Historians have long been aware that the vicious feud between the monastery of Glastonbury and its bishop in the early thirteenth century was responsible for turning Glastonbury’s scriptorium into the most astonishing and inventive manufacturer of forged documents. In what Julia Crick has memorably termed ‘the marshalling of antiquity’, new documents were produced and older ones annotated, all tending to demonstrate the antiquity of Christian Glastonbury, and its right to self-government and autonomy, free from external interference. The monastery’s chroniclers were equally partisan, but historians and archaeologists alike have tended to accept their account of Glastonbury’s more recent history at face value. Correcting the chroniclers’ anti-Savaric bias allows for some fresh thinking on the construction of both the Glastonbury mythos and of the abbey building itself. It also raises questions about the remarkable reverence with which scholars continue to treat Glastonbury’s ancient texts.

Horace Walpole (1717–97) is well known for two important Gothic projects: his villa, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (1747/8–80), and his novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). These two manifestations of Walpole’s ‘Gothic imagination’ are frequently linked in critical literature on the Gothic Revival and medievalism more broadly; the relationship between Strawberry Hill, Otranto and manuscript illustrations visualising Otranto’s narrative has, on the other hand, received far less attention. This paper brings together a number of important and hitherto overlooked sources that help address this imbalance. In particular, it examines two large-scale watercolours by John Carter (1748–1817) that narrate some of Otranto’s pivotal scenes, allowing critically overlooked subtleties in their iconographies to emerge. The work establishes how Carter’s pre-existing interests – in particular, in Gothic architectural forms and heraldry – are harnessed to govern his representations of Otranto. These paintings, together with Carter’s other illustrations, demonstrate Walpole’s authorship of Otranto, expressed through codes hidden in plain sight. Unlike the frequently touted link between Strawberry Hill and Otranto in secondary criticism, Carter’s illustrations, the argument reveals, do not explicitly make this connection.

This paper presents a fresh reading of a significant early medieval recumbent stone monument from West Kirby, Merseyside (formerly Cheshire). Rather than being a single-phased hogback, later subject to damage, it is argued that West Kirby 4 might have been carved in successive phases, possibly by different hands. It is suggested that the carvers had different abilities and/or adapted their work in response to the time pressures of a funeral or a shift in the location or function of the stone. While a single explanation for the character of the West Kirby monument remains elusive, the article proposes that, rather than ‘clumsy and illogical’, the stone was more likely a coherent but experimental, distinctive and asymmetrical, multi-phased and/or multi-authored creation. Through a review of the monument’s historiography and a reappraisal of the details and parallels of its form, ornament and material composition, the paper reconsiders the commemorative significance of this recumbent stone monument for the locality, region and understanding of Viking Age sculpture across the British Isles. As a result, West Kirby’s importance as an ecclesiastical locale in the Viking Age is reappraised.

This paper explores the hitherto overlooked influence of France on the archaeological interests and approach of Harry Longueville Jones (1806–70), whose best-known contributions to archaeology centred on Wales. Focusing mainly on the period down to his co-founding of Archaeologia Cambrensis (1846) and the Cambrian Archaeological Association (1847), it analyses Jones’s engagement with both archaeological monuments and heritage measures in France. The discussion assesses the significance of his recording of medieval churches in and around Paris while resident in the city 1835–42, including an unpublished report that he submitted to the Minister of Public Instruction in 1840. Attention is also given to his role as one of the corresponding members for England of the French government’s Comité historique des arts et monuments. Lastly, Jones is placed in the context of other British responses to the institutions established by the July Monarchy to study and safeguard historic monuments in France.