Two hundred years after William Cunnington and Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s excavations into Bronze Age barrows on Normanton Down, Wiltshire, we offer a fresh appraisal of this renowned cemetery, which lies within sight of Stonehenge. The paper focuses specifically on burial deposits of Early Bronze Age Period 3, seen as representing a dynastic succession that controlled access to Stonehenge for a while and presided over the ceremonies therein. Pre-eminent are the finds from the Bush Barrow grave group, now housed in the Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes, and still without close parallel. Long-held notions that the skeleton was extended are dispelled; instead, the grave assemblage is reconstructed around the universal crouched inhumation rite of the period, giving rise to important new implications. Special attention is also given to two probable female graves nearby; essentially contemporary, their accompaniments contrast in a number of respects, pointing to very distinct affiliations. Our capacity to reinterpret such burial complexes is a tribute to the records made by the pioneer excavators.

The paper discusses the siting of Middle and Late Bronze Age hoards in south Hampshire, Sussex and parts of Surrey and Kent. It presents the results of fieldwork at the findspots of a hundred metalwork deposits and discusses the most informative ways of studying them on the ground. On the coastal plain the hoards were not far from occupation sites, and can be associated with evidence of burnt mounds and occasionally with field systems. That was less common on the chalk. Throughout the study area these deposits were normally located along watercourses, with a special emphasis on small areas of ground beside, or overlooking springs and confluences. It seems as if the deposition of bronze metalwork was governed by certain conventions. For that reason it may be possible to predict the pattern of future discoveries.

This paper describes the rediscovery of the exact location for the Isleham hoard (tl 63197253) and presents the results of related fieldwork; it briefly reviews the metallurgical significance of the hoard, and discusses its local environmental and social context, as well as the distribution of founder's hoards within the Fenland region.

The hoard was found to have been placed in a pit dug into a filled-in Bronze Age boundary ditch, next to a rectangular building, and adjacent to the edge of low-lying wetland bordering a palaeochannel which revealed an environmental sequence stretching from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age. This area is also in proximity to a possible ringwork. Mesolithic and Neolithic activity is evidenced by residual flint tools and pottery. By the Bronze Age the tongue of fen next to the hoard had begun to be invaded by ferns and terrestrial vegetation and its latest peat phase was radiocarbon dated to 4045 ± 62 bp. Molluscs within the boundary ditch show an open landscape with a mixture of dryland and wetland taxa, and the presence of Vertigo angustior, a rare British species no longer known from Cambridgeshire, and one indicative of transitional habitats between wet and dry land. This landscape was probably contemporary with the deposition of the hoard.

Current typological and radiocarbon analysis for Wilburton metalwork would suggest a date within the period 1150 to 1000 bc for the hoard, whilst a typological assessment of the pot in which the hoard was found suggests an affinity with Post-Deverel-Rimbury (PDR) Plainware dated currently from around 1150 to 800 bc. OSL dating of a sample of the pot containing the hoard yielded a date of 1460 ± 230 bc at 1 sigma.

The locations of other founder's hoards within the region suggest a clustering in the southern fens and South Cambridgeshire, apparently related to ancient routeways.

The life of Gildas by an eleventh-century Breton monk mentions his education at ‘Iren’. Though often taken to mean ‘Ireland’, this is more probably a corruption of ‘Cerin’, the Old Welsh name of ‘Corinium’ or Cirencester. If so, it implies the survival in sixth-century Britain of traditional Roman schools.

The Staffordshire Hoard was found by a metal detectorist on arable land in the parish of Ogley Hay in south Staffordshire in July 2009, and was recovered by archaeologists from Staffordshire County Council and Birmingham Archaeology. More than 3,940 pieces were retrieved, mostly of gold or silver alloy and mostly representing what appear to be martial battle goods. The date of the material has yet to be ascertained but the artefacts appear to range from the late sixth to the early eighth centuries AD. The reasons for burial remain, as yet, largely unknown. The choice of location, on the north-western spur of a prominent ridge, could have been intended to facilitate its rediscovery, unless the locale held a symbolic significance within the wider landscape. The second stage of fieldwork, in March 2010, identified a number of undated field boundaries and undated palisade trenches perhaps associated with a small farmstead of pre- or post-Roman date, unlikely to be associated with the hoard.

The seventh-century vernacular laws from the kingdoms of Kent and Wessex specify fines or compensation payments using units of account that have given us familiar terms in the numismatics of this period: scillingas (shillings), sceattas and pæningas (pennies). In light of the use of cognate words in Gothic and Old High German, and the comparative values given in the Old English law-codes themselves and in the fifth-century Theodosian Code, it is suggested that these represent a regular and durable bimetallic system correlating values in gold and silver. This proposition is examined further against the evidence of weighing-sets from sixth- and early seventh-century Anglo-Saxon graves, and it is argued that the results give greater and more precise meaning to the use of gold and silver in Early Anglo-Saxon artefacts, such as the great gold buckle from Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk.

It is well known that Anglo-Saxon England witnessed dramatic changes in landscape organization, economy and social structure but this paper aims to demonstrate how a more nuanced appreciation of these transformations can be gained by weaving together different (and superficially incompatible) strands of information. Here zooarchaeological data relating to the distribution and consumption of venison are combined with evidence from studies of weapons, landscape, Old English texts and anthropology. It is argued that, between the fifth and eleventh centuries, Anglo-Saxon society moved from being a culture centred on redistribution, in which the concept of cutting up and sharing permeated every facet of life, to one of closure and privatization, as the elite attempted to distance themselves from the lower classes.

The Bayeux Tapestry depicts three curious chequered garments. These garments are usually identified as gambesons, or some form of scaled armour. Several scholars have observed similar garments in the early twelfth-century Bible of Cîteaux. The Cîteaux garments are depicted in a pattern later used to represent fur (called ‘vair’) in heraldic art. This identification is confirmed by the pattern’s usage in cloak linings, but its simultaneous appearance as tunic material is unfamiliar in later art. The Cîteaux tunics suggest the possibility that the Bayeux garments may also have been intended to represent fur tunics. Reasons for that identification, as well as problems with the identification, are considered.

The great tower of Dudley Castle, in the West Midlands, is re-examined in order to situate it within the evolutionary sequence of great tower designs. In so doing, it is argued that the origins of its plan are to be found in the works of the early to mid-thirteenth century, and that the tower itself was probably begun during the 1260s. Furthermore, it is asserted that the tower represents a milestone in the thinking that underpinned the redevelopment of castle mottes, and that it is to be seen as the prime connection between the circle-based plans that dominated motte redevelopments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and later developments that led, ultimately, to the radically different, but architecturally successful scheme adopted by the builder of the donjon of Warkworth Castle in Northumberland.

This paper seeks to reassess the iconography and the physical condition of a fourteenth-century carved and painted casket in order to review its geographic origins and to consider its function. The intriguing, but under-researched casket (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) has been discussed mainly in terms of the Tristan iconography of its lid, apparently derived from a German version of the Tristan story. Yet the casket has been generally described as English or French. In order to review these conflicting assumptions, and to exclude the possibility of a nineteenth-century forgery, the casket was reassessed technically, and the well-preserved polychromy was found to be consistent with a fourteenth-century date. Using stylistic and iconographic analyses, a Netherlandish origin of the casket (around 1350–70) is tentatively proposed. Within the context of the controversial discussion of Minnekästchen, the casket is finally interpreted both as a practical object and as the bearer of a coded language of love.

The great majority of Scottish parish churches owe their present appearance to reconstructions carried out from the later eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It was the view of the authors of this paper, however, that in many cases those reconstructions had been relatively superficial, and that medieval work might have survived under what could, in some cases, be little more than a modern veneer. To test this view, a survey was carried out of all medieval parish sites within the dioceses of Dunblane and Dunkeld. The findings from that survey are summarized in this paper.

Two late fifteenth-century rood-screen panels in Sparham church, near Norwich, display images of corpses that are apparently unique in surviving medieval art. One is painted with two standing corpses dressed in finery, the other with a corpse arising from a tomb within a church, with a font to one side. Both panels are notable for their surviving inscriptions, and others now lost. Together, these works constitute one of the most significant English contributions to the genre of death imagery, yet their uniqueness and artistic importance has not been recognized to date. Using a range of medieval and antiquarian sources, this article aims to provide a comprehensive account of the Sparham panels’ physical and historical context, iconography and meaning. The strong possibility that they functioned as a ‘surrogate sepulchral monument’ is discussed at the end of the paper.

This paper affords a complete analysis of the construction of the original Northampton (later Northumberland) House in the Strand (demolished in 1874), which has never been fully investigated. It begins with an examination of the little-known architectural patronage of its builder, Lord Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton from 1603, one of the most interesting figures of the early Stuart era. With reference to the building of the contemporary Salisbury House by Sir Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, the only other Strand palace to be built in the early seventeenth century, textual and visual evidence are closely investigated. A rediscovered elevational drawing of the original front of Northampton House is also discussed. By associating it with other sources, such as the first inventory of the house (transcribed in the Appendix), the inside and outside of Northampton House as Henry Howard left it in 1614 are re-configured for the first time.

Since the sixteenth century, both scholarly and popular readings of tomb monuments have assigned a series of interpretations to medieval effigies with crossed legs. These have included the beliefs that the effigies dated from before the Norman Conquest; that they commemorated crusaders, or those who had taken crusading vows; and that they commemorated Knights Templar. The ‘crusader’ theory has proved particularly tenacious, and, although largely discredited by scholars, continues to flourish in folk wisdom. This paper charts the emergence and dissemination of these several ideas and the debates they engendered. It argues that the early modern identification of the cross-legged attitude as a noteworthy feature was, despite its mistaken associations, a landmark in the story of the formulation of techniques for the typological diagnosis of antiquities.

This paper uses original documentary evidence held in the archives of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society in Devizes to reassess the work of William Cunnington, FSA, carried out on behalf of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, and the contribution of his two principal excavators, Stephen and John Parker, of Heytesbury, in Wiltshire. Previously the Parkers have been regarded as little more than regular labourers on Cunnington’s pioneering excavations; the evidence now suggests that they (and in particular John) were, in fact, key to the success of Cunnington’s work. By the time of Cunnington’s death in 1810, John Parker was identifying new sites on the Wiltshire Downs and, on occasion, taking sole responsibility for excavating and interpreting them. After 1810 Hoare sponsored few further excavations and, though John was employed on at least one occasion, in 1814, the Parkers dropped back into obscurity and poverty without the regular employment, and perhaps protection, provided by Cunnington. Although John’s obituary in 1867 described him as Cunnington’s ‘principal pioneer’, no research has previously been undertaken that specifically considers the contribution of the Parkers in those early British excavations. This paper seeks to redress that oversight.

To deepen our understanding of early medieval exile, the present study characterizes ways in which scholars have studied cave use in Britain and Ireland. As key figures in the history of archaeology, Sir Daniel Wilson and Sir James Young Simpson were crucial for establishing Scotland’s cave sites as subjects for study. Triggered by these two, a century and a half of research has related these places to the flowering of Gaelic monasticism. Nonetheless, fundamental similarities between early Christian communities in Britain and Ireland are at odds with this northern distribution, and bring the question of cave use beyond Scotland sharply into focus. Our paper therefore targets two questions: (1) to what extent were cave sites used by early Christian communities elsewhere in the Insular world; and (2) is our perception of cave use as a particularly north British phenomenon skewed by the long history of Scottish interest in the topic?