A Neolithic Polished Flint Axe From East Wear Bay, Folkestone

Whilst checking for any further Iron Age and Roman material having been eroded from the cliffs at East Wear Bay. Folkestone, below the site of the Roman villa, following a series of violent storms in December 2013, the writer discovered part of a Neolithic polished flint axe (Fig. 1). The axe was found in one of a number of temporary streams which had developed as a result of heavy rain, and which had cut channels into the beach at the base of the slumped cliff. It exhibits some evidence of water-rolling, suggesting that it may have been on the beach for some time rather than having been recently brought down by the stream. On a further visit a few days later, it was noted that the channels had by then disappeared and the appearance of the beach at this point was much changed.

What survives is a mid-section across the axe, probably towards the butt end. although neither end is now present. The flint is grey, darker on one side than the other, with some brown staining. The dimensions are:

• Length: 69.0nun (maximum surviving)

• Width: 40.0-47.5mm

• Thickness: 26.5nmi (maximum)

• Weight: 121gm

A number of original (pre-polishing?) flake scars are present along both edges. Longitudinal striations caused by the polishing of the surfaces are visible on both faces and a small patch of surviving cortex has also been smoothed. Both edges have the standard squaring which prevented splitting of the haft. The butt end has been [pg283]broken away by a single blow. The cutting edge may have broken off during use, for what survives at this end shows evidence of crude reworking at some later stage.

Neolithic flint material has been recovered during recent excavations on the East Cliff at Folkestone, immediately above the findspot of this axe and it may well be that it derived from here, significant erosion having taken place over a very long period of time.[fn1] In addition, a Neolithic chipped flint axe has also previously been recovered from the base of the cliff (A. Weston, pers. comm.).

Further incomplete polished axes have been recorded from the high ground to the north of Folkestone, notably along Crete Road East near the escarpment of the North Downs and within 2km of East Wear Bay.[fn2] A near-complete polished flint axe was recovered in 2012 during work ahead of construction at the Battle of Britain memorial at Capel.[fn3]

The current find has been recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme, reference KENT-19465E.

A Previously Unrecorded Prehistoric Barrow on Coxhill Mount, River, Near Dover

During an archaeological survey of Kearsney Abbey Park at River, near Dover, an artificial mound was identified on Coxhill Mount, overlooking the Dour valley. (NGR TR 28729 43427, centred.) The weathered profile clearly indicated that this was a long-established landscape feature (Fig. 1), which could potentially represent a previously unrecognised round barrow (Parfitt 2015).

As part Dover District Council’s Kearsney Parks enhancement project, it was possible (in April 2018) to undertake some limited investigation of the site by means of two hand-dug evaluation trenches. The work was conducted by local volunteers, led by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, and provided sufficient evidence to show that the mound was indeed a round barrow of prehistoric date. As such, it joins a number of other similar monuments surviving on the sides of the Dour valley and adjacent ridge-tops (Grinsell 1992) but there are no specific antiquarian records noting the present site.

Located on the summit of Coxhill Mount some 325m west of River parish church, the mound occupies the north-eastern end of a chalkland ridge, which is defined on tluee sides by steep slopes associated with the Dour valley system. Today, the site is partially covered by scrub but this has developed since the Second World War. There is no evidence that the area has ever been ploughed, nor does the mound appear ever to have been dug into.[pg284]

The mound itself lies on sloping ground and stands at an elevation of between 78.25 and 82.50m aod. It was seemingly deliberately situated at the break of slope on the hillside to take full advantage of the natural fall of the land here. Thus, it is most impressive when viewed from downhill, on the north-eastern side, where it appears 2-3m high (Fig. 1); on the uphill south-west side, however, it merges imperceptibly with the summit of the ridge.

The mound is roughly circular in shape, with a diameter of about 25-26m. There are no surface indications of any enclosing ditch or outer bank but the two evaluation trenches, cut around the edge of the mound, established that it was encircled by a flat-bottomed ditch, with an estimated diameter of about 21.50m. indicating that the visible mound has spread slightly from its original footprint.

The ditch was best preserved on the south-western, uphill side in Trench 1 where it was about 1.90m wide and 1.00m deep, with convexly sloping sides and a flat base. On the downhill side. Trench 2 showed that when the ditch was partially filled, it had been cut into by a broad irregular pit. apparently dug as a quarry to obtain flints for knapping. The filling of this pit produced large amounts of prehistoric struck flint (60kg), including a series of nodules tested for their suitability as raw material to be further worked. Stylistically, the flint assemblage appears to be later Bronze Age.

Although the construction date of the barrow is not certain, it does seem clear that [pg285]the finished monument had later seen activity concerned with the procurement and preparation of raw flint material for knapping. A mound of early Bronze Age origin which subsequently saw an episode of flint exploitation during the late Bronze Age is suggested and this follows a sequence of events generally quite well-known on such prehistoric monuments across southern Britain.

Several of the Dour valley-side banows exhibit careful utilisation of a natural hill-slope position so that they appear impressively large from the downhill side, but are hardly visible when viewed from uphill. The implication would thus seem to be that these monuments were designed to be both viewed and approached from the downliill side. It could thus follow that the settlements associated with these monuments should be sought on the lower slopes and in the bottom of the adjacent valley.

Two small fragments of Ebbsfleet style decorated pottery (c.3350-2800 bc) and part of a Neolithic chipped axe found as residual material in the upper ditch fill of Trench 1 suggest there had been occasional Neolithic activity in the area long before the barrow was erected.

Grinsell, L.V.. 1992, ‘The Bronze Age Round Banows of Kent’, PPS, 58, 355-384.

Parfitt, K., 2015, ‘Russell Gardens and Kearsney Abbey, Dover: Archaeological survey and desk-top study with outline activity plan’ (CAT archive report, April).

Parfitt, K.. 2018, ‘Evaluation trenching on Coxhill Mount. River, Dover, 2018’ (CAT archive report no. 4096; December).

The Place-Name Kent and Welsh Cant 'Rim: Wald

Pride in Kent is nothing new. The antiquary Jolm Leland celebrated the place in Henry VHI’s day, noting how ‘The King hymself was borne yn Kent [in 1491, at Greenwich]’.[fn1] Others will have the same warm feeling, especially if (like the present writer) they were educated in Kent at an outstanding school.[fn2] However, even if Kentish patriotism is not in doubt, the actual name Kent is. Its meaning has been obscure and deserves investigation.

In this paper British-Latin Cantium or Kent is discussed in the light of the Celtic languages, with the material in four parts:

We start with Cantiaci, the area’s ancient people. Leo Rivet here made a crucial [pg286]observation. Cantium, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus (in the first century bce) after Pytheas (in the late fourth), predates Cantiaci by three hundred years. On etlmological and archaeological grounds. Rivet thought it ‘unlikely that the same tribal name persisted here’ for so long. He took Cantium as coming first and Cantiaci as derived from it much later, noting that Caesar used not a tribal name but a periphrasis (ei qui Cantium incolunf). Cantiaci will be a neologism, devised when the canton emerged as ‘an artifical creation of the Romans’.[fn3] There is further evidence. When Caesar campaigned north of the Thames on his second invasion. Cassivellaunus ordered ‘four kings who ruled in Kent’ to attack the Roman ships and camp at (as now believed, see below) Ebbsfleet, by Pegwell Bay.[fn4] If Kent had petty kings loyal to an over-king, it was neither politically united nor independent. There was no king or kingdom of Cantium. Its rulers were subservient. Even when Cassivellaunus was in a desperate position, they rallied to him. They did not revolt.

Others accepted Rivet’s case. Frere called the Cantiaci the one civitas in Roman Britain ‘to adopt not a tribal but a geographical title’ and considered that, because Kent received many inunigrants in the pre-Roman period, the Cantiaci were ‘probably an artifical grouping of these elements, created by Rome’ for administrative convenience.[fn5] Hence, it seems, Rome’s lumping together of Canterbury and Rochester (as capitals of different tribelands) into one region. Those polities have a curious afterlife in Anglicanism, where their territories survive as the dioceses of Canterbury and Rochester. The Church of England preserves a governance older than Kent County Council, older even than Roman Britain.

The composite origins of the Cantiaci were further accepted by Jolm Wacher. Amongst Roman Britain’s twenty-three known tribal peoples, they were unusual in being formed from ‘a number of smaller tribes’ (the same perhaps tnie of the Regnenses around Chichester and Belgae around Winchester).[fn6] As for Caesar’s beachhead camp attacked by local kings, it was previously located near Worth, on the old coastline inland from Sandwich Bay (although archaeological discoveries in late 2017 put it to the north, at Ebbsfleet on the Isle of Thanet).[fn7] We actually know what the kings were called: Cingetorix, Catvilius. Taxirnagalus, and Segovax.[fn8]

This sketch of Kentish Britons ends with two warnings and a map. Warning number one is about communications and is implied by a history of Rochester Bridge. Until Roman engineers started busying themselves with roads. Kent’s major east-west routes were what later became called the Pilgrims’ Way at the foot of the North Downs and the Greenway south of it. Travellers on them forded the Medway respectively at Lower Hailing and four miles upstream at Aylesford.9 Progressing with their wares and flocks, they did not think of Kent as an outline on a map. They had never seen maps. What they saw was the edge of the North Downs, extending all the way to the sea. We must remember that. Warning number two concerns an altar at Colchester. It was put up by Similis. son of Attus, called ‘a tribesman of the Cantii’.[fn10] Similis. a well-to-do pagan, left Kent for a better life in Essex. But the ‘Cantii’ given has no authority. The inscription reads CANT, more logically expanded as CANTIACORUM, which had proper legal significance. As for the map, a recent one shows KANTION between Stour and Medway, with the territory of the Segontiaci in east Kent, the Ancalites in the Low Weald south-west of Ashford, the Bibroci west of them, near Tonbridge, and the Cassi to the south, in the High Weald of modern Sussex (Fig. I).[fn11] We again recall that in pre-Roman [pg287][pg288]-A XpWbayford pj-

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times Kent was (as Metternich said of Italy) a geographical expression. It was not a political unity.

After discussing Kent’s ancient peoples, we now examine Cantiaci and other Celtic names. The essential fonn here is Welsh cant ‘outer circle, rim; hoop; fence, surrounding wall, enclosure’. Good examples are Cantsfield and Cant Beck (SD 6374) on the old Lancashire-Yorkshire border, where (despite Ekwall’s doubts) a Celtic origin for the first element is certain.[fn12] Why cant might designate a stream as well as hills is explained below.

Kent itself attracted influential (if hazy) statements from Ekwall, who repeated three previous suggestions: ‘rim. border’ and thus possibly ‘border country’; ‘white’and so perhaps ‘clearing’. A better solution was yet implied by his entries for Queen Camel and the Quantock Hills, both in Somerset, both possessing long ridges, and therefore related to Gaulish cantus ‘rim of a wheel, tyre’ and Welsh cant ‘edge; wall’.[fn13] Queen Camel and the Quantocks being away from the sea. the Britons regarded their ridges as ‘rims’ like the iron tyre of a waggon. But the lesson has not been learnt for Kent.

In an important paper, some of Ekwall’s misconceptions were cleared up by Kenneth Jackson (who then added some of his own). Jackson rejected cant ‘white’ as a lexicographical ghost, preferring cant ‘rim; tyre’ for Kent, but unfortunately relating this to the peninsula’s outline on the map.[fn14] His prestige was such that the notion, alien to the way that ancient peoples considered territory, continues to mislead. Jackson later restated his belief that Cantium derived from the tribal name Cantii.[fn15] Because Rivet ruled out ideas of tribal unity in Kent, this view should likewise be discounted. Earlier assertions on Kent as ‘rim, border’ and thus ‘border country’ (a border between what? one asks) and ‘white’ and so ‘clearing’ (a very large one, we might think) were repeated by Reaney.[fn16]

At this point comes a first glimpse of what is argued below. With Ekwall as his authority, the poet and topographer Geoffrey Grigson referred Kent (and the Quantocks of Somerset) to a Celtic form meaning ‘edge’ or ‘rim’. Noting English- named hills called ‘edge’ (like Wenlock Edge in Shropshire), he wondered if the Celtic word was used first of ‘the long edge or rim of the North Downs’ and then ‘extended to the Kent stretching out underneath?’.[fn17] His suggestion was admirably sensible and has been totally ignored.

Place-name scholars, looking neither to right nor left, went on repeating the derivations of their predecessors. Margaret Gelling, correctly translating Canterbury as ‘town of the people of Kent’, echoed Jackson on Kent as probably meaning ‘coastal district’.[fn18] So, regrettably, did Rivet and Smith in a fundamental account of the forms. Besides those for Kent was one on ‘Canza’ in the Ravenna Cosmography, which they rightly emended to Cantia. then citing Jackson on possible senses ‘encircled (seagirt) land’ or ‘borderland’ or ‘land of army hosts’, where they preferred the first. They repeated his stem denial of any Celtic form cant ‘white’. With the conception ‘circle’ in mind, they hence plumped for the interpretation ‘corner land, land on the edge’ and concluded that the place, though not precisely located, was surely in south-west Britain, because it figures with Lindinis or Ilchester in south Somerset. (We say here that Cantia is the Quantock Hills. A Roman road ran from Ilchester towards that ridge of Devonian slates and [pg289]hard red sandstones, twenty-five miles to the north-west, but conspicuous across the intervening levels. Ravemia’s Cantia is here for the first time equated with the Quantocks.) As for Cantiaci. Rivet and Smith very reasonably took it as postdating Cantium, which they then unreasonably understood as ‘comer land, land on the edge’.[fn19] This even though such a sense is unsupported by Welsh uses of cant and is foreign to the mentality of early peoples, who knew nothing of cartography.

Popular scholarship and its opposite thereafter presented an interesting prospect. John Field, a good researcher, proposed ‘borderland, land on the rim’, because Celtic forms in cant mean ‘rim. border, periphery’ and that ‘fits the geography of the county’.[fn20] But his thinking was anachronistic. Adrian Room offered an inaccurate summary of Rivet and Smith, with the translation ‘border, edge’ related to Kent’s ‘coastal situation’ or even the North Foreland. Thanet.[fn21] He forgot that, pre-modern Thanet being an island, the North Foreland was not on the Kent mainland.

Later commentators add little. Dr Parsons even retreats from what is known. He gives no explanation for Cantiuni and thinks that it may not be British.22 The Cambridge dictionary has the received rendering ‘corner land, land on the edge’ after Jackson, as well as ‘river at the edge, corner stream’ for Cant Beck, Lancashire.[fn23] Dr Falileyev, who interprets cant- as ‘circle, rim, border’, as also ‘angle, comer’, has a useful mention of Cant Hill (SW 9474), a mile-long ridge overlooking the Camel Estuary, near Padstow.[fn24] This Cornish eminence has ob­vious parallels with the Quantocks and Queen Camel of Somerset or North Downs of Kent.

After place-names in Cant-, we move to ordinary words in cant(-) as a surer guide to ineaning. The emphasis is on Celtic forms.

As regards the Welsh noun cant, it occurs in varied contexts: law, chronicle, religious lyric, love-story. A medieval legal tract defines the rights of a royal smith, who can demand payment for tluee things: the edge (cant) of a coulter, the socket of an axe, the head of a spear. All these suffered heavy use. If they broke, the consequences were irksome (or worse). Resilience was essential. However, cant cwllter ‘counter’s rim’ in the original triad was corrupted in late manuscripts, with scribes creating a fourth item, the rim (cant) of a cauldron.[fn25] Modifying or correcting that idea of cant as ‘outer circle; rim’ is heb dor, heb gant ‘without door, without wall’ in a thirteenth-century Franciscan lyric (to which we shall return) on the stable at Bethlehem.[fn26]

A sense ‘wall’ for cant in that Nativity poem is confirmed by another law tract, co-edited by the politician Enoch Powell. It has a passage on a bam with a repaired cant.[fn21] The meaning is ‘wall’, protecting the corn inside from cattle, and is so defined by the University of Wales dictionary (with Latin canthus ‘iron tyre on a wheel’ and Greek kanthds ‘felloe; outer part of a wheel’ further noted as borrowings from Celtic).[fn28]

The cant or ‘wall’ of the bam would be straight. That understood, we return to coulters, described at length in a monograph on the Welsh plough. A coulter is a vertical iron or steel bar placed before the share; it cuts into the soil, which the share then turns over. If long enough, it will remove deep roots; it must then be especially robust, because of encounters with buried stones. Its upper part may in addition have a sharp edge to slice through uplifted roots. Like the heads of axe [pg290]or spear, a coulter needed skill in the making. Iron Age and Roman coulters were straight; later ones had a 135-degiee bend, to raise roots to the surface; others were curved, though less so than a sickle.[fn29] So a coulter could be straight or bent or curving, but not ring-like or circular. A Welsh cant filter ‘edge of a coulter’ therefore has implications for the name of Kent. Cant- being used of things which were not circular, we need not apply it to the Kent coast, going round three points of the compass.

After barns and coulters, war and religion. A battle recorded in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, and the Franciscan Christmas poem already mentioned, together offer information on cant. The battle was in 634, when Welsh invaders were massacred near Hexham, which is given the Old Welsh name Cantscaul. The Old English name of Hexham being Hagustaldesham ‘young warrior’s settlement’, Cantscaul will be its Welsh translation ‘champion’s enclosure’.[fn30] The implication is clear. Welsh cant there meant the hedge or stockade around a homestead. It was a raised feature or structure, like the barn-wall of the laws. It was not flat, like an outline on a map.

As for the lyric, it was written in about 1250 by Friar Madog ap Gwallter (known from other sources). He described how the Three Kings found Jesus in a stable that was doorless and heb gant. translated as ‘no rampart’, which caimot be right.31 Castles have ramparts, stables do not. Madog’s heb gant means not ‘without a rampart’ but ‘without a wall’. He may have meant that there was no wall inside, which is why the Holy Family were accompanied byych ac assen ‘ox and ass’. Or he may have had in mind the missing wall of a Nativity scene, with the stable open on one side, a convention perhaps coming from St Francis himself.[fn32] In either case, con/Tneans ‘wall’.

Now for the fourth and final section, with conclusions for Kent and beyond. Translations of Kent as ‘corner land, land on the edge’ must be jettisoned. The sense will be ‘land o/the Edge’, the long inland cliff or escarpment of the North Downs. There are tluee reasons for this, as follows: [pg291]Old ideas of Kent as denoting a circle or periphery may be set aside. The conect sense will be ‘land of (the) Edge’ meaning not the coast but the Downs from Westerham to the Straits of Dover. That, we submit, provides a coherent and rational explanation of the evidence. It may enhance pride in the county as well. A modem hill-figure of the White Horse of Kent, cut into the chalk west of Folkestone, proves that the Downs are regarded highly by Kentish people. Given that local patriotism, it may be fitting if (as maintained here) Celtic cant- Tim, edge’ were long ago used of those hills, then giving Cantium ‘territory of (the) Edge’ as the name of the region, and so modem Kent. [pg292][pg293]

A Late Eleventh-Century Rochester Manuscript Apparently Echoing the Political Message of the Bayeux Tapestry

In this article, based on long-term research, the author presents the case that various of the decorated initials in a manuscript book produced at the Rochester scriptorium in the 1080s were quite deliberately designed to reinforce the underlying political message of the Bayeux Tapestry.[fn1] Which is that the Norman Conquest was inflicted to punish the Anglo-Saxons for crowning Harold Godwineson who had broken his sacred oath that William. Duke of the Normans, should be king after Edward the Confessor.

To help reconcile Anglo-Saxons to the Norman ascendancy some major figure - believed to be Lanfranc - who had had a hand in making the Tapestry in the 1070s conceived the idea in the following decade of making an illuminated copy at Rochester of Books 17-35 of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, which, it is argued, can be dated by the iconography of its decorated initials to the 1080s. Scribes and artists who came to work in England from the abbey of Mont-St- Michel in Normandy are pivotal to the understanding of both works.

The starting point for the research into this question was the Textus Roffensis and the earliest extant post-Conquest book catalogue from any English monastic house.[fn2] This catalogue lists the 93 manuscript books that were in the library of Rochester Cathedral Priory in 1123, of which forty-three are extant and in the safekeeping of the British Library.[fn3] Waller canied out a palaeographic study of these manuscripts in 1980 and found that during the early episcopacy of Gundulf, i.e. from 1077, a number of manuscripts were produced at Rochester Priory by a handful of scribes whose style suggested they had been trained by a Norman.[fn4]

The manuscript book in question held at the BL is Royal MS 6C. vi which contains books 17-35 of Gregory the Great’s 6th-century Moralia in Job. The author concluded that it had been copied in the Rochester scriptorium in the 1080s,5 having previously been dated to the twelfth century when many manuscripts of this work were copied in England and in Normandy. Of course. Gregory’s centuries earlier text does not refer directly to the invasion, but the subtext could do so. And indeed, it can be shown that the Rochester manuscript is unique with its series of seventeen richly decorated initials, some historiated, i.e. showing the image of a person, and some zoomorphic designs.

The fact that the designer of this manuscript chose to copy and illuminate the latter books of the Moralia in Job and not the earlier ones, which were copied later,[fn6] is significant. The earlier books by contrast are simply produced with sparse decoration or use of colour presumably because the stoiy these relate describing the early rather dissolute life of Job did not provide the designer with an iconographic theme relevant to the Norman Conquest.

[pg293]

The Rochester Manuscript - an interpretation of the decorated initials and rubrication

The following are the eight initials in question:

Job in a state of penitence (Plate I): Book 17 of the Moralia in Job relates the story of Job in a state of penitence and in the first decorated initial he is shown, with his wife, shirtless, covered with boils, encircled by serpents. The red/blue rubrication of alternate words or parts of words immediately below the bowl of the initial is noteworthy. Job in Christian iconography represents the suffering of Christ and [pg294]his Holy Church. The initial seems to be suggesting that the Anglo-Saxon Church had been in a state of sin, perhaps because of Harold’s broken oath at Bayeux; Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury until 1070, had committed the gravest sin by wresting the See of Canterbury from Robert of Jumieges during Robert’s lifetime, making both Stigand’s appointment and his consecration of Harold Godwineson as King irregular. In the decorated initial the church penitent is being offered the eucharistic bread,[fn7] the body of Christ.

[fg]jpg|Plate I Job in a state of penitence; BL Royal MS 6C. vi, fol. 6.|Image[/fg]

The Lamb of God (Plate II): the second decorated initial is an early depiction of

[fg]jpg|Plate II The Lamb of God; note the dotted y on mystica and hystoria (lines 2 and 3); BL Royal MS 6C. vi, fol. 15.|Image[/fg]

[fg]jpg|Plate III Bayeux Tapestry: Harold reports back to the elderly, childless King Edward that
William will be the next King of England.|Image[/fg]

the Agnus Dei portrayed with a cross resembling a sword. Earlier, from the fifth century, the Lamb of God had usually been depicted solely with a halo. This Agnus Dei with a sword is about ‘the taking away of the sins of the world’, through the death of Harold Godwineson at the Battle of Hastings and the enthronement of a legally consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc in 1070. The distinctive three-pronged markings on the Lamb are similar to those on the canopy above King Edward in the Tapestry when Harold Godwineson is reporting back to him after his visit to William in Normandy (Plate III).

The Archangel St Michael (Plate IV): the rubrication with its alternate red/green lettering (as in the later inscriptions in the Bayeux Tapestry, see below) reads: QUID MIRUM si aeterna Dei sapientia conspici non valet (Is it any wonder that the eternal wisdom of God may not be seen?). St Michael is a well-established figure in Christian iconography but in the context of this manuscript seems to refer to the invasion, for in 1066 the Norman fleet had set off from West Nonnandy and had been blown into St. Valery-sur-Somrne, having lost men, if not ships. The fleet remained storm-bound by a fortnight of stormy weather and contrary winds. It was when the feast of St Michael was about to be celebrated, towards the end of September that the weather changed. William was able to sail out from St. Valery- sur-Somrne. across to Pevensey and thence to battle at Hastings.[fn8] The archangel seems to be almost leaping out of the confines of the decorated initial canying sword and shield as he fights the dragon. This exuberance and creative energy, [pg296]that might have been thought impossible to demonstrate in the space available to the artist in a decorated initial, is referred to by Monique Dosdat in her book about manuscripts at Mont-St-Michel particularly in the chapter she calls L’Age D’Or (1050-1075).[fn9] Note also the archangers very large hands and feet and the patterning on his robe, reminiscent of a depiction of St Michael in a manuscript made between 980-1000 in the scriptorium at Mont-St-Michel where Lanfranc worked when he first came to Normandy (Plate V).[fn10] Harold, having received arms from William when he was a prisoner in Nonnandy. and having become his liegeman, campaigned with him in Brittany. This is one reason for the inclusion of Mont-St-Michel in the Bayeux Tapestry. Note the three-pronged scroll patterning on the stylised depiction of the mount which, nevertheless, is recognisable as Mont-St-Michel (Plate VI).

[fg]jpg|Plate IV The Archangel St Michael; BL Royal MS 6C. vi, fol. 33v.|Image[/fg]

The Stag (Plate VII): Gregory’s text at this point refers to people who distress the church. A young male deer is depicted (again with three-pronged markings on its body), its antlers do not branch, so it is not the older hart. This stag may have referred to Odo, whose help in providing ships for the invasion and in subduing the Anglo-Saxons, as well as deputising for the king when he was in Nonnandy. had been so important to William I, but who in the event had proved to be so disloyal an ally that by 1082 the king had him exiled and imprisoned in Rouen. Line four demonstrates the distinctive Rochester scriptorium housestyle abbreviation for prae, p with an open a over the top in the word praedicat (preach).[pg297]

[fg]jpg|Plate V A depiction of St Michael in a manuscript made between 980-1000 in the
scriptorium at Mont-St-Michel where Lanfranc worked when he first came to Normandy; Avranches, Bibliotheque patrimoniale MS 50 fol. 1. [pg298]

[fg]jpg|Plate VI Bayeux Tapestry: here Duke William and his army came to Mont-St-Michel and here they crossed the river Couesnon.|Image[/fg]

[fg]jpg|Plate VII The Stag: BL Royal MS 6C. vi, fol. 45v.|Image[/fg]

[pg299]The Armed and Mounted Norman Knight (Plate VIII): wearing chain-mail armour down to his knees and a conical helmet half-standing in his stimrps with lance under his arm. this mounted knight is similar to those depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry although as his lance appears to be couched, the date would be slightly later and the 1080s would seem right. He is depicted accurately accoutred in contemporary armour.

[fg]jpg|Plate VIII The Armed and Mounted Nonnan Knight; BL Royal MS 6C. vi, fol. 79v.|Image[/fg][pg300]

[fg]jpg|Plate IX Pope Gregory; BL Royal MS 6C. vi, fol. 128.|Image[/fg]

His stylised white steed, however, is lined with wavy brown stripes. Similarly, some of the horses in the Tapestry are extravagantly embroidered. As there is no precedent in any eleventh-century manuscript for a Norman knight, it might be deduced that it was taken partly from the Bayeux Tapestry and, perhaps, from contemporary life. People in Rochester would have seen such figures practising their military skills around Rochester Castle. Gregory the Great in the Moralia compared horses ready for battle with righteous people ready for trial.

Pope Gregory’ (Plate IX): Book 27 of the Moralia deals with the establishment of a system of Christian doctrine and ethics. The miniature in Byzantine style is of a man canying a holy book. Waller thought the figure represented a bust of Christ.11 However, the figure has a black beaded halo which denotes the death of an apostle or, in the apostolic line, a pope. In the textual context and in the context of the other decorated initials it seems to refer to Gregorian reform and to the recent death of Pope Gregory VIL who instituted the reform, in 1085. The following year Archbishop Lanfranc founded St Gregory’s Priory in Canterbury.[fn12] People may also have thought of the author of the Moralia, Gregory the Great. They may also have been reminded of papal support for the Norman Conquest of England for it is generally believed that Pope Alexander II gave his blessing to the Norman invasion of England.

The nimbed Eagle (Plate X): this stylised representation is of the eagle of St John with turned head. Book 31 of the Moralia equates the eagle with ‘earthly power’. As the eagle is perched securely on a Bible this suggests earthly power brought about by the Church. Or is it indeed an eagle? Eagles in earlier manuscripts are [pg301]usually naturalistically draw and coloured. This parrot-like bird has an intricate, multi-coloured, patterned, haip-shaped wing in which a central str ipe of red feathers predominates. It is not unlike some of the birds shown in the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry or those described by the Dean of St Quentin in the dream of Rollo.[fn13] Birds in Book 19 of the Moralia are seen sometimes as forces of good and sometimes evil. The alternate red and green lines of rubricated text, that refer to the misfortunes of Job, but are so applicable to the Norman Conquest are here at the beginning of Book 28, the text reads: POST DANA RERU after loss of possessions (looting) POST

mTSVl^CKA COKVOK1S

P'culu VRf |LGO1<1! p con

^Vni MRS

offt M A

jdh^Ctcm^rt jrlx’rc n tntienerunr.

[fg]jpg|Plate X The nimbed Eagle: BL Royal MS 6C. vi, fol. 142v.|Image[/fg]

[pg302]after breaking of oaths (Harold Godwineson’s broken oath that William should succeed to the throne of England) POST VULNERA CORPORIS after wounds of the body (the Battle of Hastings itself)

Only one manuscript of the Moralia rubricates this passage similarly, MS Media- theque Municipale de Bayeux 58, which abbreviates the Latin word dampna/ damna as dana (Plate XI). The text of the Moralia at this point, although referring to the misfortunes of Job, was also applicable to 1066. People were being encouraged to accept the Conquest as the will of God. almost as divine right of providence, in the way that Job had learnt with patience to accept his afflictions as the will of God.

[fg]jpg|Plate XI Only one manuscript of the Moralia rubricates this passage similarly,
MS Mediatheque Municipale de Bayeux 58, fol. 114v. which abbreviates the
Latin word dampna/damna as dana.|Image[/fg][pg303]

[fg]jpg|Plate XII Samson; BL Royal MS 6C. vi, fol. 152v.|Image[/fg]

Samson (Plate XII): a long-haired Samson with bees in his hair (straight from Judges Ch. 40) is depicted at the beginning of Book 29, astride a lion, with his hand in the lion’s mouth. He is encircled by a beaded serpent.[fn14] This Samson seems to refer to the eleventh-century Samson, Norman by birth, protege of Odo. Canon, Treasurer and, possibly. Dean of the Cathedral Chapter of Bayeux, later Bishop of Worcester. It is possible that he was associated with the Domesday survey set underway in 1085[fn15] and was the recipient of the letter from Lanfranc to Samson in which Lanfranc confirms that in the counties which Samson had been assigned the duty of making a survey he had no demesne land. This Samson was a strong survivor, like his biblical namesake; he did not lose his English lands when Odo fell into disgrace after 1082. but at that time it was perhaps thought appropriate to depict him with his hand in a lion’s mouth.

In 1980 Waller had shown that this manuscript clearly stood apart from the first group produced in the new scriptorium at Rochester Priory, but she did not explain why this might be so. It was not until four years later that she published an article entitled ‘Rochester Cathedral Library: an English book collection based on Norman models’. By then she had noticed the Norman nature of the decorative initials but still had not noticed the iconographic theme and its possible relationship to the Norman Conquest.[fn16] [pg304]Summing up, the rubrication, the coloured headlines and the richly decorated initials in the Rochester manuscript appear to have been used as a propaganda vehicle to justify the Norman Conquest of England using an iconography that Anglo- Saxon Christian people might recognize. A brilliant mind, who knew Gregory’s text from an intimate study of it, conceived the idea to use the latter part of the work for this purpose. Gregory the Great had stressed that the role of the Church was to teach, advocating a threefold method of interpretation of the Scriptures, historical, allegorical and moral. He had said ‘painting is used in churches so that those who do not know letters may at least by looking on the walls read what they cannot read in books’.[fn17] The manuscript book may have been used by priests in Rochester Cathedral to justify the Norman invasion in the still unstable political climate of the 1080s, for it is the folios with the historiated initials that are the well-thumbed ones. The second half of this paper briefly examines the provenance of the Bayeux Tapestry itself and the likely roles of Lanfranc and personnel from the celebrated scriptorium at Mont-St-Michel in the design and execution of the Rochester manuscript.

The Bayeux Tapestry

During the second half of the twentieth century most European specialists accepted that the embroidery worked in wools on linen known as the Bayeux Tapestry was produced in England, most likely at Canterbury even if it was intended for the consecration of Bishop Odo’s cathedral in Bayeux (in 1077). Evidence of an English origin rested in the forms of certain words, ceastra, the word for an Old English castle or township, and the use of the Old English eth (6) in the spelling of Gyrd (Harold’s brother). Old English ash (<e) and the dotted y in ^Elfgyva. Together with a number of stylistic similarities with Canterbury manuscript illuminations, especially an illustration in a sixth-century manuscript of The Gospels of St Augustine of Canterbury' made either in Italy or Gaul that was held by St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury and was certainly in England by the late seventh century.[fn18] It seems that the designer of the Tapestry took from this manuscript the idea of the semi-circular table portrayed in the composition of The Last Supper, Cena Domini, and used it in his depiction of the ‘Feast before the Battle’ (Plate XIII). He must have been a churchman of some standing in England to have known of this manuscript.[fn19]

This table scene also marks a significant point of change in the character of the inscriptions in the Tapestry. Those letters which had been embroidered in black are subsequently coloured alternately in red and green. Multicoloured script, typical of continental illuminations, are indicative of Norman designers/scribes working in England and this style is encountered, later, in some of the rubrication in the Rochester manuscript.

In the last two decades there have been two major international conferences on the Bayeux Tapestry. At the conclusion of the Caen conference (1999) Francois Neveux reported that there was general agreement that William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo. Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, should be considered the patron of the Tapestry and that it was worked by a team of people which included [pg305]Anglo-Saxons, Normans and other Frenchmen.[fn20] The proceedings of the second conference, held in the British Museum in 2008. included a particularly interesting paper tabled by David S. Spear about the role of Robert of Mortain, the younger brother of Odo and half-brother of William, who held much of the land near the abbey of Mont-St-Michel and also valuable manors around Pevensey.[fn21] Neither conference delivered a definitive view on provenance.

[fg]jpg|Plate XIII To the left the Last Supper Cena Domini; Cambridge, Corpus Christi MS 286 fol. 125; to the right ‘Feast before the Battle’ in the Bayeux Tapestry.|Image[/fg]

In Canterbury, as Earl of Kent, Odo may have been able to call on the creative skills of several religious communities. In 1997 the art historian Richard Gameson, formerly at the University of Kent, argued for a Canterbury provenance.[fn22] In 2006 he qualified his opinion stating that the designer of the Tapestry certainly had a connection with Canterbury, but that there is no indication in the work of where it was carried out.[fn23] Whilst Canterbury illuminated manuscripts seem to have influenced the Bayeux Tapestry’s designer, the possibility that it was worked elsewhere carmot be excluded. Canterbury’s Anglo-Saxon cathedral had been burnt down in 1067 and the archives containing the title deeds to its lands and privileges destroyed. Monks and nuns there were bitterly hostile to the Normans and a resurgence of love and loyalty for everything Anglo-Saxon took place. Scholars who argue for the Englishness of the Tapestry think that it may have been made at this time at St Augustine’s Abbey but apart from a significant number of stylistic similarities with Canterbury manuscript illuminations there is no other evidence. Certainly the Tapestry was not made at Cluist Church for studies by Teresa Webber have shown that the earliest post-Conquest manuscripts written there, previously dated to the twelfth century, were written in the 1090s.[fn24] However it is possible that some of Cluist Church’s pre-Conquest manuscripts survived the fire in some safe house and were used by the Bayeux Tapestry designer.[pg306]

Lanfranc - Archbishop of Canterbury 1070-89

When he arrived in Normandy, around 1039, from his home in North Italy Lanfranc established himself as a teacher in the abbey of Mont-St-Michel where several north Italian scholars had already settled. With the patronage of the Norman Dukes, and particularly during the long abbacy of Suppo of Fruttaria, Mont-St-Michel prospered. Lanfranc would have been at Mont-St-Michel when the north Italian Suppo was abbot, a time when, according to J.J.G. Alexander, ‘the scriptorium reaches its highest point of activity and excellence’.[fn25] Its artists’ illuminations achieved an unequalled position in the world of manuscripts of that time.[fn26]

Lanfranc moved on to the Abbey of Bec where he was converted, became a monk and then prior from 1045 until 1063, leading a ‘cloister school’ which became extra- claustral, educating the intelligentsia of Norman society. Little was written at Bec until the middle of the twelfth century.[fn27] He moved on in 1063 to become Abbot of St Etienne, Caen. At heart an academic, with a legal cast of mind, he gained his reputation by commenting on and annotating patristic texts, the writings of the early church fathers, Gregory the Great. Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose, using examples from Isidore’s Etymologiae, of which there were many manuscripts in western Europe. It was whilst he was at St Etienne that he made what Gibson terms his ‘only excursion into theology proper’,[fn28] his debate with Berengar on the nature of the Eucharist, defending the peace and unity of the church and establishing his own reputation in Western Europe as a master theologian.

The monk Gundulph had followed Lanfranc first to Bec and then to Caen in 1063 where he acted as prior to Lanfranc for seven years, following him to England in 1070 and becoming bishop of Rochester in 1076.[fn29] Scollandus (Scotland in English sources) whose work as a scribe is acknowledged in a colophon in a Mont-St-Michel manuscript, also followed him.[fn30] He was to become abbot of St Augustine’s. Canterbury, in 1072.[fn31]

By 1083 Gundulph had replaced a depleted Chapter with a community of Benedictine monks at Rochester as happened at Cluist Church. Canterbury, around the same date. Several scholars have coimnented that relations between the two embryonic cathedral priories were then very close and that Lanfranc shared in the project of establishing them. Some monks from Cluist Church were allowed to transfer to Rochester to avoid the continuing friction between Norman and Anglo- Saxon elements in Canterbury[fn32] and there must have been many occasions when Lanfranc found that he had to spend time in Rochester not least when he was sorting out the land disputes between Canterbury and Rochester.

Mont-St-Michel

It is in Canterbury soon after their arrival in England in 1067 that the gr oup of scribes and artists from Mont-St-Michel, which included both Scollandus and Lanfranc, may have drawn the cartoons for the Bayeux Tapestry. They would have consulted the body of manuscripts available to them m Canterbury together with whatever manuscripts or working sketchbooks they brought with them from Mont-St-Michel. For it is the artistic style apparent in some of Mont-St-Michel’s tenth- and early eleventh-century manuscripts that is seen in the Bayeux Tapestry, and later in the [pg307]Rochester manuscript. It seems apparent that the same designer was involved in both works, thus explaming the similarities argued for here between the two.

To give an example of the stylistic influence exercised by Mont-St-Michel the depiction of the seated position of powerful figures, with knees wide apart, appears to be a characteristic of its manuscripts in the two decades before 1066. Plate XIV shows the seated positions of the powerful figures in the Bayeux Tapestry, Edward the Confessor (in the first scene), Duke William, Bishop Odo, Robert of Mortain, even Guy of Ponthieu (when he has Harold in his clutches). They are seated on fairly elaborate throne-like chairs with knees wide apart and feet (not crossed) but placed firmly on footstools or the like. These seated powerful figures were basic to the design of the Tapestry. Compare these with the tracings of seated figures in manuscripts written and illuminated in Mont-St-Michel (Fig. 1). The one on the left showing Saint Augustine explaining the book of Genesis is from Avranches, Bibliotheque patrimoniale MS 75. fol. lv„ is dated before 1060.[fn33] The one in the middle depicting Faustus listening to Augustine is from Avranches. Bibliotheque patrimoniale MS 90, fol. 1 and is dated before 1060.[fn34] The tracing on the right from Avranches. Bibliotheque patrimoniale MS 72 fol. 97 dated 1040-1055, depicts Saint Augustine preaching against Arianism.[fn35]

[fg]jpg|Plate XIV Bayeux Tapestry: the seated positions of powerful figures.|Image[/fg][pg308]

[fg]jpg|Fig. 1 Tracings from manuscripts written and illuminated in the abbey at Mont-St-Michel dated before 1060.|Image[/fg]

The first full-page illumination in Avranches, Bibliotheque patrimoniale MS 50 fol. 1 (Plate V) was an important manuscript for Mont-St-Michel. This manuscript has been dated by Dosdat to between 980 and 1000.[fn36] This refoundation charter celebrates the refounding of the monastery by Duke Richard I of Normandy (William’s great grandfather) in 966 and it provided the model for the designer in his depiction of the abbey in the Bayeux Tapestry. It shows the abbey’s ‘protecting saint’ (patron saint) standing on a representation of the abbey. This has previously been interpreted as a scabellum or footstool.[fn37] St Michael stands within an arch supported by columns. He is clutching his shield in one hand whilst spearing a devil with the other. The shield has chequerboard patterning of squares of gold, white and green. Compare this with the depiction of Mont-St-Michel in the Bayeux Tapestry (Plate VI). The designer of the Tapestry would have first sketched the outline of the abbey and then embroiderers would have filled in his outline with decorated arches, two little turrets, and gold and green chequerboard colouring together with some dark colour (it is impossible to be sure what) on the roof which is topped with two crosses. The crosses, as the turrets and some of the roof colouring may. of course, have been added later. Both illustrations depict the arches of the abbey with blocks of stone in the background and both depict chequerboard decoration, the first on [pg309]the shield and the surround of the arches and the second on the tiling of the roof. The columns in the refoundation manuscript are decorated with coloured spiral pattern not unlike the decoration on the columns between which Tlfgyva and the clergyman are standing in the Tapestry. Mont-St-Michel is a significant part of the stoiy related in the Bayeux Tapestry and in the Rochester Royal manuscript, not just because it was around St Michael’s Day that the wind is said to have mined south enabling the Norman fleet to sail across the Channel to Pevensey but because of the abbey’s intimate involvement with and support of the Norman Conquest of England culminating in the sending of monks from the abbey to England.

Conclusion

It is the view of most scholars that the Bayeux Tapestiy was commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux and Earl of Kent and fashioned in England. It may have been worked in Canterbury in spite of the tunnoil after the filing of the cathedral in 1067. There is no evidence that the Tapestiy was worked in Rochester. The influence of the scribes and artists from Mont-St-Michel in its design can be clearly demonstrated.

The stories from Books 17-35 of Gregoiy the Great’s Moralia were used to great effect in the manuscript. Who would have thought to put the latter part of his work to use in this way? Only a distinguished European scholar like Lanfranc who in addition had first-hand knowledge of the island monastery of Mont-St-Michel and the environment because he had lived and worked there.

It is probable that the Rochester manuscript was created to replace the Bayeux Tapestiy that was transferred to Bayeux in 1082 when its patron. Odo, was exiled and imprisoned in Rouen. Sporadic periods of unrest in England continued into the 1080s and thus there was still a need to explain to the English people why the Norman invasion of England had happened. Lanfranc. the scholar and peacemaker appears to have chosen this vehicle for the purpose. London. British Library Royal MS 6C. vi is certainly more easily handled than the Bayeux Tapestiy. It never strayed far from the place of its birth, the scriptorium at Rochester Cathedral Priory until it became part of the Old Royal Library. It was presented to the British Museum by George II in 1757.

In her earlier researches the author noted that other copies of Moralia in Job had been made before the end of the eleventh century, one in Rouen and one in Bayeux and that all three copies conclude, as the Rochester one does, with notes written by Lanfranc. The decorated initials in the Bayeux Moralia, of which the patron was almost certainly Odo, do not relate to the invasion and are. strangely, unfinished. The spaces for the decorated initials are outlined but not all of them are completed. Poor materials were used, compared to the richness of the materials used to lubricate and decorate the Rochester Royal manuscript. The Preaux Moralia, Bibliotheque Municipale Rouen MS 498 seems to be conveying a message in one or two of its decorated initials, but has no iconographic theme running throughout. Only the Rochester manuscript book containing the latter part of the Moralia is lubricated and decorated throughout to tell the story of the Norman Conquest of England.

[pg310]The decorated initials from British Library Royal Manuscript 6C.vi are published with the kind permission of the British Library. The image from Cambridge. C oipus Christi MS 286 fol. 125 is published with the kind permission of the Parker Library. Images from the Bayeux Tapestry are published with special permission from the City of Bayeux. The image from Chapitre de Bayeux MS 58 fol. 114v is published with permission of the Mediatheque Municipale de Bayeux. The image of MS Avranches. Bibliotheque patrimoniale 50 fol. 1 is published with permission of the City of Avranches. The Friends of Rochester Cathedral for allowing her to use material from her article ‘A Rochester Manuscript used as Norman Propaganda to Justify the Norman Conquest of England’first published in their Report for 1992/3. The late and much revered Professor A.C. de la Mare. Professor of Palaeography. University of London, for inspirational teaching.

[fn]1|This connection had been perceived earlier by George Garnett: see Garnett, G., 1985, ‘Coronation and Propaganda: some implications of the Norman claim to the throne of England in 1066’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 35, pp. 91-116.[/fn]

[fn]2|Set out in Archaeologia Cantiana, vi, 1866.[/fn]

[fn]3|Coates, R.P., 1866, ‘Catalogue of the Library of the Priory of St Andrew, Rochester, the Textus Roffensis', Archaeologia Cantiana, vi, 120-8.[/fn]

[fn]4|Waller, K.M.,1980, ‘The Library, Scriptorium and Community of Rochester Priory c. 1 OSO- 1150’, unpubl. ph.d.. thesis, University of Liverpool, p. 134.[/fn]

[fn]5|The author is suggesting an earlier dating for Royal MS 6C.vi which would accord with the death of Pope Gregory VII in 1085, who is represented in one of the initials. Grainge, C., 1993, ‘A Rochester Manuscript used as Norman Propaganda to Justify the Norman Conquest of England’, Friends of Rochester Cathedral, Report for 1993/4, pp. 12-19 and fol. 142v on the back cover.[/fn]

[fn]6|The earlier part of the work, books 1-16, also in the BL (Royal MS 6C xii) were certainly copied in the twelfth century.[/fn]

[fn]7|The British Library in 1993 were kind enough to conduct a test to show the author that the ‘bread’ painted with white lead had oxidized over the centuries and now appeared black.[/fn]

[fn]8|Morton and Muntz (eds), 1972, The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, pp. 8-9.[/fn]

[fn]9|Dosdat, M., 1991, £ ’emluminure romane au Mont Saint-Michel Xe-XIF Siecles (Association des Amis de la Bibliotheque Patrimoniale dAvranches/Editions Ouest-France), p. 51.[/fn]

[fn]10|The author visited Avranches, Bibliotheque Patrimoniale which contains more than sixty tenth­and eleventh-century manuscripts copied in the scriptorium of Mont-St-Michel from where they were transferred after the secularisation of the abbey at the time of the French Revolution. See Alexander, J.J.G., 1970, Norman Illumination at Mont St Michel 966-1100 (Clarendon Press, Oxford); for MS 50, see p. 215 and Plate 17b.[/fn]

[fn]12|Emms, R., 1995, ‘The Historical Traditions of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury’, in Eales R. and Sharpe R. (eds), Canterbury and the Norman Conquest (Hambledon, London), pp. 160-168, at p. 160.[/fn]

[fn]13|Dudo of St Quentin, Lair, J. (ed.), 1865, De Mohbus et actis primorum Normanniae Ducum auctore Dudone Sancti Quintini Decano (Societe des Antiquaires de Normandie, Caen).[/fn]

[fn]14|Waller, 1980, ‘Library of Rochester Priory’, p. 108.[/fn]

[fn]15|Galbraith, V.H., 1967, ‘Notes on the Career of Samson, Bishop of Worcester (1096-1112)’, The English Historical Review, vol. 83, pp. 86-101.[/fn]

[fn]16|Waller, K.M., 1984, ‘Rochester Cathedral Library; an English book collection based on Norman models’, in Foreville, R., ed., Les Mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XF-XIF[/fn]

[fn]17|Migne, J.P. (ed.), Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Senes Latina (P.L.), vol. 77, col. 1027, Epistola CV, Ad Serenum Massiliensem Episcopum: 'Id circo enim pictura in Ecclesiis adhibetur, ut hi qui litterras nesciunt, saltern in parietibus videndo legant quae legere in Codicibus non valent'.[/fn]

[fn]18|Cambridge, Corpus Cliristi College MS 286 fol. 125; for a description of this folio, see McKitterick, R., 2005, ‘The Coming of Christianity: 1 The Gospels of St Augustine of Canterbury’, in Binski, P. and Panayotova, S. (eds), The Cambridge Illuminations, Catalogue (Harvey Miller, London and Turnhout), pp. 47-8.[/fn]

[fn]19|Gullick, M., 1998, ‘Professional Scribes in Eleventh and Twelfth-Century England’, in English Manuscript Studies vol. 7, Beal, P. and Griffiths, J. (eds), pp. 1-24. Veiy slight evidence of scribes who were not churchmen is cited: two pieces of evidence only from pre-Conquest England, both from Worcester.[/fn]

[fn]20|Bouet, P, Levy, B. and Neveux, F. (eds), 2004, The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History (Presses Universitaires, Caen), p. 406.[/fn]

[fn]21|Spear, D.S., 2011, ‘Robert of Mortain and the Bayeux Tapestry’, in Lewis, M. J., Owen-Crocker, G.R. and Terkla, D. (eds), 2011, The Bayeux Tapestry, New Approaches (Oxbow Books, Oxford), pp. 75-79.[/fn]

[fn]22|Gameson, R., 1997, ‘The Origin, Ait and Message of the Bayeux Tapestry’, in Gameson, R. (ed.), The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry, pp. 157-212 (Boydell, Woodbridge).[/fn]

[fn]23|Gameson, R., 2006, review article of Beech, G., Was the Bayeux Tapestry made in France? The Case for St Florent ofSaumur (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005), The English Historical Review, vol. 121, no. 493, pp. 1162-4.[/fn]

[fn]24|Webber, T., 1999, ‘Les manuscrits de Christ Church (Cantorbery) et de Salisbury a la fin du XIe siecle’, in Bouet, P. et Dosdat, M. (eds), Les Manuscrits et Enluminures dans Ie Monde Normand, (Presses Universitaires, Caen, 1999), pp. 95-105, at p. 95: Webber, T., 1995, ‘Script and Manuscript Production at Christ Church, Canterbury, after the Norman Conquest’, in Eales, R. and Sharpe, R. (eds), Canterbury and the Norman Conquest (Hambledon, London), pp. 145-58.[/fn]

[fn]25|Alexander, J.J.G., 1970, Norman Illumination at Mont St Michel 966-1100 (Clarendon Press, Oxford), p. 11.[/fn]

[fn]26|Dosdat 1991, p. 52.[/fn]

[fn]27|Veronique Gazeau, Universite du Maine told the author that the monastery of Bec was very poor in the eleventh century and that little was written there until the mid-twelfth century.[/fn]

[fn]28|Gibson, M., 1978, Lanfi'anc of Bec (Oxford University Press), pp. 62-97.[/fn]

[fn]29|Smith, R.A.L., 1943, ‘The Place of Gundulf in the Anglo-Norman Church’, English Historical Review, vol. 58, no. 231, pp. 257-72.[/fn]

[fn]30|A colophon at the end of a manuscript of Gregory’s Dialogues, written at Mont-St-Michel, now Avranches B.M. MS 103, states that Scollandus was one of six scribes who wrote this manuscript: see Alexander, 1970, pp. 17-18.[/fn]

[fn]31|See Brett, M., 1995, ‘Gundulf and the Cathedral Communities of Canterbury and Rochester’, in Eales R. and Sharpe R. (eds), Canterbury and the Norman Conquest (Hambledon, London), p. 23, n. 37; Alexander, 1970, p. 17.[/fn]

[fn]32|Waller, 1980, quotes Stubbs, W. (ed.) Memorials of Saint Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury (Rolls Series 63), pp. 234-8.[/fn]

[fn]33|Dosdat 1991, p. 53, fig. 2.[/fn]

[fn]34|Idem., p. 57, fig. 5.[/fn]

[fn]35|Idem., p. 59, fig. 6.[/fn]

[fn]36|Idem., p. 19. The author met Monique Dosdat in Avranches in July 1992. She confirmed the dating of Plate V.[/fn]

[fn]37|Alexander 1970, p. 86.[/fn]

A 1261 Charter, a Seal, and a Depiction of Canterbury’s Pre-1380 Westgate

The City of Canterbury's charters were placed in the care of Canterbury Cathedral Archives in 1884 and have remained there since. There is now a total of sixty-six of which sixty-tliree are medieval and post-medieval charters; three have been added in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. In 1951 the Cathedral Archivist. William Urry. was also named City Archivist and care of the city’s records, including the charters, remains with the cathedral under the present Cathedral and City Archivist. This has not only ensured the safe-keeping of the royal and other city charters but has meant that they have been conserved and are stored according to current best practice.

All but two of the charters deposited in 1884 were charters issued by the reigning king or queen, or by Oliver Cromwell. One of these two other charters is an agreement about boundaries between the city and Canterbury Cathedral Priory. The other takes the form of a letter, dated 1261, from the leading citizens of Canterbury to their fellow citizens and it is this document (CCA-CC-A/A/6 in the Canterbury Cathedral Archives catalogue) which is the subject of this paper.

The 1261 charter

The charter is one of a collection of charters belonging to the then County Borough of Canterbury deposited in the Cathedral Archives and, as stated on the label on the back, it came from Canterbury’s Royal Museum (now the Beaney House of Knowledge), and was numbered 2973. It is dated 28 September 1261 and concerns revocation of a local tax on bread. The charter is shown in Fig 1.

The charter is highly unusual in several ways:

• The charter is a letter addressed to the citizens of Canterbury by the aidermen appointed by the king and the jurats elected by the freemen of Canterbury to form the burghmote or borough council.[fn1] It was not a burghmote document, although it referred to a tax almost certainly imposed by the burghmote. and so would not have been recorded in the burghmote record.

• The seal is described in the charter as ‘a common seal’ of those from whom the letter is addressed.

• The seal is attached by silk cords rather a parchment tab. indicating its higher status.

The following is not a translation as such but conveys the meaning of the letter in modern rather than contemporary terms:

To all men who will see or hear these present letters: Master Hamo Doge then aiderman of Westgate, Thomas Chiche then bailiff of Canterbury and aiderman of Burgate, Robert Poire then aiderman of Northgate, James de la Porte then aiderman of Newengate, John son of William Cok[in] aiderman of Worthgate, Daniel son of Hubert, John Terry, Peter Durant, Simon Payable then bailiff, Thomas Man, Stephen and Laurence Chich, William Bune, Peter de Malling, John Hubert, Stephen Petit, Anselm le Furmager and Stephen le Taillur together with our community of Canterbury - eternal greetings in the Lord.

For as recently some of our citizens in the community have indicated that a certain payment which has been raised is an especial burden on the poor, namely that of one [pg313]penny on bread sold from any basket or any window between the feast of Pentecost and the feast of St Michael the Archangel [29 September], we have unanimously and with the consent and assent of all and singular our citizens of Canterbury for the salvation of our predecessors and for the souls of our heirs and for the alleviation of the poor of our city remitted for ever the said custom as far as it is in our power and do also quash any further revocation of this our decree.

[pg314]And lest by us or our heirs or successors the said custom may be further revoked without the presence of our common seal, we have caused to be affixed this sign of permanent confinnation so that there may never be any further revocation. And further we wish and grant for us and our heirs to the aforesaid free citizens that they may pay at the Burghmote six pence annually just as they are accustomed to have paid in past times unless as a default.

Authorised and sealed on Wednesday within the vigil of the blessed Michael the Archangel. In the forty-sixth year of the reign of King Hemy son of Jolm in the month of September.[fn2]

This is the only surviving Canterbury local borough charter. It is addressed solely to citizens of Canterbury by the chief citizens of the day: five aldermen, one of whom was a bailiff, a second bailiff and 12 jurats. The emphasis on the unanimity of the men in whose names the charter was issued may be the result of an earlier dispute. Pleas heard before the king on 12 and 18 November 1259 were brought by John Dodekere, alleging that he had been elected bailiff by the citizens of Canterbury but was ejected from office by 16 men, presumably aldermen and jurats, on the grounds that he was not properly elected. Dodekere was a prosperous land-owner and businessman in and around Canterbury. A second election held on 21 September 1259 when Thomas Chiche and Daniel le Draper were elected bailiffs. Despite Hamo Doge the lawyer administering the oath to Dodekere after the citizens had gone away, he was not allowed to perform the duties of bailiff. The case went against Dodekere. The rather bland court case could have hidden long­standing disunity and given rise to this show of unity. Dodekere was rehabilitated and served as aiderman of Newengate in 1268.[fn3]

Some details of the leading citizens named

Aiderman Doge: is a fascinating character and was involved in many aspects of Canterbury’s civic and ecclesiastical life as well as carrying out commissions for central royal administration elsewhere in Kent.[fn4] He appears in Canterbury documents as both an alderman (of the Westgate) and an official of the archdeacon from 1252 and disappears again after 1275? He was styled Master implying that he was a graduate, possibly in canon law. His father’s name is known from donations to St Augustine’s Abbey and the setting up of a chantry in 1264 but nothing is known of the date or place of his birth or the date of his death.[fn6] Hamo Doge administered oaths to bailiffs and appears as the first-named not only in this charter but in witness lists for other charters implying that he may be responsible for drafting them. Hamo Doge never served as bailiff though several others named in the charter did (see below).

Chiche Family: Thomas Chiche is shown as bailiff no fewer than eight times between 1260 and 1323 in William Somner’s list of bailiffs with Jolm Chiche listed as bailiff in 1352 implying sendee by at least three and probably four in generations of the family.[fn7] Another Thomas is listed in 1404.[fn8] Stephen Chiche seived as a bailiff in 1275.[fn9] The family were moneyers and goldsmiths and there was more than one branch documented as holding land in a number of wards in Canterbury from 1180.[fn10] In the mid-thirteenth century, the family lived in the parish of St George. Members of the Chiche family frequently witnessed Canterbury Christ Church Cathedral Priory charters. They were clearly at the forefront of Canterbury society from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.

[pg315]Simon Paable or Payable: was bailiff in 1271-2 and 1277.[fn11] He witnessed a number of charters of Canterbury Clnist Church Cathedral Priory and is mentioned in other Priory documents.

Robert Poire: aiderman of Northgate was bailiff.[fn12] The family name appears in Canterbury Clnist Church Cathedral Priory rentals from before 1200.

James de la Porte: aiderman of Newengate, was also know as James of the Gate. He witnessed many charters in Canterbury for a variety of institutions. He may be a descendent of the James of the Gate who was active in Canterbury and aiderman of Northgate ward around 1215.

John son of William Cokin: was aldennan of Worthgate and of Northgate and bailiff in 1250, 1266 and 1267.

Daniel son of Hubert: was bailiff in 1272-3 and 1275.[fn13]

John Terry: his family was formerly called Tenic and were goldsmiths. The family is first mentioned in Canterbuiy Cathedral Priory rentals in about 1180. The family was known to have owned stone houses and continued their trade until well into the fourteenth century.

Peter Durant: was bailiff in 1275 and again in 1277. He witnessed donations to Christ Church priory in which he is named as bailiff.[fn14]

Thomas Man: was named as a bailiff in the Liberate Rolls dated 2 October 1267.[fn15]

The charter was possibly drafted by Alderman Doge. He was a lawyer, familiar with Latin who worked as an archdeacon’s official assisting the archdeacon in his legal duties. However, most unusually, the name of the scribe is almost certainly known from comparing the hand with other charters where ‘Richard the clerk’ is named.[fn16]

The tax does indeed seem onerous. Bread was a staple at that time and the price of a loaf was around a penny so an additional pemiy would have been a burden on the poor. The tax imposed must have been locally introduced, although no record of that has survived. The revocation of the tax was clearly an important decision and one that perhaps had given rise to some earlier debate. Unfortunately, no minutes of Burghmote meetings survive from this date.

The seal

The seal is round, double-sided and 6crn in diameter.[fn17] The image on the seal shows a gate with a stream flowing in front of it and an impression of a city wall around the edge (Fig. 2). There is no surviving inscription. There is a cast of the Canterbury seal in the extensive seal and cast collection at the Society of Antiquaries which is almost certainly from CCA-CC-A/A/6 as casts were made of seals in the Canterbuiy collections as traces of plaster on some show (Fig. 3). Images of town gates were used by a number of cities and boroughs on their seals at around this time across Europe. That the seal is attached with red tluead rather than a parchment tab is an indication of its importance.

The counterseal is most likely Hamo Doge’s personal seal as he was the first- named on the charter (Fig. 4). No other example has been found that may be Hamo Doge’s personal seal, although some may have been one attached to other charters with which he was associated but where the seal is now lost. His name does not appear on the counterseal but his is the leading name on the charter. It is rounded and the oval in the centre is approximately 3 x 2cm. The legend is incomplete, but seems to be a general form often used on private seals expressing friendship with [pg316][pg317]clasped hands. It is not immediately identifiable as one that might have been used by Hamo Doge in his capacity as an archdeacon’s official.

An earlier version of the Cathedral Ar chives catalogue said that the seal showed ‘a city surrounded by a moat’. Some have suggested that it shows Canterbury castle, which is an early twelfth-century keep. The water is clearly flowing in front of the building and not around it or the walls. Canterbury castle was neither surrounded by a moat nor did it have a river flowing in front of it.

However, the building fits the description of the pre-13 80 Westgate as having a small chapel built on it. The West Gate was completely rebuilt at this time on the site of the earlier gate above which was the original church of Holy Cross.18 The pre-13 80 gate was demolished as part of the late fourteenth-century plan to strengthen Canterbury’s defences during the Hundred Years’ war when the threat of invasion from France was a real one.

Canterbury’s Westgate

On the Canterbury seal the chapel is somewhat out of scale, possibly to make the point that it existed but the gate would have been deep enough to accommodate not only the chapel but a guardroom and other accommodation.[fn19] Dr Hubert Pragnell has kindly produced a possible reconstruction drawing (Fig. 5). The footprint of the gate built around 1380 is probably much the same as the earlier one. The church that replaced the chapel was built alongside the gate and is now Canterbury’s Guildhall.[pg318]

Canterbury was first walled by the Romans and the extensive ran of wall that still survives follows the same line. There were eight gates in the Roman circuit including the West Gate. The footings of the London Gate over Watling Street are recorded as being in the Westgate gardens. Though, nothing survives of the Roman West Gate, one of the town’s earliest major streets left the town here and the existence of an early gateway is undisputed. By that time the Romans were well established and the route from the Channel to London. Watling Street, was a very important thoroughfare. No Roman city gate survives to any extent in England.[fn20]

It was Canterbury’s Roman west gate that was repaired, strengthened and used first by the Anglo-Saxons and then the Normans and a chapel constructed on the top of the gate. It was common practice at that time to include a chapel either over or beside a gate so that travellers could pray for a safe journey or give thanks for their safe arrival and the Westgate was no exception.

No similar depiction of the pre-13 80 West gate is known but its importance is clear. On the north-west side of the river from the gate was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s estate that took its name from the gate. Henry II walked through the gate on his way from St Dunstan’s Church to do penance at Thomas Becket’s tomb in the cathedral on 12 July 1174. and the great funeral procession of Edward Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, passed through two centuries later on 29 September 1376. This was to be the last, and possibly the grandest, of the public occasions featuring the earlier gate before its demolition. The Black Prince knew that he was near death for many months and his will included very specific instractions for his funeral. His body was to be taken through the town of Canterbury to the priory. There were details about the immediate party and money was allocated for the prince’s five or six hundred retainers to follow, all wearing the prince’s livery.[pg319]

Conclusion

Not only is this charter unique in the Canterbury city collection but no comparable charter has been found among the catalogues of other collections during the course of research for this paper. The wording and the emphatic sealing clause specifically forbidding further revocation is also unusual and indicates that it was drafted for a particular purpose, possibly by Hamo Doge the lawyer who was also the Westgate aiderman. It seems unlikely that the sole purpose was the revocation of a local bread tax but that it aimed to stress the unity and authority of those named.

The charter and its seal provide a valuable snapshot of Canterbury and its civic life in 1261. Its size and lack of inscription mean that it cannot be proved conclusively, but the seal seems to show an image of the Westgate before it was demolished towards the end of the fourteenth century and, as such is a representation of the Roman gate rebuilt by the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans.

Acknowledgements

The writer is very grateful for help and support from the staff at Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, Canterbury Archaeological Trust, Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh, Professor Paul Harvey. Dr Lloyd de Beer (British Museum), Dr David Wright. Professor Louise Wilkinson and Dean Irwin as well as many others who provided advice and encouragement.

[fn]1|In the thirteenth century the burghinote was a fortnightly meeting of the business of the borough.[/fn]

[fn]2|The writer is grateful to Dr David Wright for invaluable translation assistance.[/fn]

[fn]3|CCA-DCc/ChAnt/C/838.[/fn]

[fn]4|For a detailed biography of Hamo Doge, see ‘Master Hamo Doge, founder of the chantry’, by William Uny in The Parish of St Martin and St Paul Canterbury, ed. Margaret Sparks (Canterbuiy. 1980), pp. 36-40.[/fn]

[fn]5|He served as an official of the archdeacon at the same time as Master Omer and the latter was apparently the senior official as a stone house that still exists in the precincts was built for him. Archdeacons had a judicial role and his officials provided legal support.[/fn]

[fn]6|Hamo Doge established a chantry near St Paul’s church, Canterbuiy in 1264 covering a large area, including a dwelling house with a chapel and other outbuildings with a frontage on one side of 26.67 metres. The area was subjected to bombing in World War II but almshouses constructed on the site in 1900 survived and are still in use today. Rents from the tenants of the buildings on the site helped to fund Doge’s charity and Doge’s own house was included in the site. The site of Doge’s chantry appeared on maps into the nineteenth centuiy and the street is still called Chantry Lane.[/fn]

[fn]7|Somner, W, 2nd edn (London, 1703), p. 80. The years are 1260, 1261, 1262, 1265, 1270, 1271, 1272, 1281 and 1323.[/fn]

[fn]8|Hasted, E., vol. 12 (Kent County Libraiy, 1972), p. 603.[/fn]

[fn]9|Somner, p. 180.[/fn]

[fn]10|Urry, W., Canterbury Under the Angevin Kings (London, 1967).[/fn]

[fn]11|Somner, p. 180.[/fn]

[fn]12|Somner, W., 2nd edn (London, 1703), 180. For example, in the years 1248, 1249, 1250, 1257, 1258, 1265, 1266, 1267 and 1269.[/fn]

[fn]13|Archaeologia Cantiana, 38 (London 1926), p. 167.[/fn]

[fn]14|Ibid.[/fn]

[fn]15|Calender of Liberate Rolls, HMSO, VI, p. 47.[/fn]

[fn]16|The writer is very grateful to Dean Irwin for sharing the information he has found about Richard and looks forward to learning more from his forthcoming ph.d. thesis.[/fn]

[fn]17|The practice of sealing in post-Roman Britain is known to date from the seventh century and to have been used as a means of validation since the mid-eleventh century and was an important means of authentication. New, Elizabeth A., Seals and Sealing Practices (London 2010).[/fn]

[fn]18|Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1377-81, HMSO, p. 450. Frere, S.S., Stow, S. and Bennett, R, 1982, Excavations on the Roman and Medieval Defences of Canterbury, The Archaeology of Canterbury, vol. II, KAS, 22, fii.40.[/fn]

[fn]19|Charters relating to Eastbridge Hospital situated in Westgate ward were ‘written at the Westgate’ in the thirteenth century (CAA-U24).[/fn]

[fn]20|The Porta Negra at Trier is the largest surviving Roman gate north of the Alps but this is much grander and more robust than any contemporary gate in the Canterbury walls, among other reasons because of the availability of good quality local stone.[/fn]

Roman, Medieval, and Post-Medieval Activity at Court Lodge Road, Appledore

Archaeology South-East undertook a programme of archaeological investigations in Appledore in June-July 2016 in advance of the construction of residential dwellings on the site (Fig. 1) (TQ 95616 29263). The excavation uncovered low- level evidence of prehistoric activity, with residual flintwork recovered from within later features. Most of these pieces of flint were not closely dateable, except for a single blade of probable Mesolithic or Early Neolithic origin. Evidence suggests transient use of the coastal margins during this time.

The earliest cut features encountered at the site date from the Late Iron Age to Early Roman period and comprise several boundary or enclosure ditches containing a small number of pottery fragments including one from a 1 st-century bead rim jar. Associated carbon remains were dated to 40 cal bc - cal ad 80 (1970 ± 30 bp, Beta- 455030). Two possible ore roasting pits were also noted, although their dating and association is uncertain.

Later Roman activity was represented by the excavation of two pits. Possible structured deposits were revealed with the inclusion of near-complete vessels within the assemblage, probably indicating part of an everyday domestic fonn of votive practice. These findings suggest Appledore as an area suitable for agricultural activities and small-scale production of iron for local consumption, with the position of the site appropriate for both riverine and coastal trade.

There was a subsequent hiatus in activity until the mid- 12th/mid- 13th century, when a small amount of residual pottery was encountered in addition to a single pit. The lack of remains suggests the site’s use as an open area at that date, perhaps on the periphery of a settlement. From the mid-13th to 14th centuries activity increased with more formalised pitting occuning and evidence of the area being divided to correspond with tenement properties fronting ‘The Street’ (TP1-TP4, Fig. 2). The frequency of this pitting increased into the mid-15th and earlier 16th centuries when activity appeared to be at its greatest. A high incidence of disposal of household waste was apparent within these features, along with occasional small-scale quarry pits possibly for building materials. Several complete animal burials also occurred during this time and individual plots relating to holdings were inferred by the spatial patterning of features (Fig. 2).

[pg321]

[595575

129286

N

Period 1, phase 1: Early Roman -1 st century

Period 2: Early medieval - 12th to early/mid 13th century

[”] Excavation areaEvaluation trenches

595575

1129228

595634

129228

[pg322]

A good-sized assemblage of 14th-century CBM was recovered in even quantities from across the site suggesting a single episode of deposition. This physical evidence might correspond with documentary evidence of the French raid of 1380, which is reported to have razed Appledore and its church. If the destruction of (undefended) Appledore was extensive, material from both domestic structures and the church would have been distributed across the town, as evidenced by the recovery of a fragment of mass dial tile (Fig. 3) which is discussed in greater detail in the Appendix - although this might have equally derived from later Refonnation activity.

[pg323]

Artefactual evidence generally corroborates that of documentary research. Appledore was home to a population, at least near its centre, who were most likely well-connected merchants attaining a comparative degree of wealth thanks to their links with regional and continental trade networks. A situation which carried on into the 15th century.

After the 16th century, activity markedly decreased at the site, which is probably a direct result of the silting of the River Rother. This eventually served to cut waterborne trade routes and produced a general decline in the fortunes of Appledore. Nevertheless, some remodelling of the property boundaries occurred at this time, especially towards the western end of the plots. Activity further declined through into the 20th century, until a number of refuse pits of Second World War date were excavated, possibly relating to the oral history of Home Guard activity described by local residents.

[The full report is available at Kent Archaeological Reports online.] [pg324]The Pre-Refonnation mass dial

The most significant find amongst the ceramic building material collected from Appledore, and indeed from the site as a whole, was a fragment of a ceramic mass dial tile (Fig. 3). It was found during the evaluation phase of work, and whilst mass dials are not an uncommon feature of medieval churches, this one is unusual in that it was ceramic whereas they are far more typically carved into stone. Mass dials were installed on the south wall of a church, next to the entrance, where they would provide an indication of the canonical hours at which people were expected to attend prayer.

Many mass dials still remain in situ in many churches, or are found having been reincorporated into another part of the church structure at a later time. Reinstating historical features on medieval churches was particularly popular during the Victorian period (Rumley 2013). Although some examples include a full circular dial, akin to a sundial, a semi-circular form is more common. The example found at Appledore is approximately a quarter of the full or half mass dial, the original scheme of the mass dial not being clear from the remaining fragment.

During research carried out for the current article, no other definitive example of a ceramic mass tile was found. There were some examples of ceramic sundials, including one on display at St Augustine’s Priory, Canterbury, which is of 14th- or 15th-century date and most probably made in the Low Countries. A glazed tile in The Herbert Museum. Coventry, shows the remains of a circular dial, inscribed with Roman numerals. These could either be IX or XI depending on the orientation of the tile, which is not immediately obvious from the surviving fragment. The presence of numerals could suggest a time keeping function, and if the number represented was IX rather than XI then this tile could also be liturgical in nature as there was a ninth hour for prayer but not an eleventh.

Mass dials appear to have enjoyed a long tradition. They are commonly found on churches dating to the 13tlr/14th centuries, and examples include the Church of St Bartholomew in Ubley, Somerset; St Mary’s, Sixpenny Handley. Dorset; and the Church of St Maiy. Marston Moreteyne, Bedfordshire to name but a few. The earliest known mass dial from Britain is believed to be installed on the south wall of the Saxon church (c.700) at Escombe. County Durham (Rumley 2013).

The mass dial was found in evaluation trench (TRI), approximately 0.6km from the parish church in Appledore. St Peter & St Paul, which is where the tile is believed to have originally been installed. Whilst there is little doubt that this mass tile was initially installed in the structure of St Peter & St Paul, what is less clear is whether it was discarded as a result of the French invasion in 1380 as described by English chronicler Raphael Holinshed (Winnifrith 1983, 15), or as a consequence of the reformation during the 1550s.

The feature producing the mass tile pit [1/006] - is dated to the medieval period up to c.1550. Much of the clearly medieval building debris from site is believed to be associated with the French invasion, and in some cases this is probable based on the date of the building materials. The Flemish brick, for example, is most likely to be of 13th/14th century date (Ryan 1996, 31) and therefore very unlikely to [pg325]have been used after 1380. However, although extensive damage by the French is known to have destroyed much of the church structure - the north wall in particular is known to have required rebuilding - there is cumulative evidence that indicates the broken mass tile can be associated with the later destruction relating to the reformation.

The main basis for this assertion is the style of the tile, which is far more similar in dimensions and fabric to the 15th/16th-century floor tiles imported from the Low Countries than their smaller predecessors. The sandy, slightly calcareous quality apparent in the fabric matrix is most common amongst Low Country imports, and considering its location Appledore would have been in a prime position to receive goods straight from the Continent. There is no indication that the mass dial was originally glazed, which again places it during the Tudor period or later when tiles were less commonly glazed.

Only a single fragment of pottery was found in the pit fill alongside the mass dial, and this was a sherd of post-medieval metallic glazed earthenware (Lydd fabric PMla). Similar pottery was found during the excavations at Lydd Quarry where it was dated as being in use from the mid- 16tlr/ 17th century (Barber and Priestley-Bell 2008, 127). This dating compliments a time-frame of the mid-later 16th century for the deposit of both the pottery sherd and the mass dial, during the Reformation.

Barber, L. and Priestley-Bell, G., 2008, Medieval Adaptation, Settlement and Economy of a Coastal Wetland: The evidence from around Lydd, Romney Marsh, Kent, Oxford, Oxbow Books.

Runrley, T.J., 2013, Medieval Mass Dials Decoded. Historic Churches 20. Available online: http://www.buildingconseivation.com/articles/mass-dials/mass-dials.htm (last accessed: 5/6/18)

Ryan, P., 1996, Brick in Essex from the Roman Conquest to the Reformation, Pat Ryan, Chelmsford.

Winnifrith, J., 1983, A Histoiy of Appledore (2nd edn), Chichester, Phillimore and Co.

The Conundrum of the Apex Window at St Mary the Virgin Church, Eastry

Among the papers left by the late Dr Charles Coulson is a brief note (dated 25 January 2017) on the so-called apex window of Eastry Church. This note is set out below as a matter of record, an addendum to his major article on the church in the 2018 volume of Archaeologia Cantiana.[fn1] Some wording in square brackets added for clarification or extra detail.

In the east gable of the Chancel, masked by the late nineteenth-century roof, is a window the modern term for which is the ‘Apex window’.

Outline description: a painted glass panel (apparently) without leaded cames in the body, except for one vertical line extending from the hair of the infant Christ clipping the Virgin’s outermost nimbus, through the red/purple leaf background, [pg326]

to the (visible) top-limit of the panel. [The panel is an estimated 33cm wide and 48.5cm high.[fn2] ]

Subject: Madomia and Child - photographed from the Choir’s Stall (RHS) by Dr Michael Kinns and showing the greatest area visible between the beams (collars), top and bottom (Fig. 1).

Architectural Context: set in an upright rectangular frame, integral with the barely altered masonry of the Monastic Church (Canterbury Cathedral Priory) ascribed tentatively to the mid thirteenth century. The lintel-head, slightly chamfered, and surround, above the central triple lancet (restored 1856) are clear outside. Nine corroded thin vertical bars, strengthened by four substantial ‘Victorian’ horizontal bars, remain. In the lower half of the ‘window’ is a translucent sheet and enigmatic curving bars which are not part of the painted glass panel. Above [pg327]them a curved frame, on the plane of the panel apparently, can be made out in a good light.

The Problem of the Madonna Panel: no [other?] medieval glass survives (?). [The Panel’s] inaccessibility cannot be a sufficient explanation. The quality and allure of the Panel would focus iconoclasm. Its superb condition (insofar as remote appreciation allows) remains hard to explain. Subsequent alteration of any kind would seem to be highly unlikely.

The Roof hypothesis: a watercolour drawing (kept in the Nave) executed before 1854 shows that the Nave and (probably) the North Aisle had inserted ceilings. That on the Nave, seen from the Tower Arch, cut off the Roof entirely. Very probably the ceiling was of lath-and-plaster fixed to tie-beams of the original roof. No doubt the Chancel was similarly ceiled (as at Barfrestone). An early post-Dissolution (1535) date[fn3] [for the ceiling insertion] would have meant that the Apex Window would have been invisible for over three centuries, covering the whole of the Classical period. It will have been revealed at the time suggested by the four [Victorian] horizontal bars across the exterior aperture, but too late for the design of the Victorian roof (1869). where it abuts the Chancel gable, to display the Painting fittingly.

Some remaining difficulties:

The stylistic and technical date of the Apex Window (and Chancel).

Dateable nature of the translucent screen, inside the vertical corroded bars, to the external aperture at the top of the gable.

Internal and external access for inspection and evaluation.

Future conservation of the Apex Window is considered appropriate. [Note ends.] [pg328]

[fn]1|Charles Coulson, 2018, ‘Prior Henry (1285-1331): Rescuer of Eastry Church’, Archaeologia Cantiana, cxxxk, 199-223.[/fn]

[fn]2|Estimated by Dr M. Kinns when photographing exterior of east gable.[/fn]

[fn]3|Dr Coulson subsequently added ‘(say 1556)’ here. At this time Mary Tudor was Queen of England and trying to reverse the English Reformation.[/fn]

Some Further Bee Boles Found in Kent at Old St Albans Court, Nonington

Bee boles, the recesses in stone or brick walls used to house the skeps of coiled straw or wicker in which most bee keepers kept their bees before the anival of moveable frame hives in 1862,[fn1] are not particularly numerous in Kent. Archaeologia Cantiana has over time assiduously published all the major information relating to those in Kent;[fn2] this note adds a little to an already fairly comprehensive record.

Old St Albans Court is fortunate in its documentation so we know that in 15 5 6, Sir Thomas Hammond rebuilt a substantial part of his ancient manor house in brick.3 This included providing a Walled Garden to the West, the south-east facing wall [pg328]of which, closest to the north- western end of the house, contains three triangular topped bee boles, each of which is identical in construction to the ones recorded (IBRA Register 288) at the south end of the boundary wall in the Cathedral Close at Canterbury. This boundary wall dates probably from 1547 when a house was built on the south side of the plot.[fn4]

Our bole structures (Fig. 1) are of red brick, three bricks deep for each side for the main body, with two bricks slanting to the triangular top above. The slanting bricks have been nibbed at each end to edge together both at the top and above the side bricks; a small point but elsewhere, except in the ones mentioned above in Canterbury, photos seem to show the equivalent bricks being laid head to head at an angle of 90° which requires no shaping of the brick. The dimensions of the Nonington bee boles are: height (to apex) 12in. x width 9in. x depth 12in. They are formed by tluee bricks on either side each with a fill in 14 brick at the ends abutting an end course which is part of the fabric of the other side of the wall and from the slight difference in the brick, assessed as part of the 1666 works on the house extension behind.[fn5] The base of the bee boles is approximately 4ft above the present ground level which is judged to be about where it always was. The bricks themselves were almost certainly made on site: burning fields are recorded,6 and the Dover Archaeological Group have revealed the remains of seventeenth­century brick clamps nearby.[fn7] The modem mortaring belongs to some time in the last century.

Planning permission was received to insert a door in the south- eastern facing wall to facilitate entrance to the Walled Garden and, to our surprise, this revealed a further bee bole. In 1790, William Hammond had lavished a large sum on [pg329]refurbishing and up dating his mansion[fn8] and this included building greenhouses in his Tudor Walled Garden, all the base kitchen garden aspects of which were removed to an entirely newly built and even larger Walled Garden at the side of his Malt House about a quarter of a mile away. The south-eastern facing wall of this new Garden has been demolished but there is no village memory of it having bee boles in it. At St Albans Court, the Tudor Garden wall was extended upwards, rendered in cement with moveable wooden ventilation shutters built in at the top, a dedicated heating boiler system provided and a large greenhouse built against it. The 1790 render had covered over this newly found bee bole, certainly two others nearer the house, and possibly more to the south. This is suggested because our existing bee boles were at 7ft intervals and the demolished one exactly conformed to being one of a line as well as in height in the wall.

Looking further it was known that a section of the wall had been extended upwards in 1666 as part of other major works on the house and was then supported by a buttress - 7ft from the nearest bee bole - which probably therefore also masks another bee bole.

It is clear therefore that a line of six bee boles was made in 1556 with the possibility when looking at the wall of another three, or possibly four. The render will in time reveal how many as it decays - the 1790 greenliouses were mostly demolished in the 1960s with one free standing one remaining.

In present times, the walled garden has big variations in temperature, not infrequently touching 40°C in suimner and going below -10°C in winter. The prevailing winds are from the west and rainfall is markedly lower than within a few miles in every direction. However, birds nest in the bee boles and honey bees are in the ventilation slots in the wall above so the Tudor siting remains valid.

It would seem highly likely that the detailed execution of the desired form of bee boles was left to the individual craftsman. The Cathedral Close bee boles were inserted in the 1547 wall by outside contractors and in this stretch of wall, there are two clusters of bee boles which look similar but actually on inspection are of markedly different construction. (There are more - IBRA 288 - in the Memorial Garden beyond, again of a distinctly different and more complex structure.) Scrutinising the published photos of other recorded bee boles, some are similar but none are identical to Nonington’s. Perhaps it was the same itinerant bricklayer, or his apprentice, that was engaged by Hammond for his Nonington project nearly a decade later?

The IBRA Register records a total of 1591 bee boles in the UK (2017) of which 57 are in Kent. Penelope Walker noted that there seemed to be none south of a line from Sandwich to Ashford and beyond.[fn9] We sit on that line and the observation still broadly holds true in terms of the current Register. However, the Dover Archaeological Group recorded a fine set of bee boles at Winkland Oakes Farm in Sutton,[fn10] well south, and it seems likely that alert and observant eyes would yield more.

[pg330]‘Further Bee Boles in Kent', Archaeologia Cantiana 70, 237-240: 1958, ‘Kentish Bee Boles; Further Note', Archaeologia Cantiana, 72, 234; I960, ‘More Kentish Bee Boles', Archaeologia Cantiana, 74, 91-94; Penelope Walker, 1988, ‘Bee Boles in Kent', Archaeologia Cantiana, 106, 107-127.[pg331]

[fn]1|R.M. Duruz and E.E. Crane, 1953, English Bee Boles: National Beekeeping Museum Pamphlet No. 1, 6.[/fn]

[fn]2|V.F. Desborough, 1955, ‘Bee Boles and Beehouses'. Arch aeologia Cantiana, 69, 90-95; 1956,[/fn]

[fn]3|Topographical Miscellanies, London, 1792, Vol. 1, Kent, St Albans Court, Nonington in the Hundred of Wingham.[/fn]

[fn]4|Personal communication with Dr Margaret Sparks and Prof. Paul Bennett, 2018.[/fn]

[fn]5|J. Britton and E.W. Brayley, 1801, The Beauties of England and Wales, viii, London, 1086.[/fn]

[fn]6|Peter Hobbs, 2005, ‘Old St Albans Court, Nonington’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 125, 273-290, note 50.[/fn]

[fn]7|Awaiting publication by Dover Archaeological Group.[/fn]

[fn]8|Hobbs, ‘Old St Albans Court’, 280.[/fn]

[fn]9|Walker, ‘Bee Boles in Kent’, 109-10.[/fn]

[fn]10|Dover Archaeological Group unpublished archive report.[/fn]

An Example Of The Kent Parish Returns Listing Contributions Received For The Distressed Protestants Of Ireland 1642 Those For Elham

Because of the vagaries of record keeping during the start of the English Civil War any parish listings for the 1640s is a welcome resource for the historian.[fn1] They include:

Parish listings from all these four sources for Kent survive but their coverage is patchy at best, the Solemn League and Covenant particularly so, providing only about a half-dozen parish listings.[fn3]

Whilst parliament discussed measures to relieve the Protestants in Ireland in December 1641 it was not until the 1642 Act of Parliament that a collection throughout England took place. The act cormnences with the following words:

Whereas sithence the begining of the late Rebellion in Ireland diverse craell Murthers and Massacres of the Protestants there have beene and are daily coinitted by Popish Rebells in that Kingdome by occasion whereof great multitudes of godly and religious people there inhabiting togeather with theire wives children and families for the pres­ervation of theire lives have been inforced to forsake theire habitations meanes and livelihood in that kingdome and to flee for succour into severall parts of his Majesties Realme of England and Dominion of Wales having nothing left to depend upon but the charitable benevolence of well disposed persons.

Churchwardens and overseers were to gather the gifts and charitable benevolences, before the 1 July 1642: [pg331]

togeather with the persons names that shall give the same they or some or one of them to set downe in a note in writing in words at large and not in figures and the same note togeather with the said summs of money forthwith to pay and deliver to the severall High Constables of every hundred.

The money was then to be collected by the sheriffs and they to deliver the money and notes to the receivers. The distribution was to be by both houses of parliament according to the act. The act also called for the notes or schedules to be printed and published but this never seems to have taken place. ‘A variety of public exhortations to charity, prayer and activism buttressed these works’.[fn4]

The events in Ireland which prompted these nationwide donations are well documented. Whilst there were cases of fabrication there were also tales of the most horrendous savagery exacted by both sides. For those that would know more about these atrocities there are 31 handwritten volumes of embittered 17th- [pg332]century testimony taken after the Irish rebellion and massacres of 1641. The 1641 Depositions (Trinity College Dublin. MSS 809-841) have been transcribed and are available online.[fn5] ‘This body of material is unparalleled anywhere in early modem Europe, and provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland. England and Scotland’.[fn6]

A slightly inaccurate listing for Goudhurst of money collected for the distressed protestants in Ireland is provided in Archaeologia Cantiana, xxvm. 16-21 (but called it a Lay Subsidy listing because it was stored amongst such records).[fn7] Wliilst there are other parishes in the E 179 series the bulk of the returns for Kent are at TNA: SP 28/192.

The author is cunently transcribing all the Kent returns to make them available for researchers. No Protestation or Solemn League and Covenant appears to have survived for Elharn but there is a 1641 subsidy for the Upper & Lower Hundred of Loningborough (TNA: E 179/128/643) yet to be transcribed.

A transcribed version of the Elharn return from SP 28/192 is presented below:

[The spelling of the names has been retained, although sometimes it is difficult to decide what letter the scribe has used. All figures, spelt out in full, have been reduced to an Arabic number followed by £, s, d.]

Shepway: Loningborough Upper [Half Hundred]

Shepway: Loningborough Lower and Upper 9£ 10s 2^d

ELHAM

1642. A noate of the somme of money gathered in the parish of Elharn as a
benevolence towards the reliefe of Ireland as followeth. [pg333]

[fn]1|Lawrence Stone, 1972, The causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 (Harper), p. 13 6 et alia.[/fn]

[fn]2|Charles I, 1640: An Act for a speedie contribuc[i]on and loan towards the releife of his Majesties distressed Subjects of the Kingdome of Ireland, in Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628-80, ed. Jolin Raithby (s.l, 1819), pp. 141-143.[/fn]

[fn]3|For details of the Protestation and the Solemn League and Covenant, see S.R. Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625-1660 (Oxford, 1936) pp. 155-56, 267-271.[/fn]

[fn]4|Joseph Cope, England and the 1641 Irish rebellion (Boydell, 2009), p. 12.[/fn]

[fn]5|http://1641.tcd.ie.[/fn]

[fn]6|C.V. Wedgwood, The King’s War 1641-1647 (Collins, 1958), pp. 72-73, points out that ‘cold and hunger in the long hard winter destroyed more of the fleeing settlers than the Irish killed, either in fight or in cold blood’. Recounting some of the tales she says, ‘These fearfull tales proliferated from seeds of truth’.[/fn]

[fn]7|TNA: El79/249/9.[/fn]