Professor Martin Biddle

This three-volume work offers a comprehensive study of Winchester’s three Anglo-Saxon minsters – Old Minster, New Minster and Nunnaminster/St Mary’s Abbey – together with their cemeteries, domestic buildings, and elements absorbed into the Norman cathedral including the setting for the cult of St Swithun. Scientific evidence, and documentary, architectural, and artistic sources are woven into the results of the major excavations carried out on the sites of Old and New Minster between 1961 and 1970, and later work on Nunnaminster/St Mary’s Abbey, to present a new synthesis of Winchester’s ecclesiastical landscape. Volume 1 explores the archaeology of the first church, its documented origins in the mid-seventh century, and north Italian inspiration. It traces the architectural and liturgical development of Old Minster into a major complex celebrating the cult of St Swithun, its design inspired by the Tomb of Christ in Jerusalem. Documentary sources for the foundation of New Minster, the memorial church for the house of Wessex, on the Frankish model of Saint-Denis, are examined; archaeological evidence, though less extensive, confirms its final scale and magnificence before its documented removal to Hyde Abbey. The destruction and robbing of the two minsters during the building of the Norman cathedral are detailed. Volume 2 analyses burial practices in the Old and New Minster cemeteries, and their British and Continental parallels. Their evolution into the medieval Paradise cemetery follows, with the later ‘memorial court’ focused on St Swithun’s original burial place. Key finds are summarized, including gold braids from the probable grave of the ninth-century prince Athelstan. The architectural setting in Winchester Cathedral of St Swithun’s cult is examined. The archaeology and history of Nunnaminster and its successor St Mary’s Abbey are explored. The wider context for the Minsters as part of the evolution of Winchester as royal power centre is summarized. An appendix reviews cross-plan churches in the Byzantine empire and Europe. In addition to the illustrations with the text, Volume 3 contains detailed plans and sections, photographs, phasing charts, and images of manuscripts, artefacts and comparative churches.

Over six thousand objects were recovered during the Winchester excavations of 1961 to 1971 – by far the most extensive corpus of stratified and datable medieval objects yet presented from a single city. Martin Biddle and the team of eighty-three contributors assembled by the Winchester Research Unit have used this material to investigate not only the industries and arts, but the economic, cultural, and social life of medieval Winchester. Their findings are being published in two parts: the first part, by Katherine Barclay, will deal with the pottery remains; and this second part in two volumes by Martin Biddle covers all the objects from the finest products of the Anglo-Saxon goldsmith’s skill to the iron tenter-hooks of the cloth industry. Martin Biddle’s study of the objects identifies change through time, and traces variation across the broad social scale – from cottage to palace – represented in the excavated sites. Using the objects as evidence for the economy of the medieval city, it also throws new light on some of the great questions of medieval industry and artistic production: amongst them the development of the textile industry, the origins of wire-drawing and the manufacture of pins, the beginnings of window-glass production, and the earliest glass painting. These objects are an essential part of the evidence for the development and changing character of the excavated sites to be published in forthcoming volumes of Winchester Studies on the Minsters. To ensure complete integration between the objects and the sites, every object in this volume is related to the context in which it was found and a concordance provides a detailed conspectus phase by phase of each of the twenty sites excavated between 1961-71, and of the objects found in each phase.