (Grundy 1919: 160-1), and it appeared on the maps of both the Ordnance Survey (1815, 2-in.) and Colt Hoare (1821: map of Marlborough station), who remarked that the ‘ridge of this tumulus is more acute than any I have seen (LS 2i 12): Merewether published a full description of the mound, the details of which are still traceable today (185 la: 98). The barrow, he wrote, ‘has been opened about halfway along the ridge, but not effectually’. He makes no reference to any disturbance at the SE end, in the area of the burial chamber, but remarks on the presence ‘halfway down the slope at the east end [of] a sarsen stone; another at the base in the centre’. The former of these sarsens was investigated further by Thurnam (1860b: 410): ‘a little distance on each side, another fallen ortholith was uncovered. Between these, on each side of the remaining upright, was a horizontal walling of oolitic stones, neatly faced on the outside, five or six courses of which remained undisturbed.’ During his excavation Thurnam discovered ‘traces of skeletons’ (1868: 203) and, in ‘the debris of the cham- ber, a finely chipped leaf-shaped arrowhead of flint’ (1868: 230). He believed that the barrow ‘had been surrounded by an enclosing wall’ (1869: 45), and this view has been quoted consistently since (Grinsell 1957: 137; Corcoran 1969: 293). However, as it would seem that Phurnam only uncovered a portion of fagade — as he did at West Kennet — the existence of a post-and- panel peristalith is mere conjecture. The mound, orientated SE-NW, is now 65.0 m long, 28.0 m wide in the SE tapering to 16.0 m in the NW, and rises to 6.5 m in height over 1.5 m deep side-ditches. In the SE end subsequent mound has been constructed (OSR, 1974). The angle of the slope in front of the disturbed burial chamber suggests that some of the forecourt blocking may remain intact. The skeletal remains have been lost, of each side-ditch a 12 THE WIL ESHIRE A\RCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NAVEURAL PIS TORY MAGAZINE MANTON DOWN LONG BARROW 5 a ee Metres Figure 2. Composite plan of Manton Down long barrow. Details of the contours (at 1-foot intervals, datum point unknown) and the stippled sarsens come from Lawson and Passmore (1921, DM), while the excavated features (stone-holes and the hatched sarsens) are as revealed by Atkinson (pers. comm.). The chamber is shown restored to its original form. but the flint arrowhead is in the British Museum (Ret. 73/12-19/20). 4 Manton Down long barrow SU 14787135 (WIL, 7/Preshute G 1) ‘Visited also a fallen cromlech on Manton Down .. . not very correctly laid down on the Ordnance map. . .’, wrote William Long (1858b: 37, added note in DM copy). This error has persisted until the present day. The remains of the stone-built burial chamber are shown on all OS maps at SU 15137140, while they actually stand some 350 m to the W at SU 14787135. ‘The mound was first recorded by John Aubrey: ‘On Downe, about a mile westward from Marl- eborough, towards Hakpin, is this ancient monument fower perches long: the Barrow, or tumulus, is not above halfe a foot high’ (BLO, MS ‘Pop. Gen. ©25, fo.57). Lis sketch shows an oval mound, surrounded by a peristalith of horizontally laid stones, with a disturbed chamber at one end. This identification has been doubted (Piggott 1962: 1), but the detail revealed by the rescue excavation in 1955 makes it most plau- sible (Piggott 1973a: 314). The ‘cromlech’ appeared on the original OS maps (1815, 2-inch) and was recorded by Colt Hoare as ‘a small long barrow, covered with heath and furze, having a fallen kistvaen at the east end: the mound appears to have been set round with stones’ (1821: 43). Lukis (1867: 215), recalling a visit in 1861, described ‘a capstone resting on three supporters, one of which (that on the north side) had fallen inwards. Another supporter ranging with the fallen one appeared eastward, and there were traces of a corresponding supporter opposite it... . The ori- entation of the barrow is ESE and WNW.’ His sketch, reproduced by Daniel (1950: 68), 1s in good agreement with that of Piggott (1947: 60-1). In a report to the Society of Antiquaries of London, Harrod wrote: ‘It is an oval mound of earth with a small ditch round it, and is about 66 feet by 40. The tumulus THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION was once surrounded by upright stones; of these the stumps of three remain in situ, three others have fallen _ and the hollows where several others stood are still very discernible. At the east end was a cromlech . . . the stones . . . four feet in height from the present level of the ground, and about five feet six inches from the level of the excavated interior’ (1864: 309-10). Sadly his plan of the site has been lost. A few years later Rev. Smith witnessed the splitting of the capstone by workmen, but was able to prevent further destruction: ‘We need not fear any farther injury to it’ (1885: 198-9). Prior to its scheduling, Lawson and Passmore (1921) planned the mound. Details from this are included on the accompanying plan (Figure 2). The larger of the sarsens at the edge of the barrow was described by C. V. Goddard (1924) as ‘a flat very irregularly shaped slab. . . it may be six feet long by two feet at its widest spot. The surface is deeply hollowed in two places ? by weather’. In June 1952 the farmer levelled the mound behind the burial chamber (Anon. 1953: 82), the bulldozer revealing a cairn structure of sarsen boulders, up to 15 inches in diameter, with a capping of soil (Piggott 1973b: 314). Subsequently a rescue excavation was carried out over a period of ten days, and I am very grateful to Prof. Atkinson to include the following details prior to the final publication of the excavation report. The areas examined are illustrated on the accom- panying plan. The ‘stone-holes’ uncovered by the investigators were not of ‘classic’ type, but consisted of detached or linked areas in which the underlying chalk had apparently dissolved away so that the overlying layer of clay-with-flints had slumped into the remaining depression, leaving a core of topsoil in the remaining hole. The excavator believes that these ‘stone-holes’ largely a natural weathering phenomenon; sarsen slabs or boulders set in very shallow holes, or simply resting against the side of the mound, had acted as catchments for rain and thus increased locally the dissolving effect of mildly acidic rainwater on the underlying chalk. This interpretation is supported by the fact that these holes occurred only around the margin of the mound, none being found in the section cut transversely across behind the chamber. These findings would suggest the former existence of a peristalith around the margins of the ovoid cairn. ‘The fagade was very irregular, with a slightly concave forecourt; on the SW side the stump of one sarsen survived, set transversely to the line of the fagade. West Kennet also has a stone set transversely in a similar position (Piggott 1962: Figure 4). The stone-hole adja- cent to this stump would appear to be that of the pitted were sarsen mentioned above and illustrated on previous drawings of the barrow (Lawson and Passmore 1921, C. V. Goddard 1924; Piggott 1947: 60-1). This slab was pushed up against the S side of the chamber at the time of the barrow’s destruction, and rests there still. On the plan, the stones of the chamber are shown restored to their original positions. No trace was found of the outer southern wall slab recorded by Lukis (1867: 215) and Piggott (1947: 60-1), or of a stone-hole for it. Indeed, the shape of the capstone makes it unlikely that it could have rested on such a slab even if one had been present, and Prof. Atkinson feels that the previously planned stone may have merely been a loose boulder. ‘This leaves a very unsymmetrical plan for the chamber, but this lack of symmetry is in keeping with that of the rest of the evidence for the fagade, peristalith and forecourt blocking. No neolithic deposits remained in the much-disturbed chamber. The inner part of the forecourt had been blocked with small sarsen slabs and boulders, laid very irregu- larly. The outer end of the forecourt appeared to have been sealed obliquely by three upright stones — reminiscent on a smaller and drunken scale of the three blocking-stones across the forecourt of West Kennet (Piggott 1962: Figure 4). The stump of the central stone survived, about 4 feet in width and leaning towards the barrow. At its base on the inner side were found the much-decayed remains of an ox skull, accompanied by three sherds (one from a rim) of Windmill Hill type. The two flanking stone-holes were linked by a shallow disturbance which could indicate the former presence of dry-stone walling, but this is speculative and unproven. No pieces of oolite were found and no extra-revetment material revealed. In view of the evi- dence for the cairn nature of the mound, no attempt was made to expose side-ditches. ‘The remains of the ox skull are in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cardiff. 5 The Devil’s Den SU 15206965 (WIL 8/Preshute G 3a) Manuscript records show that this easily accessible megalithic structure was visited by most of the famous Wiltshire antiquaries. It was first recorded by Stukeley in his field notes (Piggott 1948: 391), and three of his sketches of 1723 (BLO, GM 231, fo. 203, 204, 206) were later included in his Abury (1743: tabs. 32-4). In these he shows the chamber upon a slight knoll with the capstone supported by two upright side-stones, and to the SE three recumbent sarsens that Stukeley took to be the remnants of a forecourt/facade. Cunnington (1806), Hoare (1821: 43) and Long (1858: 37, added note in DM copy) described it as 14 PH WILTSHIRE standing on an clevated picce of ground, but Harrod (1864: 311) wrote that ‘every trace of tumulus is gone’. Passmore (1922a: 523) believed that he could trace the much-spread remains of a long mound, oriented SE-NW, some 230 feet long and 130 feet broad. Vhe chamber he described as being some 70 feet in from the broader SE end and approached by a cuspate forecourt — though this description hardly matches his original sketch (Passmore n.d.; 238). When continued movement of the SW side-slab threatened the stability of the chamber, it was decided to support the outer edge of the NE upright with a bed of concrete. Under the direction of Passmore a hole 9 by 3.5 by 4 feet was dug down to the level of the old chalk. No pottery, bone or flint was discovered, and no sign of a turf line was seen (Passmore 1922a: 525). The present dolmen would seem to be the remains of a stone-chambered long barrow. The former existence of a megalithic fagade must, however, be in doubt. During the West Kennet excavations, Professors Piggott and Atkinson spent two days digging in the presumed forecourt area of the Devil’s Den but found no evidence of stone-holes (Piggott, pers. comm.). 6 Temple Bottom chambered mound SU 14867251 (WIL 10/Ogbourne St Andrew G 19) ‘Following the valley from Wick Farm southwards I came upon another tenament, called Temple Farm, to the southeast of which are the mutilated remains of a stone barrow, having a kistvaen at the east end of it: it is the finest example we have yet found of this species of interment, excepting the one in Clatford Bottom . . .’ (Hoare 1821: 42). At first sight we would seem to have an abundance of information about this totally destroyed mound: three ARCHIAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL FUSTORY MAGAZINE descriptions of it were published between 1864 and 1885, and three artefacts found during the excavation by Reverends Lukis, Smith and Spicer in June 1861 survive in Devizes Museum. However, the reports are at odds over several points and leave us no clear indication of the site’s original form. the excavation, Harrod wrote of ‘a tumulus about 47 feet in diameter, Visiting the site subsequent to and formed of large sarsen stones laid flat over a low mound of earth’ (1864: 308), a description which would suggest that the mound was round, though from Colt Hoare’s account one might infer that it was long. In his sketch (Figure 3), Lukis showed only a small remnant of mound surviving in the immediate vicinity of the chamber (1867: 214), but both he and Smith (1885: 195-6) referred to a ‘circle of upright stones’ at the base of the mound. Smith believed that many of the stones piled in and around the chamber were the result of field clearance. ‘A little from the centre of the southwest side two large flat stones rise above the rest, and stand nearly perpendicular 6 feet above the ground, and on the north side another flat stone which was formerly placed on them, has now slid down, and one end has sunk into the ground whilst the other still rests on one of the upright stones’ (Elarrod 1864: 308-9). This apparent capstone was not recorded by Lukis or by Smith, who seem to have thought that there were two chambers — the first between the upright slabs, the second immediately to the east of them. Between the uprights (at ‘a’ in the figure) they found ‘unburnt bones of a hand and foot and fragments of pottery’, together with (at ‘b’) ‘portions of a human skull and teeth, and a sarsen muller or rubber’ (Lukis 1867: 215). At point ‘ec’, beneath the edge of the upright and on the original TEMPLE BOTTOM Scale unknown Temple Bottom, after Lukis (1867: 214). Figure 3. THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION ground surface, Lukis discovered a bone gouge, and to the E ‘a layer of charcoal, calcined human bones, and fragments of coarse pottery’ (Lukis 1867: 214). Two similar bone gouges were found in_ the secondary filling of the NE chamber of West Kennet long barrow, and have been seen there as deriving trom secondary deposits (Piggott 1962: 49-50), although more recently one has been recorded at Cherhill in a clearly early neolithic context (Evans and Smith 1983: 112). Consequently it is possible that at Temple Bottom the gouge was a primary deposit, while the cremated bone was part of an intrusive burial. The bone gouge and fwo sarsen rubbing stones are now in Devizes Museum. 7 Millbarrow SU 09437220 G 17a) This impressive long barrow lay immediately N of the track running westwards from Winterbourne Monkton, and 1000 m NE of Windmill Hill (Barker 1984). In Camden’s Britannia (1695: 112) it was described by Tanner as ‘that large oblong barrow in Monkton field more especially remarkable, as being environ’d with great stones about 6 or 7 feet high’. When seen by Aubrey it was still reasonably intact, ‘a yard high at least’ (BLO, MS Top. Gen. ¢25, fo.57). His drawing shows a long barrow surrounded by an upright peristalith of 29 stones, with a rectangular stone-built chamber within its broader end. Stukeley, who visited Millbarrow in July 1723, described it as ‘215 feet long 55 broad’ (1743: Tab. 30), and said, ‘It stands due east and west, the broader end eastward’ (1743: 46). It is possible that he saw the remnants of a facade — ‘several stones are set upon the broad end of long barrow at Monkton square of one another and others lye flat but I cannot conjecture their original form they have been so plundered of late’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.33). Later in the same volume of manuscripts, below his original drawing of Millbarrow, is a sketch which may represent these stones — it shows four slabs standing in a line, at right angles to which is a group of eight others, some flat, some standing, possibly the visible portion of a burial chamber (BLO, GM 231, fo.237). Stukeley recorded the fate of two ‘plundered’ stones: ‘One very great and tall stone that supports the end of the bridge at Monkton seems to be taken from Millbarrow’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.218), and, ‘The late parson of the town took one of the finest stones and made a tomb of it for himself’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.237). This was Rev. J. Brinsdon (Long 1858b: 70), and the fine, flat sarsen (2.5 by 1.3 by 0.3 m) over (WIL 1i/ Winterbourne Monkton 15 his grave still lies at the E end of Winterbourne Monkton church. It has been pointed out that the print of Millbarrow in Stukeley’s Abury (1743: Tab. 30) appears to be reversed (Burl 1979: 89-90). To clarify this it is useful to examine the illustration. Stukeley’s original sketch of 1723 shows only the mound with no background (BLO, GM 231, fo.237) but the subsequent engraving has an added surviving ‘rough-outs’ of — this background, one which bears little resemblance to the view N or S from the site of Millbarrow (BLO, GM 231, fo.239). To this initial print Stukeley added, in ink, the Avebury church tower together with shading half way along the mound which indicated that the end to the left was the higher. After additional corrections were made to the legend, the adjusted version was included in Abury. Either the E end, on the left of the illustration, looks narrower as a result of perspective, or in the years between 1723 and 1743 Stukeley forgot from) which direction he — originally Millbarrow. sketched The partial destruction of the barrow was recorded by Merewether: ‘I saw the man who was employed in the profanation. It contained, he said, “a sort of room built wi big sarsens put together like, as well as a mason could set them; in the room was a sight of black stuff, and it did smill nation bad” ’ (185 1a: 93). From this it would seem that the chamber was of megalithic construction, and that any deposits therein had been covered by secondary filling, as has been found elsewhere (Piggott 1962: 26-30; Savory 1973: 189). The last known investigation of the mound was by Thurnam in 1863; he dug into it ‘without result’ but recorded the finding of ‘a few human teeth, a jaw bone and some teeth of horses’ by the farmer (1868: 201).° I am grateful to Dr I. F. Smith for the following recollections of her visits to the barrow, 1959-61. A hedge had been aligned more or less along the axis of the mound, preserving a narrow longitudinal slice. he disturbed remains, about 3 to 4 feet high in the centre, could be traced for a distance of about 150 feet. To the N of the hedge all had been levelled, but a damp and weed-filled hollow, up to 18 inches deep, separated the S side of the mound from the N side of the track; this was clearly one of the side-ditches. At the apparent centre of the mound, but not in situ, was the large sarsen mentioned by Crawford (1922: 55), measuring about 5 by 4 feet. Animal burrows had exposed part of another large stone, probably in situ, together with half 2. The exploration of ‘the Millbarrow at Monkton’ mentioned by Ross (1859: 188-9) may not have been of the long barrow but of the barrow recorded by Crawford (1922: 55) at SU 10877420. 16 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEENEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL EES TORY MAGAZINE a dozen smaller sarsens within a radius of a few feet. The holes descended into a mixture of soil and chalk rubble which included large slabs of Lower Chalk lying horizontally. In 1961 fragments of antler were found in the throw-out from a burrow in this area. When rejoined these made up a portion from the upper part of the beam with the stubs of two tines at one end. The antler is now in the Keiller museum in Avebury. An unsuccessful attempt was made to have the site scheduled. In 1967 the remnants of the mound were removed by a new owner of the land as part of a farm improvement scheme. Until approached by the author he had no knowledge of the existence of a long barrow at this site. The straightened track now lies some 40 m S of the site of the mound. 8 Shelving Stone SU. 10377156 G 17b) This monument stood on a ridge of land, 1300 m N of Avebury and 325 m E of the Swindon—Avebury road (Barker 1984). It had been much disturbed by the time (Wit. 12/, Winterbourne Monkton Aubrey described it as‘. . . a long picked stone seven foot and more. It leaneth eastward upon two stones . . .. (BLO, MS Top. Gen. ¢25, fo.63). Stukeley included a drawing of the structure in Abury (1743: ‘Tab. 37), where the chamber appears to dwarf a man standing before it. On a preliminary sketch for this engraving (BLO, GM 231, fo.247) he wrote, ‘. . . the four stones are still left tho’ luxated from their original station. It stood upon a barrow tho’ now for the most ploughed up. . ber the appearance of a portal dolmen, though he recognized that this was probably only the result of the partial collapse of the structure. However this drawing has led several investigators to believe that the higher end of the sloping slab marked the original entrance to the chamber, and that this end (in common with other _. Stukeley’s drawing gives the cham- stone-chambered mounds in the area) faced in an easterly direction. Despite Stukeley’s statement that the tomb ‘lay directly northeast from) Abury’ (1743: 49), most researchers have placed the site at SU 09437220. The round barrows in the background of ‘Tab. 37 (Stukeley 1743: 72) could then be interpreted as those on Windmill Elill. But Stukeley also wrote that the cham- ber ‘looks to the two barrows on Hakpen’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.247), and indeed the barrows depicted do strongly resemble the round barrows Avebury G 21 and G 22 and the twin-barrow Avebury G 30a. Unpublished drawings of a ‘fallen cromlech north of Avebury’ by John Britton (n.d.) are in fact of Shelving Stone, and show the capstone sloping down towards the I, resting upon two elongated side-stones (Figure 4). ‘The dimensions of the capstone were given as 8 by 5 by | feet (in broad agreement with Aubrey), while one of Figure 4. Shelving Stone, tracing from an original by John Britton (n.d.). THE LONG MOUNDS OF THIE AVEBURY REGION the supporters measured 7 by 4 by | feet. This would suggest an original chamber size of approximately 2 by I byl m. The tomb was totally destroyed by — 1849 (Merewether 185 1a: 93); in 1857 Mr Hillier of Monkton ‘examined the site of these stones but found no traces of burnt bones, or of anything to show that there had been an interment on the spot’ (Long I858a: 343-4). Today the site is under pasture, with no trace of a mound visible. Examination of Stukeley’s drawing on site would suggest that the orientation of the chamber would have been ESE-WNW. 9 Old Chapel long barrow SU 12907290) (WIL 14/ Preshute G 10c) Our knowledge of this long barrow stems entirely from the records of William Stukeley, who visited the site in 1723 and 1724. The mound, oriented NW-SE, lay immediately NW of the rectangular carthen enclosure on Temple Downs known as Old Chapel. The ‘two great stone works upon it) (Stukeley 1743: 47) are illustrated clearly in one of his 1723 drawings (BLO, GM 231, fo.224), previously in WAA/ (Piggott 1947: 62). ‘The stones at the SE he describes as ‘a semi-circular cove, or demiellipsis of five great stones’ (Stukeley 1743: 47), although another of his sketches of 1723 (BLO, GM 231, fo. 10) and an attempted reconstruction (BLO, GM 231, fo. 47) clearly shows seven. Meas- urements added to one 1723 sketch indicate that at least two of the stones were 10 fect in length (BLO, GM, 231, fo.4). ‘In the second stonework’, at the NW end, which has been reproduced 17 . one stone lies flat on the ground, along the middle line of the barrow. On cach side a flat stone stands upright, and two flat stones stand upright at right angles, as wings to them’ (Stukeley 1743: 48). While Stukeley clearly recorded the size of the barrow as 100 feet in length and 27 feet in width (1723; BLO, GM 231, fo.4), his description of the nature of the mound is ambiguous. Initially he wrote ‘a long barrow compos’d of stones, properly a Kairn as called in Wales’, but later deleted ‘compos’d of’ and inserted ‘sett round with’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.47). On one 1723 drawing Stukeley did indeed include a line of five small sarsens along the SW side of the barrow (BLO, GM 231, fo. 10) (Figure 5); while this may be evidence of a peristalith, the stones may have been present only as a result of field clearance. No side-ditches are shown on any of his drawings of the mound. Interpretation of the stone structures on the mound is dithcult — the most chamber-like structure exists at the NW end, a peculiar positioning especially in this region. Corcoran (1969: 294) thought that these stones could be the remnants of a transepted chamber. While this is possible, to link the chamber to the SE ‘fagade’ one has to postulate a passage as long as that at West Kennet ina barrow of much narrower dimensions. And if one considers it a simple chamber with the ‘wings’ forming flanking fagade stones (Piggott 1947: 62), then the chamber faces SE into the body of the mound. Stukcley’s reconstruction shows a deeply concave fore- court to the SE, lined by an orthostatic fagade, with no means of access to the chamber behind (BLO, GM 231, fo.47). Burl (1979: 103) has tentatively suggested that if fate) Figure S. Old Chapel long barrow, sketch of Stukeley’s 1723 drawing, (BLO, GM 231 fo.10). 18 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL PHS PORY MAGAZINE this is correct then it is possible to interpret this as a multi-period structure, with the forecourt and the bulk of the barrow having been added to a small existing tomb. Since Stukeley’s time this stone-chambered tomb has been almost completely destroyed. Colt Hoare (1821: 42-3) found it had ‘been nearly annihilated by successive operations of the plough. One flat stone only remains at the east end of the barrow, and very faint vestiges of the other parts of the work.’ Smith (1885: 129-30) was unable to locate it, but Crawford (1922: 54) recognized ‘a low mound, almost ploughed away’. By 1975 all that could be seen was ‘a large amorphous ground swelling in arable land’ (OSR, 1975), and to the eve of faith this is still visible. 10 West Woods long barrow SU 15696563 (WIL 15/West Overton G 12) Although it stands on a slight rise, the features of this barrow are difficult to discern, for it is covered both by trees and by a carpet of bluebells. Both the Ordnance Survey (1815, 2-inch map) and Colt Hoare (1821: map of Marlborough station) depict it as a round barrow, Smith (1885: 210) and Goddard (1913: 306) recorded it as a ‘bowl-shaped’ barrow; Passmore (1923b: 366-7) recognized it as a short long barrow, oriented K—W. ’ Passmore (1923b) recorded the recollections of one of the participants of an opening of the barrow by Sir Henry Meux in about 1880: ‘A trench was cut from the north side into what was thought to be the centre of the tumulus. At this point a small cairn of small sarsen stones was reached. In the centre of this was a dolmen consisting of four upright stones (the spaces between which were packed with large flints) and a capstone covering them, all of sarsen. The large top stone was levered off... and the inside was found to contain certain black matter. . . . The inside of the dolmen was about 6 feet by 3 feet, its longer axis coinciding with that of the barrow. As it contained no relics it was left undisturbed, the capstone being replaced in its old position, and the excavation filled in.’ The barrow is now 38.0 m long, with a maximum width of 30.0 m; it is slightly higher at the EF end, where it reaches 3.3 m. Well-defined but heavily silted ditches (9.0 m wide, 1.1 m deep) flank both sides, and a ditch at the E end (0.5 m deep) is separated from the side-ditches by narrow causeways (OSR, 1974). The disturbance resulting from the excavation of Sir Henry Meux is still evident; at the top centre of the barrow there is a small depression with a shallow cutting leading from this to the N edge of the mound. 3. Grinsell (1957; 145) states ENE-WSW in error. On present evidence this long barrow would seem to be atypical in several respects. Re-excavation will be necessary to determine whether the central megalithic chamber, perhaps with intact filling, is the only one within the mound, and whether it ever had a passage allowing repeated access (Kinnes 1975: 20). 11) Avebury Down near SU 116701 (WIL 16) In September 1878 A. C. Smith visited this monument (n. d., vol. 1: 181) and later wrote — ‘several sarsen stones, consisting of one small capstone on three supporters, surrounded by a very low mound of earth; in all probability a burial place, or diminutive cromlech’ (1885: 150). His map placed it on the down, Ik, of Avebury, close to twin-barrow Avebury G 30a. Kk. H. Goddard (1913: 183) quoted Smith without comment; Crawford (1922: 55) ‘hunted in vain’ for the site, but placed it on his personal map (n.d.) close to SU 116 701. Daniel (1950: 230-1) listed it as no. 16 on his inventory of chambered tombs in Wiltshire, but in Corcoran’s updated inventory (1969: 294) the grid reference and description of ‘WIL 16 Avebury Down’ do not refer to Smith’s ‘diminutive cromlech’ but to South Street long barrow. There is little more that can be said about this lost site — 1t may have been merely the remains of a cist within a low round barrow. 12) Oldbury Hill SU 04696931 (WIL 17/Calne—Cherhill G 5) The mutilated remains of this long barrow lie on the saddle-like spur that runs from the NW of Oldbury Camp towards Calne Without long barrow (no. 21, below). While its W end appears undisturbed, the E end is a confusion of banks and hollows, the result of chalk diggings that in 1864 led to the exposure of three skeletons. The mound and burials were subsequently examined by William Cunnington. The skeletons were found in the SE portion of the barrow, lying ‘in a large shallow grave surrounded by small blocks of sarsen stone... . In the earth with which the grave had been filled up was an abundance of rude pottery and flint flakes considerable quantity of charcoal and wood-ashes towards the bottom of the cavity, particularly on the north side.’ When Cunnington dug ‘in the centre of the barrow’ he exposed ‘a cist 6 feet 8 inches in depth, and about 2 feet wide by 3 feet long’ which ‘contained . . . a few wood-ashes’. Trenches cut into the N and NE sides of the barrow produced no further finds (Cunnington 1872; 103-4). ‘The true extent of the barrow is difficult to discern. there was a THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION Cunnington (1872: 103) described it as being ‘in length 60 feet’, while Crawford (n.d.) wrote ‘LB. Length 180 feet — no sign of ditch’, and it is this measurement that is quoted in the Victoria County History (Grinsell 1957: 139). Archaeologists as far apart in time as Thurnam (1868: 203) and Corcoran (1969: 294) have considered this to be a stone-chambered long barrow, probably due to the presence of the sarsen blocks and the ‘filling’. However, Ashbee has suggested that this monument is in fact a timber-chambered barrow (1970: 129). This plausible explanation would interpret the ‘cist’ as a post-hole, and the sarsen blocks as a structure analo- gous to the sarsen boulder banks found within the mortuary house at Waylands Smithy 1 (Atkinson 1965: 127). Of the inhumations three skulls survive: that of a male in the Duckworth Laboratory, Cambridge (Thurnam collection no. 198), and those of two females in the collection of the Wiltshire Archacological Society (Devizes Museum, ref. no. C8 and C9), together with a sarsen ‘muller’ from the barrow (ref. X96a). 13. Shepherd’s Shore long barrow SU 03876610 (WIL 18/Bishops Canning G 38) This mound, 2000 m N of Bishops Canning, was first recorded by Smith (1885: 66) as ‘a barrow, now very widely spreading, once doubtless very large, more oblong than circular . . . no trace of a ditch visible’. In 1914 ‘the plough turned up sarsen stones in the mound’, which was subsequently investigated by M. E.. Cunnington (1926: 397-8): “The mound measured 90 feet from east to west and 55 feet in width.’ The base of the barrow was formed by a compressed layer of turf which reached a depth of 2 feet at the centre. In the upper portion of this layer were found picces of sarsen, oolite and upper greensand rock; above this was a plough-spread covering of chalk rubble. The Cunningtons found that the central area had been disturbed previously, but were able to trace a ‘grave’ dug into the underlying chalk. In addition, ‘on the ground level on the southeast side in the undisturbed part of the mound, were found five thin flat slabs of oolite . . . laid as though to form a paving. Human bones were found, some under but mostly over this . at least five individuals, those of three adults and one child ... were unburnt mixed indiscrim- inately with . . . the burnt bones of at least one other adult. The skeletons were incomplete and the bones were all broken and not in their natural relative posi- tions; four vertebrae were strung upon a rib bone. . . . No ashes or sign of fire were found in the mound and not a single fragment of pottery throughout.’ 19 While the presence of oolite might suggest that this was a stone-chambered mound, no orthostatic structure was revealed by the excavation. Indeed, certain fea- tures might be taken to indicate that this was a timber-chambered long barrow: the published section shows the ‘grave’ to be about 3 feet in width and could be interpreted as a post-hole, while the rudimentary pavement finds parallels in other timber-chambered tombs (e.g. Atkinson 1965: 127). The basal turf mound, with chalk capping, suggests that side-ditches may exist unseen along the flanks of the mound. The curious mixture of burial practice evident here only adds to the anomalous nature of this barrow. 14 Easton Down long barrow SU 06376610 (WIL 19/Bishops Canning G 65) “The long barrow, of moderate size, ranges almost due east and west, has the usual slight trench on the north and south sides, not continued round west or east end, which last is the highest and widest part of the mound. ‘There were marks of former diggings at the east end, near which a large opening was made down to the natural soil. Here were the scattered bones of four human skeletons, two adult males, and two apparently young persons. The teeth were much worn, the erosion being most marked on the outer edges of the lower, and the inner edges of the upper, teeth. There were also a few chippings and fragments of sarsen stone’ (Thurnam 1860a: 324). This is the account left by investigation into the long mound upon Easton Down — a mound that he was later to include in his list of ‘unchambered’ long barrows as ‘Easton Hill’ (1868: 180). The mound is still a conspicuous feature, situated on a ridge some 1600 m S of Beckhampton Road long barrow. Ploughing has obscured the side-ditches and has spread the edge of the mound, which now measures roughly 40 m by 28 m. At the E end there is a marked depression some 8.0 m in diameter, which is probably the remnant of Thurnam’s intrusion. Slightly to the W of this depression is a shallow trench, cut into the top of the mound from the S side, while around the S fringe are disturbances resulting from chalk extraction. It was from one of these that Passmore lifted a piece of oolitic limestone — ‘one thin slab, roughly six inches square’ (1922b; 50). Smith has also recorded oolite from this barrow (1965a: 117). On the flimsy evidence of ‘fragments of sarsen’, Corcoran (1969; 295) classified this mound as a stone- chambered barrow, and although _ this identification is supported by the presence of oolite it Thurnam. of his long should be regarded at present as equivocal. The skeletal remains have been lost. 20 Titik WILTSHIRE 15 Horton Down long barrow SU 07686580 (WIL 20/Bishops Canning G 91) In his remarkable paper on the Wiltshire long barrows, John Phurnam recorded an ‘unchambered long barrow’ that he had explored — °31. Horton AW p3 Rifled before Skeletons N end No secondary interments’ (1868: 180). “Phe skeletal remains have since been lost. The identity of this barrow is still uncertain. M. E. Cunnington thought he meant Kitchen Barrow (1914: 386). Indeed, Kitchen Barrow (WIL 21 — below) does appear in Ancient Wiltshire, though drawn as a round barrow, while Horton Down long barrow docs not (Hoare 1821: map of Marlborough station). However, ‘Thurnam (1868: 173) describes his Horton long barrow as ‘lying north and south’ — an orientation more appli- cable to Hlorton Down long barrow than to Kitchen Barrow. In 1921 Passmore noted ‘a long barrow hitherto unrecorded’ lying 250 yards S of the carthwork on Horton Down. “Uhe barrow is 132 feet long by 36 fect broad, and roughly 3 fect high. . . in the south end is a square pit, apparently dug down to the old surface level, with two small sarsens in it. The true bearing of the long axis of the barrow is 4+ degrees west of north, practically north and south. ... There are only the slightest traces of side-ditches’ (Passmore 1922b; 49). His original sketch of 1921 survives (Passmore n.d.: 254). At present the mound ts under plough, the remnants lying to the S of a wire fence. It is much spread and is barely perceptible; there is no evidence visible cither of the pit or of the side-ditches. Beneath the fence are a collection of small sarsens which would appear to have been removed from the mound — the largest measures 1.0: by 0.6 by. 0.2 m. Devizes Museum holds a small collection of 43 picces of worked flint (Ace. no. 96-1975) gathered from the edge of the barrow. 16 Aitchen Barrow SU 06686480 (WIL 21/Bishops Canning G 44) ‘This barrow stands on a spur at the S edge of the down overlooking the Vale of Pewsey, 1300 m to the SSE of Kaston Down long barrow. It was included on his maps by Colt Hoare (1821: map ot Marlborough station) and was described by Smith (1885: 114) as‘... possibly a long barrow, which has been much mutilated... a gentleman had dug a trench right through it many ” M. E. Cunnington (1914: 386) meas- ured it as being 107 fect in length and 64 fect in width years ago. ere at the broader NE end, the mound being oriented NE-SW; “The untouched, but the mound is in a very untidy and ditches are quite distinct and ARCELAEOLOGICAL AND NVECRAL PISTORY MAGAZINE disturbed state; near the wide end there has been a considerable excavation never filled in, and in it a large [ler belief that this was the mound referred to as ‘Horton’ by ‘Thurnam (1868: 180) was committed to paper before the re-discovery of Horton long barrow by Passmore (1922b: 49). I. F. Smith notes the recovery of pieces of Great Oolite from the barrow (1965a: 117). Vhis finding sarsen. stone.’ would support the identification of the mound as a stone-chambered tomb, but excavation is necessary for final confirmation. At present the barrow is well preserved under pasture, with its side-ditches (8.0 m wide and 0.4 m deep) clearly visible (OSR, 1973). The protruding sarsen is still evident. 17) Monkton Down SU 11637230 G 8) This intriguing mound lies at the foot of the scarp 2000 m E of Winterbourne Monkton. It was one of (WIL 22/Winterbourne Monkton several investigated by Merewether, who illustrated it as a regularly shaped mound (SW-NE) with a fagade of eight stones at its SW end. ‘Five different openings had been made in this long mound, which were afterwards conjoined, and formed one continuous — cutting throughout.’ Towards the centre of the mound, on the S side, were found ‘a large half of the os frontis of an ox, some fragments of horns of deer, and one small tip of an ox’s horn’, while at the NE end were uncovered the head of apparently a greyhound, and close by the side a fragment of a ampulla of Roman form’ (Merewether [85ta: 104). M. FE. Cunnington wrote of the mound, *. . ‘at about a foot from the surface small . there are four sarsen stones still to be scen at the western end; there is no sign of ditches’ (1914: 406). ‘The mound is now some 20 m long and 10 m wide, oriented WSW-ENE, with a pronounced curve at its E end, up the slope to the N. Phe W end has been eroded and several small sarsens have been exposed, though whether this can be interpreted as a revetment is doubtful. The true nature of this mound, flanked by two round barrows, is uncertain, but the finding of an ox skull and deer antler invites comparison with the contents of the Beckhampton Road long barrow (no. 19, below). INVENTORY: OTHER LONG BARROWS 18 Avebury G 21 SU 11006920 Described by both Smith (1885: 148) and Goddard THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION (1913: 177) as ‘a very low barrow’, this site lies 250 m to the E of the S avenue from Avebury. However, Passmore (1922b: 50) states that it ‘is a distinct long barrow with the highest end to the SSW; on each side are very broad but shallow hollows which, together with the mound, have been nearly obliterated by the plough’. While it appears in Grinsell’s lists (1957: 137) as a long barrow, it qualifies only as a ‘doubtful’ example. In 1974 an Ordnance Survey Field Officer wrote of the site — ‘A mound 26.0 m across and approx. 0.4 m high, possibly a round barrow, is situated on a ridge of land which extends up to 100 m to the NNW. There is nothing to suggest that this ridge, 1.0 m high and 30.0 m wide is artificial’ (OSR, 1974). Indeed, the farmer of this land confirms that this ridge consists of a seam of sarsen that runs up through the field. It would seem that this monument, now levelled, was a round barrow sitting upon a natural ridge. 19 Beckhampton Road long barrow SU 06666773 (Bishops Canning G 76) This long barrow stood on a ridge running along the axis of the valley 2500 m WSW_ of Beckhampton. Its long recorded history spans two and a half centuries, from Stukeley’s description in his field-notes of ‘A very long pyriform barrow in the valley from Bekampton to Rundway Hill’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.15), to the report of its excavation in 1964 (Ashbee, Smith and Evans 1979: 228-50). As the 1964 report contains a full account of the earlier records of the site only the details revealed by the dig are recounted here. The long barrow, oriented NE-SW, survived to a length of 133 feet, but in its original form it is probable that its length corresponded more closely to the length of the side-ditches. The N of these (162 feet long) was less regularly cut than the S (170 feet), and was interrupted towards the distal (SW) end. Both the mound and the ditches tapered from the NE to the SW. The proximal end of the mound, overlain by a later round barrow, had been disturbed previously by Vic- torian investigators, most probably Thurnam (1868: 180). The shape of the barrow had been determined by a framework of wooden fences. An axial line of stake- holes, which ran the length of the barrow, had at the proximal end offsets from each side, dividing this portion into about 20 bays, while lateral lines of holes closed the ends of the bays and continued around the curving proximal end. While it is probable that this smooth curve was laid out as a single operation, irregularities of plan distally suggest that the bays (or bottom, 21 pairs of bays) were built one at a time. In general the infill in any particular bay was uniform, consisting of material quarried from the side-ditches with wooden poles and brushwood spread between successive layers. Evidence of revetment remained at the proximal end and along the S side of the barrow. This consisted mostly of fine chalk gravel banked against the foot of the lateral fencing, with a retaining layer of turves laid above the chalk. Except for one natural sarsen, which had been included in the mound by a deliberate out-pouching of the lateral fence, the sarsens found in the structure were small. They lay against the bay divisions and may have been used to hammer the stakes into the ground. The excavation confirmed the abrupt flattening of axial profile, approximately half-way along the mound, suspected as a result of the contour survey and shown in a thumb-nail sketch by Stukeley (BLO, GM 231, fo.15). The reconstruction proposed visualizes the barrow as ridged along its entire length, rising to its maximum height of about 7 feet towards, but not at, the proximal end. The transverse profile would have been sloped down towards the retaining fences. Distal to the last pair of bays there would have been an abrupt drop in height to the level of the low ‘annexe’. This tail to the barrow would have been some 3 feet high, and retained not by a fence but by planks set on edge, supported by revetment material. The ancient surface beneath the barrow yielded evidence that the mound had been built in an area of long-standing grassland, but with both arable and wooded areas near by. A sample of oak from a large patch of charcoal below the ancient surface produced a radiocarbon date of 3250 + 160 b.c. (NPL-138). This is considerably carlier than the date for the construction of the barrow, obtained from an antler pick found within one of the bays and dated to 2517 + 90 b.c. (BM-—506b). No trace of human remains were found — nor was any provision recognized for their inclusion in the barrow. Most notable among the finds were three ox skulls, found at intervals along the mound, on or just above the original ground surface. Other animal bones were found scattered throughout the mound. 20 Brombam G 3 SU 00396529 The former existence of a long barrow on Beacon Down, to the N of Oliver’s Castle, has been noted by several writers, most recently Grinsell (1957: 139). Indeed Colt Hoare (1821: map of Calne and Swindon stations) showed a long barrow at this site, oriented N-S. However, while the slightly earlier Ordnance 22 THE WILTSHIRE Survey map (1815, 2 inch) appears to agree with Hoare, the relevant symbol adjoins the line of the Old Bath Road, and may in fact be a milestone rather than a long barrow. The mound is not recorded by Smith (1885), and Cunnington (1914: 408) reported that the barrow ‘cannot now be found’. Crawford suggested that it owed its disappearance to ‘quarrying rather than to ploughing’ (1922; 59). At present there is no trace ofa mound visible at the site, though a slight natural ridge runs K—W across the field. 21) Calne Without SU 04556933 When viewed from below, from cither the N or the S, this site has the appearance of a classically shaped long barrow. But when examined at close quarters it can be seen that this shape, at least in part, is the result of chalk diggings. The mound, 300 m W of the Oldbury Castle obelisk, was first recorded by M. E. Cunnington (1914: 388): ‘E and W. The remains of a long-shaped mound, much cut about by stone diggers; perhaps the remnants of a long barrow.’ It was considered by Grinsell (1957: 139) to be ‘almost destroyed doubttul’. However, in 1968 an Ordnance Survey Field Officer wrote, ‘Old diggings have resulted in large pits surrounding and encroaching upon what appears to be an E-W mound. . . . If it is a long barrow both ends have been destroyed. . . . Grinsell may be incorrect in virtually dismissing it (OSR, 1968). This view 1s supported by I. F. Smith, who feels that under certain ground conditions traces of flanking ditches are visible (1983, pers. comm.). 22 Horslip long barrow SU 08607052 (Avebury G 47) This long barrow, situated on the S slope of Windmill Hill, was fully excavated during the spring and summer of 1959. The report (Ashbee, Smith and Evans 1979: 207-28) contains a full account of both the barrow’s history and the details of the excavation. The barrow, SE-NW, was roughly rectangular; it was flanked. by parallel ditches some 50 m in length. It had been deliberately levelled, leaving only disturbed chalk covering an irregular area of sub-barrow soil. While there was no evidence for the use of large sarsens in its construction, the excavators felt that the large blocks of chalk found in the ditch may chalk-block sandstone found in the ploughsoil above the mound oriented have formed a revetment. have been traced to sources in the Mendip Hills, indicating connections with the area to the W. No Slabs of ARCLIANEOQLOGICAL AND NANVPURAL EUSTORY MAGAZINE traces of internal structure or of burials survived. ‘The quarry ditches were relatively narrow and deep at the NW end, becoming broad and shallow at the SE. The primary fill consisted of chalk rubble and wash, with interleaves of humus. In this layer were found a compact deposit of ox bones, and two pieces of antler, from which a radiocarbon date of 3240 + 150 b.c. (BM-180) was obtained (Ashbee and Smith 1966: 299). ‘The secondary fill, the result of ploughing, contained substantial amounts of late neolithic material, including sherds of Peterborough and Beaker ware. In_ the ploughsoils above the ditches were found artefacts from all periods from the Early Neolithic to the present — the early neolithic pottery probably derived from the lev- clled mound or the ancient surface beneath it. 23° Aings Play Down long barrow SU 01056599 (Heddington G 3) Situated as it is on the S slope of Kings Play Hill, this long barrow does not seem to be placed in a very conspicuous position. Flowever, assuming a reasonable amount of woodland clearance in the Neolithic, its chalk mound would have been visible from much of Roundway Down. Shown on the maps of both the Ordnance Survey (1815, 2 inch) and Colt Hoare (1821: map of Calne and Swindon stations), it was undis- turbed until excavated in 1907 by B. H. and M. E. Cunnington. Prior to excavation the barrow was 101 feet long and lay ENE-WSW,;j its present orientation (NE-SW) may be the result of the exploration by the Cunningtons. It could never be argued that the Cunningtons’ methods were anything but thorough, so one can be quite sure that no trace of a stone-built structure existed within the mound: “The dark seam of the old surface turf was plainly visible under the whole area of the mound’, which consisted ‘entirely of chalk rubble, apparently taken from the wide shallow ditch which extended along both sides of the mound’. Excavation revealed two axial holes in the chalk (2 feet diameter and 2 feet deep) 15 feet apart, and a trench (2 feet wide, 1 foot deep) running across the width of the mound at the E end. Vo the S of the axis, and bracketed by the holes, was found a single contracted inhumation. ‘This lay on the original surface, surrounded by the remains of turf containing traces of ‘either decayed wood or charcoal’ (Cunnington 1909: 311-13). The remains of the male skeleton (Fereday 1956: 36), the skull in many pieces, and flint flakes from the barrow, are to be found in the Devizes Museum. Re-appraisal of the excavation report has led Ashbee (1970: 40, 129) to suggest that this ‘unchambered’ long barrow originally contained an axial mortuary house, THe LONG MOUNDS OF THE \VEBURY REGION and had a wooden fagade at the EF end. Certainly both the comminuted nature of the skull and the presence of a ‘saucer-like depression’ in the S of the mound, directly over the burial (Cunnington 1909; 311), would indicate the collapse of that area immediately adjacent to the axial holes, as would be expected with the eventual decay of an internal timbered structure. 24 Lambourne Ground SU 09407563 (Winterbourne Bassett G Ic) In Abury William Stukeley made reference to the stone circle NW of Winterbourne Bassett: ‘West of it is a single, broad, flat and high stone, standing by itself. And about as far northwards from the circle, in a ploughed field, is a barrow set round with, or rather composed of large stones’ (1743: 45). By 1883 Lukis was able to record, “The menhir, west of the circle, and the barrow northward have disappeared’ (1883: 347). The barrow was listed as a bow! barrow by Grinsell (1957: 200), but until a recent revision the Ordnance Survey showed a long barrow on its maps at SU 0940 7563 —a position not in keeping with Stukeley’s original description. At this site is a very low mound, 35 m in length, triangular in shape with the broad end facing SSW. This irrregularity in the ground is of no archaeological significance, its shape the result of a pond-like structure immediately to the S and cart- tracks to either side. 25 Lockeridge SU 14936779 (West Overton G 24) The possible existence of a long barrow at this site above Lockeridge village was noted by Crawford: “Half (castern) of a LB > 8.iv.25’ (Crawford n.d.). Grinscell (1957: 145) described the site as 105 feet long, 75 feet wide, 4 feet high and oriented ENE-WSW: ‘No obvious side-ditches. Doubtful, much reduced by ploughing.’ At present the site is little more than a slight swelling in the corner of a field. In 1974 an Ordnance Survey Field Officer wrote, ‘At the siting a natural lift in the plough occurs along a hedge line with a slight lynchet to the west. Any identifiable features have now been destroyed, and Crawford’s contention that this was a long barrow cannot be sustained’? (OSR, 1974). 26 Longstones long barrow SU 08716915 (Avebury G 17) This barrow lies N of Beckhampton and 250 m SW of the Longstones. It was first recorded by Stukeley: ‘By Bekampton cove . . . the vallum of Abury, and points to the cove hardby; which shews that the cove to be as a chapel’ (1743: 46). Even by Stukeley’s time it had been ‘much damaged by a vast body of earth, as thick as 23 the digging chalk out of it and perhaps stones’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.3). Merewether described a bronze age urn which had been found in the mound, and commented, “This barrow has been on several occasions reduced tor the purposes of husbandry, and has generally ‘produced such relics’ (1851b: 109). The urn fragment is now in Devizes Museum. At present the barrow is 84.0 m long, 35.0 m wide and up to 6.0 m high, oriented NE-SW. The clearly defined side-ditches average 0.6 m in depth and are cach 24.0 m wide (OSR, 1973). The mound has been severcly mutilated — its SW end has been ploughed, leaving a rounded shelf in the field, while the NE end has been dug out and the resulting hollow is now used as a rubbish top. Much chalk rubble has been exposed by rabbit burrows; the ‘two sarsens on the top’ seen by Smith (1885: 100) are no longer visible. 27 Roughridge Hill long barrow SU 05486576 (Bishops Canning G 92) ‘The existence of this long barrow was unsuspected until acrial photography revealed its flanking side- ditches (Grinsell 1957: 138). It lies in a generally K—-W direction, 1000 m ESE of Shepherd’s Shore, and immediately S of the vallum of the Wansdyke. An Ordnance Survey Field Officer estimated the mound to be 70.0 m long, approximatelfy 40.0 m wide, and up to 2.5 m high. “The ditch on the south is ploughed out and is visible only as a soilmark, but on the north a short portion of the ditch, up to 0.7 m deep, protrudes from beneath the Wansdyke which. overlies it’ (OSR, 1973). The W end of the mound has since been shortened by ploughing. While this mound would seem to fit Stukeley’s description of a ‘pyriform’ barrow ‘on the hill southwest from Bekampton, cut through with some later division dike’ (1743: 45), ‘a very fine one and very large’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.32), his failure to mention Wansdyke (a name he knew well) this identification in doubt. leaves 28 South Street long barrow SU 09026928 (Avebury G 68) This long barrow, oriented ESE-WNW, was situated 120 m E of the Longstones and to the N of South Street, a minor road running between Beckhampton and Avebury Trusloe. Stukeley was the first to record the mound, but his several drawings of the site give no consistent indication of its precise form. Further details of past records are to be found in the account of the barrow’s excavation (Ashbee, Smith and Evans 1979: 250-75). 24+ PEE WILTSHIRE The earthen and chalk mound was 41.3 m long with a maximum width of 15.0 m, and though unfinished appeared to be rectangular in shape. ‘Vhe parallel flanking ditches both ended, at the EF, level with the proximal end of the barrow. ‘This had been delimited by a crescentic zone of chalk rubble, into which a late neolithic/beaker pit had been dug subsequently. Of the ditches the S was the more regularly cut, tapering from FE to W, while the N appeared to be unfinished. As at the Beckhampton Road long barrow, the mound behind the frontal chalk rubble was shaped by a series of wooden hurdling bays, here 20 bays to either side of the long axis. In these had been placed material from the side-ditches, laid down in the order in which they would have been encountered during the quar- rying — turves and loose soil against the axis, then sub-soil, with the chalk towards the edges. “Towards the front of the mound five large sarsens, and several smaller ones, had been included in the bay structure, but there was no evidence that these represented a collapsed chamber. ‘wo disturbances in the mound at this point would appear to have been the result of the removal of at least four large sarsens, perhaps during the medieval period. It is possible that it was these, left on the adjacent field boundary, that Stukeley saw and mistakenly drew as a peristalith (1743: Tab. 24). No human burials were found within the barrow. The construction of the barrow was dated to the second quarter of the third millenium BC by radiocarbon estimations taken from ox vertebrae (2750 + 135 b.c.; BM-—357) and an antler (2670 + 140 b.c.; BM-—358a) from the bottom of the N ditch, and from an antler included in the filling of one of the bays (2580 + 110 b.c.; BM-—358b). INVENTORY: MISCELLANEOUS 29 Avebury G 30a SU 11707001 This twin-barrow is situated on the crest of the slope 1200 m E of Avebury. It appears in the background of Stukeley’s drawing of Shelving Stone (1743: Lab. 37), where its bipartite nature is clear. However, it is shown by both Colt Hoare (1821: map of Calne and Swindon stations) and the OS 1815 2-inch map as a long barrow. In 1849 it was excavated by Merewether (185 la: 91), and is described by Smith (1885: 148) as ‘twin barrows enclosed within one ditch’; subsequent surveys have agreed (Goddard 1913: 178; Grinsell 1957: 154). 30 Avebury village In his Mfonumenta Britannica John Aubrey makes reference to a stone structure within the Avebury ARCHIAEKOLOGICAL AND NVEURAL PIS TORY MAGAZINE henge, similar to the Trefignath burial chamber on Anglesey: “The crosse street within this monument was made in the process of time for the convenience of the rodes. One of the monuments in the street that runs [?] East and West. . . (like that above Holyhead) . . . is converted into a pigstye, or cowhouse: as is to be seen in the roade’ (BLO, MS ‘Top. Gen. ¢24, fos.36-7). However he does not illustrate it on any of his maps of Avebury, and no other antiquarian remarks upon the site. No such structure exists today. In all probability the shelter Aubrey saw consisted of adjacent inner circle stones, linked by dry walling. A photograph in the Country Gentleman (Anon. 1904: 2350) shows just such walling between the two remaining sides of the Cove, though it is unlikely that Aubrey was referring to these particularly massive stones. 31 Beckhampton Penning ‘Stone Circle’ SU 09856714 ‘Upon this heath south of Silbury-hill, was a very large oblong work, like a long barrow, made only of stones pitch’d in the ground, no tumulus. Mr Smith beforemention’d told me, his cousin took the stones away (then) 14 years ago, to make mere stones withal. | take it to be an archdruid’s, tho’ humble, yet mag- nificent; being 350 feet or 200 cubits long’ (Stukeley 1743: 46). It is clear from his personal maps (n.d.) that Crawford felt that the so-called ‘stone circle’ 800 m SW of West Kennet long barrow was in fact this particular ‘archdruid’s’ tumulus. Stukeley’s field notes, made two centuries earlier, confirm this view: “Che long barrow _ as does the archdruids on the south end of the meridian. . . the most humble yet highly magnificent . . . | could not find the circles they told me of hereabouts’ (BLO, GM 231, fo.32). The ‘meridian’ is a line projected through both Silbury Hill and the Cove within Avebury (Barker 1984), and was first recognized by Stukeley while on a visit to the Wansdyke. ‘Two versions of his ‘General representation of the country about Abury’ survive, drawn from this Wansdyke view-point in July 1723 (Stukeley 1723; BLO, MS. Top. Gen. b53, fos.31b, 31c). These show a tear-drop enclosure at the southern end of his ‘meridian’, formed by 30 upright stones. To the FE of the enclosure is drawn ‘South long barrow’ (West Kennet), and to the W ‘South Downs long barrow’ (Beckhampton Plantation, no. 32, below). In 1877 the ‘stone circle’ at Beckhampton Penning, ‘due south of Silbury . . . with Abury directly behind’ was discovered by Smith (1885: 177-9). He uncovered 22 small sarsens which apparently formed an oval on south downs . . . stands cast and west. . Hitk LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION setting, 261 feet N-S by 216 feet E-W. In 1921 Crawford was able to record, ‘Many stones still visible on surface 19 xii 21? (Crawford 1921), but by 1950 these were ‘lying in heaps and probably hardly any in sitw’ (Grinsell 1957: 33). They have since been removed. 32 Beckhampton Plantation long barrow SU 090067 15 William Stukeley’s account of the long barrows in the region of Avebury (1743: 45-6) has confused successive generations of archacologists. Even allowing for the inclusion of the stone enclosure at Beckhampton Penning and a certain amount of repetition, too few monuments are known to account for all the sites that he mentioned. Luckily his original ficld notes are not so ambiguous: “The long barrow on South Downs among the furzes is 100f. long stands E and W as does the arch-druids on the south end of the meridian and the south long barrow... . This barrow was set round with great stones as Milbarrow but one left. ... The top of Silbury and Abury steeple just appear at the furzes long barrow’ (Stukeley n.d.; BLO, GM 231, fo.32). Here is an unequivocal record of another long barrow on the downs to the S of Silbury Hill, a barrow which is included in two of Stukeley’s sketches (1723; BLO, MS Top. Gen. b53, fos.31b, and 31c). Elsewhere he described it as ‘A long barrow 22 paces long composd of chalk pointing directly to Overton Hill which bears from it ENE. . Farmer Green, standing a dozen years ago one great stone at the head of it ie. towards Overton Hill’ (Stukeley n.d.; BLO, GM 231, fo.4). Clearly the entry in Abury — ‘Another among the furze bushes south of Silbury, set with stones, which Farmer Green carried away’ (Stukeley 1743: 45) —is an amalgamation of folios 4 and 32 of the notes. So, where was this monument? Stukeley wrote that ‘Furzes long barrow is in the line from 4 barrows to the single barrow west of South long barrow’ (n.d.; BLO, GM 231, fo.248). The ‘4 barrows’ to which he referred are the round barrows on the SW edge of Hakpen Hill, centred on SU 115687, while the ‘single barrow’ is Avebury G 55 (Smith 1965b: 24-46). A line between these sites, when projected to the SW, crosses the FE . set round with stones taken away by end of Beckhampton Plantation —a coppice which stands astride an old field boundary, 800 m W of Beckhampton Penning ‘stone circle’. From here the top of Avebury church is just visible; while the view to Silbury Hillis obscured by trees growing in the hollow at Beckhampton Penning, the whole length of the plantation is clearly visible from the top of Silbury. Thus this would seem to be the likely site of the lost Nm a ‘south downs long barrow’, and is in keeping with the IGeation shown by Stukeley (1723; BLO, MS Top. Gen. b53, fo.31b). However, as no trace of a mound ts visible here, it is worth recording that Crawford found ‘sarsens and signs of a slight mound’ (n.d.) at SU 08636710, a site near by and close to the projected sight-line. Stukeley’s evidence may also be the key to another long-standing puzzle. On a page of his Monumenta Britannica (n.d.; BLO, MS ‘Top. Gen. ¢25, fo.57) John Aubrey illustrated three from the Avebury region — Millbarrow, Manton stone-chambered barrows Down, and a third which has always been identified as West Kennet. Piggott has pointed out the discrepancies that cast doubt on this identification (1962: 1-3). While Aubrey described his barrow as being 4 perches (approx. 65 feet) in length, and ‘above halfe a yard high’, the West Kennet barrow ts 350 feet long and up to 10 feet high. The stones at the E end in Aubrey’s drawing show little resemblance to the documented remains at West Kennet; while Aubrey’s barrow seems to have a peristalith of stones, lying flat on the ground, no such structure was shown in Stukeley’s sketches of West Kennet (Piggott 1962: Plate 2) or revealed by the excavations carried out by. Piggott and Atkinson (Piggott 1962: 3). Piggott ends his review of the evidence with the comment, ‘It is even possible that Aubrey is describing another (lost) barrow altogether.’ This perceptive observation can now be supported more effectively. Stukcley variously described the ‘south downs long paces’ and ‘100 f.’ long, and recorded that many stones formerly stood at the E end. barrow’ as being ‘22 In two passages he referred to some sort of peristalith, and the context of the description in Abury suggests that these were laid flat to the ground rather than standing upright. ‘hese details lead the author to believe that Aubrey was illustrating not West Kennet but the barrow at Beckhampton long barrow Plantation. 33 Bishops Canning G 23 SU 05856761 This barrow lies on the valley floor, 750 m W of Beckhampton Road long barrow, and immediately to the north of the mounds known as the “Three Barrows’. O.G.S. Crawtord (1922: 59) considered that, although marked on OS maps as a round barrow, it was ‘prolonged into the ploughed field on the southwest as a long low mound orientated NE-SW, with a_ total length of 220 feet. . bank and ditch running N and 5S. suspect this to be a long barrow. Can it be that referred . it is crossed by an old boundary I strongly 26 TH WILTSHIRE to by Stukeley. . ?? This is a reference to the barrow described by Stukeley as being ‘on the hill southwest from Bekampton, cut through with some later division dike’ (1743: 45). Bishops Canning G 23 could hardly be described as ‘on the hill’! Bishops Canning G 23 is described by Goddard as a “wide low barrow’ (1913: 197), while Grinsell (1957: 157) lists it as a bowl barrow, ‘clongated, probably by ploughing’. ‘he barrow has now been totally levelled, and there is nothing to suggest that the ‘low mound’ is anything more than a natural shelf marking the southern edge of the shallow gully which runs through the fields. 34 Bishops Canning G 81 SU 06866733 ‘This barrow sits on the NW edge of Hemp Knoll, just over 400 m SSE of Beckhampton Road long barrow. On the OS 2-inch map of 1815 it is shown as a long barrow, oriented NE-SW, but on Colt Hoare’s map (1821: map of Marlborough station) it is depicted as a round tumulus. Smith (1885: 106) described it as ‘A large bowl-shaped barrow . . . with a trench across the middle, continued down the hill toward the north’, and Grinsell (1957: 158) suspected, quite reasonably, that it was this barrow to which Stukcley referred as ‘on the hill southwest from Bekampton, cut through with some later division dike’ (1743: 45). Excavation has since confirmed that it was indeed a round barrow, covering a single inhumation accompanied by a Beaker. But the barrow was not without neolithic connections, for beneath it was found evidence of neolithic use of the site — five pits containing flint artefacts, Windmill Hill pottery, antler, animal bone hazeclnut-shells (Robertson-Mackay 1966: 102). and 35 Furze Hill ‘kistvaens’ SU 117653 (approx.) ‘In the valley running from ‘Tan Fill south-west and north-cast there are rows of large stones. . . . : A little more to the south in the same valley is the evident remains of a kistvaen; the larger chamber traceable, as well as the passage leading to it. And again, on the top of the hill to the south-east is another, evidently of the same kind’ (Merewether 185la: 102-3). ‘The valley described here is clearly the one which runs (initially at least) S from the village of East Kennet, and contains the so-called ‘Langdean Circle’ (Passmore 1923a: 364-6). Even today, after centuries of land clearance, lines of sarsens can be recognized, some carthfast, others set upright or leaning. As no mentions these now other antiquary unrecognizable structures their true nature must ARCHIAFOLOGICAL AND NYECRAL LUIS PORY MAGAZINE remain a mystcry, though the first-mentioned ‘kistvaen’ could possibly be the enigmatic ‘Langdean Circle’ itself. 36 = Horshp 2 near SU 086705 On his personal maps Crawford (n.d.) recorded the possible traces of another long barrow, adjacent to the Horslip long barrow, which he had noticed on an aerial photograph (Avebury W 6510’). During the excavation of the Horslip long barrow in 1959 careful examination of the field revealed no surface evidence for this second barrow (I. F. Smith, pers. comm.). 37 Roundway G Sab SU 01496483 This barrow is situated at the foot of the N slope of Roundway Hill, 1300 m E of Oliver’s Castle. Both the Ordnance Survey (1815, 2-inch map) and Colt Hoare (1821: map of Calne and Swindon stations) show it as a long barrow. Hlowever, excavations by W. Cunnington (1860: 162-4) showed it to consist of two adjoining long barrows, 134 fect in total length, 95 feet wide, 7 feet high, with a surrounding ditch some 18 inches deep. The bronze age cremations and accompanying grave goods are in Devizes Museum. Roundway G 5 is probably the barrow described by Stukcley (1743: 45) as ‘Another pyriform, made only of earth, under Runway-hill’, although it is possible that he was referring to either Shepherd’s Shore long barrow or the destroyed Bromham G 3. 38) Waden Hill SU 10366924 William Stukeley included in his Abwry a view of the southern avenue as scen from the E (1743: Tab. 22). Of this drawing Crawford wrote, ‘At the north end of Waden Hill (Windmill Boll) he shows what appears from his drawing to be a long barrow, ori- entated NNW-SSE. The remains of the mound are still visible in the grass field . . . but without further evidence it would be rash to say that it was such’ (1922: 61). Crawford went on to say that further study had convinced him that it was only a round barrow. Indeed, ‘Tab. 23 (Stukeley 1743: 44) shows not a long barrow but a group of three round barrows on the crest of Waden Hill. Acrial photography has revealed at least nine ring ditches on this crest, but no trace of a long barrow (Wiltshire Sites and Monuments Record). Finally it is necessary to mention an isolated mound which lies between the Avebury and Berkshire groups, and which would not be covered by any other surveys: | THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION Wanborough/Liddington G 4 SU 22507977 This long barrow was first recorded by (1922b: 49), who recognized a mound 165 feet long, 42 feet wide and up to 5 feet high, oriented SE-NW. Any side-ditches had been obliterated by ploughing. Twelve sarsens (Grinsell, quoted on OSR) protruded from the mound, and various hollows in its substance seemed to be the remnants of previous excavations. Four skeletons had been dug from the barrow in about 1890, and the bones of at least one of these were forwarded to St Thomas’s Hospital. All are now lost. A survey of the barrow has been completed by the Swindon Archaeological Society (forthcoming). The barrow is much mutilated and poorly defined; two Passmore sarsens protrude from the body of the mound, one of which may be in situ. DISCUSSION Any discussion of the long mounds of the Avebury region is hampered by problems of definition, despite the attentions of various archaeologists over the last three hundred years. In this area there were perhaps 25 long mounds; Figure 6 summarizes their classification based on the evidence in the present inventory. In places this is at odds with previous surveys; excavation will have to be the ultimate arbiter. It is also incomplete, to some extent, for the status of many sites is uncertain. Much more needs to be known about the local neolithic societies, and of how the different mound types fitted into the social pattern, before an attempt at a definitive discussion can be made. A thorough knowl- edge of the status of the various mounds and their _ relative chronology may prove essential. Sadly the prospects for excavating some of the unclassified sites are not good: the business end of Longstones long barrow has been destroyed; Horton ' Down is almost obliterated; Roughridge Hill is severely ' flattened; and Bromham G 3 is unrecognizable (if it | ever existed). While the remnants of the mounds and / the ditches may yield radiocarbon dates and useful “environmental information, the extent of the | destruction may mean that the true nature of the -mound is irretrievable. The discussion will try to follow the threads of the vayailable evidence: firstly to the stonc- chambered barrows with the chambered tombs of the ‘Cotswolds, secondly to compare the non- megalithic ‘mounds with the other long barrows of Wessex, and lastly to examine the relationship between the two iclasses and the significance this may have both locally ‘and further afield. compare | | | | Nm ~I STONE-CHAMBERED BARROWS UNCHAMBERED BARROWS proven Beckhampton Road South Street proven West Kennet Manton Down Devil’s Den Temple Bottom Millbarrow Shelving Stone Old Chapel West Woods posstble/ probable I orslip Monkton Down posstble/ probable East Kennet Adam’s Grave Easton Down Kitchen Barrow Beckhampton Plantation TIMBER-CHAMBERED UNKNOWN STATUS BARROWS Horton Down Roughridge [ill Bromham G 3 Calne Without proven Kings Play Down possible Longstones Oldbury Hill Shepherd’s Shore The A Figure 6. vebury long mounds summarized. STONE-CHAMBERED LONG BARROWS The stone-chambered long barrows of the Avebury region were considered as part of the Cotswold-Severn group of megalithic tombs even before the group was first named (Thurnam 1868). The connection between the group around = Avebury the concentration of tombs in the Cotswolds was seen to be confirmed by the existence of a ‘classic’ tomb at West Kennet, with its terminally placed transepted cham- bers, formal trapezoid plan, and its use of drystone walling. Indeed, consideration of the Avebury group tends to be overshadowed by the evidence from West Kennet, for the only other recent excavation is a short rescue dig at Manton Down. Because of their bearing on local developments the results from Waylands Smithy, the Berkshire chambered tomb some 25 km isolated and distant, will also be included in the following discussion. Both Corcoran (1969: 16-17) and Darvill (1982: 5-6) have argued forcibly that when considering the Cotswold—Severn group all the neolithic megalithic tombs in the area must be included, and not just the 28 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NYPURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE ‘classic’ examples. Within the geographically defined group much internal diversity in_ typological cha- racteristics 1s recognized (Darvill 1982: 5), and this discussion will try to see if these characteristics can be used to trace the affinities of the Avebury group. Similarities between the Avebury and Cotswold—Severn chambered tombs Comparison of the following seven features shows the similarity of the two groups: Burial rite It seems undeniable that part of the function of the local chambered tombs was as ossuaries. Uhe best recorded evidence is from West Kennet, where over 40 inhumations (plus two cremations) were found. Successive inhumations had been made in the cham- bers, and the incomplete nature of many of the skeletons suggests ritual abstraction of skulls and long bones (Piggott 1962: 67-8). Evidence from other tombs in the area is scanty: ‘traces of skeletons’ at Adams (Vhurnam 1868: 203), perhaps a_ single inhumation and a secondary cremation at Temple Bottom (Lukis 1867: 214415), ‘a few human teeth’ at Millbarrow (Thurnam 1868: 201), and ‘the scattered bones of four human = skeletons’ at Easton Down (Vhurnam 1860a: 324). While there is a great variety in the apparent ritual in the tombs of the region, the dominant rite would appear to be collective, successive inhumation. The skeletal remains are ‘disordered, frag- mentary and fractional’ (Daniel 1950: 103), and paral- lels for abstraction are seen at Randwick, Nympsfield, Lanhill and Waylands Smithy 2 (Piggott 1962: 65-8). Grave Cotswold—Severn Stone-built chambers In both areas local stone slabs were used for the chamber uprights, corbelling and capstones, with dry- stone walling often filling the interstices. Oolite The use of locally quarried pieces of limestone to form revetment walls is frequently recognized in_ the Cotswold barrows. Similar stretches of drystone walling have been discovered at both West Kennet and Adams Grave, and further pieces of oolite have been picked from Easton Down and Kitchen Barrow long Windmill — Hill enclosure. Grains of oolite also occur as filler in pottery found at Windmill Hill and in the secondary filling at mounds and from causewayed West Kennet. The source of this foreign stone is intriguing, as it did not come from the Cotswolds but from the Frome— Bath-Atworth region to the SW (Piggott 1962: 58). ‘The -use of this stone was not restricted to the prehistoric period, and one must beware the finding of rogue pieces derived from much later road-metalling (I. KF. Smith, pers. comm.). Mound shape The majority of the excavated Cotswold tombs are trapezoidal in shape (Darvill 1982: 9); the outlines of the mounds at West Kennet, East Kennet and Adams Grave all look trapezoidal, and Waylands Smithy is provenly so (Atkinson 1965). Hlowever, the mound shape is not invariable — the original shape of the Manton Down long barrow would seem to have been ovoid. Chamber filling Secondary filling of the chambers was recorded at West Kennet (Piggot 1962: 26-30), and similar fillings have been reported at) Millbarrow, West Woods and Waylands Smithy 2. While secondary filling of the chambers is far from universal in the Cotswold—Severn region it has been recognized at Pen-y-Wyrlod 2 (Savory 1973: 189) and more locally at Uley and Stoney Littleton (Piggott 1962: 67). Forecourt blocking The forecourts of most of the excavated Cotswold tombs have been found to be filled with pitched stonework, ‘blocking’ inserted relatively late in the period of use of the monument (Darvill 1982: 59). Similar blocking has been found at West Kennet and Manton Down, and may remain intact at other exam- ples in the area (e.g. Adams Grave, East Kennet). Finds A characteristic of chambered tombs is the relative paucity of finds accompanying the skeletal remains. At West Kennet, apart from the pottery associated with some of the floor deposits, the finds came mostly from the secondary filling. Parallels for the bone scoops, stone, bone and shell beads can be found in the Cotswolds (Piggott 1962: 76; Danicl 1950: 129-35, Corcoran 1969: 72). Of especial interest are the seashells, also found at Nympsfield, which would suggest contacts with the coast, the nearest being to the S or SW. Little is recorded from other sites — a finely flaked leat-shaped — flint Adams Grave (UVhurnam 1868: 230) and a bone gouge from ‘lemple Bottom (Lukis 1867: 214). arrowhead — from Tiik LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION Differences between the Avebury and Cotswold—Severn cham- bered tombs In many ways the five differences are more illuminating than the similarities: Nature of the mound In the Cotswolds the mound which covers the burial chambers is usually a cairn, consisting of limestone slabs derived from near-by ‘quarries’. In the Avebury area, While a cairn structure accounts for a proportion of the mound, most of the bulk is formed by quarried chalk. At West Kennet a cairn of sarsens formed the spine of the mound and continued around the chambers; this was capped by layers of chalk rubble. A similar situation was discovered at Waylands Smithy 2. At least part of covering mounds at Manton Down and Kast Kennet was cairn in nature, and similarly (but less certainly) at Old Chapel and Temple Bottom. But while large sarsens occurred in the body of the barrow, the bulk of the mound of Millbarrow was of chalk. Flanking ditches These represent the source for the mound material. At Cotswold—Severn tombs the shallow quarries are not always regularly placed (Darvill 1982: 11), while the ditches of the Avebury tombs are found cut into the chalk on each side of the mound. Ditches are present at a minimum of seven of the stone-chambered long barrows (West Kennet, East Kennet, Adams Grave; Millbarrow, West Woods, Kitchen Barrow). Easton Down, Revetment The majority of the Cotswold—Severn tombs have edges defined by drystone walling. However, at 22 sites this distinct edge to the cairn was masked by extra-revetment material (Darvill 1982: 42). In the Avebury region the existence of a drystone or post-and-panel surround to the barrows is “ot proven, despite the often-quoted existence of such structures at West Kennet and Adams Grave. No extra-revetment material was recognized during the excavations at West Kennet, Manton Down and Waylands Smithy. However, the existence of peristaliths to certain barrows in the area is well documented. In these cases the edge of the barrow was delineated by a kerb of large sarsens. At Waylands Smithy 2 and Manton Down (Atkinson 1965: 131; and pers. comm.) these were merely rested against the sides of the mounds, while the documentary evidence concerning = Millbarrow suggests that the sarsens stood upright to a height of 6 or 7 P fect. Peristaliths of the former type probably 29 existed at both Old Chapel and the newly rediscovered Beckhampton Plantation long barrow. There is no evidence for the existence of a peristalith around the West Kennet long barrow; more work is necessary to determine what sort of revetment, if any, this barrow had. Forecourt shape The classic Cotswold—Severn forecourt is cuspate in shape and is lined by carefully laid dry-stone walling. When terminally placed such a forecourt either opens on to a flattened end to the cairn or merges with well-developed ‘horns’ to each side (Corcoran 1969: 53; Darvill 1982: 9). At present there is no evidence for the presence of cuspate forecourts in the Avebury region, except for the rather dubious claim by Passmore for the Devil’s Den (1922a: 523). The local preference would appear to be for crescentic forecourts and/or flat facades. At West Kennet (Piggott 1962: 64, Corcoran 1969: 53) exca- vation revealed a crescentic forecourt entered from a flat fagade, both lined by orthostats linked by drystone walling — the ‘post-and-panel’ technique. (Darvill (1982: 59) is alone in visualizing the forecourt as cuspate.) At Manton Down there was a shallow, slightly concave forecourt lined again with orthostats, but with no traces of drystone work (Atkinson, pers. comm.). And at Waylands Smithy there was no forecourt but an impressive flat fagade of six orthostats, linked by drystone walls. Other local evidence is less clear. At Adams Grave ‘Thurnam appears to have uncovered part of a post-and- panel facade (1860b: 410), probably of a flat nature. Another similar fagade may have existed at Millbarrow, and perhaps also at Beckhampton Plantation (Stukeley, various references in inventory). And again from Stukeley’s field notes, some form of orthostatically lined, crescentic court seems to have existed at Old Chapel long barrow. Chamber types When considering chamber types it is advisable to avoid the over-enthusiastic approach which creates typologies by the detailed dissection of tomb plans. Research is revealing how cach tomb is a unique, local construction, despite the clear indications of affinity with neighbouring monuments. However, the broader catcgorics, listed recently by Darvill (1982: 7-8), do still seem to be of truce archacological significance. In the Avebury group of stone-chambered long barrows only terminal chambers (both simple and transepted forms) are known at present. There are no proved cxamples of laterally chambered mounds, 30 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEXRFOLOGICAL AND NYVEURAL EIS TORY MAGAZINE despite their widespread occurrence in the Cotswolds and the presence of two such barrows (Lanhill and Luckington) only 25 km to the W. Neither are there any portal tombs (Shelving Stone was merely a collapsed rectangular chamber), although these do occur in neighbouring areas (Somerset — and Oxfordshire). A great deal has been written about the possible origins of the different chamber types. While no intricate lineage needs to be sought for the simple box-like chamber, much has been made of the simi- larity between the simple terminal chambers of the Cotswold tombs and the terminally placed mortuary structures of the Wessex non-megalithic long barrows (Piggott 1967: 391; Corcoran 1969: 80-81; Whittle 197 7:23): Equal interest has been shown in establishing a ‘source’ for the transepted chamber tombs. In this case a derivation is sought from similarly chambered mounds in S Morbihan and at the mouth of the River Loire (Daniel 1950: 158; Piggott 1962: 59-64; Corcoran 1969: 82-8). Spread of the style is envisaged via the coastal sea-lanes, with landfall in the Bristol Channel area and subsequent inland movement. The theory is not without its problems, the chief one being that while the French examples are found within ovoid mounds, those in the Cotswold—Severn region are enclosed by trapezoid mounds. Proponents of the theory (e.g. Whittle 1977: 57) cling to the hope that the be-sanded transepted chamber at Penmaen Burrows will be shown to lie within an ovoid mound. Current opinion would see the transepted form in Britain as a local development allowing subdivision of the burial space (e.g. Kinnes 1975: 20), with the French tombs — as parallel development. Chronologically their position is unclear, though the examples — of increase in complexity would suggest a relatively late date (Darvill 1982: 29). Whatever their genesis, the transepted Cotswold— Severn tombs merit further consideration, for they may shed light on the relationship between the Avebury region and other areas. West Kennet is reasonably central to the distribution of the eight examples E of the Bristol Channel; to the SW lie Stoney Littleton and Nempnett Thrubwell (Fairy’s “‘Voot), to the NW Nympsfield and Uley (Hetty Pegler’s Tump), to the N Notgrove and Burn Ground, and to the NE Wayland’s Smithy 2. All eight were set in trapezoidal mounds; with the exception of West Kennet and Wayland’s Smithy 2, all had both cuspate material (Darvill 1982: 67). Documentary evidence that the burial with forecourts and extra-revetment shows chambers were filled blocking material at West Kennet, Wayland’s Smithy 2, Stoney Littleton and Uley, while this material was absent from Nempnett Vhrubwell (Darvill 1982: 54). A study of the chamber layout at the various exam- ples is interesting. At Nympsfield and Wayland’s Smithy 2 there is but a single pair of transepts. At West Kennet there are two pairs of lateral transepts, situated immediately adjacent to one another — a situation echoed at Uley, Notgrove and Burn Ground. ‘Three pairs of transepts exist at Stoney Littleton, each pair separated from its neighbours by a stretch of passage — a similar layout is suspected for the destroyed mound at Nempnett ‘Thrubwell. With reference to the supposed Loire-Cotswold link, two points are now worth making. First, only one example has been identified in NW France of a cham- bered tomb with more than two pairs of transepts (Corcoran 1969: 88; Whittle 1977: 57). Despite their relatively coastal position it is thus unlikely that Stoney Littleton and Nempnett Thrubwell were the tombs of freshly arrived ‘settlers’. Second, West Kennet shows greater similarity in design with those transepted tombs in its NW, N and NE than it does with those to its SW, further undermining the postulated path of diffusion. Chronology of the Cotswold—Severn chambered tombs The most recent review of the evidence for the chronology of the tombs ts that by Darvill (1982: 17-30). While it is clear that chambered tombs were being constructed in the area by 3100 b.c., in the absence of a good selection of radiocarbon dates the best indicators of relative chronology are the pottery finds. Darvill points out that the pottery from the blocking of the laterally chambered tombs 1is_pre- Peterborough in style, while that from the blocking at terminally chambered tombs is often a mixture of Peterborough, Beaker wares. Pre- Peterborough style pottery is found at the terminally chambered examples only in constructional contexts. Thus, he argues, the final acts at terminally cham- bered tombs seem later than at laterally chambered tombs. ‘Phe clear implication is that construction of terminally chambered tombs would have postdated the construction of laterally chambered tombs. Plausible as the theory seems, at present it is based on a limited amount of material from relatively few sites. Certainly pottery from blocking contexts can bear little relevance, in isolation, to the date of construction. Until more dates are available from terminally cham- bered tombs it may be prudent to acknowledge that some of this type may also be early (Whittle 1977: 56). Grooved and THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION At this point it is worth re-examining the evidence from the two chambered tombs in the Avebury region that have been scientifically excavated. At first sight they would appear to have little in common — West Kennet, with transepted chambers at the end of a massive trapezoid mound, and Manton Down, with a simple terminal chamber set in a short ovoid cairn. However, similarities do exist; both had orthostatic fagades with one upright set at right angles to the fagade line; both had forecourts blocked by small sarsens and sealed by three upright slabs. In the absence of radiocarbon estimations, pottery is once again the main indicator of date. At West Kennet pre-Peterborough style pottery was recovered from constructional contexts; similar sherds have been recov- ered from near-by Windmill Hill in ditch fill dated to 2570 + 150 b.c. (BM-74). From the blocking material came late neolithic pottery. At Manton Down sherds of undecorated ‘Windmill Hill’ ware were found at the foot of one of the slabs which sealed the forecourt, a situation comparable to that at the laterally chambered tombs discussed by Darvill. Here is anecdotal evidence, and at present it is no more than that, that in the Avebury region there was a small, irregular, oval cairn with a simple, irregular terminal chamber, which on the evidence of the pottery predated a large, regular, trapezoid mound with a complex, regular, transepted terminal chamber arrangement. What is of interest is the proximity of the tombs (less than 5 km apart) and their structural simi- larities. Radiocarbon dates from the burials at West Kennet and the ox skull which accompanied the sherds at Manton Down would be fascinating. To summarize briefly, the status of the stone- chambered mounds of the Avebury region as outliers of the Cotswold-Severn group of megalithic tombs 1s beyond doubt. No predominant link can be established between the Avebury group and any one particular district within the Cotswold—Severn region. ‘The majority of the features that set the Avebury tombs apart from the ‘mainstream’ Cotswold tradition can be paralleled in mounds of the non-megalithic tradition. NON-MEGALIPHIC LONG BARROWS Consideration of the non-megalithic long barrows of the Avebury region reveals close similarities between them and the long barrows of the remainder of Wessex. As the non-megalithic tradition has been quite fully covered by Ashbee (1970), only brief illustration of these nine similarities is made. The evidence from the Berkshire long barrows (Wayland’s Smithy | and Lambourn) is also included. Mound shape Ashbee recognizes three distinct shapes. All three are to be found within the Avebury region: trapezoidal at Beckhampton Road, rectangular at South Street and perhaps at Horslip, and ovoid at Wayland’s Smithy 1. Size The range of size recognized in neighbouring areas 1s quite considerable — Salisbury Plain East 65-315 feet, Salisbury Plain West 78-390 feet (Ashbee 1970: 26). While inclusion of the Berkshire mounds (Wayland’s Smithy | 54 feet, Lambourn 220 feet) produces. a similar range for the Avebury group, this does tend to distort the local evidence. At Avebury itself the lengths do seem to emphasize the subdivision of the non- megalithic group into timber-chambered (Oldbury Hill 60 feet, Shepherd’s Shore 90 feet, Kings Play Down 100 feet) and unchambered (South Street 140 Beckhampton Road 160 feet, Horslip 170 feet) mound feet, types. Mound construction This was clearly not to a uniform blueprint, but was governed by local geology. However, most of the barrows were situated on the chalk, and the bulk of the mounds consisted of chalk rubble flanking ditches (e.g. Kings Play Down). At certain sites sarsen stones were included within the mound (e.g. South Street, Shepherd’s Shore), sometimes in such numbers that a basal cairn was formed, similar to that found at West Kennet (e.g. Wayland’s Smithy 1, Lambourn). Internal subdivision of the mound has been recognized at the South Street and Beckhampton excavated from Road long barrows. At these sites have been found the traces of wooden partitions which divided the mound substance into a series of bays. Revetment In their original state non-megalithic long barrows seem to have had clearly defined edges. Revetments of several types have been discovered: a timber palisade at Fussell’s Lodge (Ashbee 1966), hurdling at South Street and Beckhampton Road (Smith and Evans 1968), turf at Holdenhurst (Piggott 1937), and perhaps chalk blocks at Horslip (Ashbec, Smith and Evans 1979: 212). Fagade At the broad end of the barrow the formal revetment was often further developed to produce an impressive fagade. Frequently this consisted of timbers set in a bedding trench (e.g. Fussell’s Lodge, Kings Play Down), but other arrangements are seen (¢.g. a frontal 32 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NYVPURAL PISPORY MAGAZINE mass of chalk rubble at South Street and Beckhampton Road). The facade line varied from site to site; convex, concave and flat examples are all known. Mortuary structures ‘These are the structures of timber, stone and turf which have been found beneath non-megalithic long mounds and which seem to be involved with the disposal of the dead. ‘two forms are recognized — ‘enclosures’, such as that at Nutbane (Morgan 1959b), and narrow ‘houses’, usually placed at right angles to the proximal end of the barrow. At Wayland’s Smithy | a timber structure, with a pitched roof, covered the skeletal remains (Atkinson 1965: 127-30). Though the evidence for pitched roofs 1s far from conclusive, similar structures have been traced at Fussell’s Lodge and Nutbane (primary phase) and may have existed at Kings Play Down and Oldbury Hill (Ashbee 1970). At some sites (e.g. Nutbane and possibly Oldbury Hull) the timber structures were burnt prior to the raising of the mound. Internal chronology The best illustration of the internal chronology of non-megalithic long barrows is seen at Nutbane (Morgan 1959b). Here several phases of timber struc- tures, including two periods of burial deposition, preceeded the raising of the chalk barrow. Such internal chronology is not yet recognized at megalithic tombs in the Cotswold—Severn region, although multi-period sites are well documented elsewhere (Corcoran 1972). While this may be due, in part, to incomplete excavation techniques, it may also be due to the unstable nature of large stone chambers. These would have required immediate support from a cairn, especially when corbelling was the method of roofing (Kinnes 1975: 25). ‘There is much variation in the internal chronology of the non-megalithic long barrows. At Wayland’s Smithy 1 the mortuary structure stood for at most 12 months prior to the raising of the mound (Atkinson, pers. comm.). Nothing is known of the building sequence of any of the other timber-chambered long barrows in the region, but only one period of construction was apparent at the South Street and Beckhampton Road ‘cenotaph’ barrows. Human remains Once again considerable variation is evident between different non-megalithic long barrows with respect to the human remains that they contain. Inhumation seems to have been the predominant final rite, but the fragmentary nature of many skeletons and the weath- ering evident on many bones suggests that corpses were subjected to a period of excarnation prior to. their inclusion in the long barrows. At Nutbane two acts of interment were recognized — the primary deposit of three articulated skeletons (two adult males, one youth) being disturbed by the later insertion of an articulated male skeleton (Morgan 1959b). At Fussell’s Lodge between 53 and 57 dis- articulated burials were found. They probably had all been inserted at once, the bones being stacked in certain areas and, to some extent, sorted by type (Ashbee 1966: 30-32). In the Avebury region the most recently available evidence comes from Wayland’s Smithy 1, where the remains of at least 14 individuals were discovered. Most showed some degree of disarticulation, but no evidence of bone abstraction was found (Atkinson 1965; and pers. comm.). Kings Play Down long barrow was found to cover a single contracted male skeleton (Cunnington 1909: 311-12), while that on Oldbury Hill contained one male and two female skeletons (Cunnington 1872: 103-4). Phe enigmatic long barrow at Shepherd’s Shore was found to contain the dis- articulated and incomplete skeletons of three adults and one child, the bones broken and sorted, mixed with cremated human bone (Cunnington 1926: 398). However there are certain long barrows from which material has ‘cenotaph’ barrows no provision had been made for the no— skeletal been recovered. At the inclusion of bodies, while at other examples some form of construction was evident within the mound (e.g. Thickthorn Down; Drew and Piggott 1936). Animal remains The bones of oxen, sheep and deer have been common findings during the excavations of long barrows. Whether these were totem animals, offerings or the remains of feasts 1s far from clear. Especially intriguing is the inclusion of ox skulls in various mounds — at Fussell’s Lodge they were found associated with the burials and the collapsed mortuary structure, while at Beckhampton Road three skulls had been placed at intervals at the base of the mound. Ox skulls are recorded from two other mounds in the Avebury region — Monkton Down and the stone-chambered barrow at Manton Down. Chronology of the non-megalithic long barrows The chronology of the non-megalithic serics is more firmly established than is that of the stone-chambered long barrows. However, in view of the complicated internal chronology of many non-megalithic barrows it is important to establish exactly what is being dated by THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION a radiocarbon estimation. The following dates are currently available: 3415 + 180 b.c. (GX-1178) Lambourn long barrow. It was previously thought to be a stone- chambered’ barrow; excavation — has revealed structures similar to Wayland’s Smithy 1. The radiocarbon date came from material from the base of the flank- ing ditch (Wymer 1966, 1970). 3240 + 150 b.c. (BM-180) Horslip. Date from antler in primary ditch fill. 3230 + 180 b.c. (BM-134) Fussell’s Lodge. Date from burnt wood from the mortuary house (Ashbee 1964). (I-2328) Wayland’s Smithy 1. Date from charcoal patch which postdated the tim- ber-chambered barrow (Atkinson 1965: 132). 2820 + 130 b.c. 2721 + 150 b.c. (BM-49) Nutbane. Date for the second timber phase, between the two periods of burial deposition (Morgan 1959a). 2702 + 130 bic. (BM-356, 357, 358a, b) South Street. Average of four samples. 2517 + 90 b.c. — (BM-506a) Beckhampton Road. Date from antler from base of mound. Darvill (1982: 68) has argued that the ‘cenotaphs’ were early in date. While Horslip would seem to be early, its true nature is uncertain, and the early date quoted by Darvill for the Beckhampton Road long barrow comes from a pre-barrow phase. The dates from the two ‘cenotaphs’ bracket the date of the lower ditch fill at Windmill Hill (2570 + 150 b.c. BM—74) (Smith 1960), and this contemporaneity is shown by the finding of plain Windmill Hill sherds beneath the South Street mound (Ashbee, Smith and Evans 1979: 269). Changes of ritual with time? In an exciting paper, Thorpe (1984: 51-4) suggests that with time there was a change in the ritual at the non-megalithic long barrows. He points out that the monuments well dated and well understood by modern excavations (listed above) show a progressive decrease in the number of bodies housed beneath the mound, with a corresponding increase in the degree of articu- lation, culminating in single, articulated, male burials with grave goods under the latest examples (e.g. ?Kings | Play Down). This he takes to reflect an increasing degree of social differentiation and consequently an increasing exclusivity of burial in long barrows. It is probably taking the theory too far to see the empty ‘cenotaphs’ as an additional step in the sequence. It is more likely that these represent a separate phenomenon within the non-megalithic tradition. 33 To the timber-chambered — and chambered long barrows of the Avebury region are summarize, un- good examples of the Wessex non-megalithic tradition. In view of the clear connection southward, the link with the Mendip region suggested by the evidence from Horslip is intriguing. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO CLASSES Relatively few occupation sites of a neolithic date are known in southern Britain. On the chalk the search for such sites is not helped by the action on the sub-soil surtace of mildly acidic rain — the gradual dissolution of the chalk can destroy traces of structural post-holes (Atkinson 1957). The long mounds are some of the best surviving neolithic constructions, and in the absence of occupational sites much time has been devoted to the study of these monuments. The relationship between the stone-chambered and the non-megalithic long barrows is of significance not only with regard to the development of the British Neolithic but also to that of the neighbouring areas of Denmark and France where similar problems exist (Madsen 1979; Giot 1981). The interpretation of evidence from chambered tombs and non-megalithic long barrows is beset with as yet unsolved difficulties (Piggot 1973a). It is doubtful that monumental burial was the predominant burial practice (Kinnes 1975: 16), and while many long mounds clearly relate to the disposal of at least some of society’s dead this may not have been their sole, or even primary, purpose (Renfrew 1981: 73). It is unlikely that they all had similar functions, and these may have changed with time (Thorpe 1984). Sadly the frag- mentary evidence that remains from the diggings of past archaeologists is of limited value, but one must also beware the overuse of results from more modern excavations. Such is the variety of construction and ritual now evident that generalizations based on the evidence from one site can be highly misleading. Chronology A better understanding of the relationship between the two main types of long mound will be possible when a fuller chronology has been determined. It is essential to know whether the two groups were built and were in use at the same time, or whether there was a succession either within or between the groups. The chronology of each group has been considered above. Perhaps the strongest evidence for the primacy of the non- megalithic tradition over the stone-chambered is the single carly date from the Lambourn long barrow. Other relatively early dates (e.g. Fussell’s Lodge, 3230 + 180 b.c., BM—134) can be matched by sites in the Cotswold—Severn region (¢.g. Pen-vr-wyrlod 2, 3020 + 34 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NYVEURAL EIS PORY MAGAZINE 80 b.c., HAR-674). At present there is little firm evidence to prove the primacy of either group, and it seems likely that both types were in use during the same period (Smith 1974: 126; Whittle 1977: 214). Constructional features With neither radiocarbon estimations nor the neolithic pottery sequence yet able to demonstrate a succession of barrow type, many researchers have turned to other facets of the evidence from the two groups in an attempt to establish the priority of one over the other. However, as much of the evidence can be used either way, the sequence ‘revealed’ tends to depend on the bias of the author. For years now the trapezoid mound has been seen as one of the main unifying features of the two groups. Its ultimate origin is sull disputed; sources proposed include the long-houses of the Danubian culture (Piggott 1967: 389), the Polish Kujavian barrows (Daniel 1967: 315), and even the Breton long mounds (Whittle 1977: 213-18). In Britain the derivation of the Cotswold—Severn trapezoid cairn from the non-megalithic tradition has been a frequent suggestion (Corcoran 1969: 77; Daniel 1967: 315). The importance of the mound itself is well illustrated by the Avebury ‘cenotaphs’ — these mounds give strength to the idea that external shape and internal contents were separate concepts. The intense interest southern shown in the trapezoid mound has tended to obscure the fact that mounds of other shapes (ovoid and rectangular) do exist; mound shape may prove to be more a reflection of local preference than is at present thought. Parallels have often been drawn between the timber mortuary structures of certain non-megalithic long barrows and the simple terminal stone-built chambers of the Cotswold—Severn region (e.g. Corcoran 1969: 82, Whittle 1977: 213), and various claims have been made for the derivation of one from the other. Kinnes (1975: 19) has pointed out that despite the clear differences in the rituals observed at the two types of long mound (see above) they have a basic identity of function — that of enclosed space interment. Indeed he argues that the observed differences are due to the nature of stone chambers, for they would have necessitated differences in the sequence of construction, would have allowed for a longer period of access, and thus could have enabled a divergence of ritual. The belief that the timber-built chambers of the Wessex long barrows were the progenitors of the simple terminal chambers of the Cotswold—Severn tombs (Corcoran 1969; Danicl 1967) would certainly fit the scheme envisaged by Darvill (1982), which sees the laterally chambered Cotswold tombs as early and the terminally chambered tombs as late examples. In this respect radiocarbon dates from the simple terminal stone-chambered mounds of the Avebury region would be extremely interesting. Powell (1969: 11) suggested that the post-and-panel facades at certain stone-chambered long barrows in the Avebury region (West Kennet, Adam’s Grave, and also Wayland’s Smithy 2) could be copies in stone of a technique used at turf-revetted non-megalithic long barrows. Certainly a turf wall lining a concave fore- court would require support from upright timbers to prevent its collapse. This valuable idea was developed further to suggest that the drystone walling of the Cotswold-Severn tombs could be a copy of the pri- neiple of turf revetment; as Powell pointed out, a cuspate forecourt built of turves would be a naturally stable structure. His clear inference was that the development of the Cotswold tombs was strongly influenced by earlier non-megalithic barrows. Possibly the most impressive use of the post-and- panel technique in the Avebury region was at Millbarrow, which had the only well-documented example of an upright peristalith, though the existence of drystone walling is speculative. Elsewhere in Britain drystone walling is a common building technique, often seen at relatively early cairns (e.g. Pen-yr-wyrlod 2), and while it may be a copy of turf revetment it need not have been derived necessarily from the Wessex non-megalithic long barrows. Aspects of siting Both tombs and the Wessex non- megalithic barrows share a generally easterly ori- entation of the broader end of their mounds. Mound orientation is always a difficult problem due to the spreading of many examples by ploughing, and in the Avebury region the problems are further complicated by the dubious status of many of the mounds. Burl (1979: 95) saw the orientation of the non-megalithic long mounds of the area as being evenly spread between NE and SSE, with the chambered tombs being more restricted, between E and SSE. The evi- dence from the present inventory would suggest the following orientations: ‘Timber-chambered long barrows Unchambered long barrows Stone-chambered long SE (except Kitchen barrows Barrow, NE) It is possible to see Kitchen Barrow as a special case, as one of a pair along with Horton Down long barrow (orientation N-S) some 1400 m distant. Certainly a the Cotswold ENE-E NE-SE THE LONG MOUNDS OF THIF AVEBURY REGION Thiessen polygon centred on Kitchen Barrow would not give it much ‘territory’ between the edge of the chalk escarpment and the ‘territories’ of near-by mounds. Similarly it is possible to see the long barrows on Roughridge Hill and Easton Down (both orientated E-W, 850 m apart) as an adjacent pairing. It is difficult to know how far to take this idea, but other pairs are apparent — most notably Millbarrow and Shelving Stone (both with simple terminal stone-built chambers, oriented roughly E—W, some 1200 m apart). However, on a general level it may well indicate that the local settlement areas may have contained more than one long barrow, with the barrows set towards the periphery. Any attempt to describe barrow distribution is prone to error due to the vagaries of mound destruction. For instance, the apparent gap between the two clusters of barrows in the Avebury region — the first around the headwaters of the River Kennet, the second on the chalk escarpment above the Vale of Pewsey (Piggott 1962: 57)—has been filled by the rediscovery of the long barrow at Beckhampton Plantation. Little in the way of a consistent pattern emerges from a study of the chosen sitings. Stone-chambered barrows are found in various settings: low lying (e.g. Millbarrow, Temple Bottom), false crest (e.g. West Kennet, Manton Down), and peak (e.g. Adam’s Grave). The timber-chambered mounds are found across slopes (Kings Play Down and Shepherd’s Shore) and on ridges (Oldbury Hill) — all stand on the W edge of the Avebury group. And while the unchambered ‘cenotaphs’ share a preference for low-lying sites, the orientations of the two best examples are at right angles. Functions It is when speculation is made as to the possible functions of long barrows that blurring of the distinction between the two main classes tends to occur. For example, there is a common belief that the non-megalithic long barrows cluster on the causewayed enclosures, and attractive, if slightly arbitrary, maps have been drawn to illustrate the theory (Ashbee 1978: 83; Renfrew 1983: 132). However, these maps make no distinction between the stone-chambered and the non- megalithic barrows — in the Avebury region both are included. And one of the principle pieces of evidence that links the long barrows with the causewayed enclosures concerns the abstraction of certain bones from a stone-chambered barrow (West Kennet) and the presence of similar bones in the ditches of a near-by causewayed enclosure (Windmill Hill). That the long mound, per se, was of significance to 35 the local neolithic society is clear. But the true nature of the society and of the significance of the long mounds to it still eludes us. So while some would see them as a product of a settled agricultural community, built as territorial markers in response to increasing population density (Darvill 1982: 90; Renfrew 1983: 136), others would see them as the product of a less static population, built in response to soil depletion and prior to a move to fresh land (Ashbee 1978: 85). The nature of the bone assemblages within the mounds is equally uncertain. The traditional view accepts both and ossuaries, with access for burial restricted, probably to a socially dominant group. An interesting alternative the timber stone chambers as has gained favour since the excavation of a series of ritual pits at Goodland in Northern Ireland. These contained occupational debris (pottery, struck flint, charcoal and dark soil) and are thought to have been dug by neolithic people in response to soil impov- erishment (Case 1973: 193). Parallels have been drawn between these pits and certain court cairns which contained similar material together with surprisingly few burials. As these contents were introduced as a single act they have been interpreted by Case (1973: 193-5) as foundation deposits rather than true burials. This theory has been championed by Ashbee (1978) who has applied it to all chambered tombs and non- megalithic long barrows, seeing them more as shrines, or fana, than as mausoleums. This would seem to be an over-zealous application of the theory over too wide an area and in situations where serial depositions have been recognized. This is not to deny the role of such monuments as shrines; at those sites where there is limited skeletal material and evidence of a single period of deposition the theory is extremely attractive. However, in the Cotswold—Severn region it is difficult to deny either the existence of the rite of successive inhumation or the ossuary aspect of the barrows. The concept of a ‘foundation deposit’ at West Kennet which ‘was not complete untul later neolithic times’ (Ashbee 1978: 81) is difficult to accept. Origins and development “The centuries after 4000 b.c. saw the final impact of farming colonization across western Europe, with major population movements and — adaptations complicated by interaction with stable prosperous hunter-fisher groups around the rich marine basins from Biscay to the Baltic’ (Kinnes 1982: 29). The change to the neolithic style of life may have been achieved in different ways in different places. While in Denmark it seems to have been the indigenous mesolithic inhabitants who made the gradual change 36 TH WILESHIRE ARCEEXNEOLOGICAL AND NYVEURAL PIS PORY MAGAZINE (Madsen 1979: 301-2), in Britain there is, as yet, less evidence of continuity. However, the belief that in Britain the new _ lifestyle associated = with immigrants from the continent is coming under Was question. It is in the coastal ‘impact zone’ (Kinnes: 1982) that one can see the emergence of monumental tombs — the megalithic tombs of the Atlantic fagade and the non- megalithic barrows of northern Europe. Radiocarbon dates in the early fourth millenium b.c. have been obtained from such tombs in several areas, and at present it appears possible that the idea of collective burial developed in several places. It is currently thought that the earliest ‘tombs’ for collective burial were little more than box-like struc- tures of timber or stone, either free-standing or set in a minimal supporting mound. Such simple structures require no intricate typological derivation. What does require explanation is how collective burial suddenly came into vogue at a similar time in widely separated areas. The nature of the may be irretrievable, but the means by which the concept achieved widespread acceptance may involve the coastal sea-lanes (Darvill 1982: 86-8). The sea can be regarded not so much as a barrier but as a catalyst — for trade; for the establishment of kinships; for the movement of people and, more importantly, of ideas. Quite when the covering mound, and its attendant functions, became important is far from certain. The form in central southern Britain, the trapezoid mound, is seen by many archaeologists as part of the northern European tradition of long barrows. Almost implicit in this theory is an acceptance of diffusion of the idea through Poland and Germany to Denmark, and then by way of coastal interaction to NW France and Britain. Within Britain the non- megalithic long barrows of Wessex and Yorkshire have been regarded as the source of the trapezoid mound for respectively the Cotswold—Severn region and the Clyde cairns (Daniel 1967: 315). Certainly there is some evidence for the late ‘arrival’ of the trapezoid mound in the W and N of Britain, with the superimposition of long cairns upon earlier struc- tures being seen in both Wales (Dyffryn Ardudwy, Carnedd Hengym South) and Scotland (Gleniron 1, Camster Long). But chronological problems elsewhere do much to weaken the theory, especially the early radiocarbon dates from the Breton tombs and the apparent contemporaneity of the Cotswold—Severn and Wessex long mounds in Britain. The importance of the relationship between the Cotswold—Severn tombs and = the Wessex — non- megalithic barrows 1s clear — they stand at the centre ot initial stimulus dominant the area of contact between the two European tradi- tions. Crawford’s view (1932: 5), that they were a unitary phenomenon, the varying structure depending only on the local availability of building materials, is no longer tenable. ‘he differences between the two classes are best illustrated by the evidence from Wayland’s Smithy I and 2; here the shared tradition was of interment, but the construction of the two barrows was distinctly dif- ferent, as were both the rites of inhumation and the pottery associated with either barrow. Wayland’s Smithy does little to establish the priority of the non-megalithic chambered tombs — in terms of the neolithic timescale the 50-year interval between the two phases is negligible. More significant would be an understanding of the local change — was this an updating of an outmoded monument, or the forceful imposition of a collective enclosed space barrows over the — stone- rival structure, or what? Were there two cultures or two branches of one going their slightly separate ways? Better insight into the society allied to each monument is required before such questions can be answered convincingly. Perhaps we should acknowledge the common fea- tures of the two types by envisaging their common ancestry in the coastal ‘soup’. Perhaps it was from this ill-defined consensus of ideas that the early neolithic groups of southern Britain derived certain ideas which were then adapted to suit local custom. On present evidence it is best to visualize a parallel development of the two types in southern Britain, with the Cotswold— Severn region absorbing more from the megalithic tradition and Wessex more from the non-megalithic tradition. The similarities between the two may speak less of direct influence, and more of a common heritage. ‘This said it seems undeniable that in the Avebury region there is evidence of local contact — the stone- clearly hybrids. The importance of the Avebury region throughout the neolithic period is clearly demonstrated by its wide range of impressive monuments — the three causewayed enclosures, the various forms of long barrows, Silbury Hill, and the Avebury complex of henge, circles and avenues. The area may owe its significance to its chambered barrows — are strategic position between Wessex and the Cotswolds, and the control local people may have held over trade between the two regions. ‘Trade, perhaps in flint, would certainly have been an effective way of estab- lishing close and continuing contact between the two areas. Future research? It is disappointing that after two and a half centuries of THE LONG MOUNDS OF THE AVEBURY REGION documented investigation, relatively little is known of the society that constructed the long barrows. Some attempt has to be made to locate more settlement sites, and in the Avebury region recent field-walking has revealed scatters of worked flint which may hold clues as to the settlement patterns. With regard to the long barrows, before the evidence in the inventory above can be used further, it will be necessary to establish the broad classificational type of each mound and their relative chronology. Limited excavation of disturbed and threatened monuments may reveal evidence of their original internal form, and the untouched, silted side-ditches may hold material suitable for dating, as well as valuable environmental evidence. Such investigations, together with the use of various specimens from museum collections, could yield a wealth of material for radiocarbon estimations. Especially interesting is the possibility of obtaining dates from the terminally stone-chambered mounds: material is readily available from known contexts in both Manton Down and West Kennet. A radiocarbon date from Millbarrow — with its peristalith and simple terminal chamber — could be informative, especially when compared with similarly endowed — non- megalithic barrows such as Fussell’s Lodge. Re- excavation of the timber-chambered long barrows on Kings Play Down and Oldbury Hill would also be worthwhile to establish their original plans and the contexts of the skeletal remains that survive. Some attempt should be made to salvage details from the most severely eroded sites. For the foreseeable future money will not be available for large-scale excavations — however it should be possible for local societies to harness local enthusiasm and, under expert direction, carry out a programme of field research, including small-scale excavation. One would hope that such an approach would counter the present stagnant state of research while producing valuable information in a field of considerable archaeological interest. Acknowledgements. The writer is indebted: to numerous archacologists who, without exception, responded generously to requests for guidance and information from a total stranger. Special thanks are due to: Mrs Corbyn and Mrs Colman, librarians at Devizes Museum; Dr Isobel Smith for her recollections of several sites; Professor Atkinson for his detailed account of Manton Down long barrow; and most importantly to Professor Stuart Piggott, with whom the blame must lie for encouraging an amateur to commit his obsessions to paper. BIBLIOGRAPHY \NON., 1904. Photograph in the Country Gentleman. ANON., 1953. Manton long barrow, WAAL 55: 82-3. ASHBEE, P., 1964. The radiocarbon dating of Fussell’s Lodge long barrow, Antiquity 38: 139-40. ASHBEE, P., 1966. The Fussell’s Lodge long barrow excavations, 1957, Archaeologia 100: 1-80. 37 ASHBEE, P., 1970. The Earthen Long Barrow in Britain (London: Dent). ASHBEE, P., 1978. The Ancient British (Norwich: Geo Abstracts). ASHBEE, P., and SMITH LF., 1966. 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The Excavation of Amesbury Barrows 58, 6la, 61, 72 by PAUL ASHBEE with contributions by JULIET CLUTTON-BROCK’, ROWENA GALE’, PETER A. JEWELL', CAROLE A. KEEPAXS, R.P.A. PEEK” and S.E. WARREN” A bell-, a disc-, a bowl- and a double barrow, were selected for excavation from damaged barrows in Amesbury parish, E of the river Avon. The bell-barrow (58), of chalk-mantled loam, with a broad, flat-bottomed ditch, covered a central cremation grave, furnished with a fabric- and moss-wrapped bronze knife-dagger, its hilt lacking a pommel, and a piece of iron pyrites. A rectangular grave, containing a cremation, with a globular miniature vessel, faience and amber beads, a beaver’s incisor tooth and a bronze awl, was the principal burial of the razed disc-barrow (61a); the inbumed remains of three young people were close by. A stake circle with a central structure was beneath the bowl-barrow (61), as were unfurnished inbumation and cremation burials. Beaker pottery sherds were in the mound which was bounded by a narrow ditch adjusted to accommodate one of the cremation burials. The ditch of a saucer-barrow overlapped that of an initial bowl-barrow (72). An inurned cremation had been the central burial of the initial barrow and two cremations, one furnished with an awl, a shale bead and a bone point, were beneath the extension. The array of barrows E of the river Avon may have developed after that surrounding Stonehenge. Many were built upon ancient fields. Contents INTRODUCTION Earlier records of the barrows page 40 1 THE BARROWS AND THEIR BURIALS Bell-barrow 58 page 43 Excavation The plough-reduced barrow, its structure and fea- tures: ancient soil; central grave and furnished cremation burial; loam core; remnant of the chalk rubble envelope; surrounding ditch, traffic ruts Disc-barrow 61a page 46 Excavation The plough-reduced monument, its arrangement and features: ditch and exterior bank; graves and burials; inhumation burials in a natural pit; rectangular cremation grave; infilled pit; internal mounds; natural and other cavities + British Museum (Natural [listory), Cromwell Road, London SW7. $ Jodrell Laboratory, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. {St John’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge. § Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments Laboratory. 4k Bradford. Department of Archaeological Science, University of Bradford, Bowl-barrow 61 page 52 Excavation The plough-reduced barrow, its structure and fea- tures: ancient soil; burnt area; stake circle and central stake arrangement; plaster casts of the stake points; burials, cremations and inhumations; cremation burial 2 (stake circle interior); cremation burial 3 (stake circle interior); inhumation burial | (stake circle exterior); loam core of the barrow; fragment of rock from the loam core; remnant of the chalk envelope; surrounding ditch; disturbances in the barrow Bowl-barrow, overlapped by saucer-barrow, 72 page 63 Excavation The barrows, their structure and features: graves and their contents; ditches of the bell- and saucer-barrows 2. DESCRIPTION OF THE GRAVE FURNITURE AND OTHER ARTIFACTS FROM THE BARROWS Bell-barrow 58 page 67 Central cremation grave: dagger, dagger sheath, cloth wrapping of dagger, iron pyrites, pottery; flint 40) Phi WIL TSEURE Disc-barrow 61a page 73 Inhumation burials and natural pit: pottery Rectangular cremation grave: miniature pottery vessel; beads and other objects from miniature vessel’s infill; beneath the miniature vessel; beaver’s incisor tooth; scrap of beads and _ shell bronze; bronze awl Bow!l-barrow 61 page 76 Loam core of the barrow: pottery; flint Bowl-barrow, overlapped by saucer-barrow, 72 page 79 Central burial of the mitial bowl-barrow: urn Cremation grave | (beneath the secondary saucer- barrow): bronze awl; bone point; shale bead 3 COMMENTS ON THE GRAVE FURNITURE AND OTLIER ARTIFACTS Bell-barrow S58 page 80 Dagger; cloth and wrapping; iron pyrites Disc-barrow 61a page 81 Miniature pottery vessel, beads; shells; beaver’s incisor tooth; bronze awl ARCIIAROLOGICAL AND NAYEURAL TLHSPORY MAGAZINE bowl-barrow 61 page 82 Pottery; flint bowl-barrow, overlapped by saucer-barrow, 72 page 82 Urn; bronze awl; bone point; shale bead 4° GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS The barrows and their burials page 82 Radiocarbon dates page 83 The barrows and their context page 84 5 SPECIAL STUDIES Human remains by CAROLE A. KEEPAX page 84 Large-animal remains by JULIET CLUTTON-BROCK page 88 Small-vertebrate remains by PETER A. JEWELL page 88 Charcoal by ROWENA GALE page 88 Neutron activation and X-ray fluorescence analysis of faience beads from barrow 61a by R.P.A. PEEK and S.E. WARREN page 89 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS page 89 BIBLIOGRAPHY page 89 Introduction ‘These tour barrows, Amesbury numbers 58 (NGR SU 17334226), 6la (NGR SU 17514233), 61 (NGR SU 17834237), and 72 (NGR SU 17834147), were exca- vated between 30 July and 11 September 1956. They belong to the focal group (Figure 1) of the dispersed barrow assemblages on the W-facing lower-plain chalk slopes, to the F of Amesbury and the river Avon. They are at the southern extremity of the massive array (on either side of the Old Marlborough Road) that extends to Snail Down (Clark 1941: Plate 92), near Everleigh, and the southernmost of the four musters of bell, disc and other especial barrows contained within it. “Uhis group, essentially three lines on New Barn and Earl’s Farm Downs (Figure 2), comprises seven bell, five disc, one saucer and _ fifteen barrows. M. E. Cunnington (Mrs B. H1. Cunnington) recorded barrows 58, 59 and 60 as ‘all under plough’ in 1913. Acrial photographs taken in 1926 (kindly made available by C. W. Phillips, Archacology Officer of the Ordnance Survey) and 1938 (by Major G. W. G. Allen) show them as almost all ploughed, but upstanding and readily identifiable. L. V. Grinsell (1957) describes barrow 58 as ‘ploughed’, 61a as ‘nearly ploughed out and on arable’, and 72 as ‘ploughed out. In 1956 barrows 58 and 61 were visible on the ground, while bowl 6la and 72 had been effaced. Because of sustained damage, excavation was spon- sored by the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate of the Ministry of Works (now the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England). Nineteenth- century barrow investigation had not extended to the E of Amesbury, so it was likely that excavation would reveal intact sub-mound features and burials. With such considerations in mind, a bell-, disc-, bowl- and double barrow were selected. ‘The area had been acquired for intensive agriculture, and it was felt, that as many barrows as possible should be examined during the time available. Normally a barrow should be excavated in its entirety (Ashbee 1960: 184), but the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate insisted on partial excavation. ‘Trenches were extended to explore particular features of interest. Summary notices were published (Thomas 1958: 238; Longworth 1957: 222), and certain of the results included in general works (Ashbee 1959: plate 1, A, B; 1960: plates VIb, VIIa, [Xa, XIIa, figures 4, 7, 21). Earlier records of the barrows New Barn Down takes its name from the New Barn (NGR SU173422) on the northern side of the A303 trunk road, about 1.5 miles' E of Amesbury. Earl’s Farm Down is on Haradon Hill, considered to be a combination of ‘hearg’ and ‘dun’, broadly ‘heathen 1. Excavation records used imperial units, as was usual at the time, and these are retained in this report. WIE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 6la, 61, 7 Enis FARM DOWN puL FORD ee, DOWN @- BELL BARROWS @-pIisc BARROWS @ - OTHER ROUND BARROWS LONG eee eh Figure 1. c Barrows E of Amesbury. temple down’ (Gover, Mawer and Stenton 1939: 359). Stukeley (1740: tab. XXIV) depicted Haradon Hill as where the modern A303, Amesbury to Andover, road surmounts the escarpment, just S of Beacon Hill. His prospect shows the barrows and two versions of the Andover road. He thought that this had been the site of ‘a sacellum or little temple’ since ‘an innumerable com- pany of barrows on the opposite hill, on the other side of the river coming down Haradon, and in the line of the avenue seem to regard it’. In pursuit of his fieldwork, Stukeley ‘stood upon this hill, May 11, 1724, during the total eclipse of the sun, of which I gave an account in my /timerarium. Here is a most noble view of the work and country about Stonehenge.’ The Crocker maps in Sir Richard Colt Hloare’s Ancient Wiltshire, ‘Everley Station VP and ‘Amesbury Station V, South District’, show the New Barn Down and Earl’s Farm Down barrows on the northern and southern sides of the Amesbury to Andover trunk road. The Earl’s Farm Down barrows are E of the Old Marlborough Road, while the Newton Barrows, just to the S, encroached upon by the railway in 1901, are named. Haradon Hill is indicated on the Everley map as yust N of the point where the road crosses the ridge. This group was one of many on the downs between Amesbury and Everleigh (Hoare 1810: 178, 197). He writes (Hoare 1810: 215): Quitting Amesbury, and following the turnpike road which leads from thence to Andover, we perceive the hills on each side thickly strewed with barrows of large dimensions; and a little on this side the 76th mile-stone, we find a Druid barrow? on the left intersected by the turnpike road, and at a short distance to the right, a large bank and ditch running nearly in a parallel line with the road, and ascending the hill with it. It is very perfect on this spot, and may be traced along the vale in its course westward down to a barn, and through one large arable field beyond it. In 1901, using Colt Hoare’s maps and identifying the barrows thereon, A. H. Lyell FSA, numbered and plotted them on the 6-inch Ordnance Survey map, old edition, of the War Office land on Salisbury Plain and in the surrounding district. Elis map was lodged with the Society of Antiquaries of London and is abbre- viated as ‘Soc. Ant. Map’. The Rev. E.. H. Goddard 2. Colt Hoare’s name for a disc-barrow. 42 THE WILTSHIRE A\RCHEAKOLOGICAL AND NATURAL PIS TORY MAGAZINE DITCH n . 400 = rs oe # MY (aK wl a ne 5 oi ie ie Segue Een Bares Se LAN Gram Re Fag ote Bos © he, oo! <7 O NEW BA N Powe pe | eee ; R of 2 didas week “T° ° * [aucrorof PARIS ee ack DOWN -BELL BARROW -DIS€ BARROW - BOWL BARROW SAUCER BARROW Figure 2. Barrows on New Barn and Earls Farm Downs. included the barrows on the downs E of Amesbury in His Victoria County History gazetteer (Grinsell 1957: his list (Goddard 1913), giving them parish numbers 151, 207, 216, 222) gives more detail: and citing the ‘Soc. Ant. Map’ numbers. The details he : . 2 58 NE of New Barn 17334226. 100 ft diam. 4% ft height. gives of the barrows excavated in 1956 are: re Ploughed. Air photo suggests prob. a bell-barrow of overall 58 Barrow just on N side of Andover Rd, 1% miles from diameter 160 ft. Amesbury, near the New Barn. OM 54 SE, AWI [Ancient 6la N of Andover Road 17514233. Diam. mound? Height Wiltshire, vol. 1] Station VI, Soc. Ant. Map 533. mound /% ft. Berm width? Ditch width 15 ft. Height of outer 61 Barrow to E of last [60], N of Andover Rd at Cross bank /% ft. Over-all diam. 155 ft by tape, 160 ft from air Roads. OM 55 SW; AWI Station VI; Soc. Ant. Map 535, photo. Nearly ploughed out and on arable. 67-75. On Earl’s Farm Down S of the line of the ditch and 61 W of Bulford turning 17834237. Diam. in paces 20. Andover Rd, E of the Marlborough Rd, and W of Beacon Hill Height in feet 2. D [ditch]. Copse, OM 55 SW shows a catered group of 9 barrows. 72 [in saucer-barrow section] Earls Farm Down 17834147. AWI Station V. South shows only 8 here; Soc. Ant. Map 554, 48 ft. Diam 1% ft. Height. Ditch and outer bank ploughed 555, 551, 552, 553, 556, 558, 560, 564. (This map (OM 1889) out. Ditch and outer bank seen by L.V.G. before 1939, but shows another barrow 557 touching 72. This is not on OM levelled by ploughing 1939/45. Overlapped by later bowl 1900.) barrow. eee . ne 72 {in bowl-barrow section} Among Earls Farm Down heir character — bell, disc, ete. — was not specified, Group 17834147. Diam. in_ paces 14, Height in feet 1. nor had barrow 61a been recognized. Overlaps saucer-barrow to E with same number. L.. V. Grinsell’s fieldwork amplified Goddard’s list. THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 L. V. Grinsell kindly supplied details of these barrows, and others of the group, in advance of his publication. Barrow 62 had been included in his bell- barrow series (Grinsell 1933: 217). In June and July 1956 Professor J. D. Evans, of the University of London Institute of Archaeology, exca- vated barrows 67b, 73, 74, disc-, bowl-, and_bell- barrows on Earl’s Farm Down (Thomas 1958: 238—40; 43 Longworth 1957: 222); in the summer of 1961 Mrs P. M. Christie excavated barrows 70 and 71 (Christie 1964; 1967), the eastern outliers of the same group. Details of barrows 61a and 67b, the disc-barrows, were included in Grinsell’s analysis of these monuments (Grinsell 1974). Thus, to date nine barrows of the New Barn and Earl’s Farm Down groups have been examined. 1 The barrows and their burials BELL-BARROW 58 Excavation (Figure 3) Excavation was by cross-trenches, extended to explore the central area. A segment of the ditch was examined on the §S side. The barrow appeared as a low mound, spread at its skirts. Extra-luxuriant grass on its crown denoted the loam core, exposed beneath the thin modern ploughsoil by the destruction of the chalk-rubble envelope. A similar enhanced grass growth marked the ditch, despite the spread nature of the mound. Attempts to reduce the barrow by ploughing had given it an uneven outline. The plough-reduced barrow, its structure and features Ancient soil (Figures 3, 4) The upper 3—4 ins. of the ancient soil (Layer 4) beneath the barrow was dark brown and stone-free. The stones, angular, weathered flint fragments, rarely more than 4 ins. in length, were everywhere at the base of the profile. This ancient soil rested upon the weathered chalk, from which it was separated by thin rafts of ochreous granular iron pan. Its removal revealed one or two irregular natural cavities, infilled with stiff brown loam and weathered flint fragments. ‘The natural chalk surface was even, displaying only superficial irregu- larities. The general height of the surface of the pre-barrow soil above the modern surface was about 1 ft 4ins., for the barrow stands upon an approxi- mately level area (Atkinson 1957: 232; Ashbee 1960: 59, Figure 19). The points of extinction of this ancient soil transgressed the margins of the original barrow, the outer limits of the remnant part of the chalk envelope which encircled the plough-truncated loam core. During excavation areas of ancient soil were scrutinized for traces of tillage (Ashbee 1960: 58; Ashbee, Smith and Evans 1979: 282), but its surface was even and undisturbed. The W and N trenches exposed parts of a considerable scatter of charcoal, presumably from the burning of brushwood or twigs on the ancient surface. The charcoal proved to be of //ex sp. (holly), Rosaceae, sub-family Pomoidiae (apple, Malus sp.; pear, Pyrus sp.; and hawthorn, Crataegus sp.) and Acer sp. (field maple) (page 88) below). Central grave and furnished cremation burial (Figures 3, 4,5, 6) Loose chalk rubble, spreading upon the surface of the ancient soil, with a sag of the base of the loam core, indicated the presence of the central grave. This, some 4 ft long, 2 ft 6 ins. broad, and about 2 ft 3 ins. deep, had been loosely infilled with chalk rubble intermixed with soil. Because of the expansion factor (Jewell et a/. 1963: 27) the material stood some 6 ins. proud of the ancient surface. The weight of the dense loam core had compressed it, producing the sag. Vertical striations, the marks of an antler pick, could be seen upon the vertical and overhanging sides of the pit, which had a dished, but flat, bottom. This had been scraped smooth, while the lips of the pit, where dug through the ancient soil, were worn and rounded. A layer of grey wood-ash, containing few charcoal fragments, covered the flat bottom of the grave-pit upon which the cremation had been heaped (Figure 5). This roughly rectangular heap of cremated bones, the remains of an adult, possibly female (page 84 below), was closely circumscribed. The larger bone fragments were at the top of the heap and the smaller at the bottom. At the margin there lay a bronze (‘almost pure’ copper, according to a first laboratory examination) dagger, with horn hilt-plates, the pommel absent. Copper corrosion products had preserved traces of a sheath. The dagger and sheath had been encased in moss and wrapped in cloth. Close by, and in contact with the wrapped dagger, was a large segment of a nodule of iron pyrites. Both dagger and iron pyrites lay on the more gently sloping side of the deposit of cremated bones. Loam core (Figures 4, 7) The loam core (layer 3) is presumed to have been the topsoil stripped at the outset of ditch-digging and 44 TH WILTSHIRE ARCEENEOLOGICAL AND NYVEPURAL EIS TORY MAGAZINE Aal\ahe Se Bite Rey, BARROW SS Ps oy hie vee ete eae | ORIGINAL Figure 3. Barrow 58: character of the mound, and excavation. heaped over the central burial. A dark-brown, compact, tenacious loam with charcoal and reddened, burnt patches had been, with weathered flints, built up into short horizontal lenses. At the tailing-off margin of this loam core these flints were in lines. Small weath- ered sherds of pottery, worn fragments of bone and various flint flakes as well as charcoal (page 88 below) were encountered. ‘Phe pieces of charcoal were of Acer sp. (probably field maple), and Prunus sp. (possibly bird cherry, Prunus padus, wild cherry, Prunus avium, or blackthorn, Prunus spinosa) (page 88 below). Remnant of the chalk rubble envelope (Figure 4, layer 2) Before excavation a collar of chalk could be seen encircling the truncated loam core. This was the remnant of the chalk envelope, unaltered chalk rubble dug from the encircling ditch; as undamaged mounds show (Ashbee 1960: 44, Plate Viltb), the envelope THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 7 @ - @® - @ - MODERN PLOUGH SHOVES ENVELOPE @ - CHALK RUBBLE REMNANT =P G IHAVL. KY RAINWASH AA APAAA AA COT T CUT ry) van fly J K CENTRAL GRAVE G) - PRE-DAMAGE HUMUS IFFILL © - LOAM Bn vw % Ser a@ CREMATION BURIAL Figure 8. Barrow 61a: bank, ditch and burials. staining. This was covered, as is the nearby bell- barrow (58) ditch, by dark, almost black, humus (layer 2), which infilled the top of the ditch and overlapped on to the weathering ramp. This contained small pieces of chalk and was surmounted by a black, stone-free zone. The declivity was infilled by ploughsoils (layers 1, 1a). Nothing, apart from these ploughsoils, which resulted from the razing of the bank, suggested that the ditch infill was other than from the depreciation of the sides. Of the dise-barrow’s former bank there survived only a slight elevation of the surface of the natural chalk above its surround. Excavation showed that a thin skin ARCEEAEOLOGICAL AND NYVEORAL PISTORY MAGAZINE BARROW 61a ca rk. 2, oa a Seer " REDUCED BANK of ploughsoil (5 ins. as against about 10 ins. elsewhere) covered the plough-lacerated chalk on the site of the bank. The outer lip of the ditch indicated the position of the inner edge of the bank. Graves and burials Within the barrow were two deposits of human remains: unburned bones in a natural pit; and cremated bones ina grave. Another pit, although resembling the form of a grave, contained no remains. Inhumation burials in a natural pit (Figures 10, 11) THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 49 AMES: BRUURIV 4 BARRER OW, Cara CET l T TOES FIT AA, AAR OAN ROR NY fe @ - @ MODERN PLOUGH SOILS ae @ - PRE- DESTRUCTION HUMUS INFILL SITL OF BANK ; aapes SungUREDs=e=>) B L v CHO LLOL DoT SEE @ es SMALL CHALK RUBBLE @ - CEMENTED CHALKY RAINWASH ZoNTEL OF BANK y ( COCO Tr Dooce aeaen}) G@ - PRIMARY CHALK RUBBLE SILT arab airs ea Parser n NATURAL ?INFILLED CAN THY PIT SITE OF BANK y D- Figure 9. Barrow 61a: radial sections. Figure 10. Barrow 61a: inbumation burials. THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 50 AMESBURY BARROW 61a ve IRREGULAR ?NATURAL PIT LY juke” be SF NW OMATION : —= Spek BURIALS a : s @ i . NS . PLOWGH:- SCRAPE D 2 SURFACE OF CHALK 2? GRAVE . . . . . . . . . <. . . . . . . . . . A y © *BROWN LOAM (9 #2 ee We ee eee B oot + @ WEATHERED 7: cichpRomowcnnne: cee 29 ee PRINTS 8 evi os Big Gif sa (3) jfenle) eis > 5 Fi 2M Dib PAW Ot SBew Ral Aes 1RON SKULL yw PYRITES FRAGMENTS 0 OVER MANDIBLE VERTEBRAE Y SCAPULA FEMURS 4 RADIUS ULNA 8 RADIUS SKUSE “ FRAGMENTS » HEAPED © CREMATED " MINIATURE BLAVER INCISOR Bay ses bt IF 5M Figure 13. Barrow 61a: rectangular cremation grave. first, followed by the vessel, the awl, and the beaver tooth. Infilled pit (Figure 14) This pit, rectangular with rounded ends, was 5 ft long, 3 ft wide and about 1 ft 8 ins. deep beneath the plough-scraped surface of the chalk. Its sides were vertical, its bottom flat; the infill was a chestnut-brown loam containing uniformly sized weathered flint and chalk fragments. Towards the bottom this loam shaded into powdery grey chalk wash, which was readily detachable from the sides and bottom. It was thought that this cavity was a grave — indeed, it is not unlike that found beneath barrow 58 — but it contained nothing other than pieces of charcoal in its infill. Flecks and a larger piece were in the upper material while other pieces, about 12 in. long and wide, were in the lowermost 3 ins. of the chalky wash and on the bottom. Internal mounds (Figure 8) Major G. W. G. Allen’s aerial photograph of the barrows, taken in 1938, shows a single mound within the oval ditch. It was thought that an elevation of the plough-scoured chalk surface might denote its limits. TEE WILTSHIRE ARCEIXEOLOGICAL AND NAYTPURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Ploughing had, however, obliterated all traces, and nothing remained to show whether a mound had covered the rectangular cremation grave or any other feature. Because of its two interments this monument has been thought of as an oval twin disc-barrow (Grinsell 1974: 109). Natural and other cavities When the plough-scraped surface, inside the ditch, was cleared, irregular cavities, indicated by patches of brown loam, were found. Many contained a stiff chalky wash difficult to remove from their irregular and often multi-piped bottoms. Some contained elaborate root systems: no artifacts were found in their infill. One hole was conical, about | ft in diameter and 1 ft 1 in. in depth. Incidental and appropriately spaced circular holes, about 2 ins. across and sometimes 6 ins. deep with pointed bottoms, were considered to have been made with a heavy iron bar to house sheepfolding hurdles (Grigson 1957: 62). Such infill as they contained was loose, and some were open holes. BOWL-BARROW 61 Excavation (Figure 15, 16) Cross trenches to the surface of the ancient soil revealed a stake-circle coupled with complex internal features. After the record of sections (Figure 18), the trenches were extended to encompass the stake-circle and explore the anomalous behaviour of the ditch. The plough-reduced barrow, its structure and features (Figures 16-18) The buried soil beneath the barrow (layer 4) was a dark brown, almost black, stone-free layer, about 3 ins. deep, which overlay some 5—6 ins. of uniform (about lin. by | in.) angular flints and chalk fragments. Its removal revealed the pitted, rotted nature of the chalk beneath, the surface of which was honeycombed with irregular cavities, some large and with a chalky wash infill (Figure 18). Although there was an accumulation of ploughsoil against what remained of the mound on the uphill side, and a corresponding subtraction on the lower flank (Figure 18, C—D), the general height of the surface of the ancient soil above the modern ploughsoil surface was about 10 ins. (Atkinson 1957: 232; Ashbee 1960: 58, Figure 19). The extinction of the ancient soil at the periphery of the mound coincided with the outer limits of the mound’s chalk envelope. On the W flank it was well preserved, but on the E margin it concluded beneath the chalk envelope remnant where the berm had weathered, the material therefrom having moved into the ditch (Figure 18, C-D). THE EXCAVNTION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 BARROW 61a AMESBURY DARK LOAM, \ WEATHERED FLINTS & CHALK LUMPS PLOUGH-SCRAPED -CHAL ee Ova ee Pole (a. 0 fa K SURFACE. © igmte! #) e* 6 \'0 @ CHALKY LOAM & WASH 1M Ww Y Figure 19. Barrow 61: excavated barrow from W. Black rods mark the stake-circle. Figure 14. Barrow 61a: infilled pit. wn 54 THE WILTSEURE ARCEEAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL FUISTORY MAGAZINE AMES BUR Y RARR OW 61 a | / ik We 3 / | vaste REMATION 1%, et i See ANCIENT PN eae SOn aa Ge genus Seance oy Gat marion 2 AS yO Ce AS cd Minegh ee hee SNC ES ee hat hae ACS Peer ce eet kt BLT Ca eet feat Cla ar dD. ae ee CREMATION 3 C Meas. DEE DISTURBANCE IN BARROW 3 O° [ FSS FZ ABOVE O. . | STAKE- HOLE 70M Figure 16. Barrow 61: character and excavation. Burnt area (Figures 16, 17) An elongated oval area of fine charcoal (page 89 below), with a N lobe, which had been accommodated by an irregularity of the ditch (Figure 16), occupied the central area beneath the mound. The weight had compressed this spread of charcoal, which proved to be of Quercus sp. (oak) and Fraxinus sp. (ash), with traces of Rosaceae, sub-family Pomoidiae (apple). Nowhere was this burned area more than about 2 in. deep. Here and there clean chalk rubble had been scattered upon it, particularly at the N margins. The numerous, irregu- larly spaced stake-holes were of two kinds (Figure 17): shallow, not penetrating the ancient soil and normally about 2 ins. to 4 ins. in depth, and deep (Figure 17, A-N), penetrating the burnt layer and the ancient soil. The first, with the tapering interiors which invariably contained comminuted charcoal, may mark the means whereby wood was supported for burning; the second may have been connected with the rectangular stake setting (Figure 17, I-XI). The absence of grey ash, and the clean chalk rubble found at the fringes of the area, might suggest that the fire was extinguished or that the THE EXCAV XVEION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, POM AS Bel? Ron SPACE CLRCLE & a BURNED AREA 35 3537 38° 39 77) wn an BARROW 61 b GENTRAL AREA °- STAKE-HOLES HBee pe INTO CHALK 17 © - SHALLOW HOLES “nal? mm IN ANCIENT SOIL a-T STAKE-HOLE 15 F 17. Barrow 61: stake-circle and central area. Figure ash was blown away. The signs of intense burning sometimes found beneath barrows (Ashbee 1981: 7) — | reddened soil, calcined flints and burned chalk — were absent. There were patches of charcoal beneath the _ flexed adult skeleton (Inhumation(s) 1), but the pits and the elongated scoop, which housed cremations (2, 3) | and an infant inhumation burial (2) respectively, had been dug through the charcoal spread. Stake circle and central stake arrangement (Figures 15, iG 17, 19) All the stakes (Tables 1-3; Figure 17, 1-43; a—n; I-X1; | A-Y) had been removed before the barrow was built. | Nowhere were they detectable in section in the body of | | | STURBANCE "45 1- AF = STAKE CURCWE Re Ya Sal AUK IE, HOU E.S INSIDE CIRCLE 1-XM ? 2STRUGTURE SUMO DIE "GIREG IVE 5M the mound, in its loam core or the remnant of the chalk envelope. The filling was loose, resembled the loam core of the barrow, and worm castings were often detected. It was possible to loosen the fill from the sides of the stake-holes and make measurements and plaster casts (see below). It was evident that every other stake (e.g. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9) of the circle had been measured in; the intermediates, all of which equidistant, had been subsequently sited by eye. The stakes varied from 1 in. to, exceptionally, 2% ins. 24% ins. was the diameter for most of the stouter ones. not were in. diameter, although The plaster casts showed they had been axed; where they had not encountered flints in the subsoil the points had retained their form. The stouter stakes were those 56 DHE WILTSHIRE ARCHAKOLOGICAL AND NATURAL PISTORY MAGAZINE AMESBURY BARROW 61 NATURAL CAVITIES @ - @ MODERN PLOUGH SOILS @- @ REMNANT CHALK § CLAY SOIL ye DISTURBANCE EIN AEST OF REE “- 8) LOAM CORE (@) ANCIENT sOIL NATURAL Pit G = PRE-DAMAGE HUMUS ACCUMULATION > HUMIC CHALKY RAINWASH ©) CHALK 8 HUMUS RS TAKE-HOLE GQ © CEMENTED CHALKY RAINWASH ® PRIMARY CHALK RUBBLE SILT Lak 5M Figure 18. Barrow 61: radial sections of the plough-reduced mound. Figure 19. Barrow 61: black rods mark the central setting. THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 6la, 61, 72 initially driven, the lighter, near wands, being used to fill the gaps. The stakes and group of stakes outside the circle were of similar dimensions, as were the incidental stakes inside the circle and penetrating the burnt area. The limit for driven stakes appears to have been 3 ins. diameter (Ashbee 1960: 62), more massive posts being accorded sockets. An entrance or entrances to the circle on the S side, where the distances between stakes were considerable (eg 4 ft. 5 ins.), could be envisaged. In the middle of the circle an arrangement of stakes (Figure 17, I-XII) formed a rough rectangle. Four had formed the N side; four, with the corner stake, the EF; and four the W; while the S was open and bounded only by the corner stakes. Two stakes adjacent to the E side (L, M) may have repaired or reinforced it, as may another (XI) on the W. Three more (N, O, P), at a distance, could have been related to the irregular pattern of deep-set stakes (A-Y) rather than to the central arrangement. A single stake, its hole (XII) undamaged by recent pits, inside the rectangular arrangement may have ensured stability; were this setting of stakes the remains of a mortuary house (Ashbee 1960: 52-4), this stake might have supported the roof. The corner principals were slight, 1 in., 2 ins., 14% ins. and 2% ins. in diameter respectively. These uprights, which are likely to have been of coppice wood (Rackham 1976: 48), were withdrawn before the barrow was built. Table 1 gives the particulars of the 43 stakes, num- bered 1 to 43, in the circle, Table 2 those of the 14, designated a to n outside the circle; and Table 3 those of the 12, numbered I to XI, in the central arrangement. Stake-holes A to Y were mostly about 2 ins. in diameter and usually 4 ins. deep. They appeared as ancillary to the rectangular arrangement, and as allied to the shallow series, which were usually about 2 ins. in diameter and 2 ins. deep. Plaster casts of the stake-points Casts were made of stakes numbers 1, 3, 4, and 5 in the circle and of the tips of number 12 and L (Figure 17). Soil, loosened from the sides of the stake-holes with a soft | in. paintbrush, was removed with a teaspoon, the final grains being picked up with a_ stiff artist’s paintbrush, lightly greased. Such a brush was also used for greasing the sides of the stake-holes with vaseline in places that fingers could not reach. Plaster of Paris was poured in, and a piece of wood left projecting from the top of the cast to facilitate removal. Because of projecting flints, the casts had, for the most part, to be dug out. Vaseline and soil was removed with warm water and detergent prior to labelling. The casts show that the points of the, probably, Al ~— distance stake depth from from previous number diameter ancient soil condition stake ins. Ins. ft ins l 2% 6 good = 2 2% 3% fair Tepe? 3 2 44 good 0 5% 4 2% 6% good l 5% 5 1% 5 good I 7 6 2 44 fair 1 9% 7 2 3% good 1 8% 8 IY SW fair 1 3 9 2¥4 2% good 3 6” 10 1% IY no point 2 IY 11 2 274 good 2 10) 12 l 14 clear 3 8% 13 7/4 1 tip only 1 10% 14 2 2 oval 1 10 15 I” 3” fair 3 6” 16 2“ 4 uncertain 0 6” 17 2 3% fair 2 vi 18 1Y 1% uncertain 2 3% 19 2 3% good, angular 4 5% 20 IY 2% good 3* 26 21 2” 5% good 1 9% 22 2 3 fairly good 1 7% 23 24 3 fair 1 10% 24 2 2% good 1 774 25 174 1” good 1 9% 26 1% 5”% fair 1 5 27 2% 5% good, oval 2 3” 28 1Yr 44 good 1 10% 29 2% 6” good EG! 30 2% 5% good, angular 2. 1% 31 Ys 34 tip 1 10% 32 2 SW rather angular | 6% 33 2% 344 rather angular 1 9M% 34 1% 3% oval 1 10 35 2% 3Y4y good 1 9 36 244 3% good 1 8 37 1% 4 fair 1 134 38 2% 44 rather angular 0 7% 39 2 + good p} IY 40 2% 3% good De) 41 2” 7¥s good Dew 0 42 2% 6¥%8 good 1 9% 43 2” 7 good 1° 7Y2 Table 1. Barrow 61: details of stake-holes in the stake-circle (Figure 17). (By Doreen Clarke and David E. Johnston.) coppice-wood stakes (Rackham 1976: 48) had been sharpened with a metal axe. Many surfaces show the impressions of the abrasive effect of driving stakes into chalk, which had been retained in the holes and was visible on the casts. This was clear near the point of 58 Pit WIEETSTERE VRCEEXEOLOGIOAL AND NYVEURAL EES PORY MAGAZINE depth from designation — diameter ancient soil = comment Ins. ins. a IY 3 uncertain, double? b VY 2” tip only ¢ V4 1% tip only d 14 2” fair e 134 3 two. stakes touching one e€ 2 414 another fi 2” 4 good g 2A 54 oval, fair h IY 2% up 1 1% 2% fair k 2 5% oval | 1 V4 up m 1% 3% fair n 2u%4 4 fair Table 2. Barrow 61: details of stake-holes outside the circle (Figure 17). (By Doreen Clarke and David E. Johnston.) distance from depth from — previous stake number diameter ancient soil ft ins. comment ins. Ins. | | IY — clear Il 14 4 1 Oo” fair Hl 2”% + 2 5% fair IV 2 3% I 3: fair V 2 4 De fair VI 2Y%4 34 1 6 square tip Vil 1% IY 1 2 uncertain Vil 24 + 3.11 angular IX 2 3% 2 good xX 1% BY 2 3 fair XI 2 3% 5 fair XII 22 = = in water Table 3. Barrow 61: details of stake-holes in the central arrangement of stakes (Figure 17). (By Doreen Clarke and David FE. Johnston.) number 4, while number 5 displays the gash made in the wood by a flint when the stake was driven. Burials, cremations and inhumations (figures 16, 20-24) No trace of a central burial was found. It was concluded that the central part of the barrow had not been for burial, and that the raison d’étre for the final mound building was the peripheral group of burials inside the stake circle, at the margin of the burned area, and those outside. The interior group of burials, a close-set cluster AMESBURY BARROW 6! CREMATION GRAVE I A — — B CDOGE OF GRAVE PIT A B PLOUGH soit ae Sera = “yy LOOSE sort OE AS Be AL (AO BROWN 8 LLL LLLHOAM Vea! ore Od Lf bebrhobal Ld DARK SOIL ce A FRAGMENTS OF CREMATED BONE Fa bm Figure 20. Barrow 61: cremation grave 1. (Figure 21) consisted of two adult cremation burials (numbers 2 and 3), in oval pits, and the inhumation burial (number 2) of an infant in an elongated shallow Scoop. 2 The exterior inhumation burial (number 1) was flexed and of a young adult female, accompanied by a child, while the cremation burial (number 1) in a circular pit, was of an adult. This pit (Figure 20) had been infilled, but the others had been covered by the building of the mound. The interior group of burials could, because they were beneath the loam core, have been the first to have been covered, together with the external cremation, for which a ditch adjustment had been made. The exterior inhumation burial might have been subsequently placed in position as it was beneath the tail of the chalk envelope. The numbers of these burials were given during excavation; they have been retained although they do not indicate affinity or sequence. Cremation burial 2 (stake circle interior) (Figures 16, 21) THE EXCAVNTION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 358, 61a, 61, AMESBURY CREMATION EDGE OF GRAVE PIT FRAGMENTS DARK SOIL gS FLINTS Va BARROW 61 CREMATED BONE SM The oval pit, with sloping sides, about | ft 6 ins. long and _ little than | ft at the top correspondingly less at the bottom, had been cut through the ancient soil and only about | in. into the chalk beneath. Its depth below the surface of the ancient soil was some 5 ins. The adult cremated bone fragments (below, page 85), in a matrix of dark soil with charcoal (below page 89), containing four or five small, weathered pieces of flint, had covered the bottom of the pit in a graded heap. Its infill was the loam of the core of the barrow which had been packed around the burned bones. more broad and Cremation burial 3 (stake circle interior) (Figures 16, 22) This oval pit was of similiar area to no. 2, but deeper. Cut through the ancient soil, its sides were vertical, although sloping to form an oval bottom in the chalk at a depth of 10 ins. Again, the adult, probably female, cremated bone fragments (below, page 85), In a matrix of dark soil containing some 10 or 12 small fragments of weathered flint, had covered the bottom of the pit, forming a graded heap about 5 ins. high. Like number 2, its infill was the loam of the core of the barrow which had been carefully packed around the burned bones. As | innumber 2, but even more markedly, the substance of the barrow core was in compact clods which, despite Figure 21. Barrow 61; cremation grave 2. continuous rain, could be readily removed from the loose pile of bones. Inhumation burial 2 (stake circle interior) (Figures 16, 2F) Because of wet conditions, this shallow, clongated, oval grave was until the ancient. soil removed. Clearly it had been cut through this ancient not detected was soil; its sloping, chalk-cut bottom would have been about I] ins. at the proximal end and I ft 2 ins. at the N, distal, end from its surface. “he burial, the eroded and fragmentary bones of an infant (below, page 85), only occupied a half of the grave. It had been covered with scatters of small, clean pieces of chalk, the greater quantity being over the collapsed skull, and chalk had filtered down amongst the bones. The final infill was, as in the cremation graves, the loamy barrow core, material almost indistinguishable from the ancient soil. Inhumation burial(s) (stake circle exterior) (7 23) The remains of a young adult female (below, page 85) gures 16, had been deposited on the surface of the ancient soil in a flexed position on their right side, with the head contiguous to the circumference of the stake circle. Ploughing had displaced the skull, mandible, certain 60 THE WILTSEURE ARCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NYVEURAL PISTORY MAGAZINE A. MAGE? S.B UU ROY CREMATION GRAVE 5 BARROW 61 CREMATED BONES, DARK SOIL LF 5M Figure AMESBURY PLOUGH-DISTURBED FLEXED BURIAL [INHUMATION(S) 1] Figure 23. Barrow 61: inbumation(s) 1. BARROW 61 22. 1M Barrow 61: cremation grave 3. THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 61 AMESBURY INHUMATION 2 AN INFANT BURIAL EDGE OF CHALK CUT SURFACE OF CHALK AFTER “ REMOVAL OF ANCIENT SOIL Vi Lafe PROFILE le CUT INTO Pes Fell A] lia) ! Figure 24. Barrow 61: inhumation 2. vertebrae and other bones, including the right scapula and humerus; bones were collected from the modern ploughsoils. Juvenile bones by the knees (Figure 23) were mingled with the bones of the adult skeleton. Examination has shown that a second adult was repre- sented, as well as the 85). A scatter of clean chalk rubble was on the ancient surface and beneath the bones, as were patches of comminuted charcoal, peripheral to the burned area. juvenile (below Cremation burial | (stake circle exterior) (Figures 16, 20) This deep, almost cylindrical, pit was on the N side of the stake circle and almost 10 ft from it. When the ditch was dug a lobe was diverted to comprehend it. Weath- ering had reduced the depth of the grave, on the berm of the barrow. A shallow circular scoop about 2 ft 9 ins. in diameter had been dug through the ancient soil and into the chalk, to a depth of some 9 ins. In the centre of this a cylindrical shaft, about 10 ins. in diameter and 10 ins. deep, had been sunk. The grave was between natural cavities (Figure 18, A—B), some of which may have been visible and could have determined its siting. Its proximity to one of these had allowed the survival of a small area of ancient soil CHALK 2! aM (Figure 20, section) beyond the point of extinction at the margin of the barrow. A small amount of loose brown soil, from the ancient soil, had fallen into the bottom of the cylindrical shaft. ‘The cremation, the burned bones of an adult, had been tipped into it, filling it to a depth of 6 ins. Soil, some of it wormeasts, cemented the fragments of burned bone together, as it did in cremations 2, and 3. The infill included yellow, burned chalk (Ashbee 1966: 8), clean chalk of firm consistency, loose brown soil, chalky soil, and chalky loam. A third of the barrow was unexcavated and, while the entire interior of the stake circle was cleared and studied, less than a third of the exterior area was examined. Had excavation been total, other peripheral burials might have been encountered. Loam core of the barrow (Figure 18) The loam core of the barrow (layer 3), dark brown, sometimes black, displayed horizontal streaks of chalk and flint. There were also patches, about 7 ins. long and broad and sometimes about 2 ins. deep, of black, greasy soil. These contained charcoal (Fraximus sp., ash), numerous weathered fragments of bone, pieces of 62 PEE WIL ESEERE pottery and struck flakes of flint. Although most of the bone splinters were too small for identification, the presence of Cervus elaphus (red deer), domestic ox and sheep or goat was verified (below, page 88). Fragment of rock from the loam core A piece of fine-grained rock, patently foreign to the area, was also found in the loam core. Dr J. F. S. Stone kindly arranged for it to be examined by the Stone Axe Sub-Committee of the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries. Their report (no. 1041, 28 February 1957; Evens, Grinsell, Piggott and Wallis 1962: 263) was: Macroscopic examination: a hard, fossiliferous, dark grey limestone. Microscopic examination showed that it consisted of grains of calcite, foraminifers, crinoids and other frag- mentary fossils. It is a piece of Carboniferous Limestone and might be from the Mendip Hills. It is 3 ins. long and 2 ins. broad. [AMESBURY | BARROW 72 ; ] es i | DISTURBANCE Men. ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NYVEPURAL LIS PORY MAGAZINE Remnant of the chalk envelope (Figure 23) Ploughsoil stripping exposed a chalky collar around the truncated loam core. It consisted of clean chalk rubble or chalky clay soil (layers 2, 2a) resting against, and before plough damage covering, the loam core (layer 3). An indication of the erstwhile height of this barrow is provided by the way in which this material mantled the berm and collapsed into the ditch (Figure 18, B-C). The base of the chalky envelope, where it rested upon the ancient soil or trespassed on to the berm, was about 8 ft wide so that the mound, about 42 ft in diameter, could have been just over 6 ft high. Ploughing has reduced this to about 2 ft, spreading the mound and concealing the ditch below derived plough soils. Surrounding ditch (Figures 16, 18) This ditch was, allowing for weathering, narrow and deep; its bottom was littlke more than 2 ft wide and, when originally dug, it would have been about 4 ft 4 Figure 25. Barrow 72: excavation. € NATURAL CAVITY THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 7 6 ins. deep. The bottom was buried beneath chalk rubble (layer 8) to a depth of about 1 ft, which was sealed by cemented chalky rainwash (layer 7) derived from the clay grade material in the chalk of the hillslope. This in turn was covered by chalk and humus (layer 6), which also cloaked the narrow berm of the barrow. A deep deposit of humus, containing flint fragments, upon which a thin stone-free turf-line had developed, completed the process (layer 5). Because accumulations from the barrow mound (e.g. Figure 18, B-C, layer 2) were interleaved with ditchside derived silts, and because the deep layer of chalk and humus (layer 6) may also have been barrow-derived, the final humus concentration (layer 5) did not everywhere completely cover the ditch (Figure 18, C—D, layer 5a). It may be assumed, from the ditch’s trumpet- mouthed profiles (Jewell and Dimbleby 1966: 339), that its sides were dug straight and vertical, for rapid silt frequently preserves the bottom part. Had the narrow ditch of this barrow been dug with vertical sides the initial rapid silt accumulation might have been deeper. Thus, there are some grounds for supposing that some barrow ditches had sloping sides. Disturbances in the barrow (Figures 16-18) Two pits, which coalesced, were at the centre of the mound and might represent an earlier attempt at PLOUGH-REDUCED BARROW y La O-@ @ “: PRE-PLOUGHING HUMUS ACCUMULATION MODERN PLOUGH SOILS A LARGE BROKEN @) 63 excavation. [heir loose infill was in marked contrast to the compact loam core (layer 3). Although two lobes of this pit penetrated the ancient soil, the greater part stopped at the surface, and certain stake-holes of the central arrangement were undamaged. BOWL-BARROW, OVERLAPPED BY SAUCER-BARROW, 72 Excavation (Figure 25) Ploughing had left this twin-barrow standing little more than about | ft above its immediate surround. ‘Trenches, longitudinal, — were subsequently enlarged, and other cuttings made to examine particular features and relationships. An outer bank to this saucer-barrow was seen prior to 1939; it was destroyed during the war years (Grinsell 1957: 222), and excavation revealed no trace. transverse and The barrows, their structure and features (Figures 25—28) All traces of the enmoundments had been destroyed by ploughing; modern ploughsoils were everywhere, except in the truncated ditches, graves and pits (Figures 26, 27) in contact with plough-scraped chalk. Sufficient upstanding chalk had, however, survived to indicate that the ancient soils beneath these barrows might have stood as much as 1 ft 6 ins. above the modern surface (Atkinson 1957: 232; Ashbee 1960: 59, Figure 19). Beneath each barrow there were natural cavities (Evans 1968), which had been intensively burrowed AMESBURY BARROW ]2 < PLOUGH- Zs ©€® REDUCED CHALK SURFACE A PLOUGH-REDUCED CHALK SURFACE ©) > CHALK RUBBLE SILTING CONSOLIDATED CHALKY WASH FLINT NODULES we PLOUGH -REDUCED BARROW y KR PLOUGH-REDUCED ZA CHALK SURFACE (O) > HUMIC INWASH © GREY-STAINED CONSOLIDATED CHALK RUBBLE Ca 10F |Figure 26. a Ti qe NATURAL TT CAVITY Th ied Wt © 7 & x NATURAL x n~ PLOUGH-REDUCED CAVITIES CHALK SURFACE 5M Barrow 72: transverse, radial, sections of the plough-reduced barrows. 64 Thi WILE TSTURE AMESBURY BARROW 72 LOO G4 T UD NAIL. -SvE€ TOON G@ - MODERN PLOUGH solLs Q@) - PRE-PLOUGHING HUMUS ACCUMULATION @ - CHALK RUBBLE SILTING YA > a a NATURAL CAVITIES we PLOUGH-REDUCED BARROW Y «NATURAL CAVITY 1OF XN pLOUGH- REDUCED CHALK SURFACE 7 ARCIIARKOLOGICAL AND NYVEURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE wv PLOUGH -REDUCED BARROW y x KNATURAL CAVITIES KX pLOUGH-REDUCE BD CHALK SURFACE 7 - CONSOLIDATED CHALKY RAINWASH @ - HUMIC INWASH Figure 27. Barrow 72: longitudinal sections of the plough-reduced barrows. AMESBURY BARROW 72 DITCH OF 9 WESTERN = R BARROW ® 6) - HUMIC INWASH SF @ - CONSOLIDATED CHALKY WASH Figure 28. Barrow 72: section showing the stratigraphic relationship between the two barrows. DiTcH oF A tO) EASTERN a BARROW FLINT NODULES 5M tc PLOUGH-REDUCED BARROWS ¥ H XK PLOUGH- REDUCED 7 CHALK SURFACE DITCH OF 0) - MOLERN PLOUGH SOILS EAST N aoe ©) - PRE-PLOUGHING HUMUS ACCUMULATION ©) - CHALK RYBBLE SILTING © - GREY -STAINED CONSOLIDATED CHALK RUBBLE 1M through the infill of the ditch of the earlier bowl-barrow. into by rabbits. A large warren, in which were the bones of a recent sheep and lamb, was beneath the W bowl-barrow where soft yellow chalk had been hon- eycombed with burrows which intruded into the central grave, disturbing the broken urn. That beneath the later, E. saucer-barrow was of crescentic form, its infill being of brown earth, chalky rainwash and deeply weathered flint fragments. Graves and their contents (Figures 25, 29, 30) A cremation beneath an inverted urn was at the centre of the annular ditch of the W barrow, while two cremations were encompassed by the penannular ditch of the E barrow. One of these burials was furnished with a bronze awl, a bone point and a shale bead, while the other was unfurnished. Despite plough truncation it was possible to see that this last cremation had been interred in a rectangular grave not dissimilar to that housing the urn beneath the W bowl-barrow. Urn (beneath the bowl-barrow) (Figure 29) An inverted cinerary urn had covered the burnt bones of an immature person housed in a rectilinear pit, with about a third of the urn’s body protruding above the surface of the ancient soil. A small cairn of flints may have covered it. Ploughing had severed the body of the urn from its rim, which remained, together with a part of the cremation, in the pit, partially destroyed by rabbits, while a large flint nodule had fallen into it (Figure 31). Sherds from the urn were found close by. The ditch of the saucer-barrow has been cut THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61 AMESBURY 72) es ys SURVIVING RIM OF URN ' BARROW 72 4 URN BURIAL ; BENEATH FLINT DABS UTE RNGS aris ase se i aaa U-NODULE MOWWIND, 6 2 BRS pmsraiat acm PLOUGH- l ar eee m ip \ DESTROYED / \ BODY OF /f USN = iG! 17 Figure 29. JAM | < AMESBURY | CREMATION PIT 1 BARROW CREMATION PIT2 PLOUGH-REDUCED CHALK SURFACES ¥ + CREMATION SOIL y FRAGMENTS vy OF BURNED BONE | Figure 30. Barrow 72 » burials beneath the later saucer-barrow 5 Barrow 72 central inverted-urn burial beneath the mitial bown-barrow. 66 Pith WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NVEORAL PHSPORY MAGAZINE Ry, Vis One Wj iy Wipf Figure 31. Barrow 72: damaged inverted urn beneath the mitial bowl-barrow. 32. Barrow 72: the ditch of the saucer-barrow cut through the ditch of the earlier bowl-barrow. THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 7 Cremation grave | (beneath the saucer-barrow) (Figure 30) An irregular pit, its depth diminished by ploughing, housed the well-calcined bones of an adult in a circular heap. Beneath them was a robust, basil-ended bronze awl, a bone point, and a shale bead. Cremation grave 2 (beneath the saucer-barrow) (Figure 30) Immediately below a rectilinear pit, reduced by ploughing, was a narrow shaft which contained, min- gled with soil, a small quantity of burned bone, mainly skull and long bone fragments, not necessarily human. The sides displayed signs of blackening comminuted charcoal. from Ditches of the bowl- and saucer-barrows (Figures 25—8) The ditch of the bowl-barrow was annular, and that of the saucer-barrow penannular. Although ploughing had destroyed the mounds, the ditches, except on the N side of the saucer-barrow, had largely survived. Their final humus accumulations had been pared and then smothered by ploughsoils, while their weathering ramps, internally and externally, had been mostly removed. It was almost impossible to gauge the diameters of the mounds. The broad ditches may have been dug with slightly battered sides. The initial infill was a humic inwash 67 (layer 5), which had been followed by consolidated chalky wash (layer 4) or chalk rubble (layer 3). A grey-stained chalk rubble consolidation (layer 6) may indicate periodic standing water in these ditches, for the bedrock, a solidified glacial sludge (Evans 1968), was impermeable and at the time of excavation they wre frequently filled by the heavy rains. The large flint nodules, found in the ditch of the saucer-barrow on its S side, may reflect composition. On the N side of the two barrows, the end of the penannular ditch of the saucer-barrow had been dug across the ditch of the bowl-barrow and into the berm. On the S side, however, the end of the penannular ditch merely intruded into the earlier ditch (Figures 25, 32). The later ditch, and its infills, the grey-stained consolidated chalk rubble (layer 6), the looser primary chalk rubble silting (layer 3) and the relatively undamaged, substantial top layer of humus (layer 2) could be seen (Figure 25, G-H; Figure 28) to intrude into the earlier and overlaid its consolidated infill of chalky wash (layer 4). The stratigraphy shows that the small bowl-barrow, after the time necessary for an accumulation of primary silts in its ditch, had been linked to a larger, later saucer-barrow, constructed on its EF side. The monument had in consequence the appearance of a double-barrow (Grinsell 1957: 222), a misidentification which the excavation corrected. 2 Description of the grave furniture and other artifacts from the barrows This section only describes the finds. They are discussed, and comparative material is presented, in section 3 (pages 80-2). BELL-BARROW 58 Central cremation grave (Figures 5, 33-7) A dagger, with a part of a nodule of iron pyrites, lay upon the cremated bones in the central grave. Attached to it by wooden (yew) rivets were its horn hilt-plates, from which a pommel, or butt, had been broken. Traces of a hide sheath, preserved by copper corrosion compounds, were on the blade which, with the remains of the hilt, was encased in sphagnum moss and wrap- ped in cloth. Dagger (Figures 33, 34) The dagger is of almost pure copper, with a maximum length of 4 ins. and a maximum breadth of 1% ins. Ogival in outline with a rounded heel indented in two places, it is elliptical in section with an average thickness of about Yio in. Despite corrosion, traces of grooving are discernible upon each face. The hilt attachment area, the butt of the blade, has a slightly curved mark and is perforated by two holes, each Ys in. in diameter, and the horn hilt-plates were attached by two rivets of yew wood (Taxus baccata L). They were about 4% in. long and Yo in. in diameter. If the indentations in the butt were also intended for rivets, they were not so employed, for the two plates, of the composite hilt, had only two pertorations, both of which corresponded with those in the butt of the dagger. From the better preserved of the two horn hilt-plates it was possible to see that it had been finely finished, if not polished, and had exactly fitted the butt of the blade (Figure 35). Although the second plate was warped and damaged, it had been equally carefully made. Both plates were, at the junction betweea blade and hilt, curved in such a manner as to have left a positive hilt-mark on the blade. A feature of each plate was a ragged upper end which suggested that the pommel, of the trough variety (e.g. Piggott 1963: 85, OF D 5 O8 Titik WILTSHIRE Figure 33. Figure 19), which would have secured the plates, or a plain termination of the paired plates, had been snap- ped off before wrapping and deposition. Identical hilt-plates of this kind are likely to have been secured together by resin or some similar adhesive. Dagger sheath Corrosion products, massive on one side of the blade and less so on the other, had preserved the vestiges of a close-fitting sheath (Figure 36). his sheath’s fibrous ARCTINEOLOGHIONL AND NYVEURAL PISTORY MAGAZINE Barrow S8: hilted dagger and split iron pyrites module from the central grave. Scale 1:1. qualities, retained by the eruption of the blade, showed it to have been of fur or raw-hide. The short, dense character and calibre of the indurated individual hairs, may indicate the skin of beaver, otter or deer (Ritchie 1920: 17, 155-58; Southern 1964: 267, 408-20), although calf- or pony-skin is also a possibility (Clark 19 S:22 222): The dagger blade, with its attached, broken-off hilt (Figure 35), had been encased in sphagnum moss. I'fforts were made to preserve this wrapping, but the THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 Figure 34. pieces displaying form and character crumbled before laboratory action could be taken. | Cloth wrapping of dagger The cloth, which was the final wrapping, survived as fragments (Figure 37), few of which were more than lin. by 1 in. in size. They were seen to have been _ closely woven; pieces of the moss and detached frag- |ments of corroded bronze adhered to them. _ Miss Audrey Henshall of the National Museum of 69 Barrow 58: dagger, from the central grave, with horn hilt-plates from which the pommel had been snapped. Found wrapped in moss and cloth and resting upon half a module of iron pyrites. Lifestze. Antiquities of Scotland, who had studied prehistoric British textiles (Henshall 1950), was kind enough to examine surviving fragments and commented: Only a few tiny fragments of this cloth were preserved, the largest being ¥4 in. square. It is in a very degraded condition, but it is possible to see that it is a fine plain weave with about 40 threads per inch in one direction and about 64 in the other direction. This is considerably finer than the other English early bronze age cloths, which are all plain weave (Henshall 1950: 133). The threads are too decayed for the direction of 70 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Figure 35. the spin to be made out. The fibre has not been identified. Under the cloth there are the remains of two other layers. The lower one has the appearance of being fur; it consists of a mass of fibres lying more or less parallel, but not spun or woven. Little can be seen of the centre layer, but it is homogeneous and might be thin skin. A small sample was submitted to the Wool Industries Research Association who reported, The fibres were extremely friable and only very short pieces of fibre could be extracted from the cloth. They are animal fibres, but we are unable to state their origin. No scale pattern was seen on the fibres but quite a number of them were medullated. The medullae were wide medullae in fibres of this diameter (12—15,2). Iron pyrites (Figure 33) This part-nodule of iron pyrites (FeS,) was in close contact with the bronze dagger and bears a_ stain Barrow 58: one of the dagger hilt-plates. About 4+ X lifesize. therefrom. This segment is about a third of an ovoid nodule which had been broken by a blow. Iron pyrites nodules, with their characteristic radiating structure, are common in the chalk, the gault, and allied clays. Pottery The excavation of the truncated loam core of the barrow yielded 36 abraded and mostly featureless sherds of pottery. These included: 7 patent Beaker fragments, one of which was from a late-stage vessel; a fragment of a rusticated Beaker; 4 of Grooved Ware; and 16 pieces of massive gritted ware, perhaps from an urn. Five more such sherds were recovered from the lower ploughsoil of the ditch. Flints Worked and used flints were found in the ploughsoil of the barrow: 65 flakes; 7 knapping spalls; 1 calcined core ™ 8, 6la, 61, 72 5 SBURY BARROWS AME AVATION OF XC. E THE Ze. Ve About 4 X lifes copper corrosion products. ved by g sheath preses mm W, sho: 1 blade Barrow S8: dagge 36. ligure AZINE azusafy x ¢ taa0 ysnt ‘yqmit sazisafyy Xx & fapun gal fry -4odavp aqy doscy 01 pasn Gro]? qi fo suausvaf igs mong LE WAT] AND NATURAL HISTORY MAC ICAL ARCH AEOLOC WILTSHIRE THE THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 7 and 3 calcined pieces; 2 scrapers; | broken retouched flake; | broken retouched blade; and 1 serrated blade. Worked and used flints were also associated with specific features. In the chalky silts of the ditch (Figure 4, layers 6, 7) were 17 flakes; the ancient soil (Figure 4, layer 4) yielded 25 flakes and 10 knapping spalls, while 4 flakes and 4 fragments of calcined flint were found in the upper fill of natural pits beneath it; in the loam core (Figure 4, layer 3) were 96 flakes, 56 knapping spalls and 3 scrapers, 1 of which was on the end of a long, parallel-sided flake; in the relict part of the chalk envelope (Figure 4, layers 2, 2a) were 3 flakes. About a third of the struck flints were worn and abraded or had a deep patina; others with a bluish- white patina, sometimes blotchy, had sharp edges. About one-sixth of the flakes were large — the first flakes from a considerable nodule — and reminiscent in cha- racter of flint-mine debris and stood apart from the smaller, usually secondary, flakes which characterize flint-working debris in round barrows. DISC-BARROW 6la Inhumation burials and natural pit (Figure 11) Pottery Sherds of Ebbsfleet, Mortlake and Grooved Ware pottery in the infill were in juxtaposition to the inhumation burials; this suggests — they - incorporated into the infill of a grave. They were associated with a pocket of soil impregnated with comminuted charcoal, and the Mortlake sherds are blackened. Pi-P2: rim sherds of ashy, blackened, flaky ware from the rim of a small Mortlake bowl. Ornament on the moulded rim of alternating triangles of deep, narrow cord impressions. Exterior spaced impres- sions below the rim and interior closely-spaced oblique cord impressions. , P3-P8: 6 body sherds, 5 of which lack interior | surfaces, which belong to the rims P1, P2, and are of the same ware. Two display cord and incised line ornament. P9: abraded light buff rim sherd of Ebbsfleet affinity with rim ornament and spaced external finger-pinch impressions. P10: much-abraded body sherd displaying what may have been ornament formed by the articular ends of were small bird or mammal bones. PULL: | of finely executed ornament made with the cut end of | bird or animal bone. |P12: massive finely gritted sherd of hard ware displaying a broad, shallow channel. heavy, abraded body sherd displaying two lines 73 P13: abraded sherd of hard sandy ware showing incised lines. P14: featureless crumbs of pottery related to P3—P8. Rectangular cremation grave (Figure 13) The globular miniature vessel was found upright with the other objects against and beneath it: the beaver incisor tooth was against its side with the oblate amber bead beneath. Removal of the disclosed the bronze awl, the remainder of the beads and shells with the scrap of bronze close by. Removal of the infill of the miniature vessel yielded two amber beads, one of which was fragmentary, a fossil encrinite joint, and two small flint flakes. miniature vessel Miniature pottery vessel (Figure 38, 39: 1) This oblate miniature vessel has an imperfectly flattened base and a plain, inward-canting angular rim. Its height is 1% ins. Its maximum diameter is 3% ins., the mouth diameter 2 ins., and the diameter of the base flattening 1/0 ins. Twin perforations just below the maximum girth, each in. in diameter, have centres Ys in. apart. The dark-faced appearance of the upper part of the vessel is the result of recent handling and rubbing-in of an earthy deposit. The base displays the original light buff fabric, with some barely perceptible patches of reddening, which contains waterworn quartz fragments and traces of burned-out vegetable fibres. A sawn small bone was used to produce the twin perforations. “These were pushed through from the exterior, the bone leaving proud crowns of clay around each hole inside the vessel. Beads and other objects from the soil infill of the miniature vessel (Figures 38, 39: 2, 3) In the soil infill of the miniature vessel were two amber beads and a fossil crinoid: 2: An oblate amber bead, “% in. diameter, with a perforation %o in. diameter, and ¥s in. deep. Cracked and chalk-solution coated. Another amber bead, apparently of the same dimensions, in fragments coated with chalk solution. 3: Fossil crinoid (Encrinus) stem ossicle, cylindrical (Apiocrinus, Jur), Ys in. long and “6 in. diameter. ‘Two small, partially crusted, flakes or knapping spalls of grey-brown flint were also in the soil infill of the miniature vessel. Beads and shells beneath the miniature vessel (Figares 38, 39: 4-9) Beneath the miniature vessel were further beads and cowrie shells: 4: Cowrie shell [Trivia arctica, Montagu), ¥s in. long Migure ay. THE WILTSEURE ARCEEAROLOGICAL AND NATURAL TIS PORY MAGAZINE Barrow 61a: miniature vessel, beads, cowrie shells, beaver’s incisor tooth, awl and scrap of bronze, [rom the rectangular cremation grave. Just over lifestze. ru: teed THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 ™~s wn fi =- -_ = —|{ = -@ -|/-e 4 | A fl ae oe ES | 10 | 12 | | | Figure 39. Barrow 61a: miniature vessel, beads, cowrte shells, beaver’s incisor tooth, awl and scrap of bronze, from the rectangular cremation grave. Scale 1:1. and % in. wide at the slit aperture, with traces of a 9: Cracked and chalk-solution coated oblate amber close-set perforation at the broader end. bead, of ’% in. outer diameter, so in. inner diameter | 5: Blue faience segmented bead of 5 segments, with a and |% in. thickness. long and ¥ in. in diameter. | 6: Cowrie shell (Trivia arctica, Montagu), ¥ in. long and 5 in. wide at the slit aperture, with a possible | perforation through the sides. 7: Red-brown shale or steatite quoit-bead, of % in. | outer diameter, 4 in. internal diameter and /% in. | thickness. Cut and carved to shape, irregular interna- | Ily and externally. 8: Blue faience segmented bead, broken but originally Ao in. long and Y% in. in diameter. ‘The 4+ segments were flattened during the manufacturing process, perhaps by rolling, to the extent that they appear to be separated by incisions. \ l | | part of 2 segments broken away at one end, % in. | | \ Beaver’s incisor tooth (Figures 38, 39: 10) This incisor tooth, with its pulp cavity broken from it, and perhaps of some antiquity when deposited, is 1Yio in. long, % in. broad at the broken, proximal end and %o in. broad at the distal bevelled end. Its exterior, buccal enamel is deep orange in colour. There are no traces of wear upon the dentine sides, which might be expected had it been used as a tool; and the wear upon the bevelled, distal end could have come about natu- rally during the lifetime of the animal. 76 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAROLOGICAL AND NATURAL LISTORY MAGAZINE Scrap of bronze (Figures 38, 39: 11) This scrap is Yio in. long, Yio in. broad, with a one- sided bevel Yio in. long. Bronze awl (Figures 38, 39: 12) This awl, of circular section, has a basil distal end, formed by hammer blows, from which the pointed proximal end progressively tapers. It is “10 in. long, with a medial diameter of Yio in. at Y% in. from the basil end. BOWL-BARROW 61 Loam core of the barrow The patches of black, greasy soil contained, besides numerous splinters and weathered fragments of bone, pieces of pottery, struck flakes of flint, and a piece of limestone. Pottery The pottery consisted of 2 rim-sherds of Peterborough affinity and 16 plain body-sherds of the same ware, 6 robust fingertip-ornamented sherds, 2 heavy rim and 2 equally heavy base sherds of Beaker character, and 42 clearly identifiable pieces of Beaker pottery, of which 10 are plain. The 70 sherds of pottery represent more than 20 Figure 40. BCU Barrow 61: sherds of Beaker pottery from the loam vessels. Many are too small for detailed remark. All are worn and most of the Beaker sherds have lost their surface. Only the pits distinguish the pieces of Peterborough affinity; they could be from a bowl of about 8 in. diameter from the Ebbsfleet division (Piggott 1954: 308; Smith 1965: 73). The fingertip-ornamented sherds could be from a large vessel of Pot Beaker or Giant Beaker type, bearing widely-spaced decoration, and the heavy rims and bases are from something similarly large. A selection of the Beaker sherds is illustrated (Fig- ures 40, 41): Bl: rim-sherd of purplish-red, of fine paste, with close-set horizontal fine, even comb- ornament. A slight undulation of line, a close conjunction of impression, and an overlap illustrate the potter’s decorative precision. B2: abraded rim-sherd of compact paste with red exterior and brown interior. Smoothing, subsequent to widely spaced lines of irregular-toothed comb ornament, has partially obliterated some impressions. B3: body-sherd with red exterior and brown interior. The comb-impressions are deep, and the comb was, after application, dragged to enhance the closely set zones of lines of horizontal lines. core. Scale 1:1. 1 B7: THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 6la, 61, 72 Figure B4: body-sherd with brown-red exterior and_buff- grey interior, bearing broken horizontal lines of | close-toothed comb ornament and part of a zone of zigzag or split herringbone motif. | BS: body-sherd with red exterior and brown interior, | with wide-set lines of impressed comb ornament and traces of a latticed zone. The teeth of the comb were { worn and certain of them were near-circular. | B6: an abraded body-sherd with two lines of fine, even, toothed comb impression and part of a latticed zone. The ware has a deeply reddened exterior, a | black core and a dark brown interior surface. body-sherd with red exterior and interior surfaces | and a dark core. Although the red exterior surface is worn it can be seen that the two double lines, and a | single line, of ornament were executed with an | unworn comb with even rectangular teeth, \B8: body-sherd of fine red ware. The horizontal lines oof even, rectangular-toothed comb ornament bound a | zone of vertical impressions. ‘hese were initially ; i Th #1. Barrow 61: sherds of Beaker pottery from the loam core. Scale 1:1. vertical incisions upon which triple tooth impres- sions were superimposed. B9: base-sherd of brown ware with large grits. The two lines were initially formed by the impressions of a dragged, worn comb. Subsequent smoothing has reduced their width and enhanced their depth. ‘The remaining 24 sherds of Beaker pottery comprise: 3 body-sherds with close-set horizontal lines of comb ornament, comparable with B1; 7 sherds with wide-set lines of comb stamping, of much the same character as B2; 3 small sherds with their lines of ornament subsequently smoothed, as is that of B9; 1 sherd with a worn double line of comb ornament and comparable with B7; 1 sherd with short, infilled stroke ornament; and 8 sherds with traces of zoning, comb-stamped lattice, herringbone, infilled and unfilled triangle and oblique stroke ornament. A single worn rim-sherd may have borne zigzag cord-ornament, but its condition excludes certainty. With 2 exceptions, which have red exterior and dark interior surfaces, all the sherds are of 78 Figure 42. THE WILTSHIRE ARCEIAROLOGICAL AND NYPORAL EHS PORY MAGAZINE Barrow 72: collar of urn from the initial bowl-barrow; bronze awl, bone point and shale bead from the secondary saucer-barrow. Urn-rim ¥5 lifesize; bead, awl and bone point lifestze. | | | | | | | | | | Pik EXNCAV XNTION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, Gla, 61, 7 SSS SS SSS PSION FIBRO OO OO \ \ = jf / 43. saucer-barrow. Figure an evenly fired red ware. The 9 plain sherds, which include a substantial piece from the lower part of a vessel and a small square-rimmed fragment, have, with one exception, a red exterior and dark interior. ‘This _ darker inner surface may represent traces of the fouling of vessels which led to their being discarded and broken. With the exception of a badly worn, and thus ambiguous, rim-sherd, all these fragments of Beaker | pottery are from vessels of Middle Style (Case 1977: Figure 4). ‘Flint Twenty-seven pieces of flint were collected: 2 round- } | | | | Barrow 72: urn (scale 1/3) from the initial bowl-barrow; awl, bone-point and shale bead (scale 1/1) from the secondary nosed scrapers, 2 retouched flakes of the side-scraper variety, 2 flakes with retouch, 16 struck flakes (3 of which are primary, bearing cortex, and 4 secondary but still with cortex), and 5 knapping spalls. In view of the abundance of weathered flint in the composition of the barrow, the incidence of imple- ments and knapping debris is low. Quantities were associated and pottery with the dark soil, bone, fragments. BOWL-BARROW, OVERLAPPED BY SAUCER-BARROW, 72 Central burial of the initial bowl-barow (Figure 29) A rectilinear pit housed the burnt bones in the inverted urn. Ploughing had severed its body from the collar. 80 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEENEOLOGICAL AND NYVEORAL EIS PORY MAGAZINE Urn (Figures 42, 43) The remaining parts of the collar, 5% ins. deep, denote an urn of about 11% ins. rim diameter. Remains of the body are insufficient to indicate whether it was necked or undifferentiated. External collar ornament consists of opposed filled triangles, bounded by two lines, of twisted cord ornament (Abercromby 1912: Plate Cv, Figure 73). The shading stops before the apexes of certain upward pointing triangles, leaving them plain. Paired lines of twisted cord ornament the internal bevel. An urn of this diameter, with a deep collar, could have been as much as 1 ft 3 ins. high with a base of about 6 ins. diameter. It was well-fired; the flint temper rarely obtrudes into the surface, whose deep reddish-brown colour might betoken high-temperature firing. Cremation grave I (beneath the secondary saucer-barrow) (Figure 30) Beneath the calcined bones, and unmarked by heat, lay a bronze awl, a bone point, and a shale bead. Bronze awl (Figures 42, 43) This robust awl, 1% ins. long, has a squared basil-end Yio in. broad. At the basil-end the sides are flanged and unworn, a differing patina suggesting that it was hafted. It tapers to a circular sectioned point and from point to basil-end-flattening it is polished, presumably by use. This use-polish overrides and blurs the longi- tudinal furrowing of the metal from, perhaps, forging. Bone point (Figures 42, 43) This broken point, !Mi6 in. in length, lacks its ip, which was broken in antiquity as was the point from its butt. A groove suggests that it was made from an immature cannon bone, perhaps of an ovicaprid. Shale bead (Figures 42, 43) This truncated double-conical shale bead is % in. across with a perforation “4 in. in diameter, and Yioin. deep. Its circularity, the circularity of the perforation, and the minute internal and external striations point to it having been produced upon a lathe. From the topsoil of the saucer-barrow there came a penny, VICTORIA D.G. BRITT:F.D., 1863. 3 Comments on the grave furniture and other artifacts BELL-BARROW 58 Dagger (Figures 33, 34) The basis for the classification of daggers is the blade, since the hilt is usually missing (Ashbee 1960: 100). Essentially, the dagger from barrow 58 belongs to the series of ‘flat riveted knife-daggers’, the definition ‘knife-dagger’ having been devised by ‘Thurnam (1871: 448). The class of knife-daggers was listed by Fox and Grimes (1928); commented upon by Piggott (1938: 69), who pointed out that it contained examples not strictly flat; examined by Atkinson (1954-6: 9), who detected basic differences in hilt conjunction outline; divided into five groups by Piggott (1963: 82-5); and, more recently, ordered by Gerloff (1975: 159-74). The flat riveted knife-dagger series (Gerloff 1975: 161), with which the present comprises flat blades with two or three rivet holes and mainly straight or slightly curved hilt-marks. Because of its ogival outline and weight it stands apart from the worn, whetted, lightweight or damaged examples. In outline it is not dissimilar to a blade from Wilsford barrow 54 (Annable and Simpson 1964: 43, 136-46), or the larger dagger from Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire (Ashbee 1957, 152, 157, Plate X11), while other examples of indistinct grooving are known (Ger- loff 1975: 170, nos. 328-331). example is to be associated, Hilt and sheath remains are widespread. Thurnam (1871, 457) remarked upon sheaths and handles. Knife- dagger hilts usually consisted of separate horn or wooden plates riveted to the blade and stuck (Atkinson 1954-6: 9; Ashbee 1957: 164-5) or secured together with rivets and often fitted with a trough pommel. Sheaths were normally of leather (Evans 1881: 227-33; Ashbee 1960: 100-3, Figure 29; Piggott 1963: 82-5, Figures 18, 19; Henshall 1968: 177, Figures 40, 41, Piggott 1973: 357; Hardaker 1974). Dagger hilts and the remains of sheaths have regularly survived in chalkland barrows. Of note are: Aldbourne Barrow 8 (Greenwell 1890: 54), where traces of wood were on the hilt-plate; and Amesbury 85 (Newall 1931: 437, Plates 2, 18a) where “The handle was probably of yew and the pommel of bone (ivory?). This was not in a good state of preservation since all the original surface had per- ished. It was mortised to take the tenon of the upper end of the handle.’ The knife-dagger from Everleigh barrow 2 (Vhurnam 1860: 332; 1871: 455, Plate XXXIV, 6) had traces of a wooden hilt and a leather sheath. The hafted flat blade from Milston Barrow 51 (Silk Fill) (Hoare 1810: 195n., Plate 23; Annable and Simpson 1964: 41, no. 114) and the flat’ riveted knife-dagger from (Cunnington 1860: 163; Roundway Barrow Sa THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 Thurnam 1871: 456, Plate XXxIv, 454; Annable and Simpson 1964: 56, no. 371), which is alleged to have had a wooden handle ‘about a foot in length’ should also be considered. An 18th-century barrow-opening records wooden rivets securing hilt to blade and is not without ambigu- ity. At Bincombe, in Dorset, there was ‘an instrument of brass formed like a spearhead, but flat and thin’. ‘It had been fixed to a shaft by means of three wooden pegs, one of which remained in the perforation when found, but on being exposed to the air fell immediately into dust’ (MS minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London for 1748: 51; Warne 1866, part III: 7; Evans 1881: 226). The term ‘shaft’ recalls the asserted length of the handle of the Roundway knife-dagger. Cloth and wrapping Mortimer (1905: 5) records wrapping around the Towthorpe dagger, saying, ‘Under and over this weapon was a large quantity of dark matter, resembling decayed and compressed leaves.’ A dagger in a Beaker burial at Shrewton (Moore and Rowlands 1972: 42) was wrapped in moss. The cloth impressions on daggers from Haxton Farm, Fittleton (Annable and Simpson 1964: 55, 357), Lambourne, Berkshire (Henshall 1950: 131-2, Plate XIV, 4) and Pewit Farm, Charlton, in the same county (Piggott 1939) may be from wrappings, as may impressions upon axes from Wilsford Barrow 5, the Bush Barrow (Annable and Simpson 1964: 46) and the Dorset Ridgeway (Abercromby 1912: vol. 2, Plate CX, O. 34a). The Shrewton moss-wrapped dagger was also in cloth, thought of as part of a bag (Moore and Rowlands 1972: 42). | Iron pyrites | Pieces of iron pyrites have been associated with fire- | production (Hoare 1810: 195; Bateman 1848: 53, 59; Borlase 1872: 235; Greenwell 1877: 264-68; Mortimer 1905: 91, 210; Grinsell 1953: 36, 183). Sphagnum moss | could have been used as tinder (Moore and Rowlands | 1972: 8, 44). Pyrites appears to have been a male | accompaniment. i | DISC-BARROW 6la _ The objects from this cremation grave can be associated ' with the Wessex culture (Piggott 1938). Miniature pottery vessel | The many miniature vessels found in the Wiltshire area (Savory 1958; Annable and Simpson 1964: 114-17) |show no. close counterpart for this plain, oblate, “miniature vessel, although not dissimilar plain miniature vessels have been found in northern Britain. ro There are examples from Stanton Moor in Derbyshire (Vine 1982: 365, nos. 630, 631, 632, 634, 636); Abercromby depicts five from Yorkshire (1912: vol. 2, nos. 293, 294, 297, 305, 309); while Lindsay Scott includes four more (1951: Figures 2, 5, 13, 15, 16) from Scotland. Savory (1958: 108, Figures 5, 10) illustrates a plain globular cup from Penderyn, in Wales. These plain miniature vessels are a sub-group of a complex series (Ashbee 1960: 127). Beads Kew faience beads (page 89 below) display the flattened segments of one of our examples; a bead from Wilsford Barrow 54 (Beck and Stone 1936: Plate LXII, Figures 1, 4, lower) is comparable, as is a Scottish example from Glenluce Sands (Beck and Stone 1936: Plate LXIV, Figure 3, 15). The well-made bead with five clear segments can be likened to the five-segment beads in the Upton Lovel (Beck and Stone 1936: Plate LXI, Figure 1; Stone 1958: Plate 60) and North Molton (Fox and Stone 1951: Plate vil, b, 1) necklaces. About 1000 graduated amber beads were found in a bowl-barrow (no. 2e) at Upton Lovel (Annable and Simpson 1964: 103, 227), and our beads can be matched within this assemblage. Quoit beads of shale were found in barrow 47 at Durrington (Annable and Simpson 1964: 108, 334-5), and may have acted as the terminals for the Upton Lovel necklace. Shells Colt Hoare (1810: 68, 114) records only marine shells, Nerita and Dentalitum, from Wiltshire barrows, but Warne (1866: 327) specifically mentions a cowrie shell found among burnt bones under a barrow ‘three miles west of Dorchester’. Three cowrie shells (Cypraea Europaea) and a periwinkle (Nerita) were in an assem- blage, which included a beaver’s incisor tooth, from Langton Barrow I in Yorkshire (Greenwell 1877: 137-8). Two perforated flat periwinkle shells (Littorina littoralis LL.) were found at the neck of the primary inhumation interment beneath a barrow’ on Rockbourne Down, in Hampshire (Piggott and Piggott 1946: 157). Fossil encrinites have been found with beads, notably in barrows at Wilsford (no. 7) and Preshute la (the Manton barrow). Beaver’s incisor tooth Beavers’ incisor teeth (Clark 1971) have been found in barrow graves (1810: 124; Greenwell 1877: 38, 138; Mortimer 1905: 28, 132), although with nothing to indicate their function. 82 Pith WILE TSEURE Bronze awl An insubstantial awl such as this example might be one of the basil-ended series (Annable and Simpson 1964: 113, nos. 421, 428, 430). This hammer-flattened basil- end may have facilitated hafting (Thurnam 1871: 465-6; Evans 1881: 188-91). BOWL-BARROW 61 Pottery The sherds of Ebbsfleet character would not be out of place in the Windmill Hill assemblage (Smith 1965: 73-4). Large beakers are few in Wessex (Piggott 1962: 44+) where, as perhaps — at Durrington Walls (Wainwright and Longworth 1971: 48-155), their fun- ction was fulfilled by the many substantial Grooved Ware Settlement debris, pottery regularly encountered in barrows (Ashbee 1981: 31), and may reflect the deliberate breaking and disposal of vessels. etc., 1S fouled vessels. Flint Scrapers common at Durrington Walls (Wainwright and Longworth 1971: 164). The round- nosed examples from Barrow 61 would not be amiss among these although counterparts for the side- scrapers and retouched flakes were found in the West Kennet chambers (Piggott 1962: 47, Figure 15, +7). fate) were BOWL-BARROW, OVERLAPPED BY SAUCER-BARROW, 72 Urn Because only the collar remains, the urn cannot be placed with exactitude within the primary urn series, although its single decorative trait (Longworth 1961: 270, Figure 3, 1) may put it late in the tradition. Its found, perforated whetstone, containing a cremation, beneath closest Wessex counterpart was with a a bowl-barrow at Warminster (no. 5; Annable and Simpson 1964: 65, nos. 536-7). The collar might have 4 General considerations THE BARROWS AND THEIR BUREALS It was envisaged that the excavations would allow insight into the nature of an aggregate of barrows (Ashbee 1960: 194). These (Figures 1, 2) form sub- groups of the array between Boscombe Down and Everleigh, Colt Hoare’s Everley station (1810: 195; Grinsell 1941: 81, Map 1). Uheir siting and character could have been planned: barrow 58, the bell-barrow, stood alone and was the last of a line; 6la, the dise-barrow, was adjacent to a triple bell-barrow; 61, the bowl-barrow, was solitary; while 72, the double- barrow, also began or concluded a sequence. ARCTENEOLOGICAL AND NYEURAL PIS TORY MAGAZINE been executed by the same potter, although the body is squat and small-based. “wo others (Annable and Simpson 1964: 119, nos. 510, 515) from Collingbourne Kingston Barrow 8, one primary and the other secondary, are also comparable in terms of collar Similar urns can be seen further afield in Lincolnshire, = Derbyshire and ~~ Northumberland (Abercromby 1912: Plates LXVII, 73; LXIX, 96; LXXVI, 173; LXXU, 116). No single area can be indicated for the origins of the collared urn tradition (Longworth 1961: 287-8), so these may show no more than general motifs. similarities. Bronze awl Robust basil-ended awls, the later developed form (Piggott 1953), can be obliquely or squarely finished (Annable and Simpson 1964: nos. 428, 430, 466 and nos. 254, 364, 421). In length they range from about lin. to 1% 1in., although an exceptional example is 3% ins. (Annableand Simpson 1964: no. 364). Awls have been with leather working and are components of occupational graves (Ashbee 1978a: 41). associated It remains for the patterns of striation and polish (Cunliffe 1970: 11, Plate 11) to be related to functions and materials. Bone point Bone points are frequent in barrow graves, and a broken example from Amesbury barrow 85 (Moore and Rowlands 1972: plate 3, f14) is. not Comparable points were found at Durrington Walls (Wainwright and Longworth 1971: 181). dissimilar. Shale bead A shale or lignite bead was found in barrow 16 at Collingbourne Ducis (Annable and Simpson 1964: no. 498) with a handled mug of food-vessel affinity. Barrow 58’s mound diameter, broad berm and wide, flat-bottomed ditch (Figure 3) conforms to bell-barrow specification (Grinsell 1941: 80, Figure 2), although its possibly female interment ts alien to a series considered to have housed males (Piggott 1973: 354). The disc- had an oval ditch enclosing a single that of barrow 58. ‘The accompaniments of — the adult) cremation, in_ the rectangular had the those customarily encountered in dise-barrows and were, possibly, female (Grinsell 1974: 86). Its globular cup’s closest counterparts are in northern Britain, which barrow, 6la, mound and resembled grave, character of EE INEWEMPION IO! amplifies the alien traditions of mace-hcads, Grooved Ware and dise-barrows (Piggott 1973: 356, 363). In the bowl-barrow, 61, a central stake structure and circle preceded the interments. Similar stake-circles were a feature of Amesbury barrow 71 (Christie 1967), an augmented bowl-barrow at the eastern end of the larger line on Earl’s Farm Down (Figure 2). These and others (Ashbee 1960: 60-65) indicate coppicing (Rackham 1976: 48) to provide stakes. he charcoals include fruit-woods; some of the ancient ficlds upon which barrows have been sited (Figure 41) might have been orchards, the of which is akin to coppicing. Double barrows (72) are rare, although numbers are in the Stonchenge barrow surround and its eastward extension (Grinscll 1941: 83, Map 11). These could have been analogous to those selected for phased enlargement (Christie 1967), for others of this and the adjacent groups are of a less evolved nature. maintenance RADIOCARBON DATING Three radiocarbon dates, all produced by AE RE Har- in o “ N € LP, SSA yi “1gUre AMESBURY BARROWS 58, Gla, 61, eo) Barn and Karl’s Farm Downs: aerial photograph showing barrows sited upon ancient fields. Barrow right; 72 1 at upper edge, left of centre. (Photograph: University of Cambridge for Aerial Photography). 83 well, were obtained from charcoal fragments from specific features of two of the barrows. The charcoal fragments (Acer sp.) incorporated with occupation earth into the loam core of barrow 58, the bell-barrow, gave LIAR-6226, and those (raxinus sp.) from barrow 61, the bowl-barrow yielded both PLAR—-6227 trom. the burnt arca beneath the barrow and TE LAR—6225 from charcoal mingled with burned bone fragments from Cremation Grave 2. The results may be summarised as follows: barrow sample location HAR no. date b.c. date b.p. 58 loam core LIAR-6226 3310480 1360480 61 cremation FIAR-6225 3550480 1600480 grave 2 61 burnt area FIAR-6227 35204100 1570+ 100 D. Haddon-Reece, Ancient contributes the following: “The statistical test reported by Ward and Wilson (1978) shows no significant difference between the dates from barrow 61. In other words, there is no evidence that these dates are not simply replicate Monuments Laboratory, N 3 & vIS, 61a, 61 are bottom 84+ Tie WILTSTERE ARCIIANE OLOGICAL XND NAXEPURAL EES PORY MAGAZINE determinations of the same chronological event; they can therefore be combined, by extending the same statistical procedure, as 3540+ b.p., 1590 b.c. ‘Applying the same test to compare the two barrows, a real difference emerges, and any suggestion that they are contemporaneous may be rejected. Calibrating the dates with the R. M. Clark (1975) curve gives: date I sigma range 2 sigma range (68% confidence) (95% confidence) (1760-1575 BC) (1860-1495 BC) (2035-1865 BC) (2110-1790 BC) 1660 BC 1955 BC barrow 58 barrow 61 The two dates for barrow 61 are thus significantly different from the solitary one from barrow 58, but clearly, extended argument cannot be based on them. Nonetheless, they illustrate the general premise regarding the priorities of the region (Piggott 1973: 354): barrow 61, of Beaker affinity, a simple bowl- shaped mound, covering cremation and inhumation graves, preceded barrow 58, a bell-barrow, a large mound with a berm separating it from its surround- ing ditch, built over a dagger-furnished cremation grave. In addition, they conform to the emergent pattern available for the Beaker and Wessex culture phases of the region (Ashbee 1979-80: 82). THE BARROWS AND THEIR CONTEXT Most of the round barrows E of the Avon flank the Nine Mile river (Gover, Mawer and Stenton 1939: 9) and skirt the N sector of Sidbury hill. Those on New Barn and Earl’s Farm downs are the southernmost outliers of this array. The Stonehenge barrow surround began, perhaps, with Robin Hood’s Ball’s long barrows (Ashbee 1978b: 102, Figure 29; 162, Figure 47) and may have been extended. E of the Avon long barrows are fewer, although contiguous to the Nine Mile river (Ashbee 1970: 77, Figure 6) and not always employed as founder barrows for the later lines and groups of round barrows (Grinsell 1979). Many are within sight of Stonehenge (Stukeley 1740: 38) and have been built upon earlier ancient fields (Figure 44). Because of the terrain, any extension of intensive barrow-siting had to be eastwards from the established Stonehenge groups. A rise in the rate of barrow- building may have been brought about by economic change and local aggrandisement (Fleming 1971; Ashbce 1978b: 160; Burgess 1980: 172). In Dorset the rate of barrow construction was about one a year (RCHM(E) 1970: 427), which would have meant four or five for the whole of Wessex (Grinsell 1958: 93-4). Considerations of siting and labour would have involved the maintenance of appropriate specifications (Ashbee 1981: 25), as the homogeneity of bell- and disc-barrows illustrates. Eventually the confluence of the river Avon and the Nine Mile river, in effect Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, became the focus for the barrows on both sides of the Avon. ‘This might have brought about the extension of the Stonehenge Avenue down to the river (RCH M(E) 1979: 11) to indicate its new importance by formally linking the earlier centre with the later. 5 Special studies Human remains dy CAROLE A. KEEPAX Eight cremations and the bones of 6 individuals, from inhumation burials, were presented for study. Four of the cremations consist of small amounts of cremated bone, none of which represented the entire comple- ment of a cremated body. There were 2 adult inhumations and 4 children under 16 years of age. A detailed description of the human remains from each barrow is given. BELL-BARROW 58 Central grave These fairly well calcined remains of an adult (possibly female) represent most parts of the skeleton. The bodies of about 12 thoracic and lumbar vertebrae are present. Most of these display slight bony lipping (due to degenerative joint disease (osteoarthritis)), indicating that the individual was probably more than 25 years old. Several fragments of long-bone shaft are stained green, possibly owing to contact with bronze. There is no evidence to suggest that more than one individual is present. DISC-BARROW 6la Inhumation burial dug into the natural pit The mixed remains of a minimum of 3 individuals are present. These may be grouped as follows: Infant, 4(£1) years old There are fragments of mandible, maxilla, ium, ischium, femur and tibia. Nine deciduous teeth and 11 partly developed permanent teeth are also present. Adolescent, 13-16 years old The skeleton lacks some of the skull, left arm, some ribs THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 and vertebrae, bones from the hands and some feet bones. The upper left maxilla, containing 6 teeth, is present. The third molar is unerupted. There is enamel polishing of six but little wear of seven. All of the major epiphyses are unfused, but the pelvis has united at the acetabulum. Young adult The possible presence of an adult individual is indicated by a few skull fragments and 2 lower first (or second) molars. There is only slight wear of the teeth, indicating that this was a fairly young individual. Rectangular cremation grave These are the well-calcined remains of one adult. Most parts of the body are represented. There are no indications of sex. BOWL-BARROW 61 Burials inside the stake circle Cremation burial 2 There are a few incompletely burnt bone fragments (average size about | sq. cm), including long-bone shafts, skull, phalanx fragments and the roots of permanent teeth. There is no evidence to suggest that more than one adult is present. Cremation burial 3 Well-calcined remains, representing most of the body of an adult, are present. The general size of the bones and shape of the pelvis fragments suggest that the individual was probably female. The age of the individual is not apparent. Inhumation burial 2 This is the fragmentary and eroded skeleton of an infant, lacking some ribs and vertebrae, bones from the hands and feet and the left arm and leg. The crowns of 8 deciduous teeth are present (3 upper incisors, one upper canine, 2 upper molars and 2 lower molars). The roots of the incisor teeth are partly formed. The development of teeth corresponds to that of a child about 9 (+3) months. However, the general size of the bones seems to correspond with an age of about 18 (+6) months. As a compromise an age estimation of about 12 (+6) months may be suggested. Burtals outside the stake circle Inhumation burial(s) 1 Mixed with the adult bones are fragments of a child’s skeleton; thus the bones may be divided as follows: Young adult female (inhumation burial 1) The skeleton lacks the clavicles, left scapula and 85 humerus, the left ossa innominata. No wormian benes, orbital osteoporosis, torus mandibularis, t. auditivus, t. palatinus or t. maxillaris were observed. The sphenoid articulation is of the normal (sphenoparietal) type. Twenty-six teeth are present. There is no ante- mortem tooth loss. The lower third molars are erupted; the uppers are erupting. A lower second molar displays caries. The dentition indicates that the individual was probably between 17 and 25 years old. There is slight calculus, very slight alveolar bone recession and a small lingual cusp on one of the upper canines. occlusal glab. — occip. L. Ik 190 max. parietal B. B 138? basi. — bregmatic Ht. H’ 137(?) basi. — nasion L. LB 104(?) frontal arc S, 136 parietal arc Sy 135 occipital arc Se 124 frontal chord Si iL SIF5) parietal chord Se 119.3 occipital chord Se 9907 palate b. G, 41(?) foraminal | FL 34.5 simotic chord SC 11.8 bi-condylar width Wi 126.7(?) bimental b. ZZ 45.9 least ramus b. RB 34.7 sagit. ht mandib. H, 29.7 max, mandib. I. ML 99 proj. 1. ramus RL 54.5 ht at 2nd molar M.H 25.8 condyle 1. CYL — 19.8(?) coronoid ht CH 62.2 mandib. angle M/ 116° 30’ min. frontal b. B’ 99.9 Table 4. Barrow number 61, inhumation number 1: skull meas- urements (mm). left right max. L. femur (FeL,) 448 448 min. A.P. diam. (FeD,) 22.9 22.3. trans. diam. (FeD,) 35.0 301.5 max |. tibia (TiL,) = 360 max A.P. diam. (TiD,) — 30.8 trans. diam. (TiD,) = 19.8 max |. humerus (HuL,) = 317(?) max. diam. ([luD,) = 21(?) min. diam. (FluD,) = 13.2(?) max. I. radius (RaL,) - - max. |. ulna (UIL,) = - STATURE (max) 5 ft 5 in. Table 5. measurements (mm). Barrow number 61, inhumation number 1: long-bone WIL TSEERE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NVEURAL TIS TORY MAGAZINE Figure 45. Barrow 61: Inbumation 1, healed fracture of metacarpal. PHE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, In the middle of the shaft of one of the metacarpals there is deformation and angulation. X-ray examination confirmed that this was a fracture suffered many years before death and subsequently healed (Figure 45). There are also skull, vertebrae, rib and long-bone fragments from the ploughsoil above inhumation 1. Some of these are ploughed-up bones from the inhumation. However, the presence of a second atlas vertebra, a fragment of the right frontal (duplicating the skull fragments from inhumation 1) and 5 anterior teeth (also duplicated in inhumation 1) indicate the presence of a second adult individual. The teeth are only slightly worn, suggesting that this individual was probably fairly young. Child 5(+1) years old Fragments of skull vault, femora, humeri and a frag- ment of the right maxilla are present. There are 2 deciduous molars; a permanent molar and an incisor, with partly formed roots; the crown of a permanent premolar with little of the root formed. There is a small enamel pearl on the root of the upper right first permanent molar. Cremation burial 1 There are a few small fragments of lightly burnt bone, including long-bone shafts, ribs and a few hand bones, from an adult individual. BOWL-BARROW, OVERLAPPED BY SAUCER-BARROW, 72 Urn burial beneath the initial bowl-barrow A few burnt fragments of skull and long-bone shafts are weight uniden- skull long bones (g) tified TOTAL weight weight %* weight %* weight barrow number 58 2600 1690 205 22 430 47-85 barrow number 6la, rectangular grave 2700 2035 95 14 550 82 8 barrow number 61, cremation burial number 3 1047 583 98 21 294 63 I4 barrow number 72, number | 307 210 35 36 60 61 0 | * Percentage of identified bone. Table 6. Cremations. vertebrae O/ 0 87 present. Judging by the thickness of the bones, the individual may have been immature. Burtals beneath the secondary saucer-barrow Cremation burial | The well-calcined remains of one adult individual (more than 20 years old) are present. There are frag- ments of skull (cranial sutures partly obliterated), long- bone shaft fragments and some bones from the hands and feet. There are no real indications of the sex of the individual. Cremation burial 2 There is a small quantity of burnt bone, mainly skull and long-bone shaft fragments. hese remains are not necessarily human. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS As the remains are from four different barrows, there seems no justification for considering the individuals as representative of a single population. The dental health of the skeletons is fairly good, and there is only one case of ante-mortem tooth loss. Only 3 teeth are carious. There is no case of severe periodontal disease as indicated by alveolar bone recession. ‘here was one probably healed fracture (metacarpal). Skull meas- urements, long-bone measurements and weight details of the cremations are in Tables 4, 5 and 6. Acknowledgement: 1 should like to thank Dr J. L. Price for his valuable comments concerning the X-rays. ribs hands and pelvis pectoral approximate feet girdle average size of fragments weight %* weight %* weight %* weight %* (cm’) 60 6 35 4 75 8 20 2 + 4 0 0 12 1 0 0 0 0 3 23 + % I 25 y 2 / 2 0 0 2 2 0 0 0) 0 Li’ 88 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Large animal remains dy JULIET CLUTTON-BROCK The mammalian remains were fragmentary and their incidence sporadic, as is usual with burial sites where there is no evidence of contemporary habitation. ‘The following mammalian species have been identified from the barrows. BOWL-BARROW. 58 From the ditch infill: Cervus elaphus (red deer), shaft of a metatarsal bone. BOWL-BARROW 61 From the base of the recent pit dug through the crown of the barrow: domestic pig, a small tooth, an incisor. Fragments of a mandible, with lower molars | and 2, were found in the loam core (layer 3), which also yielded the distal end and shaft of a Cervus elaphus (red deer) tibia and a first phalanx of domestic ox. BOWL-BARROW 72 One small complete tusk of domestic pig was found in the ploughsoil cover of the ditches on the N side of the monument. Small-vertebrate remains by PETER A. JEWELL BELL-BARROW 58 From the loam core: amphibia — very many; mole (at least 3 individuals); toad (several); weasel (2, one prob- ably male, the other probably female); short-tailed vole (Microtus agrestis L.) (more than one). From the upper ditch infill: very many young amphibia. DISC-BARROW 6la From the upper ditch infill: very many young amphibia. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ‘The small bones found in barrow 58 were recorded on 6 separate finds; in total they comprise the remains of at least 3 moles, 2 weasels, one short-tailed vole and a great many small (young) amphibia. These small vertebrate bones must be the remains from the pellets that are disgorged by raptorial birds. In other archaeological excavations, notably those in the barrows at Snail Down, Wiltshire, these tiny bones have been found in small aggregates just as they were in the original pellet. The present finds are few in number, which is unfortunate because if a large sample of prey items can be examined, then some indications about the environment can be obtained. However, it can be noted that the short-tailed vole (Microtus agrestis L.) is present and this is typically an animal of open grasslands. The bank vole, an indicator of scrub and woodland, is absent. ‘The presence of the mole and an abundance of amphibia (probably mostly toad) are quite consistent with an open environment. Weasels are often taken by the larger birds of prey. If the environment was open, then it is easy to understand how any stakes erected by man would make attractive nesting-posts for birds like buzzards and kites. Even without stakes a turf pile would have the same attraction. If the bodies of the dead had ever been left exposed at the place, there is even more reason to see why birds frequented it. Charcoal dy RowENA GALE Several samples did not contain any vegetable material or, if present, it was in such a state of deterioration as to make identification impossible. ‘The samples identified match our reference material as follows: BELL-BARROW 58 Krom the ancient soil: family Rosaceae, sub-family Pomoidiae (could be apple, Ma/us sp.; pear, Pyrus sp.; hawthorn, Crataegus sp.). Krom the surface of the ancient soil: charcoal scatters proved to be of Acer sp. (? field maple) and //ex sp. (holly). From the loam core: Acer sp. (? field maple) and Prunus sp. (could be Bird cherry, prunus padus, wild cherry, Prunus avium; blackthorn, Prunus spinosa). DISC-BARROW 6la Associated with the inhumation burials dug into the natural pit: Quercus sp. (oak) and further material of which the charcoal content was too minimal for identification. BOWL-BARROW 61 From a natural pit beneath the ancient soil: Pinus sp. (pine). THEE EXNCAV VTION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 From cremation grave 2: Fraxinus sp. (ash). From the burnt layer on the ancient soil and beneath the crown of the barrow: Quercus sp. (oak) or Castanea sp. (the feature which separates the genera 1s not visible in this sample; however, since Castanea was a Roman introduction it seems likely that it is Quercus); Fraxinus sp. (ash); family Rosaceae, sub-family Pomoidiae. There was also material of which the charcoal content Was too minimal for identification, and matter not of vegetable origin but similar in structure to bone. From the loam core: Fraximus sp. (ash). There was also material of which the charcoal content was too minimal for identification. 89 BOWL-BARROW, OVERLAPPED BY SAUCER-BARROW, 72 From the natural cavity beneath the saucer-barrow: Fraxinus sp. (ash). From the bottom of the ditch of the saucer-barrow at the point of its intersection with the ditch of the bowl-barrow, on the N side: Quercus sp. (oak); Prunus sp. [here was also material of which the charcoal content was too minimal for identification. From the base of the modern ploughsoils: Quercus sp. (oak). Neutron activation and X-ray fluorescence analysis of the faience beads from disc-barrow 6la by R. P. A. PEEK and S. E. WARREN Neutron activation and X-ray fluorescence analysis of the segmented faience beads from barrow 6la (for details of methods and comments thereon: Aspinall e¢ al. 1972; Aspinall and Warren 1976) found no lead but showed a high level of tin (at least 1:5) relative to copper. This is comparable to average results for other British faience (Aspinall and Warren 1976), thus reinforcing the analytical differences between this, central European (Harding and Warren 1973) and near Eastern faience. The copper content, as determined by neutron activation analysis, is about 1% referred to the total volume of a bead, i.e. of the order of 5—10% in the vitreous surface layer. Acknowledgments. \t is a pleasure to acknowledge the considerable help with every aspect of the excavation, including photography and drawing, provided by the principal site assistant, David E. Johnston (now of the University of Southampton). Edward and Doreen Appleby, Doreen Clarke, Graham Connah (now of the University of New England), Diana Davies, Timothy Miles and Nicholas Wood, and others, contributed to the work; without them it would have been impossible. The excavation was visited by O. G. $2 Crawford, G. C. Dunning, L. V. Grinsell, R. L. S. Newall, Dr I. F. Smith, J. F. S. Stone and Nicholas Thomas. Dr M. W. Thompson was the conduit for the Ministry’s facilities. L. V. Grinsell most kindly made details of the barrows available in advance of his own Victoria County History (1957) publication, and C. W. Phillips procured copies of early aerial photographs. Austin Underwood of Amesbury undertook local liaison and photographed people in action. Carole Keepax (Ancient Monuments Laboratory) studied the human remains, Juliet Clutton-Brock (British Museum (Natural History)) the animal remains, Peter Jewell (Mary Marshall and Author Walton Professor of Physiology of Reproduction in the University of Cambridge) the small vertebrate remains, Rowena Gale (Jodrell Laboratory, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) the pieces of charcoal, and R. P. A. Peek and S. E. Warren (University of Bradford) the composition of the faience beads. Miss Jill Walker (Isotopes Meas- urements Laboratory, Harwell) undertook the radiocarbon dating, and David Iladdon-Reece (Ancient Monuments Laboratory) commented upon it. Leo Biek of the Ancient Monuments Laboratory made the materials from the barrows available for examination. Dr J. F. S. Stone arranged for the piece of foreign stone from barrow 61 to be examined by the Stone Axe Committee of the South-Western Group. of Museums. Sarah Jennings (Norwich Survey, University of Fast Anglia) drew the line illustrations of the grave furniture and other objects from the barrows. Miss Ann J, Clark was the conduit for the facilities of English Heritage, the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England. BIBLIOGRAPHY ABERCROMBY, J., 1912. The Bronze Age Pottery of Great Britain and Treland (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ANNABLE, F. K., and SIMPSON, D. D. A., 1964. Guide Catalogue of the Neolithic and Bronze Age Collections in Devizes Museum (Devizes: Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society). ASHBEE, P., 1957. The great barrow at Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire, Proc. Prehist. Soc. 23: 137-66. ASHBEE, P., 1959. Stake and post circles in British round barrows. Arch. J. U4 (1957): 1-9. \SHBEE, P., 1960. The Bronze Age Round Barrow in Britain (London: Phoenix House). \SHBEE, P., 1966. The Fussell’s Lodge long barrow, Archaeologia 100: I-80. \SHBEE, P., 1970. 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Soc. 28: 209-66, FLEMING, A., 1971. Lerritorial patterns in bronze age Wessex, Proc. Prehist. Soc. 37: 138-66. FOX, A., and STONE, J. Fo S., 1951. A necklace from a barrow in North Molton parish, north Devon, Antig. J. 31: 25-31. FOX, C., and GRIMES, W. F., age cairn in south Pembrokeshire, Archaeologia Cambrensis 83: 137-74. GERLOFF, S., 1975. The early bronze age daggers in Great Britain. Prahistorische Bronzefunde, Abt 6, Bd 2 (Miinchen: C. A. Becker). GODDARD, FE. H., 1913. \ list of prehistoric, Roman and pagan Saxon antiquities in the county of Wilts., WAAL 38: 153-378. GOVER, J. E. B., MAWER, A., and STENTON, F. M., 1939. The Place-Names of Wiltshire (english Place-Name Society, 16) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). GREENWELL, W., 1877. British Barrows (Oxtord: Clarendon Press). GREENWELL, W., Wiltshire, Berkshire &c., Archaeologia 52; 1-72. GRIGSON, G., 1957. The Wiltshire Book (London; Thames and Hudson). 1928. Corston Beacon: an early bronze 1890. 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Forty Years’ Researches into British and Saxon Burial Mounds of East Yorkshire (London: A. Brown & Sons). NEWALL, R.S., 1931. Barrow 85, Amesbury, WAAL 45: 432-58. PIGGOTT, S., 1938. The Early Bronze Age in Wessex, Proc. Prehist. Soc. +: 52-106. PIGGOLTTL, S., 1939. Excavation of a round barrow near Pewit Farm, Charlton Down, Berks., Transactions Newbury and District Field Club 8 (no. 2): 109-16. PIGGOLT,S., 1953. The bronze awl, in A. L. Parke, The excavation of a bell-barrow, Oakley Down, Wimborne St Giles, Proceedings Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 75: 36—-+4. PIGGOTTL, S., 1954. The Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). PIGGOTT, S., 1962. The West Kennet Long Barrow Excavations, 1955—56 (London: HMSQ). PIGGOTT, S., 1963. Abercromby and after: the Beaker cultures of 1961. The origins and development of the Britain re-examined, in L. LI. Foster and L. Alcock (ed.), Culture and Environment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 53-91. PIGGOTT, S., Wiltshire, vol. 1, part 2 (University of London, Institute of Elistori- cal Research). PIGGOLL, S., and PIGGOTTL, C. M., 1946. Phe excavation of a barrow on Rockbourne Down, Proceedings Hants. Field Club and Archaeological Society L6rA56=62., RACKHAM, O., 1976. Trees and Woodland in the British, Landscape (London: J. M. Dent). 1973. The Wessex culture, Victoria County History of THE EXCAVATION OF AMESBURY BARROWS 58, 61a, 61, 72 RCHM(E), 1970. An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Dorset, vol. 3 (London: HMSO). RCHM(E), 1979. Stonehenge and its Environs (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). RITCHIE, J., 1920. The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). SAVORY, H.N., 1958. A corpus of Welsh bronze age pottery, Part IL: Pygmy cups, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 18 part 1: 89-118. SCOTT, L., 1951. 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Durrington Walls: Excavations, 1966-68 (Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, 29) (London: Society of Antiquaries). WARD, G.K. and WILSON S.R., 1978. Procedures for comparing and combining radiocarbon age determinations: a critique, Archaeometry 20, 1: 19-32. WARNE, C., 1866. The Celtic Tumuli of Dorset (London: John Russell Smith). Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural Elistory Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 92-100. A Bell Barrow in Clarendon Park by P. J. FASHAM’ with contributions by JANET HENDERSON,’ JENNY COY,! aad WENDY J. CARRUTHERS: In 1961 Major H. F. W. L. Vatcher excavated a damaged bell barrow in Clarendon Park near Laverstock. No excavation report was published, but the surviving field records allow an account to be compiled of a bronze-age round barrow of characteristic type. The barrow had been built with a flint ring. There were four buried stake-holes, a possible mortuary structure, a single primary cremation, and extensive burning under the barrow. At least two pottery vessels of early- and middle-bronze-age types had been present. The barrow had previously been disturbed, presumably by antiquarians, at least twice. INTRODUCTION During the early 1960s Major and Mrs Vatcher jointly and separately conducted a number of excavations for the then Ministry of Works. Several of those exca- vations have not been published, and the Department of the Environment (now English Heritage) has commissioned the ‘Trust for Wessex Archacology (formerly the Wessex Archacological Committee) to prepare for publication some of the outstanding Wiltshire excavations. Uhis report is the first prepared by the Trust for Wessex Archacology. ‘Uhe site, Sche- duled Ancient Monument 352, was excavated in November and December 1961 by Major Vatcher for the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments, Ministry of Works (now HBMCE), as the barrow was being damaged by ploughing. The site is still scheduled. ‘The site is Grinsell’s (1957) Clarendon Park 5 and is listed in the Wiltshire Sites and Monuments Record as SU 13 SE number 615. The monument had been disturbed prior to the excavation on at least two different occasions. LOCATION (Figure 1) The barrow lay at the northern end of Cockey Down at SU 178327, almost at the junction of the parishes of Winterbourne, Laverstock and Clarendon Park, but lying just within the latter parish. It lies about 400 m N of the northern end of a ‘Celtic’ field group on Cockey Down. Situated on Upper Chalk at a height of over 400 feet (122 m), the barrow occupied a commanding posi- tion overlooking the valley of the river Bourne. It appears to have been located on a false crest with the northern half of the site lying on a considerable slope, Trust) for Wessex Archaeology, The Archaeological _ Centre, 65 The Close, Salisbury SPI 2EN. * Ancient Monuments Laboratory, English — [leritage, Fortress Llouse, 23 Savile Row, London WINX 2LIE. £ Faunal Remains Project, Department of Archaeology, ‘The University, Southampton SO9 SNIT. § 15 Cardigan Gardens, Reading RGI 5QP. about 1 in 10, the southern side being relatively flat. The excavation records suggest that the break of slope was natural rather than due to an artificial creation, such as a lynchet. EXCAVATION METHOD AND RECORDS The excavation records comprise cight sheets of field drawings consisting of plans, detail plans and sections, book, 159 negatives and related prints, and one small file of one — field monochrome — photographic correspondence. The field book records the location of 108 occurrences of finds including pottery, animal bone, cremated bone, shale, snail shells and charcoal. ‘These finds occurrences were recorded either by offset from the main baulks or by triangulation. As imperial units were used, they are retained in this report, with their metric equivalents. It has been possible to estab- lish the horizontal location of most of the finds to within about | foot (0.3 m). The vertical distribution ts recorded as a depth, and by analogy with other exca- vations by the Vatchers, the depth was measured from the topsoil above the artefact. A list of 12 samples taken from the barrow mound and the southern section of the ditch is recorded in the field book but it is not possible to identify the true locations of these samples. The results of a contour survey were recorded in the field book, and although almost one-third of an acre (1600 m’) had been surveyed, only a small portion of the survey could be utilized. The 159 photographs provide coverage of various stages and clements of the excavation. The correspondence file consists of letters between Major Vatcher and the Ministry of Works, timesheets for the workforce and a 92-word summary of the excavation published in WAAI (Anon. 1962). It is apparent from the file that the later stages of this excavation were conducted in foul weather. It can be deduced from the available records that the barrow was excavated on a quadrant basis. Following the contour survey four trenches aligned N, S, E and W were laid out from a peg at the approximate centre of the barrow. The trenches were 8 ft (2.3 m) wide and A BELL BARROW IN CLARENDON PARK CLARENDON PARK Location Maps KEY-Map A Round Barrow Long Barrow Field System Figure 1. Clarendon Park. Location map. Fussell’s @ lodge ~—— 93 94 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAROLOGICAL AND NATURAL FHS TORY MAGAZINE eventually had 2 ft (0.54 m) wide baulks. The plough- soil was removed by hand, the S and W trenches being excavated first. A temporary 2-foot-wide baulk on the line of the W side of the S trench-was left across the W trench. All deposits in these two trenches were then excavated to natural, and the temporary baulk removed. The N and E trenches were probably exca- vated at this stage. The SSW portion of the SW quadrant was excavated to the edge of the weathering slope of the ditch and the WSW portion subsequently removed. Excavation also continued in the other quadrants. “he two northern quadrants were exca- vated to the top of the weathering slope, and excavation of the NW quadrant to the outer edge of the ditch was started but not completed. The SW quadrant had an additional baulk (2 feet wide) and was excavated to the outer edge of the ditch. The central portions in the area of the disturbances were removed prior to the baulks being removed back to the top of the ditch weathering slope. ‘he old land surface was apparently excavated at different times in each quadrant with the greatest attention being paid to the NE quadrant. It is impossible to resolve the sequence in which the E, W and N_ baulks were removed. All natural features, solution hollows and putative tree holes appear to have been excavated. BARROW CONSTRUCTION (figures 2 and 3) The barrow was located on a break of slope in a false crest position. This break of slope was natural and not the consequence of any human activity. The first stage of the barrow construction seems to have involved the placing of a ring of flints 28-30 ft (8.5—9 m) in diameter and 2-4 feet (0.6 —1.2 m) wide, context 5. This survived to a height of about 1 ft (0.3 m). “Phe centre was filled with dumps of flint, context 6. A layer of earth and weathered chalk, context 3, possibly derived from ancient topsoil or turves, surrounded the primary flint ring. This may have been removed from the top of the ditch. Context 2, a layer of medium-sized chalk rubble, enveloped the earth and weathered chalk of context 3. The chalk had presumably been excavated from the ditch. There is no evidence to suggest that the chalk had ever covered the central flint portion of the barrow. The ditch, with an internal diameter of 71 ft (21.6 m), was 3—4 ft (0.9-1.2 m) deep. The top width varied from 8 to 13 ft (2 to 3.9 m), the basal width from 3 to 44% ft (0.9 to 1.4 m), and it was 3—4 ft (0.9-1.2 m deep. The fill of the ditch was fairly consistent throughout; primary and secondary chalk silts lay below a layer of flints (context 22) which were presumably derived from the central mound material. The flints themselves were buried by various loam deposits which represent periods of both — soil stabilization and downhill soil movement. There is sufficient indication of a berm for this barrow to be classified as a bell barrow. The berm may have been more than 10 ft (3 m) wide. ‘The centre of the barrow had been disturbed twice. The earlier disturbance, context 80, was an irregular oval hole measuring 12 by 14 ft (3.6 by 4.2 m). The second hole, context 17, was approximately 7 by 12 ft (2.1-3.6 m). There is no indication of dating for either disturbance, and it must be assumed that they were the result of 18th- or 19th-century antiquarian activity. There were four sherds of early/middle-bronze-age pottery in the inner flint rubble core of the barrow. All the finds from the ditch were in the flint layer, 22, or above. THE OLD LAND SURFACE (Figure 4) The old land surface was apparently better preserved, and certainly more fully recorded, in the NE quadrant. An arc of charcoal lay approximately on the line of the outer edge of the primary flint dump in the NE quadrant; it continued into the NW quadrant. The photographs indicate a stratigraphical separation of two of these charcoal deposits. Some of this charcoal prob- ably derived from fairly substantial timbers which had been burnt 7 situ. Vhe identified charcoal was mainly of oak and ash, samples 84 and 108 (below). There was a further concentration of charcoal at the S side of the site in a similar location relative to the primary flint dump. There were also patches of charcoal under the central flint dump in all but the SW quadrant. Four stakeholes, contexts 25, 26, 27 and 28, were discovered in the old land surface. Stakehole 28 was 2% ft (0.76 m) inside the primary flint dump. The other three stakeholes were located towards the centre of the barrow, preserved in the chalk around the central disturbances. These disturbances, context 17 and 80, may have destroyed other stakeholes. ‘The stakeholes did not form a coherent pattern. The correspondence file reveals that one of the stakeholes, probably context 25, ‘like the others told the same story in that it sloped inwards, was filled with charcoal, and was covered by throw-out from the grave’. It is difficult from the available records to sustain the argument that any of the stakeholes could have been buried by ‘throw-out’ from the original burial pit. Only layer 63, recorded in the W section, may be such a deposit. The excavators thoughts, expressed in a letter written a month after the excavation, must possess validity, and it is probable that the four stakeholes were securely stratified under the barrow and relate to an immediately pre-barrow period of activity. 95 LL BARROW IN CLARENDON PARK A BE “Moding aqf fo suoljias UDpY “xD Uopuatnjy *Z andy 3dS aoDjINS |DODJDYS som WIS resi JUN 8 = HJDYD-xerg PUD) PIO II WOS jini — HOSDOY guar \H | €310h-330L Vv (P@Ssares) H-9 UO!}DaS 4-3 UODaS 3| 13A37 318V VAY ON ¢310H-33uL 2 yy) as ea: (Passares) G-J UOlDaS zl | sauniv3as pay sarawenyi lil WHNLYN WOS-8Ns ~ @-V uoYIeS suomeg §= WY WVd ~=NOGNAYVIO ‘punou moting agi fo uvjg yVg uopuamy ‘¢ aindi4 HHISTORY MAGAZINE AND NATURAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL Ps ja O¥M 07 Se oc Sz 4 st ol Ss 0 : zi \ \ s / es | / eee \ ea | ! \ a \ eS i Bae 4? oy | / OV \ Ss oe w \ , y, / / a \ | ia} \ ce CA i! \ os =) 4 / / S Q \ eH \ | \ S f vy, \ \ \ Vv : : / \ / ax = \ ep) / uf an, esse. |e : cc \ 4 é / Pe \ Se VE S < 7 i era \ 7 Se ue[q InojwoD es Se a = ad \ aa 4 ae = x \ See, Se ea R a ” NOWLD3 : : 3a 3 THE WILTSHIRE % NOILIIS ueiq MOlIeg AUVd NOGNAAVTO BARROW IN CLARENDON PARK NV BELE HS @ * + o Y3980, HS Y aie eC Y0 25 < ‘aonfuns puny pjo aga Jo und papwreg, ‘y4vq uopuosvpy c aN — WYVd NOGNAYVTIO vole [e1]U90 JO jIv1I9q ajdwps jDODY) 2]O4 84D}S |DodsDYD au0q uDWINY yung auoq UDWNH ‘fp aNd 98 THE WILTSHIRE There were three sherds of early/middle-bronze-age pottery from the old land surface, six definite and three possible occurrences of burnt bone, and two definite and one possible occurrence of animal bone. Seven early- or middle-bronze-age sherds and one possible iron-age sherd were found in the fills of the central disturbances, as well as nine occurrences of bone, four of them burnt. OTHER FEATURES Three ‘cup-shaped’ pits were located either towards the top of the weathering slope of the ditch or within the slope. These small pits are subcircular and 15-18 ins. (0.35—0.46 m) in diameter. Only contexts 81 and 82 were excavated; they were 3 ins. (76 mm) and 10 ins. (0.25m) deep respectively. Pit 83 does not appear to have been excavated. These pits contained charcoal and burnt flints. Charcoal from context 82, sample 108, was of maple with a little alder. A spread of charcoal in the NE quadrant, context 84, was believed by the exca- vator to represent a fourth pit. Feature 29, obliquely sectioned in the W trench, was described by Major Vatcher as a deer leap. It was about 8 ft (2.4 m) wide and 2-3 ft (0.6-0.9 m) deep. It had been recut several times. [t is presumably of late or post-medieval origin. THE FINDS There were 108 occurrences of finds, comprising pottery, charcoal, bone and shale. The find-spots were recorded three-dimensionally, and each occurrence may contain more than one item and more than one category. Flint was not collected. Pottery There were 55 sherds weighing 302 g from 37 recorded locations. Uhe individual sherds were small, the largest weighing 22g. The pottery was macroscopically divided into 11 fabrics (details in archive). There were nine post-medieval sherds and a similar number of Roman sherds. Most of the pottery (36 sherds) was from the ditch, occurring in the flint layer 22 or higher. There was no pottery in the primary silt. Fourteen of the sherds in the ditch were typical of bronze-age pottery, seven of late-iron-age, seven were Roman sherds, and eight were post-medieval. There were four sherds of typical bronze-age pottery in the central flint material of the barrow mound, and three bronze-age sherds on or in the old land surface. ‘here were seven bronze-age and one probable early-iron-age sherd in the area of the central disturbances, 17 and 80. There was a post-medieval sherd in the top of the primary flint dump, 5, described as being ‘in loose flints of mound’, a ARCEEXNEOLOGICAL AND NYVPURAL LISTORY MAGAZINE description which an area of disturbance. Of the remaining three sherds, one of a bronze-age fabric was in the material that filled the weathering slope on the inside of the barrow ditch in the SE quadrant, a Roman sherd lay just inside the inner weathering slope in the NE quadrant, and another sherd came from just outside the ditch in the E cutting. In general terms the nature of the fabrics of the pottery is not dissimilar to the collection of early- and perhaps suggests middle-bronze-age ceramic material from the urnfield cemetery at Kimpton (Dacre and Ellison 1981). A fragment of an everted rim, possibly from a Collared Urn, is illustrated in Figure 5. It was found within the central flint core of the barrow. Figure 5. Clarendon Park. Pottery. Scale 1/2. Shale There were four fragments of shale in the flinty layer 22 of the ditch in the FE cutting. They were probably originally from the same artefact, a fragment of a category Sc armlet (Woodward forthcoming); that is, a hand-made ‘armlet’ with the central core extracted and the exterior surface trimmed but not finished (P. Cox, pers. comm.). ‘This particular object may have been produced in the Purbeck area, or the raw material may have derived from the Kimmeridge Clay which outcrops 28—40 km W of the site to the EF of Gillingham in Dorset. Human bone (identified by Janet Henderson, Ancient Monuments Laboratory) There were seven recorded occurrences of fragments of human bone. One was in the central flint core, four were at various points on the old land surface, and two were in the area of the central disturbance. The distribution in fact tends to indicate two possible groupings of cremated bone; one to the N of the centre of the barrow and one damaged in the central robber pits. An unburnt human rib was found adjacent to the latter group. The biggest single occurrence of cremated human bone was in the central disturbance; it included fragments of skull, vertebrae (two), adult distal pha- lanx, possible scapula and longbone shaft. Miss Hen- derson comments that there was no evidence for more than one individual. The full details of Miss Henderson’s identifications are in the archive. A BELL BARROW IN CLARENDON PARK Animal bone (identified by Jenny Coy, Faunal Remains Project) The animal bones were examined at the Faunal Remains Project based at the University of Southampton, who reported that there were no animal bones of significance in undisturbed contexts. The full records are in the archive and at the Faunal Remains Project. Charcoal by Wendy J. Carruthers Charcoal identification was carried out on four selected samples as shown in Table | below. The quantity of charcoal identified per taxa is given as a weight in grams, but this is only in order to indicate the relative proportions of taxa present. It is not to be considered as an absolute measurement since only the larger frag- ments of charcoal were identified and there may be biases caused by increased fragmentation of certain taxa and variations in the density of the charcoal. The four samples produced a notably wide range of taxa with no obvious similarities between them in species present or relative proportions of the species. All the charcoal studied was of common trees or shrubs which may form woods, scrub or hedgerows. Some (Alnus sp./Salix sp./Populus sp.) frequently colonize wetter soils, for example streamsides, and several show preferences to basic soils. _ sample reference number 84 100 105 108 _ Acer sp. (maple) = 0.06 — 3.03 Alnus sp. (alder) Fraxinus excelstor 1. (ash) , Pomoideae (cf. Crataegus sp. — ~ (hawthorn) | Prunus sp. (cherry, plum, sloe, i etc.) | Quercus sp. (oak) 0.46 4.50 — = (Salix sp./Populus sp. (willow = 0.09 = = | or poplar) | Ulmus sp. (elm) = 0.22. - - | Nw S io a) ess NI | l 2 | total number of fragments a 65 97 36 | identified \Table 1. Charcoal identifications, showing weight in grams in each jcase. Samples 84 and 100 may represent an oak artefact with ash attachments, or boards of these two species with charcoal from other ispecies. DISCUSSION | Phasing summary There is no evidence for any form of activity on the site pefore the barrow was constructed other than the | | | 99 immediately pre-barrow ritual activities. There is no late-neolithic pottery either in the old land surface or incorporated within the barrow mound. This may have some bearing on the discussion of whether earlier material was accidentally or deliberately incorporated into the mounds of round barrows (Ashbee 1979/80). The first clear sign of activity must relate to the funerary ritual immediately before the barrow was constructed. A spread of charcoal patches occurs in the central area of the barrow, an area most readily defined by the limit of the primary flint dump (context 5) and the immediately surrounding earth and weathered chalk of context 3. In the NE quadrant the definition of this charcoal spread is most clear. Indeed it may be thought that the timbers were deliberately arranged around that arc before being burnt. There were also isolated patches of charcoal on the old land surface underneath the chalk envelope. Burnt areas and spreads of charcoal under barrow mounds are not uncommon, but the sharply defined are and the incineration of apparently large timbers 4 ft by 6 ins. (1.2 by 0.15 m) is less common. Four stakeholes were discovered beneath the barrow mound, and these were apparently sealed by the throw-out from the grave. There are many examples of stakeholes under round barrows (Ashbee 1960: 60-65); some form circles, e.g. Amesbury G61 (Ashbee 1960) and Amesbury G71 (Christie 1967), or more arrangements such as at Arreton Down (Alexander, Ozanne and Ozanne 1960). So-called mortuary struc- tures, usually consisting of a four-post plan, have been discovered at Barrow B on Chaldon Down (White 1973a), under Winterbourne Kingston 14 (White 1973b), with plank linings at Amesbury G51 in the Stonehenge Cursus Barrow group (Ashbee 1978), or in more elaborate form as at Beaulieu Heath II and IX (Piggott 1943). Stakeholes 25, 26 and 27 may have formed part of a rectangular structure 6 by 3 ft (0.9 by 1.8 m), assuming that a fourth stakehole had been removed by the central disturbance. Such a structure may best be paralleled, although about half the size, beneath Winterbourne Stoke G30 at the W of the Stonehenge Cursus (Christie 1963). All but one of the 14 occurrences of burnt bone were in the central area of the site, either stratified on the old land surface, within the barrow material above, or in the fill of one or other of the two central disturbances. The excavator believed that there had been one pri- mary and one secondary burial, both in urns. Consideration of the pottery suggests that at least two separate bronze-age vessels can be identified, the sherds all being body sherds. Vessel A is represented by five represent complex 100, THE WILTSHIRE \RCEEAEKOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE sherds of flint and grog-tempered pottery (Fabric 7) similar to early-bronze-age material in the region. All the sherds were from the flint-filled layer in the ditch, four in the S cutting and the fifth in the E. The remains of vessel B comprised seven sherds of flint-gritted pottery (Fabric 1), reminiscent of local middle-bronze- age material. Three of the sherds were in the central flint core of the barrow, two in the flint layer in the ditch in the N cutting and two in the same layer in the W cutting. The available evidence suggests that there was a primary cremation, possibly associated with Vessel B, but does not readily indicate the presence of a secondary cremation. Major Vatcher consistently interpreted the results of the excavation in terms of there being evidence for a secondary burial. The possible mortuary structure and the single primary cremation are not remarkable features in the burial practices of the Bronze Age. Neither is the presence of the burnt area, although the extent and magnitude of the burning are unusual. The identification of substantial timbers may be a function of preservation or may relate to burial ritual. The flint ring was next constructed; and its centre was then filled with flints. The chalk from the ditch was spread around the outside of the flint ring but there is no evidence to suggest that the chalk was spread over the top of the barrow. The method of construction, building a flint ring and then filling in its inner part, is used elsewhere in the Bronze Age, but not commonly. An annular flint and sarsen ring of some 20 ft (6 m) covering two child burials was excavated beneath West Overton Barrow G6b (Smith and Simpson 1966), and the chalk rings at Amesbury G70 (Christie 1964) and under the E mound of the Micheldever Wood oval barrow (Fasham 1979) appear to be similar to the flint ring in Clarendon Park. The barrow and its environs The barrow is one of three possible barrows on the northern edge of a chalk scarp overlooking the River Bourne (Figure 1). The barrow immediately SW may be only a fairly recent disturbance. These barrows are isolated from an extensive range of prehistoric ‘Celtic’ fields which cover some 2'2 km’. These fields lie on two different alignments, so were probably laid out on two separate occasions. The one alignment is along the edge of the scarp along Cockey Down and the other is on the flatter ground due S of the site. The long barrow at Fussell’s Lodge (Ashbee 1966) also lies away from the fields. There is one ploughed-out barrow within the field system above Cockey Down. In the valley bottom was a ditched bow] barrow with an intrusive Anglo-Saxon burial. It stood adjacent to a primary Saxon barrow (Musty 1969). A kilometre NE lies the hill fort of Figsbury Ring with a barrow outside on the SW side. The Clarendon Park barrow was separated from its contemporary fields, and there is no hint of the location of any related settlement. The only distinguishing feature of the barrow is the nature and extent of the burnt wood on the old land surface. ‘—The monument appears to have been a barrow, although it probably was not of prolonged or major significance in the Bronze Age. The finds and archive will be deposited in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum. Acknowledgements. The preparation of this report was made possible by a grant from the Department of the Environment to the Trust for Wessex Archaeology. The illustrations were prepared by Stephen Crummy. Mr Roy Canham, Archaeological Officer of the Wiltshire County Council, freely provided access to his Sites and Monuments Record, and the detail of Figure | is based on data from that record. I am grateful to Dr Ann Ellison, former Director of the Wessex Archaeological Committee for her comments, and in particular for advising on the pottery. BIBLIOGRAPHY \LEXANDER, J., OZANNE, P. C., and OZANNE A., 1960. Report on the investigation of a round barrow on Arreton Down, Isle of Wight, Proc. Prebist. Soc. 26: 263-302. ANON., 1962. Excavation and fieldwork in Wiltshire 1961, WAAL 58: 242. \SHBEE, P., Phoenix House). ASHBEE, P., 1978. Amesbury Barrow 51: excavation 1960, WAM 70/71: 1-60. ASHBEE, P., 1979/80. Amesbury Barrow 39: excavations 1960, WAAL 70/71: 1-60. DACRE, M., and ELLISON, A. B., 1981. A bronze age urn cemetery at Kimpton, Hampshire, Proc. Prehist. Soc. 47: 147-203. FASHAM, P. J., 1979. The excavation of a triple barrow in Micheldever Wood, Hampshire, Proc. Hants. Field Club Archaeol. Soc. 35: 540. GRINSELL, L. V., 1957. Archaeological Gazetteer, VCH Wiltshire, vol. pts 1. CHRISTIE, P. M., 1963. The Stonehenge Cursus, WAA/ 58: 370-82. CHRISTIE, P. M., 1964. A bronze age barrow on Earl’s Farm Down, Amesbury, WAM 59: 30-45. CHRISTIE, P. M., 1967. A barrow cemetery of the second millenium BC in Wiltshire, England, Proc. Prebist. Soc. 33: 336-66. MUSTY, J., 1969. The excavation of two barrows, one of Saxon date, at Ford, Laverstock, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, Anfig. Journ. 49: 98-1 17/; PIGGOTT, C. M., 1943. Excavation of fifteen barrows in the New Forest 1941-2, Proc. Prehist. Soc. 9: 1-27. SMITH, I. F., and SIMPSON, D. D. A., 1966. The excavation of a round barrow on Overton Hill, North Wiltshire, Proc. Prehist. Soc. 32: 122-55. WHITE, D. A., 1973a. The excavation of three round barrows on Chaldon Down, Dorset, 1969, Proc. Dorset. Nat. Hist. Archaeol. Soc. 95: 34-43. WHITE, D. A., 1973b. The excavation of a bell barrow at Winterbourne Kingston, Dorset, Proc. Dorset Nat. Hist. Archaeol. Soc. 94: 37-43. WOODWARD, P. J., forthcoming. Excavation of a late iron age - Romano-British settlement at Ower, Dorset. 1960. The Bronze Age Round Barrow in Britain (London: Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine vol. 79 (1985), pp. 101-8. Excavations at Potterne, 1984 by CHRISTOPHER GINGELL and ANDREW J. LAWSON’ Excavations at the late-bronze-age site at Potterne, 1984, continued the programme of 1982 and 1983. 200 square metres of midden and underlying occupation site were excavated, with samples wet-sieved and treated by flotation. Auguring established the area of the midden deposit. Studies of the very rich finds, with their notable bronze, antlerwork, and ceramics, are also reported. Asa result of the excavations carried out at Potterne in 1983 (Gingell and Lawson 1984: 31-4), a more exten- sive evaluation of this important late bronze age/carly iron age site was conducted between July and September 1984. The principal aims of this evaluation were to demonstrate more precisely the stratigraphy of the site and to define its extent. STRATIGRAPHY The preliminary excavations of 1982 and 1983 had established that the stratigraphy of the site’s two principal elements occupation — layers overlain by a midden. The deposits, up to 2 m in thickness, represented an unbroken — sequence occupying much of the first half of the first millennium BC. Initial analysis of the pottery by Dr Elaine Morris had indicated that significant changes occured in the form and fabric of the assemblage through the depth of the deposit. However, as much of the archacological deposit appeared homogeneous and without visible layers, a tightly controlled excavation method was called for so that changes in the analysed sequence could be related to depth and dispersal throughout the excavated area. In 1984 an area 20m by 10m was excavated, including in its easterly corners the two 5 m square trenches excavated in 1983 (Figure 1). The area was divided into 1 m squares and the deposits excavated in horizontal spits 10 cm thick. These stratigraphic units were adhered to until clearly defined lithological changes could be observed. Using such a method 150 comprised contiguous ‘columns’ of 1m > blocks each 10 cm thick were created. As excavation of the entire site using such a method would be prohibitively expensive, the Opportunity was taken to test different excavation methods. As a control, and for the retrieval of botanical and microfaunal remains, + columns (2.6 per cent of the * ‘Trust for Wessex Archaeology, The Archaeological Centre, 65 The Close, Salisbury SPI 2EN., site area) were wet-sieved in a flotation tank. After disaggregation in Calgon, samples were passed through a 600-micron sieve, the flot being collected in a 200-micron sieve. 15 ‘columns’ (15 per cent) were carefully trowelled and finds collected. In order to gauge the effect of an increased sample area, these ‘columns’ were placed singly and with two, four or eight together. Preliminary results of ceramic analysis by Dr Morris, and of mineralized seeds by Wendy Carruthers show a recurrent major change in the nature of the deposit in the ‘columns’ so far analysed. This horizon which sees a change in the size of sherds and in fabric, as well as a change from nitrophilous plants is reflected in the observed stratigraphy and may mark the junction between ‘occupation’ and ‘midden’ layers (Figure 2). Through analysis of more ‘columns’ such horizons can be extrapolated throughout the deposits. By the close of excavation, a large number of post- holes and pits had been exposed. These formed two groups separated by a barren area which ran diag- onally through the centre of the excavation but which carricd a complex of water-worn gullies. The group to the S lay principally above an artificial terrace exposed in 1983, the line of which was followed by that of four large greensand boulders. A compacted and conereted surface containing bones, sherds and stones covered the natural greensand in much of the This covered at least one post-hole, but was punctuated by the post-pipe, suggesting that the surface was formed while struc- central area. surface tures still stood. Since the end of the excavation, a programme of refitting sherds from individual vessels has been attempted. The exercise has been most successful in the upper deposits where the sherds are larger. Lines connecting refitting sherds from different stratigraphic units have been projected into a schematic midline section (Figure 5a). On such a plot the parallel lines demonstrate that the upper deposit has accumulated uniformly and without major disturbance. AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE ARCLIAEOLOGICAL THE WILTSHIRE 102 “K/ES6] Ul paypanaxa qauady jodisutd fo uvjd posauaey *] ainsi E n “Hi i oll = i} = 2 3} € 3° 3 v =| i O@Z/I8I 007/181 syeaH + . + 1a suapinog pursuasi5 WS > Kay YUON arts cae ANaY4.LLOd + O77/691 007/691 103 1984 EXCAVATIONS AT POTTERNE, ‘DUIINI $8/€86] Jo wold § ¢ ‘Muaqauad agi fo § jaqoudy qdnosgs Sursiny ¢g6y fo uowpras WZ “DUINI $RG] JO uoLpIas Jsar Jog | 18u01f99S aatgwqaAddaquy °Z andi € NOILOUS saydwos C P86! _-¢ NOILOAS Ca z L777 elas IG les Ba re Pal sozisit N you |BodseYyd auog pure Asayjod }UINg BSS [los uonedns90-asd 7777) sjaaaj uonedns90 G4 | | NOLLOAS uappiw 5 o yayouAL Sy v86l/€86l HNdaddLLOd 104 THE WILTSHIRE EXTENT In order to plot the extent of the homogenous black midden deposit, a Garrett hand auger was employed, with samples taken on a 20 m grid and more closely where clearer definition was required. Such a manual technique was essential as no success had been achieved with a variety of geophysical aids. The augering demonstrated that the midden deposit covered an area of at least 5 ha. Considerable variation in the thickness of midden exists; the greatest thickness is in the central region, the area to be occupied by the expanding modern cemetery (Figure 3). During the augering a number of substantially deeper cores were taken in the field to the S of the excavation. Through excavation, it was demonstrated that some of these represented a buried ditch of Romano-British date and it is probable that the hilltop S of the current excavations was covered by a system of similar earthworks. THE FINDS ‘The assemblage of finds recovered during three seasons at Potterne, from areas totalling no more than 217 square metres, is of a scale and richness which does not diminish with familiarity. The metalwork assemblage from the excavations is of special interest. 177 finds of bronze contain, in addition to the ubiquitous awls and tweezers of the period, a very high proportion of sheet bronze including many vessel fragments. One crumpled bowl fragment found in 1982 appears to have been abandoned after a very crude solder was applied; a piece of another bow] from last year’s area has a flanged rim with a good rivet joint and imitation rivet bosses below the rim. These and most other pieces come from the midden and the surface of the underlying occupation. They should not be seen as indicating that sheet metalwork formed a similarly high proportion of all bronze possessions in the settlement, since the large surface area of sheet metal makes it less suitable for re-melting, producing too much dross. However if its proportion in_ the assemblage is influenced by a high disposal rate, its presence in such quantities is a sure indication of the wealth which was to be found in the late bronze age community. In worked bone and antler, with some 187 finds to date, we find a range transitional between the limited material, mostly awls, bone pins and other pointed implements of middle bronze age assemblages, and the industry of the Age exemplified in the collection of 580 pieces at All elaborate developed — [ron Cannings Cross — presumably the later phases on that site (Smith 1982). At Potterne the finer material is all in antler. Typical of the objects formerly associated only ARCHLIAEOLOGICAL AND NYVEPURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE with the Early Iron Age are weaving combs; at Potterne only plain examples come from the midden. The ring-and-dot and linear designs appear in antler-work at Potterne only on the abundant handles for rat-tail tanged ‘The gravedigging is a type already known from late bronze age contexts as at Runnymede Bridge (Longley 1980: Figure 14, Plates XVI, XVII). Unusual pieces in the Potterne collections are an antler mount, with four tools. antler cheek-piece found in holes for bone pegs, of which two survive, and a very fine bobbin-like ornament with very small bored holes through the ends and throught the centre of the shaft. Beads in both amber and glass have been found in both midden and occupation levels, in a range of colours: black, blue, green and amber-coloured. Another material of ornamental use is shale. 85 finds have been made of what should for the moment, before analysis by X-ray fluorescence, be classed as jet-like materials. In all probability of Kimmeridge shale, the objects consist mostly of bracelets, with some beads and small rings, but most interestingly, cup fragments €XISt. The ceramic collection from the 20 m by 10 m area opened in 1983 and 1984 amounts to approximately 125,000 sherds with a nett weight of about 1.1 tonnes. Even this sample has its limitations, since over much of its chronological span the assemblage is extremely rich in variety for the early Ist millennium BC. The most interesting vessel types are often only represented by a few sherds, and within the more common ones are many fabric sub-groups showing differing production techniques. Dr Elaine Morris has studied the changes in fabric, quantity and size of sherds in sample columns from the 1984 area, and last year analysed a large part of the 1983 collection. This work is now continuing. The most important change is from an early ‘open’ assemblage, with pottery from a range of production centres in different raw materials, to a closed but more highly decorated assemblage in the later midden phases, dominated by sandy fabrics in all probability of local or on-site production. ‘The latter phases include c. 15 per cent of non-local oolitic limestone fabrics repre- senting most classes of vessel but predominantly the larger jar forms. The flint-, grog- and_fossil-shell- tempered fabrics, obtainable from sources within 10 km of the site, decline as sand and oolite varieties increase. Analysis of vessel forms is in progress. Figure 4 contains examples of the range of forms occurring in a sequence through the midden deposits. We have undertaken a programme of recording refitting pottery sherds now comprising parts of some 600 vessels from the 1984 area. Figure 5a shows 5 10 RNE, 1984 AVATIONS AT POTTE XC E co 09e/SSI LIC HV Ove/sst 9ICHV Jo soponf hg pagnse Oze/ssl o0e/sst £OC HV O8|HV TIKI AVIS [DINAIA) SPVAMITUT Ul (VT ID So]Oqd 4aony uo Pospq “uapplut MUNDO AG gOnodgy ayo STN IJHDULIGIS *¢ UONTPARIX $861 082/ssi 092/SSL Ovz/Ssi o@2/ssi o0z/ssi O8t/SSI LOLHV c8HV SLHV cL HV 69 HV 9SHV SSI Busey Buoje sapyoid sainy ANA LLOd ($7 Sursspa ays 07 uo pajoaload ays uolypavrxy ‘()] c INTL of VAL Puesusa9 uappiw |losdoy Kay Ogi/sst Ovi/ssi Oz@l/sst O01 /Sst SIHV Ly HV O9 HV S9 HV 48 do 14818 106 Y MAGAZINE va nae) PT TWA aan ce J ae ee pe oe. 2S & hoa] and jars trom. itermediate levelselt) the sagen EXCAVATIONS AT POVTTERNE, 1984 107 POTTERNE Mm Dispersal of Refitting Sherds cers tae ees wi | == N SS >=—M€o je spits ING Srl = il SESS Q Sins aaa | mS ; fle | 1 metre | | ai — = us| | i i: = L _| lia 5 Mi. x5 ee | L ie : 3 metres POTTERNE Dispersal of Refitting Sherds B =) Le h + A seit | TWA PT Figure Sa. Pottery refits projected on to midline section of 1984 excavation. Figure Sb. Composite plan of pottery refits at all levels in 1984 excavation. 108 THE WILTSHIRE inter-context joins projected into a median section, Figure 5b the same refits from all levels in plan. The results show the characteristic dispersal of clusters of conjoining sherds (each cluster usually recovered within one square metre context and not shown) which has resulted from the pattern of dumping of refuse. Differences in the sources of this refuse (possibly, for example, from cess-pits, hearths and domestic rubbish heaps) can be seen in examples of widely differing surface condition, burning and = mineralization of conjoining sherds. Variations in conditions within the midden are also observable. The best results were obtained in the middle and upper (uncultivated) levels of the midden; although emphasis was placed on recording refits between sherds from different excavation levels hardly any significant instances were observed. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that whilst each refit is a piece of positive archaeological data, it is difficult to obtain reliable negative evidence. Too many factors influence the observation of refits to prove their absence from particular levels. ARCHIAER OLOGICAL AND NYPURAL TESTORY MAGAZINE Acknowledgements. ‘The Potterne Project was sponsored in 198+ by English Heritage, the Prehistoric Society, the William \. Cadbury Charitable Trust, the Hlawkings Charitable Trust, the Robert: Kiln Charitable Trust, Pains-Wessex Schermuly Ltd, F. Rendell and Sons Ltd, G. Pearce & Sons Ltd, and the National Westminster Bank. Much of the post-excavation processing has been undertaken by a Manpower Services Commission Scheme through the Community Council for Wiltshire, supported by a grant from Kennet District Council. Excavations were conducted with the kind permission of Potterne Parish Council and Col. de Leighton Brooke. The authors with to record their gratitude to Dr Elaine Morris for ceramic analysis, Wendy Carruthers for botanical analysis, Gill Woolrich and Julia Green for supervising the MISC scheme, Wiltshire County Council for conservation work, and particularly Peter Donaldson for trench supervision. We thank Julian Cross, Robert Read and Paul Vhorogood for the illustrations to this report. REFERENCES GINGELL, C. J., and LAWSON, A. J. excavation and research at a major settlement of the late bronze age, WANE 78: 31-4. LONGLEY, D., 1980. Runnymede Bridge 1976: excavations on the site 1983. The Potterne Project: of a late bronze age settlement, Surrey Archaeol. Soc. Res. 6. SMITH, MoJo C., 1982. \ survey of worked bone from iron age sites in Wiltshire. Unpublished dissertation, University of Southampton, Department of Archaeology. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 109-54. The Excavation of an Anglo-Saxon Cemetery (and Some Prehistoric Pits) at Charlton Plantation, near Downton by SUSAN M. DAVIES’ with contributions by ANNE-MARIA BOJKO,’ ELISABETH CROWFOOT,° PHILIP HARDING,® and JANET HENDERSON‘ A late-Sth-century to 7th-century Anglo-Saxon cemetery came to light in November 1981 during the widening of the W side of the A338, 3 km N of Downton. Substantial damage had been done before work was stopped, although staff of Salisbury Museum et al. had managed to salvage parts of 12 burials whilst 1t continued. Eventually, 30 graves and a single urned cremation were excavated. The affinities of the artefact material are explored. In addition, four prehistoric pits, one probably neolithic and three late Beaker were also examined. CONTENTS Appendix 3: index to archive 153 Introduction 109 Acknowledgements 153 Location and geology 111 Bibliography 154 Site description 111 The Anglo-Saxon cemetery; post-cemetery build-up of deposits at the S end of the site The graves and grave groups \13 Urned cremation, SF36 — Group 1: ‘Warrior’ burials — Group 2: female graves with goods — Group 3: burials with knives or knife and buckle only — Group 4: adults without grave goods — Group 5: infant and child burials — Burials salvaged by Salisbury Museum — Unprovenanced objects handed in by workmen Artefact discussion and specialist reports 136 Swords — Shield bosses — Spearheads — Knives and scramasax — Buckles and belt/leather fittings — Brooches — Beads and other glass objects — Chatelaine sets, bags and purses — Cosmetic and jewellery items — Pottery, glass and wooden vessels — Textiles by Elisabeth Crowfoot Human skeletal material by Janet D. Henderson 143 Sex — Age — Stature — Dental wear — Caries - Abscesses — Antemortem tooth loss — Peri- odontal disease — Other observations of dental disease — Bone pathology — The cremation Discussion and conclusions 145 Appendix 1: the prehistoric features 147 Pits — Pottery — Flint by Philip Harding Appendix 2: the conservation work, resulting technological and organic information, and methods of treatment of the objects by Anne-Maria Bojko 149 INTRODUCTION The site of the cemetery was discovered in November 1981 during road-widening by Wiltshire County Council on the W side of the A338, the Salisbury to Ringwood road, some 3 km N of Downton (c. SU 167249) and about | km from the present village of Charlton, which lies to the SW (Figure 1). The site takes its name from a plantation some 400 m up-slope to the W on the estate of the Earl of Radnor, from whom Wiltshire County Council purchased the land for the road improvement in 1981. Unfortunately, some time elapsed between the actual discovery of the remains by workmen and the reporting of the site to archaeologists. After 4 or 5 days the site did come to the notice of Salisbury Museum, where finds had been brought for identification. The Museum staff, working under difficult conditions as road- widening continued, salvaged the partial remains of 12 burials together with some objects. Work was suspended when the importance of the site was made clear to the County Council by its archaeological staff, Roy Canham and Alison Borthwick. The Council immediately allowed access for proper archaeological investigation. Subsequently, the Trust for Wessex Archaeology (formerly the Wessex Archaeological Committee) carried out an excavation under the sup- ervision of the author, assisted by Philip Harding, over 3 weeks in late November and early December, by no means the ideal season. Trust for Wessex Archaeology, The Archaeological Centre, 65 The The finds from the excavations and from the initial t FR cs cect moro nites Essex. Ros adenine work, eine wien! Me Se EON Riverview, Big Row, Geldeston, Beccles, Suffolk NR34 OLB. (Appendix 3), are deposited with Salisbury and South § Ancient Monuments Laboratory, Fortress House, Savile Row, Wiltshire Museum. London W1. This report deals in detail with the burials excavated ++ PH WILTSHIRE ARCHAROLOGICAL AND NYPURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 110 J Salisbury CHARLTON EEO OS PLANTATION 1 Able LOCATION PLAN Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Single Anglo-Saxon Burial Anglo-Saxon Pottery and other LON 4 Witheringt Charlton (© Bing na lantation A Domestic Debris Excavated Area with location of Base-line (cf Fig 2) Downton N CUE ( ra S) c 5 Ss Y Cl c £ Oo | ec @\ Salisbury Contour heights in feet 7; 2 Salisbury ——— Saxon ; Cemetery Charlton Plantation Figure 1. Site location. THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY by the Wessex Archaeological Committee, but also contains a list of the finds handed in by workmen. These, although now sadly unprovenanced and lacking in associations, nevertheless provide a useful addition to the excavated material, in consideration of the site’s chronology and status. The prehistoric features and finds are discussed in Appendix 1. LOCATION AND GEOLOGY (Figure 1) The cemetery site of Charlton Plantation lay on the lowest W chalk terrace above the flood plain of the river Avon at a height of c. 50 m (160 ft) O.D., overlooking the broad river valley to the E. The land to its W rises towards Charlton Plantation itself, which lies on a chalk spur at a height of c. 91-106 m (300-350 ft). The cemetery itself is on fairly level ground sloping from N-S some 1.60 m over a distance of 100 m, the slope being greater over the south half. While the site had been in arable a ploughsoil 0.20-0.30 m deep had built up. The underlying subsoil is a Coombe Rock, with clay-filled periglacial involutions particularly prevalent over the S_ half. The subsoil made the initial identification of some graves difficult, even after 3 or 4 attempts at cleaning, and also affected the preservation of the human skeletal material, which was in many cases poor and spongey. SITE DESCRIPTION (Figure 2) The length of the cemetery (as defined by located graves) was in the region of 100 m from N to S. The area available for excavation was severely restricted by the extent of the road-widening before work stopped. This had involved the removal of 1.5 m of chalk on the W side of the existing tarmac road, over a width of 9 m W from the kerb, to leave a 60 degree slope up to the level of the adjacent ploughed fields. The N part of the excavation was a strip 50 m long comprising a narrow level area 0.7-1 m wide along the fence, and a 60 degree slope (light stipple in Figure 2) down to the level of the road, in which parts of several burials survived. The S part, again 50 m long, was a narrow strip 4 m wide, with a vertical drop of 1.5 m on its EF side (close stipple in Figure 2), from which the ploughsoil had been removed by machine. In two areas even this narrow shelf had been damaged by machine holes 2 m long by 1 m wide and 0.5 m deep, for the contractors’ equipment. The entire area available for excavation was approximately 210 sq. m. About 75 per cent of the potential cemetery area available between the existing road and new edge (excluding any extension W into land still in arable use) was destroyed before the roadworks were postponed and __ archaeological investigations could begin. In the surviving strip were 111 30 graves (in addition to those salvaged by Salisbury Museum) most of which survived in a reasonably intact state (Figure 2). At the S end were four small pits (44, 69, 88, 102; see Appendix 1), and a densely packed gravel layer (93), observed initially in section, which overlay two graves (76 and 106). The Anglo-Saxon cemetery (Figure 2) A total of 42 graves and a single urned cremation were found. Of these, 12 (numbers 3—25) were salvaged by Salisbury Museum staff. The remaining 30 graves and a cremation were excavated under the auspices of the Wessex Archacological Committee. Almost all the topsoil had been removed by machine, so that some graves were already visible in the subsoil. Others, however, particularly at the S end (from grave 109 southwards) where the periglacial clays were dominant, only became visible after 3 or 4 attempts at manual cleaning. This was largely due to surface compaction by the tracked machine used in the roadworks, which probably also accounts for the extremely disturbed condition of grave 109 (Figure 13). Where only the E end of a grave appeared from under the baulk, a section was cut back to reveal the entire grave (graves 32, 40, 51, 55, 57, 76, 82, 87, 91, 98, 106). Most of the graves lay directly beneath the modern ploughsoil, cut into the Coombe Rock or periglacial clays. Occasionally they lay below layer 92, which appeared to be a remnant ploughsoil (e.g. grave 55), or the flint layer 93 (graves 76 and 106). The depths of the graves, measured from the extant top of the subsoil, varied from 0.10 m to 0.55 m, the average being 0.30 m. In most cases the skeletons were reasonably well protected from modern ploughing, but in the shallower graves, for example grave 107, the plough must have been skimming over the skull of the burial. A cremation urn, SF36, of which only the lower half survived, lay crushed on the subsoil. No pit was visible for this urn. The graves were mainly rectangular or sub- rectangular in plan, with vertical sides (sections available in archive). Some, mainly the shallower graves, had more rounded ends (e.g. graves 59, 107), and a few (e.g. grave 57) had indications of plank- linings. Flints were used as a partial lining in graves 40 and 49, and to define grave 34 where it cut through another. There was no evidence for grave markers, and the relatively high number of intersecting graves may also indicate that there were none. On three occasions one grave cut another (graves 34/51, 59/85; and 98/100), and there was one sequence of four intersecting graves (in chronological order graves 65, 61, 63 and 38). Twenty-cight graves were aligned W-E (i.e. heads Grave salvaged during roadworks, approximate location only. Grave salvaged during roadworks * Machine-cut vertical edge. Machine-cut 45° slope. Limit of excavation THE WILTSHIRE Urned 4 Cremation 38 ARCHIAROLOGICAL AND NAVPURAL PIS TORY MAGAZINE SITE PLAN Figure 2. General site plan. THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY W), 8 S-N and 3 N-S. Three burials salvaged by Salisbury Museum are unlocated. Post-cemetery build-up of deposits at the S end of the site At the S end, running from grave 82 to the S end of the site, and initially visible only in section, were two layers under-lying the modern ploughsoil. Immediately under the ploughsoil was a fine orange-brown clayey- loam, layer 92, 40-100 mm thick. This overlay a layer of densely packed flint pebbles 40-60 mm in size, and 40-60 mm thick, layer 93. Layer 93 overlay both the natural periglacial clay subsoil and graves 76 (7th- century) and 106. Layers 92 and 93 were both cut by a shallow round-bottomed post-medieval gulley 104, of probable 18th-century date. Layer 92 was visible occa- sionally along the length of the site, where the subsoil was slightly deeper than average, for example from grave 55 northwards. Layer 93 initially appeared to have been deliberately laid and to be related to the cemetery. It is now considered more likely that both layer 93 and 92 relate to agricultural activity and natural sorting after the site had reverted to pasture. The likely date for ploughing is sometime within the medieval period. THE GRAVES AND GRAVE GROUPS The individual graves and contents are listed below and are illustrated in Figures 3 to 15. All objects recovered, unless extremely fragmented, are illustrated. X- radiographs were used in preparing the illustrations of the metalwork. Minimal details of measurements are given in the text; others are available in the site archive. A suggested date for the grave group is appended to each grave description. The descriptions begin with the urned cremation, and then graves excavated by the Trust for Wessex Archaeology, divided into 5 groups defined by associated objects and age: 1 ‘Warrior’ burials, graves 57, 76, 78, 61 (burial 68). 2 Female graves with goods, graves 38, 32, +9, 34, 40, 98, 100, 85. 3 Burials with knives or knife and buckle only, graves 59, 63, 71, 82, 106, 107. 4+ Burials without grave goods, graves 51, 55, 61, 65, 91, 109. 5 Infant and child burials, graves +1, 53, 67, 80, 87. There follow the graves excavated by Salisbury Museum; eraves 3, 5; 7,9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23,25 (these lack grave plans) and then the unprovenanced finds handed in by council workmen. The spearheads are classified according to Swanton’s (1973) type series, the knives according to Bohner 113 (1958). The classification of beads is discussed below, pages 139-40. All graves are rectangular unless otherwise stated. Graves and their fills, as well as other features and layers, are assigned unique context numbers. Objects, including skeletons, are treated as “special finds’ and numbered in a separate series, in accordance with the recording system used by the Trust for Wessex Archaeology. Thus a burial, 60, 1s part of a grave, 57. Urned cremation, S¥36 (not illustrated, location on Figure 2) Lower part of pot only. Twenty-eight sherds in a fine reduced sandy fabric, with fairly common medium quartz. Very small sample of human bone. Group 1: Warrior burials Grave 57 (Figures 3 and 4). W-E, length 2 m, width 1.2 m, depth 0.41 m. Double inhumation. Burial 60. Adult male, 20-25 supine, arms by sides. years; extended Iron knife type B, length 153 mm, mineralized horn or antler on tang (Figure 3A, SF60). Spearhead type L, length 215 mm, internal socket diameter 12 mm (Figure 3B, SF62). Burial 59. Adult male 25-30 years; extended supine, right arm by side, left hand on hip. Oval iron buckle, length 33 mm, mineralized textile on surface (Figure 4E, SF64). Carinated iron shield boss, diameter 180 mm, height 87 mm, traces of mineralized skin on underside of flange, and wood (Salix sp. or Populus sp.) around rivet holes; apex possibly inserted (Figure 4C, SF63). Iron knife type E, length 129 mm, mineralized horn or antler on tang (Figure 4D, SF66). Iron spearhead type H2, length 256 mm, internal socket diameter 14 mm, mineralized textile and wood on blade, and wood in socket. 6th century. (Figure 4F, SF61). Grave 76 (Figure 5). W-—E, sub-rectangular, length 1.8 m, width 0.95 m, depth 0.4 m. Burial 90. Adult male, 35-40 years; supine, skull turned to S, left arm across pelvis. Fragment iron rectangular-sectioned bar, length 66 mm. Iron scramasax, length 245 mm, mineralized horn or antler tang; skin on blade. (Figure 5B, SF92). 7th century. Grave 78 (Figure 5). S—N, sub-rectangular, length 1.6 m, width 0.6 m, depth 0.2 m. 114 THE WILTSHIRE | Burial 89. Sub-adult male, supine, skull turned to E, left arm across pelvis. Iron spearhead type L, length 245 mm, diameter uncertain; mineralized wood in socket, Salix sp. or Populus sp. (Figure SA, SF91). 5th/6th century. 15-20 years; socket Grave 61 (Figure 6). W-E, length 2.2 width 0.95 m, depth 0.25 m; double inhumation. Burial 68. ?male, 15-18 years; supine, arms crossed over pelvis. Iron spearhead type J, socket diameter 12 mm; socket and textile on blade (Figure 6A, SF25). Iron knife type Al, length 96 mm; mineralized horn or antler on tang (Figure 6B, SF72). m, internal in length 176 mm, mineralized wood CHARLTON PLANTATION grave 5/ Burial 60 ARCIEAEFOLOGICAL AND NATURAL FISTORY MAGAZINE Small oval iron buckle, length 29 mm; mineralized textile. (Figure 6C, SF73). 6th century. Burial 69. Sec under group 4, page 126 below. Group 2: Female graves with goods (Figures 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) Grave 38. (Figures 6 and 7). W-F, length 1.80 m; width 0.87 m; depth 0.27 m. Cuts graves 63 and 65. Double inhumation. Burial 37. Female, 20-25 crossed over chest. Iron knife type D, length 132 mm; mineralized horn or antler around tang. (Figure 7D, S40). Copper-alloy plaque, central raised stud and trian- gular hole with inlaid, gilded decoration — small years. Supine, hands (itty i Ait MN it hit iy 7 aii Ii. if nih, UA ga el itll hi i An it Mi ih WAC Figure 3. Burial 59 Grave 57 (Group 1) with finds from Burial 60. Scales: plan 1:5, finds 1:2. THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY 115 CHARLTON PLANTATION grave 5/ PTR TIEN EET ti da f ‘ TM Meh VAC AH fig) Metall ea hea a vie gM HL ae} Wyqqtittes al! ee pl ual lt Al Wine i iy al SF 66 Phyo Yt 4 a fap }!, \ S\N ) it sue ATT {tush \ 1 FUITITHATenTennsnvtn SSS = SSE RmE= a = a: Yi wtp tai in qv | uti f 0) 5 10 cm. =e is ae a WAC Figure 4. Grave 57 (Group 1) finds from Burial 59. Scale 1:2. CHARLTON PLANTATION 1 ne PASIANENOOONASCTTAPHTNVTLGOETTPOTUOVANINENV THT er on Winn, | Mn on yee yay! ttn Ba call ——— HAT ANANUUATPECUTUATITANTTTHATT MIAH yin Burial 89 Burial 90 = AM hil ANH RT Ah tl} Na Pa il i i or Sa iin gage pe ees Si hi He il ‘if il “a tI) ii ei ee SLi Ta —= = =i) n a ae lu) Ly i Laat | (inal ile i HT TE D 0) 0:5 1 1:5M. (graves) 0 5 10 15 cm (finds) Figure 5. Graves 76 and 78 (Group 1). Scales; plan 1:20, finds 1:2. CHARLTON PLANTATION ¥ graves 38,61,63 & 65 Burial 75 gnave/65 TN grave 38 D eg" oe ee SEY a: sy a — a Burial 75 d e leather ? Fee) ‘nea Burial 69 grave 61 I TART A 6 SF72 B siStave sii: 08 1M. 0 (finds) 5 10cm. | WAC SPC F igure 6. Stratified Graves 38, 61, 63 and 65 (Groups 2, 4, 3 and 4 respectively) with finds from Grave 61. Scales: plan 1:20, finds 1:2. CHARLTON PLANTATION grave 38 Wei tae Metin wy Wir eR { capitan t SFIS 0 5 10cm (finds) (E & beads) 0 1 2cm t a ee (ra Sars | cee Se | WAC SPC Figure 7. Finds from Graves 38 (D-P) and 63 (R-S). Scales: beads and E 1:1, others 1:2. CHARLTON PLANTATION grave 32 i hi m™m “Burial 17 grave 49 cei 16 ogg? OA. (ya B- °D grave 34/5] 0 1M 0 5 10cm i a tome Se | — et | fi 49B- WAC ( graves) (finds except 49B-D) Bee ‘gure 8. Graves 32, 34, 49 (Group 2) and Grave 51 (Group 4). Scales. plans 1:20, finds 1:2. 120 impressed circles and probable zoomorphic figures at the top — either side of suspension hole. Length 36 mm; — width (max.). | Probable pursemount (Figure 7E, SF34). [ron rings, diameters 40 and 42 mm (Figure 7F and G,, “SE34); ,splus. 5 rings (not illustrated). Found as a group, probably a purse. Iron pin fragments, lengths 40 and 36 mm (Figure 7H and J, SF49 and SF44). Set of interconnecting iron rings, length 30mm, individual diameters c. 12 mm; mineralized textile remains (Figure 7K, SF46). Class VI bead (Figure 7L, SF47). Pair of bronze clasps for bead chain, lengths 18 mm and 24 mm with five Class VI beads (Figure 7M and N, SF32 and 33). Glass and amber beads, (all glass and selection of amber illustrated): one Class I, dark green with groove around girth; one Class I, pale green with red and white marvered bands; one Class IV, pale green; 42 Class VI (amber) (Figure 7P, SF32 an 33). Not illustrated: three unidentifiable iron objects. 7th century. Burial 38. Child, companied. 7th century 32 mm fragments of 5-6 years, supine, —unac- Grave 32 (Figure 8). ? Double burial — heavily disturbed by machining — W-E. Burial 14. Female, 50 years+, ? laid in lap of burial 17. Fragment iron knife blade, type uncertain; length 51 mm (not illustrated). Fragmentary iron buckle, length 34 mm with miner- alized textile remains (not illustrated). Burial 17. Female, 35—40 years; supine, left hand on pelvis. Pair of disc brooches with incised circle (“bullseye”) decoration and tinned surfaces. Traces of miner- alized textile on undersurfaces of both. Diameters 34 mm and 35-37 mm (Figure 8C and D, SF20 and SF19 respectively). Sth/6th century. Grave 49 (Figure 8). W-—E, head end only extant. Surviving length 0.70 m; width 0.70 m; depth 0.40 m. Burial 16. Unidentifiable. Iron knife blade, ? type B. Length 70 mm (Figure 8A, SF21). Class I bead, pale yellow translucent; 2 Class II beads, both black with yellow marvered trail (Figure 8B, SF22). Probably 6th century. THE WILTSHIRE ARCIIAROLOGICAL AND NVEURAL EIS PORY MAGAZINE Grave 34 (Figure 8). W-E, feet end destroyed; extant length 1.5 m; width 0.60 m; depth 0.20 m. Burial 18. Female, 15-20 years, arms across stomach area. Fragment of ribbed pale blue, translucent vessel glass, Roman, length 42 mm (Figure 8A, SF42). Small oval iron buckle, length 21 mm (Figure 8B, SF 43). ? 6th century. Grave 40 (Figure 9). NW-SE; E end damaged, W end underlying fence-line. Length 1.80 m; width 0.70 m; depth 0.35 m. Burial 24. Female, 20-25 years; supine, hands crossed over pelvis; some bones from both feet missing. Accompanied by objects from any one burial. Tubular copper-alloy strap-mount, with incised-line decoration, length 30 mm. (Figure 9A, SF23). ‘Tubular copper-alloy strap-mount, length 29 mm. (Figure 9B, SF27a). ‘Cross-patee’ dise brooch, diameter 22 mm. (Figure 9C, SF29). Rolled copper-alloy cylinder, one end closed with punched suspension hole, one end open; length 67 mm; probably ‘cosmetic’ brush handle (Figure 9D, SF28). Circular cast copper-alloy buckle with iron pin, diameter 26 mm. (Figure 9E, SF57). Iron knife type B (?), extant length 110 mm; miner- alized horn or antler on tang, textile on blade (Figure 9F, SFS53). Iron diamond-shaped rivet-head, length 33 mm. Curved iron bar, length 24 mm (Figure 9G and H, SF58). Two bronze plates riveted to fragments of an ivory ring, length both 22 mm (Figure 9J and Kk, SF27b and SF31). ‘Two copper-alloy strips twisted into ‘finger-rings’, possibly originally a single bracelet, with fine, punched-dot decoration along edges, length both 85 mm (Figure 9L, SF58). Thin copper-alloy plate, probably part of ivory ring above (Figure 9M, SF52). Collection of 21 glass and 17 amber beads (Class V1): selection only illustrated. Glass beads comprised: Class I; one translucent plum-coloured; one opaque yellow; and seven decayed blue (not illustrated). Class II; 2 opaque yellow; 4 opaque yellow with brown marvered trail; 1 opaque yellow with dark green intersecting arcs and red dots, 1 brick pink, 1 opaque red (Figure 9N, SF51). largest number of THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SANON CEMETERY 121 CHARLTON PLANTATION grave 40 | Burial 24 me - a ain 4 ' SF 27b J SF 31 K textile ' QO 2 | ry ae | SF58 L (finds) Oo a eee 10cm. i S52 | I (beads) 0 1 2cm. SE Zz SF51 \Figure 9. Grave 40 ( Group 2). Scale: plan 1:20, beads 1:1, other finds 1.2. 122 Piik WILTSHIRE Not illustrated: 1 class III, colour uncertain; 2 class V beads; 17 class VI — 4 cylindrical, others semi-quoit/polygonal. Grave goods not illustrated: 6 unidentifiable frag- ments of copper alloy; 1 boar’s tusk, found with the large group of objects on the left pelvis. 6th century. Grave 85 (Figure 11). W-E, E end damaged. Length 1.76m, width 0.75 m, depth 0.15 m. Cut by grave 59. Burial 94. Female, 35-40 years; supine, arms by sides. Feet missing. Bone comb, plain, 3 iron rivets, length 72 mm (broken) (Figure 11B, SF96). Small oval iron buckle, pin missing, length 19 mm (Figure 11C, SF1OO). Fragment of iron ring, length 20 mm (Figure 11D, SF 162). 4 class V beads, lengths 10-14 mm (2 illustrated); 12 class VI beads (8 illustrated) (Figure 11E, SF97). 6th century. Grave 98 (Figure 10). W-E, length 1.90 m; width 0.54 m; depth 0.4 m. Cuts grave 100. Burial 102. Female, 30-35 years; supine, right hand resting on waist area, left hand pushed against north side of grave, high in fill. Iron buckle with double-plate, length 35 mm (Figure LOA, SFI11). Square-sectioned iron rod, length 34 mm (Figure 10OB, SEILO). Copper-alloy disc with small, sub-square hole and stud on underside to which a fragment of skin or leather adhered; diameter 22—23 mm (Figure 10C, SF 106). Copper-alloy needle with square-section, length 100 mm (Figure LOE, SF107). Iron knife type B, extant length 116 mm (Figure 10F, SF109). Circular iron buckle, diameter 25 mm (Figure LOG, SF112). Iron plate buckle, length 53 mm (Figure 10H, SF112). Iron ring diameter 32—33 mm (Figure 10J, SF112). Curved iron strip, length 66 mm (Figure 10K, SF112). 15 fragmentary iron rings and buckles, 3 illustrated (Figures 10L, M, N, SF112). Objects G to N inclusive were found together, lifted as one object and excavated in the laboratory. They chatelaine set, hanging from the waist. were probably originally a = purse or Loop of twisted copper-alloy wire, one end flattened, ARCHIAROLOGICAL AND NATURAL TISTORY MAGAZINE the other broken in antiquity, diameter 26-28 mm (Figure LOP, SFLOS). Class | cobalt blue bead, three class VI (Figure 10Q, SE LO8). Late 6th to 7th century. Grave 100 (Figure 10). W-E, length 1.70 m, width 0.75 m, depth 0.40 m. Cut by grave 98. Burial 114. Fragmentary remains only, lower legs and feet, part of right arm. Copper-alloy strap-end, composed of two flat plates with a single rivet and simple incised lattice decoration on both sides; length 38 mm. ‘Traces of leather surviving between the plates (Figure 10D, SFI15). Probably a pair with another strap-end found in the upper fill of grave 98 with similar decoration, but length 42 mm (Figure 10, SF101). Late 6th to 7th century? Group 3: burials with knives or knife and buckle only (Figures 6, il, 12) Grave 59 (Figure 11). S—N, sub-rectangular; length 1.60 m; width 0.77 m; depth 0.32 m. Cuts grave 85. Burial 67. to left. Iron knife type C, extant length 133 mm, miner- alized horn or antler along tang (Figure I1A, SF74). Late 6th to 7th century. ? Female, 30-35 years; supine, legs flexed o = Grave 63 (Figures 6 and 7). W-—E, sub-rectangular; length 1.75 m; width 0.77 m; depth 0.10 m. Cuts graves 61 and 65, cut by grave 38. Burial 70. Male, 40-45 years, supine, arms by sides. Iron knife type B?; extant length 159 mm, miner- alized horn or antler on tang, mineralized leather (sheath?) on blade; cutting edge very worn (Figure 7R, SF80). Small oval copper-alloy buckle, length 17 mm, small patch mineralized textile on surface (Figure 7S, SF81). 7th century. Grave 71 (Figure 12). W-—E, sub-rectangular; length 1.76 m; width 0.84 m; depth 0.44 m. Burial 86. crossed over pelvis. Iron knife type C?; extant length 107 mm, miner- alized horn or antler on tang; textile on blade (Figure 12€, SF87). Class I bead, pale translucent bluey-green, 2 dark green marvered lines (Figure 12D, S88). Late 6th/7th century. Female, 35-45 years; supine, hands CHARLTON PLANTATION grave 100 1M. ——~ ttyl AK ius (Cia CRMC LD) ta Hi SF 106 (@; SF 15 aD SF 101 : A, from fill of CAIN INSU Mien tal - grave 98, | = nt Hat probably from Wallet are dn burial 114 wee Mea ny Di ia tie PMT il Fa i Hh Hh Ra if SF112 | | = sF112, M a ae Ss | Fj L | { K @ | SF112 GREAT CLBTT DP a | sens N | 0 10cm. | | | -O) 3 | | a | 0 1 2 3cm. \ a |Site P SF 108 (P& Q) | WAC = SPC vigure 10. Graves 98 and 100: (Group 20. Scales: plan 1:20, beads and P 1:1, other finds 1:2. 124 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAROLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE CHARLTON PLANTATION Burial 67 SET Hcg l AM TT TAN ill i iy iN) grave 85 SF97 WAC SPC Figure 11. Graves 59 and 85 (Groups 3 and 2). Scales: plan 1:20, beads 1:1, other finds 1:2. CHARLTON PLANTATION at Win Wh : i il Na i it | St Ne We ly ni Bn iN, Hy (itt SF85 Burial 84 | mil ifs "i I MAN eda: mst eaatyiud lta ia Hany tt iq i if i i AUN ti tee ih i hi (Eg ai yal ty vy HK i TN O (graves) 0:5 1M a ee 0 (finds) 5 10cm SF88 ie Burial 113 Wl a tl < ‘Me I) i] ' | ( SS ml i {vn it hy wy it i {t | io nt nf iy li We dig WAC Figure 12. Graves 71, 82, 106 and 107 ( Group 3). Scales: plans 1:20, bead 1:1, other finds 1:2. 126 Grave 82 (Figure 12). W-E. 0.90 m; depth 0.38 m. Burial 84. Male, 45-50 years; supine, arms by sides. Oval iron buckle with plate, length 43 mm, height 29 mm (Figure 12A, SF159). Iron knife type C? Length 133 mm. Mineralized horn or antler traces on tang, textile on blade (Figure 12B, SF85). Late 6th/7th century. Grave 106 (Figure 12). WSW-ESE, rectangular; length 1.85 m, width 0.75 m, depth 0.44 m. Burial 113. ? Male, 50+ years; supine, left leg crossed over right, left arm on pelvis, poor con- dition. Iron knife type C, point broken, extant length 157 mm (Figure 12F, SF116). Late 6th/7th century. Grave 107 (Figure 12). N—S; sub-rectangular; length : 1.45 m; width 0.58 m; depth 0.27 m. Burial 103. ? Male, 30-35 years; appears to have been crammed into a grave insufficiently large, flexed on left side, arms crossed on waist, head turned to left. Iron knife type B, length 143 mm, mineralized horn or antler on tang (Figure 12, SF104). S5th/6th century. Length 2 m; width sub- Group 4: adults without erave goods (Figures 6, 8, 13) & & § Grave 51 (Figure 8). W-E, sub-rectangular; extent length 0.75 m; width 0.70 m; depth 0.10 m. Cut by grave 34. Burial 35. Male, 50+ years; supine, arms by sides; upper torso, arms and skull only survive. Undated. Grave 55 (Figure 13). W-E, E end damaged, W end under fence-line. Length 1.70 m; width 0.93 m, depth 0.57 m. Burial 41. Female, 25-30 years; flexed on left side. Undated. Grave 61 (Figure 6). Part of double inhumation burial with burial 68 (see under group 1). Burial 69. Male, 25-30 years; disturbed heavily by cutting of grave 63 — skull of burial 68 visible in fill of grave 63. Presumed to be supine burial. S5th/6th century. Grave 65 (Figure 6). S—-N. Length 2.05 m; width 0.51 m; depth 0.12 m. Earliest in sequence of four graves, cut by graves 61, 63 and 38 (in stratigraphic order). THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY Burial 75. Male, 30-35 years; supine, partial remains only, central body, upper legs, and lower left leg missing. 5th/6th century. Grave 91 (Figure 13). W-E; sub-rectangular. Length 2.03 m; width 0.8 m; depth 0.50 m;_ steeply sloping sides. Burial 93. Male? 20-25 years; supine, left hand across pelvis; toe bones found well up grave, under left knee, as if foot originally laid high in grave? Undated. Grave 109 (Figure 13). ible, owing to machine damage. N-S; ?sub- rectangular; length 1.80 m; width 0.74 m; depth negligible as extant. Burial 77. Very badly damaged. Female, adult; probably supine. Undated. Very faint outline only vis- Group 5: Infant and child burials (Figure 14) Grave 37. See under Group 2 burials (page 114). Grave 41. (Figure 14) W-E, E end damaged; sub- rectangular; extant length 0.55 m; width 0.51 m; depth 0.15 m. Burial 26. Child, 2-3 years; probably supine. Undated. Grave 53 (Figure 14). S—N; rectangular; E side damaged; extant length 1.00 m; extant width 0.51 m; extant depth 0.25 m. Burial 39. Child, 9-11 years; supine, arms folded across waist. Undated. Grave 67 (Figure 14). S—N, sub-rectangular. Length 1.35 m; width 0.65 m; depth 0.30 m. Burial 76. Juvenile 12-15 years; flexed on left side. Only child burial (apart from = sub-adult male, grave 78) with any grave good. Bone needle, length 70 mm (Figure 14A, SF158). Undated. Grave 80 (Figure 14). S—N, sub-rectangular; length 1.00 m; width 0.45 m; depth 0.21 m. Burial 82. Child, 7-9 years; supine. Undated. Grave 87 (Figure 14). W—E, sub-rectangular, length 1.45 m; width 0.54 m; depth 0.27 m. Burial 83. Child, 3-6 years; supine. Undated. CHARLTON PLANTATION WAC Figure grave 55 Burial 41 es ”\ —— “Ss Z Burial 93 JE al 0) 05 1 1S M. t cy =a ee SPC 13. Graves SS, 109 (burial 77) and 91 (Group 4). Scale 1:20. CHARLTON PLANTATION grave 41 WAC Figure 14. Child graves 41, 53, 67, 80, 87. Scales: plans 1:20, find 1:2. THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY Burials salvaged by Salisbury Museum (Figure 15) Only the finds are illustrated. Grave 3: Burial 1. Adult. SF143, (1) 2 fragments thin copper-alloy strip with répoussé dot-and-scroll decoration; length 54 mm (one rivet hole) and 37 mm. (ii) 1 fragment copper- alloy bucket ‘strap’, with 4 rivet holes, riveted to horizontal strip as (i). Length 42 mm. (ii) 2 copper-alloy fragments, probably also from verti- cal strapping for bucket (part illustrated) (Figure 15). (iv) 3 fragments unidentifiable mineralized wood; diamond-shaped, flat. (v) iron rivet head length 30 mm (not illustrated). SF 144, thin copper-alloy strip with répoussé dot- and-scroll decoration as SF 143 (i) (Figure 15). 5th/6th century. Grave 5: Burial 2. Adult. No finds. Grave 7: Burial 3. Adult. No finds. Grave 9: Burial 4. 20-25 years. No finds. Grave 11: Burial 5. Adult. No finds. Grave 13: Burial 6. 30-35 years. SF145, 10 fragments thin copper-alloy strip forming 2 bands: 4 20 mm wide (top band), diameter (top) 74mm) 6 22 mm wide (lower band), diameter (top) 92 mm. Repoussé arc-and-dot motifs, on lower band intersecting. Very fine workmanship. No rivet holes present, no sign of vertical strapping. SF163, Iron knife, type B, extant length 97 mm, mineralized horn or antler on tang (Figure 15). 5th/6th century. Grave 15: Burial 7. 15-20 years. SF146, iron knife blade, type uncertain, extant length 67 mm and 2 fragments thin copper-alloy sheet with punched holes. Length >14 mm. Prob- ably bucket fittings (Figure 15). Sth/6th century. Grave 17: Burial 8. SF147, solid cast bronze buckle, hemispherical section, ‘shield-shaped’ pin, on iron mount. Length 27 mm (Figure 15). SF148, copper-alloy — kite-shaped Length 20 mm (Figure 15). rivet. mount. 129 Grave 19: Burial 9. SF160, tubular copper-alloy strap-mount, plain. Length 23 mm (Figure 15). Grave 21: Burial 10. 20-25 years. SF 149, iron spearhead type H1, length 192 mm (point broken); interior socket diameter 16 mm. mineralized wood in socket, A/nus sp. (Figure 15) SF150, silvered shield stud, diameter 19 mm. SFI151, 4 fragments mineralized wood, A/nus sp. (not illustrated). SF152, fragments of the silvered surfaces of two shield boss studs, diameters 19 mm (Figure 15). SF153, gilded cruciform copper-alloy fitting with two disc-headed double-incised — line decoration, gold foil on main plate only; length 33 mm, ? box fitting (Figure 15). S154, diamond-shaped copper-alloy plate with répoussé dot decoration around edge and in centre. 2 small rivet holes at either end. Length 23 mm, mount for bucket or spear? (Figure 15). 5th/6th century. Grave 23: Burial 11. No finds. Grave 25: Burial 12. 7-9 years. SF164, copper-alloy quoit brooch with iron pin, diameter 51 mm, _ inscribed concentric circle with fine punched-dots — infilling triangles between circles, substantial mineralized textile remains on pin (Figure 15). 5th/6th century. rivets, Female(?); 40-45 years. decoration Unprovenanced objects handed in by workmen (Figures 16-20) SF124 (Figure 16). Pattern-welded iron sword, hilt broken off subsequent to discovery. Extant length 758 mm; maximum blade width 48 mm. Miner- alized remains of timber sheath with sheepskin lining, and traces of leather around the base of the hilt. Timber sheath shows traces of curvilinear decoration near the hilt end. SF125 (Figure 16). Pattern-welded iron Overall length 898 mm; hilt length maximum blade width 50mm. Mineralized remains of wooden sheath on blade, also leather on upper part of blade, and textile remains on pommel. ‘Timber sheath shows vestigial remains of sword. 118 mm; linear decoration about a quarter of the way down the blade. The X-ray also suggests that the blade has inscribed curvilinear decoration down its centre. CHARLTON PLANTATION burials excavated by Salisbury Museum Burial 6 f—— wer THN ae AAVOTELOTTTENT Sea 4 | 4 fil Hic tayiny Burial 8 0 5 10 cm. EE Jee rial 9 a eee ee SF 164 \ ) 1 2 3 4 cm WAC Figure 15. Burials salvaged by Salisbury Museum staff. Scales: SF164 1:1, others 1:2. CHARLTON PLANTATION unprovenanced finds pattern weld taken from X-ray Figure 16. Unprovenanced objects. Scale (approx.) 2:9. ———— 10 20 30 40 50 cm. Th 9M Oa = HPV ANY ate AM Al MPU 08, u SIE ag pattern weld taken from X-ray WAC SPC CHARLTON PLANTATION ihe: \ & unprovenanced finds 9 5 10cm. Ta Vie iil Tea ae ui} i) ii il) | { ty j fl TT ene — _— TOA AVATNTeNE TH ortinrurtivettoranniest ATMA BMAD I | SECT Re Cos \ Hl HU itr Figure 17. Unprovenanced objects. Scale 1:2. CHARLTON PLANTATION unprovenanced finds ({}! ren i { jigls ts Ln RAUNT LT A BALLWIN wt. Lat ay Figure 18. Unprovenanced objects. Scale 1:2. CHARLTON PLANTATION unprovenanced finds aA TMK ny eee i) inl HHI Ti ToT IK (i) { I tipi Hy cHTATMONTTOTTTD) TA Mea a ye \ LCA e TA ea ii SF 141 AIMITW Sse Iii My 1/, ; hy ie / 4 / / WAC Figure 19. Unprovenanced objects. Scale 1:2. THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY CHARLTON PLANTATION unprovenanced finds SF 136 WAC SF 134/136 SPC Figure 20. Unprovenanced objects. Scales: SF134 and SF136 1:1, others 1:2. SF120 (Figure 17). Iron shield boss of single-piece construction, with high carination and long (broken) spike and four disc-headed | rivets. Maximum diameter 130 mm; flange width 19 mm, height 100 mm. Traces of mineralized wood, Salix sp. or Populus sp., around rivets. Dickinson (1976) Group 4, 5th century. SF123 (Figure 17). Iron spearhead type K1(°). Length 145 mm, internal socket diameter 14 mm. SF128 (Figure 17). Iron spearhead type H2. Length 233 mm; external socket diameter 21 mm. Miner- alized wood remains (unidentified) in socket. SF135 (Figure 17). Iron spearhead type 3. Length 380 mm; internal socket diameter 12 mm. Miner- alized textile remains on blade. SF127 (Figure 18). Iron spearhead, in superb condi- tion. Length 350 mm; external socket diameter 23 mm. 7 inlaid brass bands around socket, 5 at base of socket, 2 at base of blade. Hexagonal blade shaft. Most like spearheads of type H2. Miner- alized wood remains of shaft, Fraxinus sp. SF165 (Figure 18). Iron spearhead, damaged after discovery, type H3(?). Length 361 mm, internal socket diameter Mineralized wood remains in socket, A/vus sp. 2 extant rivets through socket. SF 121 (Figure 19). Carinated iron shield-boss with 6 silvered rivets and tinned centre stud, apex possibly inserted. Overall diameter 180 mm; flange width 30 mm; height 84+ mm. SF122 (Figure 19). no extant rivets and broken flange and_ spine Diameter 15 mm. Carinated iron shield-boss with probable — single-piece construction. 144 mm; flange width 13 mm, extant height 65 inm. SF126 (Figure 19). Iron spearhead type E1. Length 136 DHE WILTSHIRE 173 mm (socket broken), Mineralized wood remains of shaft probably from Pomoideae family, Pyrus sp. or Sorbus sp. SF10 (Figure 19). Iron knife type B. Length 132 mm. Point broken. SF141 (Figure 19). Iron knife type B. Length 110 mm. Point broken. SF129 (Figure 20). Broken copper-alloy strip with one rounded end. Inscribed circle and punched- dot decoration. Single rivet hole in rounded end. Length 101 mm. Bracelet or bucket binding? SF130 (Figure 20). Broken end fragment of thin copper-alloy bucket-binding with répoussé ‘lobed- arc’ decoration. One rivet hole. Length 32 mm. SF131 (Figure 20). Broken end fragment of thin copper-alloy bucket-binding with répoussé scroll- and-dot decoration. Single rivet hole at end. Length 48 mm. SF132 (Figure 20). Fragment of thin copper-alloy bucket-binding — with decoration. Length 86 mm. SF133 (Figure 20). Fragment of thin copper-alloy bucket-binding with 2 rivet holes. Decoration as SF132, probably. Length 30 mm. SF134 (Figure 20). Triangular thin copper-alloy mount with 3 rivet holes in apices. Length 29 mm. Mount for bucket? SF136 (Figure 20). whorl’ or sword-bead, hemispherical. Diameter 37 mm. SF137 (Figure 20). class I bead. Diameter 9 mm. SF138 (Figure 20). Broken pair of plain copper-alloy tweezers. Length 54 mm. SF139 (Figure 21). Plain copper-alloy trefoil-headed small-long brooch. Length 62 mm. SF142. Roughly cylindrical lump of wood, Length 110 mm, (the oval) 80-60 mm. Taxus sp. Probably small bucket or tankard. (Not illustrated). répoussé ‘lobed-are’ Marvered black glass ‘spindle- Dark orange-brown translucent widths cross-section — 1s ARTEFACT DISCUSSION AND SPECIALIST REPORTS Swords Both swords are unprovenanced and therefore have no other Both are of the ubiquitous ‘narrow-bladed’ type (Bohner 1939, group B) which are not closely-dated, and both have pattern- welded blades (see Figure 16 and Figure 24). The mineralized organic remains of wooden scabbards with artefact or associations. sheepskin lining and leather cover are all standard fittings for such weapons (Harke, pers. comm.), and the carved linear decoration is also not atypical. One ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NYTPURAL FUSTORY MAGAZINE unusual feature, however, on SF125, is the apparent incised curvilinear decoration down the centre of the blade (see drawing of X-ray, Figure 16), for which there does not appear to be a parallel in Anglo-Saxon England (Harke, pers. comm.). As swords are a relatively infrequent find in cemeteries and are a_ time-consuming, therefore presumably ‘expensive’, commodity to produce, they are frequently suggested to indicate ‘high-status’ burials. The lack of provenance at Charlton Plantation is therefore particularly unhelpful in’ the overall assessment of the social structure of the cemetery. Shield bosses Of the four shield bosses found only one (SF63, Figure 4C) can be assigned to a grave and burial (grave 57). It is possible, however, that the rivet gilding found with burial 10 (Figure 15, SFIS0-52) belonged to SF121 (Figure 21), an association compatible with the other artefacts from that burial. All the bosses are carinated with wide rim-flanges and disc-headed rivets. ‘The excavated boss, SF63 (Figure 4C) accompanied the double ‘warrior’ burial in grave 57; 1t was on the shoulders of the bodies (Figure 3). The boss seems to have been put in position without the shield-board, or at least not fixed to it, as the lack of rivets and shield-grip fragments, as well as its position, indicate. ‘There were, however, mineralized remains of wood, either Salix sp. (willow) or Populus sp. (poplar), adhering to the underside of the rim-flange. The boss falls into Dickinson’s category 2 (Dickinson 1976), which has a broad date range, generally in the 6th century. Its association with the two spears, Swanton types L and H2, and the buckle confirms a 6th-century date. he two knives, both Bohner type B, also fit this dating. Parallels for this boss type are known from several sites, including the nearly Petersfinger cemetery (Leeds and Shortt 1953: figure 8 ef a/.). The three unprovenanced — bosses _ fall into Dickinson’s groups 1.1 (SF121, Figure 19); 1.2 (SF122, Figure 19); and 4 (SF120, Figure 17). Of these SF120 is the earliest, a tall, narrow ‘Stachelbucke? derivative (Hirke, pers. comm.), probably of 5th-century date in the upper Thames region (Dickinson 1976). SF121 and SF122 are standard late-5th- to early-6th-century types, although SF121 has more rivets than other examples, such as the one from Portway, Andover, Hants., with 4 rivets (Cook, forthcoming). The number of rivets may result from repair. ‘The rivet-heads of SF121 are silvered, as is the centre stud on S63, grave 57, and the studs from burial 10. The mineralized remains from the bosses suggest that the shield-boards were probably covered with leather. THE EXCAVATION. OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMIOTERY The boards themselves were probably made of Sa/ix sp. (willow) or Populus sp. (popular), quite commonly in use in the Sth and 6th centuries, as at Spong Hill. Historically 77/ia (lime) is the traditional wood for shields, but this does not appear to be common practice before the 7th century. (Iam grateful to the information. ) woods Ancient Monuments Laboratory for this Spearheads Eleven socketed iron spearheads were found, 4 in excavated graves, one salvaged by Salisbury Museum, 6 unprovenanced. The excavated examples were all located on the edge of graves (e.g. Figure 3) approxi- mately level with the skulls or slightly above; 3 were high within the fill of the grave, as if the complete spear had been propped along the edge. The Charlton spearheads have been classified according to Swanton’s (1973) type series. Associations of some excavated spearheads complement Swanton’s suggested date range, on which dating of the unprovenanced examples relies entirely. Table 1 summarizes the spearhead types, with their artefact associations and dating. All the spearhead types are fairly commonly repre- sented in the immediate area of central southern Eng- land, and many are directly paralleled locally. Types H1, H2, J and L were also found at Petersfinger, near Salisbury (Leeds and Shortt 1953), and type H2 also at Witherington (Swanton 1973: 109). One of the type H2 spearheads (SF127 Figure 18), is an exceptionally fine example of an inlaid spear. The iron in this example is exceptionally uncorroded, and the details of the midrib and hexagonal facetted socket are particularly clear. Inlaid spearheads have been found previously at Salisbury and Harnham Hill (Swanton 1973: 109), as well as at more distant sites such as Lyminge II, Kent (Swanton 1973: 109). Various woods were used for the spear shafts, including Fraxinus sp. (ash); A/nus sp. (alder); Salix sp. or Populus sp. (willow or poplar) and one of the Pomoideae family, possibly Pyrus sp. or Sorbus sp. (pear or, whitebeam/rowan). Other remains found on the blades include leather, wood and textile, the last perhaps indicating that the object (e.g. SF165, Figure 18) was wrapped in cloth before deposition. The wood remnants (e.g. SF135, Figure 17) may indicate a plank-lining to the grave. mineralized Knives and scramasax Seventeen whole or fragmentary knives were found, 2 (SF140 and 141, Figure 19) unprovenanced. The knife was the most common object, as is usual in Saxon cemeteries. Four types in Bohner’s (1958) classification were identified: Type A: both back and cutting-edge curve in towards the point. Common throughout Sth—7th centuries. Type B: straight’ back, cutting-edge curved up towards the point. Sth—6th century. grave number SF Swanton date position in grave associated artefact dating Figure number — type (centuries) number 21 149 H1 late 5-6 > bucket mounts?; box fittings? 15 57 (burial 59) 6l H2 6 S edge; adjacent to skull, right iron knife type B; oval iron 4 side buckle 57 (burial 60) 62 I 6 N edge; adjacent to skull, left iron knife type B 3 side 61 25 J late 5-6 adjacent to skull (possibly knife type Al; oval iron 6 misplaced in machining) buckle 78 91 le late 5—6 adjacent to skull, right side ~ 5 unprovenanced 123 KK? late 5-6 — - 17 unprovenanced 126 E1? late 5—6 - - 19 unprovenanced 127 H2 late 5-6 - - 18 unprovenanced 128 H2 6 - - 1e/ unprovenanced 135 K3 6-7 - - 17 unprovenanced 165 113 late 5-early 6- - 18 Table 1, Classification of spearheads. 138 Type C: straight cutting-edge, back curved or angled towards the point. Late 6th or 7th century. Type D: convex cutting-edge and concave back, both curving towards the point. 7th century. Knife type, grave location and position within the grave are summarized in Table 2, together with other rel- evant dating information. Mineralized organic remains adhering to most of the knives indicate that they had horn (or more dubiously antler) handles (e.g. Figure 7D). Evidence for skin or leather along some blades (e.g. Figure 9F) implies either a leather sheath, or beltmounts or straps. Occa- sional mineralized textile remains, probably from clothing, are also present (pages 141-4 below). Knives were recovered from both male and female adult graves, in roughly equal numbers. The actual position of the knife within the grave varied; generally it lay towards the left waist side (e.g. grave 40, Figure 9), apart from the double ‘warrior’ burial in grave 57 (Figure 3) whose 2 type B knives lay on the right-side pelvis of both skeletons. In grave 107 (Figure 12) the knife (type B) lay some distance to the right of the right femur. Grave SF malel Bohner date number number female type (centurtes) 13 163 ? B 5—6 32 155 ? Ae 5-7 38 +0 k D 7 40) 53 F Be 56 49 21 ? B 5-6 57; 60 M Be 5-6 57 66 M B 5—6 9 74 I ( 6-7 61 72 M \l 5—7 63 80M B 5-6 71 87 | ( 6-7 82 85 M ( 6-7 98 109 F B 5-6 106 116 Me ( 6-7 107 104 MP B 5-6 unprovenanced 140 ? B 56 unprovenanced 141 ? B 5-6 Table 2. Classification of knives. THE WILTSHIRE ARCLIXEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL EIS TORY MAGAZINE The ‘scramasax’ from grave 76 (Figure 5), accom- panying an adult male burial, was unique on the site. Since its length, c. 245 mm, falls short of that defining a ‘seax’, it 1s better described as a ‘long knife’ (Hiirke, pers. comm.), although Mrs Hawkes (Meaney and Hawkes 1970) calls such a type at Winnall a ‘scramasax’. Like the knives, it showed mineralized remains of a horn or antler handle and leather traces on the blade. Long knives of this kind appear to be confined to 7th-century male burials (Hirke, pers. comm.), though one from Droxford, Hants. (Aldsworth 1979; figures 19, 12.1) is suggested as of Sth—-6th century date. Buckles and belt/leather fittings Eleven burials were accompanied by buckles, mainly oval or sub-circular and of iron. One was delicate, oval and of copper alloy (Figures 7S). Iwo were composite of iron and copper alloy (Figure 9E; and SF 147, Figure 15). Several of the iron buckles have remnants of mineralized textiles on them (below, pages 141-4). None of the buckles appear to be as early as the Sth century; but three (Figure 9F; Figure 4; and SF147 Figure 15) position in grave associated artefact dating Figure number > bucket binding, etc. 15 adjacent to left arm - 8 under left elbow pursemount, etc. 6,7 under left arm tubular belt-mounts, etc. 9 adjacent to cranium - 8 adjacent to right pelvis spearhead type L; shield- 3 boss adjacent to right pelvis spearhead type H2; 3,4 6th-century buckle adjacent to left pelvis - Il under. left arm spearhead type J 6 under left arm = 6. 7 pelvis, right of centre - 12 adjacent to left elbow buckle, late 7th? 12 under left arm chatelaine, etc. 10 under left arm = 12 adjacent to right femur = 12 ? i 19 ? - 19 TH EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SANON CEMETERY are more likely to be 6th century, one (Figure 11C) is possibly 7th century. SF147, with burial 8 (Figure 15), is a ‘shield-on-tongue’ buckle, well paralleled at Droxford, Hants. (Alsworth 1979: Figure 29, BM9). The Charlton buckle is associated with a kite-shaped stud or rivet (Figure 15, SF148). This type also occurs at Droxford (Aldsworth 1979: Figure 32, BM12 and 13) at Meonstoke, Hants. (Devenish and Champion 1978: Figures 2, 6 and 7), and 1s typical of the ‘Quoit Brooch Style’ (Evison 1965). Similarly the composite buckle from grave 40 (Figure 9E) is associated with two tubular belt-mounts (Figure 9A—B), also typical of the ‘Quoit Brooch Style’ and_ paralleled at Droxford (Aldsworth 1979: figures 33, 42) and Petersfinger (Leeds and Shortt 1953: plate VII, 130). The small plain, oval buckle (Figure 4) is also typical of a 6th-century assemblage. The possible 7th-century buckle (Figure 12) with belt-plate is paralleled at Ford near Salisbury (Musty 1969). The iron buckles in grave 98 (Figure 10G—N) are likely to belong to a chatelaine or bag and are discussed below. Two copper-alloy tubular belt-mounts in grave 40 had simple incised lines along the short edges. Another was found with burial 9, grave 19. They are typical of a 6th-century Quoit Brooch Style assemblage. Finally, two rectangular, double-plate strap-ends (Figure 10, SF115 and 101) were found, one from high in the fill of grave 98, and one accompanying burial 114, grave 100. Both have simple incised double- line lattice decoration on both sides. They make an obvious pair belonging with burial 114, which was disturbed by the cutting of grave 98. They do not appear to be paralleled in the immediate area, and may well be a 7th-century type. Brooches Five brooches were found, 3 from excavated graves (Figures 8C, 8D, 9C), one rescued by Salisbury Museum (Figure 15, SF164) and one unprovenanced (Figure 20, SF139). Two cast-bronze disc brooches with iron pins accompanied burial 17, grave 32, one placed on each shoulder of the burial (Figures 8C, 8D). Both have inscribed concentric circle (‘bull’s eyes’) decoration and signs of having a tinned surface, a feature known in roughly half the brooches of this type (Dickinson 1979: 41). The decorative motif is also standard, though much variety in detail, such as number and position of ‘bull’s eyes’, has been observed. The brooches, 34 and 35—37 mm in diameter, fall close to the mean established size for upper- Thames types (36 mm), where this is the most common type of brooch (Dickinson 1979: 40). Examples from further S 139 are also fairly common, for example at Droxford, Hants. (Aldsworth 1979); Portway, Andover, Hants. (Cook forthcoming); Harnham Hill, Wilts. (Dickinson 1979); and Chessel Down, Isle of Wight (Arnold 1979). A date range for the type from c. AD 450 to 550 has been suggested. Dickinson (1979) argues that they become less common during the latter part of that period, for the majority which have some associations are dated to the 5th-century. Dickinson also argues for an origin within or associated with the ‘Quoit Brooch Style’ school of development. Though not directly associated, several objects belonging to this school including tubular belt mounts and a shield-on-tongue buckle, occur at Charlton Plantation, adding further weight to the argument for a southern ‘English’ devel- opment in the metal-working tradition. Also associated with this development in metal- working tradition are quoit brooches with V-shaped pin slots (Dickinison 1979). One of these occurs at Charlton (Figure 15, SF164); it has a rather more complex design than that cited by Dickinson (1979). It had no accompanying artefacts, and the suggested date range is similar to that of the disc brooches, late 5th to early 6th century. One brooch (Figure 20, SF139) is a plain, trefoil- headed small-long brooch (cf. Leeds 1945: figure 4C), without a pin. Though the small-long brooch is rela- tively frequent in central S England, the square-headed is more common for example Collingbourne Ducis (Gingell 1978: figure 15, 5) and Droxtord (Aldsworth 1978: figure 31, 2 etc.) whereas the trefoil-headed forms appear to have a more easterly distribution in Kent and East Anglia. The Charlton example is apparently unique in Wiltshire. The final brooch (Figure 9C) was found in grave 40, which contained a 6th-century burial of a young female. It is a small, plain copper alloy ‘round-cross’ or ‘cross-patee’ disc brooch with tinned surface, as yet unparalleled. As the grave also contains ‘Quoit Brooch Style’ tubular belt-mounts, it may be another example of a southern English ‘school’ of metalworking in an area which may well be fairly central to the devel- opment of the style. Beads and other glass objects Some 120 beads were found, all but one coming from just six graves — 51 beads from Grave 38; 40 from grave 40; 3 from grave 49; one from grave 71; 21 from grave 85; and + from grave 98. The two sets from graves 38 and 40 were found around the pelvis and upper leg area, indicating a pendant string from the waist (Fig- ures 6 and 9), whilst the others were found in the shoulder. “The general vicinity of the neck or 140 PEE WILTSEURE proportion of amber to glass beads is approximately 2:1 overall. “The beads illustrated show the general shape and size range of the amber beads, and all the glass examples, unless very poorly preserved. ‘he beads fall into the following classes: Glass Class I: ‘quoit-shaped’ Class Il: ‘cylindrical’ Class HI: ‘sub-spherical’, opaque or red Class IV: melon beads Class V: ‘metal-in-glass’ segmental beads Amber Class VI: all types, ranging from narrow cylinders to polygonal to roughly hemispherical — or discoid. Most of the beads can be easily paralleled at cemeteries in the vicinity as well as further afield. It has been suggested (e.g. Dickinson 1979) that amber and metal- in-glass (Class V) beads are of 6th-century date, but some of the Charlton examples, as those from grave 38, seem more likely to be 7th century. A single marvered-glass object (Figure 22, SF136), hemispherical, dark bluey-black, and c. 34 mm in diameter, is likely to be a spindle-whorl or ‘sword- bead’, rather than a bead or pendant. It can be paral- Portway, Andover, Hants. — (Cook, forthcoming). leled at Chatelaine sets, bags and purses Grave 98 produced a chatelaine set or bag, comprising a series of iron rings and buckles (Figure 1OG—N). Remnants of at least one, more likely 2, ivory rings from a bag were found in grave 40. These were probably repaired with the surviving copper-alloy plates (Figure 9], 9X), which suggest a ring diameter of c. 130 mm. No iron rings were found in this grave. ‘The third purse or bag in the form of iron rings and a copper-alloy mount, was found in grave 38. The shield-shaped mount (Figure 7E) is unusual, but paral- leled at Petersfinger (Leeds and Shortt 1953: plate VI, 46) and by an almost identical example from Chessel Down, Isle of Wight (Arnold 1979: figure 4, 8). It is described by Arnold as a pendant bucket mount, but the Charlton example from a 7th-century grave, seems more likely to come from a purse or bag. Cosmetic and jewellery items A small number of items falling into this category were found. ‘They include two bone objects, a pin, the only item found in any child’s grave (grave 67, Figure 14:\) ARCHIAFOLOGICAL AND NYVPEORAL PISPORY MAGAZINE and a plain, 3-plate double-sided comb held together with iron rivets (grave 85, Figure 11B). Metal items include one copper-alloy cosmetic-brush holder (grave 40, Figure 9D), a bronze stud or dise and a bronze necdle (grave 98, Figures 10C, LOE), a pair of plain bronze tweezers (unprovenanced, Figure 20, SF138); and 4 possible bronze bracelet fragments (graves 40, 98, and unprovenanced). The grave 40 fragments (Figure 9L) comprise 2 narrow strips, with punched decoration along the edges wound round to form finger (?) rings. Originally they were probably both part of a single strip, one end of which is tapered, from a bracelet broken in antiquity. The bracelet may have been of Roman date. Similarly the twisted wire loop from grave 98 (Figure 10P) was probably originally a bracelet, again of Roman origin. Pottery, glass and wooden vessels A single fragment of pale blue-ribbed vessel glass was found in grave 34 (Figure 8A). [tis probably of Roman origin and served as an amulet. Finds of pottery were limited to sherds in the fill of the graves, including residual prehistoric and Roman material; no vessels were found as grave goods. A list is in the archive. Wooden vessels are implied from the bronze fittings for ‘buckets’, except for one small gilded cruciform plate and studs, which may be from a small box (Figure 15, SE153). Such a type of box-plate is not common, and its dubious association with other shield fittings suggest an alternative interpretation as a shield-mount. Bucket fittings include fragments of straps (Figure 15, Sk143), decorative mounts (Figure 16, SF154; Figure 20, SF134), and binding strips. One cylindrical lump of wood (identified as Taxus sp., yew), too badly preserved for proper identification, may have been a small bucket. All the bucket bindings are well preserved and decorated with extremely well executed repoussé arcade-and-dot and scroll motifs in various designs. Most of the strips were attached by small bronze rivets, apart from SF1I45 (Figure 15) which was_ soldered. None of the designs has a good direct parallel locally. However, the character of the ‘Quoit Brooch Style’ artefacts from Charlton Plantation adds weight to Arnold’s (1979) suggestion of the development of an English school of metal-working in the Hampshire Basin or Isle of Wight. Textiles by Elisabeth Crowfoot ‘The textile remains from the Anglo-Saxon burials are small, and most in poor condition. Fibres in the threads have all been replaced by metal oxides, with the exception of parts of those on a bronze buckle (Figure 141 EMETERY LO-SAXON (¢ ia) AN A XCAVATION OF E THI xvyp sasadsns souravadde ‘sadAvy IO pyoy Suaagun APo]I Lote [Pus ATUO (v) se ouues aq 01 Apoyrpun ‘xepy aourivadde PpaesOlojop ‘ouresé ‘opun SIDALT SIABIM ‘uids I[QULIRA popuostuz 10 sawn g punoay ‘davaM wos Surpn.noid Is.AVOD YIM? Spaey ‘ouy den, Joo ose Spayjnd suy ‘asooy yieousopun urys pooryda.: DALIM PIIRIOLIOIOP 10 ‘pang punost pains ‘dssvos [OOM Ajqeqoid tpaseuep sovyains Avapo voir [jews AjUO ‘saaAvy ‘sayoqed Jood aoryans ‘sasima Ayqeqo.d joo. Suids uaasun ‘pary (PILZ ANSL]) SUOIADYD ‘SISA ‘sued + ‘yeopa aSpazg ‘ssadey 7 (LT ‘O17 SainSiy) paseuep dovyins ‘payynd spray STUIMMMOI (LULU ¢ OT xX $7 UO 6) BI/IZ Sal x By Uu¢ (ul G/S (61-81/8°”) spraiy) = 1/6 60 X 60 Wut ¢ UO +/9 COKE (2 B90 Gasileed [alex 20nle 2 6/71 “9 (Ge 15 I aa (CIES Ges 6/6 O07 X 8'€ ‘9 WUT ¢ UO g/g FO X. 9°0 OI/c1 * SYOM ¢ ‘SIsIM 7 17 x LY] ww ¢ uo 9/9 AUIMIANSDIML +7 UN0I Aqqra [ES C/G Aqqra Aqqea proryla LEMS Cie Aqqni¢ proiyy spraiyy CECA Aqqey wyqui¢ [Aa 7/2 qaqea aJou-+ puouwreip UdYOIG JO UOIAIYS “TEM 7/7 aavpam LIZ. LIZ, ZIZ. ZIZ. Ald 10 7 TATE ZIZ. Ald 7 JO Z CATE ZIZ. paorydai pootydai poordai jsoul “XU pooryda. pooryda. poordas paseydai paorydai poordai pooe|da. poordai poorydai paorydai paosrydai paorydai agp (z+ a8vd uo panunuos) Crosuaaur ap1yxa yt °§ 94? 1, (q) IpIs QUO IIAO (q) a (v) dor ssosoe quswuyore -uid pur ‘urd proquid “yorq apis Joyo apis auo apis au0 UO. ayoy Jeou ‘yorq yivousopun ‘uid jo dooy aovyins suo uoupisod SBULI UOdT + Suny yoq uod Sut Aoqpe-saddos Sul Aoe-toddoo yoooiq IsIp Aoy[e-taddos yooo.q dstp Aoqpe-taddoo JUIUISL.Y uo. WUIWISeAY apponq uo yoooiq wonb Aoqye-taddoo appnq Aoqpe-taddoo yoalqo uo! (<)diis-pjorys yoalqo oF FE oe) van = Vay +91 etl Aaquinu AY Be 8E Le 8E tC OF tC OF LI ce LI (Ge $I 8t +] ce Cl SC 8 ZI es $I I € DING IaaDvIT (ping n iAZ1 1 AL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAC IC HAKOLOC » WILTSTIRE ARC TEI 142 pasrurep aovfins ‘speatyi 19s1e0d *§90BJ} ISAO [JB S99. Polo e os paseurep DoVJANS “DAO [[e sooe.n ub, poq punol punomn peolyi¢ pasvurep sovyins JO ysowu J9A0 sayoied [yeurs JOO, sisassns douesvodde PpoieIOLIoIIp JOVFAINS DAPROM “Teayo ulds ‘soar. Potoqeos IAOGE (B) JO SIP. ‘Suiddeim xey Atqeqoid nq ‘uids uaaa tsvare pasaueos Jap.10q YEW aAvawne Suiod sou Z, JSALOD ‘speaty pou) asutty ysassns sared ul SutAy, spvasyy aos tpaseuep sdeios jpeus AWdA ‘aavan paseurep STUOULULOD eC x 0'9C. 2 re ~ x va (opryq Wp) Wd ¢°g JOAO0 80. X OT FIX O'F MUMIA SPIU SI/FI-T1 poieunso OT/OL *Y Gl/iely 2 1B) ie (91/7707) WU ¢ uo 8/II—-O1 8/6-8 CI/O1 “9 uno) [[tM3 ie sprolya [3 cfc [TEM 7/7 (Germ [Wise “SIUDUBRY SOG IYI JO SIUIWAINSEALU |[LIOAQ) °¢ “paitis asinsayio say. daoxa ‘wo sad spraiyy ut ate sUnOT) + say paoeyd Buroq peosyi dae ayqeqoad aya ‘sured ay] Jo istwy Suruurds aya aieotpul Gg pue 7 sionay oy “saprxo yeiaut Aq paoejdas saiqy, suvaw paseidoy, “oaks ayi ur algo ay) Jo you ‘yalqo ayi UO apXAI JO UOISOg “| Nm MUOJMIAML IIIXIT °€ Ign T/Z —-pasejdaa = (q) eys uo (v) proyarads poour Z/Z, -pacstjdaa apeyq ayppru uo. 97] -uasoidun Zz qoyoos peay.rads poour S/Z __ pastdar_ puke ‘apis au0 uo. 69] -uovoidun - ulypoqg ‘pnis posrjdar = jeiou punosr — Aoqpe-saddoo 901 ran 86 apryq prayavods pour Z/Z,— -pastjdai jo apis auo uo. cg] -uoroidun - apriq pur aeys prayavads pooue T/Z, paseydar rau ayoos uo. 87] -uoroidun - XeSVLULAIS S/Z -pasetjdar = ao ey.ms_ uo uO 76 06 9/ prayarvods TIZ, — paseydair (q) apts s9yio0 uo! 16 68 8/ proyarads ZIZ, — -pasejdai — (v) apis auo uo. 16 68 RL qyly vou FZIZ, pooryda. sapis y10q aptuy UOT 8 9g IZ proy.avods ZIZ, — paoryda apis au0 uo. 19 66 LS 8 fe yaov{daa (9) suq jpe uo uid uodt 1s ¢ S¢d/Z I | 'q Il 5 ot ce BE AOQuul uds -atqgyy uousod joalqo As [PLING dae THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY tlt I= 0 pe —Il-y1-;— ee ee est Den ey rl Lar mute Tee Ae —j—)—)|}—|— |}. — = — — = — a eeess Roel ARS a b c d Figure 21. Textiles: a. Tabby (plain) weave; b. 2/2 (four-shed) toll; c. z/z warp chevron twill, displaced meeting; d d¢lhole tablet wedve. OF) in Grave 40; these, too deteriorated — for identification, were probably flax. The appearance of some of the oxide replacements, however, indicates which were originally of flax and which of wool. The weaves are those normally found in Anglo- Saxon cemeteries — tabby (plain) weave (Figure 21 a); 4-shed (2/2) twills (Figure 21 b), in one case with inaccurate reverses (Figure 21 c); and tablet-weave (Figure 21 d). Of the 9 tabby weaves 5 can be described as fine, with counts from c. 21/18 threads per cm (grave 38, SF46, Figure 7K) to 12-14/16 (SF126, Figure 19), their appearance suggests flax, in 3 cases perhaps cloths wrapping objects with the burial (grave 38, iron rings; grave 57, burial 59 and SF126, spearheads), in 2 perhaps women’s headveils (burials 12, 24). The other 3 tabby weaves, all of medium grade, have more the appearance of wool, perhaps from the women’s gowns, pinned by the brooch in burial 17 (grave 32), and lying against the rings in grave 40 (a), and from a cloak or blanket spread over or lying against the scramasax in the man’s burial 90, grave 76. The 9 certain fwi//s are, as far as can be seen, all 4-shed constructions. Three, medium grade, have the mixed spinning — Z-spun warp, S-spun weft — often found in good clothing fabrics, tunics or light cloaks (graves 3, 17 and SF 165); only one, that from burial 1, grave 3, shows reverses in the weave, with the usual inaccurate meeting found in northern weaving and associated with the use of the warp-weighted loom, from either a chevron twill (Figure 21c) or else part of a broken diamond pattern, with reverses in warp and weft directions. The other 6 fwills have Z-spinning in warp and weft. Five, on 3 spearheads (grave 57, SF135 and SF91), a buckle (SF156) and a belt-fitting (grave 38), suggest medium to coarse cloaks, or blankets laid over the -graves, some paired threads of that in grave 57 (burial 59) suggesting a fringe. The last, on the pin of a brooch in grave 32 (burial 17) is an unusual piece; one system (?warp) is fine and hard-spun, the other (?weft) coarse and loose. nearly warp There — is always a 143 preponderance in finer twills woven on the warp- weighted loom, but the weft, though sometimes softer, is usually of the same grade as the warp; the very coarse soft weft here, which gives a count of c. 18—20/6-8 estimated per cm, is very noticeable. Unfortunately the fragments are small and deteriorated; the presence of a stripe or other decorative feature might account for its coarse wefts. Small traces of twists, probably from tablet-weaves, survive in 3 graves. One clear example, on an iron fragment from burial 7 (grave 15), is a solid, rather coarse scrap in 4-hole tablet-weave with the twists lying in chevrons (tablets threaded right and left, Figure 21 d); both edges are missing, but the coarseness of the piece suggests the border woven on a cloak or blanket, rather than a separate braid or belt. Traces on a knife in grave 57 (burial 59), with coarse threads perhaps from the main weave near the point, may indicate a similar origin, while the twists on a quoit brooch from burial 12 are more likely to come from a decorative braid edging the neck of the woman’s dress. The rather limited range of textiles in this cemetery are similar in spinning, weave and quality to those published from a number of Anglo-Saxon sites (Crowfoot 1978 a and b, 1981 imter alia), with the exception of the twill fragments from burial 17 described above, which is unlike anything so far recorded. THE HUMAN SKELETAL MATERIAL by Janet D. Henderson ‘The human skeletal remains from 43 inhumations and one cremation at Charlton Plantation were examined in the Ancient Laboratory. Bone preservation was generally poor — only 3 skeletons Monuments could be described as being in a fair condition and this much restricted what could be observed and deduced. The individual summaries and complete inventories of the bones and teeth present of each individual. The material was examined for details of demo- graphy (sex, age and stature) and health, and for skeletal and dental metrical and morphological variables. The sample was far too small for analysis of this last category. he observations fitted well within bounds of variability. Individual results are listed in the archive (Appendix 4). archive contains Sex (Vable 4) Attribution of sex was either probable (male/female), possible (?male/?female), or impossible (adults lacking diagnostic material and infants, juveniles and sub- adults). 144 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NYPURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE The sample was very small and almost half of it was classed as ‘not sexed’. One could only note a relatively even distribution between the sexes. sex number male 9 >?male 3 female 8 ?female + not sexed! PB Total 44 1. Includes cremation. Table 4. Human skeletal material by sex. Age (able 5) Table 5 gives standardized results for age; that is, the infants, juveniles and sub-adults appear in 5 year groups, along with the adults. The age results show a fairly even spread, and the slight peak at the 20—25 age-group has no statistical significance. age (years) number 0-5 5-10 10-15 15-20 20-25 25-30 30-35 35-40 40-45 45-50 SO+ we NO Hwa few f rv Gi adult 35—45 I unverifiable 3 total 44 Table 5. Human skeletal material by age. Stature (Table 6) Poor preservation so affected the estimation of stature that it could be assessed only for 16 individuals of the 44. The range and the sexual dimorphism were not unusual. stature (m) number 1.50-1.54 1 female 1.55—1.59 + female 1.60-1.64 2 female 1.65-1.69 = 1 70S1-74 6 male 1.75-1.79 2 male 1.80-1.84 | male total 16, 7 female, 9 male Table 6. Human skeletal material by stature. Dental wear The degree of wear on the occlusal surfaces of the dentition increased with age on all teeth. Further, as has been found with other Anglo-Saxon population samples (Miles 1963), the rate of wear was generally high — suggestive of a coarse diet. Younger individuals (in particular burials 24, 59, 75 and 93) showed a relatively greater degree of wear on the incisors, espe- cially when compared to the molar teeth. Caries Carious infection of the teeth was found in 4 individuals. Only 18 of the 44 individuals (41%) had teeth available for examination; 454 teeth were present from those 18 out of a maximum total of 579 or 79% (based on an adult dentition of 32 teeth). Eleven of those teeth had carious lesions, a low rate of 2.4%. The DM rate (decayed and missing antemortem as a percentage of teeth) was 4.85% (the advantage of the DM rate is the allowance it makes for disease in teeth lost antemortem). Other Anglo-Saxon samples have been given DM rates of 5.6% (Brothwell 1966) and 8.1% (Hardwick 1960), much higher than at Charlton. This finding, although weakened by the small size of the sample was consistent with that of Moore and Corbett (1971; 1973) of a lower incidence of caries among Anglo-Saxons than in either Roman or medieval times; its likely cause was the relatively coarser diet of the period. Otherwise, the pattern of decay resembled that in Moore and Corbett (1971). Except for one caries on an incisor, only molars were affected; the most frequent site of attack was the cemento-enamel junction at the interstitial margins. Caries varied in size from small to large. On only one example (burial 70) was there an abscess present which could probably be associated with a caries on the adjacent tooth. A bscesses Only 3 abscesses were present in the 369 sockets which could be examined (64% of the maximum possible total THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY for the 18 individuals) this could not be taken as a significant result. All 3 occurred on the buccal surface of the jaw, 2 small and one moderate in size. One (burial 4) showed antemortem loss of the adjacent tooth, another (burial 35) half loss of the tooth crown and pulp exposure, and the third (burial 70) a caries in the tooth — all indications of contigous dental disease possibly associated with the lesion. Antemortem tooth loss Teeth had been lost antemortem in 5 individuals, a rate of loss of 2% (antemortem loss as a percentage of maximum possible teeth), much lower than that reported for Anglo-Saxons (14.15%) by Brothwell (1966). Since many of the 18 individuals could not be fully examined due to their incomplete maxillae and mandibles, this result was not significant. Periodontal disease Alveolar recession of bone (generally associated with periodontitis during life) was recorded on a scale 1-3 (slight — severe). Slight periodontal disease was not found over the age of 25; moderate incidence ranged from 20-45 (with only one individual in the age bracket 40-43); and severity was seen in those aged 45+ — the normal pattern of severity increasing with age. A hint that the disease was progressing relatively fast — 2 individuals aged 20-25 were scored as moderate — may have been an accident of the small sample size. Other observations of dental disease These were largely confined to impacted teeth and partial anodontia (absence of teeth). Two individuals (Burials 60 and 93) had impacted teeth, in both the left mandibular canine. There was no evidence (on X-ray examination) for resorbtion of the teeth involved. Although any tooth may be impacted, the most common are the third molars, followed by the maxillary canines, according to Shafer, Hine and Levy (1974), who reported an incidence of third molar impaction of 22% (maxillary) and 18% (mandibular), and of maxillary canine impaction of only 0.9%. (No figures are available for other teeth). Partial anodontia was present in the same 2 individuals, burials 60 and 93. Burial 93 showed absence of a maxillary third molar, a mandibular second molar and both mandibular third molars, burial 60 both mandibular second premolars and third molars. ~ Burial 60 also retained some deciduous teeth — a maxillary canine, a mandibular canine, and both man- dibular second molars. Absence of teeth is a fairly common condition; an incidence of third molar absence of 35% is given by Shafer, Hine and Levy (1974), and 145 the teeth missing here were the ones most often missing. he deciduous retention seen in burial 60 may have been associated with this absence in the permanent dentition. Burials 60 and 93 were involved in both impaction and absence. Tooth absence, in particular, tends to show familial tendency (Shafer, Hine and Levy 1974); it is possible that this was the case here. Bone pathology Poor preservation was, probably, in part responsible for the scant evidence for disease. There were no examples of major disease or trauma, and the only evidence for infection which had spread to the bone was some slight sub-periosteal deposition of new bone on the shafts of the right tibia and fibula on burial 75. A tentative identification could also be made of: Spondylosis deformans (burial 41); congenital fusion of cervical vertebrae (burial 60), and cribra_ orbitalia (burial 83). Fuller details are given in the archive. The cremation Individual details of this burial (36) have been included with the results for the inhumations. The sample was extremely small (a few grams only), too small to reveal anything about cremation practice. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS The inevitable drawbacks of salvage work, conducted under less than ideal conditions and the relatively small number of graves ruled out deductions as to site status, organisation and so on. The excavation at Charlton Plantation nevertheless provides a useful addition to the early Saxon period in the central Avon Valley. The Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at Petersfinger and Harnham Fill, Salisbury, occupy very similar topographic posi- tions to Charlton Plantation, overlooking the valley of the Avon on its N and §S sides respectively. These two sites, within 5 km of Charlton Plantation, are of similar date. There are other cemeteries at Coombe Bissett, St Edmunds Hall, Salisbury, Ford and Winterbourne Gunner to the N of Salisbury. A single ‘warrior’ burial was found in 1836 at Witherington Ring, directly across the river from Charlton Plantation (Figure 1). To the S, the nearest known cemetery is the late 6th-/7th-century site at Christchurch, Dorset (Jarvis 1983), again on the W side of the river Avon floodplain. Stray finds from the general area include a ‘weapon’ from near Clearbury Ring (Hawkes 1970) and a crema- tion from near Fordingbridge, Hants. (? Gorley) (Hawkes 1970). Examination of the finds suggests that the cemetery at Charlton Plantation was in use for at least 150 years @) Adult Male @) Adult Female (1) Adult ? D Sub-adult Ge) Juvenile/Child QD Sth/6th C @ Late 6th/7th C ©) Unassigned @ Shield — Scramasax © Belt fittings ® Bucket Metal jewellery 4 Chatelaine Cosmetic Implements 25 metres Jewellery | Legend Belt fittings PLANTATION CHARLTON Weapons Date Age/Sex Grave plan class distributions. and object Date, age and sex, Figure 22. THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY (Figure 22). It is reasonable to think that the narrow transect investigated established the N-S extent of the cemetery; but its E and W limits are difficult to estimate. The finds handed in, before systematic recov- ery began, suggest an minimum of 7 individual graves were lost; but, if the density was similar to that found in the excavated section, up to 60 graves could have been destroyed. Unfortunately the question can never be fully answered. The westerly limits are likewise difficult to estimate without further work. However, the topography field boundaries and lynchets running across the sloping land to the W. The lowest (N—S) one of those, some 30 m away from the excavated area, could define the extent of the cemetery, as it coincides with the slope to the W becoming steeper as it rises towards the copse of Charlton Plantation on the hilltop. A low mound, some 15 m SW of the S end of the excavation, could be the remnants of a barrow, which may have formed a focal point for the development of the cemetery in the early period. Clearly the cemetery have substantially larger than is currently recorded, possibly containing several hundred individuals. The evidence from the finds, the potential extent of the cemetery, the skeletal material, with its range of ages from infant to mature adult, both male and female, all suggest that it served a small village or hamlet. No settlement sites are known in the immediate area. The nearest is a site discovered during rescue work in a gravel pit at Hucklesbrook, some 15 km to the S, which produced a sunken-featured structure together with a small amount of early Saxon pottery (Graham 1984). In addition the important work by the Avon Valley Group, in fieldwalking the lower (Hampshire) end of the valley around Breamore, has produced vegetable- tempered pottery scatters and likely settlement sites (the author is grateful to Tony Light for discussion of these sites). To the N finds of similar pottery were made SW of Petersfinger, near Dairyhouse Bridge, in trial excavations by Salisbury Museum Research absolute suggests must been 147 Group (David Algar, comm.). A further indication of the importance of the river valleys in the pers. location of Saxon settlements comes from recent work in the Itchen Valley near Winchester. Here a set- tlement with at least 6 sunken-featured structures and 200 m_ of the immediately adjacent to the cemetery excavated by Mrs Hawkes (Fasham ef a/., in prep.). In contrast other settlement sites lie on higher ground, as at Charlton, Hants., (Addyman_ and Hughes 1972) and Bishopstone, Sussex (Bell 1978). Bishopstone lay immediately adjacent to its cemetery, but upslope on the same spur of land. It has often been associated pits lay within river, proposed that the earliest Saxon settlements lay on the higher ground and that the valley bottoms were utilized in a secondary phase, perhaps of deliberate re-location. Indeed, even the preponderance of vegetable-tempered pottery at the Itchen Valley site, though frequently a 5th- or 6th-century item, need not necessarily imply an early date for that site, since other finds are more commonly associated with later, Middle Saxon sites, and the pottery fabric itself is current in Hamwic (Saxon Southampton) into the 8th century. Perhaps therefore the earliest settlement site to which the cemetery belongs lay upslope towards the downs, and_ the present village of Charlton, a little over | km to the S, represents this secondary phase or relocation of set- tlement. The cemetery might have remained in use for some time, following such a re-siting of settlement, perhaps remaining on the periphery of the village ‘territory’ as a boundary marker. The Avon Valley around and S of Salisbury now contains a wealth of cemetery data for the early Saxon period. Hints towards the contemporary settlement pattern are beginning to emerge. It is only by continuing this work and by increasing survey, exca- vation if necessary, and documentary study that the cemeteries can be located in their landscape and the development of that landscape of the post-Roman period fully understood. Appendix 1: The Prehistoric Features Pits Four small pits lay in a rough arc, towards the southern extremity of the site (Figure 2). One (44) had been damaged in the roadwork machining, and one (102) was cut by an Anglo-Saxon grave, 71. Three of the pits (69, - 88, and 102) had very similar dark brownish-black clayey-loam fills, whilst the fill of the fourth (44) was lighter orange brown in colour and more clay-like. Pit 44 was sub-circular c. 0.45 m in diameter and 0.12-0.15 m deep, with an irregular base. It is possible that ‘pit’ 44 represents the butt end of a small ditch, rather than a discrete pit. Pit 69 was roughly circular, 0.45 m in diameter and 0.15 m deep, with straight sides and a flat base. Pit 88, again sub-circular in plan, was 0.65 by 0.55 mand 0.15 m deep. Pit 102, only half extant, was 0.36 m in diameter and 0.16 m deep. The functions of these features are uncertain; 69, 88 and 102 may be postholes from a building. 148 THE WILTSHURE Pottery (Vable 7)! Two distinct fabrics were discovered, one (fabric 7) exclusive to pit 44, the other (fabric 6) confined to pits 69, 88 and 102. Fabric 6 is a dark orange-brown, friable sandy fabric, with frequent inclusions of medium, rounded quartz, fairly common iron ore and rare flint up to | mm. Fabric 7, varying from dark orange to dark grey in colour, is tempered from sparse to common angular calcined flint, | to 6 mm in size. One fabric 7 rim and one sherd had cord-impressed decoration; and a single plain rim is fabric 6 (Figure 23). Fabric 7 pottery is probably late neolithic and fabric 6 late Beaker. Context Fabric Number of sherds weight (g) 44 7 17 18 69 6 34 173 88 6 28 37 102 6 18 138 Table 7. Pottery from prehistoric features. Flint by Philip Harding? Flint was collected from three (88, 44, 69) of the four features at the southern end of the site (Table 8). A fourth group was found as re-sorted material in grave 71, which may have originated from pit 102. All material was recovered manually, although a sample of the contents from pit 69 was sieved through a 1 mm mesh. ‘This feature consequently produced more knap- ping chips. Three tools came from features: Fabricator (Figure 23.A) made ona flake, 59 X 29 mm, D-shaped section. Glossy slightly rolled condition, lightly patinated. Heavily worn at one end, but some wear on the edges and opposite end. Grave 71. End scraper made on a flake, 53 xX 43 mm. Clark’s (1960) type An. Convex scraping edge made by abrupt, direct retouch. Some deposition of calcium 1 The author is grateful to Dr A. B. Ellison and Dr I. F. Smith for examining this material 2) ‘The author wishes to thank Dr . Moss for her information on the microwear. ARCTIAEFOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 5cm A 8 Figure 23. Prehistoric pottery and flint. Scale 1:2. carbonate on dorsal and ventral surfaces. Pit 44. End scraper or knife made on a flake, 72 x 45 mm. Convex distal end made by semi-abrupt, direct retouch. Pit 44. Mottled dark grey flint is available from the chalk and overlying clay with flints. Most of the material from features which are cut into periglacial hollows is unpatinated, however flint from features cut into chalk has developed a light patination. Most of the material is in mint condition and probably results from core trimming of a flake industry produced by hard-hammer percussion (Ohnuma and Bergman 1984). The lack of a larger sample prevents further comment on_ the technology. The relatively high proportion — of retouched pieces (at least 6 pieces) suggests that this does not represent industrial activity. Six pieces including the fabricator have dulled flake scars and may be residual. A micro-denticulate from pit 88, with gloss on the broken burnt retouched context flakes flakes flakes flakes chips tools miscellaneous 44 l 6 l - 10 z I 69 - 5 2 - 100+ — — 71 6 12 - - 6 Il 2 88 5 + - 3 = = = Table 8. Flint from prehistoric features. THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY ventral surface (Figure 23.B), was submitted to Dr E. Moss (Institute of Archaeology, London) for microwear analysis. She confirmed the presence of gloss and detected further traces along the distal edge. She regards this as having formed from use, probably in a planing motion, on an unidentified fibrous vegetable substance. Possible materials include reeds, flax or leguminous crops, but not wood. As the collection is in mint condition and includes at least 2 other micro-denticulates, other pieces may have microwear traces. Unfortunately the remainder could not be examined in detail. The flint appears to form part of a homogenous industry producing flakes by hard-hammer percussion. Its condition and the presence of knapping chips 149 suggests that it is broadly contemporary with filling of the features and thus with the pottery; it was most probably incorporated into the features from the immediate vicinity. Some of the material was clearly utilized before its incorporation into the features. This assemblage, although small, forms an important addition to late prehistoric flintwork. The potential survival of microwear traces offers a rare opportunity for the study of tool use in an area where surface traces are normally destroyed by patination. These traces stress the potentially rapid turnover of unretouched tools as well as showing the apparently random nature of their selection, so that vast numbers consequently go unrecognized. Appendix 2: The Conservation Work, Resulting Technological and Organic Information, and the Treatment of Objects by Anne-Maria Bojko Finds were deposited at the laboratory of the Wiltshire County Museum Service at Salisbury immediately after their excavation. It was hoped that speedy treatment would minimise post-excavation deteriora- tion, so that the maximum amount of information about the artefacts could therefore be retrieved. The role of the conservation laboratory is not only to stabilise objects, and prepare them for display, but also to discover any technological features which they may exhibit, and to analyse any other useful information they retain. Space here only allows a summary of the more interesting features which were noted; a full report is in the site archive. Information retrieved from the artefacts falls into two broad categories: technological details, revealed by such techniques as X-radiography; and the evidence of organic material, which may be retained in the corrosion products of the metal artefacts. Technological information All metal artefacts are X-rayed by the laboratory prior to their examination and treatment. X-ray study is invaluable in revealing construction features such as brazed joints or surface coatings and inlays, which may not be apparent beneath — the crust. _ Additionally, it indicates the underlying condition of the object, showing hidden areas of weakness. X-radiography of the Charlton Plantation material has revealed several interesting features. Of especial note are the radiographs of the swords (Figure 24) which clearly demonstrate that the central portions of corrosion the blades have been pattern-welded, and the cutting- edges then forged separately on to this central core. Unfortunately, as Anstee and Biek (1961) have pointed out, the exact method of manufacture of a given blade cannot be determined from radiographs alone, as dif- ferent methods of similar patterns. Construction method can only be determined conclusively by cutting a section through the blade. The Charlton swords are too fragile to allow met- allographic examinations of this nature. X-radiography also revealed surface coatings and construction produce inlay beneath the corrosion crust of several artefacts; cleaning proved these to adhere well to the surface of the objects and to be in good condition. Tinning was the most common type of surface decoration, but silvering and gilding were also recorded. Surface coatings were analysed by Justine Bayley at the Ancient Monuments Laboratory using — the technique of X-ray fluoresence (XRF). Although no attempt was made to analyse the composition of all the copper-alloy objects from the site, some analyses were made as a by-product of examinations of objects which had been tinned, silvered or gilded. In this relatively small number of objects investigated, alloys such as brass and ‘gun metal’ appear as prevalent as tin, lead and bronze. The corrosion products of all these alloys tend to disfigure their true nature, and may lead to their convenient, but misleading classification as ‘bronze’. Mineralized organic remains As soil conditions rule out its unaltered preservation, 150 THE WILTSHIRE Figure 24. X-radiograph of a section of the pattern-welded blade organic material survives only as mineralizations or ‘replacements’ by iron or copper salts. As mineralized material is generally confined to a thin layer on the surface of metal artefacts, the excavators were careful to lift all objects with a generous portion of adhering soil. No cleaning of finds took place on site — an extremely important point, as many of these deposits are indistinguishable to the naked eye from the soil and corrosion surrounding the object, and only become apparent when it is cleaned under magnification. All cleaning of artefacts was therefore undertaken in the laboratory using a low-powered binocular microscope. Careful examination resulted in the discovery of miner- alized wood, textile, horn/antler, leather and animal fur. The most substantial traces of mineralized wood were preserved on the weapons, notably the swords and spearhead sockets (Figure 25). In the case of sword SF 124 (Figure 17), iron salts from the blade preserved the wooden scabbard sufficiently to retain features of its surface decoration (Figure 26). Samples of the mineralized wood were examined by scanning electron microscope at the Ancient Monuments Laboratory, \RCHLIAEFOLOGICAL AND NYVEORAL FISTORY MAGAZINE of sword SF 125. Figure 25. Scanning electron micrograph of mineralized wood from the scabbard of sceord SF125 (X 300). and the majority of the identifications were done by Jacqui Watson. The only substantially unmineralized wood was in association with the copper-alloy bucket bindings. Here, their survival is probably due to the toxicity of copper salts to micro-organisms responsible for the THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SANON CEMETERY breakdown of organic material. Deposits resembling thin whitish filaments were noted on several copper- alloy objects; they appeared more prevalent on objects found on, or in close proximity to the skeleton, and are likely to be the remains of nematode worms poisoned by the copper salts while feeding on the corpse. Their presence on copper-alloy artefacts has been noted by other investigators. Skin product, or leather from the site survives on a number of objects, both mineralized with iron and ~ unmineralized with copper alloy. Traces on the blades of several knives suggest these had been leather sheaths. Identification of species, however, was impossible. Several of the copper-alloy objects retained traces of unmineralized skin product. The largest piece was on Figure 26. Detail of decoration on the scabbard of sword SF 124. the back of the quoit brooch with burial 12 (Figure 15). This may represent the remains of a leather jerkin; but, given the inhibiting effects of decay of copper salts, it may equally be traces of the corpse’s own skin, and it is unwise to draw any inferences about clothing. Microscopic examination also detected the presence of horn or antler on several objects, notably the hilts of the swords, and the tangs of several knives. (Horn, antler and bone are notoriously difficult to differentiate between when degraded and stained with metallic salts.) However, their laminar structure points to their being either horn or antler rather than bone. The final type of mineralized material is textile and animal fibre. Textiles from the site survive almost exclusively in the form of mineralizations. Degree of THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NAXEORAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 152 Figure 27. Mineralized textile from the fragment of shield grip SF143. preservation varies enormously; in the better-preserved examples, the direction of spin and the weave are clearly visible (Figure 27) (report by Miss E. Crowfoot, above). Animal fur is represented by the sheepskin inner lining of a sword scabbard. In a sample examined using a scanning electron microscope the iron salts had made several good casts of the fibres, the bract patterns being clearly visible (Figure 28). Careful examination produced a surprising amount of detailed information despite difficult excavation condi- tions. We were extremely fortunate to work on the Figure 28. Scanning electron micrograph of mineralized animal fibres lining the scabbard of sword SF124 (x 300). SEM facilities for Figures 25 and 28 were provided by the Ancient Monuments Laboratory. THE EXCAVATION OF AN ANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY material so quickly, as this made examination and cleaning much easier. A further point which has become apparent is the need for excavators to record which way up objects were lying in the burial envir- onment. At present, this is hardly ever done. It would be of enormous help in interpreting traces of organic material which could point to the presence of such features as wooden linings within graves. Treatment In accordance with general conservation principles, treatments were selected which would be. stable, reversible and in no way detrimental to the objects. Because the finds were to be treated almost immediately, they were first stored in conditions approximating those of the burial environment — kept damp in the soil in which they were lifted, and sealed in plastic bags. This prevented the surrounding soil from forming concretions. However, this type of storage is risky if a period longer than a few days is likely to elapse between excavation and treatment, as the damp accelerates the corrosion processes which recommence when the objects are disturbed from the equilibrium which they have reached with their burial envir- onment. All cleaning was done under magnification. Because delicate organic material survived, all the initial cleaning was carried out using handtools such as scalpels and needles. (Chemical cleaning is not gene- rally appropriate to excavated material, as it may strip 153 away any surviving patina, destroy organic material, and leave the object with an unsightly appearance.) All cleaning of the copper-alloy objects was completed with handtools. Several iron objects were also cleaned by air abrasion, after they had been examined to determine the extent and nature of any surviving organic remains. The air-abrasive machine produces a fine yet of compressed air mixed with abrasive powder which can be directed at the area to be cleaned. Both air pressure and powder flow are adjustable, and the device allows controllable and efficient cleaning of the corrosion crust down to the original surface. As some abrasion also takes place where the flow is not spe- cifically directed, the method is not really suitable for objects which retain large areas of mineralized organic material. When the mineralized organic material appeared integral to the artefact, as was the case with the sword scabbards and knife tangs, it was consolidated i situ. Unfortunately, some of the mineralized textile was found to be obscuring surface detail on some of the objects, and it was therefore removed. This was only done after the remains had been identified by Miss Crowfoot, and after a photographic record had been made. After cleaning, the metal artefacts were stabilized by standard conservation methods: the copper alloy was immersed in 3% benzotriazole, and the ironwork was desalinated. In order to give further protection against corrosion, the metal artefacts were then lacquered. Appendix 3: index to excavation archive in Salisbury Museum File 1 Field records Graphics index Photographic index SF index Context index Burial index Context records Levels book Site notebook File 2: Finds records and specialist reports Inventory of grave goods by burial and by box location. SF forms. _ Analysis of finds: beads and glass; copper-alloy objects; brooches; weapons; knives; buckles/chatelaines; pottery — fabrics, prehistoric, Saxon, and summaries; flint — record and report. Specialist reports: textile by Elisabeth Crowfoot; wood identification by Jacqui Watson, technical report on the metalwork by Anne-Maria Bojko; human bone by Janet Henderson. Human bone analysis archive: appendix 1, individual results: bone preservation, sex, age, and _ stature; appendix 2, results for sex, age and stature; appendix 3, demographic methods; appendix 4, metric and morphological variables; appendix 5, index of abbre- viations, metric and morphological appendix 6, bone pathology — individual details; bibhography. variations; Acknowledgements. Alison Borthwick and Roy Canham of Wiltshire County Council Archaeological Service not only co-ordinated arrangements for access but also participated in the digging, along with their colleagues Ann Beard, Steve Hartgroves, Lesley Marshman and Bob Smith. Peter Saunders and Clare Coneybeare of Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, along with members of the Museum Research Group, in particular David Algar and John Hadley, did a stalwart salvaging job before the roadworks were stopped. Michael Corfield and his staff, particularly Anne-Maria Bojko and Lynn Wootton, frequently provided advice and assistance on-site in addition 154 THE WILTSHIRE to examining and conserving the material in the laboratory. 1 should also like to thank the many others who rallied round and gave up their weekends to ‘rescue’ Charlton Plantation: the Avon Valley Group, notably Tony, Light and Harold Hanna; the Wessex Archaeology Group; staff and students of the Department of Archaeology, Uni- versity of Southampton; and my colleagues from the Trust for Wessex Archaeology Unit. Wiltshire County Council kindly provided a caravan and allowed the access to the site. | am grateful to the Earl of Radnor for allowing access to his land during the excavation and for his great interest in the site. Many people assisted at the post-excavation stage and | am most grateful for the advice and comments received from then, in particular to Chris Arnold, Tim Champion, Vania Dickinson, Bruce Eagles, Heinrich Harke, Ann Ellison, David Hinton, Andrew Lawson and Martin Welch. Analytical and wood-identification facilities were provided by Justine Bayley and Jacqui Watson of the Ancient Monuments Laboratory. The drawings were executed by Stephen Crummy of the Trust for Wessex Archaeology Unit, occasionally assisted by the author, The excavation was financed by the Department of the Environment. BIBLIOGRAPHY ADDYMAN, P. V,, and LEIGH D., 1978. The Anglo Saxon village at Chalton, Hants: second interim report, Aled. Archaeol. 17: 1-25. ACKERMAN, J. Y., 1853. An account of excavations in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Harnham Hill, Salisbury, Arch. J. 35: 259-78. \LDSWORTH, F., 1979. Droxford Anglo-Saxon cemetery, Soberton, Hampshire. Proc. Hants. Field Club Archaeol. Soc. 35: 93-182. ANSTEE, J. W., and BIEK, L., 1961. A study in pattern welding, Med. Archaeol. 5: 71-93. ARNOLD, C. J., 1979. Anglo Saxon cemeteries on the Isle of Wight. Unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Southampton. BELL, M., 1978. Excavations at Bishopstone, Swssex Archaeol. Coll. 115. BOHNER, K., 1958. Die Frankischen Altertiimer des Trierer Landes. Berlin. BROTHWELL, D. R., (ed.), 1963. Dental Anthropology. London. BROTHWELL, D. R., and BLAKE, M. L., 1966. The human remains from the Fussell’s Lodge long barrow, in P. Ashbee, The Fussell’s Lodge long barrow, Archaeologia 100; 1-180. CLARK, J. G. D., 1960. Excavations at the neolithic site at Hurst Fen, Mildenhall, Suffolk, 1954, 1957 and 1958, Proc. Prehist. Soc. 26: 202-45. COOK A., forthcoming. Andover, Hants. CROWFOOT, E., 1978a. The textiles, in C. J. Gingell, Early Anglo- Saxon cemetery at Collingbourne Ducis, WAAI 70/71: 66, 70, 71, 78, 79-82, 85, 87. CROWFOOT, E., 1978b. The textiles, in B. Green and A. Rogerson, The Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Bergh Apton, Norfolk, East. Ang. Arch. 7: 98-106. The Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Portway, ARCHIARFOLOGICAL AND NATURAL PISTORY MAGAZINE CRO WEOOT, E., 1981. The textiles, in A. M. Cook, The Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Fonaby, Lincolnshire, Occ. Papers in Lincs. Hist. & Arch. 6: 89-100. DEVENISH, D. C., and CHAMPION, T. C., 1978. A’ sixth-century Anglo-Saxon grave at Meonstoke, Hants, Proc. Hants. Field Club Archaeol. Soc. 34: 37-42. DICKINSON, T. M., 1976. The Anglo-Saxon burial sites of the Upper Thames and their bearing on the history of Wessex c. AD 400-700. Unpublished D Phil. thesis, Oxford. DICKINSON, T. M., 1979. On the origin and chronology of the early Anglo-Saxon dise brooch, in Hawkes, Brown and Campbell (1979): 39-80. EVISON, V. L., London. FASHAM, P. J., ef a/., in preparation. The Anglo-Saxon settlement at Martyr Worthy, near Winchester. GRAHAM, A. H., settlement found during gravel extraction near Hucklesbrook, in the Avon valley, Hampshire, Proc. Hants. Field Club Archaeol. Soc. 40: 127-30. HARDWICK, J. L., throughout the ages in relation to the Englishman’s diet, Brit. Dent J. 108: 9-17. HAWKES S., BROWN, D., and CAMPBELL J., (eds.) 1979. Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History: 1. Oxford: British Archaeological 1965. The Fifth-Century Invasions South of the Thames, 1984. Evidence of prehistoric and Anglo-Saxon 1960. The incidence and distribution of caries Reports, no. 72. JARVIS, K.S., 1983. Excavations in Christchurch 1969-1980. Dorchester: Dorset Nat. Hist. Archaeol. Soc. Monograph no. 5. LEEDS, FE. T., 1945. The distribution of the Angles and Saxons archaeologically considered, Archaeologia 91: 1-106. LEEDS, E. T., and SHORTT, H de S., 1953. An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Petersfinger, near Salisbury, Wilts. Salisbury: Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum. MEANEY, A. L., and HAWKES, S, C., 1970. Two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at Winnall, Winchester, Hampshire. London, Soc. Med. Archaeol., Monograph Series no. 4. MILES, A. E. W., 1963. The dentition in the assessment of individual age in skeletal material, in Brothwell (1963). MOORE, W. J., and CORBETT, M. E., 1971. The distribution of dental caries in ancient British populations I: Anglo-Saxon period, Caries Res. 5: 151-68. MUSTY, J., 1969. The excavation of two barrows, one of Saxon date, at Ford, Laverstock, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, Antig. J 49: 98-117. OHNUMA, k., and BERGMAN, C., 1984. Experimental studies in the determination of flaking mode. Bull. Instit. of Arch. 19 (for 1982): 161-70. SHAFER, W. G., HINE, M. k., and LEVY, B. M., 1974. A Textbook of Oral Pathology (3rd edition). SWANTON, M. J., 1973. The Spearheads of the Anglo-Saxon settlements. London: Royal Archaeological Institute. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 155-63. The Roads of Anglo-Saxon England by DAVID A. I . PELTERET Although there is every evidence for mobility of people and goods in Anglo-Saxon England, the roads of the period are unstudied, partly because the obvious written sources are few. However, there 1s good post-Conquest evidence, and more can be gleaned from indirect contemporary evidence, such as words relating to transport in Old English texts, place-names, land charters, air photography and other archaeological work. These potentials are shown by examples from Wiltshire. A glance at the index of Sir Frank Stenton’s magisterial Anglo-Saxon England or Richard Hodges’s recent and stimulating — if controversial — Dark Age Economics will reveal not a reference to roads or to communications. ! One of the only general works on the history of roads in Britain comments: ‘it is odd, though true, that we know much more about bronze age villages, fields and indeed trackways than we know of Saxon ones . . . in the Dark Ages or early Saxon period, we are not even sure where the settlements were and we certainly have no known roads which we can date to these times.” This is a serious lacuna in our knowledge since the Anglo- Saxons were a very mobile set of peoples. Whether it be the restless and turbulent Wilfrid in the 7th century,’ the pilgrims and traders who occupied the schola * 1. Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxtord History of England, vol. 2, 3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and Trade, A.D. 600-1000 (London: Duckworth, 1982). Stenton’s only paper on the subject, “The road system of medieval Eng- land’, in Doris M. Stenton (ed.), Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 234-52, contains very little material on the Anglo-Saxon period. 2. Christopher C. Taylor, Roads and Tracks of Britain (London: Dent, 1979), pp. 8455. On Wilfrid, see David P. Kirby (ed.), Sait Walfrid at Hexham (Newcastle upon ‘Tyne: Oriel Press, 1974) and Henry Mayr- Harting, ‘St Wilfrid in Sussex’, in M.J. Kitch (ed.), Stadres im Sussex Church History (London: Leopard’s Head Press, 1981), pp. 1-17. +. Briefly discussed by Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 40-1; G. J. Hoogewerff, ‘Friezen, Franken en Saksen te Rome’, Mededeelingen van het Nederlandsch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 3rd ww series, 5 (1947): 1-70, provides a map opposite p. 70. For the itinerary of one Anglo-Saxon’s late-10th-century Roman journey, see Francis P. Magoun, Jr, ‘An English pilgrim-diary of the year 990’, Mediaeval Studies 2 (1940); 231-52. Lantfred, Miracula Sancti Swithunt W, 23-8, Acta Sanctorum, Juli I, 297. 6. ‘4 gelricus episcopus de cicestra. uir antiquissimus & legum terre wn sapientissimus. qui ex precepto regis aduectus fuit ad ipsas New College, University of Toronto, Toronto MSS 2Z3, Canada. Saxonum or Saxon quarter of Rome in the 8th and 9th centuries,’ or the slave woman stolen in the N= of England who sought the intercession of St Swithun at his tomb after being sold in Winchester in the 10th century,” have existed in England to permit such mobility. Nor was this mobility merely pedestrian. Bishops travelled round in wagons: William the Conqueror, for instance, sent one to fetch the aged Bishop theiric of Chichester, when he wished to consult him at the trial some form of communications network must on Penenden Heath.’ Material goods also needed to be transported: Jumber, for example, to Droitwich in Worcestershire, required to stoke the furnaces to produce the salt that would be transported throughout the W Midlands.” We cannot make sense of the inter- antiquas legum consuetudines discutiendas & edocendas. in una quadriga.’ John Le Patourel, “Che reports of the trial on Penenden heath’, in R. W. Hunt, W. A. Pantin and R. W. Southern (ed.), Studies in Medieval History presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke (Oxtord: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 15-26 at p. 23 (\ ‘Vext); translated in David C. Douglas and George W. Greenaway (ed.), English Historical Documents 1042-1189, English Listorical Documents, vol. 2, 2nd edition (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 482-3, no. 50. A wagon with a rudimentary form of suspension is illustrated in a manuscript containing -EIfric’s translation of the Hexateuch: C. R. Dodwell and Peter Clemoes (ed.), The Old English Mustrated Hexateuch (British Museum Cotton Claudius B. 1v) (Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, vol. 18, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1974), fol. 60r,v; one of the illustrations is reproduced with a brief discussion of the technology involved in the wagon’s construcuon in Albert C. Leighton, ‘Eleventh century developments in land transport technology’, Stanley Ferber and Sandro Sticco (ed.), The Eleventh Century, Acta | (Binghamton (NY): 1974). See also A. C. Leighton, Transport and Communication in Early Medieval Europe AD 500-1100 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972), pp. 86-7, where some other references to Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman wagons are supplied. 7. See the excellent study by Della Hooke, “Che Droitwich salt industry’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 2 (British Archaeological Reports 92, Oxford, 1981), pp. 123-69. “The practice of transhumance must also have led to the development of 156 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NYTURAL TISPORY MAGAZINE tribal warfare of the early Anglo-Saxons, the Viking campaigns, the monastic revival of the 10th century and even the Norman Conquest itself unless we posit the existence of roads. Their absence from the text- books lies not in the paucity of the material but in our failure to seek topographical explanations for significant political, social, and cultural developments in Anglo- Saxon history. Part of the reason why roads have not received much attention is that there are very few obvious written sources. The widespread reservation of royal rights, generally called the frimoda necessitas, is known to all who have worked with Anglo-Saxon charters." These royal prerogatives, based probably on Roman law and first evidenced in a genuine charter of AD 770, included the repair of bridges, an obligation known in Old English as brycg-bot or brycg-geweorc. Yet tor the whole Anglo-Saxon period, know anything much about a few bridges, most we really only notably the one at Rochester, for which a document (which may, in fact, be post-Conquest in date) records the obligations on estates in Kent for its repair.” As for roads themselves, our most direct evidence about major routes is post-Conquest. Vhe Less Willelmi certain routeways, but it may be difficult to establish whether they have an Anglo-Saxon origin. ‘The antiquity of such routes and their continued survival in south-central France is traced in a book that might act as a stimulus for similar investigations in England: Pierre A. Clément, Les Chemins @ travers les dges en Cévennes et bas Languedoc (Montpellier: Presses du Languedoc, 1983), esp. Part Il, Chap. 6, and Part HII, Chap. 1. 8. On the terms and the royal obligations associated with it, see W. S. Stevenson, ‘Trinoda necessitas’, Engl. Hist. Rev. 29 (1914): 696 n. 37; the charter referred to is no. 59 in Peter H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks 8, London, 1968) (hereafter referred to as S followed by the number of the document). George ‘1. Dempsey, ‘Legal terminology in Anglo- Saxon England: the Tyrmoda Necessitas charter’, Speculim 57 (1982): 843-9, does not seem to be familiar with Nicholas Brooks’s arguments on the development of the common burdens, “lhe development of military obligation in eighth- and ninth-century England’, in Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (ed.), England Before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 69-84. 9. ‘List of estates Hable for work on Rochester bridge’, in Agnes J. Robertson (ed. and trans.) Anglo-Savon Charters (London: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. L06-9, no. LIL. On other bridges, see Marjorie B. Lloneybourne, “Che pre-Norman bridge of London’ in \.E.J. Hlollaender and William Kellaway (ed.), Studies in London History presented to Philip Edmund Jones (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), pp. 17-39, and Martin Biddle and D. J. Keene, ‘Winchester in the eleventh and twelfth centuries’, in M. Biddle (ed.), Winchester in the Early Middle Ages, Winchester Studies 1, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 271-2. 26 mentions four royal roads: Watling Street, Ermine Street, the Fosse Way, and the Icknield Way." The first three were Roman roads and the last an ancient trackway that had been converted into a Roman road. Anyone who committed murder or assault on these roads committed a breach of the King’s Peace. In the Leges Henrict Primi 10 the king’s writ extended further to every herestret or highway. The king had the right to brigbot'' and also to stretbreche. This offence is listed in Hn 80 as one of a number that could take place on a royal highway (va regia): it is defined as occurring ‘where someone destroys a road by closing it off or diverting it or digging it up’. A highway is described as one that ‘should be wide enough for two wagons to meet and pass there, and for herdsmen to be able to make contact, with their goads at full length, and for 16 knights, armed, to ride side by side. That is called a royal highway which is always open, which no one can close or divert with walls he has erected, which leads into a city or fortress or castle or royal town.’ Within urban areas, the same laws raised some streets above others in importance: ‘Every town has as many main streets as it has main gates appointed for the collection “This last provision is probably a post-Conquest development but there is some evidence of tolls and dues.’ As Brooks (note 8), p. 72, points out, bridges were intimately linked with fortifications. Detailed topographical work on some of the Burghal Hidage towns may reveal the location of some of these bridges or, at the least, permit intelligent guesses as to their original location to be made. Of course, for some ancient towns the evidence is too inadequate, as in the case of Northampton (see A WV: Northamptonshire Archaeol. 15 (1980): 138-55), and some towns Goodfellow, “The bridges of | Northampton’, may not originally have had bridges, as Dr Cyril Hart asserts was the situation in Peterborough (see “The Peterborough region in the tenth century: a topographical survey’, Northamptonshire Past Present 6 (1981); 245). 10. Some manuscripts mention only three and exclude the Icknield Way. See Felix Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Halle: Max Neimeyer, 1903-16), vol. 1: 510-11. Reference to the King’s Peace in relation to the four roads is also to be found in Leges Edwardi Confessoris 12 (Liebermann, Gesetze 1, 637-8). Il. Asis to be found in earlier laws; cf. V Atr 26, 1; VI Atr 32, 3; and also Il Cn 65, the source of the section of Hn 10, 1 dealing with brycg-bot. 12. ‘80, Sa Srreft]breche est si quis uiam frangat concludendo uel auertendo uel fodiendo.’ L. J. Downer (ed.), Leges Henrie Primi (Oxtord: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 250 (texd; p. 251 (translation). 13. ‘80, 3 Tanta debet esse ut inthi duo carri sti possint ad inuicem obuare, et bubulet de longo stumbh sui possint assimulare, et xvt milites possint equitare de latere armati. ‘80, 3a Et mia regia dicitur que semper aperta est, quam nemo conclaudere potest uel auertere cum m{ur ts suis, que ducit in cruttatem uel burgum uel castrum uel portum regium, Ubid., p. 248 (text); p. 249 (translation). 14. ‘80, 3b Et unaqueque cutitas tot magistras uias quot magistras portas habet ad theloneum et consuetudines insignitas. Ubid. TIE ROADS OF ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND for pre-Conquest viae regiae,"’ and certainly Watling Street remained a major landmark, since it was utilized as a boundary both by Alfred and Edmund _ in agreements with the Vikings." Such then is the most obvious documentary evidence on Anglo-Saxon roads. ‘To provide the history of 600 years of Anglo-Saxon roads culled from recondite sources is a task too great for one investigator to accomplish — which is the central point of this paper. Here is a theme which, if undertaken by a number of specialists in a variety of fields, could provide a synthesis of a vast amount of material that lies at hand but has either not been sought out or has yet to be assembled. Scholarship has now reached a point where a review of the evidence is not just possible but is desirable for further advances to be made. This paper will discuss some of the sources of information on Anglo-Saxon roads, and provide some lines of approach that might be taken to obtain both direct and presumptive evidence about them. The difficulties inherent in such a study will not be shirked. Among the tools and primary evidence that are now available is the computer concordance of texts in Old English compiled under the editorship of Professor Richard Venezky and Dr Antonette Healey." Here is a rich source for both philologists and historians possessed of diligence and ingenuity. It contains numerous words directly and indirectly related to communications. This paper will touch on only a few terms such as stret, ford, crundel and pytt, the latter two providing on occasion, as will be seen, presumptive evidence of roads. One should be prepared to consult it not only for obvious words like weg and the northern gata but also for words like wegn, ‘a waggon’ or ‘cart’, since these might often provide indirect evidence of roads. It is only fair to note, however, that the Concordance has its limitations. The word herepes has been a source of puzzlement to many. The Concordance unfortunately does not dispel the mystery. The entry drawn from S 298 is typical of the other entries for this 5. It appears in an apparently genuine charter of AD 979 issued by Archbishop Oswald in the phrase ‘cynges ferdstre? (S_ 1340). 16. For the Treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, see Liebermann (note 10), vol. 1, pp. 126-9 (text): Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (ed.), Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 171-2 (translation) and pp. 311-13 (notes). The peace agreed to between King Edmund and Olaf Guthfrithson, which resulted in Watling Street as the boundary between their territory, is reported by Simeon of Durham in ‘T. Arnold (ed.), Symeonts Monacht Opera Omnia I]: Historia Regum (Rolls Series 75, London, 1885), pp. 93-4, s.a. 939 (text); Dorothy Whitelock (ed.), English Historical Documents ¢. 550-1042, English Historical Documents 1, 2nd edition London: Methuen, 1979), p. 239, no. 3. 157 word and its related compounds like herestret and hereweg: ‘Donne on sucordleage walle Sonon on wulfwelles heafod Sonon on wealweg on done stan et dere flodan from dem stane fords on sone herepad on done dic.”'’ Here there are neither epithets nor clauses present that would assist in the definition of the word. In this instance the Concordance is merely a convenient means of directing attention to all the written sources, but these will have to be correlated with detailed topographical evidence before a definition can be hazarded. A second major resource is the English Place-Name Society collections for the counties of England. The earlier volumes do not have the degree of detail that the more recent ones contain, especially in the field names.'"” There are also a number of counties like Somerset that have yet to be surveyed. The potential of the published volumes to provide information on roads, largely unexploited. Care, of course, must be exercised. One should start by using the pre-Conquest and Domesday material. Place-names in later sources can act as supporting evidence for the existence of postulated Anglo-Saxon routes but never as the primary evidence. The best-known information about Anglo-Saxon roads are the land charters. One need not feel inhibited by the paucity of editions: Sawyer’s bibliography cf Anglo-Saxon charters supplies a list of the primary sources, so that one can compile one’s own edition of any particular charter if need be. Sawyer’s book and the annual bibliographies in Anglo-Saxon England between them list most of the considerable body of work that has appeared in local archaeological and historical society publications. A vast amount of work on ‘solving’ charter boundaries was done by G.B. Grundy in the earlier part of this century.” Grundy was a classicist who worked in the study with Ordnance Survey maps. Most will now agree that one needs to know Old English well, to use other cartographic aids such as Anglo-Saxon nevertheless, is sources of 17. Richard L. Venezky and Antonette di Paolo Healey, A Microfiche Concordance to Old English, Dictionary of Old English Project, University of Toronto, and University of Delaware, 1980. 18. ‘.. . then on to Sorley Well, thence to the source of “Wolf-well”, thence along the wea/weg to the stone at the stream, from the stone along the highway to the ditch. . . .” Ibid., fiche HO17, p. 272 (text); English Historical Documents c. 550-1042 (note 16), p. 524, no. 88 (translation). 19. John Field, appropriately enough, provides a listing of field names in his English Field-Names: A Dictionary (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972). 20. Grundy published numerous lengthy papers. Those that are particularly relevant include “Che evidence of Saxon land char- ters on the ancient road-system of Britain’, Archaeol. J 74 (1917): 158 THE WILTSHIRE uthe, enclosure, canal and railway maps, and, most importantly, acquire a first-hand knowledge of the area by walking and discussing the topography, soil-types, and history of the area with locals.*! Much can stll be accomplished in identifying charter boundaries but it is easy to overlook how much is already known, espe- cially since a great deal is buried away in local history journals or, in some instances, has not even been published but reposes in manuscript form in_ local libraries. The work of the late Dr TR. Thomson will be well members of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society: his annotated 6-inch Ordnance Survey maps with his solutions to the bounds of various Wiltshire charters have been deposited in the Society’s library at Devizes. They await, however, detailed re-examination and known to reproduction on maps of a more convenient scale before they can become of general use to scholars.” Archaeology is the discipline which is likely to supply the largest amount of fresh primary information on roads. A lot is already available, particularly through the study of the layout of English towns and villages.*' A careful examination of the topography of a medieval town can provide a fairly clear picture of the patterns of roads radiating from it, as Dr Martin Biddle’s work at Winchester has illustrated.’ If this is combined on a regional scale, it is even possible to show communications links that differ from those existing today: roads in the Cambridge region, for instance, seem in Anglo-Saxon times to have been largely K—W 79-105; “The ancient highways and tracks of Wiltshire, Berkshire, and Hampshire, and the Saxon battlefields of Wiltshire’, Archaeol. J 75 (1918): 69-194; “The Saxon land charters of Wiltshire’, Archaeol. J 76 (1919): 143-301, and 77 (1920): 8-126. 21. Some sage advice on solving charter bounds is provided by T. R. Thomson in “The early bounds of Wanborough and Little Hinton’, WAM 57 (1958-60): 203. W. G. Hoskins, Fieldwork in Local History (2nd edition, London: Longman, 1982) should be obligatory reading for all those interested in this topic. i) nN For references to these maps, see IT. R. Thomson and R. E Sandell, “Phe Saxon land charters of Wiltshire’, WAAL 5 (1961-3): 442-6. 23. For Wiltshire towns, see the preliminary archaeological survey by 8 Jeremy Haslam, Wiltshire Towns: The Archaeological Potential (Devizes: WANHS, 1976); these and other towns are also discussed in John Schofield, David Palliser and Charlotte Harding (ed.), Recent Archaeological Research in English Towns (London: CBA, 1981). Very useful maps are available in M. D. Lobel (ed.), Historical Towns: Maps and Plans of Towns and Cities in the British Isles, with Historical Commentaries, from Earliest Times to 1800, vol. 1 (London: Lovell Johns, 1969), vol. 2 (published as The Atlas of Historic Towns) (London: Scolar Press, 1975). Jeremy Haslam (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England (Chichester: Phillimore, 1984) was published too late for me to make use of in this paper. © ARCIIAROLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE in alignment rather than N-S.” In this task, the large number of aerial photographs taken by Professor J.K. St Joseph and others and now housed — at University may be of considerable assistance. “Though the value of aerial photography for a variety of purposes is generally recognized,” its potential for assisting medievalists in the study of sull-surviving road networks has not been generally commented on.” The most fruitful possibilities lie in combining the Cambridge evidence derived from several disciplines and asking more general questions than the specialists may have posed. So far, very little has been done. One of the best examples of what can be accomplished is Dr Della Hooke’s regional study of the W Midlands in the Anglo-Saxon period and also her detailed examination of its saltways.* Here a geographer has employed philological, historical and archaeological information to great effect. Mr Christopher Taylor, a_ field archaeologist, has provided the only monograph-length study in his Roads and Tracks of Britain but lamentably did not provide detailed references and only a minimal bibliography.” Dr David Hill also has made a start on the subject through his cartographic approach to the history of Anglo-Saxon England.” Discovering the course of Anglo-Saxon roads is not an easy task.*! The balance of this paper will be devoted to suggesting a few methods that could be employed to rediscover them, concentrating largely on one county, Wiltshire.” Historically the heart of Wessex, where 24. Biddle and Keene (note 9), pp. 260-8 and figs. 6 (opp. p. 258) and 7 (p- 262). 25. Taylor (note 2), pp. 106-8 and fig. +46. 26. See J. K. S. St Joseph (ed.), The Uses of Air Photography (London: Black, 1977). 27. Neither the pioneering work by O. G. S. Alexander Keiller, Wessex from the Air (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Crawford and 1928) nor the recent introduction to the subject for medievalists by M. W. Beresford and J. Kk. S. St Joseph, Medieval England: an Aerial Survey (2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) explicitly discusses roads. 28. Della Hooke, Anglo-Saxon Landscapes in the West Midlands: the Charter Evidence (British Archaeological Reports 95, Oxford, 1981) and “The Droitwich salt industry’ (note 7). 29, Mention should also be made of Brian P. Hindle’s brief introduction, Medieval Roads (Shire Archaeology 26, Aylesbury, 1981). H. W. Timperley and Edith Brill, Avcrent Trackways of Wessex (2nd edition, Shipston-on-Stour: Drinkwater, 1983) may contain some useful information but this is not directly related to the material in the Anglo-Saxon charters. 30. David Hill, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, L981). 31. See the remarks by Taylor (note 2), pp. 85 and 90-1, 32. BR. R. Darlington, ‘Anglo-Saxon Wiltshire’ in VCH Wiltshire, vol. 2 (1955), pp. 1-34, provides a conspectus of the history of the county. THE ROADS OF ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND Alfred won his first important victory against the Danes at Edington in AD 878, it is one of only four counties to retain its boundaries in the revolution of 1974, when new counties were established. About 180 charters relating to Wiltshire are extant, half of them containing bounds.’* One of its attractions is that the Wiltshire Archaeological Society has been in existence for over a century. Not only, therefore, have its historical sources been examined but also its many archaeological ones. Topographically, Wiltshire possesses chalk downlands, particularly in the N of the county, and also areas of clay. In the E lies the Savernake Forest. The shire is crossed by a number of rivers, most notably the Avon, which flows S through it. Because of the chalk and clay, most of the settlements were probably originally placed in these river valleys. ‘There are about 50 ford names in the shire, about half of them being recorded in 1086 (1.e., in Domesday Book) or before.** One has to remember, of course, that rivers can change their course through the centuries. Nev- ertheless, with careful topographical analysis it should be possible to plot the Anglo-Saxon fords and the roads leading from them.” Other counties might be able to provide further terms relating to river crossings, notably bridge (which, it must be remembered, could denote a causeway as well as a bridge). Unfortunately, though there are four Wood Bridges in Wiltshire, all are attested in post-Conquest sources and so cannot be used in the absence of other evidence as indications of Anglo-Saxon roads. This evidence might be provided by Roman roads. Considerable advances have been made in recent dec- ades in our knowledge of these roads. Studies at a national and regional level were undertaken by Ivan 33. Thomson and Sandell (note 22). 34. The topography is discussed in detail by Joyce Gifford, “The physique of Wiltshire’, VCH Wiltshire, vol. 1, part 1 (1957), pp. 1-20. 35. Places mentioned in Domesday Book have been conveniently assembled and plotted on maps in H. C. Darby and G. R. Versey, Domesday Gazetteer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). See also J. E. B. Gover, Allen Mawer and F. M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Wiltshire (English Place- Name Society 16, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). 36. For an example from another county of what can be done, see R. H. C. Davis, “The ford, the river and the city’, Oxomtensia 38 (1973): 258-67. _ 37. Ivan D. Margary, Roman Roads in Britain (3rd edition, London: Baker, 1973); The Viatores, Roman Roads in the South-East Midlands (London: Gollancz, 1964). See also Richard W. Bagshawe, Roman Roads (Shire Archaeology 10, Aylesbury, 1979) and Britannia: Consolidated Index of Volumes I-X 1970-1979, pp. 99-100, s.v. Roads. Vhe latter journal reviews annually the latest discoveries in Roman Britain. 159 Margary and the ‘Viatores’, and these have been supplemented by other more recent detailed studies.” It is clear from the passage in the Leis Willelmi 26 that Roman roads remained in use throughout the Anglo- Saxon period; I believe they formed the basis of the Anglo-Saxon road network (a view also held by Professor Donald Logan, who believes that they provided the means for the advances of the Vikings round England). What the Wiltshire material shows is that one cannot assume that a Roman road remained in service, either in whole or in part. The Wiltshire charter of AD 940 concerning Liddington (S_ 459) mentions a road that evidently was the Roman route from Cunetio (now Mildenhall) northwards. This is described as a tobrokene strate. Vhe road was thus still recognizable but it had deteriorated badly and may even at that date have been impassable.” How then can one determine which Roman roads remained in use? First, a detailed topographical study of those Anglo- Saxon towns overlying a Roman settlement could reveal this. Regrettably, Wiltshire did not possess major Roman towns that continued in use as urban areas for this to be practicable to illustrate. Another, possibly more rewarding method, would be to determine where ecclesiastical parish boundaries are coterminous with Roman roads. This suggestion is fraught with hazards, but I share Dr Hooke’s confidence that parish boundaries can be a major source of information about Anglo-Saxon routeways.”’ Parish boundaries seem to have been fixed only at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period,*' even though there is evi- dence to suggest that some are of ancient origin,” possibly even pre-Anglo-Saxon."' Their shape may in part be dictated by topographical considerations but there are too many parish boundaries that follow 38. KF. Donald Logan, The Vikings in History (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 151-6. Frank G. Roe, ‘The winding road’, Antiquity 13 (1939): 191-206, is less sanguine about their survival. | owe the reference to Prof. Logan’s book and to Simeon (note 16 above) to Dr Simon Keynes. 39. See Thomson (note 21), p. 208 and fig. 1. 40. D. Hooke, “The reconstruction of ancient routeways’, Local Hist. 12 (1976-7): 212-20 at pp. 212-3. 41. G.W. O. Addleshaw, The Development of the Parochial System from Charlemagne (768-814) to Urban I (1088-1099) (St Anthony’s Flall Publications 6, 2nd edition, York, 1980). 42. D.W. Rollason, “The date of the parish-boundary of Minster-in- Thanet (Kent), Archaeol. Cantiana 95 (1980 for 1979): 7-17, suggests that the western boundary of Minster and Margate parishes may go back to the late 7th century. 43. Desmond J. Bonney, ‘Early boundaries in Wessex’, in P. J. Fowler (ed.), Archaeology and the Landscape: Essays for L. V. Grinsell (London: Baker, 1972), pp. 168-86; see also his ‘Pagan Saxon burials and boundaries in Wiltshire’, WAAL 61 (1966); 25-30. Lam not convinced, however, by the arguments for the antiquity of 160 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Roman roads for this to be mere chance." Of course, where the two coincide, one cannot be sure that it was a still-used road that was being employed as a boundary: it could well be the agger or even the ditch.” If, however, there is evidence that the route of a Roman road continued in service in post-Conquest times, it is a legitimate assumption that it was used as a routeway by the Anglo-Saxons. It is generally accepted that Roman roads are denoted in the vernacular sources by the word stret. A.H1. Smith defined stret as ‘a Roman road, a paved road, an urban road, a street’.” I find this definition somewhat inexact. [t is extremely dubious whether the Anglo-Saxons after the settkement period were aware that some of the roads they used had originally been laid down by the Romans. inappropriate word. ‘The Romans frequently employed flint or gravel for their roads.” The word was indeed used of urban streets, but it would appear that it was unusual in the Anglo-Saxon period for town roads to be surfaced with flagstones. The earliest level of Church Street in Oxford was stone-paved but most of the streets there were usually covered with gravel, as was this street in later resurfacings.* Thetford had a flint cobbled street” and Gar Street in Winchester was also originally cobbled.” When one turns to the Venezky- Healey Concordance, one finds a notable absence of ‘Paved’? is also an epithets describing the surface of the street. Apart from the famous reference in Beowulf describing the way to Heorot as stret wes stan-fah,’' where stan is a convenient alliterating word and where pleonasm is part of the poetic style, and a single instance of a ‘stony street’ in a place-name, where the adjective probably refers to the quality of the street rather than its composition,” there parishes put forward by Susan Pearce in her paper, ‘Estates and church sites in Dorset and Gloucestershire: the emergence of a Christian society’, in Susan Pearce (ed.), The Early Church in Western Britain and Ireland: Studies presented to C. A. Ralegh Radford (British Archaeological Reports 102, Oxford, 1982), pp. 117-38. 44. Laurence D. Stamp, Man and the Land (2nd edition, London: Collins, 1964), p. 60, fig. 16, shows how parishes in Wiltshire are long and narrow in areas of substantial topographic contrasts whereas they are more regularly shaped in areas where water 1s readily available. 45. Excluded from discussion here is the use of hedgerows as an indicator of roads because it has been shown that there are too many imprecisions involved in the dating of hedges. See John Hall, ‘Hedgerows in West Yorkshire — the Hooper method examined’, Yorkshire Archaeol. J. 54 (1982): 103-9, esp. p. 106. 46. A. HL. Smith, English Place-Name Elements (English Place-Name Society 55-56, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), vol. 2, 161, s.v. stret. 47. Margary (note 37), p. 21. 48. T. G. Hassall, ‘Excavations at Oxford 1970: third interim report, Oxontensta 36 (1971): 1-14. are few adjectives used other than ea/d, ‘old’, appro- priate if referring to a Roman road.”. This suggests that stret denoted a route with a prepared surface and so could best be defined as ‘a metalled road’. Without further investigation it would also be unwise to assume that all non-urban sfrets refer to Roman roads. Wiltshire is particularly interesting as a county since it possessed an estate structure of ancient origin. Six of the seven major estates that formed part of the Confessor’s demesne owed the annual render of food necessary to support the king and his retinue for one night, the firma unius noctis.* One of these manors was Amesbury, on the River Avon.” It originally possessed two outlying estates, one in the forest in Hampshire at Lyndhurst, and another on the Isle of Wight at Bowcombe. R.R. Darlington, writing in 1955, found the latter ‘inexplicable’.* Since then, the researches of G.R.C. Jones into what he has called ‘multiple’ or ‘discrete’ estates has clarified this phenomenon.” Discrete estates were often to be found in the vicinity of hill-forts, which provided a focus for them. The Wiltshire Domesday entries tend to mask this, as appendant estates for large manors such as Salisbury are often not recorded, but Amesbury is located near one. It may not be possible to record cartographically the routes between the central estate and appendant manors but at least one should be able to determine the general /ines of communication, In the case of the Bowcombe estate one can go further. Professor Jones’s suggestion that the link between Amesbury and Bowcombe was via _ the Hampshire Avon is very plausible, especially since there were four other manors on that river with outliers on Wight.” 49. Brian Kk. Davison, “The late Saxon town of Thetford; an interim report on the 1964-6 excavations’, Medieval Archaeol. 11 (1967): 190-1. 50. Martin Biddle, ‘Excavations at Winchester 1964: third interim report’, Antiq. J 44 (1965): 230-64 at pp. 242-3 and pl. LXX XII, and Martin Biddle and David Hill, ‘Late Saxon planned towns’, Antig. J 51 (1971): 77 n. I. 51. Beowulf, line 320. 52. Stanystreet, Lancs. 53. Other adjectives used include ‘brad’, ‘ceap’, ‘lang’, ‘port’, and ‘sealt’. The ‘grene strate’ of Christ and Satan 285 is obviously a poetic usage. 54. Amesbury, Bedwyn, — Calne, Tilshead, Warminster. Britford was exempt. 55. KR. B. Pugh discusses the history of the area in “The early history of the manors in Amesbury’, WAAf 52 (1947-8): 70-110. 6. Darlington (note 32), 61. Chippenham, 7. Glanville R. J. Jones, ‘Settlement patterns in Anglo-Saxon Eng- land’, Antiquity 35 (1961): 221-32. 58. Ibid., p. 230 and fig. 4. x _Z- Cirencester {) 6 4 miles \\ « fk Be \ er eee ie Y Sa \ ia NEN \ Sa ) SS Wa = a *S \ Cricklade ) 0 y? \ ) ( SAS I \ y) \ ( \ Liddington4|.. % \ \ NU\ \ ( 4 \ ES i ~ Ly \ Pu \ \ Mildenhall \\ 4 n Marlborough, »..\ ( Bee t R. Kenne Chishucgen) * ( BA Me Bedwyn (| = ( \ ou *¥ ) ( ») ( : | =a 7 r\ 4 ca aN silshead (TéMNE N Winchester Se ) \ — 15 miles ? Whiteparish S * rw >) = e / \ pe ee Ford named in Doomsday Book Crundel mentioned in ® Royal manor * A.S. charter w Burghal Hidage borough @ a Mint 4 Anglo-Saxon church Calne Chisbury Other town, village or parish Figure 1. Evidence for Anglo-Saxon roads in Wiltshire. Roman road Roman road formi of an A.S. charte Doomsday borough ng part r 162 THE WILTSHHRE It is less easy to determine the route from Lyndhurst to Amesbury. There may well have been a‘ Roman road from Poole via Otterbourne to Winchester, although it is now impossible to be sure of this.” If the road was complete, it would have crossed the Avon, and Lyndhurst would have lain not far from it. Since this was a forested area, ancient trackways may, however, also have been used. It is quite possible that detailed study might solve this problem; the possibilities of such a minute examination have been revealed in the fine work done by C.C. Taylor on Whiteparish in Wiltshire.“ Although Amesbury seems to have been less important to the king at the ttme of Domesday, other royal manors clearly benefited from royal favour in the preceding century. The king had an obvious financial incentive to encourage market centres on his demesne for the tolls that they brought in.“' It is interesting to note that four of the royal manors acquired mints and four were listed as boroughs in Domesday Book.” The presence of a mint was at least an encouragement for the development of a market, even if it cannot be assumed that one existed wherever there was a minter.” The presence of markets and of boroughs in turn presumes the presence of radiating roads, whose routes might be deduced from the layout of a town.” One should not be discouraged that it will not always 59. Margary (note 37), pp. 94-5, Route 422. 60. C. C. Taylor, ‘Whiteparish: a study of the development of a forest-edge parish’, WAAL 62 (1967): 79-102. See also his papers, “The Saxon boundaries of Frustfeld’, WAAL 59 (1964): 110-15, and “Three deserted medieval settlements in Whiteparish’, WAAL 63 (1968); 39-45. 61. On markets, see Florence E. Harmer, ‘Chipping and market: a lexicographical investigation’, in Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickins (ed.), The Early Cultures of North-West Europe (H. M. Chadwick Memorial Studies) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), pp. 333-60. 62. The relationship between the two is discussed by Tl. R. Loyn, ‘Borough and mints, AD 900-1066’, in R. EL. M > Dolley (ed.), \nglo-Saxon Coms: Studies presented to FM. Stenton on the Occaston of his 80th Birthday 17 May 1960 (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 122-35. See also H.R. Loyn, “The origin and early development of the Saxon borough with special reference to Cricklade’, WoT y8Cl961=3): 7al5x 63. For current information on the production of various mints, see D. M. Metealf, ‘Continuity and change in English monetary history c. 973-1086’, Parts | and UH, Brit. Nami. J 50 (1981 for 1980): 20-49, and 51 (1982 for L981); 52-80. 6+. .\mongst numerous studies that might provide assistance, see C. \. Ralegh Radford, “Phe later pre-Conquest boroughs and their defences’, \edieval Archaeol. 14 (1970): 83-103, and Biddle and Ehill (note 50) 65. HM. Vaylor and Joan Vaylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 729. See also H. M. Laylor, “Phe pre-Conquest churches of Wessex’, WAAT 58 (1961-3): 156-70. ARCHIAFOLOGICAL AND NYVEURAL TISTORY MAGAZINE be possible to map all Anglo-Saxon roads in detail. An innovative approach towards the source material can often show the general lines of communication, which in itself can provide useful social and economic information. Sometimes one will want to ask questions that the experts themselves have not yet answered — but this is, of course, precisely how knowledge of the past can be expanded. ‘Take, for example, the Anglo-Saxon churches of Wiltshire. So far, there are 13 sites that have been identified as containing Anglo-Saxon stone material.” The origin of the stone employed in these buildings has not been determined by archaeologists or architectural historians.” Yet it is well known that there was good building stone to be found just outside Wiltshire, at Bath, near Oxford and on the Isle of Wight.” Furthermore, one can draw on the evidence of place-names. Though there is no such obvious a name as the Oxfordshire Standhill, which is derived from stan-(ge)delf, ‘a digging for stone’, 1.e., ‘a quarry’, there are a number of places where the word crundel is used. This word seems to have had several meanings such as ‘chalk-pit- and ‘gully’. In some contexts it seems to mean ‘a quarry’. The word py/t, especially when preceded by sand- or stan-, could also be indicative of a quarry.” Here the collaboration between architectural historians, geologists, geographers and place-name experts could be very fruitful.” 66. The possibilities have been revealed by E. M. Jope, “The Saxon building-stone industry in southern and midland England’, Medieval Archaeol. 8 (1964); 91-118. Philip A. Rahtz has excavated a Saxon gravel pit at Downton; see “Saxon and medieval features at Downton, Salisbury’, WAAL 59 (1964): 124-9. in the exca- vator’s view this pit was used to supply gravel for make-up, possibly for a building on the flood-plain near the pit. This site, therefore, has no value in this present context as an indicator of building stone. 67. Jope (note 66). 68. Margaret Gelling, The Place-Names of Oxfordshire, Part 1 (English Place-Name Society 23, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 90. 69. English Place-Name Elements, vol. 1, pp. 116-17, s.v. B. Grundy ‘On the meanings of certain terms in the Anglo-Saxon charters’, Essays and Studies 8 (1922): 47-50. 70. English Place-Name Elements, vol. 2, 75-6, s.v. pytt. J. B. Ward- Perkins in ‘Quarries and stoneworking in the early middle ages: crundel, ct. G. the heritage of the ancient world’, Artigianato e tecnica nella societa dell'alto medioevo occidentale, Settimane di Studio del Centro ita- liano di Studi sul?’ Alto Medioevo 18 (1971), vol. 2, 525-44 at pp. 542-3, emphasizes how little we as vet know about early medieval quarrymen and masons. Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones draw only on post-Conquest evidence in “The English medieval quarry’, Econ. Hist. Rev. 9 (1939): 17-37, but their paper is useful in emphasizing (p. 30) how small quarries were in the high middle ages. Place-names containing elements such as crundel and pytt thus may well be indicative of quarries. 71. Since originally composing the above, I have noticed that Della Hooke has made substantially the same points in her Anglo-Saxon THE ROADS OF ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND As these last observations imply, it is unwise to concentrate simply on a single artificial entity like a county. Southern Wiltshire should be regarded as being part of the Hampshire basin, while the N has natural links with Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Such a wider perspective is clearly necessary if the existence of a network of roads in the country is to be discovered. The E-W pattern to roads in Cambridgeshire has already been alluded to. Professor Joel Rosenthal has recently observed, ‘We can easily see Wessex and Mercia as self-contained kingdoms, each with a western frontier for expansion and assarting, each with a E—-W economic axis.”’ An analysis of the roads of early England can be a means of testing his observation, which I suspect has a lot of truth to it. This paper does not set out to provide an overall picture of the roads of England. Its main purpose is to Landscapes. (note 28), pp. 274-7. For some theoretical considerations drawing on pre-Conquest Somerset material, See Christopher M. Gerrard, ‘Ham Hill Stone: a medieval distribution pattern from Somerset’, Oxford J Archaeol. + (1985): 105-15. 163 act as a spur to the endeavours of others to search out the information that has the potential to enlighten us on many facets of Anglo-Saxon life. When data on the roads and tracks of the country have been assembled, we will be able to attain a more balanced view of the Anglo-Saxon past. Acknowledgements. Vhis ts a revised version of a paper read at the First Conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in Brussels on 23 August 1983. | wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a grant to attend this conference. ‘Vhe Librarian of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Mrs Pamela Colman, kindly granted me access to Dr ‘T.R. Thomson’s maps’ in the Society’s library and subsequently supplied me with a tracing of the Anglo-Saxon charter boundaries as recorded by Dr Thomson on a composite 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey map in the Society’s library. | am grateful to Ms Ada Cheung of the University of Toronto’s Cartographic Office for drawing the map that accompanies this paper. ~I nN Joel T. Rosenthal, “The swinging pendulum and the turning wheel: the Anglo-Saxon state before Alfred’, in William H. Snyder (ed.), The Early Middle Ages, Acta 6 (1982 for 1979): 95-115 at p. LOL. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 164-77. The Tisbury Landholdings Granted to Shaftesbury Monastery by the Saxon Kings by R. H. JACKSON The landmarks which delineate the Tisbury holdings are listed in a charter of AD 984; they were identified by G. B. Grundy as fitting the present parish boundary of Tisbury. Further information in a concord of 1241, in a perambulation of Gillingham Forest of 1299-1300, and in a survey of the bounds of Donhead St Andrew of 958 complements study on the ground to show that the Tisbury lands specified in the charter include also the parishes of Sedgehill and Berwick St Leonard, parts of Chicklade and (probably) Hindon parishes, and part of Semley Common. An identification of the bounds of the Semley Saxon charter ts made, and a revision of Grundy’s identification for Tisbury, on these larger boundaries. In both cases the Saxon description closely follows the surviving topographic features. INTRODUCTION A charter of King Aethelred the Unready, dated to 984 and now in the British Library,' lists the landmarks which delineate the ‘Tisbury land-holdings. Since the charter records that the lands were given to the monastery by Aethelred’s ancestors, it is reasonable to surmise that the gift was first made by King Alfred when he built and endowed the monastery in 888.’ In 1919-20 G. B. Grundy fitted the Saxon land- marks to features on the present boundary of Tisbury parish;’ he was aware that his solution was capable of and refinement by — the and method — of investigation of topographic features. Vhat is what | amendment ‘laborious, expensive slow’ on-the-spot have tried to do. On detailed study it is apparent that the charter includes a very large number of landmarks for even the large Tisbury parish. Furthermore, Grundy made no allowance for the fact that the present bounds of Tisbury include part, at least, of the Saxon estate of Wardour. Since Wardour was held at that time by the Monastery of Wilton, no part of it should have been included in the Shaftesbury land-holdings. ‘This suggested to me that the charter actually circumscribed a larger area than Grundy thought; this has proved to be the case, as the landmarks embrace the parishes of Sedgehill and Berwick St Leonard as well as Tisbury, together with parts of Semley and Chicklade parishes. Two holdings sharing common boundaries with Tisbury are Semley (with Donhead, Tisbury, 1. British Library Harleian Ms 61 (The Shaftesbury Cartulary), fos. 2v and 3r. (A medieval transcription of a lost original.) J. A. Giles (ed.), Annals of the Reign of Alfred the Great: Asser of St Davids (London, 1848). in) Sedgehill and Motcombe) and Donhead (with Tisbury and Semley). Saxon surveys exist for both Semley and Donhead, but no satisfactory solution of the former has been published. No Saxon survey of Motcombe is available, but the bounds of Gillingham Forest were delineated in 1299; as its limits coincide with the Motcombe bounds with Semley and Sedgehill, this document covers the gap. The nine landmarks of the Semley charter can be identified with features of the modern boundary, which is still well marked by physical features for most of its course. Nevertheless, an attempt to match the Semley landmarks with corresponding features in the Tisbury charter failed; evidently the charters do not follow a common boundary between the holdings. Reference to a concord in the Public Record Office? This ‘Final concerned an agreement whereby the Abbess of Wilton provided the explanation. Concord’ granted the Abbess of Shaftesbury full use of an area of common pasture in her holding of Semley. The concord gives sufficient description of the landmarks which delineate that area to allow its recognition. A second attempt to match Tisbury and Semley surveys, this time including the leased portion of common land in both of them, resulted in complete accord. However, the concord is of the year 1241, and a good reason is required in order to justify applying it to the conditions two and a half centuries earlier. To discover that reason it 1s necessary to examine the origin of ‘final concords’. During 1199, the first year of Richard Is 3. G. B. Grundy, “Phe Saxon land charters of Wiltshire’, Archaeological J 77 (1920): 90-6. +. Public Records Office CP 25/251/13 (Feet of Fines, Henry HI, 1241). THE TISBURY LANDHOLDINGS GRANTED TO SHAFTESBURY MONASTERY BY THE SAXON KINGS 165 reign, an enactment was made requiring all persons claiming to possess land or to receive special privileges to be able to produce a legal document in support of the claim. Holders were exempt from this requirement if they could prove they held as of ancient custom by producing witnesses or other evidence from what has come to be called ‘the period of legal Memory’. But in practice, when a case was contested in court, the litigant with the legal document very often held the advantage. Consequently a large number of apparent disagreements were brought before the justices for the sole purpose of obtaining a document which would set out, in the form of a new agreement, what was in fact an ancient right.’ [ believe the 1241 concord was one of those instances, and that it is reasonable to regard it as material evidence for the Saxon boundaries, despite its much later date. THE CONCORD OF 1241 Since the concord, made in 1241 during the reign of Henry III, has not been published in a full translation,‘ one is here given. The numbers in square brackets after the landmarks are mine and will be used in the form ‘Concord 1’, etc., equating them with landmarks appearing on other documents. ‘Forest 1’, ‘Donhead 1’, ‘Semley 1’, “Tisbury 1’ and so on, are used in the same way in their sources: This is the final concord made in the court of the lord king at Wilton, Holy Trinity in one month, in the twenty-fifth year of the reign of King Henry son of King John, before Robert de Lexinton, Radolph de Sulleg, William de Culeworth, Julian de Neville and Robert de Haye itinerant justices and other loyal subjects of the king then there present, between Alice, Abbess of Wilton, complainant, and Amice, Abbess of St Edward, in that this same Abbess of St Edward claims common in the land of the same Abbess of Wilton in Semley and whence this same Abbess of Wilton questions the justice of the claim of the Abbess of St Edward, since she herself holds no rights in the land of the Abbess of St Edward in Donhead and Sedgehill. This same Abbess [St Edward’s] made service and ought to hold common rights and thence this plea has been made between them in this same court, namely, that the Abbess of Wilton concedes for herself and her successors to the Abbess of St Edward and her successors that they shall have common of pasture for all their working animals in all that part of the former pasture of Semley called Whitemarsh facing Sedgehill on the western side of the metes and divisions written below, namely from Freshford [1] along the new bounds which continue along the length of the aforesaid pasture to Bowleshey [2] and then along Bowleshey Ditch [3] to La Mapele [4] and then along the ancient 5. R. B. Pugh (ed.), Feet of Fines, Wiltshire, Edward I and II (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society vol. 1, 1939), Introduction. boundary to Kingsettle [5]. Thus though neither the Abbess of Wilton nor her Successors have rights or claims in the aforesaid common or soil [?] on the western side of the aforesaid metes and divisions the rightful claims are granted to the Abbess of St Edward to the profits she may wish to make from the aforesaid land without hindrance or interference from the Abbess of Wilton or her successors for ever, fur- thermore the Abbess of Wilton remises and quitclaims for herself and her successors to the Abbess of St Edward and her successors all those rights she claimed to have in the common pasture of the Abbess of St Edward in Donhead on the southern’ side of the metes and divisions written below, namely, from Kingsettle [5] along the way which continues to the east to the new bounds made between the lands of the Abbess of Wilton in Semley and the land of the Abbess of St Edward in Donhead and so along the new bounds to the northern ditch of Lindbury [6] and on along the ancient ditch to La Horstan [7] thence by the way which continues towards the east to the head of Berkore [8] then to the middle of Berkore [9] by way of the new bounds to the Stone [10] which lies near the road from Berkore towards the east near the ditch of Berieshey and for this concession, fine and concord the Abbess of St Edward remises and quitclaims for herself and her successors to the Abbess of Wilton and her successors all rights she had claimed to hold in all the rest of the land of the Abbess of Wilton in Semley and similarly all rights she claimed on the eastern side of the aforesaid division of Whitemarsh and on the northern side of the divisions of the pasture of Donhead. Thus the Abbess of Wilton is authorized to make such profit as she desires in her Semley land which lies on the eastern and northern sides of the aforesaid divisions without hindrance or interference from the Abbess of St Edward or her successors for ever. It can be ascertained from the details given in this concord that the Abbess of Shaftesbury had the sole right to use that part of Semley Common which lies along both sides of the East Knoyle to Shaftesbury road as it passes through Semley parish. The landmarks may be interpreted and placed as follows: ‘Whitemarsh facing Sedgehill This confirms the placing of the Whitemarsh, Tisbury 19 (below, pp. 172-3), at the place where the Berry brook now crosses the East Knoyle to Shaftesbury road. Concord 1; Freshford. This is the same spot, as the text indicates. Concord 2: along the length of pasture to Bowleshey. The place name may be interpreted as ‘Bow lea’s hedge’. The hedge today running S along the E side of the road forms an arc, or bow, and — what is more 6. EK. A. Fry, ‘Calendar of Feet of Fines, Wiltshire, 1195-1272’, WAAL (1920): 34. of "Kéysley: Env \ Tumuatus x . bas i ip Chapet Fietd Barn p enaval Fm. Lugmarsh | a / Ley of yA é ? if Park. t/ i pes i a rls” ” Friots Hayes 9 4 - "4 Fm *S Sg Lower Mend Park’ edigehitt Miangt o RK i \, ~ Shorth Green Fro” she: Poort § lotcombe } fi cc) 0... Figure 1. The Tisbury bounds. Dotted lines are modern parish boundaries, dot-and-dash lines are ancient boundartes. Landmarks are numbered as in the text with prefixes: C Final concord, D Donhead, F Gillingham forest, S Semley, T ‘Tisbury. (Ordnance Survey basemap, Crown Copyright). 168 THE WILTSHIRE interesting — the farm bounded by the hedge is called Bowmarsh. Concord 3: along Bowleshey Ditch. The S extremity of the hedge reaches the steep escarpment of Hart Hill, from which point a deep ditch runs W along the lower scarp back to the road. This must be Bowleshey Ditch. Concord 4: La Mapele. This maple tree must have been in the vicinity of Hart Hill. Tisbury 20, ‘On maple tree hill’, must refer also to Hart Hill. Concord 5: Kingsettle. This is separated from Hart Hill by the width of the road running between them. Concord 6—9 are valuable in clucidating the Semley survey (below, p. 169). Concord 10: the Stone. A boundary stone, of undoubtedly great age, is still in position at the side of the road above Leggetts Farm; it appears to be the original stone mentioned in the concord, or a successor to it. THE BOUNDS OF GILLINGHAM FOREST IN 1299-1300 John Hutchins published two perambulations of Gillingham Forest. One in Latin he attributed to the time of Henry IIL and the other in English to 1568. Of the former he wrote: “This document is contained in the fly-leaves of a very ancient MS of the Gospels in Latin, usually called “The Book of Cerne”, as having formerly belonged to that monastery.’ For my purpose, however, the perambulation, solution and map by Charles D. Drew of the 1299-1300 perambulation was very appropriate.* This solution consists of 21 land- marks, of which five are useful in elucidating the Tisbury and Semley surveys where those boundaries met Motcombe and Sedgehill. The difference in the dates of the several documents was not important in this case, providing there was agreement in the placement of the corresponding landmarks. The five landmarks are now listed, with their num- bers in the Forest survey, and their relationships to landmarks in other surveys which share this boundary: Forest 8: And thence to Horeappelder. A later perambulation, made in 1568, states that this was then called ‘Gouge Pool’. This equates with the Poles Lea of Tisbury 24 (below, p. 174). 7. John Hutchins, History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset vol. 3 (London, 1868), pp. 662-3; after the book of Cerne (Cambridge University Library). 8. Charles D. Drew, “The forests of Blackmoor and Gillingham’, in © ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NAYPEURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Forest 9: And thence to Cowreg. This confirms the reading of Tisbury 23 ‘cunes rigt’ as ‘cows ridge’ (below, pp. 173-4). Forest 10: And thence the Fi erngore. This is the ‘stigele’ (i.e. stile), of Tisbury 21 (below, p- 173) and Semley 6 (below, p. 169). Forest 11: And thence to Soulescombe. This combe, below Kingsettle, which is not used in the surveys of adjoining lands, leads to the next position. Forest 12: And thence by the bounds between the demesnes of the Lord King and the bounds of the demesne of the Abbess of Wilton to Kingsettle. This is Concord 5 (above), indicating that the Forest surveyors considered it was in the demesne of the Abbess of Wilton, although sole use of the strip on the W of Semley Common had been granted to the Abbess of Shaftesbury. THE BOUNDS OF DONHEAD ST ANDREW Donhead, with a number of other estates, was granted to Shaftesbury Monastery by King Eadwig in AD 958. In the Saxon charter it is delineated by 21 landmarks.” Grundy’s solution’ to the N section I believe to be correct, and can be used to make the following observa- tions on individual landmarks: Donhead 3: Wermes bank. This is the place now known as Little Down, where the boundary coming from the SE reaches the East Knoyle to Shaftesbury road. I put it there because it is also the site of Forest 13, which reads, “Thence on high to Wermewell’ (Usque ad sursum Wearmewlle — Hutchins). Donhead 4: Thanne forth be dine on Laiboc heved/Then On Wermes hore fordward/Forward on to forward by the dean to the beech headland. Semley 5 (below) directs to the same point, “Phonan to reocsoran’, and indicates that ‘reocsoran’ is a miscopy of the original ‘Beocsoran’ meaning beech banks. The place is the extreme NW of the Donhead boundary, and the extreme SW of the Semley survey. Donhead 5: On berg hore uneward/On to birch bank. This equates with Concord 8 (above) and Semley 3 (below). Donhead 6: Thanen on cealvlege/Then on to calves lea. This is the ‘chealfaleage’ of Semley 2 (below). The Marv'll Book (Gillingham: Blackmoor Press). 9. Grundy (note 3), pp. 57-60. 10. Ibid., landmarks 3-6. THE TISBURY LANDHOLDINGS GRANTED TO SEAR EESBURY MONASTERY BY THE SAXON BOUNDS OF SEMLEY I have not seen the original document," but have taken the landmarks from Grundy’s transcription’ and used his numbering sequence. Documentary and on-site study has been used to translate the Saxon and position the landmarks. King Eadwig Wilton Monastery in 955. It formed part of a very large grant of 100 hides at Chalke, this also included Broadchalke, Bowerchalke, Ebbesbourne Wake, Alvediston, Berwick St John and Vollard Royal. The bounds of Semley are given separately as: granted this estate to Aerest on Nodre forde at genon gemythan Up be Nodre to Chealf leage Thonne thwyres ofer tha leage west and suth andlang Beore oran Thonne ofer Lind oran Thonan to Reoches oran And swa on tha stigele Thanna to Radeleage Thonan to Bilanleage And swa on Semed oth it cymth eft to Nodre ford. Semley 1; Aerest on Nodre forde at genon gemythan/First to Nadder ford beyond the mouth (of the Sem). The survey starts where the Semley to Tisbury road crosses the Nadder, a short distance S of where Sem and Nadder meet. Semley 2: Up be Nodre to Chealfa leage/Up the Nadder to Calf lea. The boundary follows Nadder upstream and S to a meadow on the W bank opposite where the ‘Tisbury boundary (Tisbury 16 below) meets the river. Semley 3: Thonne thwyres ofer tha leage west and suth and lang Beorc oran/Then athwart the lea SW and along Birch banks. The boundary crosses the meadow diagonally southwestwards, crosses the Donhead road S_ of Hook Manor, and over Round Hill on the same alignment, then climbs the slope towards St Bartholomew’s Hill (‘Beore Oran’). Local people still call St Bartholomew’s Hill ‘Barker’s Hill’, a survival of the old name, Berkore. The boundary ditch runs W through the woods that crown the hill and longside the unadopted road down to the hamlet of Gutch Common. Semley 4: Thonne ofer Lind oran/Then over Linden tree banks. The boundary now turns SW and climbs the Upper Greensand escarpment via Tittlepath to the ditches of Castle Rings, the iron-age hillfort called in the 13th century ‘Lindbury’ (see Concord 6, above). -Semley 5: Thonan to Reoches oran/Then to Beeches banks. Discussed under Donhead 4, above. Leaving the ditches westwards the boundary reaches its SW 11. British Library Harleian MS 436 (The Wilton Cartulary). 12. Grundy (note 3), pp. 41-2. Pitk SANON KINGS 169 corner on the hill above Kingsettle. Semley 6: And swa on tha stigeleland so on to the stile. From the hill the ditch, which here marks the county boundary between Wiltshire and Dorset as well as the parish boundary, descends to Peaks, where it is also in contact with the Sedgchill boundary. Semley 7: Thanne to Radeleage/Then to Radlea. The boundary follows a hedgerow to the place where the Berry brook crosses under the East Knoyle to Shaftesbury road (Concord I, above), then follows the stream eastwards to the open field called Rodelee (TVisbury 18 below). Semley 8: Thonan to Bilanleage/Then on to Bila’s lea: (now Bilhay). The boundary, still going E, reaches the area of Bilhay, where the Sem now makes a string of small lakes, the Bilhay Ponds. Semley 9: And swa on Semed oth it cymth eft to Nodre fordelAnd so along the Sem until it comes back to Nadder ford. The boundary follows the Sem until it enters the Nadder, which it follows the short distance to the ford where the survey began. Three of the nine landmarks have woodland associations, and three refer to pastures or meadows. The tree references, to birch, lime and beech (together with maple in the Tisbury and Concord landmarks), all occur on the high Greensand terrace, while the leas are all in the abundantly watered clay below. How little the scenery seems to have changed. THE SAXON BOUNDS OF THE LANDS COMMONLY CALLED TISBURY King Ethelred in his charter of 984" gives the history of the Tisbury estate prior to that year. He records that it was the habit of his ‘antecessores’ to confirm the grant of it to Shaftesbury monastery but that King Edmund took it back and gave it to his wife Algife for a present, and granted the monastery Bucticanlea in its place. After the death of Algife, King Eadwig changed the estates back again. This last arrangement the charter now confirms. Archbishop Dunstan and many other high clerics and nobles witness and approve the docu- ment. Attached to the Latin charter is a survey in Anglo-Saxon giving the bounds of the estate. The Saxon scribe, or rather his copyist, made free use of the thorn symbol, not only to represent ‘th’, but quite often for ‘W’ and on other occasions, apparently, for letters he was unable to decipher in the script from which he i was copying. I use the letter “Y’ or ‘y’ to indicate the 13. Wlarleian MS 61 (note 1). 170 THE thorn in the transcriptions. the title of the survey: ‘Dis sant ya landimare yare tyen tiye hiye at Vissebir? tha thare twen tiwe hide “These are the landmarks of the twenty Tisbury.’ ‘The landmarks read: The point is illustrated by hide at Arest ye Cigel mere scheth on Nodre Andlang stremes oth gosesdene Thanen to yere twichenen Of yere twichene on Wilburge imare On yane grene wer On Wermundes trey Of Wermundes tre a dun richt inne ye imade Of yane miyon anlang stremes on yane ealde wdeforde on yane grene wel Onne ye heved stokes Of yanne heved stocken fory be tyelf aceron yat it comet to yealyege Yannen to hig yege yannen to wdesfloda yannen to suthames forde anlange hege reawe yat it comet to Nodre an lang Nodre on Semene anlang Semene to Rodelee yanen on yere hyiten meres yannen om Mapeldere hille yannen on ya stigele yannen on Sapcumbe yannen forder West on cunes rigt yanne cyrder it north on Poles leage yannen on maric broc yanen on Wiyig broch yanen on Sidinic [?] Mor yannen ford’ on cnugel lege and on hiclesham yannen on meare wei of yane wege anlang hrigces to nipedeforde an lang weges yat it cumet to funt geal on yone herpod’ yannen to gificancumbe an lang cumbe to stanweie anlang hrygges to yere lindenlege yannen on Leofriches imare ford’ be gemare eft on Funt al of funtes brigce anlang hrigces to Alfgares imare forde be hisimare oy’ heved stoceas yanen to cigel mere broke anlang stremes eft on Nodre. Although several landmarks required much thought before they could be elucidated, the present W and N boundaries of Sedgehill, and the NW and N boundaries of ‘Tisbury as far as Fonthill Lake, comply with those of the Saxon survey. The next section presented considerable difficulty, since the landmarks are locational names, do long since forgotten, except for a personal Saxon name of a person dead 1000 years. Furthermore, the enclosure award of 1840 modified the E boundary of Berwick St Leonard, which presented itself as a possible Saxon boundary, by — straightening — its ‘The circumscription [ finally decided to be correct encloses former erratic — line. a small part of the present parish of Hindon and ; substantial part of Chicklade parish, as well as all a Berwick St Leonard. Hindon village and parish is not known to have existed in Saxon times; it seems to have been created, mostly from East Knoyle parish, in the 13th century Fonthill Lake the remaining landmarks could easily be . Once the survey had been taken back to followed to complete the rest of the N- boundary of Tisbury, back to the starting point on the Nadder. I En Great Britain and Treland, vol. 15. Grundy (note 3). W. FI B. Oldfield, History of the Counties, Cities and Boroughs of 1816). The Wiltshire possessions of the | (London: Jones, © WILTSITURE ARCEIAEOLOGICAL AND NYPEURAL ELIS PORY MAGAZINE The landmarks are given below in numbered sequence, as for previous documents in this paper, first in the Saxon and then in English. After my comments I append, for comparison, the interpretations of the three investigators, identified by ‘D.G.’ for Dr ‘W.G.’ for Rev. Goodchild, and ‘W.H.]J.’ for Canon Jones." Grundy’s solution is an agreement with regard to the siting, but not always the meaning, of the following landmarks (in my numbering), I-12 earlier Grundy, 2, 14-18, 31 and 32, 42 and 43 (which are in Grundy’s numbering I-8, 10-13, 25 and 26, 33 and 34 respectively). Thus I have produced a new solution for half of the survey. Tisbury 1: Arest ye Cigel merc scheth on Nodre/First the Chilmark [brook] runs into the Nadder. The survey begins where the Chilmark brook joins the Nadder. The brook, which now runs N of the railway embankment about 400 m N_ of Panters Bridge, used to enter the Nadder the railway line’s width nearer Panters. D.G. First where the Chilmark boundary abuts on the Nadder; W.G. Where the Chilmark brook falls into the Nadder; W.H.J. From the point where the Chilmark brook runs into the Nadder. Tisbury 2: Andlang stremes oth gosesdenelAlong the river to Goose Dean. The boundary runs SW up the Nadder for about 900 m to Sutton Mandeville mill. It then angles W, following a small tributary stream up a narrow, wooded valley (Goose Dean) to its spring source. From the spring the boundary continues on the same line to meet the road, Sutton Row. D.G. Along the stream to Gos’s Dean; W.G. To Gosesdene. Tisbury 3: Thannen to yere twichenen!Then on to the road junction or, maybe, cross-roads. The SE corner of the boundary, where Lagpond Lane meets Sutton Row. D.G. Then to the place where the roads mect; W.G. Then to the place where the stream is divided. Tisbury 4: Of yere twichene on Wilburge imare/From the road junction to Wilbury boundary bank. The boundary runs W following a hedge and low bank along the Upper Greensand terrace. The bank becomes more prominent as it approaches the Castle Ditches hillfort, which in Saxon times seems to have been called Wilburgh, that is, Wilbury. 322-31 WAAL, vol. 44, pp. 322 . W. Good- WAAL, vol. 44 \bbess of Shaftesbury’, child, “Lisbury in the 322-31. Anglo-Saxon Charter’, THE TISBURY LANDHOLDINGS GRANTED TO SHAFTESBURY MONASTERY BY THE SAXON KINGS 171 D.G. From the cross-roads to Wilburh’s Balk; W.G. From the division of the stream to the boundaries of Wilburgh. Tisbury 5: On yane grene weilOn the green way. The boundary continues W along the greensand terrace, then begins to descend, passing through hillocks of greensand. The ‘Greenway’ may refer to a grassy track or to the nature of the terrain. D.G. to the Greenway. W.G. Then to the Greenway. Tisbury 6: On Wermundes trey/To Wermundes tree. The gentle descent continues until the greensand meets the underlying gault. There the boundary, marked by a prominent ditch turns abruptly S. Wermundes tree, perhaps a tall boundary post, must have stood at the boundary angle, where it would have been seen from many viewpoints. D.G. To Wermundes tree; W.G. To Wermundes tree. Tisbury 7: Of Wermundes tre a dun richt inne ye imadelFrom Wermundes tree down right into the meadow. The boundary ditch does exactly this, down to the stream that has come from Ansty and Swallowcliffe and is flowing towards Tisbury. D.G. From Wermundes tree; W.G. Wermundes tree straight down to the meadow fields. Tisbury 8: Of yane miyon/From the mouth of the stream. A few paces up stream from the previous landmark, the Swallowcliffe brook joins the Ansty stream. D.G. Down straight to the place where streams meet; W.G. From the meadows. Tisbury 9: Anlang stremes on yane ealde wdeforde/On along the stream to the old wood ford. The first of several fords in the survey, now all replaced by road bridges. The site is now known as Ansty Water. Before the stream was bridged it probably widened into a shallow expanse at this hollow at the foot of greensand slopes. D.G. Along the stream to the old ford at the wood: W.G. Along the stream to the old woodford: W.H.J. To the old woodford. Tisbury 10: On yare grene weilOn the green way. The boundary leaves the stream and follows a hedge which runs alongside a ditch of running water, across a meadow within the angle made by the Ansty road and Squalls Lane. The boundary is then taken up by Squalls Lane, which steadily climbs SW towards the greensand escarpment. Until a few years ago the lane had a substantial bank. The greenway then climbs the escarpment diagonally by way of Rebbecks Hill. The name ‘Greenway’ is again associated with the rock structure. From D.G. road. Tisbury 11: Onne ye heved stokes/On to the head stakes. Rebbecks Hill is a high spur from the Upper Green- sand terrace which separates the Squalls Farm valley from the deep hollow of Ansty Coombe. It is not difficult to picture the need to erect a protective fence of stakes along this ridge. My three predecessors read this landmark as ‘On neye heved stokes’, rather different translations. D.G. to beneath the head stakes; W.G. to beneath the main boundary posts; W.H.J. to nether head stock. Tisbury 12: of Yanne heved stocken fory be tyelf aceron yat it comet to yealyege/From the head stakes forward by twelve acres that it comes to Wealb way. Following the spur southwards the boundary path passes along a wood still called Twelve Acre Copse and meets at right angles an unadopted, but well- defined road. This ancient road has come down off the chalk downs lying to the S, and the boundary now turns N alongside The name ‘Wealway’ suggests its use by the Welshmen, that is, the Britons, before the Saxons took over the area. D.G. From the Head stakes on by the 12 acres till it comes to wall (or possibly Welshman’s) way; W.G. From the main boundary post straight on by 12 acres where it comes to the British roadway; W.H.J. By the 12 acres to the British road. Tisbury 13: yannen to hig yege/Then on to high way. The boundary road after 800 m reaches the N slope of the greensand and divides. One fork descends quite steeply. The other follows a less steep course along a terrace in the scarp; this must be the ‘high The woods through which both roads run is called Highwood, and the lane they both meet at the foot of the escarpment is Highwood Lane. Where the boundary road branches the present Tisbury boundary turns W and then S and passes right through Old Wardour Castle, so half the castle is in Tisbury parish and the other half in Donhead. At some period the historic Domesday Wardour must have been divided between Donhead and ‘Tisbury. after the monastic holdings were disposed of Donhead and Tisbury all came into the possession of the same To the Greenway; W.G. Along the green hence their way’. manor of This division must have taken place following the dissolution and Wardour, owner. Uhe terrace ‘high road’ collapsed in a land- slide before reaching the foot of the escarpment, and now no obvious physical feature marks its final section. Elowever, the gap in the boundary may be bridged by discovering the boundary ditch in Grove Wood leading S to the next landmark. Nm D.G. Then to Hay Way; W.G. Then to High Way. Tisbury 14: yannen to wdesflodalThen on to the wood flood. The boundary must have run along Highwood Lane southwesterly as far as the W side of the entrance to the road which leads to Old Wardour Castle. That road leads S, running through the plantation on its western side; parallel to it can be seen the old boundary ditch. The ditch stops at the S end of the plantation. | understand that it formerly continued along the open field adjoining, but was filled in and levelled during the last war. Had the ditch been preserved it would have led down to the lake near the old castle. The description ‘wood flood’ suggests an area subject to more or less permanent flooding, but with seasonal variations of extent. Before the several ponds and small lakes and their feeding streams were controlled and contained, the area now reached by the boundary at Ark Farm would undoubtedly have been subject to flooding. D.G. Then to the great intermittent stream of the wood; W.G. Then to wood’s flood. Tisbury 15: Yannen to suthames fordelThen on to south ham ford. The boundary turns W along the valley through Wardour Park. ‘This valley now contains a number of well-constructed large ponds, connected by a small stream which was, in the 18th century, enclosed within a stone conduit. The S homestead and its ford must have been in this valley. D.G. Then to south house ford; W.G. Then to the ford in the south pasture. Tisbury 16: An lange hege reawe yat it comet to Nodre/Along the hedgerow that comes to the Nadder. Following westwards along the valley bottom, the conduit becomes open as it passes through a small clump of hazel and other bushes. Near the W end of Park Pond a bank, surmounted by a hedge, is reached. The hedge turns S. When it meets the overflow from the pond it turns W again alongside the overflow which, in a short distance, falls into the Nadder. On the opposite side of the river is the meadow called Calf Lea in both the Semley and Donhead surveys. D.G. Along the row of trees tll it comes to the Nadder; W.G. Then along the hedgerow till it comes to the Nadder. THE WILTSHIRE ARCHIAEROLOGICAL AND NAPURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE The boundary follows the Nadder to its junction with the Sem. D.G. Along the Nadder to the Sem; W.G. Along the Nadder to the Sem; W.H.J. Thence it goes to Semley. Tisbury 18: Anlang Semene to Rodelee/On along the Sem to Road Lea. The Sem’s westward course passes through the man-made Bilhay Ponds, and then through the adjoining woods. The boundary bank can be seen on the S side of the river as it flows through the wood. Beyond the W end of the wood the boundary bank turns NW to the river’s edge and appears again on the opposite bank, where it angles WNW to Tokes Lane. The open grassland, which the boundary crosses, is the Rodelee of the survey. Goodchild thought the name ‘Rodelee’, which equates with ‘Radleage’ in Semley 7 (above), might be from Rotherley, meaning a cattle field. Grundy felt that Red lea or Reed lea was perhaps intended. I think the name is the equivalent of a present-day ‘Road lea’ — the field through which a road passes. The English word ‘road’ is derived from the Old English word ‘rad’, meaning ‘ride’; and the Semley name for this field, ‘Radleage’, confirms my interpretation. The 6-inch OS map of the area shows several fragmentary sections marked ‘Roman road’ aligned on a course which passes through this field. Furthermore the Roman road crosses Tokes Lane, which on Andrews’ and Dury’s Wiltshire’ map is called Old Strait (that is, Old Street), suggesting that that is the Roman road. However, from a 17th-century Inquisition Post Mortem we learn that it was then called Old Street Lane.” This is descriptive of a roadway leading to Old street, which is what there 1s. D.G. Along the Sem to Red lea: W.G. Along the Sem to Rodelea (probably for Rotherlea); W.H.J. To Roselea. Tisbury 19: yanen on yere hyiten mercs/Then on to the Whitemarsh. Some explanation needs to be made. The boundary leaves Tokes Lane where the lane angles to the SW, and continues westward along a hedge and ditch to the SE corner of the wood which, on OS maps is called Abbeys Wood. The present Tisbury parish boundary turns N along the entire length of the wood’s E edge, about 200 m, and on the same line Tisbury 17: An lang Nodre on SemenelOn along the Nadder to the Sem. across open country for about another 200 m before turning NE to begin its return. Grundy placed his Records Society), no. 100, 1635: “Thomas Bennett of Pithouse, Kast latch’. 16. BK. Crittall (ed.), Andrews’ and Dury’s Map of Wiltshire, 1773 (Devizes: Wiltshire Records Society, Vol. 8, 1952), section 4. 17. Inquisitiones Post Mortem, Charles 1, part 1 (Devizes: Wiltshire THE TISBURY LANDHOLDINGS GRANTED TO SHAFTESBURY MONASTERY BY THE SAXON KINGS landmarks, not very convincingly, on these bounds, and it is here that my solution parts company with his. Before leaving the wood, however, I must digress. King Aethelred’s charter states that he now restores to Shaftesbury Monastery a wood called Sfgenylle Bar which his reeves had plundered. This curious jumble of letters is very puzzling. Was it intended to be Sedgehylle? But it seems to have elements of both Sedgehill and Knoyle (Saxon Cnugel). Did the original read ‘Sedgehill Knoyle Bar’? Did the scribe start to write that, but taking his eye away to dip his quill in the ink, begin again in the wrong place? We shall never know! The present the Mr N. Rimmington, tells me that its correct name is ‘Abbesses Wood’ and that originally it stretched for the full 400 m of the boundary of Sedgehill with Tisbury, its N end reaching the boundary of Sedgehill with East Knoyle. In Aethelred’s day East Knoyle was a royal estate, and his reeves there would be able to plunder the wood whenever opportunity served. The suffix ‘Bar’ suggests a barrier or boundary strip, and this, Abbey’s Wood certainly is. Iam confident Abbey’s Wood is the one referred to. My solution leads straight on along the S end of the wood where it becomes the boundary between Sedgehill and Semley. Whitemarsh can be placed as an area within and adjoining the N end of Semley Common on the extreme W of Semley parish. The concord (above) positions it as facing Sedgehill. A farm right against the Semley/Sedgehill boundary is called ‘Whitebridge’, a name which could have derived from an erstwhile Whitemarsh bridge. Just over the boundary, in Sedgehill parish, — is Berrybrook Farm, which old maps call Whitemarsh Farm. I have no hesitation in siting the ‘Whitemarsh’ landmark where the Berry brook is crossed by the East Knoyle to Shaftesbury road, a short distance N of Whitebridge Farm House. D.G. Then to Whitemarsh; Whitemarsh. Tisbury 20: yannen on Mapeldere hillelThen to Maple tree pill. The present Sedgehill/Semley boundary angles SW from Whitemarsh and follows a hedgerow to the Hugglers Hole road and Peaks Farm. While Peaks Farm is upon ground which is a little higher, by no stretch of the imagination can it be said to be upon a hill. Phe combined evidence of the Semley survey and its solution, the concord and its landmarks and the Gillingham Forest perambulation, show that Maple Tree Hill was in Semley parish, in the owner of wood, W.G. Then to 173 neighbourhood of the present-day Hart Hill. Shaftesbury Monastery must have included in its lands the western Semley Common which Wilton Monastery had also included in its survey. D.G. Then to Maple-tree Hill; W.G. Then to Maple tree Hill. Tisbury 21: yannen on ya stigele/Then on to the stile. From Mapletree Hill the concord directive leads to Kingsettle, on the W side of the Shaftesbury to East Knoyle road, and there, quite plain to see, is the boundary ditch marking not only the parish boundary between Semley and Motcombe but also the county boundary between Wiltshire and Dorset. This leads northwards down a steep drop into the coombe below and then up a gentle incline to Peaks Farm, where the three parishes of Motcome, Semley and Sedgehill meet. Peaks Farm can be confidently selected as the site of the stile. Fernegore was an alternative name for Peaks. The Gillingham Forest survey called it Fernegore in 1299 (above), Andrews and Dury named it Peaks in 1773, the 1876 OS map Fernegore,; today’s maps and general usage have returned to Peaks. The Forest survey, perambulating in the reverse direction to the Tisbury survey, has these landmarks as its numbers 9-12, and provides considerable supporting evidence. The names Peak, Pike, Picket, Piked, when associated with place names, denote areas with sharp angles or corners; likewise the elements Gore and Gara are indicative of triangular-shaped grounds. At Peaks the three parishes mentioned meet, forming the apices of three triangles. D.G. Then to the stile; W.G. Then to the stile (or perhaps the ‘point’. Tisbury 22: yannen on SapcumbelThen on to Sapcumbe. From Peaks the boundary continues westward, but the name Sapcumbe is now lost. I place it at the junction of the Hugglers Hole road with another road which runs N and 5, as this position is intermediate between Peaks and the next identifiable landmark. D.G. Then to the combe of the spruce firs; W.G. Then to Sapcombe; W.H.J. To Sapcumbe. Tisbury 23: yannen forder west on cunes rigt/Then further W to cows ridge. This landmark, — which previous investigators, was solved ‘on the spot’. The scribe defeated had written it in such a way that it appeared as ‘on cures rigt. The way is well marked by ditch and bank from the road junction westward along a natural ridge. This ridge, still called ‘Cowridge’ is the site of Gillingham Forest 9 (above) — ‘and thence to Cowrige’. The survey scribe telescoped some of 174 his letters together, making the final stroke of one letter serve as the first stroke of the next one. In this case he failed to write the letter ‘e’ close enough to the half-letter ‘n’; the ‘n’ looks like an ‘r’, hence ‘cures’ instead of ‘cunes’. ‘Cunes’, presumably, intended to be the plural of the Saxon word for cow, cul. D.G. Then on west to cur’s ridge; W.G. Then further west to a turning on the right. Tisbury 24: yanne cyrder it north on Poles leagelThen it curves N to the lea of pools. The boundary does this exactly. For about 1600 m the boundary ditch and hedge leads N in a gentle curve until it reaches a field containing five or six ponds. D.G. Then it turns north to the lea of the pool; W.G. Then it bends northwards. to Pole’s lea; W.H.J. To Poleslegh. Tisbury 25: yannen on marie brocl/Then on to boundary brook. The boundary now angles NE for about 1200 m and meets a small, The junction with the brook marks the NW corner of Sedgehill parish. D.G. Then to the boundary brook; W.G. Then to the boundary brook. Was much-meandering — brook. Tisbury 26: yanen on Wiyig broch/ Then on to Withy brook. Following the Boundary Brook eastwards for 22 km reaches its source in a field only a short distance from the East Knoyle to Shaftesbury road and 800 m N of Landmark 19 (Whitemarsh). The course of the boundary for most of the distance between the spring and the road is marked by a dry ditch. Crossing over to the E side of the road the upstream and ditch is again seen, running along the N side of a belt of trees. In about 400 m the ditch, now containing water, meets a brook coming from the SW, the Withy Brook. This brook flows on and past the N end of Sedgehill’s FE boundary with ‘Tisbury (Tisbury 19 above). About 200 m further E the boundary ditch leaves the brook, angles NE within a hedgerow, reaches a terrace on the slopes N of Prior’s Farm and then runs along the SE edge of Withybed Plantation. At the W end of the terrace is a pond fed by a stream from the N. Overflow from the pond has made the terrace into a small marsh, and the trees, even in June, have their roots in water — facts which help with the next obscure landmark. D.G. Then to Willow Brook; W.G. Then to Willow Brook. Tisbury 27: yanen on Sidinic(?) Mor/Then on to ? marsh. Sidinic is not clearly written (it could be ‘Sidnne’, which is equally meaningless). I believe this is THE WILTSHIRE | ARCLIAEFOLOGICAL AND NYECRAL ELIS PORY MAGAZINE another instance where the word should be deduced from the physical feature. The original word may have been Sidlinc, and the phrase meant sidelinch marsh, or possibly, sidling marsh. Either would describe the site well. D.G. Then to ? marsh; W.G. Then to Sedgehill moor. Tisbury 28: yannen ford’ on cnugel lege/ Then forth to Knoyle lea. The boundary ditch continues NE from the plantation to the cross-roads at Kinghay (i.e. King’s hedge), crosses the Hatch to East Knoyle road and continues NE along the left-hand hedge of the lane leading to Cools Farm. The boundary here is between ‘Tisbury and East Knoyle, which was a royal manor in Saxon times; hence no doubt, the description king’s hedge. D.G. Then to Knoyle lea; W.G. Then straight to Knoyle pasture, W.H.J. To Knoyle. Tisbury 29: And on hiclesham/And on to Hicol’s homestead. About 800 m from the cross-roads the boundary, having run along the length of a wood called Sumerleaze Oaks, turns N. The homestead, presumably, was situated near there. Hiclesham appears to have been derived from a personal name. The boundary had climbed gently from the cross- roads but its northward turn directed it on to, and up, the slope leading to the Upper Greensand escarpment. D.G. And to Hicol’s house; W.G. And to Hic- lesham: W.H.J. And Hiclesham. Tisbury 30: yannen on meare weilThen to boundary way. The ditch and bank reach the escarpment, lead up to a terrace roadway and form the extreme NW angle of ‘Tisbury parish. The boundary roadway leads E but turns gradually S as it reaches and passes the Hindon to Newtown road. The boundary descends the scarp southwards. D.G. Then to the boundary way; W.G. Then to the road that leads to the common pasture. Tisbury 31: Of yane wege anlang hrigces to nipedefordel From the way along the ridges to Nypred ford. ‘The boundary road leads to the banks of an ancient enclosure which another concord calls Clotley.'* The boundary turns EF and follows the man-made banks to the Fonthill Gifford to Newtown road as far as the Oddtord Brook, now a bridge and formerly the ford. D.G. From the way along the ridge to ? ford; W.G. From. the ridge to Impedeforde [a misreading for Nipredeforde]. road along the 18. Feet of Fines, Henry [1 (note 4): ‘Clotleg within the Earthwork’ (Clotlet inf. ambit fossit’.). THE TISBURY LANDHOLDINGS GRANTED TO SHAPTEESBURY MONASTERY BY Thi SAXON KINGS 17 Tisbury 32: An lang weges yat it cumet to funtgeal/On along the roads that come to funt water? From Nypred ford the road to Fonthill Lake forms the Tisbury parish boundary. Although Fonthill Lake is man-made, the terrain suggests that it was always more than just a small stream. D.G. Along the way till it comes to ? of the spring; W.G. Then along the road till it comes to Fonthill. Tisbury 33: On yone herpod’/On then to the herepath [military road]. Grundy related landmarks 33-9 to the ‘Tisbury boundary only; his solution of those is not convincing, and he had no surveys of neighbouring holdings to assist. | eventually worked back from the last landmark (43) and satisfied myself that a route taking in Berwick St Leonard was required. As all Saxon surveys run clockwise, the boundary would leave Fonthill Lake and turn westwards along the S of Berwick St Leonard. The stream that enters Fonthill Lake at its N end comes from the W and forms the present S boundary of the parish. Westward the watercourse gradually becomes no more than a small intermittent stream. Its course continues past the SW corner of Berwick into Hindon parish for almost 400 m, then bends SW, passes under the Berwick to Hindon road and, accompanied on its S side by an old unadopted road, arrives at the foot of Hindon High Street. I have taken landmarks 32 and 33 to be along the roads that accompany the funt stream to the Herepath. The Herepath I believe is now the Tisbury to Hindon road and that, before the making of Hindon High Street, it followed the present School Lane which, I also believe, originally was continuous with the road N of it that leads to Chicklade. That being so, the junction with the Herepath was either where the unadopted road meets the Tisbury to Hindon road or where the stream meets School Lane. D.G. Vo the highway; W.G. On to the broad road. Tisbury 34: yannen to gificancumbelThen on to ? combe. The name of this combe has no_ present-day connection, nor does it resemble any of the old ways of spelling Chicklade; nevertheless, after eliminating all other possibilities, I believe it refers to the depression in which Chicklade village lies. “he School Lane going N is cut off by the present Hindon to Berwick road from another road a short distance to its W which leads N to Chicklade. These two sections, once joined, | suggest, constituted the ancient Hlerepath. The Herepath climbs steadily, _crosses the old Ox Drove and drops down a steeper slope to meet and cross over the A303 main road at an the W end of Chicklade village. D.G. Then to Gifica’s combe?; W.G. Then to the Ivy draped combe; W.H.J. To Gificancombe [Gifcombe?]. Tisbury 35: An lang cumbe to stanwetelAlong the combe to stonewdy. The Herepath continues on the N side of the A303 as a wide and flinty unadopted road. It climbs the N slope of the combe (Cratt Hill) for about 1500 m until, at the W end of Great Ridge woods, it is crossed by another unadopted road running W to E. This road I equate with the stoneway, and the N boundary of Chicklade turns eastwards along it. Part of the W Great Ridge woods: is called Stonehill Copse. The underlying chalk of the ridge is here capped with a formation of Clay with Flints. The Stoneway runs between two banks about 6 m apart. For 800 m it skirts the woods and then continues within them; after a further 400 m it becomes the N boundary of Berwick St Leonard. The banks are there composed of such sizeable flints that it is difficult to decide whether to call them banks or walls. Large beech trees grow on top of them, and the years have given the banks repeated coverings of leafmould. It is only where their mantle of moss and vegetation has been disturbed that the rocky nature of the banks has been revealed. D.G. Along the combe to Stoneway; W.G. Along the cumbe to the gravelled road. Tisbury 36: Anlang hrygges to yere lindenlegelAlong the ridges to Linden lea [Lindley]. The name Lindley is a fairly common place-name, which indicates that linden (lime) trees were abun- dant and widespread. However, none have survived in the area now reached by this survey. I place it at the NE corner of Berwick parish where the boundary turns S. [ have read Lindenlege where Grundy and Goodchild read Litlenlege. D.G. Along the ridge to Little lea; W.G. Along the ridge to little leaze. Tisbury 37; yannen on Leofriches imare/Then on to Leofric’s boundary banks. Leotric, of course, must have been well known when the survey was made, but he has had a multitude of successors. The E boundary of Berwick was modified in 1840 by an enclosure award, with land in Berwick owned by John Benett exchanged for land of equal value owned by William Beckford in Fonthill Bishop; the boundary between Berwick and Fonthill Bishop was redrawn as an almost straight line running from the Stoneway back down to the A303 in Chicklade Bottom. This tidying-up crased -the former boundary which the enclosure award map 176 THE WILTSHIRE shows as taking a somewhat staggered line of descent to Chicklade Bottom. Presumably Leofric’s ditch and/or bank formerly marked this line. D.G. Then to Leofric’s balk; W.G. Then to Leofrich’s boundary. Tisbury 38: ford be gemare eft on Funt allFurther by the boundary bank back to Funt water. The boundary crosses the A303 and climbs the S slope of the combe to where some remnants of the old banks survive. This area, too, was changed by the 1840 award, and also by the construction of an 18th-century coach road from near Hindon to Chicklade Bottom. From the old banks the boundary turns SW along the line of the coach road for a short distance, and then angles SE to run for the best part of 1500 m along a magnificent thorn hedge back down to the stream at the SE corner of Berwick St Leonard parish. This landmark completes the circuit of the Berwick and Chicklade holdings. D.G. On by the balk again to Fonthill; W.G. Onward by those boundaries again to Funtal. Tisbury 38: Of funtes brigcelFrom Funt’s bridge. Grundy and Goodchild read this direction as ‘to Finch’s ridge’. I disagree. It is another case of the scribe telescoping letters so that ‘funtes’ appears as ‘fintes’, but the following word is quite clearly ‘brigce’ and not ‘hrigce’. The bridge was probably not far from where the present road bridge crosses the stream as it enters the N end of Fonthill Lake. D.G. To Finch’s ridge; W.G. ‘To Finch’s ridge. Tisbury 40: An lang hriges to Alfgares imare/Along the ridges to Alfgar’s boundary bank. The survey now resumes its progress along the N boundary of ‘Tisbury, which was left between land- marks 32 and 33. From the bridge the boundary climbs the Upper Greensand scarp once again, on the E side of the N end of Fonthill Lake. The greensand here forms a prominent ridge called Little Ridge. The boundary, marked by a deep ditch running between two banks, proceeds eastwards along the backbone of Little Ridge for 800 m. The ditch then makes a S and W hairpin turn and descends to the foot of the ridge. Its arrival at the bottom is marked by a boundary stone indicating Tisbury to the W and Chilmark to the E. The present boundary continues SE from the boundary stone, crosses the modern drive to Fonthill House and ascends the limestone slope S of the house. There is no noticeable ground feature to equate with Alfgars boundary bank across the valley between Greensand and Limestone. However, when the boundary reaches the wooded area occupied by Ashley Wood and Farnell Copse it picks up a shallow © ARCIIAREOLOGICAL AND NAXPURAL PISTORY MAGAZINES ditch and low bank on the E edge of those woods, and then angles eastwards to pass through a N extension to Farnell Copse. D.G. Along the ridge to Alfgars’s balk; W.G. Along the ridge to Alfgar’s boundary. Tisbury 41: Forder be hisimare oy heved stoccas/ Further by his boundary to the head stakes. The boundary, still proceeding eastwards, reaches the road which goes N to the hamlet of Ridge. Shortly before reaching the road, however, it makes a number of zig-zag turns in quick succession to take it round the lip of a drop into the hollow where part of Ridge hamlet shelters. Here, around the lip, would have been the protective fence of stakes. D.G. On by his balk to the head stakes; W.G. Further on by his boundaries to the main boundary posts. Tisbury 42: yanen to cigel merc brokelThen to Chilmark brook. From the E side of the Ridge road the boundary continues eastwards in an almost straight line for about 2500 m. In its progress it crosses Lady Down, passes by Moses Wood and through part of Chicksgrove Wood, crosses the Ham Cross to Chilmark road and reaches the Chilmark brook via a public footpath. D.G. Then to the Chilmark brook; W.G. Then to the Chilmark brook. Tisbury 43: An lang stremes eft on NodrelAlong the stream back to the Nadder. The Chilmark brook forms the last 800 m of the boundary, until it runs into the Nadder at the point where the survey began. D.G. Along stream once more to the Nadder; W.G. Along the stream again to the Nadder. CONCLUSION The perambulation is thus completed of a land-holding of about 4000 ha (10,000 acres), within a boundary line some 65 km (40 miles) long. The survey heading assesses the holding at 20 Hides, but this, I expect, referred to the arable only. Reckoning a Hide at about 48 ha (120 acres), the arable amounts to 960 ha (2400 acres) or 25 per cent of the whole, probably more than is the case today. The Domesday record, made a century later, still assesses the Tisbury holding of the Abbess and Monastery of Shaftesbury at 20 Hides; pasture it assessed at 1 by 2 league, that is 2.4 by 1.2 km, making. 290 ha (720 acres); woodland _ is assessed at | by I league, 2.4 by 2.4 km, say 580 ha (1440 acres). Adding together arable, pasture and woodland gives a total of 1830 ha (4560 acres), a little under half the area of the holding. The other half THE TISBURY LANDHOLDINGS GRANTED TO SHAFTESBURY MONASTERY BY THE SA\NON KINGS Le. would be made up of uncultivated waste, hillsides, marshes, ponds, rivers, streams, roads and lanes, quar- ries, sawyards, and habitable dwellings, not forgetting churches and burial grounds. I am satisfied that the topographic identification given here proves that the Tisbury lands of the Abbess included, as well as Tisbury parish, the parishes of Sedgehill and Berwick St Leonard, part of Chicklade parish, part of the present Hindon parish (the only portion of the boundary of whose precise identification I am a little doubtful), and the piece of Semley Common she held as sub-tenant of the Abbess of Wilton. Historians have been ready to accept that Semley 1s not specifically mentioned in Domesday Book because it is included under the heading ‘Chalke’ in the lands of the Abbess of Wilton.” But they have not been as ready to accept the non-appearance of Sedgehill and Berwick St Leonard as being due to their inclusion under ‘Tisbury’... I hope this paper will overcome that reluctance. The question of Chicklade and Domesday Book remains unsolved. This study shows that only part of Chicklade was a possession of Shaftesbury Monastery and therefore included in the Tisbury holdings. Where is the rest? Jones thought he found an entry which might refer to Chicklade in ‘Chigelei’,”! which consisted of 142 virgates of land (about 18 ha or 45 acres) and was 19. VCH Wiltshire, vol. 2 p. 91. 20. Ibid. (Neither Berwick St Leonard nor Sedgehill are mentioned). held by Edwin, a king’s thegn. Edwin’s holding was of a size to have been accommodated in the part of Chicklade not held by the Abbess of Shaftesbury. It was gratifying to discover that so much physical evidence in the form of ditches, banks, boundary hedges, and enclosure banks, mentioned in the charter, still survived. Some of those landmarks have been erased since I saw them, they having fallen victim to the needs of modern farming. The bounds themselves, in much of their course, pass through unspoiled coun- tryside where imagination can picture the scene being very little different from that the Saxon surveyors saw. Wandering along the greensand scarps and terraces, passing through bluebell-carpeted woods or beside meandering streams, how often the boundary was made to take advantage of the local geography. Because of this strategic placement there has been no need to remove quite long stretches of the ancient landmarks in the interest of present needs. Nature, however, 1s gradually filling the shallower ditches, and it is only a question of time before most of the Saxon work disappears for ever. Acknowledgements. | thank all those farmers, farm managers, estate owners and their representatives, and private owners of land, who — without exception — allowed me to walk over their ground and, ina few cases, walked with me. Mr C. Chippindale assisted in the final revisions of the paper. 21. Ibid., pp. 162 and note, 217. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 178-83. Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Stonehenge Bluestones by AUBREY BURL’ Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Stonehenge story, discredited as a fantasy since the 16th century, began to gain some substance once more when 19th-century geologists showed the Stonehenge bluestones had come to Wiltshire from the W. Piggott suggested the Stonehenge story might preserve a genuine prehistoric tradition of the bringing of the bluestones from the Preseli mountains. However, all medieval accounts refer to the great size of the Stonehenge stones, which must indicate the Wiltshire sarsens. Perhaps Geoffrey confused stories about the bluestones with the sarsens. A more credible explanation is that Geoffrey misunderstood contemporary stories of the great standing stones of the Irish county of Kildare. It seems that the Stonehenge story ts not a remnant of prehistoric folk memory, but merely a medieval attempt : blemished by geological incompetence, to explain how the ponderous sarsens had been set in place. Fight hundred and fifty years ago Geoffrey of Monmouth, one of Britain’s explained why Stonehenge had been built. In Book VIII (12) of his History of the Kings of Britain, a ragbag of fact and fiction disguised as a documentary account and completed by AD 1138, he reported the advice given by the magician Merlin to Ambrosius Aurelianus, King of the Britons. Three hundred British nobles had been massacred by their Saxon enemies. ‘If,’ said Merlin, ‘you want to grace the burial-place of these men with some lasting monument, send for the Giants’ Round earliest ‘historians’, which is on Mount Killaurus in Ireland’ (Geoffrey of Monmouth [1138]: 196). Merlin added that the stones of the circle had healing powers and had been set up by giants from Africa. This convinced the king that the ring would be a dignified and fitting cenotaph, and after much trouble the stones were transported to Salisbury Plain where Merlin erected them. This preposterous story, though credible to most medieval chroniclers, was so obviously fantastic that historians from the 16th century onwards abandoned it completely (Chippindale 1983: 26). It could only begin to come to life again when 19th-century geologists began questioning where the Stonehenge bluestones might have come from. Some 70 or more of these stones had stood inside the ring of sarsen uprights. ‘he origin of the sarsens themselves had long been recognized. In his Stone-beng (1655, reissued 1725) the royal architect Inigo Jones said, ‘the same kind of Stone whereof this Antiquity consists may be found, especially about Aibury in North Wiltshire (Jones 1725: 23), and for the past 300 years it has been accepted that the huge sandstone pillars had been dragged from the Marl- borough Downs twenty miles north of Stonchenge. " 40 St James’ Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham. This was not true of the bluestones, which were clearly different from the sarsens. As long ago as 1721 William Stukeley was aware that the stones of Stonehenge were not all the same; he contrasted the sarsens with the Altar Stone ‘which is of a still harder [sort], as design’d to resist fire’, composed of ‘a kind of blue coarse marble’ (Stukeley 1740: 5, 30). He observed that the sarsens were less soft than the stones of the inner circle. In 1722 when digging the round barrow, Amesbury 4, he described some broken fragments in it as ‘bits of red and blue marble, chippings of the stones of the temple’ (Stukeley 1740: 46). He did not, however, speculate about their source. Nor did William Cunnington 79 years later when after his excavation of the Bole’s long barrow in July 1801, he wrote that one of the large stones there was a ‘bluestone’, ‘ye same to those of the upright stones in ye inner circle at Stonehenge’ (R. Hl. Cunnington 1975; 15). It was a further six years before Cunnington conjectured that they might have been ‘brought from some part of Devonshire or Cornwall (Chippindale 1983: 124). That was the beginning of a century of argument. In 1833 Conybeare declared the bluestones might have been found on Dartmoor, and during the 19th century the Mendips, Shropshire, Devon, Cornwall, Pembrokeshire, North Wales, Cumberland, the Channel Isles, Normandy and Brittany all were offered as sources (Harrison 1901: 168). Doubtful that prehistoric man could have shifted rough stones any great distance, Judd (1903: 60) considered that both the sarsens and the bluestones had been conveyed to Salisbury Plain by glacial drift. It was another 20 years before the source of the bluestones seemed settled. Following an analysis of the variety of bluestones existing at Stonehenge — spotted dolerite (presclite), GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTIL AND THE STONELIENGE BLUESTONES 179 rhyolite, volcanic ash, and others — H. H. Thomas (1923) noted that just such a mixture was to be found near the Carn Meini outcrop in the Preseli mountains of Pembrokeshire (Dyfed). The fact that the Altar Stone, a block of micaceous sandstone now prostrate near the centre of Stonehenge, had also come from SW Wales, from the Cosheston Beds near Milford Haven and only 20 miles S of the Preselis, apparently confirmed this hypothesis. This Welsh source for the bluestones seemed to provide some substance for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of how the stones had been brought from Ireland. The Preselis, rising almost exactly halfway between eastern Ireland and Wiltshire, stood on the route prehistoric people might have taken on their way from one region to the other. Donne Bushell (1911) had described the Preseli countryside as a_ prehistoric Westminster filled with megaliths; it was plausible to see Preseli as a cult area from which a stone circle had been dismantled after a tribal war and taken by sea and river to Salisbury Plain. So romantically appealing was the idea of this bold enterprise that within a year of ‘Thomas’s paper it was being archaeologically accepted: ‘The tradition relative to this event was narrated by Geoffrey of Monmouth’ (E. H. Stone 1924: 65). The notion that a 12th-century chronicler might have recorded a memory at least 3000 years old was exciting. ‘In the story of Stonehenge in Geoffrey of Monmouth we may have the only fragment left to us of a native Bronze-Age literature’ (Piggott 1941: 319), and Stuart Piggott went on to point out that a myth about the head of Bran, a slain Celtic hero, being taken from Ireland to London via Harlech and Pembrokeshire might also contain a lingering iron-age memory of an ancient route that had passed by the Preselis. Opinion tended towards the belief that Beaker people had transported the bluestones from the land- mark of the Preselis on their way back from copper- prospecting in the Wicklow mountains of Ireland. These pioneering explorers would have known the Preselis because some of their fine maceheads and battle-axes of spotted dolerite came from there. ‘The Group XIII stone axe-factory was located on Carn Mein1 itself (Stone and Wallis 1951: 128-9), which may have been regarded as a magical place. ‘I would suggest that it is the character of the outcrop itself which gave to the rock its magic qualities and made worthwhile the tedious and dangerous journey to Wiltshire’ (Lynch 1975: 124). Others agreed. “Phe awe-inspiring cha- racter of Prescelly Mountain is almost sufficient to account for the special significance of the rocks which crop out along its crest’ (Atkinson 1956: 175). This combination of Irish trade route, stone-axe manufacture and source of the bluestones convinced many people that Geoffrey of Monmouth had indeed chanced upon an old tale that fossilized the admiration the perilous and moving of the bluestones had made upon the prehistoric mind and back-breaking which had been passed orally from generation to generation. ‘It is hard to believe that Geoffrey of Monmouth arbitrarily selected the one correct direction for the transportation of the stones when he had the whole compass to choose from’ (Burl 1980: 7). ‘There was nothing inherently implausible about the reconciliation of Geoffrey’s story with the Preselis as the bluestone source. The saga of the stones’ journey from Wales to Wiltshire was so dramatic that it could well have been recounted from century to century, albeit distorted and tinged with interpolations of magic and Merlin. Even an origin for the bluestones in Snowdonia not the Preselis (Howard 1982: 117) did not invalidate the possibility that Geoffrey had repeated a genuine prehistoric tradition. The iron-age tale of Bran’s head mentioned an Ireland—London staging-post at Harlech, a port hardly 15 miles S of Mount Snowdon. Geoffrey had written merely that the stones had come from Ireland. Whether the bluestones had been taken from the Preselis or from Snowdonia, his story could still be construed as a corrupt version of an old legend. Three elements in the Geoffrey story require giants, Africa, and Ireland. It is understandable that to people in the Middle Ages the monstrous megalithic structures must have been built by giants, and no further elaboration is needed to account for their appearance in the story. Why such ogres should come from Africa has little to do with geography. To western Europeans in the 12th century ‘Africa’ was no more than a vague region W of Egypt, an appropriate home for ‘the uncanny supernatural’ (Tatlock 1950: 387). Africa was not a real place. It was a source of the inexplicable, a fountain of the marvellous. For semi-human dreadful creatures such as giants to explanation: have emanated from that remote, unworldly realm was an explanation entirely acceptable to Geoftfrey’s won- dering readers. For us today to associate Geoffrey’s ‘Africa’ with prehistoric contacts between Iberia and Britain is to misunderstand the mediaeval world- picture. ‘Modern semi-scientific conjecture as to the actual origin of Stonehenge has no bearing on Geo- ffrey’s account, simply because there is no thinkable channel by which the prehistoric facts could have reached him’ (Tatlock 1950: 40). But if ignorance and superstition are enough to account for Africa and the giants in Geoffrey’s ‘faction’ about Stonehenge, they cannot be used to reject Ireland 180, THE WILTSHIRE ARCHIAROLOGICAL AND NYVECRAL PISTORY MAGAZINE as fanciful also. To understand why that country was chosen some knowledge of the early 12th century is needed. There are vital questions to be asked about Geoffrey’s narrative, including what he himself had seen or where he had obtained his information, always remembering that much of his ‘data’ were fictitious (Thorpe 1966: 17). Quite a lot is known about Geoffrey’s life. Born around AD 1100, maybe in Brittany or possibly at Caerleon-on-Usk in career survived the turbulent years of civil war between Stephen and Matilda. Fle was probably canon of St George’s College at Oseney, near Oxford, and he finally became Bishop-Elect of St Asaph in Flintshire (Clwyd) although there is no record of his ever going there. He died in 1154. He clained that his History was based on an old Welsh manuscript, ‘a certain very ancient book written in the British language’, but this, if ever it existed, has disappeared. It is just as possible that his ‘facts’ came from a variety of sources such as the Welsh Annals, Gildas, Nennius and others, and his own imagination, ‘turning chronicle history into literature’ (Thorpe 1966: 19). The unreliability of his statements had led to the criticism that ‘there has scarcely, if ever, been an historian more mendacious than Geoffrey — of Monmouth’ (Brooke 1976: 78), warning the reader to Monmouthshire, — his take nothing on trust in The History of the Kings of Britain. Especial scepticism is demanded about the Celtic material which Geoffrey, a Welshman or Breton, tended to glorify. The Stonehenge story with its praise of the Britons is no exception. On his travels Geoffrey may have seen Stonehenge for himself. Equally, from his undetailed description of it, he may only have read about that imposing monument. Eight years before the completion of his own book the Historia Anglorum of Henry of Huntingdon had appeared, a work which had the famous paragraph about Stonehenge as the second wonder of Britain whose stones ‘of a wondrous size have been erected after the manner of doorways’ (Harrison 1901: 65), the earliest surviving reference to the great antiquity. Geoffrey’s flimsy knowledge of Stonehenge could have come trom the Historia Anglorum, just as his account of the massacre of 300 Britons probably came from the older British History of Nennius dating from c. AD 800 (Morris 1980: 2). There is no evidence, internal or external, to prove that Geoffrey had first-hand knowledge of the stone circle itself. With great religious houses and cathedrals of the lith century Winchester, Glastonbury, Old Sarum and Amesbury and with near Stonehenge at clerks travelling between them, it is unlikely that Stonehenge was unknown. But what passers-by would have remarked have insignificant bluestones, dwarfed by the trilithons and half-hidden inside the ring, but the incredible sarsens that towered above them, three times their height, massive pillars so bulky that it seemed no mortal men could have raised them. Not one bluestone is shown in either of the two I4th-century sketches of Stonehenge. One, now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, displays only the outer sarsen ring — changed into a rectangle. The other, in the British Museum (Egerton MS 3028, folio 30) is a drawing of Merlin lifting a lintel into place with huge sarsen pillars behind him but with no sign of a bluestone anywhere (Chippindale 1983: 22). It was the size, not the nature of the stones, that intrigued the medieval spectator. And, as Piggott (1941: 208) pointed out, 12th-century geology was certainly not sufficiently advanced to find anything incongruous about the presence of dolerite in a upon would not been the cretaceous landscape. ‘That it was indeed the impressive sarsens to which Geoffrey referred is plain from his description of them. “The stones are enormous and there is no one alive strong enough to move them.’ This could not be a reference to the bluestones, on average no more than 3 metres long (Atkinson 1956: 42) and no bigger and heavier than some of the stones used in the building of a Norman cathedral. Neither their weight nor the distance involved in their transportation would have surprised Geoffrey. The stones for the great church at Bury St Edmunds, erected in his lifetime, came from as far away as Barnack in Northamptonshire and Caen in Normandy (Harvey 1971: 21). A bluestone weighed no more than 4 tons. This was very different from the 20-50 tons of the sarsens. ‘he Britons, said Geoffrey, tried to shift the stones of the Giants’ Round with hawsers, tackles and ropes, the same equipment used by cathedral masons, ‘but none of these things advanced them an inch’, and it was left to Merlin to move the stones by magic. The emphasis Geoffrey placed upon the size and weight of the stones, the description of Henry of Huntingdon that Stonehenge was composed of arch- ways ‘so that doorway appears to have been raised upon doorway, nor can anyone conceive by what art such great stones have been so raised aloft’ are more appli- cable to the sarsens than to the bluestones. It was the sheer mass of Stonehenge with its lintels that impressed the Middle Ages. this it that there can be no straightforward connection between Geoffrey's leg- From seems endary account and the source of the bluestones. GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH AND THE STONEHENGE BLUESTONES Indeed, if the stones’ derivation was Snowdonia rather than the Preselis then they could have been shifted towards Salisbury Plain by glaciation (Kellaway 1971), a geological explanation which would eradicate all reason for believing in a long-lasting recollection of a prodigious effort of transportation. Judd discussed the improbability of the stones being hauled ‘in their rough state over mountains, hills and rivers’ when, instead, the prehistoric labourers could easily have shaped and lightened them at their source. Glacial drift, however, would account for the undressed condition of the bluestones which were ‘reduced to something like half their bulk . . . before re-erection’ (Judd 1903: 58-9). As a rejoinder, however, it should be added that some of the bluestones have never been shaped, and others may have been smoothed a long time after their introduction into Stonehenge (Atkinson 1956: 39). Nevertheless there is some archaeological corroboration for Judd’s contention, inasmuch as there is no other stone circle in the British Isles to which stones have been dragged from more than five or six miles away (Burl 1976: 408, ‘source of stones’). It can be argued that Geoffrey, having read some imprecise epic of the bluestones, mistakenly presumed it referred to the sarsens. A more credible alternative suggests that, so far from having misinterpreted a real event, Geoffrey had instead been misled by stories he had heard from his contemporarics. Once Africa, giants and even the Welsh bluestones are erased from his fairy tale the crucial question must be why he claimed Ireland as the country from which Stonehenge had been taken. There is no reason why a cleric with Welsh connections who was gathering together Celtic stories and legends should have confused Wales with Ireland. One must assume that he really did mean Ireland, but without the bluestones and the Preselis the Irish association seems puzzling. The answer, however, may be simple and begins with the location of Mount Killaurus where the Giants’ Round stood. It has been suggested that it should be looked for in early documents relating to the Preseli region (Grinsell 1975: 8), but it now appears that this would be fruitless. For Ireland itself Faral (1929: II, 241) thought Mount Killaurus might be identified with Killala, Co. Mayo, fairly close to some court-cairns and a few stone circles such as Summerhill House (G_ 192335), but the only conspicuous mountains at Slieve Gamph (370 m OD), Maumakeogh (380 m) and Nephin (807 m) are 12 or more miles away. Uhis, and the position of Killala in the far NW of Ireland, makes it an unconvincing location. ‘Tatlock (1950: 81) thought, from the ‘Kill-’ prefix, 181 that Uisneach or Ushnagh Hill (184 m) near Killare in Co. Westmeath was feasible. This great prehistoric centre (N 291489), reputedly the exact centre or ‘navel’ of Ireland, commanded vast views in all directions and was the scene of iron-age assemblies for the fires of Beltane (Macalister 1935: 101f.). The ambi- ence is superficially tempting, but Killare also is a long way from the coast. Nor are there any stone circles or standing stones in the vicinity. Earlier writers believed the site to be in the Irish county of Kildare. It is noteworthy that 6 miles NNE of the town of Kildare is the Hill of Allen, 206 m high, and ‘famous in Irish legend as the Otherworld seat of the mythological Fionn mac Cumbhail (Killanin and Duignan 1962: 318). This hill, its name a corruption of ‘Allmhuin’, is by coincidence linked with another legend of a severed head, this time of the hero, Fergal, who was killed at the battle of Almu. After decapitation his head had offerings taken to it ‘at midday in Allen’ (Ross 1974: 156-7). Around the Hill of Allen are modern towns and hamlets such as Kilmeage, Kil- linagh, Killahan, Killinthomas and Kildare itself, the prefix ‘Kal-’ deriving from the Latin ce//a for a church or burial-place. One must ask why 12th-century English clerics should know anything about Co. Kildare. This is not a mystery. There was a rich monastery at Kildare, the principal one of the kingdom of Leinster, founded by St Brigid in the Sth century, sacked and burned several times by Vikings between AD 710 and 1089 but rebuilt and still, in 1185, possessing one of the finest illu- minated manuscripts in Ireland. Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) saw it when in Ireland with Prince John. ‘Among all the wonders of Kildare noth- ing seems to me more miraculous than that wonderful book, which they say was written at the dictation of an angel during the lifetime of the virgin’ [Brigid]. Gerald admired the artistry ‘so delicate and subtle, so close together and well-knitted, so involved and bound together and so fresh still in their colourings . . . that you will not hesitate to declare that all these things must have been the result of the work, not of men, but of angels’ (Gerald [1187]: 84). ‘There unusual about a Welsh archdeacon visiting a monastery in Co. Kildare. Anglo- more was nothing Norman churchmen had been travelling to Ireland since Lanfranc, William Ps Archbishop of Canterbury, asserted the authority of the Church of Rome and received the obedience of Irish bishops in 1074 and 1085. Earlier still an Irish litany of pilgrim saints, compiled around AD 800, mentions Gauls, Britons, Saxons, even Egyptians coming to Ircland (Hughes 1972: 209), Another Christian work of the same period 182 THE WILTSHIRE ARCILIAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL THSTORY MAGAZINE exulted in the contrast between the ruined pagan shrines and the flourishing churches, particularly at Kildare. ‘Great is victorious Brigid, and lovely her thronged sanctuary’ (Hughes 1972: 205-6). From the 11th century onwards, Irish priests were sent to Canterbury or Winchester to be consecrated as archbishops (Scherman 1981: 226). The Irish Sea was a busy monastic thoroughfare. The natural port for travellers from England and Wales to Kildare was Dublin, 30 miles from the monastery. From there the wayfarer would skirt the Wicklow mountains to the S and pass through the settlement of Naas 10 miles from Kildare. In the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth several monasteries existed there. Now, this area had been one of the most potent cult centres in prehistoric Ireland. The Curragh with its barrows, earthwork and henges was immediately to the EF of Kildare, the Hill of Allmhuin was only a few miles away, and St Brigid herself may well have been a Christian personification of the Celtic goddess Brighid (MacCana 1970: 34) with a suspiciously heathen- sounding fire burning perpetually in her monastery. Medieval clerics would have been unhappily aware of the enduring attraction of the pagan places, and they would have seen the gaunt relics of ritual structures as they passed Naas. Surprisingly, Tatlock (1950: 81) said that megalithic monuments were scarce in the region ‘with none near Naas’. He was wrong. There were abundant megaliths. Gerald of Wales’ comments were quoted word for word by Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1812: 129). ‘Fuit antiquis temportbus in Hibernia lapides congeries admiranda quae et chorea Gigantum dicta fuit et in Kildartensi planicie, non procul a castro Nasensi, tam ingenii, quam virium opere mirabiliter erexerant. Unde et tbidem lapides quidam alius simillimi, simulque modo erecti, usque in hodiernum conspiciuntur’. In Ireland, in ancient times, there was a collection of stones called the Giants’ Dance that demanded admiration and on the plains of Kildare, not far from Naas castle, [giants] set them up as much by skill as by strength. Moreover, stones just like them, and raised in the same way, are to be seen there to the present day.’ Many of the stones mentioned by Gerald are still standing. They are the famous pillars of Wicklow granite and are amongst the tallest standing stones in the British Isles, concentrated in the counties of Carlow and Kildare in quite a small area of eastern Ireland. Some such as Aghade, 1.8 m high, Ardristan, 2.7 m, and Mullaghmast, 2.1 m, stand several miles Sof Naas, but the very tallest stones are much closer. Craddockstown West (N 911163), 4.4 m, is only 22 miles SE of Naas and is one of ‘the many granite pillars to be found in the Naas district’ (Evans 1966: 136). Longstone Rath (N 936206), a slender pillar of 5.3 m with a Beaker cist at its base, is 2% miles SE of the town. The Punchestown pillar (N 918165), 24 miles away, is the second tallest menhir in the British Isles after Rudston in Yorkshire. It stands a soaring 6 m in height, and when it fell in 1931 was found to be 7 m long and to weigh over 9 tons. The dimensions of these great stones compare well with the average + m height of a Stonehenge sarsen. ‘These scattered stones around Naas were surely the huge pillars commented upon by the clerics. It is easy to imagine that Gerald of Wales and others before him visualized in these lofty menhirs, so similar in size and appearance to the sarsens of Stonehenge, the remains of an enormous stone circle, truly the work of giants, the majority of whose stones had been taken to Salisbury Plain to be erected in another ring of exceptionally big uprights. ‘Merlin . . . put the stones up ina circle. . . in exactly the same way as they had been arranged on Mount Killaurus in Ireland, thus proving that his artistry was worth more than any brute strength’ (Geoffrey [1138]: 198). Years ago, this association of Stonehenge with Naas used to be the accepted explanation, as Hoare indicated when he remarked (1812: 132) of Gerald of Wales, ‘I never had reason to complain of his want of accuracy in the description of places.’ Earlier still, in the 17th century, John Aubrey in his Monumenta Britannica, completed by 1689 (Hunter 1975: 87, n.6), had written of an Irish correspondent, ‘Mr Gethin told me, that at Kallian-hill (or a name like it) in Ireland, is a monument of Stones like those at Stone-heng; and from whence the old tradition is that Merlin brought them to Stone-heng by Conjuration’, adding in Latin on the same page that they were located ‘on the plain not far from Naas’ (Aubrey 1689: 127). It is only the modern red- (or blue-) herring of the Preselis that has transfor- med Geoffrey’s Celtic fantasy into archaeological fact. It would seem that his Stonehenge story is not a remnant of prehistoric folk memory but merely a attempt, \ geological incompetence, to explain how the ponderous sarsens had been set in place. The bluestones may have come from the Preselis or from Snowdonia. The sarsens may have come from the Marlborough Downs or may have lain on Salisbury Plain itself. But the legend is no more than a monkish mixture of Merlin, magic and imagination. Four hun- dred years after Geoffrey of Monmouth another anti- quarian, John Leland, knew better. “Almost everything that is related about the bringing of these stones from medieval blemished by GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH AND THE STONEHENGE BLUESTONES 183 Ireland is fictional,’ he wrote. ‘For everybody, however ignorant, ought to know that these enormous stones . . were brought by Merlin from some quarry nearby’ (Leland 1547: 31). BIBLIOGRAPHY ATKINSON, R. J. C., 1956. Stonehenge. London: Hamish Hamilton. AUBREY J., 1689. Monumenta Britannica, Parts I & II. (Edited by J. Fowles, Milborne Port: Dorset Publishing, 1980). BROOKE, C. N. L., 1976. Geoffrey of Monmouth as a historian, in C. N. L. Brooke, D. E. Luscombe, G. H. Martin, and D. Owen (eds.) Church and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to C. R. Cheney on his 70th Birthday: 77-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BURL, H. A. W., 1976. The Stone Circles of the British Isles. London: Yale University Press. BURL, H. A. W. 1980. A word in time: folk stories and stone circles, Sangreal 3(2): 5-13. BUSHELL, W. D., 1911. Among the Prescelly circles, Arch. Camb. 11: 287-333. CHIPPINDALE, C., 1983. Stonehenge Complete. London: Vhames and Hudson. CONYBEARE, W. D., 1833. Stonehenge illustrated by geology, Gev- tleman’s Magazine 103: 452-4. CUNNINGTON, R. H. 1975. From Antiquary to Archaeologist. Princes Risborough: Shire. EVANS, E., 1966. Prehistoric and Early Christian Ireland: a Guide. London: Batsford. FARAL, E., 1929. La légende arthurienne: études et documents. Paris. GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH [1138]. The History of the Kings of Britain. (Translated by L. Thorpe, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). GERALD OF WALES [1187]. The History and Topography of Ireland. (Translated by J. J. O'Meara, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). GRINSELL, L. V., 1975. Legendary History and Folk-lore of Stonehenge. St Peter Port, Guernsey: Toucan. HARRISON, W. J., 1901. A bibliography of the great stone monuments of Wiltshire — Stonehenge and Avebury, WAM 32: 1-169. HARVEY, J., 1971. The Master Builders. London: Thames & Hudson. HOARE, R. COLT, 1812. The Ancient History of South Wiltshire. London: William Miller. HOWARD, H., 1982. A petrological study of the rock specimens from excavations at Stonehenge, 1979-80, in M, W. Pitts, ‘On the road to Stonehenge’, Proc. Prebist. Soc. 48: 75-132. HUGHES, k., 1972. Early Christian Ireland: Introduction to the Sources. London. HUNTER, M., 1975. John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning. London: Duckworth. JONES, 1., 1725. The Most Noble Antiquity of Great Britain, Vulgarly called Stone-Heng. London. JUDD, J. W., 1903. Note on the nature and origin of the rock-fragments found in the excavations made at Stonehenge by Mr Gowland in 1901, WAM 33: 47-64. KELLAWAY, G. A., Nature 233: 30-5. KILLANIN, LORD, and DUIGNAN, M. V., 1962. Shell Guide to Ireland. London: Michael Joseph. LELAND, J., 1547. Antiquarti de Rebus Britannicus Collecteana, I. (Edited by T. Hearne, London, 1715). 1971. Glaciation and the stones of Stonehenge, LYNCH, F., 1975. The impact of landscape on prehistoric man, in J. G. Evans, S. Limbrey, and H. Cleere (ed.), The Effect of Man on the Landscape: the Highland Zone: 124-6. London, Council for British Archaeology. MACALISTER, R. A. S., 1935. Ancient Ireland. London: Methuen. MacCANA, P., 1970. Celtic Mythology. London: Hamlyn. MORRIS, J., (ed. and trans.) 1980. Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals. London: Phillimore. PIGGOTT, S., 1941. The sources of Geoffrey of Monmouth, II: the Stonehenge story, Antiquity 15: 305-19. ROSS, A., 1974. Pagan Celtic Britain. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. SCHERMAN, kK., 1981. The Flowering of Ireland: Saints, Scholars and Kings. London: Gollancz. STONE, E. H., 1924. The Stones of Stonehenge. London: Robert Scott. STONE, J. F. S., and WALLIS, F. S., 1951. Third report . . . on the petrological determination of stone axes, Proc. Prebist. Soc. 17: 99-158. STUKELEY, W., 1740. Stonehenge, a Temple Restor'd to the British Druids. London. TATLOCK, J. S. P., 1950. The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae’ and tts Early Vernacular Versions. Berkeley: California University Press. THOMAS, H. H., 1923. The source of the stones of Stonehenge, Avr. /. 23: 239-60. THORPE, L., 1966. Introduction to Geoffrey of Monmouth (1138): 9-47. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine vol. 79 (1985), pp. I84+-91. Widow Hyde of Heale by JENNIFER MILLER’ The story of Charles ITs escape after the Battle of Worcester exerts a perennial fascination, as the voluminous literature on the subject shows. Amongst the chief protagonists in this drama ‘Widow Hyde of Heale’ provides a key role. This paper gives an up-to-date account of her life. She was a Wiltshire woman born and bred, with very many connections within the county: a Hyde both by birth and by marriage. She was one of the ten children of Dr Thomas Hyde, Canon residentiary of Salisbury Cathedral, by his second wife Margaret, widow of Canon John Bold! and daughter of Tobias Sanford, Doctor of Physic and sometime Master of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Gloucester.’ Of their eight daughters two were given the same christian name, as was sometimes done in those days even when both similarly-named children survived. Katherine the younger, and heroine of this narrative, was baptized in Salisbury Cathedral on 15 May 1608. Her father was Chancellor of Sarum from 1588 until his death in December 1618, and held at various dates the Wiltshire livings of West Kington, Idmiston, Boscombe, Stratford ‘Tony and Sutton Veny.'’ He was related to the grandfather of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, Laurence Hyde of West Hatch, Wiltshire, Esquire, whose second son Sir Laurence was Attorney General to Queen Anne of Denmark. The families were on friendly terms, and Katherine’s future husband was amongst the relatives whom Dr Hyde entrusted to carry out the provisions of his will.* Katherine was left a portion of £80 by her father, and a further £40 by her mother, who lived until 1625. In * Flat 1, 2 Heathview Gardens, London SWI15 3SZ. 1. By whom she had a son Henry Bold. Salisbury Cathedral baptismal register. Public Record Office (PRO) will of Dr John Bold, PROBLI/99, f. 4. Will of Frances Kingeston of Devizes, spinster (sister of Flenry Bold’s wife), PROBII/160, f. 72. Bodleian Library, Ashmole Mss. 36, f. 143v. John H. Raach, A Directory of English Country Physicians (London: Dawsons, 1962), p- 80. 3. Alumni Oxonienses, early series, vol. 2 (1891), p. 783. PRO, E 334/9, f. 194v; E 334/12, ff. 50, 57v, 79; E 334/15, f. 35v. 4+. Wiltshire Visitation Pedigrees (London: Harleian Society 105-6, 19534), p. 98. J. J. Hlammond, ‘Notes on the Hydes of Wilts. and Cheshire’, Wiltshire Notes and Queries (1909): 340, 341, 342. PRO, will of Dr Thomas Hyde, PROBII/133, f. 10. 5. Ibid. PRO, will of Margaret Hlyde, PROBII/145, f. 63. Eric ii) 1622 Margaret had obtained a lease of the farm of Flamston in Bishopstone for 99 years during the lives of her children Thomas Hyde, Katherine the younger and Lucy Hyde. By her will she was careful to provide for the maintenance of her unmarried daughters until their portions were paid, and Katherine the younger was also given a diamond ring when Margaret died, probably at her house in the Close.’ Katherine’s surviving brother ‘Thomas Hyde was presented to the living of Abbotts Ann in Hampshire in 1633, and may have been able to provide a home there for his sisters, of whom three married gentlemen of Salisbury: Thomas Bee, Giles Hutchins and Peter ‘Thompson.’ Considering that Katherine’s family had lived for so many years in the Close as neighbours of Sir Laurence Hyde, it is not surprising that one of his many sons had hoped to marry one of her sisters. But Francis Hyde had to forsake England for Venice, and give up his chosen bride; so that it was left to Katherine the younger to revive the family relationship. An abortive licence for her marriage being dated 1638,* at last the parish register of Abbotts Ann triumphantly recorded that on 24 April 1640 ‘Laurence Hyde of Heale in the county of Wilts., Esq., son and heir to Sir Laurence Hyde, knight, was married unto Katherine Hyde, daughter to Thomas Hyde, Doctor in Divinity, Chancellor of Kerridge (ed.), Surveys of the Manors of Philip, first Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery (Devizes: Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society Records Branch 9, 1953) p. 126. Wiltshire Record Office (WRO), will of Jane Hyde, Archidiaconal Court of the Sub-Dean of Sarum, 1692. 6. PRO, E 334/19, f. 84v; CP 25(2) 609/1659 Mich. (Thos. and Margaret Bee, Salisbury, Wilts.) Visttation (note 4), p. 19. WRO, 351/1. Abbotts Ann parish marriage register. 7. Hammond (note 4), p. 433. Bodleian Library, will of Francis Hyde of Christ Church, Court of the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, 1637. His intended bride Barbara Hyde (possibly buried at Bromley, Kent in 1691) married Edward Northey, vicar of Tisbury and later also rector of North Tidworth. WRO, will of Edward Northey, Episcopal Consistory Court of Sarum, 1677, and of Jane Hyde (note 5). 8. Arthur J. Willis, Hampshire Marriage Licences 1607-1640 (London: Research Publishing Company, 1957, etc.), p. 128. WIDOW LIYDE OF HEALE Church of Sarum, and fifth son of Robert Hyde of Norbury in Cheshire, Esq.’ Laurence Hyde was a widower with three surviving children by his first wife, the heiress Amphillis, daughter of Sir Richard ‘Tichborne of Winchester Castle and of Vichborne in Hampshire:’ and he was some 13 years older than Katherine. In 1608, when his father was Reader, he had been admitted to the Middle Temple; and he graduated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1612. In 1624 and 1628 he was returned as MP for Hindon. Already a man_ of substance during his father’s lifetime, he had had to pay a fine of £17 10s in 1631 for avoiding knighthood." By August 1625 he was living at Heale, in the parish of Woodford, where his son Robert was baptized in 1629 and his daughters Amphillis and Helen in 1626 and 1630 respectively.'' Heale House stood isolated from other dwellings, yet within easy reach of Salisbury; and the beauty of its situation, on the banks of the river Avon, remains an enchantment at the present day. The property, described as including 1000 acres of pasture and 100 of meadowland, with gardens, orchards, woodlands, hop yards and a water mill, had been acquired by Sir Laurence Hyde at the beginning of the seventeenth century.'’ A portrait of Laurence Hyde of Heale in middle age, said to have been painted by Cornelius Johnson or Janssen, was reproduced early this century and shows him as a bluff-looking man with strong features and a heavy moustache. A companion portrait reproduced at the same time looks too old to represent either of his wives, but the face resembles the portrait of Katherine as a widow, now in the collection of the Earl of Clarendon. The Clarendon portrait has been variously attributed to Cornelius Johnson, who is thought to have left England in October 1643, or to John Riley, who was not born until 1646: it is difficult to suppose that this life-like work can be an ad vivum study of her face by the latter artist.'’ Katherine looks old for her years, and one doubts if she can ever have been a 9. The Parish Register of Kensington, Middlesex (London: Harleian Society, Registers 16, 1890), p. 67. PRO, C 142/565/199. 10. Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple (London: Butterworth, 1949), vol. 1, p. 91. Alamnr (note 3), p. 782. PRO E 178/5702. 11. PRO, EE 115/213/89; C 21/D9/8. Society Woodford parish register transcripts. R.E.H. Duke, ‘Woodford register of baptisms,’ Wiltshire Notes & Quertes 7 (A911): 160. 12. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion ed. W. D. Macray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), vol. 5, p. 210. PRO, € 54/1653; CP 26(1) 264 (Trin. 42 Eliz., Wilts). WRO 492/40. 13. Hammond (note 4), facing pp. 337, 385. Robin Gibson, Catalogue of Portraits in the Collection of the Earl of Clarendon (Wampshire: of Genealogists, 185 beauty, but her expression is shrewd and humorous, and one can well imagine her to have been a woman of character and resource. The deterioration of the political scene must have clouded poor Katherine’s short married life. Her hus- band did not sit in Parliament again, but acted as a Wiltshire commissioner to collect the subsidy raised in 1641 after rebellious Scots had invaded the north of England." On 3 December 1643 Laurence Hyde was buried in Salisbury Cathedral, where he had been baptized on 10 November 1594. So soon a widow, Katherine had no children of her own; but she was left with the heavy duty of caring for her step-childrens’ welfare, and trying to safeguard a royalist landed estate, in a time of civil war. She was helped and advised by one of her husband’s younger brothers, Dr Thomas Hyde DCL, who at about this time was Chancellor of Sarum." A royalist like the rest of his family, Dr Hyde had assisted Charles I with a loan of £1000 at the king’s headquarters in Oxford the previous summer." In 1646 Katherine had to appear before the parliamentary committee for Wiltshire sitting at Faulston Manor House to compound for her own estate, and for the estate of her late husband, and for the estate of his only son and heir, the 16 year-old Robert. Her signature appears on the schedule whereby she was to pay a total of £80 for the twenty- fifth part of Wiltshire lands situated at Heale, Durnford, Whiteparish, Dinton, Rodbourne Cheney and Stratford, together with other property in Hampshire and Surrey. Due to uncertainty over liabil- ity for the Dinton estate, the fine may later have been reduced by £10." The next year, in accordance with the marked legal tradition of his father’s family, young Robert was admitted to the Middle ‘Temple; and afterwards he was sent to France, by then a haven for English refugees, in pursuit of further education. However Katherine’s hopes for her step-son were dealt an irreparable blow by his premature death in France in about 1650, and he may well be the ‘young Gent: one published privately by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1977), pp. 73, 74. Tercentenary of the Battle of Worcester: Exhibition of Paintings from 1642 to 1651 (Worcester: City Art Gallery, 1951), p. 33. For Janssen and Riley see Dictionary of National Biography 29: 248, 249, and 48: 307. aed 14. PRO, E 179/259/22; E 179/199/405. PRO, C 9/126/74. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxontenses (London: 1691), vol. 1, p. 9OL. WRO, will of Robert Hyde of West Flatch, Ksq., Archdeaconry Court of Sarum, 1642. Robert Elyde's daughter Barbara was the first wife of Dr Thomas Chafin. 16. PRO, E 403/2571 part 2, f. 59. 17. British Library, Add. Mss. 22,085 f. 42v. J. Waylen, ‘Falstone day-Book,’ WAAL 26 (1892): 343-46, 370. HHSTORY MAGAZINE AND NYEPURAL ICAL ARCHIAEFOLOC THE WILTSHIRE 186 ‘pania Kysnoiaard saranos uo paspq aaadipad Jouig ° | oAndis j (igdiay) aysiy went (Z) (guy) (1991-91) uyeyy “soy (1) = ano7y uyof = ua|ay] (OS91-6791) 9qQoy (FE9I-L791) auuy (9691-9791) ! y (f79] “p) aouaane’] (uewysuazy Aasyduinzy (ZE91 “P ‘“6I9T “w) (€F9IF6S1) FJEPH JO (2) = 295) ausoqyat | yduy = apapy aouauney] = (SE9I-£091) anoT uyof = PAOIF) ALE (afim wuyf StH) (1991-8091) auLayEy (ce91 Kings] 10 parsuoyy uodue] go10jy fo apkty 1goy Jo s21g3nop auuy (Z) ‘paging som afin suf 250944) paenag uyeyy ‘soyy “Iq (Z) ASYUON psempy = aSpug (1) = uosdwoy | saiag = sulyoangy sayin) = aag sewoyy = HEH pseyrry (1) = (0791-9191) Yaqoy — (BEIT Fusayy “e191 °g) Aon] (LOVI-T191) ExeqQIEG — (9991-191) Ga sewoyy (7691-6091) uel (£591 Susy *2091 °g) autayrey (0691-5 Mew (6S 91 Fusayy “+091 “g) 19IeTIEW (p91 Susay ZO91 9) yeqeziyy (uoiduypy — fo mopim) : (pansauns ags wogm) uoisadury Yyi9qezi[y (O¢91 S9Z1Aaq] Ie “We “OO91 °9) amo] uyof = (g¢91 “p) 2pAPY yraqezity surydInfy psempy = apApy auef pjog Asuayy (fim ssa 3g) (purgsnq 1515 429) [assaiuryy Asepy = aa apAyy sewoyy JQ] = psojueg iaseTuepy = aa pjog uyof 4q WIDOW LIYDE OF HEALE Mr Hide’ whose burial in Paris on 5 June of that year is referred to by John Evelyn." With so many _ royalists Katherine was far from being the greatest sufferer, and the fate of her eldest sister Elizabeth was particularly unhappy. Having lost her first husband in 1638,” she married Dr Thomas Chafin DD, prebendary of Sarum and vicar of Mere in Wiltshire, who also held the living of Fovant. Energetic and outspoken, he was soon reported to the Long Parliament for having proposed to add to the Litany ‘from all lay Puritans, and all lay Parliament men, Good Lord deliver us.’ He was defended in January 1641 by Edward Hyde, the future Lord Chancellor Clarendon: but the Commons decided to send for the clerical offender, and in March, after a long debate, Dr Chafin only escaped imprisonment in the Tower by one vote. Kneeling at the bar of the House, he was reprimanded by the Speaker.” However Chafin’s open advocacy of the King’s led the Commons to resolve to send for him once more in October 1642; and subsequently, parliamentary soldiers sent to Mere to hunt him down ransacked his property and treated him with an outstanding brutality which combined with the effects of his incarceration in Fisherton prison to break his health. In September 1645 he was haled before the Faulston Committee and made to pay £50 in order to be set at liberty. He died at Mere in April 1646, still in official custody, ‘leaving his relict and family in a forlorn and mean condition’.”' During court proceedings the following autumn over land transactions involving John Coventry, son of Lord Keeper Coventry and a former royalist Colonel of Foot, reference was made to soldiers searching for Dr Chafin having broken into the vicarage at Mere.” For years Elizabeth Chafin stuggled to clear the burden of debt owing at her husband’s death. By April 1651 she was being hard pressed over an outstanding sum for which amongst her relatives cause 18. Admissions (note 10), p. 145. PRO, C 9/126/74. E. S. De Beer (ed.), Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), vol. 3, p. 8. 19. She had married Richard Hall, rector of Beverston in Gloucester- shire, in Salisbury Cathedral in 1618. John Henry Blunt, Dursley and its neighbourhood (London and Dursley: 1877) pp. 156, 157. Library, will of Richard Hall, Consistory Court of Gloucester, 1638. Hyde.) 20. Barrie Williams (ed.), The Subscription Book of Bishops Tounson and Davenant (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, vol. 32, 1976-7), p. 41. R. Webb (ed.), Historical Notices of Events by Nehemiah Wallington (London: Richard Bentley, 1869), vol. 1, p. 176. Wallace Notestein (ed.), The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), pp. 276, 277, 3598, 419. 21. British Library, Add. Mss. 22,084, f. 29 (reversed); Add. Mss. 22,085, f. 4. John Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy (London: 1714), Gloucester City Episcopal (Witnessed by Lucy 187 she was sued in the Court of King’s Bench, and afterwards in Chancery in November 1651. In her answer she claimed that for many years she had not had one pennyworth from her estate towards her own subsistence. Her necessity may late husband’s personal have obliged her to take refuge with her sister, as after Elizabeth’s death a grant of administration described her as having been late of Heale, Wiltshire.” Early in 1651 one of Katherine’s brothers-in-law, Sir Henry Hyde, who had acted as Charles II’s repre- sentative abroad, paid the supreme price for service to the Crown, and was beheaded in London. By the will he made during his 1 at Dasma in the Tower, he had left mourning rings to ‘widow Hyde of Heale’ and to her brother Dr Thomas Hyde.” Such near knowledge of the dire penalties to which she would become liable did not prevent Katherine from rising to the challenge of the most momentous occasion of her life: the arrival at her house on the evening of Monday 6 October 1651 of the fugitive King, hunted throughout the land, with a price of £1000 on his head.” recognized Charles IT immediately; but with admirable prudence and self-control concealed her knowledge. Despite his disguise, she She had seen him once before, seven years previously, when as Prince of Wales he had accompanied the royal army, which had quartered for some days at Salisbury in October 1644, on the Dorset to Hampshire. He had intended to trust her anyway. Apart from the outstanding merit of her husband’s family, she was known personally to at least two of the royalist conspirators engaged in contriving the King’s escape: Colonel John Coventry and Dr Humphrey Henchman DD, of the Close, and she was most highly regarded as a ‘worthy discreet loyal lady.’ Coventry had already given her some warning of what she might expect, and Henchman had gone to Heale in advance, to prepare for the King’s reception.” march from part 2, p. 66. A. G. Matthews, Wa/ker Revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 371. C. E. Ponting, Michael, Mere’, and T. H. Baker, ‘Notes on the history of Mere’, WAAT 29 (1897): 33, 282. PRO, KB 27/1737 Trin. 1651 m. 242 (Awbrey v. Chafin). PRO, C2/Charles I/C13/39. For Coventry see SP 23/183, ff. 464 to 476; SP. 23/199, f. 232. 23. PRO (note 21) and C2/Charles I/A5 1/42; PROB6/37, f. 99. 24. David Lloyd, Alemorrs of the lives, actions, sufferings and deaths of those “The parish Church of St nm iS) noble, reverend and excellent personages (London: 1668), pp. 559, 560. PRO, will of Sir Henry Hyde, PROBI1/298, f. 95. 25. Richard Ollard, The Escape of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966), pp. 16, 39, 116. 26. William Matthews, (ed.), Charles II's ea from (Berkeley: University of California, 1967), p. 67. C. E. (ed.), Diary of the Marches of the Royal te during ihe great Civil War kept by Richard Symonds (London: Camden Society 74, 1859), Worcester Long 188 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEAKOLOGICAL AND NYEURAL PIS TORY MAGAZINE By an unfortunate coincidence, several gentlemen visitors, including Katherine’s brother-in-law Frederick Hyde of the Middle Temple, had already arrived at Heale, straining the available accommodation and increasing the risk of discovery: no doubt these factors may have contributed towards overcoming Katherine’s composure, when she saw her monarch actualiy sitting at her supper-table. But afterwards, summoning all her resource, she planned a manoeuvre whereby Charles pretended to take his departure the next morning, and returned again secretly at about one o’clock that afternoon. Meanwhile she house of witnesses by giving all her servants leave of absence for the day to attend the fair at Salisbury: this was an event of long standing, for a Michaelmas fair lasting from 30 September to 7 October had originated in 1270. Admitting the King by the back door, she showed him to a secret room which had been constructed during the Civil War as a hiding place for loyalist refugees, and for cleared the caution had made her urge that knowledge of the royal presence should be confined to herself and to her sister, and during the period of anxious waiting that followed the sole attendants on the King were Katherine and her sister: ‘whose name,’ said Charles IT to Pepys nearly 30 years later, ‘I remember not.”* This unsung Wiltshire heroine numbered amongst Katherine’s many sisters is most likely to have been either the widowed Elizabeth Chafin, or Katherine’s spinster sister Jane Hyde, who ranked next to her in age. An inventory of Heale House taken after Katherine’s death refers to the chamber of Mistress Jane Hyde. Next to it is mentioned a bedchamber with hangings, and over the kitchen with its roasting spits was a chamber, perhaps Katherine’s own, in which amongst other furniture stood a bedstead with valence and curtains of black, and a cypress chest, with two green carpets. A preference for green was shown in the parlour, where the curtains were covered in green and there was another green carpet, perhaps to lay on the table board. Here also was a side table, a cupboard, plenty of chairs and stools, and a couch. An inner closet in the house contained a stove and a desk, glasses and sweetmeat dishes; adjacent to it an outer closet held another bedstead. There was a hall, and a large dining- room furnished with a great oval table, stools and a side pp. 129, 141. A.M. Broadley (ed.), The Royal Miracle (London: Stanley Paul, 1912), p. 201. Abraham Jenings, Afiracu/um Basilicon (London: 1664), pp. 52, 53. wm ~ Ibid., pp. 93, 54. Clarendon (note 12), p. 210. Vhomas Blount, Boscobel (London: third edition, 1680), part 2, pp. 23, 24. VCH, vol. 6 (1962), p. 140. cupboard; a little dining-room held another bedstead, with striped curtains, and a plentiful store of bedclothes, napkins and some tablecloths. Intriguingly, there was a room within the little dining-room containing a bedstead, chairs and a stool, hangings and one window curtain. The enumeration of a separate bake-house, brew-house, milk-house, salt-house, store- house, apple-loft and ‘hast-loft’ (presumably hayloft) gives some indication of the wide-ranging activity involved in running a country house in those days. A later inventory mentions details probably dating from Katherine’s days at Heale: that the arms of Hyde and Tichborne were represented in the parlour, and that the chamber with hangings of arras round the walls also displayed a picture of Laurence Hyde of West Hatch and his wife. The name and arms of ‘Thomas Hyde appeared on a cypress chest in the room over the kitchen: another cypress chest stood in the passage outside.” Heale House was later rebuilt to an extent which now makes it impossible to locate Charles IP's hiding- place with certainty: but wherever he was then concealed, Katherine’s security precautions were effec- tive enough to keep him undetected for a stay of six days. At length, on the evening of Sunday 12 October, Dr Henchman returned to Heale with the joyful tidings that a ship had been secretly chartered for the king’s escape, and at two o'clock the next morning Charles slipped out of the house by the back way. The faithful cavalier Colonel Robert Phelips, whose local knowledge made him an invaluable guide, was at the appointed rendezvous, the meadow gate opening on to the riverside. However at this critical juncture, the horse he had provided for the King suddenly bolted along the upstream bank. Although the royal mount was soon recaptured, there was great difficulty in repairing its bridle; but a makeshift harness was after Katherine saved the situation by producing a length of strong ribbon, and that day Charles If was able to proceed a good 70 km on his fateful journey." After this final nerve-racking experience one can imagine what hopes and fears distracted Katherine’s mind as she returned to the business which had probably caused the presence of the untimely guests at Heale,; the settlement of the affairs of her younger contrived 28. W. Matthews (note 26), pp. 34, 69. 29. PRO PROB4/12696; C 11/53/28. 30. Country Life, vol. 37 (27 February 1915), p. 272. VC/ (note 27), p. 224. 31. W. Matthews (note 26), p. 69. Broadley (note 26), pp. 199, 200, 202, Ollard (note 25), pp. 119, 121. WIDOW HYDE OF HEALE step-daughter Helen, now co-heir with her elder sister Amphillis to their own mother’s Hampshire inheritance. Helen Hyde became the bride of John Lowe, a young man from an armigerous Salisbury family,” and grandson of Katherine’s half-sister.” Some 10 years previously, John Lowe’s widowed mother Mary had taken as her second husband Dr Humphrey Henchman, the royalist clergyman so instrumental in the King’s escape, and this close family connection no doubt served as a pretext for his visits to Heale. By 29 December 1651 John Lowe and his wife Helen were living at Heale, and an agreement had been drawn up whereby Frederick Hyde of the Middle Temple and William Lowe, a younger brother of John, acted as trustees for the Hampshire property, in part of which Katherine herself had a life interest. Earlier that year, a lease for Katherine’s life had been incorporated in a family conveyance of land in the Swindon district of Wiltshire.* In about 1647 Katherine’s elder step-daughter Amphillis Hyde had married the head of a Dorset branch of the Chafin family, Thomas Chafin of Chettle, Esq., described by the first Earl of Shaftesbury as ‘a personable well-carriaged man of a good estate’ who ‘wanted neither understanding nor value for himself, was an enemy to the Puritan party’. Chafin was imprisoned at Poole by 1646 for raising money for Charles I, and had to pay a large fine in order to obtain his pardon. He died in 1655, and in October of that year his widow Amphillis made a further settlement of property with her sister Helen Lowe and Helen’s husband John, who by then had moved from Heale to Shaftesbury.” The following year, Amphillis married as her second husband a lawyer of the Middle Temple, William Lisle. He was the second son of Sir William Lisle of Wootton, isle of Wight, and his political sympathies were very different from those of his elder brother, the regicide John Lisle. The intention of marriage between Amphillis and William Lisle was published in Woodford Church in w i) Visitation (note 4) pp. 98, 120. Wiltshire Inquisitiones Post Mortem (London: Index Library, vol. 23, 1901). pp. 326-9. 33. Elizabeth Lowe, wife of a prominent resident of Salisbury, now deceased. Katherine’s other half-sister, Jane Hyde, have married Edward Hutchins, prebendary of Sarum, and rector appears to of Nettleton and of Brinkworth, for whom see Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 28, p. 335. PRO, CP 25(2) 242/Hil. 44 Eliz. (Hyde, Hutchins). Will of Edward Hutchins, PROBI1/156, f. 64; and of Dr IT. Hyde (note 4). 34. Their daughter was baptized in Salisbury Cathedral in 1642. WRO cartulary 8/1. Mr Kk. H. Rogers kindly drew my attention to this valuable source. 35. Ibid. PRO, CP 25(2) 608/Hil. 1650. 36. W. D. Christie, A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper (London: 189 April 1656.” But being in London the next month, she succombed to a sudden and fatal illness, and was buried in the Temple Church on 15 May 1656, aged only 30. On her death bed Amphillis begged her father’s brother, Dr Thomas Hyde DCL, to undertake the charge of her three young children by her first marriage, and at her great importunity he consented. He was already executor of the will of her first husband, and it was difficult to raise the money Chafin had assigned for his children’s maintenance. Suspicious Commonwealth authorities had noted the temporary residence of Dr Thomas Hyde, Doctor of Law, in the parish of Woodford the previous year; and naturally, in order to discharge his onerous trust, he now turned to his sister-in-law and to his agent, Mr John Browne, who then lived at Heale. He relied on them to oversee the children and provide for their diet, clothes, and schooling, and Katherine also had the responsibility of keeping accounts of this expenditure. * Thus Katherine was again left with three of her husband’s descendants on her hands: grandchildren this time. Little Amphillis Chafin was aged eight at her mother’s death, her brother Bampfield was not quite seven, and Thomas was five.*” Perhaps concern for the children’s upbringing, or feelings of approaching old age now induced Katherine to return to the city she knew so well, and by May 1657 she had taken up residence there. During this period Salisbury ‘the English Venice’ as is shown by the epitaph on Francis Hyde; ‘Born in the English Venice, thou didst die, dear friend, in the Italian Salisbury’. Streams ran through many of the streets, and town bridges had been constructed to the deepest water-courses. Katherine settled at Friars Bridge in Tanner Street (now known as St Ann’s Street), near the junction with Brown Street. Although a parishioner of St Martin’s, she lived in close proximity to the Cathedral, and her house served as a meeting-place for the Hyde family.” This dwelling was probably three storeys high, w ith a was sometimes described as Cross Maemillan, 1871), vol. 1, appendix 1, p. xvii. John Hutchins, History and . ig ee of the County of Dorset (London: John Bowyer Nichols, 1868), vol. 3, p. 565. PRO will of Thomas Chafin, Esq., PROB10/809; CP aol m: 3. 37. Admissions (note 10), p. 129. Jack Davies Jones, The Royal Prisoner (London: Lutterworth Press, 1965), pp. 52, 102, 163. Woodford register (note 11). 38. PRO, C9/126/74. British Library, Add. Mss. 34,012, f. 23y 39. Society of Genealogists, Chettle parish register transcripts. 40. WRO, 492/41 (Netton deed). Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London: 1662), Wiltshire, p. 145. Historical Monuments in the City of Salisbury (London: HMSO, 1980), vol. 1, pp. xxxiv, xxxv, xl. VC/7 (note 27), p. 79. Briush Library Map Room, City of Salisbury by William Naish, (1751). Ancient and 190 THE WILTSHIRE ARCH AROLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE garden at the back and in front a gatehouse facing the street. It was substantially furnished, and contained a hall, and two parlours. In the kitchen was a fine array of pewter, no doubt transported from Heale; and there was also a larder, pantry, buttery, wash-house, store- house, wood-house and coal-house. On the floor above were several bedrooms, and there was also a nursery, a necessity now that Katherine was always to have young children living with her. One of the garrets at the top of the building was stocked with a plentiful supply of linen and household materials.*' After the jubilation of the King’s return in May 1660 the death of her young charge Bampfield Chafin that November must have been a grief for Katherine,” but by then she had other family consolations. Helen Lowe and her husband had returned to live with her step-mother, and they had two small children of their own. A subsidy return for the household that month gave Katherine a rating of modest affluence at £3 6s. 8d.; the wealthier Lowes were assessed at over £10, while Katherine’s unmarried sister Jane was reckoned to be worth only 2s. for tax purposes. Some of the names which followed, assessed at a shilling each, may have been those of servants formerly sent out of the way whilst Charles Il was smuggled into Heale House. The following year, John Lowe was knighted a few days before the King’s belated but triumphant coronation in April 1661.* Concerned to help the husband of her former step- daughter Amphillis, Katherine had lost little time in addressing a petition to Charles If in the following terms: To the King’s most excellent Majesty the humble Petition of Katherine Hide widow showeth that Sir William Lisle entailed in 1630 about five hundred pounds per annum in possession and about three hundred in reversion, after one, two, and three lives, upon John Lisle his eldest son and the heirs males of his body, which for want of such issue was to come to William Lisle his second son, from whom the said John cut it off, by fine and recovery, because the said William did in his duty and affection constantly adhere to your Majesty and Royal Father; that the entail being so cut off, the said estate is forfeited to your Majesty for the treason of the said John, May it therefore please your most sacred Majesty to grant 41. PRO, PROB+4/1296 42. Salisbury Cathedral burial register 43. PRO, will of Sir John Lowe PROBII/328, f. 143; E 179/199/419. William A. Shaw, The Anights of England (London: Sherratt & Hughes, 1906), vol. 2, p. 234. 44. PRO, SP 29/20, f. 73. Transcripts of Crown copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of the Controller of LIMSO. Spelling modernized. 45. PRO, FE 112/511/17 Fil. 14 & 15 Charles Il; C 6/195/69; SP 29/66, f. 260. the forfeiture of the said estate to your Petitioner, that she may be enabled thereby to testify her kindness to the said William Lisle (who is her son in law) and likewise by your Majesty’s grace and bounty, obtain a better subsistence to herself. And your petitioner shall ever pray for your Majesty’s long and happy reign.” ‘The settlement of about 1630 had been made on the marriage of John Lisle with his first wife, who died shortly afterwards. A few years later he married another heiress, the ill-fated Alice, who was eventually executed for sheltering a refugee after the Battle of Sedgemoor. Her marriage portion had to be devoted to settling the debts of her father-in-law, Sir William Lisle, and consequently fresh conveyances were made to secure her jointure; moreover she and John Lisle had a very large family of children to provide for.” Inquisitions taken of his forfeited lands in April 1661 showed that he had been seized of substantial property in Hampshire, as well as the reversions of two Wiltshire manors after the death of his widowed mother Dame Bridget Lisle: Holt in the parish of Bradford, and Pomeroy in the parish of Wingfield.” Although not usually lacking in gratitude towards those who had aided his escape after Worcester, Charles II was beset by a horde of claimants at the Restoration, and other very deserving royalists were also petitioning for some benefit from John Lisle’s estate.” In the event, the estate was granted to the King’s brother, James Duke of York, from whose representatives William Lisle was allowed to buy back family lands in Hampshire, and the Manor of Holt in Wiltshire in December 1661, subject to his own mother’s life- interest in the property. He also gained the reversionary inheritance of the farms of Pomeroy, and of Dendhouse or Deadhouse, in the same area of Wiltshire.** Possibly it was Katherine’s brother who benefited the most from her courageous fidelity to the Crown. After the stirring events of October 1651, on 3 November John Coventry acted as arbitrator in a long-standing dispute over the tithes of Abbotts Ann, in which Dr Thomas Hyde DD was involved, the civil wars having reduced his income in this respect. A 46. PRO, E 178/6445; E 178/6519. I 47. PRO, SP 29/20, ff. 74, 75, 76. 48. PRO, © 54/4072 no. 12. © 54/4706 no. 20. Will of Sir William Lisle, PROBI1/319, f. 42. 49. His first wife was Bridget, daughter of John Seward of Stoke under Hamdon, Somerset, Esq., and niece of Canon Elenry Seward of Sarum. PRO, C 21/S15/L1. Abbotts Ann parish burial register. WIDOW HYDE OF HEALE widower by 1651,” Dr Hyde also became much involved with Anne, daughter of William Langton, for many years the mistress and finally the wife of that indefatigible Henry Woodlands, Dorset, Esq., whose estate was under sequestration at the time of his death in October 1650. Dr Hyde did what he could to help Hastings’ widow recover her jointure, and married Anne in 1652. Three years before the Restoration, he was still in quiet possession of his Hampshire living, and subsequently complaints were made that he had conformed too much to Puritan ideas during the Interregnum.” Very soon after Charles II’s return, anticipating that Dr Hench- man would be rewarded by further preferment for his outstanding services, Dr Thomas Hyde DD petitioned to succeed Henchman in his church appointments, claiming that he himself had always been faithful to the King and to the Church of England, and that he had suffered ‘in person, liberty and estate’ for his loyalty. His character was personally vouched for by Dr Henchman, and by Dr Earle, later Bishop of Salisbury, and also certified on 12 July 1660 by the future Archbishop, Sheldon.*' Dr Hyde’s application met with approval, and on 17 November 1660 he became prebendary of Teynton Regis, and precentor of Sarum on the promotion of Henchman to the bishopric of the see, also succeeding him as rector of Westbury, Wiltshire. A further mark of special royal favour was obtained in February 1664, when Charles II allowed Dr Hyde to exchange his house in the Close for another. Fittingly, a portrait of the King embellished the great parlour of Flyde’s residence.” Katherine was evidently held in high esteem to the sportsma n, new ecclesiastical 50. For Hastings, see Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 25, p. 128. PRO, SP 23/90, ff. 576, 579, 761, 768; C 8/112/84; C 7/426/48; C 9/22/67; C 24/869 (2) Foy le v. Hyde; C 22/68/36. PRO, SP 29/12, ff. 18, 19. PRO, FE 331/Sarum 7 m.3; SP 29/92, f. 44; PROB4/8660. nan N= Hastings — of 191 very end of her days, as in May 1661 Mr Thomas Shuter of the Close, having chosen his niece to be executrix of his will, was anxious that ‘Sir John Lowe knight and Mrs Katherine Hyde widow of Friars Bridge’ should advise and protect her. He left them each a pair of gloves ‘as tokens of my love, to whose ancestors I have been much obliged.’ Mr Shuter, formerly overseer of the will of Katherine’s mother, and clerk to the Dean and Chapter, was then aged about 73.°* But Katherine did not survive him to give this final proof of her benevolence: she died at her house in St Martin’s parish on 10 August 1661 and was buried in the Cathedral, amongst very many of her relatives. A brief memorial inscription on the floor of the S aisle of the nave recorded that she had died in the 54th year of her age. Administration of Katherine’s goods and chattels and of those of her sister Elizabeth Chafin was granted on 19 October 1661 to the stalwart Jane Hyde, who appears to have outlasted all her sisters, and lived until January 1692.*% Katherine’s personal estate, including an annuity of £20, nearly £30 worth of plate and £10 in old gold, with her watch valued at two pounds, was reckoned to amount to £431 Ils. 2d. altogether; presumably she had been in rela- tively comfortable circumstances.” So ‘Widow Hyde of Heale’ had the immense satisfac- tion of living to witness the restoration of the monarchy. Had she survived longer, she might have received some personal reward, as his adventures after Worcester had made a strong and lasting impression on Charles II: but conceivably it may have been a crowning mercy for her that she died too soon to grow disillusioned with the King for whom she had risked so much. 53. PRO, will of Thomas Shuter, PROBIO/951; © 21/D9/8. 54+. Burials (note 42). Wiltshire Gazette, ‘Memorials in Salisbury Cathedral’, no, 22 (23 December 1926), p. 3. PRO, PROB6/37, ff. 99, 99V\. > 55. PRO, PROB4/12696. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 192-200. The Building History of Urchfont Manor by ALAN T. €oSLEE; The complex building history of Urchfont Manor can be reconstructed from records and the physical evidence of the house itself. The first Sir Wilham Pynsent’s house, brick-built in the Restoration manner, shows evidence of an early re-modelling in the Wren manner, probably by William Talman. The second Sir William Pynsent, who died in 1765, left his property, Urchfont included, to William Pitt the younger, soon to be elevated as Lord Chatham. With its purchase by the third Duke of Queensberry, Urchfont began a series of changes of ownership. From 1825 Urchfont was owned by the Watson-Taylor family, and from 1843 occupied by Simon Watson-Taylor, Liberal MP for Devizes. The Watson-Taylors modified the house again, in an insensitive way, and sold it — their fortune dissipated — in 1928. It was bought in 1945 by Wiltshire County Council as an adult-education college, the role it still serves. As with so many historic houses, especially those which have had numerous changes of ownership, there are no authentic records of the origins of Urchfont. However, by piecing together numerous elements of biographical material, family histories and oral tradi- tion, and blending these with 17th- and 18th-century architectural history, it has been possible to build up a partly circumstantial but authentic history of the house and estate. Careful examination of the structure of the building during maintenance work and repairs has also revealed much evidence of alteration which was not available when the last private owner, Hamilton Rivers-Pollock, wrote about Urchfont Manor! for WAA/, and it is partly to incorporate this new knowledge that this particular paper has been written. SIR WILLIAM PYNSENT, FIRST BARONET, AND THE BUILDING OF THE HOUSE From the Dissolution of the Monasteries untul the end of the 17th century, a high proportion of the great houses of England were built by lawyers, and admis- sion to the Bar became one of the surest routes to political and financial success. William Pynsent’s case was no exception. He moved to London from the village of Woodbury, near Topsham in Devon, and was the only son and heir of a father described on a church memorial as a ‘Gentleman’. In 1667 William was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, and the same year he *“Goosander’, Richmond Road, Appledore, Brideford, Devon. 1. Hamilton Rivers-Pollock, ‘Notes on Erchfont Manor House’, WA 46 (1938). There are not less than 65 recorded spellings of ‘Urchfont’ such as the very early medieval ‘Erchesffeunv’, ‘Orchesfunt’, ‘Urichsfonte’ and the more recent ‘Ushont’ and ‘Erchfont’. Stabilization of the spelling as ‘Urchfonv’ dates back to married Patience, the daughter of Alderman Bond, a prosperous merchant of the City of London. We know nothing of William’s subsequent career except that he was granted an office of profit at the time marriage. Either his wife brought him considerable wealth, which seems probable, or he had done exceptionally well for himself, for in 1678 he abandoned his civil-service appointment and moved to Urchfont, where he bought considerable property. The village was already known to him, since Olive Matthews, the wife of his cousin, Robert Tothill,’ also of Woodbury, was known to be an heiress of Urchfont and it was from her that the purchase was made. As his subsequent career was to confirm, William Pynsent subscribed to most of the conventional atti- tudes of his class and times. In the 17th and 18th centuries, to be successful socially and in politics, it was not sufficient to possess wealth, one should also be seen to possess it; and the best way to display one’s wealth, even for a London lawyer, was through the ownership of a country estate and a noteworthy house. Possessing these, the way would be set for a rising man to become, firstly, a local magnate, and, eventually, a national political figure. “his was precisely what the acquisition of Urchfont was to provide for William Pynsent, who in 1687 was created a baronet by James Il. The following year he was ‘pricked’ as Sheriff for Wiltshire, although with the Revolution of 1688 his name was replaced by John Wyndham; it was not until of his the preparation of the first Ordnance Survey map early in the 19th century, The alternative ‘Erchfont’ continued in use in connection with the Church and Manor until the 1950s. 2. A handsome memorial to them, erected by Sir William Pynsent, stands in the chancel of Urchfont church. THE BUILDING HISTORY OF URCHFONT MANOR 1693 that he occupied the Office, having purged himself of his association with the deposed ruler. In the same year he was also elected Member of Parliament for Devizes. The formula for advancement had proved successful, and it was about this date that Sir William embarked upon the enlargement of his house, trans- forming it into a mansion fit for a man of his new status. What was the nature of the property which had helped to make this rapid advancement possible? Initially, Pynsent had bought an estate of about 1600 acres, but this was added to during his lifetime and the occupancy of his until it eventually amounted to nearly 4000 acres. The estate, with its house lying slightly W of the village, was divided into numerous tenancies, the principal one being occupied by John Richards, who lived in a house on the site of the present Urchfont Manor. Mr Richards’s house was demolished; parts of it incorporated into the new one included a large, handsome stone ‘Tudor fireplace, which now graces the entrance hall, some Tudor oak panelling in the ground floor sitting-room (the panelling is now concealed under a canvas covering), and numerous oak beams and joists supporting the ground floor. Their size indicates that the demolished house was of no mean dimensions. SuCCeSSOLS THE PYNSENT HOUSE Pynsent’s house was built in the Restoration style of mellow, local brick,’ liberally dressed with limestone for the quoins, door frames, drip courses and window frames. It was S-facing. A rather plain frontage of seven bays of mullion and transom windows stood on two storeys above a basement with partly concealed windows. ‘The steeply pitched concave roof of Cotswold stone tiles was broken by three dormer windows. If one’s analysis of the building is correct, the plain frontage was relieved by an imposing central portico until this was moved to a central position on the E front of the house. As an architectural feature, the portico focussed attention on the main entrance to the house. It consists of two protruding columns with delicately carved Corinthian capitals, behind which are two pilasters of similar design. Above the columns is a large enriched pancl, and above this again a carved pediment; in its centre is a tilted scrolled shield bearing a monogram of letters W. P. The E and W ends of the house were of the same plain style, both consisting of four pairs of mullion and transom windows on two storeys. The grounds were almost as important as the house 3. According to tradntion, the bricks were made at ‘Brick Plot’, a site about half a mile N of the Village. 193 itself. About a mile due S, standing prominently on the northern ridge of the Salisbury Plain stands Urchfont Clump, an imposing circular plantation of beech trees in close proximity to a smaller clump. According to oral tradition, Urchfont Clump was planted by Pynsent. Whether this is correct or not, the clump was certainly used by him as the main prospect for the house, and the focal point for his tree-planting. A broad avenue of some 30 widely-spaced lime trees focussing on the clump was planted; two massive and gnarled specimens from it still remain quite close to the house. Originally the view of the Salisbury Plain was slightly impeded by a brick wall running E—-W. This was built as a protection against straying sheep and cattle, for the droveway from Urchfont to Easterton meandered across the park. In the mid 18th century, when a turnpike was constructed about 200 yards to the S, the brick wall was no longer necessary and was demolished. It has been assumed that the architect responsible for the design of the house was William ‘Valman, but there are a number of reasons for doubt, Talman’s carly career is obscure; but he is noted for having taken the first steps towards the English Baroque house. Firstly, the design of the original house is similar to houses of the same period, both in Devizes and in surrounding villages. It seems improbable that ‘Talman would have wasted his talents in designing a house so plain and easily copied. Secondly, the S front of the house must have had a distinctly late Restoration appearance, a design so unlike other houses built by “Valman that it must lead to serious doubt about his involvement. However, the E front presents a marked change of style. In general appearance it is distinctly ‘Wren-ish’ and has been described by Pevsner as ‘one of the best houses of this type in Wiltshire’.* ‘his was the style with which Valman was familiar. Clearly, the house is of two periods, and the style of the EF front, which was built some time after 1600, is consistent with its being designed by Talman. Above the fireplace in the Library (the old entrance hall) is a large painted panel of the EF frontage (Figure 1), which looks remarkably like the backdrop of a stage set. The formal gardens and broad gravelled walks are in the French style of which ‘Valman was the principal popularizer. About these gravelled walks a number of fashionably perambulating. There are two solitary old ladies near dressed people are — self-consciously the house, another pair in the foreground, and four mixed couples, the men in full-bottomed wigs and 4+. Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Wiltshire ((larmoi- dsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. +83. 194 THE WIEESEERE ARCEENEOLOGICAL AND NYVEURAL PUISPORY MAGAZINE Figure 1. wearing swords, all engaged in carnest conversation. “Two of them are accompanied by three King Charles spaniels which are playing on the banks of the formal water garden, on which are dotted improbable-looking swans. In the background rises the E clevation of the house, accurate in the baroque detail, though not in scale, and differing from its present appearance only in the inclusion of two dormer windows on either side of the imposing central pediment. ‘The painting gives the impression of house and grounds rather grander than reality, and one may doubt whether the gardens were ever as claborate as portrayed. However, the outline of paths and foundations of the gazebo may still be traced Panel painting of the E front shows appearance of Urchfont Manor as built for Pynsent. (Photograph Courtesy Anthony Baggs.) in the lawn which replaces the formal garden, and two large water conduits converge below the site of the water garden. ‘The painting gives no indication of any alteration to the house, save in the matching pairs of mullion and transom windows located, somewhat incongruously, on either side of the central pedimented block with its set of sash windows. A few details of the career of William Talman may help us to understand this, and other peculiarities of the house. Like his contemporary and Christopher Wren, Talman was a Wiltshire man. In fact, since his father is known to have lived at Eastcot, sometime — patron THE BUILDING HISTORY OF URCHIFONT \EXNOR less than a mile W of Urchfont Manor, one may assume that the young William Talman must have been familiar with Oakfrith Wood, lying on the boundary the with John Richards’s farmhouse, and with the village of Urchfont. Sometime during William’s childhood his family moved to West Lavington, some 4 miles from Urchfont, which hence- forward was to be regarded at his parental home. This familiarity with the Urchfont area suggests that his probable involvement in the reconstruction at Urchfont manor was no accident, for it was a relatively small commission to be undertaken by an architect of his reputation. In the 1680s Talman had collaborated with Wren in the enlargement and restoration of Hampton Court Palace, but from all accounts it was a difficult part- nership, for Talman was known to be a man of ill-temper and truculence, and eventually he quarrelled with Wren. This resulted in his dismissal, and the loss of prospects of preferment from the Office of Works. Henceforward his commissions were to be for private patrons, of whom Pynsent would have been one of the lesser ones. Talman’s association with Wren was to have a lasting influence on his architectural style, as evidenced by the description of Urchfont as a ‘Wren house’. One basic similarity lay in the type of window designed by them and included at Urchfont. The sash window was first used by Hugh May in the new apartments at Windsor, completed in 1683, and a few years later Wren and Talman used them in the design of Hampton Court. Prior to these buildings the mullion and transom casement window was still fashionable, although the ‘fenestre anglais , a window which opened vertically, had gained some popularity. However, its disadvantage was that only the bottom half of the window could be opened, and pegs were required to hold it in position. The sash window, involving the use of counter weights, removed these difficulties and set the fashion, confirming the ultimate demise of the mullion and transom casement. ‘Talman was an enthusiast’ for the new sash window, as was evident in his work at Chatsworth, Dyrham, Standstead, Uppark, and in the alterations designed for between two estates, 5. In the very formal painting of the E frontage the central window on the first floor is half open, drawing one’s attention to the fact that the house has been designed with the modern sash window. 6. Pevsner (note 4), p. 483, suggests that the front windows were replaced about 1730, probably on account of the narrower glazing bars than were used when sash windows first became fashionable. However, he accepts the date of the E front windows, which are exactly the same. One can only assume that the original windows were replaced, probably at the date of the next major alterations 195 Pynsent’s house. They were included in the central section of the new E frontage, and in all probability he was also responsible for the replacement of all the mullions and transoms by sash windows on the S frontage.’ First of all, the portico over the central doorway was removed from the $, and re-erected as a main feature on the E front. Indications of the portico’s original location can be clearly seen in_ brickwork surrounding the present entrance and in the much altered jambs of the doorway.’ Originally the house was an oblong building, the F. and W fronts broken by four sets of mullions and transoms. This plan was now radically altered, with the extended E front converting the house into an L shape. Viewed from the E, one now has the impres- sion, as no doubt was intended, of a large square house; but viewing it from the N-E one is surprised to see that the N side is a narrow one. In redesigning the EF frontage two pairs of mullions and transoms on both floors were demolished, and the central pedimented portion and a matching wing with mullions and transoms were added. The central portion stands out 2 feet from the adjoining wings to form a pedimented block rising to the full height of the house. It is built of a nicely contrasting small, fine, rose-coloured brick, beautifully laid with extremely fine mortar putty. In the centre, approached by a curved flight of steps, now stands the Corinthian portico forming an impressive garden entrance to the house. On either side of the doorway is a sash window with triangular pediments and on the first floor are three similar windows, the central one with a segmental pediment. The central portion is further enriched with a bold cornice of moulded stonework, with curved modillions beneath which is a square window flanked by two oval win- dows. This central block dominates the whole of the E front, as doubtless was intended. The interior of the house contrasts with the imposing EF front. With the exception of the dining-room, which is entered through the central portico, rooms are relatively small, though lofty. Clearly it was a house built to be lived in rather than as a stage set for grand occasions. Only the dining-room retains all of the original softwood panels; prior to the late regency to the house in the 1830s. 7. The doorway was reduced in size to the same measurements as the sash windows, and in the interests of symmetry the door was replaced by a sash window, below which was inserted a small pair of stable doors. To use this garden entrance involved raising the bottom half of the window and then opening the twin doors, This unusually cumbersome combination of sash window above a pair of doors is also to be found in the dining-room at Dyrham Park, designed by ‘Talman. 196 THE WILTSHIRE period when the walls were covered with stretched canvas and the now fashionable wall papers, most of the principal rooms were panelled from floor to ceiling with large raised panels in bolection moulding. The dining-room fireplace, as are those in several of the principal rooms, is framed in heavy stone bolection moulding with a stone over-mantel. Above the fireplaces in six of the rooms are panel paintings of the 17th century after the style of Claude of Lorraine, but hardly of his merit. The scenes are mainly Continental and classical, and represent very early examples of English landscape painting. Expert opinion suggests that, with the exception of the painting of the E front of the house, these paintings were all the work of a Dutch artist, one of the many who came to England in search of commissions after the Restoration. Another feature of the house which merits comment is the handsome staircase. It has broad, easy treads, spiral balusters and a wide handrail, and, on the first floor, part of what musi have been a long and handsome gallery. The spaciousness of the stair well is now greatly reduced as a result of the construction of a servants’ staircase, space for which was obtained by demolishing almost half of what had formerly been a double flight, fanning to left and right at the lower landing. A Jath-and-plaster wall extending to the full height of the house now divides the stair-well and squeezes the former spacious access to the dining room into a narrow passage. Formerly, access to the stair- well from the library could be through either of two large pairs of double doors situated on either side of the fireplace, but one of these has been replaced by a cupboard. These alterations, together with many others less damaging to the appearance and fabric of the house were carried out by Simon Watson- Taylor, prior to his coming to live at Urchfont in 1841, and were necessitated by the transference of servant accommo- dation from the basement to the attic. One other feature warrants comment. The present entrance hall on the W side of the house is puzzling and somewhat incongruous, since all the doorways into it are noticeably smaller than elsewhere. The main entrance has heavy stone bolection moulding and is clearly contemporaneous with the original building, but alterations to brickwork and stonework suggest that the doorway was moved from some other location. Was it, perhaps, originally the main S doorway before the removal of the portico? ‘There is a mason’s mark on one of the door jambs. If others were found elsewhere in the house, the mystery might be nearer solution. Unlike other rooms on the ground floor, the entrance hall is stone-flagged. Beside the large open “Tudor fireplace is a blocked entrance to what was a narrow ARCIIAEF OLOGICAL AND NATURAL PES PORY MAGAZINE staircase giving access to the basement. This suggests that the entrance hall was originally the kitchen, removed to its present location when the house was re-modelled. Whether this or not, the entrance hall seems to be a fitting place for the extraordinary massive elm kitchen table, brought to Urchfont from Erlestoke in 1902 and, until 1970, housed in the laundry. is correct SIR WILLIAM PYNSENT, SECOND BARONET The first William Pynsent died in 1719 and was buried in Urchfont Church together with other members of his family. Ele was succeeded by his eldest son, William, then a man of 40 who had married a wealthy widow from Curry Rivel in Somerset. On the death of his wife, Mary (née Jennings) he inherited the house and estate of Burton. Henceforward this estate at Curry Rivel was known as Burton Pynsent. The second Sir William Pynsent, emulating his father in his marriage to a lady with considerable financial expecta- tions, had now laid the foundations for a similar political career to the first baronet. After his marriage he settled in Market Lavington, where the baptismal records show that he had a son and three daughters. Sometime after 1713, following the death of his father- in-law, he moved to the Somerset estate, and in 1715 became Member of Parliament for Taunton in the Whig interests. Twenty-five years later he was also chosen as Sheriff for Somerset. On his father’s death, Sir William was the owner of two estates and a man of considerable influence in both Somerset and Wiltshire. ‘The Urchfont house continued to be occupied by Sir William’s mother until her death in 1735, by his brother John and sister Elizabeth until their deaths in 1749 and 1759, and subsequently by his daughter, Leonora, until her death in 1763. During this period Sir William’s interests lay mainly in Somerset, although he returned to Urchfont from time to time, remaining there for a prolonged period after his daughter’s death. These bald family details suggest a rather unhappy widower, whose four children all predeceased him. Other records enable one to sketch a character study of a witty, though cantankerous and quick-tempered, old gentleman, careless of his appearance and reputation, disliked by his surviving sons-in-law and heartily recip- rocating their feelings. In his latter years, spent largely at Urchfont, he lived a solitary existence and was known among his few friends and acquaintances for his eccentric political views. In 1763, despite his age of 83, Sir William braved the rough roads and was driven by coach to London where he called on William Pitt, the Younger. Perhaps his THI BUILDING HISTORY OF URCHFONT MANOR somewhat bizarre political views had already reached the ear of the Great Commoner, for despite several attempts, Sir William was unable to see Pitt. It is simply recorded that he was turned away by the servants on account of his disreputable appearance. Not until his death two years later did the reason for his visit to Pitt’s home become clear, when his will was found to contain the explanation. In 1763, Sir Wilham Pynsent had drawn up a Will, without recourse to an attorney and with the Vicar of Urchfont and Sir William’s housekeeper as witnesses, which made Pitt heir to his property, including the Urchfont and Burton Pynsent estates. Despite the unfortunate outcome of his attempt to see Pitt, Sir William did not feel snubbed, and the Will, signed on every page to avoid the possibility of dispute, remained unaltered. There are two possible reasons for this unusual bequest which had the effect of depriving his relations of any but a token share in the inheritance. The first was his hearty dislike of his relatives, and the fact that a more than adequate provision had already been made to his late daughter (the mother of a grandchild) by the Tothills. The second reason involved Sir William’s political views. These are revealed in Macaulay’s essay on the Earl of Chatham, and Horace Walpole’s corre- spondence and memoirs. Explaining the bequest to Pitt, Macaulay records: He [Sir Wiiliam Pynsent] now thought that he perceived a close analogy between the well-remembered events of his youth and the events he had witnessed in extreme old age; between the disgrace of Marlborough and the disgrace of Pitt; between the elevation of Harley and the elevation of Bute. This fancy took such possession of the old man’s mind that he determined to leave the whole of his property to Pitt. This was a restrained version of Sir William’s motives, since it was for publication, but in the London salons, wagging tongues were enjoying the event as an opportunity to denigrate both Sir William and Pitt. Ina letter to Sir Horace Mann, Horace Walpole wrote: "Tis the marvellous, the eccentric, that characterises Eng- lishmen. Come, you shall have an event in the genuine taste, and before it is pawed and vulgarised in the newspapers. It is fresh this very day. Strong marks of novelty you see — in Somersetshire or Wiltshire, I think, who has left £200,000 to Mr Pitt, to Mr William Pitt, to the Mr Pitt... Vincent — the town and I are not sure of the name yet, but it is certain he never saw Mr Pitt — I hope that was not the best There is somebody dead somewhere — somebody called Pinsent or reason for the legacy! The parson of the parish, who made the will has sent word to Hayes [the residence of Pitt in Kent] that it is lodged in the housekeeper’s hands, who has command from the defunct not to deliver it but to the legatee, on order. Unluckily Mr Pitt is in bed with gout in his hand and cannot 197 even sign the order; however, Lady Chatham has sent for the will, and it is supposed her order will suffice. You may depend on all the latter part, I had it but two hours ago from Lady Temple. A week later, writing to the Earl of Hertford, Horace Walpole waxes even more scurrilous as he becomes master of his subject: You have heard to be sure of the great fortune that ts bequeathed to him [Pitt] by Sir William Pinsent, an old man of nearly ninety, who quitted the world on the Peace of Utrecht, and, luckily for Mr Pitt, lived to be as angry with its pendant, the Treaty of Paris. I did not send you the first report, which mounted to an enormous sum; I think the medium account is £2,000 a year and £30,000 in money. This Sir William Pinsent whose fame, like an aloe, did not blow near a hundred, was a singularity. The scandalous chronicle of Somerset [Lady North] talks terribly of his morals . . . Lady North was nearly related to Lady which encouraged Lord North to flatter himself that Sir William’s extreme propensity to himself would recommend even his wife’s parentage for heirs; but the uncomliness of Lady North and a vote my lord gave against the Cider Bill, offended the old gentleman so much that he Pinsent, burnt his would-be heir in effigy. Are we to suppose that a vote against the Cider Bill actually determined the way that Sir William was to leave his property, even though it is known that Pitt voted on the other side? A week later Horace Walpole wrote again to the Earl of Hertford adding a new embellishment to the gossip of the town: Do you know that Sir William Pinsent had your brother [Henry Conway, He said to his lawyer, | know that Mr Pitt is much younger than I am, but he is in very bad health, as you will hear it before me, if he dies first, draw up another will with Mr Conway’s name instead of Mr Pitt’s and bring it down to me later to become Field Marshal] in his eye? directly. All of this gossip, whether based on fact or fantasy, was later included in Horace Walpole’s Memoirs, though it was expressed in more moderate and _plau- sible terms. There, Sir William is depicted without the imputation of immorality or senility, as a man who had a dedicated though frustrated Whig, voting in Parliament against the Treaty of Utrecht, dedicated to the cause of the exiled Marlborough, heartily detesting Harley who, as Lord ‘Treasurer, was the first politician recognizable as Prime Minister, flirting with the of John Wilkes, like William Pitt, vigorously opposed to general warrants. Merely by pursuing political principles which Sir William also endorsed, Pitt inherited a great fortune, the reward for being an been cause and 198 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEIAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE honest statesman. Honesty in public life’ was in fact a principle for which Pitt had fought, and of which Sir William was well aware. This, rather than imputations against either man, made by his political opponents, was the most likely factor in this historic bequest. The Pynsent relatives did not submit to the legality of the will without a struggle. Sir William’s nephew and assumed heir to the baronetcy, the Rev. Robert Pynsent, and Henry Daw Tothill, brought a joint action against Pitt, seeking to have the Will set aside on the grounds of Sir William’s insanity. The case failed in the Court of first instance, was successful to the extent of £15,000" on appeal to the Lords Commissioners, and finally failed completely on appeal to the House of Lords. The legality of the Will was proven, but in an age much given to idle gossip, there was more to come. Pitt’s wife had been created Baroness Chatham in her own right some 12 years when, in 1767, he was created Earl of Chatham. This ‘desertion’ of the Commons added a fresh cause to the attacks of his political enemies, which were taken up and used in an indif- ferent poem and scurrilous lampoon which appeared in Wiltshire and Somerset broadsheets. Later repeated in Waylen’s History of Devizes under the title ‘Pynsent’s Ghost’. The ghost of the late demented Sir William is made to visit Chatham at ‘the silent midnight it was hour’ and to address him as follows: Villain repent — repent, though late, Thy broken oaths and vows, And give me back my lost estate, Since shame hath stripped thy brows How could you say the Cause was good, and yet the Cause forsake? How could you say you sought not gold, Yet gold on all sides take? How could you swear your country’s love Did o’er your breast prevail? And why did I, old doting fool, Believe the lying tale?" THE LATER HISTORY OF THE HOUSE While contemporary gossip writers continued with their scandal-mongering, they had been unable to provoke Chatham into any comment. In fact, he had 8. When Pitt occupied the lucrative and most sought-after office of Paymaster to the Forces, he rejected every prospect of profit, deeming them to be illicit. At the date of the bequest his income amounted to £200 per year! 9. £15,000 was the amount of the Tothill bequest to Sir William’s daughter, Leonora. 10. This poem, together with extracts from Macaulay’s ‘Essay on the more urgent matters to attend to. A decision had to be taken about the future of the estates; after spending some time at Urchfont, he decided to sell the estate, together with the Manor of Patney. Burton Pynsent was to be retained and, after alteration, became his principal home. With a sale in view, an estate map was prepared. It still remains at Urchfont, and provides an interesting guide to the largely unenclosed farmland and to the tenant farmers of the parish. Some three years after the bequest the estate was sold for £26,500 to the Duke of Queensberry. The Burton Pynsent estate lies outside this brief history of the Pynsent family save for one thing. On the top of a high neighbouring hill where it could be seen for more than 20 miles, Chatham erected a great column to the memory of his benefactor. There is neither a eulogy nor a list of improbable virtues, as so much beloved by his contemporaries, but at the base of the column is the simple inscription, ‘Sacred to the Memory of Sir William Pynsent”' The purchase of Urchfont by the third Duke of Queensberry was unexpected, since he was already the owner of a vast estate formerly belonging to the Earl of Hertford. The Duke lived at Amesbury Abbey, some 15 miles to the S across land which belonged entirely to him. However, he was also the owner of considerable property within the parish of Urchfont, with which was included the Lordship of the Manor. Thus, by purchasing the estate and rounding off his property, the ownership of the house and the Lordship of the Manor became vested in the same person, though, incongruously, the Manor was to be occupied by tenants. The Pynsents, father and son, had owned Urchfont for approximately 85 years, but the Queensberry purchase began a rapid succession of changes of own- ership and occupiers which lasted until 1843. Following the death of the third Duke, the estate passed to the, fourth Duke, ‘Old Q’, whose bachelor pursuits and high living left him with little tme to attend to the needs of Urchfont. In 1786, needing ready cash, he sold the estate at a greatly diminished price to William Salmon, an astute young attorney of Devizes. Despite the neglected nature of the estate, Salmon’s purchase proved an excellent investment as the value of Earl of Chatham’ and from the correspondence and ‘memoirs’ of Horace Walpole appear in Pollock (note 1). The article contains a fuller account of events surrounding the bequest than has been possible here, though with a slightly different conclusion. 11. Chatham also erected a memorial tablet to Sir William in Urchfont Church where he is buried but this has long since disappeared. THE BUILDING HISTORY OF URCHFONT MANOR land rose steeply, following the enactment of the Enclosure Act of 1788 and the agriculture boom of the Napoleonic wars. Salmon retained the property untl 1825, the Manor being occupied by tenant farmers. During the years since the Chatham bequest, Urchfont Manor was leased successively to Daniel Compton and his successors, to John Townsend, Joseph Tanner, and finally to Benjamin Harding, all of whom farmed the relatively small home farm. There can be no doubt that during these tenancies the house, particularly the interior, suffered greatly from neglect. Numerous windows were blocked, fireplaces bricked up and the panelling in many rooms fell into disrepair. There was promise of a better future for the house and estate when Salmon sold them in 1825. The buyer, George Watson-Taylor,’? was a man of considerable means who had made a fortune from sugar estates in Jamaica and reputedly added substantially to his wealth from numerous profitable privateering ventures during the latter years of the Napoleonic wars. Moreover, his wife, the daughter of a Scottish earl, possessed an equal fortune. With their joint resources they were determined to build a great estate and found a dynasty. George Watson-Taylor was as typical of the early 19th century as the first Sir William Pynsent was of the 17th century. Both exemplified the xouveau riche of their age, using their wealth to obtain power and admission to the aristocratic class; Sir William used the law; George, like his contemporary Jamaican plantation owner, William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey, invested the vast profits of imperial expansion in land and property. The Watson-Taylors had been established in central Wiltshire for less than 10 years at the time of the purchase of Urchfont Manor. Their seat was at Erlestoke Park, an impressive Palladian mansion some 5 miles W of Urchfont." From Erlestoke their purchases extended westward to the outskirts of Westbury and included Edington, with its great Priory buildings. Regrettably, they demolished the bulk of this medieval house, reducing it to no more than a comfortable gentleman’s residence within the Priory grounds. The purchase of Urchfont enabled George to extend his estates to the E, including Wedhampton and the Manor of Patney, and he was already established as 12. The hyphenated name was adopted on his marriage. ‘Watson’ was his wife’s family name. 13. Among the rich new fittings for Erlestoke was John Britton’s ‘Celtic Cabinet’ (pages 250-3 below). 14. Now in the Wiltshire County Record Office. 15. George Watson-Taylor rebuilt the estate village of Erlestoke and erected a new parish church; he was also responsible for planting 199 a man of substantial property in Devizes. Urchfont Manor remained let to Joseph Tanner until 1839; although it was bought as a home for George Watson- Taylor’s eldest son, Simon, he did not occupy the house until 1843. A measure of the importance attached to the 1825 sale of the property is to be found in a bound volume containing a detailed description and valuation of the house and estate." This was prepared and bound in full calf with gold tooling by Richard Webb of Salisbury. Its ‘general observations’ provide an insight into the social conditions in the village during the Agrarian revolution, and at a time when the Speenhamland system of Poor Relief still operated. After commenting upon the splendid pros- pect from the south of the Manor, and the possibility of its improvement through tree planting’ on the steep slopes of the Salisbury Plain, the writer continues: ‘A considerable portion of the lands may be much improved by draining, in several instances by grubbing hedges between small fields, and by letting off water from the lanes; these works would also be of great advantage to the parish by giving employment to labourers, many of whom are often without work . . . and would gradually bring them back to industrious habits, and ultimately relieve the Poor Rate.’ [dleness was still seen as the principal cause of agricultural poverty! These suggested improvements were implemented soon after Simon became responsible for the estate. The alterations to the house, carried out about 1840, were insensitive, but the whole estate undoubtedly benefitted from once again having an owner-occupier. In the year following the purchase of Urchfont, George Watson- Taylor was chosen as Tory Member of Parliament for Devizes, which he represented until the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. Unlike his father, Simon supported the Liberal cause, and in 1857 repre- sented the same constituency in Parliament, having been chosen as Sheriff for Wiltshire a few years previously. Simon continued to live at Urchfont Manor until 1860 when he returned to Erlestoke as owner. He was succeeded in 1902 by his son, George, who also lived at Urchfont for a short period. However, for three- quarters of a century the family fortunes had steadily the extensive oak woodlands which extend along the northern edge of the Salisbury Plain from Erlestoke to Edington. This enthusiasm for tree planting transformed the landscape in the area and was continued by Simon at Urchfont. He renewed the Urchfont Clumps and adjacent woodlands and was responsible for planting most of the specimen trees in the Manor park. ° 200 THE WILTSHIRE \RCHAROLOGICAL declined as a result of extravagant living and bad investments. George was now obliged to sell the Erlestoke estate to meet his creditors, to move from Urchfont Manor to the bailiffs house; in 1928, when the Urchfont estate was sold, he retired to the neighbouring village of Stert and to comparative obscurity. For a number of years the Manor was once more let to tenants, who continued in occupation until it was bought by Hamilton Rivers-Pollock who, like the first owner, was a distinguished lawyer. ‘There are few alterations to the house attributable to this last private owner, though in the neighbouring Oaktrith Wood a small brass tablet commemorates the replanting of 35 acres of woodland by Hamilton AND NAPURAL EISTORY MAGAZINE Rivers-Pollock and his wife. This followed the felling of most of the trees during the First World War. On the death of Hamilton Rivers-Pollock in 1942 the house was used during the remaining years of the Second World War as a home for disabled children, and in 1945 was bought by Wiltshire County Council for use as a residential college for Adult Education, the estate, save for 150 acres, being sold separately to the tenant farmers. Above the fireplace in the entrance hall is inscribed the personal motto of Hamilton Rivers-Pollock, which reads, ‘Audi Alteram Partem (Listen to the other side). One cannot doubt that he would have approved of the Manor’s present educational role. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 201-5 The School Welfare Provision in Salisbury, 1908-18 by JAYNE WOODHOUSE’ Growing realisation of the extent of physical distress among the nation’s schoolchildren led, early this century, to legislation which established medical inspection, and extended the voluntary provision of meals in elementary schools. This article considers how national policy was interpreted at local level in Salisbury. It examines the origins of the school welfare service in the city, with the introduction of medical inspection, and the move towards providing treatment for the ailments discovered. Issues raised by these developments — the maintenance of voluntary effort, the extent of parental responsibility, the question of cost, and the concern for national efficiency — are discussed in their local context. Finally, Salisbury’s failure to implement a school meals programme 1s considered. INTRODUCTION At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Liberal programme of social reform included legislation which laid the foundations of the school welfare service. In 1906, the Education (Provision of Meals) Act enabled local authorities to extend the voluntary supply of meals in elementary schools. This was followed in 1907 by the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, which instituted a system of medical inspection, extended in 1918 to include secondary schools. The legislative programme was based on the growing concern that disease and malnutrition were so prevalent among the nation’s schoolchildren, that it was impos- sible for many of them to benefit from education. ‘This had become increasingly apparent since the 1870 Act, which brought large numbers of the poorest children into school. Reports by members of the medical profession, and the work of Booth' and Rowntree’ highlighted the extent of poverty and distress. In response, some enlightened authorities appointed School Medical Officers far in advance of government directives. Meanwhile voluntary agencies in many of the major cities began to provide meals for children in need. The increasing evidence which pointed to the poor physical condition of the nation’s schoolchildren coincided with a widespread concern for the well-being of the race. The growth of foreign competition from 1870 onwards, together with the relative decline of Britain’s position in the world market, aroused fears that the country was becoming a nation of degenerates. These anxieties seemed to be justified when out of * 18 Chiselbury Grove, Harnham, Salisbury SP2 8EP. 1. C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, first series, London: Macmillan, 1902. 700,000 recruits for the Boer War, over one-third were classified as unfit for military service. The highly influential Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, set up to investigate the extent of the problem, underlined the importance of medical care and adequate food at an early age as the foundations of a fit and healthy country. It further recommended medical inspection and feeding of schoolchildren as vital means of improving the nation’s health.’ The report was fundamental in influencing public opinion towards the idea of a school welfare service. “wo important motives for the legislation of 1906 and 1907 therefore emerge. Firstly, a philanthropic desire to alleviate the plight of the many under-nourished and chronically ill children. Secondly, the economic factor which aimed to secure the future prosperity and well- being of the nation by investing in the health of its children. The establishment of medical inspection and the extension of the school meals service represent a milestone in the history of education. From this time, education came to be seen in a much wider context, as schools began to assume responsibility not only for instruction, but also for the welfare of the whole child. However, underlying this achievement were many issues which reflect contemporary attitudes to poverty and state intervention. Although the state acknow- ledged some role in the provision of child welfare, it was careful to ensure that the new Acts would not undermine _ parental provide assistance for cases that were not truly ‘deserving’. Fear responsibility, — or that the provision of school meals might pauperize the i) B.S. Rowntree, Poverty: a Study of Town Life, 3rd edn., London: Maemillan, 1902. 3. Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Detertoration, London: TLIMSO, 1904. 202 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEIEXROLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE parent and encourage him to abandon his family duties was a major concern. It was an implicit part of the 1906 Act, which imposed a duty on local authorities to recover the cost of meals from parents whenever possible, while ensuring that only truly worthy cases were fed. Similar considerations were also reflected in the attitude towards medical inspection. While inspecting schoolchildren became the duty of the local authority, it remained the parental responsibility until 1918 to ensure that effective treatment was carried out. This was reinforced by the Children Act of 1908, which made parents liable to prosecution for failing to provide adequate food, clothing, or medical attention for their children. The effect of this was to place many needy parents in conflict with the local authorities, by imposing duties on them which they were quite unable to fulfil. There was also great concern at the cost of providing for these new services. To many, they represented merely an additional burden for the already over- pressed ratepayer. Opponents of the scheme further resented the creation of new official posts as a result of the legislation. They saw this as yet another move to enlarge the bureaucracy and so strengthen state control at the expense of individual freedom. The foundations of the school welfare service had therefore been firmly laid prior to the First World War. It remains to consider how national policy and the issues it raised were interpreted at local level in Salisbury. THE SCHOOL MEDICAL SERVICE IN SALISBURY, 1908-18 Acting on directives from the Board of Education, Wiltshire began to introduce a scheme of school medical inspection in February 1908, the development of which has been described elsewhere.’ Salisbury, however, possessed a separate education authority at this time, and so was free to follow a course of action independent of the rest of the county. Some consideration of the city’s social and economic situation during this period provides a historical context for subsequent developments. At the turn of the century, Salisbury was a small market town with an essentially rural outlook. There was some industrial development, but this was on a small scale, so that Salisbury did not experience the major social upheavals that had taken place in many of +. Wiltshire County Couneil, Annual Report of the Principal School Vedical Officer, 1972, pp- 72 5. J. Woodhouse, The educational crisis in Salisbury, [888—1890, WAAL, 78 (1984): pp. 87-93. the large manufacturing towns. The city’s educational provision had a long history of domination by the Church. The voluntary system had been successfully strengthened and upheld throughout the nineteenth century, to the extent that Salisbury had never had a board school.’ Under the 1902 Education Act, an Education Committee of 20 members was established. Flowever, the Church of England remained the controlling force, and the first council school was not built until 1924.° Educational policy was dominated by the desire to maintain the voluntary system of schools, and minimize state control. By these means it was hoped to keep the cost of schooling to a minimum, thus serving the best interests of the ratepayer. It was within this context that the school medical service was estab- lished in Salisbury with the appointment of Dr E.T. Fison, the Medical Officer of Health, as School Medical Officer (SMO) on 7 December 1908. Dr Fison’s duties were annually to examine all 5- and 12-year-old (later extended to include 7-year-old) chil- dren attending elementary schools. He could then notify parents of the ailments discovered, and urge them to seek treatment. However, the responsibility for securing medical attention lay firmly with the parent. The role of the SMO remained during this period one of inspection and recommendation, and did not extend to providing treatment. The annual reports produced by the SMO provide a unique insight into the physical condition — of Salisbury’s schoolchildren. In his first inspection, Dr Fison examined 865 children. The most prevalent condition proved to be verminous heads, especially among the girls, almost half of whom were infested with lice. There was also a very high incidence of tooth decay, which affected 674 children. Of the other ailments, defective vision was the most common with 89 cases. Other defects included ear disease — 59 cases, enlarged tonsils — 46, adenoids — 32, ringworm — 12, and heart disease — 11. Dr Fison also reported that 49 children had ‘bad’ clothing and footgear, and 138 were poorly nourished.’ National figures suggest that in spite of all these problems, Salisbury schoolchildren were rather more healthy than many of their contemporaries, especially in the industrial areas. Although the number of ver- minous heads seems high, results for the whole of Wiltshire show that in fact Salisbury was one of the cleanest districts in the county.* This encouraged the 6. VCH Wiltshire, vol. 6 (1962), p- 161. 7. Salisbury Education Committee, Annual Report of the School Medical Officer of Health, 1909. 8. Report of SMO, Wiltshire, 1910, p. 16. THE SCHIOOL WELFARE PROVISION IN SALISBURY 1908-18 local authority to believe there was little cause for alarm, and so the report was received with a degree of complacency. The Education Committee agreed it proved that ‘the state of the children of Salisbury was very satisfactory’.” The press reported: “it is not more alarming than the average Salisbury’s elementary school-children appear to be, at least, as healthy... the country Dr Fison immediately recognized that his inspections had only limited value unless effective follow-up repe rt. as their contemporaries in other parts of 10 treatment could be secured. Ensuring that parents sought medical attention for their children proved difficult, and the rest of the period was concerned with attempts to tackle the problem. The local authority was under no compulsion to provide treatment, the cost of which had to be met by the parents. In cases of extreme hardship, application could be made to the Board of Guardians, but many people were naturally reluctant to do so. Some self-help schemes were established to meet the need, such as the Baptist Church’s “Medical Inspection Slate Club”. This offered extra food, medi- cine, spectacles and other requirements to the value of 5s., on the monthly payment of 2d."' But clearly not everyone could benefit from such a scheme, nor could it meet the whole burden of expense. As well as the question of cost, there was also a lack of medical facilities. All cases Infirmary, which offered the only centre for treatment in the city at this time. In his first and subsequent reports, Dr Fison pressed continually for the appointment of a school nurse as one solution to these difficulties. ‘The Education Committee were referred to Salisbury refused repeatedly to comply with this request. Their response was to set up in 1912 Children’s Care Committees.'? Such Committees were already in exist- ence throughout the country. "They were attached to individual schools, and consisted of interested parties, such as school managers. Vheir role was to follow up in the home cases recommended for medical treatment. In Salisbury their efforts met with little success, and the number of families failing to seek’ attention actually increased. There was a particular reluctance on the parent’s behalf to agree to throat operations, especially after an inquest on a boy who died following such treatment." The situation made the appointment of a school 1914, Dr Fison, nurse increasingly urgent. By 9. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 23 January 1909. 10. Tbid., 1O May 1910. It. Ibid, 23 January 1909. 12. - Salisbury Education Committee Minutes, 10 June 1912 (Wiltshire 203 supported by the Board of Education, was also pressing tor a school clinic if the work of the medical service was to be at all successful. However, all plans were delayed by the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. It was not until 1917 that Gertrude Jones was appointed school nurse, at an annual salary of £100,"' and a further year later before children were able to attend the new school clinic at Hulse House. From this time on, the role of the school medical service would — increasingly encompass the treatment as well as the inspection of the city’s schoolchildren. Statistics supplied by the SMO offer one means of ascertaining the success achieved by medical inspection during — this They suggest a definite improvement in the cleanliness of girls’ heads. In 1908, 43 per cent of girls examined had lice in their hair, while 10 years later this had declined to just 13 per cent.'’ Success in this area may be attributed to the high priority it received, both by teachers and the period. medical profession. Furthermore the authority to exclude verminous children from school must have helped prevent the spread of infestation. ‘There was also a small improvement in the other defects identified during inspection, particularly poor vision as the supply of spectacles increased. Aside from these tangible results, possibly the greatest achievement was to draw attention to the condition of Salisbury’s schoolchildren, and arouse public interest in the prob- lems revealed. DISCUSSION The provision of the school medical service in Salisbury \ which determined local educational policy — notably the preservation of voluntary control, the importance of was dominated by the issues individual responsibility, and the interests of the ratepayer. The new legislation was interpreted as a means of strengthening state control over the locality. The result would be the creation of more bureaucratic posts, which would undermine parental responsibility. Furthermore, the additional expense involved in imple- menting government policy would have to be met by an increase in the rates. These arguments can be seen in the reluctance to provide any sort of medical treatment for the problems revealed by inspection. Although compelled by law to SMO, the Committee determined that ‘the provision of treatment by the local appoint: a Education were Record Office). 13. Report of SMO, Salisbury, 1913, p. 20. 14. Minutes (note 12), [1 June 1917. 15. Report of SMO, Salisbury, 1918. 204 THE WILTSHIRE schoolchildren will not be Their response to the lack of follow-up treatment was to use the voluntary resources available through the estab- lishment of Care Committees. The local authority was also prepared to allow Salisbury Infirmary to try and cope with the increasing workload, and Jet Dr Fison examine patients in his own home, before they would sanction further facilities. The provision of medical treatment was seen firmly to be the responsibility of the parent. Proposals for the appointment of a school nurse or the establishment of a authority for elementary resorted to unless all other agencies fail’.'’ school clinic were considered moves to undermine this authority, and cause an unnecessary burden to the ratepayer. J. Folliott of the Education Committee expressed the general disapproval: ‘it was now proposed to provide not only a medical officer, but a dentist, and by and bye they would want to provide a cook for the children [laughter]. Let the parents look after their children and do a litthe more work them- selves.” This view was reinforced by the local press: “The old story is repeated of a Government Department offering inducement to a local authority to undertake a new duty. By this method local rates have risen all over the country, and while it cannot be asserted that the localities have not in some ways benefited, the system is most unsatisfactory." However these concerns had to be weighed against the increasing evidence that the Care Committees were not proving effective, and that the work of the SMO was wasted if treatment could not be secured. The appointment of a school nurse owed much to the personal pressure exerted by Dr Fison. His efforts, supported by the Board of Education, were also fundamental in producing a policy concerning the establishment of a school clinic. These proposals were strengthened by the current preoccupation with national efficiency. Medical treatment at an early age would produce healthy citizens, able to take an active place in society. Any financial expenditure would be offset by the increasing number of adults pursuing an independent existence. Medical attention for schoolchildren represented the Opportunity to health of the city’s population, and on these grounds could be justified economically. As a result of treatment given at the school clinic, ‘the health of the children would be improved, and they would be brought up as good change of increase the 16. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 16 January 1909. 17. Salisbury Times and South Wiltshire Gazette, 13 January 1915. 18. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 16 January 1915. ARCILANEOLOGICAL AND NYVEURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE members of society and would be able to earn their own living, instead of having a great deal of trouble to do so’? However, in the facilities which were made available for the clinic, the question of cost was again the overriding factor. have ‘the use of a room’ at Hulse House, when it was not required by the Town Council, with an additional room set aside by Lady Hulse for the treatment of eye Through — this Education were their responsibilities, with only the minimum of financial The school medical service was to defects.” action, the Committee seen to acknowledge commitment. If any one issue can be said to have establishment of the Salisbury, it is that of cost. A picture emerges of a local authority, implement government directives, but determined to supply only the minimal The prime consideration of the Educa- tion Committee appears, therefore, to have been the protection of the ratepayer before the health of the dominated the school medical service in compelled — to requirements. schoolchild. SCHOOL MEALS IN SALISBURY, 1908-18 The permissive legislation of — 1907 compulsion on local authorities to introduce a school meals service. They could, however, raise a 2d. rate to supplement the voluntary provision of meals, should they so wish. The Act was widely implemented nation- ally, but was not put into practice in Salisbury. Here the feeding of schoolchildren received no_ official placed no support until it became compulsory. It may be assumed that during this period the need was not so great as in the major industrial cities, where many of the children were indeed half-starved. Nev- it is certain that Salisbury had its share of needy cases, and that these were ignored by the local ertheless, authority. The extent of the problem is difficult to ascertain from the available evidence. In the first report Dr Fison identified 134 children with nutrition ‘below normal’ and four who were ‘badly fed’, making a total of 15 per cent of those examined. However, in the same year a circular sent to local head teachers reported only 2 per cent of pupils in want of food. This discrepancy may be accounted for by the fact that Dr Fison included in his figures cases which ‘would be explained by other such as heredity, bad hygiene, or actual The response from George Herbert infants’ causes, disease’.”! 19. Thid., 20. Ibid. 21. Report of SMO, Salisbury, 1908, p. 7. 13 October 1917. THE BUILDING HISTORY OF URCHFONT MANOR school does suggest nonetheless that in some areas the situation was serious. “The majority’ of its pupils were unable to take full advantage of their education through lack of food, and this was ‘worse in winter.” Further proof of distress is revealed by the need to open a soup kitchen for the poor each winter. In 1908 it provided 26,000 dinners over 12 weeks, showing that it was supplying a considerable demand.” In this field also the Education Committee were not prepared to supplement voluntary effort. Help for the small but significant number of children who were undernourished was provided by the schools without any official support. At St Edmund’s House, hot dinners were regularly available, while St Osmund’s gave soup and bread to ‘every child in distress’. This policy of non-intervention reflects the stance taken by the rest of the county. Five per cent of children examined in Wiltshire in 1911 were undernourished, and 3% per cent suffering from rickets, but here too there was no official response.” The failure to institute a school meals programme in 22. Ibid., p. 8. 23. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 18 April 1908. 205 Salisbury reflects the reluctance to intervene in an area where voluntary efforts was established. It also demon- strates an unwillingness to assume responsibility for what was generally believed to be a parental duty. CONCLUSION In its policy towards the establishment of the school medical service, and its refusal to support the supply of school meals, Salisbury demonstrates the local issues which determined the educational provision at this time. These were, a reluctance to provide official support in an area traditionally dominated by voluntary effort, an overriding belief that child welfare was the province of parental responsibility, and a fear of committing ratepayers to any additional expense. The welfare of the city’s elementary schoolchildren appears to have received a low priority in the face of these considerations. Acknowledgement. 1 would like to thank Eric Smith for his help in the preparation of this article. 24. Minutes (note 12), 10 June 1912. 25. VCH Wiltshire, vol. 5 (1957), p. 339. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 206-13. Small Rodents in Wiltshire: Dormouse by MARION BROWNE’ The paper surveys the occurrence of the dormouse Muscardinus avellanarius i Wiltshire, using data from early records and from systematic survey over the years 1975 to 1984. The methods of data collection are described, new records are set out, and various aspects of distribution, habitat choice and nest ecology are discussed. INTRODUCTION A ‘small rodent’ is here defined as being a mammal belonging to the order Rodentia and having an average adult weight of 50 g or less. Thus defined, and repre- senting the family Gliridae in Wiltshire, is the dormouse Muscardinus avellanarius, a nocturnal rodent which occupies an arboreal niche. A few early records were available, dating from 1956 to 1974. A National Survey, instituted by the Mammal Society in 1975, has been the model for dormouse recording in the county since that date. ‘This paper, one of a series dealing with the distribution and status of mammals in Wiltshire (Dillon and Browne 1975; Browne 1983; Dillon and Browne 1984), summarizes known incidence and distribution of Mf. avellanarius in Wiltshire up to the end of 1984 and presents available information on various aspects of its biology. METHOD A provisional distribution map was established from information extracted from the National Biographical Records Centre and from known local sources up to 1974. Very little information — was distribution was sparse and seemed likely to be an incomplete record. Members of the Natural History Section of the Wiltshire Archacological and Natural History Society and local members of the Mammal Society therefore took part in a national Dormouse Survey, which was instituted by the Mammal Society available, in 1975; the national survey sheet was used as a model for further dormouse recording. Kvidence was sought on the presence of //. avellanarius from sightings and field’ signs, with information on location, map reference, habitat, and nest shape, size, composition, height above ground and support. Comments on the vulnerability of sites were invited. Physical characteristics were established from live sightings and specimens. — Physical from dead Latimer Lodge, West Kington, Swindon SN14 7JJ. Figure 1. Physical proportions of M. avellanarius. 1:2. proportions of M1. avellanarius are shown in Figure 1. It is a compact mouse of rounded appearance with a soft dense pelage, golden or reddish brown in colour, somewhat paler ventrally. The tail, which is covered with short dense fur, is almost equal to the combined length of head and body; it is the only British mouse with a fully furred tail. The head displays long black whiskers and the black eyes are large and prominent. The ears are rounded and small, but conspicuous. The feet are prehensile and there is free lateral movement in the wrists, allowing flexibility when grasping branches. As well as live sightings, dead animals provide acceptable evidence, as do field signs such as stripped honeysuckle bark, nests, feeding signs and_ skeletal material. Supporting evidence is preferred for the fine stripping of honeysuckle bark, since other mammal species also strip bark. Nests are characteristic and provide reliable evidence of the presence of M1. avellanarius. A variety of plant materials is used in nest composition, the materials being detached and carried to the chosen site; it is this feature which distinguishes the nest from that of the harvest mouse Micromys minutus, which constructs nests of living material suspended amid the plant stems (Dillon and Browne 1975). The nest of AL. avel/anarius, which may be oval or spherical in shape, is wedged firmly into a fork of the supporting plant or plants; size varies, as does height above ground, and there is no definite entry hole, the mice push their way in and out. A typical nest is shown in Figure 2. M. avellanarius feeds on a variety of nuts and fruits. SMALL RODENTS IN WILTSHIRE: DORMOUSE H | i \ Figure 2. M. avellanarius: a typical nest. Approx. 1:2. In particular, it eats hazel nuts, feeding aloft among the branches of hazel Corylus avellana, extracting the kernels and dropping the empty nutshells, which lie on the ground beneath the bushes and are easily retrieved for identification. The method of opening nuts is characteristic, and the marks made by the incisors, when extracting the kernels, are diagnostic. ‘The mouse holds the nut between its front feet and rotates it while the lower incisors cut through the shell, producing a neat round hole with a smoothly chiselled inside edge. At the same time, the upper incisors also grip the nut while it is rotated and produce curving scratches outside the edge of the hole. These features, noted by S upper premolar oer m2 m3 e. @.e @.@ oe @ S Figure 4. Skull, lower jaw and teeth of M. avellanarius. 3:1. upper molars upper incisor ee: 207 Figure 3. Hazel nuts opened by M. avellanarius. 1:1. Hurrell (1980), have been studied in detail and are shown in Figure 3. Skeletal remains may be isolated from the castings of predatory birds and from animal remains in discarded bottles. Diagnostic features have been noted and used in analysis (Dillon, Browne and Junghaans, in prep.); these features are shown in Figure 4. RESULTS By the end of 1984, 51 records were received from 43 sites, covering 19 1 km squares within the county. The minimum number of individual mice deduced from the evidence was 51. All records were added to the existing distribution map. Known distribution at 31 December 1984 is shown in Figure 5; the map is plotted on a 1 km grid but, for clarity, only the 10 km grid is shown. Additionally, at least 10 possible sites were searched with negative results. Basic details of the records were reported in annual Mammal Reports (Gillam 1973-75; Browne 1977-83). 27 per cent of the records were of chance sightings of single live animals. Approximately 6 per cent were of dead animals and approximately 67 per cent were field signs. he nature of record is shown in Figure 6 as total numbers and per cent of the records. Habitat information from the survey sheets was divided into three main categories in terms of cover — ‘marginal’, ‘closed’ and ‘artificial’. The first two main categories were subdivided into more detailed habitat types. Of the ‘marginal’ habitats, ‘woodland edge’ and ‘coppice edge’ denote linear distribution along the perimeter of, or bordering a track or ride within, lower incisor S lower Yy premolar In2 lower molars m3 208 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NA PURAL TISTORY MAGAZINE Figure 5. M. avellanarius: known distribution in the county. Figure Sa. Woodland: distribution in the county. live dead San Figure 6. Nature and number of records and per cent representation. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 hedgerow fence row marginal woodland edge coppice edge road verge mixed woodland closed old coppice rough common artificial garden Figure 7. Habitat: number and per cent of records. SMALL RODENTS IN WILTSHIRE: DORMOUSE woodland or copse. Of the ‘closed’ habitats, ‘mixed woodland’ denotes mainly deciduous woodland at tran- sitional stage with dense undergrowth, with areas of coppiced hazel and sometimes small areas of conifer plantation; ‘rough common’ denotes an area partly covered with dense scrub, with some hazel and other shrubs but few standard trees. Other categories are self-explanatory. The number and proportion of records for each habitat type are shown in Figure 7. The main areas of woodland in the county are shown in Figure 5a, which is plotted on a 1 km grid with, for clarity, only the 10 km grid shown. The use of 12 different plant species for nest 209 nently, as did feeding signs, represented by opened hazel nuts; these are shown in Figure 9 as total numbers and per cent of the field sign records. Number of records refers to groups of nests or nuts found at one location; it is not an indication of total numbers of nests or nuts, nor is it any guide to the number of mice present. The number of nests on one site varied from one to 10; this is not an indication of numbers of mice, since individual animals may use more than one nest. The total number of nests recorded was 47, of which full descriptions partial descriptions for a further four, and it is on these 26 were available for 22 and use sites a nest [ood composition — support clematis Clematis vitalba seedheads, bark + 2 = 4 bramble Rubus spp. leaves, branches I 8 = 20 briar Rosa spp. leaves, branches I 2 = 7 honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum bark, branches 8 7 = 12 birch Betula pendula leaves, branches l 4 = 8 hazel Corylus avellana stems, branches, nuts = 9 18 28 oak Quercus robur branches — I - I+ bluebell Endymion non-scriptus leaves, stems I = = I grasses Gramineae spp. 19 3 - 19 spruce Picea abies branches - I = I bracken Pteridium aquilinum fronds, branches 11 5 = 14 moss = - 2 - - 2 - - brushwood = 3 = 3 Figure 8. Plant species known to be used by M. avellanarius construction, for nest support and for food, has been dimiber per cent observed. Other plants were noted in the survey sheets ati 20) 31 but only those known to be utilized are considered nuts 18 36 here. The number of records for each plant is shown in Figure 8, with the part used, the use to which it was put and the number of sites at which each was recorded. Only 13 individuals were seen live; of these, six were found in nests, one was in a nest-box and one was crossing a road. Three individuals were found dead. One was caught in a fence, one was trapped in a discarded lemonade bottle from which it had been unable to escape (Morris 1966), and one was identified from skeletal material isolated from the castings of a tawny owl S¢riv aluco. Stripped honeysuckle bark was not noted as an independent field-sign record. Nests featured promi- Figure 9. Field signs: number and per cent of records. nests that nest ecology data were based. Six nests were also found in nest boxes but, although their provenance was known and they were assigned to the ‘mixed woodland’ habitat category, no further information was available. Oval and spherical nests were found in sizes ranging from approximately 50 mm to approximately 150 mm in diameter. These are shown in Figure 10, expressed as numbers and per cent of the nest records. Nine different plant species were identified in the composition of nests. In individual nests the number of component plants varied from one to three. Where 210 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL ENSTORY MAGAZINE 60x 80 1 70x 80 4 60x90 3 Oval 100x120 2 80 xi30 1 90 x130 4 50x50 1 70x70 2 Spherical 90x90 4 100 x100 2 150 x150 2 clematis Clematis vitalba honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum bluebell Endymion non-scriptus grasses Gramineae spp. bracken Pteridium aquilinum moss bramble Rubus spp. briar Rosa spp. leaves birch Betula pendula unidentified ~ Figure 11. Nest composition: number and per cent of records. leaves were used they were few in number and did not contribute substantially to a nest in terms of bulk although, in one nest, leaves formed a complete outer shell which had dried and hardened into a consistency not unlike papier maché. Fine grasses were recorded for the linings of four nests, whereas coarser grasses were noted for the outer or main complexus. Nest composition data are presented in Figure 11 as number and proportion of nests in which each component was used; it does not represent the proportion of each component in terms of bulk. Nests were found at heights from ground level to 3 metres above ground. ‘These were divided into seven categories. The data are presented in Figure 12. Nine different plant species were found used for nest support, and there were also three records of nests 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 10 Figure 10. Nest shape and size in min: number and percent of nest records. number per cent outer lining bark strips I = 1.25 seedheads 4 = 6 bark strips 8 = 12 stems 1 = = leaves = | 3 21 4 37 11 - 16 2 = 3 1 = 1.25 I = 1.25 1 = 1.25 12 = 18 found in brushwood piles. More than one support plant might be used, for example bramble Rubus spp. grow- ing up through the branches of young spruce Picea abies. Nest support data are presented in Figure 13. No evidence exists of the diet of M/. avellanarius in Wiltshire other than hazel nuts at the 17 sites at which opened nutshells were recorded. It was observed that the marks made by the upper incisors on the outer edges of the nutshells varied in direction (Figure 3), suggesting that individual nuts were rotated in different directions. Four cases of damage to habitat were noted. ‘Two were hedgerow sites where mechanical trimming was in operation; one was during coppicing and scrub clearance, when a nest containing a live mouse was thrown on to a bonfire, the mouse being seen and SMALL RODENTS IN WILTSHIRE: DORMOUSE 12) ° (e) {e) 12) [e) 1e) ° ° C0000 0 Figure 12. Height above ground in m: per cent of nest records. Figure 13. Nest support: per cent of nest records. rescued by a casual passer; and one was during Forestry Commission clearance, when vegetation containing 10 nests was removed by bulldozers. DISCUSSION M. avellanarius is found to be sparsely distributed in Wiltshire and seems to be very local in occurrence, as it is confined to a few woodland areas where its habitat requirements are still met. Comparison of the map of the distribution of M1. avellanarius (Figure 5) with the map showing the main areas of woodland in Wiltshire shows the close link between the species and the more extensively wooded parts of the county. 211 000 0000 0 +++ z para: <().5 74: 13—20. * \ Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine vol. 79 (1985), pp. 219-24. Gideon Mantell in Wiltshire by J.B. DELAIR’® and DENNIS R. DEAN‘ Gideon Mantell (1790-1852), the important early geologist and discoverer of \guanodon, was educated at Westbury and Swindon, and maintained his connection with Wiltshire. This article sets out bis Wiltshire biography, from his early field exploration round Swindon, to a last nostalgic visit in 1852. Though deservedly well known for its distinguished antiquarians, Wiltshire is less commonly associated with important early geological investigators, including William Smith (1769-1839),' Joseph “Townsend 1. Born at Churchill, Oxfordshire, in 1769, William Smith first became interested in geology and fossils through some early work as a land surveyor connected with field drainage and other agricultural improvements. Smith later advanced to the front rank of professional engineers concerned with the construction of canals, wells, and other civil enterprises. The immense first-hand geological knowledge gained from these activities in many coun- ties, but especially in the environs of Bath, led him during the 1790s to formulate the incorporating many observations made in Wiltshire. “Though basic principles of — stratigraphy, popularized for many years at various agricultural and scientific meetings (particularly in the West Country) through displays of - maps, sections, and fossils, Smith’s ideas were not fully published by himself until 1816 (Strata Identified by Organised Fossils), after which he became known as ‘Strata Smith’. In later life, Smith became a land steward in Yorkshire. He died on 28 August 1839, after having been called during his lifetime the ‘Father of English Geology’. 2. Born in London in 1739, Joseph Townsend was educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, studying medicine and botany. In 1765 he took holy orders and obtained the incumbency of Pewsey rectory, thereafter performing the dual role of vicar and doctor for over 50 years. Besides caring for the souls and bodies of his country parishioners, “Townsend actively experi- mented with agricultural methods and developed a passion for geology. Ile published extensive geological observations ins‘ Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787 (1791). By 1796 Yownsend had met William Smith and the Reverend Benjamin Richardson, sharing their enthusiasm for fossils. On [1 December 1799 Smith’s stratigraphical insights were first set down on paper at Townsend’s home, 29 Pulteney Street, Bath — a momentous event in the history of British geology. From then onwards, be Jost no opportunity to champion Smith’s discoveries. Pownsend’s final major publication, The Character of Moses Established for Veracity as an [Historian (1813-15), supported the Biblical deluge, as Smith did, and applied Smith’s principles to fossils collected (1739-1816),? the Reverend Benjamin Richardson (d. 1832),’ and Etheldred Benett (1776-1845), among others. A further significant geologist, not only associ- ated with Wiltshire but who first developed his sci- throughout England, He died, aged 78, on 9 November 816. 3. Comparatively littke known, Benjamin Richardson was vicar at Farleigh-I lungerford, Somerset, and a close friend of Pownsend; like him, Richardson was an enthusiastic collector of fossils (including Wiltshire specimens) and much interested in crop- raising. He also kept and bred Merino sheep) Richardson’s home served regularly as a meeting-place for contemporary intel- ligentsia. The celebrated Wiltshire topographer John Britton (1771-1857) first met Wilham Smith at one of his gatherings; ‘Townsend was also present. At Pownsend’s house in Bath on 11 December 1799, Smith dictated the first written summary of his stratigraphical principles to Richardson. +. ‘The second daughter of Thomas Benett of Pyt-House, Etheldred Benett was born in 1776 and lived for much of her life at Norton House, Warminster. Miss Benett, Wiltshire’s earliest (and just about only) female collector of fossils, became interested in geology sometime before 1810, probably through the influence of her relative, Aylmer Bourke Lambert (1761-1842) of Boyton, Wiltshire, Vhrough Lambert, Gideon Mantell began to exchange letters, an important member of the Linnaean Society. fossils, and stratigraphical information with Miss Benett in 1813. Miss Benett also sent a number of Wiltshire fossils to James Sowerby in London, who published descriptions and illustrations of them in his Aineral Conchology, a serial work first appearing in 1815. Both Mantell and Sowerby named new species of fossils in Miss Benett’s honor. In the second volume of Afieral Conchology (1818, p. 58), she published the earliest stratigraphical description of Chicksgrove Mill, in the Vale of Wardour. Phis was then republished by W. D. Conybeare and William Phillips in’ an important geological work (Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales, 1822, p. 175). Hler only other geological publication, an extensive catalogue of her own fossil collection (Warminster, 1831), appeared also in Sir Richard Colt Hloare’s History of South Wiltshire (UL, London, 1832, pp. 119-26). She died aged 69 on 11 January 1845; Gideon Mentell then wrote a brief but touching obituary (London Geological Journal, \ (1846): 40.). Caledonian Land Surveys Ltd, 19 Cumnor Road, Wootton, Boar’s Hill, near Oxford. + L-lumanities Division, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenooha, Wisconsin 53141, US.\. 220) THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NAPURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE entific interests there, was Gideon Algernon Mantell (1790-1852), the discoverer of /guanodon and other early British dinosaurs.’ Mantell’s associations with Wiltshire began in 1801 when, aged 11, he went from his home in Lewes, Sussex, to live with (and be educated by) his uncle, the Reverend George Mantell (1757-1832), at that time pastor of the Independent Congregation at the Upper Mecting House in Westbury. George Mantell was remembered for his tremendous proportions — he was very tall, with gigantic shoulders, and possessed amazing strength. Ele is also said to have been ‘a fair scholar’. In 1801, George and Gideon moved to Swindon, then a market town of litthe more than 1000 persons, where, on 26 January 1804, the Newport Street Independent Chapel was founded, with the Rev. Mantell in charge. ‘Uhis chapel, the first of its kind in Swindon (Figure 1), had largely been sponsored by members of the nonconformist Strange family, who had a drapery business in the high street and who would later (in 1807) found Swindon’s first. bank. Despite some initial opposition, the chapel was conspicuously successful; its congregation grew so rapidly that side-wings were soon added to accommo- date the increased numbers. In association with his chapel, the Reverend Mantell also founded and ran a Dissenting Academy for boys, and it was there that Gideon remained throughout 180+4.° In that year Gideon drew a map of Swindon’ (repro- duced here for the first time), which clearly indicated the most important public buildings and _ private holdings (Figure 2). hus, we can see his uncle’s chapel and home of Queen Street, several public and private houses, the High Street and its square, the church, some properties immediately adjacent owned by the Stranges, the Short Walk, and (in the extreme upper right-hand corner, beyond the mill) part of the Long 5. Born at Lewes, Sussex, in 1790 (the third son of a shoemaker), Gideon Algernon Mantell attended schools at Lewes, Westbury and Swindon before his apprenticeship at 15 to James Moore, surgeon of Lewes, and a brief medical education in London. From IST1 to 1833 Mantell was in practice at Lewes; thereafter, at srighton, Clapham Common and London, While at Lewes and Brighton he assembled an outstanding collection of fossils, later sold to the British Museum in 1838 for £4000. Mantell’s most famous specimens were those of dinosaurs, especially /gaanodon, a discovery he announced in 1825. hereafter, he described and named three more giant saurians and was an_ indefatigable publicist. on behalf of our now familiar concept, the Age of Reptiles. Ple also made numerous contributions to stratigraphy , palacobotany, and invertebrate palacontology. Following his death in 1852, Mantell’s extensive papers went to his eldest son, in New Zealand, and are now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Sidney Spokes’s biography of Mantell (1927), written without them, 1s being superseded by one of the present authors Walk. Though not at all like the same town today, this was the Swindon that young Gideon knew and loved. His map also indicated the houses of the quarrymen (at lower left), part of the quarry fields, and the road (at lower right) leading to the quarries themselves. Geo- logically speaking, old Swindon occupied a_ hill composed largely of Portland and Purbeck stone — the distinctive local character of the former is_ still commemorated as the Swindon series. Highly fossiliferous, these formations are of uppermost Jurassic age, some 145 to 135 million years old, and subjacent to rocks of the succeeding period. | Ammonites, those — coiled cephalopods distantly related to the modern Nautilus, were and still are common in the Portland beds, and were known from that strata at Swindon even before the close of the 18th century. In 1804, and throughout the 19th century, the whole western brow of Swindon Hill, towards Westlecott, was being excavated for building stone, so by the time young Gideon came to live in Swindon excellent fossiliferous exposures could immediately Cretaceous be seen there. Gideon Mantell, ultimately one of England’s fore- most pioneer palacontologists, was attracted to fossils early and first collected them, it seems, in these Swindon quarries. To be sure, the assumed significance of these remains was not then what we take it to be. Thus, when Gideon became curious about the large, coiled ammonites pointed out to him by the quarrymen, Uncle George told him — in all honesty, and in conformity with then-popular belief — that they were relics of the Noachian Flood.’ What mattered, however, was that Gideon began to read the sparse literature available (an Encyclopaedia Britannica essay , tor example)’ and soon realized how little was actually Returning — to 1805, he was apprenticed to James Moore, a local surgeon interested known. Lewes in (DRD). Meanwhile, the best brief summary is A. D. Morris, ‘Gideon Algernon) Mantell,’ Proc. Roy. Soc. Med. 65 (1983): 215-21. 6. Excepting some few references in the Mantell family papers (The \lexander ‘Vurnbull Library), our knowledge of the Reverend George Mantell and his churches derives entirely from that which was used also in the Victoria County History of Wiltshire. Kor this map and permission to reproduce it, we are grateful to the Alexander Vurnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. I 8. Letter, Gideon Mantell to Etheldred Benett, 3 December 1813, Mentell family papers. See also Gideon Mantell, The Medals of Creation (2 vols., London, 1844), Il: 927. 9, ‘This fact is recorded in Mantell’s manuscript journal (among the Mantell family papers), under 22 June 1832. It also appears in the published abridgment, E. Cecil Curwen (ed.), The Journal of Gideon Mantell (Oxtord, 1940), p. 104. The article referred to is ‘Petrifactions’, pp. 245-9 in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd. ed., vol. 14 (Edinburgh, 1797) and plate CCCLANNVII, figure 9. GIDEON MANTELL IN WILTSHIRE 221 Figure 1. The only known illustration of the original Newport Street chapel. ge Re eadkad Le wit Saath of Vee 100 blcres, Short CW atk b 6 yey Ce, ‘ feu SNE eid (I : gat Dae he tome fa 93) mole: cocoa a Yoga Stl Pn Z & : Ds 222 THE in natural history, local chalk exposures on the South Downs. Gideon continued collecting fossils until 1810, when he spent six months in London completing his medical studies who possessed a few fossils from before returning to Lewes in 1811 as Moore’s assistant later He comprehensive collection of and partner. now began to amass a and deeply involved in his researches (no longer a hobby) so early as 1812.” As Gideon soon discovered, local fossils, was it was not enough to know fossils only. A major task was to establish the correct sequence and geographical extent of strata. Since Gideon was largely confined to Lewes by a demanding medical practice, he depended heavily — as did most naturalists then — upon correspondence. One of his first and most valued correspondents was the remarkable Etheldred Benett of Norton Warminster, a collector of fossils in her own right and already something of an authority on the strata of Wiltshire. Chalk and Greensand formations were the House, principal geological phenomena around Warminster, but and just as they were around Lewes. From 1813 especially during the first 10 years, Etheldred Benett exchanged geological enthusiasm, on, Gideon information, drawings, and specimens until her death in 1845. The relationship of Wiltshire and Sussex strata, with their embedded fossils, was one of the first major geological problems that Gideon set out to resolve. Since large regions of the two counties are geologically similar, but with Wiltshire having more Jurassic strata than Sussex, interesting similarities and differences."! he soon discov ered many In later years, when he lived successively in Lewes, Brighton, Clapham Common and London, enjoying considerable scientific prestige but only fitful periods of personal happiness, Gideon remembered his adolescent stay at Swindon with nostalgia. In December 1826, for example, he received a letter from Uncle George informing him ‘of the death of a lady, formerly Miss Strange, to whom when a schoolboy [he had been] much attached’. ' August (1827) he went by Marlborough (mentioned twice on his Swindon map of 1804), then took a post-chaise for Swindon. considerable The following coach as far as There he was greeted by Uncle George and the latter’s son, also George, who After dining Gideon stole away to the churchyard to was of Gideon’s age and likewise a medic. with them, 10. .\ manuscript catalogue of Mantell’s collection compiled by him in 1812 cimens. 20,000. 11. We are preparing a further paper on the scienufic importance of (and now in New Zealand) listed more than +00. spe- Phe collection he sold in 1838 contained more than Gideon Mantell’s relationship with Etheldred Benett; our point WILTSHIRE \RCHAFOLOGICAL AND NYECRAL ELIS TORY MAGAZINE visit graves of persons he had once known, then strolled the Walk, happier circumstances’ he had been accustomed to walk with Long where ‘in hours and his ‘first love’." His second return visit, in June 1832, followed scientific mecting at Oxford and a reunion with his cousin George, who was now in practice at Faringdon. Though having only a few moments’ respite from his coach journey between Oxford and Bristol, Gideon was nonetheless able to leave his card at Mr Strange’s, to call ona Mrs Axford, and once again to see the Long Walk of his boyish rambles and a field on which he had once played cricket. “Those happy hours are past away,’ he continued in a brief effusion of poetry, “And many a heart which then was gay/Within the tomb now darkly dwells!/Ehew!" In 1840 Swindon became a temporary terminus on Isambard Brunel’s new Great Western Railway and, by spreading northwards down the slope of Sw indon I Lill, was speedily transformed into an important regional centre. When Gideon visited once again in July 1841 it was by rail. (He had similarly visited his cousin George at Faringdon the previous month.) Living now at Clapham Common, in S London, he enjoyed the incredible rapidity that steam locomotion afforded. Gideon’s journal entry pertaining to this excursion 1s his most elaborate regarding Swindon: Started at /ev from the Great Western Railroad at Paddington, for Swindon in Wilts, to have a ramble alone, and unmolested, over the scenes of my early childhood. Arrived at the Swindon station at one. Walked through the fields to the town, and took refreshment at the Goddard Arms. Then visited the quarries, and obtained numerous fossils. The day proved most beautiful after a cloudy and showery morning. I set off on a walk to the Churchyard, and along the pathway leading to the Long Walk, the scene of many, many happy hours, with my first love, now long since numbered with the departed. I strolled to the end of this beautiful vista, the landscape most lovely — all nature smiling, and in her most fascinating aspect, and returned through the fields to the village. I next visited the Chapel, and the garden attached, where when a boy I had spent many hours over my bed of flowers; or lying under the projecting eves of the house with a favorite poet, secluded from my noisy school-fellows. Went to the quarries and worked hard till four o’clock, and returned to the Tavern to dinner. Another stroll to the Quarries after dinner, and at six walked through the fields to the railre vad station, with a heavy load of fossils, which one of the quarrymen carried." here is that it depended in large part upon Cadeon’s first-hand acquaintance with the Wiltshire strata. 3 December 1826; 13. Journal, 30 August 1827; Curwen (note 9), 14. Journal, 26 June 1832; Curwen (note 9), p. 105. 15. Journal, 19 July 1841, 9), pp. 145-6. 12. Journal, Curwen (note 9), p. 60. p. 63. Curwen (note GIDEON MANTELL IN WILTSHIRE * Sn i ow Ee * alg Ea 2s saa’ = A oe sig GODDARDARMS Figure 3. An early photograph, c. 1900, of the Goddard Arms, Swindon. He left by the Bristol train at seven and reached London soon after nine, full of appreciation for the new facility of rail travel, yet bothered by apprehensions as he compared once again his early carefree days at Swindon with the anxieties of later life. There was then a final return in 1846. On 30 May, Gideon took the 2 p.m. train from London to Swindon and met his 19-year-old son Reginald, an aspiring civil engineer in Brunel’s employ who would later work on new railway developments around ‘Trowbridge,’ at the Goddard Arms. Gideon then walked round the town after tea, visiting his usual haunts and the quarries. The next morning, on a beautiful but extremely hot day, he took a ramble through the Long Walk, attended church (for it was Sunday), and dined early. In the evening, 16. Reginald Mantell was born at Lewes, Sussex, in \ugust 1827, the youngest. son of Gideon Mantell. In his late teens, he joined Isambard Brunel as a junior engineer, and worked on the construction of the branch line from Chippenham to Westbury. In 1850, he published a general account of the geology and fossils exposed by the railway excavations (.\ccount of the strata and orgame remains exposed in the cuttings of the branch railway, from the Great Western line near Chippenham through Vrowbridge, to Westbury in Wiltshhire’, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. Fond. 6 (A850): 310-19). Lle was resident engineer for the building of the Wilts., Somerset, and Weymouth Raily ay, ¢. 1849-50. when the temperature had become less formidable, he visited the largest quarry, obtaining many interesting specimens." Gideon left the next morning by train and, so far as is known, was never again in Swindon; he died in 1852. More than a collector, Gideon also wrote and lec- tured on geology, addressing himself to scientific and popular audiences alike.'* While it would be tedious and unnecessary to enumerate his many references to Wiltshire in these works, or those to him by Wiltshire authors, we should note that Gideon’s introduction to the study of fossils, The Medals of Creation (1844), proposed a series of geological excursions, one of which followed the line of the Great Western Railway, including both Faringdon and Swindon. Fourteen \gain he observed and collected geological material, sometimes accompanied by Mr Mackneil, the sometime honorary curator of Prowbridge Museum (WAAL 13(1872): 306-7). The fossils he collected were later described by Professor John Morris (Geol. Journ. 61850): 314415). le died on a houseboat near Allahabad, India, in 1857, from cholera incurred during the Sepoy uprising. 17. Journal, 30° May—1 June 1846; Curwen (note 9}, p. 205. 18. Gideon Mantell’s major publications are The Fossils of the South Downy (1822), Hlustrations of the Geology of Sussex (1827), The Geology of the South-East of England (1833), The Wonders of Geology (1838), and The Medaly of Creation (1844). 224 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NAYPORAL PHS PORY MAGAZINE miles beyond Faringdon” lay Swindon, where the trains stopped for 10 minutes. Here, when a schoolboy, Gideon recalled, his curiosity had been much excited by the abundant petrified ‘ram’s horns’ (i.e., ammonites) often met with in his daily rambles. ‘There was also a comfortable inn, the Goddard Arms (Figure 3), at which (in 1841) the waiter offered many local fossils for sale.” Swindon’s quarries, moreover, still abounded in fossils. Though Gideon did not mention them, brickpits then recently opened in Kimmeridge Clay around the foot of Swindon Hill were also beginning to yield different fossil material of equal interest. As was then common, good specimens could often be purchased from quarriers and_ brickyard workmen. 19. In Mantell’s day, no station had actually been built at Faringdon itself, and Mantell must have been referring to that on the main London to Bristol line called Faringdon Road, about + km S of Faringdon. W. Morris, Swindon: Fifty Years Ago (More or Less) (Swindon, 1885), p. 366. 20. Gideon Mantell, The Medals of Creation (2 vols., London, 18-+4), Ib 927-8. Vhe Goddard Arms, situated in the Tigh Street, Swindon, played host during the early 19th century to several important Wiltshire geologists, including William Smith in 1816, All in all, then, Swindon held a lasting attraction for Gideon. Geological riches as well as personal associations repeatedly beckoned him back to its envir- ons. Thus we can now add Gideon Mantell’s illustrious name to the roll call of prominent English pioneer geologists who were either Wiltshiremen or who conducted significant fieldwork in Wiltshire’s fair coun- tryside. Acknowledgements. \We wish to record our grateful: thanks to the following individuals and institutions who kindly assisted the authors in various ways during the development of this essay: Pamela Colman (Devizes), Raymond de Graff (Swindon), kK. EL. Rogers (lrowbridge), and the Alexander TPurnbull Library in Wellington, N.Z. Figure | is reproduced courtesy of Rev. R. Ellis BA; Figure 2) courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library; Figure 3 courtesy of Swindon Reference Library. when one William Pike worked there as waiter and general handyman. AX younger William: Pike (born the next year) later worked at the Goddard Arms and collected local fossils, for a better understanding of which he procured copies of Mantell’s Wonders of Geology (1838 or later edition) and Vedals of Creation (1844). These fossils were then sold to collectors, some reputedly going to the British Museum. Phe younger William Pike, at least, would have been at the inn when Mantell stayed there in July [841 and May 1846 but died the following year at 29. Notes A Handaxe from West Kennet by ROBIN HOLGATE’ and JOYCE TYLDESLEY* A round-butted cordate handaxe (Figure 1) was found on the surface of the cultivated field immediately E of the footpath to West Kennet long barrow in November 1983. The findspot lies approximately 150 m N of the barrow, at SU10506805. The handaxe (Figure 1) measures 89 * 71 X 21 mm, and weighs 140 g. It is fully bifacial, and in profile (Figure 1b) is moderately flat and slightly plano- convex. The implement has been somewhat weathered ro spreading along the ridges between the flakes. It could perhaps be argued that the implement is a lower palacolithic ovate/cordiform, but in size, shape and technology it is more reminiscent of the middle palacolithic ‘bout coupé handaxe type. The classic bout coupé handaxe is a broad refined biface with two symmetrical convex sides and a well-worked straight or slightly curved butt forming distinct corners with the sides (Roe 1981: chapter 6). These handaxes are known 10cm 5) Figure 1. The West Kennet handaxe. and battered, but its original or cordiform, with the completely around the piece. A definite swelling on the flatter face (Figure 1a) may indicate that the handaxe was made from a flake; although there is a small patch of cortex on this face it could have been situated on the striking platform and not on the ventral surface of the flake. The other face (Figure Ic) bears a larger patch of cortex, and a tranchet scar on the tip. Both faces have a thick white patina, with occasional shape was sub-rectangular cutting edge extending iron stains Institute of Archaeology, 31—+ Gordon Square, London WCIII OPY. Donald Baden-Powell Quarenary Research Centre, 60 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PN. + to occur in Britain in association with Mousterian artefacts (e.g. Kent’s Cavern, Devon), but have more often been recovered as stray surface finds, sometimes close to known Mousterian sites. Over 100 such stray bout coupé handaxes are known from S Britain. ‘Those examples which can be dated belong to the last gla- ciation. At present only one definite Mousterian artefact is known from Wiltshire, a fine sub-triangular bout coupé handaxe found at Fisherton in 1864 (Evans 1872: 551) and recorded as coming from loess ‘beneath the remains of a mammoth’. The handaxe is now in the Salisbury Museum. Evans mentioned a second artefact from this site, but its location is now unknown. From Evans’s 226 THE WILTSHIRE remarks it could be a convex side scraper, a well-known Mousterian type. The counties around Wiltshire, with the exception of Gloucestershire have all produced at least two classic bout coupé handaxes and other Mousterian material, and it is perhaps only a matter of time before further’ Mousterian finds occur in Wiltshire. \RCLIAEFOLOGICAL AND NAVECRAL HISTORY MAGAZINE \chknowledgement. We are indebted to Miss Vivienne Tanner for her drawing of the handaxe. EVANS, J., 1872. The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain, London: Longmans, Green. ROK, D. AL, L98L. The Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Periods in Britain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites in the Chippenham area by JOHN H. TUCKER’ Several sites yielding typical mesolithic flint assem- blages have been located in the Chippenham area since 1954. A re-examination of the material by Dr Roger Jacobi of Lancaster University has confirmed the presence, as previously suspected for at least one site, of upper palacolithic influence. His study has identified diagnostic tool types from the carlier and from the later Upper Palaeolithic. ! Longwood, 7 Riding Mead, Chippenham, Wiltshire. 1. The rarity of upper palaeolithic sites is not difficult to explain in view of the hostile environment at the period, In earlier Upper Palaeolithic times, the Avon valley round Seagry was a barren steppe-tundra, with snowfelds on the higher ground, only occupied by man for brief periods during the summer — and then only when the climate had improved a little. Hlorse was the chief food source. Even then the total British } / GRAVER SEAGRY 0 1 2 3 4 SMS oo ee | SCALE higure 1. The graver (1), point (2) and core (3). Earlier upper pataeolithic graver from Seagry The graver is of bec-de-flute type, Campbell’s (1978) type BD2. It is 45 mm long, 29 mm broad and 8 mm thick. ‘The burin facet is 5 mm wide, well within the limits for such implements (Campbell 1978: 91, table 48), and the tool is typical of the type. It is made from a broad flake with some cortex remaining on one side. It is densely patinated white and shows signs of slight rolling. population has been estimated at around 500 persons. During the later Upper Palaeolithic an improved climate allowed a few trees and shrubs — juniper, willow, and birch — to establish themselves. It was sull very cold, and open sites were merely summer camps where family groups went in pursuit of reindeer or horse. The British population, estimated at around 5000, probably operated from bases in sheltered valleys or cave Hole, sites, such as Gough’s Cave, Cheddar, or Avelines Burrington Combe, Somerset. POINT HEYWOOD CORE HEYWOOD [ FLINT SITES. NOTES The graver was found by the writer in situ in a section exposed by gravel-digging at Seagry (ST 965810); it remains in the writer’s collection. It was ina thin layer of natural flint pebbles embedded in sand about 30 cm above the main river gravel. No other implements were found. Gravers of this type are well known from French sites (Burkitt 1949: 63, Figure 4), and form a significant part of the earlier upper palcolithic assemblage from Paviland cave (Campbell 1978: 244, Figure 94/7). Later upper palaeolithic point from Heywood The point is a ‘penknife’ point, Campbell’s (1978) type AC23. It is 39 mm long, 11 mm wide, and 7 mm thick (cf. Campbell 1978, vol. 2: 294, Figures 144/1-144/3). The tool is made from a blade with a little cortex remaining; the bulbar end has been removed. It is of unpatiniated’ translucent’ flint’) and isin tresh undamaged condition. The field near Heywood where it was found (at ST 903757) has yielded many implements when ploughed. These were originally assigned to the Mesolithic, but the finding of this tool points to the example of CHIPPENHAM AREA. M4 x CHRISTIAN MALFORD. (Bb ECLAWAYS, * PECKINGELL 2. ECKINGELL 1. < c i * COCKLEBURY. f pees APPROX: SCALE. 2 MILES LAND OVER 300FT. 227 Hengistbury Head, where continuous occupation seems to have taken place from the later Upper Palacolithic to the Mesolithic and later. Core A small blade core, of similar flint and in a similar fresh condition, was found near by. Made from a gravel pebble, it has been flaked from two opposing directions and stull has much cortex remaining. Both artefacts are in the author’s collection. Open sites of the Upper Palacolithic are quite rare, the only other find of the period in Wiltshire being an earlier upper palacolithic biface tool from Fir Fill, Fovant. Indeed, the nearest other site is at Forty Acres Pit, Gloucestershire (earlier Upper Palacolithic). Of some 20 open sites in the S of England, only Hlen- gistbury Elead (later Upper Palaeolithic) has yielded a good series of implements. Dating is difficult, but figures from cave sites in Somerset give a date of c. 30,000 BP for the earlier and c. 11,000 BP tor the later Upper Palaeolithic (Tratman 1975; Davies 1921; Campbell 1978). Figure 2. Sites in the Chippenham area. 228 Mayor find-spots Christian Maltord 1 ST 956794 Christian Malford 2 ST 959799 Peckingell 1 ST 938745 Peckingell 2 ST 943754 Cocklebury ST 923736 Hlardenhuish ST 913747 Pew Thill ST 926745 Allington 1 ST 904750 Allington 2 ST 888767 I ley wood ST 903757 Golf course ST 906756 Minor find-spots Kellaways ST 945759 Park Lane ST 918739 Seagry ST 965810 Table 1. Flint sites of the Chippenham area summarized. BIBLIOGRAPHY BURKIPT, M. C., 1949. The Old Stone Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CAMPBELL, J.B. 1978. The Upper Palaeolithic of Britain. Oxtord: THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NYVEPURAL EESTORY MAGAZINE Mesolithic: microburin, graver, cores, scrapers Probably extension of site 1. Blades, cores. Mesolithic: microburins, microliths, blades. Similar industry to site | but nothing definitely mesolithic. Mesolithic: microburin, microliths, blades, cores, scrapers. Mesolithic: microburins, blades, cores, scrapers, chopper. Mesolithic: microliths, blades, cores, scrapers. Mesolithic: blades, cores, gravers, Neolithic implements also occur. Mesolithic: microburins, blades, cores, scraper. Later Upper Palacolithic—Mesolithic: penknife point, blades, cores, scrapers. Several industries on southern slopes below golf course, possibly mesolithic. Mesolithic: backed blade, blades, scrapers. Possibly Mesolithic: microburin?, scraper. Farly Upper Palaeolithic: graver. Stray find above gravel. Oxtord University Press. DAVIES, Jo A. 1921. Avelines Hole, Burrington Combe, Proc. Uni- versity of Bristol Spel. Soc. |: 61-78. PRAEMAN, E.R. 1975. Limestones and Caves of the Mendip Hills. An Open-work Brooch of the British La Téne Period from Cold Kitchen Hill by RICHARD HAT PATTY The remarkable brooch, (Figure 1.1), at present in the writer’s collection, is said to have been found some Cold Kitchen Hill, and although unfortunately not found under controlled conditions, the provenance. The settlement was occupied throughout the Iron Age, and a number of other brooches of very unusual form have been recorded from that site (WAM 42: 67, 68; 48: 185-9). While Celtic metal open-work is known from at least years ago at there appears no good reason to mistrust the Sth century BC, it is extremely rare on pre-Roman brooches. ‘Vhis specimen is of cast bronze, in quite good condition with a green patina, only slightly pitted 17 Spencer Road, New Milton, Llampshire BLI25 6BZ. here and there. Sadly, the original pin fastening is missing, having broken off and been replaced by an emergency repair in antiquity, the repair having very similar patina to the body. It was obviously valued. The bow is formed of two addorsed recurved elements with raised knobs at the extremities, and in profile is flat. The foot return is cast in one with the bow. Incidentally, the ancient repair is quite clear. A hole was drilled through the broken end and a bronze pin with a flat perforated head bent at right angles was inserted, and rivetted over within the openwork. A pin was then made by bending the end of a piece of wire and looping it through the hole as suggested in Figure 1.2. Curiously, this tollows precisely the original looped hinge on an iron brooch simple mechanism NOTES 229 Figure 1. The La Tene brooch from Cold Kitchen Hill (1), and comparative material. 1 Cold Kitchen Hill (scale 1:1); 2 detail of pin showing ancient repay (1:1); 3 also from Cold Kitchen Hill, now in Devizes museum (1:1); 4 Danes Graves 57 (2:3); 5 Datchet (2:3); 6 Danes Graves 95 (2:3); 7 suggested reconstruction of 1 (1:1); 8 Newonhanr Croft (1:1); 9 and 10 diagrams of the mock-spring on some ‘Wessex? type British tron-age brooches; 11 to 14 diagrams of true hinge arrangements on some British won-age brooches. 230 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEKOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE also from Cold Kitchen Hill (Figure 1.3) and another possible fragment of an iron brooch from All Cannings Cross (Cunnington 1923: plate 19.10), both of which are in Devizes museum, and which appear to be unmatched elsewhere. Similarities to the foot construction of the open-work brooch are not hard to find, similarities to the bow are apparently non-existent, and the form of the original head must be deduced. First, the foot. This clearly consists of a La Tene | or 2 type catch; the first type is usually defined as having the returned end free of the bow, the second being attached to it usually around the central area by means of a clip or ring. But in Britain a number of examples do exist on which foot return and bow are either cast in one, as this brooch, or welded or brazed solidly together, as on arched brooches from Datchet (Figure 1.5) (Fox 1958: plate 41a, but there dated too late), Danes Graves (Figure 1.6) (Fox 1958: figure 4 and p. 8), Newnham Croft (Figure 1.8) (Fox 1958: figure 6b) and on involute brooches from Eastburn (Stead 1979: figure 26.2), and Croft Ambrey (Stanford 1974: figure 75.5). Professor Hawkes (1982: 55) sees this unitary casting as a natural thing for the inventive Britons to do, long before the La ‘Tene 3 type with its unitary catch arrived in Britain in the Ist century BC. ‘The form of the foot, therefore, appears to date the brooch from the late 3rd to early 2nd century BC, the period of the typically British straight bow and involute brooches, although La Tene | types were still in use. While most of them have a disc decoration on the returned foot, and a few are plain, the knob on the foot return is not unknown on other straight-bow brooches, and it is interesting that knobs are found on some straight-bow brooches from Wiltshire, at least two from Cold Kitchen Hill itself, and one from Swallowclifte (Jope 1962: figure 2, 1-3). Second, the bow. The Newnham Croft brooch (Figure 1.8) is the only other example of an iron-age brooch with an open-work bow known to the writer, and it is noteworthy that this too has the unitary foot. Furthermore, it is decorated with a number of mincral studs rivetted in position, and the knobs on the brooch under discussion are undoubtedly copying that style of decoration, albeit less expensively. Decorative mount- ings of this type, either of amber, stone, glass, chalk or ‘paste’ simulating coral also appear on rod-bow iron age brooches of around 200 BC, on arched, straight and involute types. Examples are from Datchet (figure 1.5), Maiden Castle (Fox 1927: figure 7), Harborough Cave (Fox 1958: plate 8c), Danes Graves 95 (figure 1.6), Danes Graves 57 (figure 1.4), Burton Fleming (Stead 1979: figure 26.5), Queen’s Barrow, Arras (Stead 1979: figure 23.3), and half a dozen trom Wetwang Slack (Dent 1982: figure 4). As an aside, many iron brooches, particularly involutes, are embellished with bronze fittings. It is notable that all the examples of this period decorated with mineral mounts have one or other of the peculiarly native British Aimged pins, none with the traditional functional spring, which must have a bearing on the question of the original type of head on our brooch. Third, the original pin fastening. From the above it can be safely assumed that it was one of the forms of swivel pin current British brooches of the period. Such fall into two main groups, the ‘mock-spring’ type and the ‘hinge’ type. Uhe former mechanism amongst has wire coils simulating the bilateral spring and chord, but with pin free to swivel on a solid axis, as on the ‘Wessex’ type (figure 1.9), or the pin one with the outer coils and free to rotate on a tubular axis (Figures 1.8, 1.10). The ‘hinge’ type has a true hinge arrangement barely reminiscent of the original coils’ appearance, and of these there are four main variants: 1 ‘The end is of pivoted disc form (Figure 1.11), a variant having large rings instead of discs, held together with a large ‘eyelet, as on many involute brooches. Nm The end of the bow extends downward to a large ring, often decorated, at the bottom of which is either a slot cut to take the flattened end of the pin secured with a small rivet (Figure 1.12), or it has two small lugs to form the hinge (Figure 1.4, 1.13). More rarely, the end widens to a horizontal flat plate beneath which are two small lugs to take a pivoted pin (Figure 1.5, 1.14). + An even rarer type on the Queen’s Barrow brooch (Stead 1979: figure 23.3) has a cross-bar, but the pin is held by a long full-width axis bar, over each end of which is slipped a tubular clement grooved to simu- late the coils of a long spring. Cold Ikitchen Hill has w produced a head of this form also, but on a tradi- tional La ‘Tene 2 type bow, now in Devizes museum (WAM 44: plate II.F). In assessing the most probable type of pin fastening tor the brooch under discussion, one first eliminates the least likely. One requirement of the mock-spring mechanism is a sharp downturn of the head (Figures 1.8, 1.9, 1.10), but close examination of the broken stump reveals no indication of such. Of the alternative hinges the rarity of types 3 and 4+ makes them highly improbable. We are left with type 1 or 2, and if the head was furnished with decorative dummy covers as Was sometimes the case (Figure 1.4), its appearance NOTES would have been something like Figure 1.7, either with or without the lugs, but possibly more slim to balance the foot. It must be said, however, that the brooch could originally have had either type. On the reconstruction drawing a balancing knob has been suggested at the head end. Since writing the above, the author has to thank Dr lan Stead for drawing his attention to another bronze brooch excavated a few years ago away up in Scotland, at the Balloch Hill fort in Argyll (Close-Brooks 1982: 194 and figure 18.172), which fortuitously provides a second example with bronze knobs simulating globular mineral mounts. Although smaller, 1t has some simi- larities with the Datchet brooch (Figure 1.5), but its rod bow has an involute centre section, and while it has the studded extension to the pin fastener there is no cross-piece. It has an iron pin pivoted between two lugs, and in keeping with the brooches herein mentioned, it has the unitary foot. From the foot’s resemblance to La Tene 3 brooches Dr Close-Brooks suggested its date as late 2nd to early Ist century BC, but it could, in view of the earlier unitary fect mentioned herein, be placed a century earlier. Although the Balloch Hill bow is of more simple JOPE, § Nm ww construction than the open-work brooch — from Wiltshire, its moulded decoration is more elaborate, having incised crosses on the knobs, and S-shaped scrolls encircling and linking some of them. \cknowledgement. Vhe author wishes to thank Dr Paul Robinson for kindly reading a draft of the text, and for a number of valuable suggestions. BIBLIOGRAPHY CLOSE-BROOKS, }., 1982. In E. J. Peltenburg, Excavations at Balloch Hill, Argyll, Proc. Soc. Antig. Scotland 112: 142-214. CUNNINGTON, M. E., 1923. The Early Iron Age Inhabited Site at All Cannings Cross. Devizes. DENT, J., 1982. Cemeteries and settlement patterns of the Lron Age on the Yorkshire Wolds, Proc. Prehist. Soc. +8: 437-57. DUDLEY, D., and JOBE VE. MM. brooches from ‘Trevone, north Cornwall, Cornish Archaeology 4+: 18-21. 1965. An iron age cist burial with two FOX, C., 1927. Arch. Camb. 82:, 81-93, and Figure 25. FOX, C., 1958. Pattern and Purpose. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales. HAWNES; C.F. C., dress among the Irish, Studies on Early Ireland, 51-73. Belfast. 1982. ‘The wearing of the brooch: early tron age \L., 1962. Iron age brooches in Ireland: a summary, U/ster / Arch. 24/5; 25-38. STANFORD, S. C., 1974. Croft Ambrey, London. STEAD, L. M., 1979. The Arras Culture, London. Roman Silver Rings from Wiltshire by M. HENIG’ Decorated silver Roman rings are far from common finds in the SW of Britain. Two examples which came to light in Wiltshire in 1984 are described below, together with a third ring of bronze, possibly associated with one of these. The silver ring from Bratton (Devizes Museum Acc. No. 1984-135) has a rectangular bezel on which is a raised rectangular boss with corrugated top. The hoop of the ring is circular in section and it has expanded shoulders separated from the bezel by a narrow neck. Comparison may be made with a bronze ring from Chilgrove, Sussex (Down 1979: 149, no. 1, figure +4) which has a similarly raised bezel. For the shoulders compare the Nornour rings (Dudley 1967: 21-3, nos. 6-14, figure 8). It would seem that the ring dates from the 3rd century, and is perhaps ancestral to a simpler 4th-century type with a simple hood and three well- defined raised projections (Clarke 1979: 319, Type BIb). The silver ring from Wilton (in’ private hands, following purchase in Bristol) has a hoop of D-shaped section. It is of a characteristic 3rd-century form with * Institute of Archaeology, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford ON 2PG. Figure 1. Silver ring from Bratton (2:1). Nm ww rm triangular shoulders (Henig 1978: figure 1, Type VII). It bears, on the flattened ovoid bezel, the engraved device of a palm surrounded by a beaded border. For the device, we may compare the silver rings from Vandoeuvres, near Geneva (Henkel 1913: 49, no. 352, plate XVIII, though here the hoop is more rounded), and from Winchester Wharf, London (Southwark), (Henig 1976: 256 and plate). In the case of the latter it is possible that the origin of the fruit or berries at the end of the projections is a debased beaded border; however, the ring here is of simple form and, despite the schematic nature of the device, probably about a century earlier in date than the Wilton ring. (For other rings with palm-branches, see Henig 1978: 278, nos. 68-72; the palm evokes Victoria and was obviously a highly propitious symbol.) Phi WILTSHIRE ARCEIAEOLOGICAL AND NYPURAL EES TORY MAGAZINE Figure 2. Silver ring from Wilton (2:1). Figure 3. Copper-alloy ring from Wilton (2:1). Also from Wilton is a copper-alloy ring, hoop of circular section, with similar flattened ovoid bezel, but lacks the marked carination of the shoulders. It is not certain whether this and the above were associated, though they may have been. BIBLIOGRAPHY CLARKE, G., 1979. The Roman Cemetery at Lankhills, Oxtord: Oxford University Press. (Winchester Studies 3.) DOWN, A., 1979. Chichester Excavations \V.. Chichester. DUDLEY, D., 1967. Excavations at Nor’our in the Isles of Scilly, 1962-6, Arch. J 124: I-64. HENIG, M., 1976. Southwark, Trans. London and Middlesex Arch, Soc. 27: 256 and plate. HENIG, M., 1978. A Corpus of Roman Engraved Gemstones from British Sites, 2nd ed. Oxtord: British Archaeological Reports. (British Series 8.) A silver finger ring from Winchester Whart, NOTES i) ww Ww Preliminary Report on Excavations at Castle Copse, Great Bedwyn, 1983-4 byebs TOSTET TER’ In the summers of 1983 and 1984 Indiana University, Bloomington, began an Romano-British Copse, immediately S of Great Bedwyn (Figure 1).' The villa’ lies on the brow of a c. Bedwyn_ Brail, Downs approximately of Pewsey. investigation of the large courtyard villa of Castle 3 km-long ridge known as which rises near the Marlborough 2 km N of the head of the Vale The site occupies strategic high ground near valley; although at the top of the hill, it is amply supplied with springs and a high water table. Set on the W edge of the ridge, the villa commands a good view towards the Roman Cunetio-Winchester road, slightly 2km to the SW. The main villa complex stands on a levelled platform measuring c. 100 by 110m, while a ‘outbuildings’, also positioned near the edge of the ridge, are located in the contiguous large meadow to the SE. Three sectors, with material spanning the period from the invasion to the end of Roman domination, the junction of a broad plain and a major less than series of were opened; and four areas surveyed geophysically. Sector A, intended to clarify carly trenching by the Rev. W.C. Lukis (1853-4), for which no adequate records remain,’ revealed a large aisled structure which, in its later phases of the 4th century AD, underwent significant structural alterations. ‘The longi- tudinal exterior flint walls were totally (S) and partially (N) demolished and rebuilt slightly further apart; the interior was subdivided through the erection of several small flint and greensand partition walls between bays and columns. In addition, the original floor in the aisle was dug out, and a hypocaust system introduced, transforming the structure into luxurious accommo- dation complete with wall painting, extensive mosaic pavements and, possibly, columns. Approximately | m to the W, a smaller adjacent structure containing a te 408 N Program in Classical Archaeology, Indiana University, Indiana Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USN. 1. Program in Classical Archaeology, under the direction of the author, Prof. J. Kenfield and Dr T. How e, with finds stored at the Littlecote Roman Research Trust. foam) grateful: to Dr G. Wainwright and English Heritage (former Dok), and to Mr and Mrs AX.) Buchanan, permission to excavate, to Mr Seton Wills, founding trustee, and owners of Castle Copse, for granting Mr B. Walters, director of the LRRT for helping launch the Pins project and offering assistance at every turn, to Dr kK. Annable and Dr P. Robinson of the Devizes Museum for their help in radial hypocaust system was connected to the basilican building by a corridor paved with guilloche matte, meander and in all likelihood, ‘The purpose of this corridor was apparently to unite two previously independent buildings. Owing to the extent of Lukis’s disturbance, and pending the return of currently — illegible double-pelta mosaics. coms from conservation, the chronology of this sector is not firmly established, but a coin of Constantine I provides a terminus post quem tor the major alterations. The date of the earliest structure is stl unknown. In Sector B, intended to bisect the W wing of the complex, only the latest Roman layers have been exposed. From E to W, the sequence of rooms appears to be: a narrow vestibule or portico, paved with an interlaced box mosaic, leading to a well-worn carved sandstone threshold for double doors; a squarish entry space off the corner of a large rectangular room cantharus mosaic displaying several rude patches of mismatching preserving fragments of a high-quality tesserae; a room paved with a checkerboard mosaic bearing a heavy layer of burning: and, farthest to the W, two probable rooms, as yet ‘unexcavated. Coinage in the upper layers, with one earlier exception, dates to the first half of the 4th century. Within the courtyard, immediately E of the Roman building and on a mark- mud- mortared flints, which hints at a possible post-Roman phase. While the stratigraphic relationship between the edly diverging alignment, lies a wall of small, two buildings 1s not yet established, it appears possible that this ‘dwarf? wall may represent the latest and, from a technical standpoint, most impoverished struc- tural phase in the sector, one suggesting habitation after the abandonment of the main Roman building. In the extreme SW corner of the platform is an area of heavy disturbance marked by deep pitting and the identifying materials and records from earlier work on the site, to Mr M. Corfield) of the Salisbury County Laboratory for his help in the conservation of the finds, and to Mr \. Abraham and the -\ unfailing support for the project. Conservation braham Foundation for generous and Ww learher literature on the site is scant. Phe three main references are: “The Sixth General Meeting’, WAAL fates 253; J. Ward, ‘Great WAAL 6 (1860); 261f.: F. Roman site in Brail Wood, WAM 48 (1937-9): 318-20. 3. Ward (note 2). Bedwyn’, . Warren, ‘excavations on a Great ne. in 1936 and 1937’, 300/600 500/600 SUDViey caseas A.) 300/300 = 500/30 O..Sar SUL ZEB "628 Figure 1. Castle Copse: areas of excavation and survey, 1983-4. NOTES presence of two ashlar blocks of Bath stone. ‘This represents the sector initiated by E. R. Pole and the Paddington GWR Archacological Society in 1936-7.4 Sector C, cutting across the S wing, revealed two parallel flint walls forming a structure whose seemingly unpretentious character suggests a possible service area, though extensive robbing may well have altered its original appearance. Finds alone do not confirm this interpretation, for all three sectors have produced evidence of limited ‘industrial’ activity, although usu- ally in a ‘decline’ phase. Debris from the tall of the S-most wall suggests that it was standing and roofed at the time of its collapse, for which a coin of Constantine I offers a tentative terminus post quem. Within the courtyard, and parallel to the N wall, was revealed a heavy alignment of small flints and other building detritus which might be interpreted as a ‘dwarf’ wall, but with less certainty than that in Sector B. All three sectors possess major 4th-century floor levels within c. 10 em of each other, and the major walls in all sectors follow like alignments, despite their separation by up to 100m. This, coupled with stratigraphic evidence — a gravelly clayey level found to underly structures in all sectors — suggests that at one +. Warren (note 2). Nm as) wn point in the villa’s history a single terrace was constructed, through both cutting and dumping, and a single unified complex erected. ‘This impressive expan- sion, which apparently incorporated earlier structures such as the aisled building and adjacent radial hypocaust room in Sector A, may have been executed in the third quarter of the 4th century, and resulted in one of the larger villas yet unearthed in Roman Britain. Geophysical prospecting has located numerous extensions of known walls and the trace of others, as well as a series of smaller, similarly oriented ‘out- buildings’ in the S meadow. The study of landscape features, environmental data and documentary evidence, while still in its initial phases, already suggests evidence for land use and field forming a series of terraces in the EF. slopes of the ridge, possible estate boundaries. Several systems numerous small earthworks — suggesting — animal enclosures, and the sizeable ‘Bedwyn’ dyke linking Bedwyn Brail with Chisbury Fort, may well be Roman in origin. Finally, many of the boundaries described in Saxon land charters and the Domesday Book are reiterated by later parish boundaries of both Great and Little Bedwyn and may, in sections, reflect the limits of an earlicr Roman estate. The Saxon Charters of Bradford-on-Avon and Westwood by ROBERT HARVEY The charter of 1001 AD, in which Aethelred II granted the royal estate of Bradford-on-Avon to Shaftesbury Abbey, has often been discussed,’ and there is general agreement on the boundaries of the estate. Flowever, these solutions leave problems as to the status of Westwood, which Aethelred had granted a few years before to his huntsman Leofwine;? a year after the Bradford charter, the king granted it again, this time in dower to Queen Emma, a grant later confirmed by Cnut and Harthacnut. Emma, Westwood passed, c. 1034, to the church at Winchester, who held it in 1086.* It seems unlikely, then, that Westwood would be granted in 1001 to Shaftesbury Abbey. The purpose of this note is to suggest an alternative line for part of the Bradford boundary, so as to avoid this difficulty. The relevant part of the bounds in the Bradford From 146 Winsley, Bradford-on-Avon. 1. J. LL. P. Pafford, ‘Bradford-on-Avon: the Saxon boundaries in Ethelred’s charter of LOOL AD), WAAL S4 (1951): 210-18, 372. G. B. Grundy, “Che Saxon land charters of Wiltshire (second series)’, \rch. J 77 (1920): 101-6. P. TL. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters charter reads: ‘on with the stream until you come to Alfwerdes boundary at Wutenham. ‘hence from Wigewen brook along by Lefwine’s boundary to the Avene, [and so] along the Avene until you come to Ferseforth the Abbot’s boundary in Mitford’.* Thus the boundary follows the river Frome from ‘Vellistord down to Wittenham, namely to Stowford on the boundary of Leofwine’s estate. From here to the of the Bradford Leofwine’s coincide, but it is not stated whether the latter is to be followed by turning left or by turning right. The problem is to identify the Wigewen brook. The standard solution is to turn lett at Stowford and Avon. the boundaries estate and continue down the Frome — assuming that the next stretch of the Frome was called Wigewen — to Iford, and thence roughly along the present county boundary to the Avon.’ (London: Royal Llistorical Society, 1968). 2. Grundy (note 1), 98-101. 3. VOI Wiltshire V1 (1980); 226. +. Pafford (mote 1), 213. 5. Pafford (note 1), 217. 236 PHI WIL ESHIRE ARCHIAROLOGICAL AND NVEURAL TIS PORY MAGAZINE WYVHY NWS “BRADFORD -~ON-AVON NER CADING LEA a 3 257 HANGER WOR LTE < | (si UPPER WESTWOOD N LOWER , WESTWOOD ee / WINGFIELD TELLISFORD Figure 1. The Bradford bounds. Dotted line makes the present parish boundary. As well as the problem of Westwood’s subsequent history, this solution is open to the objection that it seems normal, when the holder of a neighbouring estate is named, for his estate to lie across the boundary from the land being granted. Further, the wording implies that Leofwine still held Westwood. If, instead, the Bradford boundary turned right along Leofwine’s at Stowford, Westwood would not be in the Bradford grant, so avoiding these difficulties. It is suggested that the Wigewen brook is the one now called the Midway brook. This rises at S° in Figure 1, (at 82155823), just cast of the B3109 Bradford to Wingfield road, and runs beside an old hedge down to join the Frome at Stowtford. This suggestion also seems consistent with the boundary given in the Westwood charter. In that charter, dated 987 AD, the boundary, described from the Avon round to Stowford, runs ‘up 6. This source S fies only about 4% mile from the Widbrook, The Place-names of Wiltshire (London: Ene- lish Place-name Society, 1939), LES. formerly Wicgebrok., Jo\. Robinson, °86. Westwood Manor and Farleigh Hlungertord’, Somerset Notes & Queries 18 (1925), 105, suggests the alternative ‘hhy pan’ = leap (gate) for ‘hlywan* = shelter 8. Grundy (note 1), 99. the stream [the Avon] to Winderley Mead; from that Mead east round Cading Lea to Raven’s Hanger; from that Elanger south to the Street [and] to the Great Shelter; from that Shelter south round Faers Shaw to the Dike tll you come to the Rood; thence to Crows’ Oak; from the Oak back to Stowford’.* ‘The identifiable names in this are: 1 Wirderleys. Fight fields in the ‘Tithe Apportionment schedule for Bradford’ bear names containing ‘Win- terleys’, but the Westwood schedule '" has none. Six fields called Ray Mead lie between Winterleys and the river Avon. In the charter, Winderley Mead reached the river; so either it is now Ray Mead, or Ray Mead could have been part of Winterleys, which would then be bounded on the north by the Avon, on the west by the present Bradford/Westwood parish boundary and on the south by the lane from Bradford to Lye Green and Upper Westwood (the Lye Green Lane, say)."' 2 Raven's Hanger. Vhe Westwood tithe map shows names involving ‘Elanger’ for almost all parts of the land above the canal, east of the road down to Avoncliff, north of the Lye Green Lane and west of the above parish boundary. The exceptions are three fields at Lye Green and a few acres called Addy Wood. Cading Lea, following Grundy, will be “The Meadow and ‘Further Meadow’ between the I langer Wood and the river, west of the parish boundary. Grundy’s suggestion is that ‘Becky Addy Wood’, as oN) Hanger Wood is now called, is ‘a much diluted “Beaca Cading Wudu’”, that is ‘Back of , or above, ‘Cading Wood’. 4 The Street? is the B3109, Bradford to Wingfield road. Lay Faers Shaw. Documentary reterences'’ from the 13th to [8th centuries refer to this as Freshaw, then demesne land of Wingficld manor; on the Wingfield tithe map the field adjoining Trowle Wood is Freshtord Leaze, an obvious corruption of Freshaw. The map makes this field lie within a ‘ghost’ wood boundary, which could reveal an earlier Freshaw. Several ‘wood’ names for fields within this boundary reinforce this: Great Wood, Shearman’s Copse, Little Woods, the Grove. Along the north side is an old hedge containing an undated ditch. Leofwine’s 9. Wiltshire Record Office. 10.) Wiltshire Record Office. Hf. The equation Winderley = \Winsley has long been abandoned in deciphering Domesday book. It is surely incorrect here too, 12.) Cirundy, (note 1), 100. 13. VOI Wiltshire 7 (1974), Wiltshire Record Office [12/1; ete. NOTES boundary, going ‘south round Faers Shaw’, would cross this ditch. is uncertain, but must reach the Street at B in Figure 1; from B the boundary probably followed Freshaw’s west side to the stream at A. 6 Crow’s Oak must supply a landmark on the brook. Possible places would be near A or at the sharp bend, half way to Stowford. seciton south of the Lye Green Lane is suggested by an old hedge on maps, surviving on the ground (and in part a nine-species hedge indicating a considerable antiquity), winding south from the TV mast on the parish to join and follow a brook which The south-eastern side of the ‘ghost A conjectural line for the mostly runs down to the road junction at W, just east of Lower Westwood. A possible line for the relevant part of Leofwine’s boundary can therefore be reconstructed as: ‘up the DSi Avon stream tll you reach the beginning of Winterley Mead; turn south round the cast side of Cading Lea and follow the parish boundary with Hanger wood on your right and Winterleys on your left till you come to Lye Green Lane; thence south across that lane [to the TV mast]; turn right and follow the old hedge to the stream and on to the road junction W’. The line of the next part of the boundary is uncertain, but must go in the general direction of the north-east corner of Midway Manor; then across the Street and over towards Oxstall Farm (with the Great Shelter perhaps near by). Then: ‘from that farm by the old hedge to Trowle Wood’ at F; ‘south round Freshaw, Dike, to the Street at B; thence, still following the boundary of Freshaw, to the Brook at A and the Crows’ Oak (?); from as Oak down the Wigewen (Midway) B across. the Brook back to Stowford’. Medieval Timberwork at Bull Bridge, Wilton by BRUCE N. EAGLES’ and PETER J. During the summer of 1983 the Wessex Water Authority constructed a flood-protection barrier in the Nadder valley at Wilton. A watching brief was kept on the site, and the following observations of timberwork, probably of medieval date, were made on 10 August. The construction on the N bank of the Nadder, at a point 100 m E of Bull Bridge (SU 09573094), required the cutting in an arc of a trench | m wide down to hard ground. The length observed was of some 20 m in a smail copse. Below topsoil, the following — strata were 1.5 m of alluvial soils; c. 1 m of wat- erlogged peaty soils; a deposit of flint Bee then hard gravels at a depth below surface of c. the waterlogged levels timbers were ee at a depth of 2 m. The timbers were of three distinct types: encountered: 5-3 m. In 1 Timber joists or studs, roughly hewn up to 20 cm cross-section, some bedded into the gravels, some upright, and some at an angle of about 45 degrees. Quercus sp. — oak. 2. Timber planks, some with a slight curve, none with length complete, up to 3.5 cm thick and 24 cm wide, with the growth rings not cross-bedded to the plank. One plank had a tapering peghole 2—3 cm in Royal Commission on the [fistorical Monuments of England, Rougemont, Rougemont Close, Salisbury. + “Trust for Wessex Archacology, Phe \rchacological Centre, 65 The Close, Salisbury. WOODWARD' diameter. ‘The were randomly distributed at a depth of 2.5 m, lying flat across an irregular layer of flint nodules up to 0.5m. Quercus sp. — oak planks and pegs. 3 Stakes, up to 5 cm diameter, driven into the gravel hard, vertically and at irregular intervals and spacing. No alignment was identified. Sa/iv sp. — willow, Populus sp. Corylus avellana — hazel. majority of the planks poplar, The timbers of types | and 2 concentrated in the S end of the trench. With them were a fragment of I3th-century pottery, and the deepest concentration of the flint nodules (rolled and broken up to 15 cm), which were certainly imported to the site. A large number of animal bones were also associated; they included sheep metatarsus and mandibles, a cattle rib single rim and jaw with some butchery marks. The timbers of type 3 were spread throughout the trench. The trench size and lack of opportunity for careful and detailed interpretation. However, the low-lying and riverine position of the site downstream of Bull Bridge, close to the site of St Michael’s Church, South Street (VCH Wiltshire 6: 29) Opposite a mill-site, recording limits the and upstream of a Benedictine Abbey, suggests that these remains are part of medieval river modifications. [It is possible that the flint was deliberately deposited to form a ‘hard’ for boats and that the timbers were part of a later riverine revetment, 238 THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NXTORAL HISTORY MAGAZINE to control the river course and modify the bank for river traffic, as at Reading Abbey (FKasham and Hawkes, forthcoming). It is unlikely that any of the timbers belonged to boats as was initially suggested. ‘The records have been given to the Wiltshire County Council’s Sites and Monuments Record. Acknowledgements. Wendy Carruthers for wood identification; Jennie Coy for identification of faunal remains; and Susan M. Davies and John Hawkes for comments and suggestions. BIBLIOGRAPHY PASHAM, P., and HAWKES, J., forthcoming. Excavations at Reading \bbey, 1981-1984. A Medieval Gold Ring from Hill Deverill, near Warminster by JOHN CHERRY’ This late-medieval gold ring was found on 10 October 1982 by Mr D. R. Green in a ploughed field at Hill Deverill, near Warminster, Wiltshire (SU 867402). With the aid of a grant from the Government fund administered by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the ring was acquired by Devizes Museum, by whose kind permission [am publishing this note. The ring has a hoop of semi-circular section (diameter 22 mm); the outside is divided into 12 sections.' Three of these sections have a black-letter inscription and are divided from cach other by three either as a word or name. Mr Richard Green has expressed the view that the proper inscription should ‘UMILL) VOUS HONOR’ which might mean ‘Humility you honour’, but ‘w/P is a strange version read of humility and the word order is not consistent with this interpretation.’ ‘The ring is a good example of a late-medieval gold ring with an inscription on the outside. A parallel for such a ring 1s in the collections of the British Museum. ' This gold ring also has a_ slanting — black-letter inscription, which in this case may be clearly read as Figure 2. Photographs of the Hill Deverill ring. sections including leaves and flowers (Figures 1, 2). ‘The most convincing reading 1s “HONOR VOUS URULL’. ‘The meaning of this is not clear ‘//onor’ clearly means honour and ‘vous’ means you, but ‘wra//, if that is the correct reading, does not appear to mean anything 1. The ring weighs 4.614 g. It was analysed by the British Museum Laboratory by X-ray fluorescence; its composition is 7+ per cent gold, 10 per cent copper, and 15 per cent silver. ‘oye sans fy (joy without end). Found in Westminster, part of the Soden Smith collection and subsequently of the Franks collection before becoming part of the British Museum collections. It dates from the [5th century. it’ was 2. Detector User (February 1984): 40. 3. O. M. Dalton, Catalogue of the Finger Rings in the British Museum, (London: British Museum, 1913), no. 926. NOTES 239 A Find of Silver Spoons from Marlborough — the Problem of the Concealment of ‘Treasure Trove’ | by PAUL ROBINSON’ The Devizes romantic authoress Mary Wiltshire (Fran- ces Mary Isborne) wrote a novel, These Maintain the City, around the theme of the discovery in 1942 beneath a sundial of a set of silver apostle spoons. In the closing pages, the finders decide to ignore their legal obligation to report their discovery to the county coroner, but to sell them by auction in London. Their thoughts are summed up: ‘He could not feel that they had done wrong; the “crown” was entirely impersonal and the handing over would do nobody any good . . . not even a museum, for the spoons valuable as they were, were not unique while the money had relieved their desperate and urgent need and solved the whole problem of their, the children’s and Laura’s future.’ The story is set in ‘Downborough’, identified by the author with Devizes and in the dedication it is stated that ‘the incident of the finding of the spoons had its foundation in fact. Finds of 16th- and 17th-century silver spoons are very far from common. From Wiltshire there comes the important find of seven spoons from Netherhampton, which are now in the British Museum.' In 1963 twelve slipped-in-the-stalk spoons made in 1637/8 were found at Cirencester,’ while in the Somerset County Museum at Taunton are two finds of spoons discovered at East Combe and Charlynch.’ These are most likely to have been concealed originally during the Civil War. A find at the New Inn, Gloucester, in 1816 of a goblet with five apostle spoons, one bearing the date 1663 shows, however, that some groups of silver were also concealed at a later date in the 17th century.’ Such finds are often of importance in identifying the style of the work of the provincial goldsmiths and their marks. ‘The Netherhampton find, for example, illustrates the work of the Salisbury goldsmiths in the late 16th and the early 17th centuries and has helped provisionally to identify the marks of John [vie and John Howe. That the find alluded to in These Maintain the City was deliberately therefore, — particularly unfortunate. however, evidence for a discovery of spoons (with a large number of coins) made at Marlborough in 1901 which was deliberately concealed is, There is, * “The Museum, +1 Long Street, Devizes SN1O INS. 1. Netherhampton Treasure Trove, WAAL 35 (for 1908): 146. C. J. Jackson, English Goldsmiths and their Marks (1921), 470. concealed. Some of them were acquired ultimately by a collector at Seend, near Devizes, and it is possible that it was to this discovery that Mary Wiltshire was alluding. The Marlborough find was made during the drainage scheme near the river. spoons and coins in it is unknown. The finder sold The exact number of both some of the spoons and probably the greater part of the coins to the antiquary and antique-dealer A. D. Passmore, while the remaining spoons were sold in London and the other coins in both London and Oxtord. Passmore did not and, of course, could not publish an account of the find in WAAT, but made a brief record of it in his archaeological notebook and briefly described it in his correspondence with Canon Goddard, both of which are preserved in the library of the WANHS at Devizes and which are the chief sources for the find. The ultimate fate of the coins is unknown. Passmore sold the spoons he had acquired to D. Heward-Bell, of Seend, whose collection of spoons, which included those found at Marlborough, was sold at Christie’s on 31 May 1961, as ‘the Property of Gentleman’ and dispersed. The purported circumstances of the discovery were that the spoons and coins were found near the river ina box which fell to pieces at the time of the discovery and which was associated with the skeleton of a horseman who ‘had on spurs and a whip in his hand. . . | had an idea that the unfortunate horseman was flying in the might from the battle of “Awborne Chase”? [18 September 1643]. This story was probably invented by Passmore to justify to Canon Goddard his acquisition of items from the find without the find having been reported officially to the coroner. Passmore continues: ‘I paid a fair price for it and a clause in the Treasure Act proves that if a treasure is lost (i.e. accidentally) it belongs to the finder, and the state of the ground proved that the poor fellow had fallen in the river, horse and all, and was drowned.’ It is, however, far more likely that the coins and spoons were found together in a box with nothing else in association and that they had been deliberately 2. J. N. Vaylor, ‘A Cirencester Treasure Trove’, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. 89 (1970): 177-8. Both at present unpublished. +. Simpson's Salisbury Gazette, 1 February 1816, p. 3. w 240 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAKOLOGICAL AND NAYPURAL TIS TORY MAGAZINE concealed near the river in the mid 17th century by a local person intending to recover them at a future date. With regard to the coins, at different times Passmore estimated that either 300 or 400 were found and that he was able to acquire the greater number of them. He briefly listed them in, respectively, his archaeological notebook and a letter to Canon Goddard (Table 1). With two exceptions, all he describes were of silver. With one exception, the denominations are not given. Edward VI | 1 Philip & Mary = l Elizabeth | 120 80 James | 13 and 1 gold = 20 Charles I 140 and 1 gold 200 {Nuremberg jettons 3/ total 297 coins 302 coins Table 1. Coin identifications, after Passmore. In his notebook he mentions separately a shilling of Philip and Mary and 20 silver coins of Charles | which he saw but did not acquire, and records that he ‘heard of about a hundred going to Oxford and London’. No other details are given of the denominations present. How carefully Passmore examined the coins is not known. He identified coins from the mints of London, Edinburgh, Exeter and Aberystwyth only, but others may nevertheless have been represented. Of the coins of Charles I he listed initial marks for 1628-43 only (Table 2). Anchor for 1628-9 Tun 1636-8 Rose 1631-2 Anchor 1638-9 Harp 1632-3 Triangle 163940 Portcullis 1633-4 Star 1640-1 Bell 1634-5 Triangle-in-circle 1641-3 Crown 1635-6 Table 2. Charles 1, initial Marks, after Passmore. Passmore emphasized that there was no coin ‘which can safely be put to a later date than 1641’. If, however, he was correct in identifying coins which had been struck at Exeter, then the find must be dated at least two years later as that mint was opened in September 1643. It is possible that he ignored that in order to strengthen his claim that the coins were to be associated with the battle of Aldbourne Chase and had been accidentally lost. At the time he was writing, however, coins now known to have been struck at Truro were 5. These presumably do not belong to the hoard. 6. WANHS Library Cuttings Book 13, p. 175 (from) Gentleman’s ascribed to Exeter, and it is possible, then, that Passmore was referring to pre-1643 coins of this mint. As a coin hoard this would be the largest of this period known from Wiltshire. It is, however, probably intrinsic value than the finds from Chippenham (1762)’ and the Old George Inn, Westbury (19th century), both of which included more gold coin. of — lesser Passmore twice noted that ‘a lov of silver spoons had been found of which he acquired seven, while the remainder ‘had gone to London’. ‘The seven include five by London spoon-makers and two provincial pieces. ‘There are three pairs. Whether any of these are from larger sets is uncertain but possible. The descriptions of the spoons below are based upon Passmore’s brief descriptions of them and those in Christie’s catalogue of 31 May 1961: Figure 1. \postle spoon with head of St Peter (left). Npostle spoon with head of St James the Great (right). Magazine, February 1762). 7. WAAL 25 (1891): 49; Wiltshire Times, 2: March 1901. NOTES 1 Henry VIII Apostle spoon surmounted by the gilt figure of St Peter (Figure 1). Wt about 2 ozs. Length 72 ins. London date letter H for 1545. Maker’s mark ‘fringed S’, attributed to William Simpson, a specialist spoon-maker active between c. 1510 and 1546.* Catalogue, lot 124 (illustrated). 2 Jbid., but surmounted by the head of St James the Great, Catalogue, lot 124. Figure 2. 3 James I seal-top spoon. Wt I oz. 8 dwt. Length 654 in. Pricked with 1623/AG/AW. No date letter. 4 Ibid. Wt 1 oz. 12 dwt. Length 7 in. Pricked with 1625/SW/FW. No date letter. The latter spoon appears to be Catalogue no. 116, which is described as having a gilt baluster finial chased with foliage. No. 3 could, therefore, be its companion, lot 117 in the catalogue, where the date is given, however, as 1629. Both are provincial pieces stamped in the bowl with a group of four hearts each containing three pellets. Charles I slip-top spoon. Wt 1 oz. 12 dwt. Length not given. London date letter for 1628. 6 Ibid. Wel oz. 10 dwt. Length 6% in. London date letter for 1628. These are probably the pair of spoons no. 120 in the catalogue, which have the maker’s mark D enclosing C, ascribed to Daniel Wn 8. T. A. Kent, London Silver Spoonmakers 1500-1697 (London: Silver Society, 1981). 241 Cary, a prominent London spoon-maker, active between 1604 and 1641/2. 7 Charles I slip-top spoon. Wt 1 oz. 8 dwt. Length 64 in. London date letter for 1628. Maker’s mark R1 with mullet below, ascribed to the London spoon-maker Robert Jygges. Catalogue no. 119. ‘The most important pieces are clearly the two Henry VII apostle spoons, which may or may not have been part of a full set of spoons. While in quality they are clearly inferior to the celebrated set of 13 spoons made in London in 1536 originally owned by the Long family of North Wraxall, subsequently acquired by Thomas Ludlow-Bruges and now British Museum collection,’ nevertheless they do illustrate the high quality of silverware to be found in the possession of Wiltshire families after the Reformation. The original owner is uncertain. Vhe initials pricked out on spoons 3 and 4 above suggest that he or she may have been a member of the Windeworth family. in Acknowledgments. | am grateful for the help | have received in writing this note from Mrs G.E.P. How, Timothy Kent and Timothy Wilson, and for the permission given by Messrs A. C. Cooper, and Christies to use the photograph of the two Apostle spoons from the find. 9. “LT. Wilson, ‘Spoons with a taste of history’, British Museum Society Bulletin 46 (July 1984): 24-7. A Puzzle from the Electoral History of Devizes by EDWARD BRADBY In the 17th century one of the ancient privileges of the Mayor and Corporation of Devizes was the right to elect members of Parliament. But from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 until the last parliament of Anne’s reign in 1713, their elections were frequently disputed, different names being returned by rival groups of burgesses.' In 1660, for example, William Lewis and Robert Aldworth were returned ‘by the Mayor under the common seal’, but William Lewis and John Norden ‘by the burgesses only’. On several occasions these | double returns were referred to the House of Commons Committee of Privileges and Elections, who found themselves faced with a tangle of conflicting evidence | about the qualifications of the voters. Among the questions raised, with increasing virulence as the disputes continued, were whether certain burgesses * Beech House, Seend, Melksham SN12 6NU. 1. Much of the evidence (based on the Commons Journal) is given in James Waylen’s Chronicles of the Devizes (1839), p. 256f., and re-worked in the same author’s anonymous //istory, Military and had taken the required oath of allegiance, whether they were qualified by residence, and whether they had used improper influence, t.e. bribery. But there was a more basic cause of dispute: was the right to elect MPs vested in the Corporation as a whole or in the senior section of it? The structure of the Borough Council, essentially unchanged since the 16th century or earlier, was threefold: first came the ‘Masters’ or ‘Mayors’, about 10 in number, composed mainly of those who had held office as Mayor, and always entitled ‘Gent’, then there were “The Twelve’, also called ‘Capital Burgesses of the Common Council’, doubtless descended from a medieval body of 12 Jurati, but by the 17th century usually reaching about twice that number; finally there were the ‘Inferior Burgesses’, often styled ‘Free and Common Burgesses’, and numbering about 50.” Now Municipal, of the Devizes (1859), pp. 296, 308f., 3516, 3598. 2. The Borough Council Minute Books, starting AD 1556, are in, WRO. There is a good short account of the constitution in VCH Wiltshire 10:268f. 242 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE there was certainly a difference in status and function between first and second grades on the one hand and third on the other. For instance, John Kent’s Book of Constitutions, of 1628,’ lays down that while all the burgesses are to go in procession to the Guildhall for the election of a new Mayor, it is only the Masters, the Town Clerk, and the Chief Burgesses Councillors (the “Twelve’), who nominate the Mayor. The distinction 1s emphasized by the regulation concerning their dress: every one of the Masters and Chief Burgesses Councillors is to appear ‘in his gowne and seemliest attire’, but the Free Burgesses in their ‘cloaks and seemly attire’. The question was, whether the distinction operating for choosing a Mayor also applied to the election of MPs. This was the point at issue in a famous case arising from a disputed election of 1688-9 for the had returned Sir William Pinsent, Bart., and Walter Grubb, and a petition against their return was made by Sir John Eyles and William Trenchard. The matter was referred to the Committee of Privileges, who stated that the question was ‘whether the Mayor and Burgesses as a select number had the right of election or all the free burgesses of the Borough’. The petitioners quoted a charter of Edward IIIf and indentures of returns in the time of Henry V and Mary to support their claim that a// the burgesses had a right to elect. One of their witnesses, under cross-examination, said that ‘he had lived near 60 years in the Town, and known several elections, but none that was by the popularity, but one about eight years since; when Sir Giles Hungerford and Sir John Eyles (one of the now petitioners) were returned by that choice, against Sir Walter Earnly and George Johnson Esq. who were chosen by the select members’.’ The reference must be to the election of 1679-80, in which Ernle and Johnson were the nominees of the ‘Select Body’, favouring the Court Party and the claims of the papist Duke of York to the succession. Hun- gerford and Eyles were put up by the ‘popular’, i.e. protestant faction. As the latter were in a majority, the Mayor was in a quandary, and finally agreed to send the return of Hungerford and Eyles provided that he was indemnified against possible later accusations of proceeding irregularly. Accordingly, Sir John Eyles (Devizes-born but now a wealthy London merchant) signed a bond of indemnity for £2000. In WANHS Library; another copy (not illuminated) in WRO. Waylen, Chronicles (note 1), p.. 260. HH. A. Merewether and A. J. Stephens, The History of the Boroughs and Municipal Corporations of the United Kingdom (1835), vol. 3, p. Mn bw To return to the enquiry of 1688: the sitting members claimed that Devizes was a ‘Corporation by Prescription’, and that the right of electing MPs was vested in ‘the Mayor and Burgesses as a select number’, in their support they cited returns of the time of Queen Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I. They also referred to the bond of indemnity given by Sir John Eyles in 1679, to support their claim that the election by the burgesses in general was without precedent, and had only been sealed by the Mayor with great reluctance. It seems that this piece of evidence rebounded to the petitioners’ disadvantage, since it suggested that their party had applied improper pressure to secure the election of their nominees. At all events, the Committee decided that the right of election ‘is in the Mayor and a select number of burgesses only’, confirming the election of Pinsent and Grubb, and the House agreed. Merewether and Stephens, in their History of the Boroughs, after describing the enquiry, comment: ‘thus the error founded upon the introduction of the corporate doctrines, and upon the mistaken assumption of the existence of corporations by prescription, led the committee of the convention Parliament to make this, their first resolution, in favour of the right of the se/ect body, which was followed shortly after by others of a similar description’.’ By Merewether’s time the right of all the burgesses to elect was firmly established. It was clearly summarized by Oldfield in 1816:° the Corporation ‘by Charter of King Charles I, consists of a mayor, recorder, ten magistrates, and twenty-four common-council-men, who have the liberty of making what burgesses they please, all of whom have votes in elections of members to Parliament’. He comments drily: ‘care is taken not to let the number of burgesses exceed that of the Corporation who creates them’, and this is borne out by the Borough records. ‘The number of Free Burgesses declined from 53 in 1660 to 32 in 1690. In 1697 the Corporation resolved to reduce the number by natural wastage to a maximum of 20, and this was achieved by 1707. By 1730 it had dwindled to single figures, and from 1740 until the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 there were never more than four. All of this has been available for many years to anyone having the patience to sift the evidence from Waylen and Merewether. My reason for referring to the matter again is that I have recently been struck by a piece of highly relevant evidence of which no mention was made in the arguments in 1688. The election of 1860. 6. TL. H. B. Oldfield, The Representative History of Great Britain (1816), vol. 5, p. 157. NOTES MPs is usually recorded in the Borough Minutes by quoting the Sheriffs precept and the answering indenture giving the Mayor and Burgesses’ return. Asa rule the indenture merely states that the return is made by the Mayor and Burgesses, without giving names. But the minutes of the elections in 1654 and 1656 actually give the names of ‘the Burgesses and Inhabitants of the Borough of Devizes’ who took part in the elections, neatly arranged in order of seniority. Now by comparing these lists with the complete lists of the three grades of burgesses, given in both cases on the previous page, we can tell that a substantial number of the votes at both elections were cast by Free Burgesses — 21 out of 46 in 1654, 27 out of 55 in 1656.’ Why was this definite piece of evidence not produced by the supporters of the ‘popular’ vote in 1688? It can ~I WRO G 20/1/17, fos. 247, 261. The former is transcribed in B. H. Cunnington, Annals of the Borough of Devizes (1925), vol. 1 (2nd pagin.), p. 120 (but some of the names need correction). In the 1654 voters’ list the name of Edward Essington appears among those who can be shown to be Free Burgesses; but he is nowhere 243 hardly have been lost in the mists of time, as it was only 32 years back, and well within the memory of the witness who had lived in Devizes for 60 years. The reason might perhaps be that the elections occurred during the Commonwealth, or ‘Interregnum’, as it was often called, and to cite them as a precedent in a post-Restoration parliament might have been counter- productive. A more prosaic possibility is that the Borough Minute Book of the period was not available: for the petitioners’ counsel, after citing returns of Ist Mary and 31st Charles II, added that ‘they had copies of other returns between these times, but that the record could not be found, to examine them therewith’. One is tempted to wonder whether the Town Clerk was as helpful as he might have been in searching the Borough archives. listed as a burgess, and so I have not counted him. In the 1656 list John Freeme is among the voters: he is not in the full burgess list for that year, but occurs as a Capital Burgess of the Common Council in a later list: I have therefore reckoned him as such. 8. Waylen, Chronicles (note 1), p. 260. George Howell, Pipemaker of Warminster by MARTIN NORGATE’ Clay pipes, usually described as being of a late-17th- century style, bearing the name George Howell are not infrequently found in southern Wiltshire and Somerset. At least three name stamps have been found; readings as follows: GEO/HOW/ELL stamped on the heel base GE/ORGE/HOWE/LL stamped on heel base or stem GE OR/HOWELL stamped on heel base or stem. A fleur de lys in the EO gap; star, fleur de lys, star below. Data about this pipemaker has been found in the parish records for Warminster (Wiltshire Record Office 2144 pieces 2 and 3; the year is modern style): Baptism 1? Sept. 1700 ‘Sarah Daugh: of George Howell Pipemaker’ Baptism 28 Feb. 1702 ‘George son of George Howell’ Baptsm 28 Mar. 1703 ‘John son of George j Howell’ Baptism 18 Jan. 1712 ‘John son’ of George Howell’ * Wiltshire Library and Museum Service, County Hall, Trowbridge. Pipe buried in Burial 17 April 1723 ‘George Howell Maker was woollen only’ It bears remarking that nearly everybody was buried ‘in woollen only’. A search of baptisms and marriages in the period 1653 to 1710 did not give any data about George Howell. Nor were there records of any other Howells in the parish at that time. From the above data one would estimate that George Howell was born in the 1660s or 70s, was married about 1700 and died 1723. He probably made pipes from the 1680s somewhere in Wiltshire or Somerset, moved into Warminster about 1700 and continued his trade up to 1723. There are other Howells whose names appear on clay pipes: John who was in Rode, Somerset in 1683, possibly a Joseph; Nathaniel; Richard who was buried in Mere 1706; and William believed to be in Rode in 1731. Acknowledgement. My thanks are due to Paul Robinson for alerting me to George Howell’s existence in Warminster. 244 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NYVPURAL TUS TORY MAGAZINE Barrows Excavated by William Stukeley near Stonehenge, 1723-4 by RK. J. C. ATKINSON’ William Stukeley’s account of his excavation of barrows near Stonehenge in 1723' is well known as the first illustrated excavation report in British archacology, and the first to describe verbally, even if only in outline, the internal structure of barrows. His record can now be extended from a hitherto unpublished source. Professor Stuart Piggott, Stukeley’s biographer,’ has drawn my attention to a manuscript in the Cardiff Public Library’ which turns out to be first draft of Stukeley’s Stonehenge (1740). The beginning of the text is dated 1723 and from internal evidence the writing extended into the following year, towards the end of Stukeley’s five seasons of fieldwork at Stonehenge.' Number in this paper Stukeley, 1723 Stukeley, 1740 I P. 81, para. | p- 44, para. 2 2 p. 81, para. 22 — 3 p. 83, para. 2 p. 44, para. 3 + p-. 87, para. 2 p. 45, para. 2 5 p. 87, para. 3 p. 45, para. 3 6 p. 89, para. 2 p. 45, para. 4 7 p. 89, para. 2 p. 45, para. 5 8 p- 91, para. 2 - 9 p. 91, para. 2 p. 46, para. 2 10 p. 91, para. 3 — 11 p. 91, para. + - 12 p. 91, para. 5 = 13 p. 91, para. 6 p. 46, para. 3 Table 1. The 13 barrows identified. The account of the excavations occurs on pp. 81-93 of the manuscript, and passages which Stukeley used later as the basis for his published account of 1740 have been sidelined. Most of these marked passages do not add significantly to the published version and need not be reproduced here; but in two cases (nos. 4 and 5 below) the manuscript account allows for the first ime the identification of the sites, and in a third (no. 8) the text is much fuller than in the published version. In addition it contains accounts of the excavation of five additional barrows which were not published in 1740, probably because they produced little or no results. For * Warren House, Mountain Road, Pentyrch, Cardiff CF4 8QP. William Stukeley, Stonehenge (London, 1740), pp. 44-6. Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley (Oxtord: Clarendon, 1950). MS 4.253, of 126 foolscap pages bound in vellum-covered boards, wn — with 10 loose folios inserted. The main text is written on the right-hand, odd-numbered pages, with numerous notes and addenda on the facing pages. all 13 excavations Table 1 gives references to Stukeley’s manuscript and published accounts, together with identifications of the barrows as listed by Mr L. V. Grinsell’ and mapped by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) in the order in which they occur in the manuscript. I transcribe below the manuscript entries for nos. 2, 5, 6, and 10-13. I have made only such changes as Stukeley made himself, namely the capitalization of the first letter of a sentence, the expansion of contractions and the occasional insertion of commas. Grinsell Barrow no. Wilstord 16W, twin bell Amesbury 43, bell Amesbury +4, twin bell Amesbury 44W, twin bell Amesbury 3 or LO7-I1, bowl Cavity near Amesbury 15, bow] Wilstord 4, dise Wilsford 13, long Wilsford 14, disc Wilsford 16, twin bell Amesbury 20 Amesbury 28 Amesbury 4 (?) Barrow 2 (Amesbury 43) ‘Upon this’ my Lord designed to prosecute his enquiries by taking a barrow north of Stonehenge which would let him into the knowledge of what he proposed, and this is the nearest diametrically opposite to the present* and at nearly equal distance from Stonehenge the contrary way. Here he made a cross cut at the top upon the points to Stonehenge and that at right angles with it, but the violent rains that then happened hindered his proceedings. “This year my Lord and I conferring upon this subject, he determined I should go on with his work. Piggott (note 2), pp. 134-5. VCH Wiltshire, vol. 1, part | (1957). RCHM (England), Stonehenge and its Environs (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979), p. 22. 7. That is, upon the conclusion of Lord Pembroke’s excavation of Wilsford 15 (no. 1 above) in 1722. 8. Wilstord 15. aw NOTES Therefore by his order upon 27 August 1723’ I began with the last mentioned which he had made an entrance into. This is the outermost of the most easterly of the group of barrows north of Stonehenge and on the south side of the cursus. It bears — from Stonehenge at the distance of 1910 Celtic feet"? as we measured it, the medium circumference of the ditch 50 Celtic rods." Chloridunum” bears south-east from it. When we had dug 6 feet we came to a great heap of coggles or flints gathered from the surface of the downs, and finding nothing under them we enlarged our cut to 10 feet diameter of a circle and found nothing at a depth of 10 feet, upon which we left it, but remarked that the composition was the same with that first opened by my Lord, being a yard thick of chalk quite about.’" Barrow 5S (Amesbury 3 or 107-11) ‘My next purpose was to search into some of the other points of the compass in respect of Stonehenge." Therefore | went to a group of barrows westward whence Stonehenge bears east-noth-east, the barrow Lord Pembroke opened a little south of south-east, the first opened 15" north of north-east." Here is a large barrow ditched about but of an ancient make.'° On that side next Stonehenge are ten lesser, very small and as it were crowded together. South of the great one is another barrow, but not equalling it in bulk. It should seem that a man and his wife are buried in the two great ones and these little ones are their children.” I cut one of the small ones through, 40 feet in diameter, At the top we found a pretty formed flint of a coralline texture. At 3 feet deep we found much wood ashes, soft and black as ink. We sunk a pit 9 foot diameter to the 9. he dates of 4 and 5 August have been crossed out. If 27 August, written in the margin, is correct it conflicts with Bodleian Library, Gough Maps 229, f. 45, which shows Stukeley to have been digging barrows on 7 August. 10. This is one of a small number of measurements given in ‘Celtic feet’. Most of them have been converted in the manuscript to Stukeley’s ‘Druid cubit of 20.8 iniches. His ‘Celtic foot’ appears to have had a value about 3 per cent greater than an English foot. 11. The ‘Celtic rod’ seems to have been equivalent to 10 ‘Celtic feet’. 12. Chloridunum is Stukeley’s name for the Iron Age hill-fort of Vespasian’s Camp west of Amesbury. 13. This refers to the layer of chalk under the turf in barrow Wilsford 15. 14. In Wilsford 15 and Amesbury 44W, previously excavated, the skeleton lay N—-S, with the head to the N. Stukeley evidently wished to see whether the same orientation would occur to the W of Stonehenge. 15. These bearings, though imprecise, make it clear that the barrow- group in question is that on Stonehenge Down immediately north of the A303, containing Amesbury 1-3 and 106-11. 16. Stukeley believed that bowl barrows were of earlier date than bell, disc or saucer barrows. 245 surtace of the chalk natural. We found a bit of the same kind of urn we spake of before, of black and red earth, very rotten, one little piece of human bone, some small lumps of earth red as vermilion, some flints burnt through, more burnt bones, vast quantity of light ashes. At last upon the solid chalk in the centre of the barrow was a little hole cut. It seems as if this was a child’s body burnt on the spot and then covered up.’ Barrow 6 (cavity near Amesbury 15) ‘Going from hence more southerly there is a cavity by a great barrow, the last'* of the south-west group and between it and what I call the bush barrow, by the county people the green barrow. This is 100 Celtic feet in diameter and about 7 deep in the middle. "Tis formed very regularly like a dish and perfectly circular, the earth taken out of it seems to have been carried to the neighbouring barrow. “Vis full of the pretty shrub erica with a blue flower heath, which was at this time in bloom. The sunbeams striking strongly into this large bason exhaled the sweetest smell imaginable, much like a honey comb and very strong. It bears 10" west of south-west of Stonehenge.'” We made a cross cut in its centre every way upon the cardinal points of the compass. It is a very good red garden mold with some flints in it, no doubt but this is owing to the rains and dews and soil of sheep sheltering themselves in it through so long a tract of time. We found a bit of red earthern pot, thin and crumbly, about a foot deep. We dug two foot deep every way and found it plain earth that seemed never to have been moved.”” 7. Colt Hoare (Ancient Wiltshire (1812), 126, no. 14+ and map between pp. 170 and 171) records only eight of this group of 12, of which two of the small ones had been opened before. One of these was evidently that opened by Stukeley. 18. Lhe word ‘last’ here is transcribed as ‘least’ in the text of 1740, which is confusing. he great barrow referred to here can confidently be identified with Amesbury 15, which is 175 ft in overall diameter and 11 ft high. 19. Stukeley’s bearing, like most of the others given in the manu- script, is inaccurate, but confirms that the ‘cavity’ described must have been close to Amesbury 15. 20. ‘The presence of heather implies an acid soil derived from clay-with-flints, the occurrence of which near by 1s attested by the name of the neighbouring plantation, Normanton Gorse; and Stukeley’s description of the soil as red with flints and seemingly never disturbed supports this identification. This large hollow sull exists about 250 ft S of Amesbury 15 and is now bisected by the boundary fence of Normanton Gorse. It is filled with nettles and contains the debris of a brick and cement building, probably of the 1914-18 war. It is too large and too deep to have been a pond barrow, ,and has no surrounding upcast. Its origin remains obscure, but is probably natural. 246 THE WILTSHIRE Barrow 8 (Wulsford 13) ‘Next we dug up a long barrow by the road side from Wilton to Stonehenge. It is between south and south- west of Stonehenge, a Druid’s barrow’! between it and that Lord Pembroke first opened.” ”TPis but a small one, 60 Celtic feet long, 30 broad. It points nearly to Stonehenge. We made at the north end a long cut, 28 feet north and south, five feet broad. We dug to the solid chalk and found nothing.’ Barrow 10 (Wilsford 16) ‘After this | opened the barrow next that Lord Pembroke first cut’? (adjoining to the last) and enclosed in the same ditch. First we made a section? 12 feet long, 5 broad, pointing to Stonehenge. It was composed of flints and chalk at the top. We found great numbers of frogs’ bones 22 feet deep. A very fat black earth all the way. At 4/2 feet frogs’ bones in great plenty. We dug 6 feet deep and finding no alteration from the black mold I ordered the pit to be enlarged to 14 feet square and 14 deep to be sunk to the very bottom, but nothing but several layers of dry flints, very large. There were snail shells too and frog’s bones at the very bottom, but no sign of holes. On the bottom upon the chalk I laid 3 half pence, one of King Charles, King William and King George, and enclosed it with flints, and so filled it up again.’ Barrow 11 (Amesbury 20) ‘Then I opened one of the three little barrows upon a declivity at the bottom of that hill where the King’s barrow stands, as vulgarly called, and by some Ambrosius’s barrow*. ‘This is south-east from Stonehenge and across the deep valley that runs from Stonehenge into the River by Lake, but found at 5 feet deep upon the solid chalk burnt human bones in a small compass.’ 21. Stukeley’s name for a disc barrow. 22. Wilsford 15. 23. In the manuscript Stukeley uses the typographical symbol §. 24. The King’s barrow is Amesbury 23, otherwise known as the Coneybury Barrow. Stukeley’s tab. XX XI identifies this barrow as Amesbury 20. 25. Grinsell records this barrow as 12 ft high, so evidently Stukeley gave up prematurely. 26. This implies a location in the barrow group containing Amesbury 1-3 and 2 (see notes 15-17), but neither of these barrows can be described as flat. Colt Hoare (Ancient Wiltshire (1812), p. 127, no. 16) identifies this barrow with Amesbury 4, in which he also EF ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Barrow 12 (Amesbury 28) ‘From hence we went to the fifth of the 7 barrows or King’s barrows south of the grand entrance or Avenue and full east of Stonehenge, viz. the fifth from the Avenue or most northern. Mr Roger Gale present. We found a large course of flints at the very top. Afterwards several bones, great and small, seeming to be of oxen, dogs, &c, but broken and scattered, with many evident marks of burning, then more fragments of great and small bones. The stratum of flints was a good yard deep and lay conformable to the external curve of the barrow. Under this was good earth. We dug about 6 feet deep and found nothing more.” Barrow 13 (Amesbury 4 (?)) ‘I opened another great and very old flat’ barrow westward from Stonehenge, 3 September, by making a cross section in it (near the little one which I supposed a child’s barrow)’ according to the four cardinal points. It was good mold at the top. Just under the surface we found many bits of bones of some quadruped, an horse or ox or deer, and a small sharp tooth like that of a dog or boar. They were broke in pieces and probably had been burnt. We found too several bits of a blue hard kind of marble like the altar at Stonehenge, some bits of small ribs. hen we came to ashes two feet deep. These bones which we found still were either burnt or broke to pieces and lay scattered all about in bits. We found some small long bones as of fowl, hens or the like, and sull much ashes. Even the chalk was burnt yellow so that the funeral pile was on the spot. Some bits of burnt potter’s ware. At 3 foot deep bits of bones. They are very hard and solid. More bits of a red marble, a small circular tooth like that of a rabbit or hare,” a bit of bone we judged human (one of my diggers was sexton of Amesbury), a bit of the leg bone of a man, the pinion bone of a goose or turkey, another long dog tooth, a thigh bone of a frog, a snail shell. We dug 4 feet deep, and still finding scattered bones without expectation of meeting any thing separate, we filled it up again.’ found sarsen and bluestone chips; but this is about 130 ft from Stukeley’s ‘child’s barrow’. 27. ‘he rabbit’s tooth may have led Stukeley to name this the ‘rabbit barrow’. A barrow so named is listed on p. 113 of the manuscript with a bearing of 251 degrees from Stonehenge. The true bearing of Amesbury 4 from Stonehenge is about 254’ degrees, which is closer to Stukeley’s value than the true bearing of about 241% degrees to Amesbury 3. Other evidence shows that Stukeley’s bearings were usually in error by several degrees, probably owing to the use of a compass with a very worn needle-pivot. On balance, therefore, the identification by Grinsell, following Colt Hoare, should probably stand. NOTES 247 The Fox Talbot Calotypes in Devizes Museum by R. E. LASSAM’ As the re-cataloguing of the prints and drawings in the Museum proceeds, so the importance and relevance of certain items and collections among them 1s being revealed. From time to time, experts in their field will be asked to comment on certain aspects of the collection. To start, Mr R. E. Lassam, Curator of the Museum of photography at Lacock, discusses the Society’s five calotypes by William Henry Fox Talbot. William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) became Lord of the Manor at Lacock near Devizes, and lived in the Abbey all his life. One of the major achievements of this remarkable man was the invention of the negative/ positive process of photography, from which all pho- tography today stems. 1985 is a particularly important year for photo- historians, for it marks the 150th anniversary of his taking a picture, in August 1835, of the lattice window in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey — the first recorded use of a paper negative. (The original * The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock, Chippenham SN15 2LG & Figure 1. Fox Talbot calotype of Lacock in Devizes Museum. negative, with ‘Talbot’s own annotation, is in the Science Museum, S Kensington.) Talbot was one of the founder members of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society in 1853, and must have donated four of his calotype photographs to the museum near this time. The calotype process Talbot’s further researches on photography, after inventing the negative-positive process, led him to discover a method which reduced exposure times from hours to minutes. Finding that gallic acid greatly increased the sensitivity of bromine paper, he was able, in September 1839, to use an exposure as short as half a minute. The new process he named ‘calotype’, from the Greek ka/os, ‘beautiful’. The Devizes caloypes comprise four of Lacock and one of Bowood dated 1853. 248 THE WILESHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Conservation The problem for museums in conserving rare pictures made at this time is that they may fade if not housed under careful archival conditions. The Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock has a gas-operated powermatic unit installed to keep the atmosphere at 48° humidity and a stable temperature of 65—68°F so that it is possible to display original material without fear of deterioration. ‘Talbot was in the habit of mounting his photographs ona rather poor-quality card, whose acidity may cause further Accordingly, — the deterioration. Devizes calotypes were referred to Jan and Angela Moor of Forest Hill, among the few paper conservationists qualified to deal correctly with early photographs. They took each original calotype off its mounting board and remounted it on acid-free archival board with a protective overlay, fixing the original print to the back surface by suspending it by corner strips of archival film. The final result is both correct for the calotypes’ survival and a great improvement visually on the original mount. Devizes has a fine collection of photographic archi- ves, but most of them, made by processes later and more advanced than Talbot’s, do not need such strict control over their conditions of storage — although care must still be taken to prevent changes of temperature and humidity. The William Butterfield font from Amesbury church by THOMAS COCKE’ The restoration of Amesbury church by William But- terfield in 1851-3 is a classic example of the High Victorian response to such a commission (Figure 1).' All existing fittings and furnishings were removed.’ Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, ‘The Lodge, Anstey Hall, Trumpington, Cambridge. 1. The material for this article derives from research undertaken by the author for The Churches of SE Wiltshire (RCEIM, forthcoming). The medieval font and the 17th- and 18th-century memorial tablets were broken up and deposited as rubble under the chancel floor. All the woodwork was stripped out, including the late medieval chancel and Ile is most grateful to the Secretary of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England for permission to publish it. 2. The faculty for the work is Wiltshire Record Office, 1550: 30. Some of the responsibility for the destruction must rest with the authorities on the spot, especially the incumbent, Francis Fowle. Figure 1. Exterior of Amesbury church, as transformed by Butterfield. Photograph of c. 1870. (From E.J. Windley, Amesbury Church (Amesbury 1917); courtesy Salisbury Museum/National Monuments Record.) NOTES parclose screens, and galleries and the hatchments of the third Duke of Queensberry and his famous duchess Kitty.’ Even the Communion plate was melted down and refashioned. Not only was the classical S front of the S transept gothicized, but the Perpendicular E and W windows and the Perpendicular chancel roof were demolished and replaced by First Pointed.* In the angle between chancel and N transept Butterfield added a new heating chamber and stair turret, the latter, as Pevsner commented, ‘one of his most violent designs’.’ To replace the banished features Butterfield provided a complete range of contemporary furnishings (Figure 2): a font, pulpit, reading desk, altar rails, vestry screen and various types of seating, graded from clergy to children. Both stone and w« yodwork were, like the stair turret, of an individual style, in which strong geometrical forms were sparingly enriched = with pierced tracery. Tas (2 iy my, ® Vpn Figure 2. The interior c. \910. 3. The appearance of the interior of Amesbury church before the ~ restoration was recorded by Ruddle in the Devizes Gazerte, 24 August 1899. 4. Itis hard to agree with Paul Thompson’s summary of Butterfield’s treatment of the fabric as ‘sensitive and careful’. (P. Thompson, Wiliam Butterfield (London: 1971), 418). Quite apart from the reconstruction of E, W and S gable walls, only 50 years afterwards 249 Most of Butterfield’s work survives, although some of its most extreme elements were reversed 50 years later. The medieval font and a few of the tablets were retrieved and pieced together, and the chancel screen was brought back from its exile in a stable.’ But the rescue of the medieval font meant that Butterfield’s great new font became an embarrassment. In 1914 it was given to the temporary Garrison church being erected at near-by Bulford — and from there it disap- peared, apparently without record.’ (The Victorian font recently installed in the present Garrison church in Bulford is not Butterfield’s.) Fortunately enough of the font appears in a photograph of ¢. 1910 (Figure 2) for its design to be reconstructed (Figure 3). It appears to have been of plain dark marble. There were four squat round shafts supporting a square bowl. The shaft bases were round but the capitals and plinths polygonal. The plinths were further accentuated by triangular ‘spurs’ at the angles. The bowl was apparently undecorated except for chamfered corners and an uncusped oculus in the 1 0 Feet 3 f 9 —== SSS at 0 Metre 1 Figure 3. Drawing of the font as reconstructed from Butterfield’s drawings and the 1910 photograph (By P.A. Spencer/RCHME. Crown copyright.). a massive restoration was necessary to repair fundamental faults in the masonry of both chancel and crossing. N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Wiltshire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 81. nm 6. Wiltshire Gazette, 19 December 1907. —I Wiltshire Record Office, 1550: 37. 250 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE centre of each side. The various elements recurred on the other furnishings, such as the angle shafts on the pulpit, although they are engaged rather than free- standing and have annular rings, and the pierced oculi on the reading desk and the fronts to the children’s benches (now adapted as altar rails). The fonts designed by Butterfield are some of the best expressions of his original conception of medieval forms. Amesbury font, a comparatively early work, is particularly stark but that at Netherhampton, not far away, 1s equally geometric, though designed 25 years later. Perhaps the combination at Amesbury of boldly unhistoricist furnishings and a radical treatment of the building can be recognized as the obverse and reverse of the same creative attitude. The Library of the Vicars of St Mary’s, Marlborough by E. G. H. KEMPSON, Jate librarian’ The library of the Vicars of St Mary’s is an important collection of 750 books (Kempson 1945; 1982), left to the Mayor and Corporation of Marlborough by William White (1604-78), for the use of the Vicar of St Mary’s, and on condition that each successive vicar should give one good book to the Library. White had been Master of Magdalen College School, 1632-48, when, as a Royalist, he had been turned out by a Parliamentary held Commission; however — he successively the rectories of Pusey (1645) and of Appleton (1662) until his death. White was a distinguished scholar, recognised for the Ciceronian style of his Latin. The books are partly educational (they include a volume of sixteen tracts printed by Wynkyn de Worde) but of varied subject: a sermon of John Donne, Milton’s first prose pamphlet, the first authorised edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, an otherwise unknown Sarum Manual (c. 1504) and three incunabula. But their most notable feature depends on White’s habit of dated marginal comments in many of his books, as well as a private * Sun Cottage, Hyde Lane, Marlborough SN8 IP. devotional account of what he terms his ‘Self-Trial’. This was to be burned by his executor, but it still remains as an outstanding social document, detailing his inmost confessions and fears. These occur on some 170 interleaves in a little book, written, as was his wont, in Latin. The history of the Library has always been a chequered one; it narrowly missed dispersal by Sotheby’s (1914) and pulping as salvaged waste paper (1942), until it came on ‘permanent loan’ to Marl- borough College in 1944. The College has now released it; and the trustees, the Town-Mayor and Corporation of Marlborough, with the agreement of — their beneficiary, the present vicar, have deposited it in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is hoped that in future years it may be utilized for some postgraduate purpose. BIBLIOGRAPHY KEMPSON, E. G. H., 1945. The Vicar’s library, St Mary’s, Marl- borough, WAAL 51: 194-215. KEMPSON, FE. G. H. 1982. William White (1604-78), schoolmaster and parson, and his private diary, Hatcher Review 2(13): 118-24. John Britton’s ‘Celtic Cabinet’ by CHRISTOPHER CHIPPINDALE’ One of the more splendid and curious objects in the Society’s founding collection is neither archaeological nor natural historical, but a piece of furniture — the ‘Celtic Cabinet’ acquired from the topographical writer John Britton in 1853. It now stands handsome in the library, with its inlaid watercolours newly cleaned and restored. An article elsewhere! publishes in full the Cabinet and its history for the first time; the Y Girton College, University of Cambridge. 1. C. Chippindale, ‘John Britton’s “Celtic Cabinet” in Devizes Museum, and its context’, Antig. J (1985). opportunity is taken here to summarize it, pointing briefly to the Cabinet’s odder features. The Cabinet (Figure 1), 91 cm wide and 117 cm high, is veneered in elm and maple over a mahogany and pine carcass. Eleven of its front panels are glass- fronted to display watercolour drawings, of which 10 survive.’ All the watercolours are of megalithic monuments, not just in Wiltshire but in Wales and the 2. The place of the eleventh is taken by a suitable photographic reproduction. NOT i) al ey y YUU Figure 1. The Cabinet in its restored splendour. rm al Li) west. Underwood, Prout, Hlyett — all topographic artists in Britton’s employ — which survive in the Society’s prints and — drawings One is certainly by Cattermole, another of the Britton circle. Two, of the dolmen at Plas Newydd, Anglesey (Figure 2), and of the Nine Stones ring at Win- terbourne Abbas, Dorset, are attributed on the backing sheets to John Sell Cotman. Their style, especially the characteristic strong blue, fits the attribution. Cotman, the major figure in the Norwich school of landscape Most are related to pencil drawings by collection. painters, is not known to have painted any other prehistoric subjects. aS SS Seats Figure 2. The Cotman watercolour of the Plas Newydd dolmen. fo Integral to the design of the Cabinet are three models, ‘Stonehenge as it is’ free-standing on the top under a glass lid, ‘Stonehenge as it was’ in the top drawer, ‘Avebury as it was’ underneath. These are immediately identifiable as the work of Henry Browne, model-maker and first official guardian of Stonchenge. ' (Among Browne’s other customers was Sir Richard Colt Hoare, whose pair of Stonehenges came to Devizes with the rest of the Stourhead collection in 1883. Displayed on green baize in a monumental angle-iron and glass case, they survived in Devizes Museum until the 1950s.) John Britton approved hugely of Browne’s models, and planned in 1825 to set up a “Druidical Antiquarian Company’ which would capitalize on his skills. Britton’s imagination — had fired by the Kidophusikon, a spectacular gas-lit audiovisual display of prospects, clouds, storm and shipwreck, invented by the Swiss painter Philippe de Loutherbourg. Finan- cially a failure, the Eidophuskon was sold in 1799 to a been 3. C. Chippindale, Svonehenge Complete (London: ‘Thames and Iludson, 1983). 4. TE. Jones, A Descriptive Account of the literary Works of John Britton, FSA, &e., &e., (from 1800 to 1844): Being a Second Part of his THE WILTSHIRE ARCIEXEOLOGICAL AND NYPURAL LEIS TORY MAGAZINE showman who broadened its appeal by adding a performing dog, musical glasses — and dramatic monologues by John Britton. In this avant-garde ven- ture, the equivalent in its day of the kind of hi-tech spectacle now provided by lasers or holograms, Britton saw possibilities for promoting interest in antiquitics. Nothing came of the Druidical Antiquarian Company — except the Celtic Cabinet. With its space for anti- quarian records, its instructive watercolours and models, it provided the Druidical experience in Only one feature of the miniature. technical Kidophusikon could be brought in — the coloured glass in the covering lid, under which Stonehenge could be scen in red, yellow, grey or clear light as the viewer prefers. The Cabinet is first recorded in Britton’s London house in 1843, but his autobiography! says plainly it was made for George Watson Taylor,’ of Earl Stoke, Devizes. Watson Taylor was MP for Devizes 1826-32. Erlestoke Park, built a few miles south of Devizes in a neo-classical style 1786-91, was bought by the Watson ‘Taylors and re-modelled in a new idiom. Britton’s Beauties of Wiltshire’ is fawningly dedicated to Watson ‘Vaylor, and talks of the ‘great elegance’ of the new fittings. But the Cabinet is missing from the very full auction catalogue of house and contents, dated to 1832. Here is the puzzle: when was the Cabinet made, and when did Britton acquire it? Reading between the lines — for the certain facts are few — one may reckon the Cabinet was made c. 1822-4, as part of the new fittings for Erlestoke, under the direction, or at the suggestion, of Britton; this explains the nature of the piece, and its incorporating drawings by his contract artists and Autobiography (London: 1849), p. 128. 5. For the Watson Taylors at Urchfont, see page 199 above. 6. Third volume (London, 1825). NOTES models by Browne. When the Watson Taylors’ finances weakened, Britton acquired the Cabinet. Valued at 100 guineas, it came into the Society’s founding collecitons with the Britton’s topographic library in 1853. The fact that the Cabinet remains unique exemplifies the failure of Britton’s scheme to spread cabinets and eidophusikons of Druidical antiquities across the coun- try-house libraries of England. Britton, preposterously vain and incurably self-promoting, was an odd personality; but he was very forward-looking in many of his ideas. His scheme for a Wiltshire Topographical rest of mr an Society, abortive predecessor of our own Society, would have been the first such association in the country. The Cabinet is a first of another kind. As well as being a splendid, and (to this eye) a splendidly ugly piece of furniture, it embodies a progressive realization that the future of ancient monuments requires a professional approach to their presentation and display. It really is a pity Britton never managed to build a Druidical eidophusikon. Acknowledgements. 1 am most grateful to Ken Annable, whose identification of the subjects of the watercolours gave the impetus for me to further explore the Cabinet’s history. ww Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine vol. 79 (1985), pp. 254+-9. Wiltshire Archaeological Register for 1983 This register for 1983 is arranged in chronological order and by parishes. In order to save space ‘83’ does not precede the serially numbered entries in the text, but this prefix should be used to identify individual items in future cross references. The Register has again been compiled on a selective basis. Records of small groups of unassociated flintwork and of pottery, when of uncertain date or of common Romano-British or medieval types, have been omitted as well as a number of other uninformative stray finds. Not included also are, firstly, certain groups of finds from sites which are due to be published in detail in the near future such as bronze-age finds from 1983 burials in Blackberry Lane cemetery, Potterne; and also certain sites which might be particularly vulnerable to the depredations of ‘treasure- hunters’. While it is no longer practical to include all stray finds, it is hoped that contributors will continue to supply full records so that future Registers may be compiled from as comprehensive a range of material as possible. Accessions to museums are noted by the short name of museum (Devizes or Salisbury) followed by the accession number. For objects remaining in private possession, the sources of information noted are museum records or individual informants, not necessarily the owners. Particulars of attribution and provenance are as supplied by the museums, societies and individuals named. Where there is a reason to doubt the accuracy of the find record, this caveat is given in the text. Acknowledgements to individual donors for those gifts to the Society’s museum at Devizes which fall within the chronological range of the register (prehistoric to c. AD 1500) will be found in the Curator’s Report for 1983. The illustrations have kindly been provided by N. Griffiths. Abbreviations G century as in C2, second century. DB Devizes Museum Day Book. PP In private possession. SAS Swindon Archaeological Society. TMAR Thamesdown Records. Museum Archaeological WAM — Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine. WAR — Wiltshire Archaeological Record. MESOLITHIC 1 Aldbourne, Key N Field. SU 247739. Broken tranchet axe or pick; blade fragment broken and retouched. PP. DB 923. 2 Aldbourne, Southward Down. SU 26147422. Pick; blade-flake. PP. DB 914. 3 Bowerchalke, hillslope E of Stonedown Wood. ST 996196. Six microliths — 4 Horsham points, | obliquely blunted point, | scalene triangle. Salisbury 37.1983. + Calne without, Sandy Lane. ST 958682. Small assem- blage comprising microburin, 2 core rejuvenating flakes, utilized blade, 2 blade-flakes and 1 broken blade-flake, 1 waste piece. Devizes. 1983.115. Chippenham, Allington. ST 888767. Small assemblage comprising 2 cores, 2 scrapers, 2 end-scrapers on flakes, | blade-flake, 1 broken blade, 1 broken flake, | waste piece. Devizes. 1983.1 10. 6 Chippenham without, W of Fowleswick Lane. ST 880764. Assemblage including micro-cores, scrapers, knife, blade-flakes. PP. DB 1000. 7 Chittoe, Spye Park. ST-952665. 2 cores, scraper, 2 blade-flakes with re-touch, 10 waste pieces. Devizes. 1983.114. 8 Christian Malford, Site I], N of Summerlands Farm. ST 959799. Small assemblage comprising 2 scrapers, 3 blade-flakes, utilized blade, borer and 2 waste pieces. Devizes 1983.116. 9 Hardenhuish, NW of school. ST 913747. Small assemblage comprising core, 2 scrapers, borer, axe- sharpening flake, 2 broken blades, blade with edge re-touch, partially backed blade with transversely worked edge, micro-burin, end-scraper on blade, core- trimming flakes. Devizes. 1983.109. 10 Kington St. Michael, Heywood Farm. ST 903757. Small assemblage comprising 2 cores, 2 scrapers, 4 blade-flakes, 2 notched blade-flakes, 2 blade-flakes and | flake with re-touch, blade with alternate re-touch. Devizes. 1983.111. 11 Langley Burrell, Peckingell Site H. ST 943754. Small assemblage comprising core, 2 scrapers, 4 blade-flakes, utilized blade-flake, core trimming flake. Devizes. 1983.112. 12 Slaughterford, Pew Hill. ST 926745. Small assem- blage comprising calcined core, calcined scraper, scraper, obliquely blunted blade, truncated blade, flake with re-touch, core trimming flake, 4 blade-flake frag- ments, waste piece. Devizes. 1983.113. n WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL REGISTER FOR 1983 13 Swallowcliffe, garden of Vine Cottage. c. ST 966269 or ST 963271 (?). Assemblage of worked pieces and waste. Salisbury. 132.1983. NEOLITHIC 14 Aldbourne, Common West. SU 26027420 to 26187422. Assemblage of 6 cores, 1 scraper, 5 retouched flakes and 40 waste flakes. PP. DB 919. Aldbourne, Common West. SU 26247421. 5 Windmill Hill sherds, 2 cores, 1 re-touched and 6 waste flakes. PP. DB 920. Aldbourne, Southward Down. SU 26527402. Small assemblage of cores, re-touched and waste flakes. PP. DB 913. Aldbourne, Common. SU 26407400. Small assem- blage of core, chisel, 2 scrapers, 6 utilized or re-touched flakes and 19 waste flakes. PP. DB 918. Aldbourne, Common. SU 26057395. Small assem- blage comprising core, hammerstone, fabricator, 4 utilized or retouched flakes and 20 waste flakes. PP. DB 922. Aldbourne, Common, around depression at SU 26347410. Small assemblage of knife, core trimming flake, end scraper, 8 re-touched flakes and 26 waste flakes. PP. DB 917. Aldbourne, FE of Lewisham Castle. SU 247739. Small assemblage of transverse arrowhead, 2 scrapers, fabri- cator, 3 re-touched flakes and 24 waste flakes. PP. DB 923. Aldbourne, W Common. SU 26267416. Assemblage of 4 cores, | core trimming flake, 4 re-touched pieces and 39 waste flakes. PP. DB 924. Aldbourne, Half-moon coppice. SU Polished flint axehead. PP. DB 996. Aldbourne, E of the Giant’s Grave by enclosure SMR 668. SU 248764. Transverse arrowhead, 14 waste flakes, 3 small blade flakes. PP. DB 946. Ebbesbourne Wake, ‘Southfield’. No Incomplete flint adze. Salisbury 141 (i). 1983. Laverstock, Southampton Road gravel pit. SU 165287. Polished flint axe head found c. 1950. Salisbury. Grafton, Wilton. S of the Swan Inn. c. SU 26776145. 7 waste flakes. Devizes. 1983.56. Pewsey, Pewsey Hill. SU 1858. Broken axe rough-out. Devizes. 1983.4. 23757898. n.g.r. BEAKER 28 29 30 Aldbourne, W of Giant’s Grave. SU 24327630. Side/ base beaker sherd with comb impressed decoration; plain body sherd. PP. DB 930. Aldbourne, SW of Giant’s Grave. SU 244762. Beaker sherd with decoration of spaced dots. PP. DB 948. Aldbourne, NE of Giant’s Grave. SU 247765. Beaker body sherd with comb impressed decoration. PP. DB 949. BRONZE AGE 31 Aldbourne, Southward Down. SU 269739. Group of 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 255 LBA sherds including two from furrowed bowls, and 1 with incised lines with white infill. PP. DB 967. Aldbourne, EF edge of barrow, Aldbourne G 13. SU 244764. 1 MBA sherd. PP. DB 951. Aldbourne, in enclosure, SMR 640. SU 24297633. 19 MBA sherds, | possible Wessex bi-conical urn sherd with thumb impressions on cordon. PP. DB 930. Edington, E of Mill. c. ST 921529. Fragment of socketed axe-head. Devizes. 1983.130. Erlestoke/East Coulston, Brounkers Court Farm. ST 9654. Fragment from the blade of a socketed bronze knife; fragment from lip of socketed axe-head. Devizes. 1983.23 and .149. See WAR 1982.36. Ogbourne St. Andrew, Gypsy Lane. SU 16767638. 3 MBA sherds in an area of burnt and broken sarsen. Devizes. 1983.132. Pewsey, Martinsell Hill. No n.g.r. Socketed bronze axe-head of the Stogursey type. PP. DB 929. (Figure 1.) Shalbourne, Rivar Farmhouse. c. SU 316617. Bronze ear-ring. Devizes. 1983.136. Wanborough, N of earthwork. SU 23627912. 2 MBA sherds; core and scraper. PP. DB 974. IRON AGE 40 Bradford-on-Avon, garden of 10 Budbury Close. ST 82186108. Two large rim sherds. Devizes. 1983.133. 41 Bromham, Mother Anthony’s Well. No n.g.r. Two early I.A. sherds and a whetstone. Devizes. 1983.84. 42 Easton Grey, in construction of road to new gauging station (1979). ST 89008715. Hollow bone tube or handle with pattern of engraved criss-cross lines. Devizes. 1983.17. 43 Upavon, in combe NE of Casterley Camp. SU 12785447. Silver coin of the Northern Atrebates under Epaticcus, type Mack 263. Devizes. 1983.28. 44 Uncertain findspot, described as ‘Marlborough Downs’. Durotrigian stater (Mack 317), plated stater (Mack 317-8) and quarter-stater (Mack 319), advertised for sale by London dealer. The findspot is improbable. PP. DB 968-9. ROMAN 45 Aldbourne, Ewins Hill. SU 25557388. Eight sherds from a large storage jar. Devizes. 1983.47. 46 Aldbourne, Ewins Hill. SU 25787426. Collection of 46 sherds. PP. DB 944. 47 Aldbourne, Giant’s Grave ridge. SU 240765 to 243765. 14 coarse ware sherds. PP. DB 952. 48 Aldbourne, SW of Three Barrows. SU 247765. Collection of C1l—2 sherds. PP. DB 953. 49 Aldbourne, SW of the Village. SU 2675. C1 coin. PP. TMAR. 50 Baydon, Coate Barn. SU 29207686. Collection of 62 sherds. PP. DB 963. 51 Bratton, N of road. ST 90285236. Broken fibula, type uncertain. Devizes. 1983.65. (See WAR 1982.53.) 52 Codford St. Mary, Chitterne Road. SU 975416. Type K fibula and Type M fibula. Salisbury 26. and 27.1983. 256 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Figure 1. Socketed bronze axe-head from Martinsell Hill, Pewsey. Register no, .37. 53 wn wn 56 Colerne, Furidge Farm villa site. SU 83627310, Finds excavated by H. Morrison in the 1950s possible including bronze fibulae (types A, O, M, H and others), 4+ iron fibulae, penannular brooch, nail cleaner, 2 bracelet fragments, pin, ligula, bronze bead and boss. Devizes. 1983.73. East Kennet, Harestone Down. c. SU 11656630. 6 Cl and 3 coins, + Samian and coarse ware sherds. PP. DB 936. East Kennet, Harestone Down. c. C1 coins. PP. DB 937. East Kennet, Harestone Down. c. SU 11706605. 8 SU 11756635. 8 60 61 C3—4 coins, 2 fibulae, 6 coarse ware sherds. PP. DB 938. Ebbesbourne Wake, Hill Farm. No n.g.r. Type H fibula found 1938. Salisbury 141 (c). 1984. Ebbesbourne Wake, garden of Hillside. No n.g.r. Bronze nail cleaner found 1927. Salisbury I41 (j). 1983. Erlestoke, Brounkers Court Farm. ST 9654. Divided bow brooch. Fragment of Langton Down type brooch, bow brooch. Devizes. 1983.23, 149 and 151. Highworth, SU 200923. Dupondius of Vespasian. PP. TMAR. Imber, Wadman’s Coppice, NW of settlement. ST 952497. Follis of Diocletian. Devizes. 1983.54. | Figure 2. Iron spearhead from Little Cheverell. Register no. .62. | | | WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL REGISTER FOR 1983 62 63 Little Cheverell, N of New Zealand farm. ST 97355105. Iron spearhead. Devizes 1983.1. (Figure 2.) Luckington, FE of Manor Farm. ST 843832. Enamelled plate brooch in the form of a hen. PP. DB 927. Ogbourne St Andrew, N of Ogbourne Maizey. SU 18607198. 28 C3 and 4 coins; Savernake ware and 2 other sherds. PP. DB 982. Pewsey, West Sharcott. SU 149588. Collection of C 1-3 sherds. Devizes. 1983.18. Figure 3. Brooch from Pewsey. Register no. .67. KS | 4 g 66 67 Nm ay —S Pewsey, Sharcott. SU 153594. Asses of Domitian, Sabina and Trajan; sestertius of Antoninus Pius. PP and Devizes. 1983.126. Pewsey, S of Braden Weg. SU 14985851. Circular plate brooch with spiral design; diamond shaped plate brooch, two mounts and a nielloed bronze object of uncertain use. Devizes. 1983.155. (Figure 3.) Potterne, Rangebourne Mill. ST 99855985. C4 Fel. Temp. Rep. imitative coin. Devizes. 1983.6. Purton, Manor Farm. SU 0987. TMAR. Roundway, garden of 47 The Village. SU 01356310. Siliqua of Julian I] and 2 other C+ bronze coins. PP. DB 983. Shalbourne, Rivar Farmhouse. SU 318618. Group of 39 Cl—2 sherds. Devizes. 1983.150. Stratton St Margaret, Cowleaze Walk. SU 165877. Coin of Julian I. PP. TMAR. Swindon, Covingham, Gilling Way. SU Bronze C4 coin. PP. TMAR. Swindon, Cricklade Road. SU 156876. Dupondius of Augustus. PP. TMAR. Upavon, E of village. Commodus. PP. DB 1002. Winterslow, garden of 92 Firs Road. SU 20753350. Bronze bracelet. Salisbury. 22.1983. Wroughton, ‘verge of road leading to Barbury Castle’. ? SU 1476. 3 bronze C24 coins. PP. TMAR. Wroughton, Coronation Road. SU 144807. Sestertius of Antoninus Pius. PP. TMAR. 3 (€4_coins: PP. 188847. SU 139553. Denarius of EARLY MEDIEVAL (c. AD 450-1000) 79 80 84 Britford, Either SU 163285 or 161282. Saucer brooch decorated with five running spirals. Salisbury 24.1983. Clarendon, Petersfinger cemetery. No n.g.r. Button brooch, 2 bronze buckles, round bronze plaque. Metal detector finds reported to the British Museum (Archaeologia 107 (1983): 117). Ebbesbourne Wake, ‘South Field’. No n.g.r. Copper alloy buckle. Salisbury. I4la, 1983. Edington, c. ST 921529. Small strap-end. Devizes. 1983.130.2. Highworth, ‘Highworth Circle’ no. 39: NW cirele in the group of four at North Leaze Farm, from the ditch. SU 19139545. Fragment of doughnut shaped loom- weight, grass marked sherd. Devizes. 1983.30,2 and 3. See also No. 96 below. Highworth, Sevenhampton. SU 206904. Silver sceatta, type Brooke 23. PP. TMAR. Upavon, E of village. c. SU 13805505. Gilt bronze button brooch. Devizes. 1983.98. (Figure 4.) MEDIEVAL (¢. AD) LO00—1500) Aldbourne, Ewins [lill. SU 25687432. sherds. PP. DB 943. Bishops Cannings, Bourton. SU 041644. Floor tile,. type as Nash Hill no. 8. PP. DB 975. Bishops Cannings, Easton Farm. Around SU 047645. 17 unglazed Lith WHEESEURE oe Figure 4. Gilt bronze brooch from Upavon. Register no. 85. Figure 5. Fragment of a nocturnal on a portable sun-dial from Bishops Cannings. Register no. .88, Part of the nocturnal on a portable equinoctial sundial, bronze parchment clip; fragment of bronze lock. PP. DB 999, (Kieure 5.) 89 Britford, Fither SU 163285 or 161282. Annular bronze brooch decorated with bosses inset with enamel. Salisbury. 23.1983. 90 Broad Hinton, Weir Farm. SU 114772. 11 unglazed sherds. Devizes. 1983.53. 9| Ebbesbourne Wake, garden of ‘Gawens’. No n.g.r. Socketed iron spearhead found in a medieval pit in 1932. Salisbury. 141(h). 1983. 9? Ebbesbourne Wake, North Field. No n.g.r. Penny of edward IE found in 1924. Salisbury. [41 (f). 1983. 93 Edington, c. SV 921529. Seal matrix with a crude design perhaps of a crown over M, alluding to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Devizes. 1983.130.3. 94 Erlestoke, Brounkers Court Farm. ST 9654. Seal matrix with a paschal lamb and legend KCCh AGNVS DEI. PP. DB 926. ARCHIAEOLOGIOCAL \ND NYVECRAL PIS TORY MAGAZINE 95 Grafton, S of the Swan Inn. c. SU 26776145. Group. of 34 unglazed sherds. Devizes. 1983.56. Highworth, ‘Ilighworth Circle’ no. 39: NW Circle in the group of 4 at North Leaze farm, from the ditch. SU 96 19139545. Four unglazed sherds and 9 bone fragments. Devizes. 1983.30. See also above No. 83. Longbridge Deverill, [ill Deverill. ST) 86721415. Inscribed gold) ring — see above, p.238. Devizes. 1983. 108. Ogbourne St. Andrew, Ogbourne Maizey, around SU 186720. Pennies of Llenry II (type Ib); Richard [ (type 3a) and cut-halfpenny of John (type Sb) — all London O8 mint; small unengraved circular pendant, 2 buckles and 2 panannular brooch fragments. PP. DB 982. Potterne, of 19 Ryeleaze. ST 998585. Enamelled bronze roundel with the shield of William Wotton, Abbot of Cirencester (between 1429 and 1440). Devizes. 1983.90. Roundway, SW of village. SU 01356310. Elalfpenny of Edward HII. PP. DB 983. Salisbury, N of Fisherton Street. SU 141301. Part of wooden bowl and shoe leather from waterlogged graves 99 garden 100 101 in the cemetery of the Dominican Friary. Salisbury. 111.1983. Shalbourne, Rivar SU 318618. arrowhead, small silver-gilt annular brooch and group of PP. 1983.150. 102 Farmhouse. Iron 56 sherds. Devizes. See above No. 71. Swindon, Toothill, Luddesdown Road. SU 122838. Penny of Edward I. PP. PMAR. Swindon, Penhill. SU. 151883. halfpenny of Elenry HL. PP. TMAR. Upavon, SE of village. SU 141547. Counterfeit groat of Edward TV. Plated bronze harness pendant with blue and red enamelled design. Devizes. 1983.12 and 97. 103 104 Cut — long-cross 105 (Figure 6.) Figure 6. Bronze harness pendant from Upavon. Register no. SLO: 106 Wilton, Waterditchampton. SU 094315. Bronze belt- chape with incised chevron decoration, PP. Salisbury. 107 Wroughton, Ken’s Way. SU 142808. Wool seal. PP. TTMAR. CORRIGIENDA 109° ‘The find of early Roman military metalwork and coins, reported in W.\A1 77 (1983 for 1982): 58 — and see also WAR 81.33 — as possibly from Wiltshire is, the finder advises us, from Camerton in Somerset. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 79 (1985), pp. 259-61. Still Building Victoria’s Monument a review article on volume XII of the Victoria County History of Wiltshire by THOMAS COCKE D.A. Crowley (ed.), The Victoria County History of the County of Wiltshire, vol. XII, Ramsbury Hundred, Selkey Hundred, the Borough of Marl- borough. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1984. xx + 257 pp., 15 maps and plans, 40 illustrations. £60.00. It is all to easy to note the publication of another volume of the Wiltshire Victoria County History as a worthy, useful but unexciting addition to the set of red bindings on the reference library shelves. Yet the progress of the series should be of vital concern, for it will form the basis for the historiography of the county for decades, even centuries to come. Volume XII covers the hundreds of Ramsbury and Selkley, a relatively compact area comprising the Kennet valley and the Downs to the N of it, together with the borough of Marlborough. The ‘star attrac- tions’ are Marlborough itself (and its associated parish of Preshute), Ramsbury and Avebury; but Aldbourne and Mildenhall, the Winterbournes and the Ogbournes are all villages of interest. Aldbourne in particular, away from the main roads by the river, was the centre for a surprising range of small industries, bell-founding from the late 17th to the mid-19th century, fustian- weaving, and and willow-plaiting. A topographical volume of the VCH always gives new information as well as revising one’s existing ideas. One delightful new fact was the quality of the Aldbourne warrens, on which Aubrey’s judgement is quoted that the rabbits were the best, sweetest and fattest in England. A valuable revision is the reconsideration of the development of Littlecote House with the Long Gallery now dated to 1583 by a building contract. The book maintains the high standards of presenta- tion traditional to the series. A few of the illustrations are not as informative as they might be, considering their limited number. In the photograph of the Square at Ramsbury the main subject appear to be the tree and the c. 1949 parked car and, while it is excellent to reproduce Stukeley’s sketch of the former appearance of Avebury Manor from his MSS in the Bodleian, it loses much of its impact without a comparative view of straw- the house today. But these quibbles in no way detract 1. VCH General Introduction (1970), p. 12. from the laudable increase in the number of plans and maps and publication of unfamiliar material such as the map of Ewins Hill in Aldbourne, c. 1608, and the wall painting of c. 1800 in the Bell Inn, Ramsbury, depicting Crowood House. But perhaps the most impressive aspect of volume XII, and of the others under preparation, is that they are produced at all. The times do not favour such comprehensive and altruistic = projects. Ina “Vhatcherite’ view a nationally-directed county history is a contradiction in terms. If individuals or institutions ina particular county desire a history, let them organize one themselves. The VCH and its materials could be dispersed locally, as indeed happened in 1927 when the Northumberland material was sold to a local County History Committee which was completing Hodgson’s history of Northumberland. | The Wiltshire series of the VCH provides particularly good grounds for opposing such attitudes. Thanks to sustained work, it is well on its way to completion. The administrative and financial arrangements worked out for it, especially the relationships with the local authorities, have been so successful that they have become a model for other areas. Wiltshire also has the advantage that no part of it was begun until after the last war. ‘Wiltshire was a virgin field for experiment since there were no existing volumes into which new volumes might need to be dovetailed.” The volumes dealing with general themes could thus be of a much higher academic standard than those of the carly years. Even in the relatively timeless field of monastic histo- ries, the articles in the ‘Religious houses’ section of a series such as Aent (volume II published in 1926 but partly written before the First World War), with their concentration on the details of the Dissolution, do not bear comparison with those in Wi/tshire volume III (published in 1956) which provide invaluable lists of monastic property and how and when it was acquired. The cross-referencing between the general essays and the detailed accounts in the topographical volumes remains a problem. ‘he former inevitably date and some were always a litthe thin, but they are rarcly corrected or enhanced even when major subjects recur in the parish accounts. The international importance of 2s bid; pc 2ile 260 THE WILTSHIRE the stone circle at Avebury and of the other great prehistoric monuments in the parish is almost lost between their brief mention in the standard parish account and the strictly condensed account in volume I part 1. Another example in volume XII is the treatment of the Marlborough schools, the King Edward Gram- mar School and the College. References to them occur throughout the Preshute and Marlborough chapters yet for an account of the schools one must turn back to a few unambitious pages in volume V. ‘The history of the Grammar School is at least brought up to date in volume XII with a statement of the school’s absorption into the comprehensive system. The history of the College in volume V, though it recounts the vicissi- tudes of its establishment and early years, offers little explanation of its astounding rise within 20 or 30 years from near-ruin to a rank among the major schools of the country, or of its continuing success. Another issue raised by volume XII is the balance between ‘raw’ fact and editorial comment. ‘The density of information given in the 15-odd parish accounts in the book is a powerful argument against tampering with the present system, for surely no county history started today would give the same intense coverage to the obscurest village as to the major centres. On the other hand the mass of detail needs to be shaped for it to be intelligible. The previous volume XI was an extreme example of the problems of working by the ancient hundreds, since it consisted of the two Winchester-based hundreds, Downton and Elstub and Everleigh, dependent respectively in origin on the bishop and the prior of St Swithun’s, which were scattered in small parcels across the shire. By contrast volume XII covers a coherent area. Little advantage has been taken in it of adapting the standard understanding of the upper Kennet valley as a whole. The strict division into sections on ‘Manors and other presentation in order to give an estates’, ‘Local government’, ‘Nonconformity’, etc., in volume XI helps to bring order to a_ disparate assortment of parishes but is less useful in volume XII. It is as if the material were sieved down into grains of detail and then stored in boxes. It is perhaps the history of Marlborough itself on which the reader unfamiliar with the town necds most guidance, quite apart from the awkwardness caused by Marlborough Castle and its successor houses being in the neighbouring parish of Preshute and thus treated in a separate chapter. There are clear but far from text- book stages in the town’s development. Marlborough has maintained a consistent plan with the famous High 3. Ibid., 23. ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL LIS TORY MAGAZINE Street, probably the post-C vonquest borough, added to the original settlement around the Green to the FE, and a consistent population never rising above 5000, but its significance in national life has varied dramatically. In the Middle Ages it enjoyed the reflected glory of the royal castle, a favourite residence of John and Henry IIIf, and emerged under the Tudors and Stuarts as an autonomous and prosperous trading centre. In the 18th century it degenerated into a pocket borough of the Bruce Brudenell family and lost its economic place in the county to Devizes, but ironically attained a fame greater than before as an important stage on the Bath Road. Then in the mid 19th century, when the loss of parliamentary status and of coaching traffic seemed to condemn the town to the respectable but obscure rank of a Ramsbury, it was rescued by the runaway success of a school for the sons of clergy. It is appropriate that the Castle site, the traditional seat of power, has passed from Crown to aristocrat to innkeeper to schoolmaster. In the present century the character of Marlborough has been profoundly affected by the huge revival of traffic on the Bath Road after the First War, and by the opening of the M4 in the 1970s which absorbed much of the traffic but brought the town much closer to London. To wish for more expressive accounts is not to demand extra work which might strain finances yet further or impede the VCH’s exemplary rate of progress. Neither is it to challenge the importance of ‘the accurate registration of the manorial descents which form the central thread of English social history’.’ An example to follow had already been established in volume VII, the first Wiltshire volume to be published, where ‘Trowbridge, a town comparable to Marlborough, was treated in a more coherent and informative way with sections on the ‘Growth of the town’ and the “Town as an administrative and military centre’ in addition to the standard ones on “Trade and industry’, ete. The account of Devizes in volume X (published in 1975) is also on this more generous scale. Marlborough could at the least have been given a brief ‘The road communications’. The volume VII descriptions of churches were again more extensive, especially as section on town as a centre of regards 19th-century restorations, than any in volume NI, although the architectural clement of the Wiltshire volumes was already to be treated ‘much more summarily’ in view of the (never completed) volumes on the County by RCHIM.* The editorial note of volume VIE envisaged that architecture in future vol- umes, far from being reduced still further, ‘may be +. VOI Wiltshire VIL (1953), pe xii. STILL BUILDING VICTORIA’S MONUMENT slightly expanded’.’ Has there developed a Puritan eschewing of comment, quotation or emphasis in favour of unadorned facts? It is no answer to claim that the VCH volumes are collections of sources or, in the double-edged words of the 1944 Report ‘an historical encyclopaedia of the English counties rather than an ordinary “county history”’.° This is belied by the very nature of the published volumes which are undeniably produced as books. If they were to be considered mere collections of sources, then with modern techniques they should be produced in a simpler and cheaper format. The distinction between published volumes and archive material has been pursued by the slightly younger contemporary of the VCH, the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. The RCHM has decided to move away from its traditional procedures, ceasing the publication of the architectural inventory of Wiltshire after the completion of work in hand in Salisbury and the SE of the county and instead either publishing its findings in different formats, more thematic than topographical, or depositing them in the archive. The future progress of the two bodies will provide an 5. Ibid. 261 interesting contrast. Both inherit traditions — of intensively edited and handsomely produced books, prepared to a standard format and written with the assumption that definitive statements were possible and desirable, especially from official or quasi-official bodies. The RCHM has to an extent abandoned these traditions: the VCH appears set to maintain them. It thus has the credit of continuing high, indeed exemplary, standards in a world much in need of them, but at the risk that the volumes’ expense and uninstructive presentation, save to the initiated, negate the purpose of their publication since they will simply be ignored. But the right concluding note to sound is not fore- boding but gratitude and optimism. As the VCH moves towards its centenary it will prove to be the finest monument of all to the Dear Good Queen. The funeral eulogy of Lady Ann Clifford, often a resident in Ramsbury Manor during her unhappy marriage to the fourth Earl of Pembroke, cited the Scripture; ‘Every wise woman buildeth her a house.’ Queen Victoria by her perhaps casual patronage of the series has ensured herself a palace indeed. 6. VCH General Introduction (1970), p. 23. Reviews Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum new gal- leries, displaying Early Man in South Wiltshire, Stonehenge, and General Pitt-Rivers. Designed by Pat Read of Robin Wade Design Associates. The Museum, now at the King’s House in the Cathedral Close, Salisbury, is open: April to September, Monday-Saturday 10-4; May to October, Monday— Saturday 10-5; also Sundays in July and August 2-5. Admission £1 adults, 20p children. Salisbury Museum left its old home in St Ann Street in 1981, and moved to the King’s House in the close, opposite the west door of the cathedral. The King’s House, fundamentally medieval and largely Victorian, has the right feel, and it is conveniently close to the tourist honey-pots of the city. The ambitious move, requiring the raising of an appeal fund of £290,000, is an immense success. From the beginning, a small display was put on, so the museum has never actually shut. The opening of the major new historic and prehistoric displays in 1984 almost completed the transformation; the last new displays, of costume and ceramics, opened this summer. Prehistory in Wiltshire is divided between Devizes and Salisbury museums by a ‘Mason-Dixon’ line running across the Plain, so the main archaeology display is early man in south Wiltshire specifically. This means some gaps at the start of the story: a single bout coupé hand-axe constitutes all the Middle Palaeolithic. With the Neolithic, the theme picks up, and goes strongly through to the pagan Saxon period. Presentation is first-rate. The firm’s distinctive style of lively, informative and academically impeccable display within a conventional format of fixed display cases works superbly. ‘he audience is seen as non- specialist, so all the clutter of archaeological ifs, but’s, firmly suppressed. ‘Hlenges’ are defined in one crisp sentence, without and we-don’t-really-know’s is qualification (or the slightest inaccuracy); cursuses — since so little definite can be said — are reduced to a copy of a Stukeley print and a few words. The detail of display is imaginative: rolled hand-axes from the Bemerton gravels are piled in a heap like shingle; a Beaker profile is drawn on the front of the Beakers’ case to show the unity of form; the history of a Boscombe Down round-barrow is traced through, not just prehistory, but via medieval destruction by the airfield in 1930; the role of an grave-robbers — to iron-age pit, neatly shown by a composite section of ‘before’ and ‘after’, is announced with the single word ‘Rubbish’; among the pots lurk Mr Guest’s splendid early 19th-century oils of the grave-groups. ‘The displays are properly up-to-date, with the pagan Saxon burials from Charlton plantation (this volume, pp. 103-54) the major element for their period. The level of information provided in the displays may be surprising: no large slabs of text are provided to may want to read them. The rationale for this, that it is better to address the major audience, than a limited minority who are better served by books, is both controversial and correct. It does slip up with the Wilton bowl, whose two sentences only get as far as date and findspot; nothing is said about its material or making, and you are not pointed to the exquisite geometric animal-head brackets on its rim. The fault here is not simply in the briefness of the text, but in what those few and precious words have been spent on. Stonehenge is less successful. The brief, to present both the archaeology of Stonehenge and later responses to the site, is too wide for the single room available. It is a small, low and enclosed space which has all the wrong inform those who physical atmosphere. Space is so limited — that Stonehenge archaco-astronomy cannot begin to be explained, Eschewing the obvious but unanswerable question of what Stonehenge was and why it was built, the display shows the monument’s phasing, with representative heaps of antler picks, bluestone chips and sarsen mauls. ‘There is a litthe on the carvings and the Beaker burial (murder at Stonehenge’) and the environs find a mention in the entrance corridor. The other half of the display shows responses to Stonehenge, first through pictures from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Some of the pictures are marvellous, but the chance 1s missed to explain the range and spread of Stonehenge iconography. The plan is to rotate items in the display, so a fair sample of Salisbury’s good holdings can be seen, The second group of responses looks at myths and realities about Stonehenge from the 14th century to ourselves. The contemporary cartoons (“Chere mightn’t be a hell of a lot of point to it but we have to comply with these EEC directives’) are excellent. The Stonehenge display has a special value as the place the actual finds from the monument can be seen, REVIEWS relentlessly scrubby, drab and (often) recent though they are. But it is not a full or happy exposition, and this means one response to the wider problem of managing and presenting Stonehenge — to provide slight information on the spot and send visitors to Salisbury to be properly informed — is not on. The third section of new archaeology displays, on General Pitt-Rivers in all his aspects, is quite marvellous. It opens with a fragment of a Victorian room, with the General’s portrait, rich red wallpaper, enclosed wheel-chair and aspidistra, and then steers you through generous spaces about his life and times. The General is too large a man to carve up neatly into distinct sectional displays, but the main themes are well-chosen, and the mix of ancient artefacts and modern words with the General’s ‘records, models, photographs, craniometer, and writing is nicely judged. The displays are much more wordy than those for Wiltshire prehistory; among the familiar are some maxims that still surprise. “The record of an exca- vation,’ the General said, ‘takes about five times as long as the actual digging’ — a discovery being re-made by rescue excavators at the present. The General as inspector and as educator of his estate workers is well-represented, and so is the force of the man, whether sorting the stratigraphy of the Acton gravels or promoting bicycling. As he said in a paper on | “Typological Museums’ (and what has that to do with _ bicycles?), ‘Bicycling is an institution that must not be overlooked in any project for the improvement of the | masses.’ No wonder, as a letter in the display shows, | the Automatic Cycle Rack Company was so startled by an unsolicited order for 100 of their penny-in-the-slot _ racks for the General’s estate that they decided to send | a representative to call. Elsewhere in the King’s House are fine new displays on medieval and recent Salisbury, with the giant magnificently impressive in his new home, the new prints room (for temporary displays), and a recent curiosity, Dr Neighbour’s complete surgery from Amesbury in its state c. 1941. | Allin all, the transformed Salisbury museum is a fine jadvance, and a worthy reward for the museum’s nerve ‘in bursting out from its old confinement. Like any |permanent displays, they willl age, and keeping them up to their first fine level will keep the Salisbury ‘curators well occupied in the future. CHRIS FOPHER CHIEPPINDALE | jl. In ©. S. Maxwell (ed.), The Impact of Aertal Reconnaissance on Archaeology (London: Couneil for British Archacology, Research 263 R. Palmer, Danebury, an Iron Age hillfort in Hampshire: an_ aerial photographic _ inter- pretation of its environs. London: Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), supplementary series 6, 1984. x + 133 pages, 38 figures, folding map in end pocket. £12.75 (paperback). As the title indicates, this is a companion volume to the Danebury excavation report published by the Council for British Archaeology. Roger Palmer has been working on air photographs of archaeological sites in Wessex since 1976, and preparation of the report on Professor Cunliffe’s 1969-78 excavations provided the occasion for a detailed study of 450 km’ around Danebury, with a prehistoric landscape of the region. The area examined extends from Salisbury at the SW corner to beyond Andover in the NE; about one-third lies in Wiltshire, the rest in Hampshire. The least controversial and in some ways the most immediately useful part of the volume is the folding map in the end pocket. This shows the whole area at 1:25,000, with the evidence of air photographs and excavations plotted against the natural background. Modern settlement detail is not directly provided but is easily discernible in the ‘negative areas’ indicated where view to reconstructing the neither crop-marks nor earthworks can be expected to show. The map provides a valuable conspectus of the principal prehistoric and Romano-British remains of the area, as so far known. Vhe accompanying text offers an analysis and classification of the data on the map and is divided into Introduction, Gazetteer, Discussion, and Period Maps. The Gazetteer takes each category of visible sites, classifies it by shape, size and distinctive features, draws attention to significant relationships with sites in the same or other categories, and (where possible) adds the evidence from excavated examples. The hope is that sites grouped on a morphological classification will be found to share functional, cultural or chronological similarities, but the excavated evidence is still too meagre for this except in the crudest terms. The present study benefits from being done in the context of similar work on an area nine times the size, embracing most of the Wessex chalklands. The chronological assessment of varying settlement and enclosure types is based on the wider sample and is not discussed in the present volume; reference has to be made to Palmer’s paper on ‘Analysis of settlement features in the land- scape of prehistoric Wessex’.! There, his ‘Vable 3 Report 49, 1983), pp. 41-53. 264 distributes 28 excavated sites amongst six chronological phases and five morphological types: the data are insufficient to permit any secure conclusion except (perhaps) that complex-looking sites are unlikely in the earlier Iron Age. A single excavation could upset even that conclusion. On ‘present knowledge, therefore, chronological inferences are mostly dependent on observable rela- tionships with better-dated features. In the Discussion a number of sample areas are examined where such relationships exist and this provides an opportunity for fuller consideration of linear ditches and field-systems, as well as some crop-mark complexes not readily treated within the Gazetteer. This leads on to the four Period Maps (Neolithic, Bronze Age, early pre-Roman Iron Age, late pre-Roman Iron Age and Romano- British). These make a bold attempt to show the development of the landscape, but it is essential to read the small print to see on what assumptions the maps are based. They do not claim to give a realistic picture for any period, but rather to emphasize which sites are securely dated to it. Thus, field-systems only appear on the bronze-age map if proven to be earlier than some iron-age feature; other fields were undoubtedly in existence, but the individual examples cannot be proved. Furthermore the distinction between ‘early’, ‘Jate’ and ‘continuous’ iron-age enclosures cannot really be justified on crop-mark evidence alone, as already noted. If Palmer’s valiant attempt to reconstruct the devei- opment of a whole prehistoric landscape does not really succeed, this does not invalidate either the aim or the methods that he uses. It simply makes clear that the evidence currently available is not yet adquate for such an exercise. The lasting value of this volume is to provide a provisional framework for further research, in which new excavation can be used constructively to test the hypotheses and solve the problems thrown up by his analysis. Until now archaeologists have just not had access to any systematic presentation of the evi- dence from air photography for the prehistoric set- tlement of this classic area. A final word on the production of the volume. After much experiment the problems of — rendering archaeological data photographs (both earthworks and crop-marks) on maps have been very from air successfully resolved at a variety of scales. ‘This sets the standard for the future. It should be noted also that substantial archives exist on which this publication ts based. The single key that provides a link between the archives, the Gazetteer and the various maps and diagrams is the National Grid Reference of each identifiable This immense site. imposes — an THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NAYEPURAL EIS PORY MAGAZINE responsibility on all who have handled the data. No errors were noted (or looked for) among the grid references in the Gazetteer, but readers are warned that they do occur in the descriptions of the Period Maps, rendering some passages virtually incomprehensible. D.R. WILSON The Southern Feeder: the Archaeology of a Gas Pipeline, edited by P. D. Catherall, Marion Barnett and Heather McClean. London: British Gas Corporation, 1984. 218 pages, numerous illustrations and plates. £9.50 (paperback). Between 1975 and 1977 the British Gas Corporation constructed a pipeline which bisected a succession of counties on a line from Cambridgeshire to Wiltshire. A archaeologists, both amateur — and professional, were involved in surveying and recording archacological sites along the route of the pipeline; a number of these sites were then partially excavated. This publication is a series of reports, some more detailed than others, on most of the excavations carried out before the pipeline was laid. More than half (57 per cent) of the 185 sites discussed consist of ditches, pits or other sites of unknown date and function. The only site to be excavated in its entirety (and then after severe machine-truncation) was a La Tene HI burial at Dorton, Buckinghamshire, which has been fully published elsewhere (Farley 1983). All the remaining sites were partially excavated, of these, eight are described in detail (two others are still to be published in the Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club). ‘The main purpose of publishing the details of the small (often undated) features and sites is to provide a starting-point which might aid future work’, the book explains (p.3). While it is debatable whether undated features will be of much use as a spring-board for future workers, the book as a whole is no more than a series of sites and monuments record-style entries converted into prose. Was it really worth publishing? As no attempt has been made to show how this linear sample of archaeological sites from a variety of landscape regions in southern Britain can form the basis for, or contribute to, regional research, the answer must surely be no. The bulk of the information presented 1s standard fodder for County-based — Sites and Monuments Records, which are consulted by most people engaged in various aspects of the archaeology of number — of each county. The more detailed excavation reports warrant publication in county or national journals, REVIEWS where they will be readily available to the appropriate audience. Indeed, it looks as if this was the original intention, as on reading some of the more detailed reports, the reader is told for the umpteenth time that ‘as a result of the proposed construction of a gas pipeline across Wessex by the British Gas Corporation, a series of sites ... were identified .. .’ (p. 97), or words to this effect. Clearly, having made the decision to publish the pipeline sites as a whole, editorial control should have been tighter: to provide other examples, the section drawings would have benefitted from the use of standardized conventions throughout; a number of illustrations could have been improved (all the flint drawings are particularly inept); and the duplication of a reference in the bibliography (Clark 1975 appears twice) is an indication of general carelessness. In fact the whole book could have been drastically reduced in length (and hence in price) by careful editing. In search of redeeming qualities, it should be said that one or two sections deserve a wider audience. M. W. Dacre, B.E.M. and R. Warmington show the very high standard of work that is often produced by amateur groups working in tandem with professional archaeologists. J. M. Maltby’s animal bone reports are exemplary. And the section on geophysical prospecting by A. Bartlett and A. David is an invaluable summary account of the réle of this survey method in field archaeology. Furthermore, the quality of — the publication, considering the price, is good and BGC should be congratulated on providing a reasonable standard of printing for the publication of reports on the archaeological sites they have destroyed. However, I cannot see many people wanting to buy this book (other than for use as a teaching aid), and it is to be hoped that in the future BGC archaeologists will ensure that any important discoveries they make will be made readily accessible by publication in either county or national journals, or in much cheaper, better-edited BGC booklets, while remaining information is merely registered with County-based Sites and Monuments Records and County Museums. ROBIN HOLGATE CLARK, A. J., 1975. Archaeological prospecting: a progress report. J. Archaeol. Sci. 2; 297-314. FARLEY, M., 1983. A mirror burial at Dorton, Buckinghamshire. Proc. Prehist. Soc. 49: 269-302. J. Haslam (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England. Chichester: Phillimore, 1984. 429 pages, 129 figures, 8 plates. £20. This book is, as its title suggests, a collection of papers 265 on the subject of towns in southern England. The material is arranged mainly by county, with some towns treated separately. The region covered is not clearly defined but appears to be the S coast counties of England, minus Sussex and Cornwall but plus Berkshire. Gloucester, but not Gloucestershire, is also included. A book like this must be considered on the one hand as a general treatment of its subject, and on the other, as a collection of individual papers. As a general work it is not really successful. ‘The omission of two counties on the grounds that they are treated in detail in papers appearing elsewhere is not really justifiable; if this is meant to be a work of reference with all available information between two covers, versions of those papers should have been included. In any case, many of the other counties have been covered recently in a series of monographs which, although perhaps often cast in planning-department mould, nonetheless much of the basic information presented here, often in a rather clearer format. And a series of discussions of the major towns without more than a brief reference to Winchester in the Hampshire chapter is surely Hamlet without the prince. The time the book has taken to produce shows in some of the chapters — for example, the current thinking on early Saxon London has undergone a radical shift in the last year. Another problem is that it is not easy to use the book as a general treatment of the subject because each different, producing a straightforward gazetteer, some attempting to define urbanism, and a great variety in the depth of analysis. There is some repetition both of theory and of content: no editorial decision appears to have been taken as to whether the ancient or the modern county boundaries were to be used, with the result that Christchurch appears in both Hampshire and Dorset. The differing styles of the plans of this town, and the less-explicably repeated Wareham, show that no uniform illustrative style for the book as a whole was thought necessary. This may not matter very much, but it underlines the fragmented nature of the work. As a collection, it is useful and it is convenient to have so much information in one place, even if it is not all in directly comparable form. Perhaps this was the wrong time to write a book like this. On the one hand, there is now too much information for it to be possible to string together every fact currently known about contain contribution — is some Anglo-Saxon towns in England or even southern Eng- land. On the other, new information is constantly arising from recent and current excavations and it is still too early for synthesis. There is not space here to take each chapter 266 THE WILTSHIRE separately, and in this journal readers may prefer a brief consideration of the chapter on Wiltshire. This chapter, written by the editor, contains many of his ideas about town development, some repeated in the chapter on Devon towns. Perhaps one should also note the chapter on Berkshire, by G. Astill, which takes a similar view of the subject. The approach is a broad one: instead of concentrating on evidence for activity at one date or another in places subsequently identifiable as urban, Haslam, Astill and one or two of the other contributors try to put urban development in a long- term economic and social context. ‘he possibility of some kind of continuity of function from hillfort to Roman villa, to Saxon wil/a regalis or monastery, to late Saxon fort and then town is sketched by Haslam for various places in Wiltshire, notably Bradford-on-Avon. ‘owns are seen as arising within a framework of political and economic organization, often at royal instigation. Uhere is much that is attractive about this approach, since I agree that to understand urbanism one must also understand the surrounding territory and the functioning of the society which exploited it. It is, however, often very difficult to be sure how much is solid fact and how much supposition. The vocabulary of this chapter has a noticeable preponderance of ‘possible’, ‘probable’ ‘suggest’, etc. | should like to know how many hillforts, Roman villas, ete. in similar topographical positions did not become either vi//ae regales or later urban or even proto-urban centres. Perhaps the context should be even broader than it is, and the organization of settkement within a region should be treated as a whole, without the possibly artificial separation of town and country which, as Maitland pointed out a long time ago, may not have been so apparent to the Anglo-Saxons or even their medieval successors as it is to us. I wonder if the editor should have tried to write a book alone, drawing on the published evidence which does now exist for many parts of the country, and trying to develop his thesis over a wider region than two counties, if possible with some clear testing against precisely formulated hypotheses. Such a book might have held together better as a whole than this one docs. Nevertheless, it is a useful contribution to the literature on the subject, with some interesting papers and compendious bibliographies. CATHERINE ELELLS Rolls of the Fifteenth of 1225 and the Fortieth of 1252, edited by F. A. and A. P. Cazel tor the Pipe Roll Society. New series vol. 45, London, 1983. xi + ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL EUS PORY MAGAZINE 165 pages. Available from the Hon. Treasurer, Pipe Roll Society, Public Record Office, Chancery Lane, London WC2A ILR. £13.35 to non-members. Like many of the Pipe Roll Society’s recent volumes, this is the text not of a Pipe Roll but of another kind of early Exchequer record. It reproduces the surviving fragments of rolls recording taxes on movables in four counties, just over half of it relating to Wiltshire in 1225. It contains the assessments of the inhabitants of 23 places, all of them manors belonging to abbeys and priories, in the deanery of Chalke in S Wiltshire, including Damerham and Martin now in Hampshire. The book provides the names of all those who were well enough off (by owning at least a heifer) to pay the tax, listing and valuing their livestock, agricultural products, and other assets including debts and beehives (101 Wiltshire taxpayers had one hive or more) on which they were taxed. The brief introduction, which leaves many questions unasked, points out that the Wiltshire assessments mention a rather smaller range of goods, with more standard valuations, than those of Lincolnshire where a greater effort to arrive at a true valuation is indicated, but nevertheless suggests, ignoring a few arithmetical lapses, ‘a quite remarkable degree of proficiency on the part of the assessors’. It alludes to the use of the Wiltshire roll by Eileen Power, to the evidence of population changes since Domesday, and to the interest of the record for students of personal names. The indexing is rather arbitrary, for example treating the surname Uphill as coming from an unidentified place and referring to crusaders and demesne only where the actual words are used; the subject index also serves as a glossary. The printed text, following the Pipe Roll Society’s practice, does not attempt, beyond the exten- sion of abbreviations and the filling of obvious lacunae, to elucidate or clarify the content of the document; it contains a mass of material which will stimulate, and with widely varying tantalize, historians interests. often C. R. ELRINGTON The Register of John Chandler, Dean of Salisbury 1404-17, edited by T.C.B. Timmins for the Wiltshire Record Society, Vol. 39 for 1983. Devizes, 1984. xxxix + 246 pages. Obtainable from M. J. Lansdown, 53 Clarendon Road, Trowbridge, Wilts. BAI4 7BS. £15 plus postage to non-members. John Chandler was successively dean (1404) and bishop (1417) of Salisbury. He had been associated with the REVIEWS cathedral since 1383, obtaining his first prebend by 1388 and the treasurership by papal provision in 1394. It is not unlikely that he was related to his contemporary and namesake, citizen John Chandler of Salisbury, and would thus have from apparently prominent and wealthy family of burgesses. His rapid promotion in the church owed not a little to the fact that he continued to enjoy the royal favour, though he performed his duties with industry and ability despite his reluctance to provoke the more come an powerful members of the establishment in the course of justice. His governance of the Salisbury chapter coincided for the large part with the episcopate of Robert Hallum, whom the more conservative Chandler was to succeed as bishop nine years before his death in 1426. : As dean, Chandler was assiduous in enateaunimns the who entered wesclanee in 1390. Tt Be ailieenee aiiae a by Chandler is evidenced by his register, clear English abstract with introduction, full indexes, and a useful glossary of liturgical and other less familiar edited now in terms occurring in the text. The dean’s jurisdiction and visitation proceedings are discussed and there is a cross-referenced analysis of the contents of the register. A shortcoming of the introduction is that there is little attempt to relate this important register ade- quately to its historical background. At the end of the 14th century there was a significant revival of cathedral life corresponding with the restoration of settled rela- tions between bishop and chapter. The right of regular episcopal visitation of the latter confirmed in 1392 occasioned change from within. A return of the pri- neipal dignitaries to residence and the reforms effected by Thomas Montagu inspired the Salisbury chapter to become during this period one of the most renowned ecclesiastical the later Middle Ages, comparable in the learning and ability of its members with the chapter of the 13th century. The register of Dean Chandler is a notable product of this era of renewal and represents a remarkably comprehensive jurisdiction. _ The purpose of the register, the earliest and most | complete decanal source su generis to survive from | medieval Salisbury, | transacted by the dean personally or by his official. By / right the | jurisdiction in the cathedral close, in his own prebend bodies of was to record the legal business dean exercised = immediate — ordinary of Heytesbury, and in the peculiars which included _ Longleat priory. His authority extended also over the | . . Poy pales . prebendal parishes throughout the diocese. “Priennial visitations, which were not customary period, are recorded for the years 1405, during this 1408-9 and 267 1412, and furnish a variety of information concerning and laity, churchyards, and prebendal property and stock. ‘Vhere are also consistory proceedings for the years 1404 and 1406, and miscellaneous business, including probate, the clergy church fabric and = content, transacted throughout the decanate. Complaints about the clergy were legion, the most serious of which concerned offences of sexual impropriety. had been halved by the time of the last visitation is as The fact that accusations of this nature much due to Chandler’s determination to eliminate such misconduct as to any other reason. A variety of including drunkenness, dereliction of duty and abuse of position. other misdemeanours are also recorded, Sexual offences are likewise prominent among the Of concern would have been the allegation of Lollardy at accusations brought against lay people. greater Yetminster in Dorset during the first visitation. This isolated incident indicates that, though heretical preachers continued to be active throughout the dio- cese, their doctrines were not sufficiently influential to pose a serious threat. Ot the inventories, providing an invaluable record of the rich variety of parochial devotion which the Reformation was later to sweep away. considerable importance — are church The details of service books, vestments and vessels indicate the liturgical state of the diocese during this period. ‘Uhe deficiency or diversity of particular vestments and the uniform absence of the Sarum customary lead Mr ‘Timmins to the surprising conclusion that the prebendal churches and chapels were ‘not much influenced by the Use of Salisbury’. It was a principle of canon law noted by Ly mdwood that the rite of the cathedral or mother foundation was to be followed throughout the diocese. In _ practice conformity was obligatory in the primary services of missal and breviary, but not in the secondary observances or ceremonial. Liturgical diversity was more the rule than the exception in medieval England, and the supposed anomalies noted by Mr ‘Timmins merely exemplify this fact. Minor criticisms aside (and here one must add the penchant for rendering place-names in the original throughout the text) the volume makes a significant contribution to the ecclesiastical and social history of the later Middle takingly edited it stands as an indispensable companion to the recently published register of Bishop Hallum. WILLIAM SMITH Ages. Well researched and_pains- 268 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NAPURAL EWS PORY MAGAZINE Avice R. Wilson. Cockiebury: a Farming Area and its People in the Vale of Wiltshire. Chichester: Phillimore, 1983. xx + 120 pages, 29 plates, 9 maps. £12.00. Cocklebury, a name probably unknown to most Wiltshire people, lies NE of Chippenham. Its 400 acres, bisected by the main railway line, are now mainly occupied by the Westinghouse works, an industrial estate, and an area of post-war housing. The remaining rural area must inevitably be built over shortly. Not, one would think, an area to inspire, yet it has found a devoted chronicler in Mrs Wilson, a native of Chippenham domiciled in the USA, who has used regular visits to this country to good purpose to produce a substantial piece of local history. In dealing with such a small area the likelihood of sufficient documentary sources being present to present a fairly continuous picture are small. Cocklebury is not rich in early sources, and our knowledge of its topography in the middle ages suffers accordingly. It contained common-field land, but it is hardly possible to say whether or not it was at any time a common-field kind. The boundaries between Hardenhuish, Chippenham and settlement of a conventional parish Langley Burrell were bewilderingly complex until the 19th century, which suggests that the parochial affiliations of particular areas were settled by own- ership considerations some time after the land was cleared for agriculture. If this is so we may have the curious, but not unique, spectacle of a common-field manor divided between two larger neighbouring set- tlements. From the l6th century the position becomes clearer; enclosure of the common fields led to the establishment of several farms, whose history is traced. The woollen industry, communications, and the rise of engineering are also dealt with. Mrs Wilson worked on Cocklebury Farm during the Second World War, and her book is particularly useful on the last days of farming there. It is sad that it ends with a note about the derelict and vandalized state of the farmhouse in 1983. Kk. HLH. ROGERS Kenneth Rogers. The Book of Trowbridge: a History. Buckingham: Barracuda, 1984. 156 pages, endpaper map, 212 illustrations in the text. £13.95 ‘The Book of Trowbridge’, says the front flap of the jacket, ‘has been published in’ both limited and gencral editions, to inform and delight natives and newcomers alike’. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, your reviewer assumes he has the general edition, but what difference, if any, there may be between the two he is unable to say. The copy in his possession does, however, contain one most encouraging feature — the names of 520 people who are listed as subscribers. The revival of this excellent traditional method of financing a scholarly work must have given the enterprising publishers an assured revenue of at least £6000, before bookshop sales began. The subscribers, who would have had little but the author’s reputation to pursuade them to part with their money, can certainly feel that their trust has not been betrayed. It is an excellent book, well designed and produced. Kenneth Rogers was born in ‘Trowbridge and has worked at the Wiltshire Record Office there since 1964. He became County Archivist in 1981. It is difficult to think of anyone with a greater knowledge of the town or with a deeper understanding of and sympathy for the stresses to which it has been subjected during the declining years of the formerly all-powerful woollen industry. It is with no lack of respect for the splendid text — a carefully integrated mix of political, social, industrial, economic and architectural history — that one draws attention first to the quality and variety of the illustrations, most of which have never been published before. They range from a poster protesting against an 1834 proposal that communicants should pay for their own sacramental wine to a Trowbridge ‘Town football team in 1890, and from the handpress on which the Trowbridge Advertiser was first printed to a group of jug-carrying children waiting at the town’s soup- kitchen in 1936. Mr Rogers has been most assiduous and imaginative in chasing his pictures and_ posterity will be grateful to him for his discoveries. The story of ‘Trowbridge is traced from its prehistoric and Roman beginnings up to what the author tactfully terms as ‘a post-war expansion which has increased its population from 13,844 to 22,984 in 1981’, a development which less kindly and charitable people might describe as a programme of sprawl, demolition and insensitive modifications which have done much to destroy the character of this attractive old town. There is, however, much to be thankful for, and despite all the officially sanctioned vandalism of the 1950s and 1960s, Kenneth Rogers finds it possible to end his book on a note of optimism. His final paragraph is worth quoting, as evidence both of his ability to see history in perspective and of his concern for the future of a place which means so much to him. ‘The worst, he thinks, may be over. “he older buildings that remain in the centre are now valued and looked after,’ he says, ‘and unsuitable modern buildings are at least in scale. REVIEWS The opportunity may arise to re-front them in due course — perhaps with copies of what they replaced! The success of a town, commercially or residentially, does not depend on the preservation of its historic buildings, but we are coming to realize that they are a worthwhile amenity, and an integral part of the town’s character and emotional fabric. Trowbridge’s experi- ence shows clearly that industrial and commercial success is quite compatible with the use of Victorian factories and Georgian town houses. The formation of a Civic Society is a favourable portent.’ This is a book which achieves the extremely difficult task of communicating the flavour and atmosphere of a town at the different stages of its history. This is in no way at the expense of accuracy — the documentation throughout is solid and precise — but the facts are presented in such a manner as to-bring the past alive, not to bury it. A series of walks around Trowbridge, armed with Mr Rogers’s book, would be a rewarding experience and, as with their other Town Books, that is probably what the publishers have in mind. One might add, as a final tribute to the author of The Book of Trowbridge, that his attitude to his native town is never anything but balanced. He does not belong to that irritatingly sentimental, my-town-my-county- right-or-wrong breed of local historian, from which we have suffered so much. Trowbridge in the 18th and 19th centuries may have been prosperous but, as Mr Rogers takes trouble to remind us, it struck visitors as dirty, shabby, socially backward, noisy, smelly and dangerous. The contemporary jingle, ‘Narrow streets and dirty people’, got it about right. The streets are no longer especially narrow, nor the people dirty, but Mr Rogers would have wished, no doubt, that the widen- ing and cleaning up processes had not been quite so brutal and unimaginative. KENNETH HUDSON Alison Hartfield. A Mile for the Milk.. Illustrated by Judith Wall. Shirley, Warwicks: K. A. F. Brewin Books, 1984. 172 pages, 27 drawings. This book tells of a tranquil and lovingly recorded childhood in the 1920s and 1930s in a north Wiltshire village below the downs. It is a small book about a small place but no less valuable for that. It does not attempt to be more than a documentary account, and so it is not primarily intended to make the daughters of the schoolmistress come alive as cha- racters. Not for them the rumbustuous happenings which coloured the young life of Laurie Lee not many 269 miles across ‘the Vale’ in the Cotswolds, so vividly brought to life in Cider with Rosie. By contrast Alison Hartfield’s is a quiet record of a sensitive little girl whose sharp perceptions brought her many delights now available to few children in today’s world. Touch, smells, colours and sounds are keenly recalled and shared with us: the wonder of finding little bleached skulls in the molehills, the intimacy of hedgerows and meadows profuse with bright spring flowers, the visits to the near-by downs, the quarry where ammonites could be found, the smell of new-mown hay, the clanging on the anvil as the stamping cart-horses were shod, and the simple household and garden duties of collecting fruit, eggs, mushrooms and nuts; all these small happenings are laid out for us to recall or at least imagine. Perhaps as daughters of ‘Governess’ these children were a little removed from the others in the village, and perplexed by the strong Wiltshire accents of the older people; they were both partakers and observers. The slow pace of village life has been so fully recalled because it was so much treasured. Imagination is here, perhaps, more than curiosity. She was surprised by her sister finding what looked like a ‘petrified sea-urchin’ — what in fact is commonly called a ‘shepherds crown’ in much of the southern chalk country. (For years the reviewer wondered at this name till many years later she saw the shepherds on the Romanesque carvings at Autun wearing conical woollen caps with parallel rows of holes up the sides, and at last understood.) But the astounding realization that the downs were once under the sea does not seem to have moved the author; rather she was stirred by the minutiae of the natural world. There are many things stored uncomprehendingly in childrens’ minds to be brought out and re-discovered later. A. H. remembers how ‘the sonorous words of Bible and sermon rolled pleasurably over my head, kindling sparks of barely grasped meaning here and there at first, moving slowly towards understanding later’. How well worth the wait for such magic as the Authorised Version and Shakespeare, and how much we lose by ‘understanding’ too soon, unaware even of our impoverishment. In this book there is little change of mood but therein lies its honesty. Such changes come as slowly as the seasons in the deep country, and the truth of these recollections, without distortion or over-emphasis, makes this a convincing document for which we are grateful. Judith Wall’s pen drawings are admirably suited to the text. MARGARET GUIDO 270 THE WILTSHIRE ARCLIEARKOLOGICAL AND NATURAL PIS PORY MAGAZINE Frank Sawyer and Sidney Vines. Frank Sawyer, Man of the Riverside. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984. 204 pages, numerous illustrations by George Woodford. £9.95. Frank Sawyer was born in the Mill Cottage at Bulford Bridge and grew up near the river, with the roar of water filling his ears as it cascaded through the near-by hatches. He left school at 13 to go to work but he was never happy far from the river and when, in 1928, he was appointed keeper to the Services Dry Fly Fishing Association at Netheravon it was all he ever wanted as a job. He tended a 62-mile stretch of the Avon for more than half a century and, when he died in 1980, he died alone and peacefully on the bank of the river he loved so much. Boyhood spent in and out of the river gave Sawyer a knowledge, eventually unrivalled, of all the river animals. Always learning, always seeking truth, out of his first wages, £2 a week in the early 1930s, he bought a second-hand microscope so that he could study the insects on which the fish fed. As a boy he had caught pike with a wire noose, grayling with a withy stick and a lump of bread, trout with his bare hands; fly-fishing seemed boring, the fishermen seldom caught anything. Later, his skill at inventing, tying and casting artificial nymphs brought worldwide fame; wherever men fished, Sawyer’s name was known, his supremacy acknowledged, his friendship sought. He travelled to fish in other countries, wrote books and articles and, during the 1950s and 1960s, took part in a number of BBC television outside broadcasts, some of the first nature programmes ever televised. He was awarded the MBE in 1978 and in 1979, at the Bowood Game Fair, he was presented by the Prince of Wales with the Country Landowners’ Association long-service medal. Yet Sawyer remained essentially untouched by fame or by the attentions of rich men. He recognized and understood man’s true relationship = with — and dependence on his environment, believed in the value of his own work and was content with the simplicity of his life. Always compassionate, in his work to improve the quality of the river he cared for the wild animals too, seeing them, not as competitors to be destroyed but as indicators whose presence showed that the river was healthy; they were part of his environment, earned their place and had rights equal or prior to his own. Cruelty was never tolerated, no animal left to suffer, no fish allowed to flap unkilled on the river bank; and for 23 years he worked on the design of a humane trap which, in 1958, at last resulted in the gin becoming illegal. He recognized too the compulsion to fish which boys have; he remembered being chased away by the old keeper and when in due course he succeeded to the post of keeper he encouraged children to the river, arranging courses for them to learn to fish. The book is composed of a selection of Frank Sawyer’s own writings — childhood memories, boyish scrapes, family outings, natural history observations, descriptions of improvements to the river, articles on fishing, instructions for tying artificial nymphs. Some of these excerpts were previously unpublished, some were taken from his books, some from articles published in the Fie/d and Trout and Salmon. Sidney Vines has assembled them, adding his own notes and linking passages in a style which blends harmoniously with that of Sawyer, producing a narrative which flows as steadily as the river itself, revealing as it goes the history, character and philosophy of a remarkable man. For Frank Sawyer was far more than a fisherman; he was a man who contributed by his industry to the advancement of knowledge and of humane standards, and who imposed on others by his own example of integrity and compassion the highest standards of human behaviour. ‘Uhis wholly delightful and readable book does full justice to Frank Sawyer’s achievements and will be read with pleasure by many, whether or not they are fishermen. MARION BROWNE John Goodyere. Minding our Manors: Notes of a Wiltshire Landowner. Privately published, 1983 (distributed by Element Books, ‘Visbury). 135 pages. £2.50 paperback. The author starts by quoting G. M. Trevelyan: “Uhe landowning classes of the early nineteenth century lived a life more completely and finely human than any perhaps that has been lived by a whole class since the days of the free men of Athens. [ agree with Trevelyan — I consider that the life of the great I8th-century and early 19th-century English country houses and estates expressed the highest achievements of English culture. In his introduction our author says that landowners today ‘belong to the rearguard of our civilization, dragging behind them a great rag-bag of the past; their houses, the old furnishings and portraits, not to mention any number of old-fashioned notions that are not quite without merit.’ This really whetted my appetite and [ looked for- ward with the greatest anticipation to the pleasures which I was about to enjoy. But, alas, the author, after this propitious start, has written a dull book. He is obviously an eccentric man and keeps mounting his REVIEWS own particular hobby-horses and taking us on long rides, of interest to him, but not, I regret to say, to us. One feels sadly, that in spite of all his right ideas and excellent intentions, his estate is a mess. The rents of landed estates, great or small, always through history, have had to be ploughed back into the estate to maintain it. The spending money of the family has had to come from outside the estate; once the family starts to spend their rents on themselves, the end is in sight. The landowner therefore either has to have a sufficient private income, or work in business or the city (and just weekend on his estate) or farm his land in hand, or live in penury and exploit his wife and family’s goodwill. In the 18th century one could do the latter with equanimity. Nowadays one 1s likely to have a full revolt on one’s hands. The last paragraph of the author’s book again strikes just the right note, which makes one regret even more the good book one has missed between the first page and the last. ‘My attitude enables the landowner to identify with the community in which he lives, they are both part and parcel of the same thing, their interests are identical. When this is achieved the result is a balanced community in which a man can live in harmony with his neighbours despite the inevitable disparities in wealth and education and this is surely a strong defence against all the vagaries of man’s making be they political, egalitarian, or ideological that threaten to rend our world apart.’ Shorter notices It is good to have Paul Ashbee’s standard book on Earthen Long Barrows' back in print, but a pity this second edition is simply a reprint of the 1970 edition, with a long preface to explain what has changed since the text, which is reprinted without amendment, was correct. The preface has a lot of new ground to cover — much of it stimulated by Ashbee’s own work — and takes a cautious line, emphasizing how often long barrows do not seem primarily to have been funerary monuments, and setting out their social context, in the Renfrew manner. Ashbee firmly eschews the wilder kinds of ideological interpretations, and concentrates 1. Paul Ashbee. The Earthen Long Barrow in Britain: an Introduction to the Study of the Funerary Practice and Culture of the Neolithic People of the Third Millennium BC. 2nd edition. Norwich: Geo Books, 1984. Alison Borthwick and John Chandler. Our Chequered Past: the Archaeology of Salisbury. Vrowbridge: Wiltshire Library & Museum Service, 1984. £3.50 (paperback). 3. The Wroughton [listory Group. Wroughton History part 2. Wroughton, 1984. nN 271 instead on topography and the relation of long barrows to first neolithic settlement. He explores further the rectangular structures under barrows, in wood (as he first recognized), turf, and stone, and reminds again — as does Barker’s paper on the Wiltshire neolithic mounds in this number of WAM — how arbitrary is the distinction between earthen long barrows megalithic chambered cairns, as we inherited it from the Victorians. Alison Borthwick and John Chandler’s report on The Archaeology of Salisbury’ grew out of a planning brief for Salisbury District Council. Partly this published report remains just that: a summary of archaeological knowledge and archaeological ignorance about Salisbury, from New Sarum back to Old Sarum, and beyond to earliest times. From this 1s worked out an archaeological strategy of what has been lost and what can be found. It is an exemplary example of a fuller role, now generally recognized, of archaeology and archaeological salvage in planning the future of English towns; and it is not the survey’s fault that, as almost everywhere, the resources simply do not exist to take up that role whole-heartedly. The Wroughton History Group have completed their splendid Wroughton History’ (reviewed in last year’s WAM 78: 143-4) in a second volume. Liz Price’s book on the Bath Freestone‘ quarries — or rather mines, since almost all the workings are entirely underground rather than opencast — is a well- illustrated survey with many clear maps. The pictures have reproduced very well, considering that the book is photocopied rather than printed. After a summary of the geology of Bath stone, the book looks at history and quarrying methods, before working through the main workings area by area, setting out what has gone and what is still visible on the surface or accessible underground. Turret clocks’ are, by the South Wiltshire Industrial Archaeology Society’s definition, the clocks with public dials or striking bells on churches, schools, public buildings, and so on. The 16-page booklet lists the 58 existing clocks in the Salisbury area, setting out in a paragraph on each what is known of its history. and +. Liz Price. Bath Freestone Workings. Bath: Resurgence Press (31 Waterford Park, Radstock, Bath B.A3 3°VS). £3.50, spiral bound. South Wiltshire Industrial Archaeology Society. \ Survey of Turret Clocks tn the Salisbury Area. Salisbury, 1983. £1.70, (stapled), from D. Jackson, 2 Byways Close, Salisbury SPI 2QS. wT D2 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEROLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Philip Carter’s History of Trowbridge schools’ looks at the years from 1800 (when there was just one Free School) to 1870, when the new Education Act found ‘Trowbridge well provided with elementary schools. “The population, almost doubling between 1801 and 1831, scarcely changed thereafter, so the pressure was greatest in the early years. Response came from the Church of England through the National schools, from the Nonconformists, from private individuals during the 1820s and 1830s, and, crucially, from the Sunday schools. Each of these is examined in turn, and the book then gives a vivid portrait of daily lite in St James’s Girls’ National School, using the school’s log-book from the 1800s, almost the only informal record of the period to survive. Mark Bowden’s pamphlet on General Pitt- Rivers, intended to complement the new display in Salisbury Museum, is one of a series planned by the Museum. The General is a large man to encompass in 12 pages, but this is as efficiently done as it may be, and the pictures are good. David Backhouse’s history of North Wiltshire pubs’ is a real enthusiast’s job, 80 small pages packed with details and = photographs and appallingly comprehensive, from the Sun in Highworth (open 1851, closed by 1861) to the Fox in Purton (open 1841, closed by 1851 — the ten-yearly census 1s invaluable as a 6. Philip ©. Carter. A /latory of Elementary Schooling in Trowbridge before the 1870 Education Net. Vrowbridge: Wiltshire Library & Mluscum Service, 1984. (Wiltshire Monograph, no. +.) £3.75 (spiralbound). 7. Mark Bowden. General Pitt Rivers: the Father of Screntific \rchacology. Salisbury: Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, 1984. 12 (stapled). source: and there is duly a photograph of the former Fox as it now stands). It is nicely produced, packed with facts, and lightly written. The cover has a splen- did picture of an Ancient Wiltshire drinker, with magnificent beer belly. Early Cinema in Chippenham, by the Sheldon School,’ does not pretend to be ‘a history of the cinema industry in Chippenham’: rather it is a little pamphlet, the result of a project for 13- to 16-year-olds, as they worked a little history out from interviews, documents, books, and the standing buildings; history, in fact, as it deserves to be — a practice to be learnt and not just results to be taught. The history of the cinema industry in Chippenham is not a large story. It begins with a projected slide of the Battle of Spion Kop (red handker- chiefs to simulate gun flashes). The picture show properly arrived in 1911, when the collapse of a roller-skating craze left the public hall without a purpose. Then came the Palace (‘the idol of the masses — Douglas Fairbanks’), and after it the Gaumont (under the slogan ‘Progress’; they sniffed when it received the honour of a mayoral ceremonial opening). In uncon- scious imitation of the cliff-hanger spirit, the booklet never actually says what happened to the Gaumont. Devotees will have to go to Chippenham to find out. CHRISTOPHER CHIPPINDALE 8. David W. Backhouse. [ome Brewed: a History of Brewing and Public Houses in. North Wiltshire. Swindon: C.AMR A Swindon Branch. 9, Sheldon School. Lar/y Chippenham 1911-1936. Chippenham: Sheldon School, 1984. Available from Philip Morgan, Department of Adult Education, University of Keele, Keele, Staffordshire SVS SBC. Crema | | | Obituaries Major John Noel Duxbury, \Mc, 1D, MA. John was born in 1911, the youngest child of a Church of England priest. He was educated at St John’s, Leather- head, and at Wadham, where he read history and rowed for his college. Before the war he taught history and classics at Cranford and at the Imperial Services College, Windsor, where he was also a rowing coach. During the war he served in the 2nd (Bucks.) Battalion of the Oxford and Bucks. Light Infantry. Two months before D Day, in April 1944, he married Marion Audrey Biles; thus in 1984 they celebrated 40 years of marriage. He fought with his Battalion from Normandy to Germany, winning the Military Cross in the Reichswald towards the close of the war. After the war he served for a time in the Control Commission for Germany, and then joined the Army Education Corps, in which his postings included that of Housemaster of the BAOR School at Wilhelmshaven, Chief Education Officer in) Aden, and Deputy Commandant of the School of Preliminary Education at Corsham. He retired from the Army in the rank of Major in 1965. It was at Corsham and always afterwards that Wiltshire became his home, and Wiltshire owes a great debt of gratitude to its adopted son: first for his 10 years at Tutor/Organizer of the Devizes Branch College of Further Education, and latterly, from 1977 to June 1984, as Secretary of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society. While working at the Devizes College he greatly extended the scope of adult education in both the town and surrounding villages. He Roundway Hospital, worked with the police cadets, and is remembered for the support he gave to the arts in Devizes, above all to music. He was very popular with his staff, with students and with his advisory committee, and developed the social side of the College lite. His experience in so many facets of education and started classes at administration enabled him to preserve a substantial degree of independence for the work of the Devizes Branch College. Meanwhile, he also served as a tutor for correspondence courses in English literature and language for the London School of Journalism, work on which he was still occupied just before he died. John’s work in Devizes over the last 18 years reflected the enthusiasm and sense of service of his patient, gentle, reserved, and forbearing yet firm, determined and courageous character. Indeed the courage which in earlier years won him the Military Cross was never failing in his approach to experiences which had their share of difficulty and sadness. ‘The Society was deeply indebted to John for his loyal and resolute support during seven of the busiest years in its history. His attitude to his work showed a dedication and generosity of spirit which is rare. He was always willing to take on extra unpaid tasks, such as his work as Honorary Secretary of the Wiltshire Buildings Record. Reaching an age when most want rather less to do, John sought out, and indeed seemed to need, work from which he got great satisfaction. Orlando’s encomium of Adam in As You Like It is particularly appropriate to John’s work for the Society — ‘the constant service of the antique world where service sweat for duty not for mead’. Norris Paul Thompson Fs.\, who died peacefully at home on 21 October 1984, was born at Gravesend. He came from a strictly nonconformist family, but was himself always something of a rebel. He had a long business career, first with Harrods, then with the family firm in Woking. From 1950 onwards he attended many courses in archaeology and became a keen amateur. As an enthu- siastic volunteer he took part in many excavations, the most memorable of which was at Masada in 1964. A member of the Surrey Archaeological Society, he served on a number of its committees. In 1959 he joined the Wiltshire Archaeological Society and in 1961 bought a cottage in Wiltshire, so that he could continue with his archaeological interests when he retired. The Society benefitted greatly from his clear-minded expertise on its Council and sub-committees and from his organizational skill and energetic enthusiasm in the field. As well as volunteering for excavations, he initiated and undertook many exploratory projects: Huish church and its surroundings, the Pewsey Vale project, the enclosure on Pewsey Hill, the Saxon church at Alton Barnes, come to mind. Norris rogramme Committee and was responsible for some For many years was chairman of the P welcomed innovations, in particular the introduction of regular coach excursions to London and longer tours to places of interest first in England and later in France. As field archacology gradually came to play a lesser THE WILTSHIRE ARCEEXEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE part in his life, he gave his time and service to the Council for the Protection of Rural England as chairman of the Kennett Group and became an active volunteer, measuring and recording for the Wiltshire Buildings Record. Shortly after his arrival in Wiltshire, he, together 274 with his wife Marion, founded the Pewsey Vale Thea- tre Club and he remained its chairman and organizer until shortly before his death. Norris will be greatly missed by all whose life has been enriched by his kindness, humour and generosity. Index Adam’s Grave barrow, [1-12 agaricales, 214-15 Aldbourne, 254, 255, 257 Amesbury barrows: excavated by Ashbee, 39-91; excavated by Stukeley, 244-6; (barrow 58) 40, 42, 43-6, 67-73, 80-1, (barrow 61) 40, 42, 46-52, 76-9, 81-2; (barrow 61a) 40, 42, 52-63, 73-6, 82; (barrow 72) 40, 42, 63, 67, 79-80, 82 Amesbury church, 248-50 antler, 104 ascomycetes, 215-16, 216-17 Ashbee, P.: paper on Amesbury barrows, 39-91, Earthen Long Barrows noticed, 271 Atkinson, R.J.C., note on Stukeley barrow-digging, 244-6 Avebury Down barrow, 18 Avebury G 21 barrow, 20-1 Avebury G 30a barrow, 24 Avebury region, long mounds, 7-38 Avebury village stone structure, 24 awl, 76, 80, 82, 104 Backhouse, D., Home Brewed, noticed, 272 Barker, C.T., paper on Avebury long mounds, 7-38 barrows: long, 7-38; round, 39-91, 92-100, 244-6 Baydon, 255 beads, 73-5, 80, 81, 82, 104, 139-40 beaver tooth, 75, 81 Beckhampton Penning stone circle, 24-5 Beckhampton Plantation barrow, 25 Beckhampton Road barrow, 21 Berwick St Leonard, 177 Bishops Canning G 23 barrow, 25-6 Bishops Canning G 81 barrow, 26 Bishops Cannings, 257-8 bluestones, Stonehenge, 178-83, 246 Bojko, A.-M., report on Charlton conservation, 149-53 bone: animal, 88, 99, 246; human, 8+7, 98-9, 143-5, 245-6; worked, 80, 104 Borthwick, A. Archaeology of Salisbury noticed, 271 Bowden, M., General Pitt-Rivers, noticed, 272 Bowerchalke, 254 Bowood, 247 Bradby, F., note on Devizes electoral history, 241-3 Bradford-on-Avon, 235-7, 255 Bratton, 231, 255 Britford, 257, 258 Britton, John, 250-3 Broad. [linton, 258 | ce Bromham, 255 Bromham G 3 barrow, 21 brooches, 139, 228-31, 256-8 Browne, [lenry, 252 Browne, M.: paper on dormice, 206-13; review by, 270 buckles and belt fittings, 138-9, 257 Bull Bridge, 237-8 burgesses of Devizes, 241-3 burials, see bone, human Burl, A., paper on Geoffrey of Monmouth and Stonehenge, 178-83 Butterfield, William, 248-50 Calne Without, 22, 254 calotypes, 247-8 Carruthers, W.J., report on Clarendon Park charcoal, 99 Carter, P., History of Trowbridge Schools, noticed, 272 Castle Copse villa, 233-5 Catherall, P.D., et al. (ed.), The Southern Feeder, reviewed, 26445 Cazel, F.A. and A.P. (ed.), Rolls of 1225 and 1232, reviewed, 266 ‘Celtic Cabinet’, 250-3 Chafin family, 187, 189 Chandler, J., Archaeology of Salisbury noticed, 271 Chandler, J., Register, reviewed, 266-7 charcoal, 88-9, 99 Charles II, King, 187-8, 190, 191 Charlton Plantation cemetery and prehistoric pits, 109-54 charters, Saxon, 157-8 chatelaine set, 140 Cherry, J., note on [ill Deverill medieval ring, 238 Chicklade, 177 Chippenham, 226-8, 254 Chippindale, C.: note on Britton ‘Celtic Cabinet’, 250-3; reviews by, 262, 271-2 Chittoe, 254 Christian Maiford, 254 Clarendon, 257 Clarendon Park barrow, 92-100 clay pipes, 243 cloth, see textiles Clutton-Brock, J., report on Amesbury large animal remains, 88 Cocke, V.: note on Butterfield Amesbury font, 248-50; review article by, 259-61 Codford St Mary, 255 coin hoard, 240 Cold Kitchen [fill, 228-31 276 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NYPURAL LIS TORY MAGAZINE Colerne, 256 conservation methods, 149-53 cosmetics and jewellery, 140, see a/so brooches, rings Cotman, John Sell, 252 Cotswold-Severn magalithic tombs, 27-37 Coy, J., report on Clarendon Park animal remains, 99 cremations, see bone, human Crowfoot, E., report on Charlton textiles, 140-3 dagger and sheath, 67-9, 80-1 Davies, S.M., paper on Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Charlton, 109-54 Dean, D.D., paper on Gideon Mantell, 219-24 Delair, J.B., paper on Gideon Mantell, 219-24 Devil’s Den, 13-14 Devizes, 239, 241-3 Devizes museum, 247-8, 250-3 Donhead St Andrew, 164, 168 dormice, 206—13 Downton, see Charlton Plantation Duxbury, J.N., obituary, 273 Eagles, B.N., note on Wilton timberwork, 237-8 East Kennet, 256 East Kennet barrow, 11 Easton Down barrow, 19 Easton Grey, 255 Ebbesbourne Wake, 255 Edington, 255, 257, 258 elections, 241-3 Elrington, C.R., review by, 266 Erlestoke/East Coulston, 255, 256, 258 Fasham, P.J., paper on Clarendon Park barrow, 92—L00 Fison, Dr E.T., 202-5 flint, 254-5: Amesbury/Stonehenge barrows, 70-3, 79, 82, 245; Charlton, 148-9; Chippenham, 226-8; West Kennet, 225-6 font from Amesbury church, 248-50 fossils, 219-24 fungi, 214-18 fungi imperfecti, 217-18 Furze Hill barrow, 26 Gale, R., report on Amesbury charcoal, 88-9 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 178-83 Gillingham Forest, 16+ Gingell, C., paper on 1984 Potterne excavations, 101-8 glass, 140 Goddard, Canon, 239-40 Goodyere, Minding our Alanors, reviewed, 270-1 Grafton, 255, 258 Great Bedwyn, 233-5 Great Western Railway, 222-4 Guido, M., review by, 269 handaxe, 225-6 Hardenhuish, 254 Harding, P., report on Charlton flint, 148-9 Harvey, R., note on Bradford and Westwood Charters, 235-7 Ilaslam, J. (ed.), Anglo-Savon Towns, reviewed, 265-6 Ilartheld, A., Afile for the Milk, reviewed, 269 Hattatt, R., note on Cold Kitchen Tlill La Tene brooch, 228-31 Heale, 184-91 [enderson, J.: report on Charlton human remains, 143-5, report on Clarendon Park human remains, 98—9 Henig, M., Note on Roman silver rings, 231-2 Heywood, 227 Highworth, 256, 257, 258 Hill Deverill, 238 Hills, C., review by 265-6 Hindley, J.B., paper on fungi, 214-18 Lindon, 177 Holgate, R.: note on West Kennet handaxe, 225-6, review by, 264-5 Horslip barrow, 22 Horshp 2 barrow, 26 Horton Down barrow, 20 Hostetter, E., note on excavations at Great Bedwyn, 23: Howell, George, 243 Iludson, K., review by, 268-9 Ilyde, Katherine, and family, 184-91 hymenomycetes, 215 Imber, 256 Ireland, 178-83 iron pyrites, 70, 81 Jackson, R.H., paper on Tisbury Saxon bounds, 164-78 Jewell, P.A., report on Amesbury small-vertebrate remains, 88 Keepax, C.A., report on Amesbury human remains, 8+7 Kempson, E.G.H., note on Vicar’s Library, Marlborough, 250 Kildare, 181-2 Kings Play Down barrow, 22-3 Kington St Michael, 254 Kitchen Barrow, 20 knives and scramasax, 137-8 La Téne, 228-31 Lacock, 247 Lambourne Ground barrow, 23 Langley Burrell, 254 Lassam, R.E., note on Fox Talbot calotypes, 247-8 Laverstock, 255 Lawson, A.J., paper on 1984 Potterne excavations, 101-8 library, Vicars of St Mary, Marlborough, 250 Lisle family, 190 Little Cheverell, 257 Lockeridge barrow, 23 Longbridge Deverill, 258 Longstones barrow, 23 Luckington, 257 | | | Saxon: bounds and charters, 157-8, 165-77, 235— INDEX Mantell, Gideon, 219-24 Manton Down barrow, 12-13 Marlborough, 239-41, 250, 259-61 medieval finds, 257-8: ring, 238; timberwork, 237-8 mesolithic, 226-8, 254-5 Millbarrow, 15-16 Miller, J., paper on Katherine Hyde of Heale, 18491 Monkton Down barrow, 20 Norgate, M., note on Howell, pipemaker, 243 Ogbourne St Andrew, 255, 257, 258 Old Chapel barrow, 17-18 Oldbury Hill barrow, 18-19 oomycetes, 215 palaeolithic, 225-6, 226-8 Palmer, D.R., Danebury, reviewed, 263+ Passmore, A.D., 239-41 Peek, R.P.A., report on Amesbury faience beads, 89 Pelteret, D.A.E., paper on Anglo-Saxon roads, 155-63 Pewsey, 255, 257 pipes, clay, 243 Pitt, William, the Younger, 196-8 Potterne, 101-8, 257, 258 pottery, 255-8: Amesbury/Stonehenge barrows, 70, 73, 76-79, 80, 81, 82, 245, 246; Charlton Plantation, 148; Clarendon barrow, 98; Potterne, 104-8 Preshute, 260 Price, L., Bath Freestone, noticed, 271 Purton, 257 Pynsent, Sir William, Ist baronet, 192-6 Pynsent, Sir William, 2nd baronet, 196-8 Queensberry, Duke of, 198 Ramsbury, 259-61 rhytismatales, 216 rings, 231-2, 238 Rivers-Pollock, Hamilton, 200 roads, Saxon, 155-63 Robinson, P., note on Marlborough spoons, 239-41 rodents — dormice, 206-13 Rogers, K.H.: Book of Trowbridge, reviewed, 268-9; review by, 268 Roman: finds, 255-7; rings, 231-2 | Roughridge Hill barrow, 23 Roundway, 257, 258 Roundway G Sab barrow, 26 Salisbury, 258 Salisbury museum, new displays reviewed, 262-3 | Salisbury, school welfare in, 201-5 Salmon, William, 198-9 Sawyer, Frank, reviewed, 270 7; Charlton cemetery, 109-54; roads, 155-63 school welfare in Salisbury, 201-5 LIT Seagry, 226 Sedgehill, 177 Selkey, 259-61 Semley, 164, 177 Shaftesbury, 164, 176 Shalbourne, 255, 257, 258 shale, 98, 104 sheet bronze, 104 Sheldon School, Chippenham Cinema, noticed, 272 shell, 73-5, 81 Shelving Stone, 16-17 Shepherd’s Shore barrow, 19 shield boss, 136-7 silver spoons, 239-41 Slaughterford, 254 Slee, A.T.C., paper on Urchfont Manor, 192-200 Smith, W., review by, 266-7 South Street barrow, 23-4 South Wiltshire Turret Clocks, noticed, 271 spearheads, 137 spoons, silver, 239-41 stake-circle under barrow, 55-8 Stonehenge, 178-83, 246 Stonehenge barrows, see Amesbury Stratton St Margaret, 257 Stukeley, William, 244-6 Swallowclitfe, 255 Swindon, 220-4, 257, swords, 136 258 Talbot, W.H. Fox, 247-8 Talman, William, 193—5 textiles, 69-70, 81, 140-3 Thompson, N.P., obituary, 273-4 Timmins, T.C.B., (ed.), Register of John Chandler, reviewed, 266-7 Tisbury, 164-77 Tucker, J.J., note on palaeolithic and mesolithic Chippenham sites, 226-8 Tyldesley, J., note on West Kennet handaxe, 225-6 Upavon, 255, 257, 258 Urchfont Manor, 192-200 uredinales, 215 ustilaginales, 215 Victoria County History, vol. 12, review article, 259-61 Vines, S., Frank Sawyer, reviewed, 270 Waden Fill barrow, 26 Wanborough, 255 Wanborough/Liddington Lill barrow, 27 Wardour, 164 Warminster, 238, 243 Warren, S.E., report on Amesbury faience beads, 89 Watson- Taylor, George and Simon, 199-200 West Kennet barrow, 8-11 West Kennet handaxe, 225-6 278 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL EHSTORY MAGAZINE ‘Wiltshire, Mary’, 239 West Woods barrow, 18 Winterslow, 257 Westwood, 237 Wilson, A.R., Cocklebury, reviewed, 268 wooden vessels, 140 Wilson, D.R., review by, 263-4 Woodhouse, J., paper on Salisbury school welfare, 201-5 Wilton, 258 Woodward, P.J. , note on Wilton timberwork, 237-8 Wilton ‘Concord’, 164, 165-8 Wroughton, 257, 258 Wilton: rings from 231-2; timberwork at, 237-8 Wroughton History, noticed, 271 oie, SS ccc