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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>It had all begun \u2013 as some of the best archaeological stories do \u2013 with a rescue dig under a car park. At the turn of the 1960s, Trust Houses had announced plans to build a new hotel in the middle of Winchester, between High Street and the cathedral. Documentary evidence, brought together by the late Roger Quirk, indicated that this site was close to the location of the famous seventh-century Old Minster, and also of the New Minster founded by Edward the Elder<\/a> to be a burial place for his father, Alfred the Great<\/a>, and his dynasty. So the new development threatened the historic core of Winchester (Felix Urbs Wintonia: \u201cthe Fortunate City of Winchester\u201d), England\u2019s first \u201ccapital\u201d and the principal seat of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex.<\/p>\n A test dig in 1961 revealed 3 metres of undisturbed strata of material going back to the Roman era, spanning the entire Old English period \u2013 and there were signs of major buildings. \u201cIt was thought that the development was likely to be on the site of New Minster,\u201d recalls Martin Biddle, who directed the Winchester excavations. \u201cAt that time there was no legal protection of any kind for the buried remains of the urban past \u2013 indeed, for any past except listed buildings.\u201d Fortunately, he found allies on the city council, including the mayor, Dilys Neate, and in 1962 the Winchester Excavations Committee was established. It was a landmark moment in the unearthing of the city\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Nine more years of intensive excavation followed, the dig rapidly evolving from a rescue operation to a well-planned long-term campaign. The work was backed by two American universities, the Ministry of Works (as it then was), the Winchester and Hampshire Councils, the British Museum and the Society of Antiquaries \u2013 a fantastic combined effort that sustained the dig\u2019s finances over so many years. In all, some 3,000 volunteers from more than 30 countries worked on the project, which won a United Nations award for international cooperation.<\/p>\n The dig captured the public imagination, spanning as it finally did some 2,000 years of history \u2013 from the Iron Age through the Roman-era town of Venta Belgarum, Anglo-Saxon Wintanceaster and Alfred the Great\u2019s capital, to the Norman conquest and beyond. It was the most comprehensive excavation ever undertaken of an early English city.<\/p>\n For all Old English history fans, as well as for scholars, the findings of the 1961 Winchester dig were thrilling. By chance, barely a month into the first season on Cathedral Green, the team discovered the base of the high altar of the Old Minster, founded around 650. They then exposed the foundations, enabling them to reconstruct a complete plan of the Old Minster, burial place of most of the early West Saxon kings. Subsequently they discovered the 10th-century New Minster and clues to the site of the royal palace, along with many other features: inscriptions, sculpture, metalwork, even fragments of wall paintings from the days of Alfred\u2019s battles with the Danes. In a very real sense, this was the root of the English monarchy \u2013 after all, the current Queen traces her descent back to Alfred and his ancestors.<\/p>\n I can remember the excitement I felt as a student when I bought the interim reports each year; I\u2019ve still got the dog-eared copies over which we pored, as if a whole new category of knowledge was appearing before our eyes.<\/p>\n Among the eye-opening discoveries was the fact that a completely new street grid had been replanned inside the Roman walls as part of the massive reorganisation of southern English towns at around the time of Alfred the Great<\/a>. Now we saw for the first time what these \u201ckings of the Anglo-Saxons\u201d, as they call themselves, were actually doing in the late ninth and 10th centuries.<\/p>\n Previously, our understanding of urban history in this period had been limited to enigmatic documents such as the Burghal Hidage. This assessment list, dating from c914 AD, details more than 30 towns and forts, some of them reused Roman circuits and Iron Age<\/a> forts, others newly built at that time. Thanks to the Winchester excavations, though, we could now clearly see the pattern of later Anglo-Saxon urban development. In fact, the discovery of the Winchester street plan even led to a reassessment of the London street plan of the ninth and tenth centuries.<\/p>\n Winchester was the showpiece for the dynasty. By the end of the 10th century, England\u2019s economic centre of gravity had shifted to London, but at the time of the Norman conquest Winchester was still the royal city. The project looked at the new Norman city, with its castles and cathedral \u2013 still today the longest nave in Britain \u2013 and charted, too, the medieval decline and the later emergence of the early modern city in the Georgian period. Never before had such a programme been undertaken and carried through in any city in Britain or mainland Europe. Not surprisingly, there is hope that Winchester will eventually be graced by a museum celebrating England\u2019s first \u201ccapital\u201d.<\/p>\n The dig, completed in 1971, was followed from the mid-seventies by an ongoing series of Winchester Studies<\/em> publications; 10 are already available, with seven more still to come. These lavish volumes, fabulously printed and illustrated, are now being digitised, with previously published volumes to be made freely available (for more details, see winchesterstudies.org.uk\/publications<\/strong><\/a>). Set alongside the archaeology, they provide an incredible range of literary, poetic, historical and documentary evidence for the city\u2019s story.<\/p>\n One aspect they highlight is that England was part of the growth of urban medieval Europe between the 10th and 12th centuries. During that period, perhaps 15 per cent of the population lived in towns and cities. Winchester housed a substantial concentration of people in an estimated 1,300 tenements, with perhaps as many as 13,000 inhabitants at its peak in the 12th century.<\/p>\n With a population of around 20,000, London was England\u2019s biggest city. Though small by later standards, it was throned with merchants from all over northern Europe, one of the law codes of King \u00c6thelred, dated to around AD 1000, singles out those of Rouen, Flanders, Ponthieu, Normandy and Frankia, as well as others from specific towns in the Low Countries and \u201cthe men of the emperor\u201d (Ottonian Germany), who had especially wide-ranging privileges. Other tolls reveal that goods brought to London included timber, fish and wine from France.<\/p>\n Winchester, the dig showed, shared in this growth. The work also revealed the beginnings of civil society in England. In the 10th century, there was more money, more mobility and \u2013 despite the impression given by the harsh laws of Edgar (king of the English 959-75) \u2013 more freedom. This information comes especially from hitherto unexamined sources published in the\u00a0Winchester Studies\u00a0<\/em>series.<\/p>\n For example, a text describing manifestations of popular piety at the shrine of Saint Swithun in Winchester between 969 and 971 gives us the records of a popular cult just as it took off. Along with stories of miracle cures at the shrine \u2013 people recovering their sight or throwing away their crutches \u2013 these accounts are invaluable for the incidental details they reveal about the lower reaches of society as well as the middle classes. They show that in Edgar\u2019s time it was possible for people to travel across England to buy and sell, to go on pilgrimage, or, if free, to seek work. People came to Winchester from London, East Anglia and Essex, Somerset, Northumbria and France. Even an English resident in Rome was lured home by stories of life-changing cures at the revamped shrine of Saint Swithun.<\/p>\n The people who congregated in this rich West Saxon city, with its royal churches and markets, represent a cross section of wider 10th-century English society: blind beggars, merchants and moneyers, bell-founders and even a \u201cskilled physician\u201d. There were many foreigners, too; indeed, Edgar was criticised for inviting too many immigrants. It was not only in London that Flemish and Frankish merchants congregated; here in Winchester, a wealthy moneyer called Flodoald (a name from Normandy or Picardy) and his brother lived in the city, perhaps with his whole family. This is the kind of merchant implied in \u00c6thelred\u2019s laws, which regulated wine imports from that part of France. The Anglo-Saxon world was changing.<\/p>\n The Norman conquest initially struck a huge blow to this rich and diverse urban milieu. In Winchester, the area taken to make space for construction of the new Norman castle (including its ditches inside and outside the city wall) totalled nearly 4.5 hectares. Thanks to the work of the Winchester Excavations team, our knowledge of the post-Conquest city\u2019s citizens now grows exponentially. For example, the first volume of the Winchester Studies examines the \u201cWinton Domesday\u201d (c1110). This house-by-house survey of the city shows where people lived and what jobs they did \u2013 staggering detail for a medieval population, encompassing people ranging from slaves and servants to merchants, priests and nobles. This enables us to link the lives of the real people in the survey with what the archaeologists find in the ground \u2013 sometimes down to the very house.<\/p>\n Thus on the north side of High Street, going towards the West Gate, the survey records properties as they had been in 1066. We find Edwin \u201cGood-soul\u201d in the second property, Leofwine the shoemaker in the sixth house, Wulfric the priest in the 10th tenement. Nearby was \u201cthe guild hall of the cnihtas [the knights or thegns]\u201d, where they used to \u201cdrink their guild\u201d \u2013 that is, hold their feasts \u2013 \u201cheld freely from King Edward [the Confessor]\u201d. Further on were \u00c6lfwin the moneyer and Leofflaed, daughter of Ecregal. There were shopkeepers, a herring-monger, priests and beadles \u2013 all members of the old community of England on the eve of the Conquest. Astonishingly, it\u2019s possible to place the city\u2019s inhabitants in their very houses and shops along the street. No other town in Britain has ever had this treatment \u2013 and maybe no other ever will.<\/p>\n The Winchester Excavations Committee continues to prepare its publications, and is now raising money to fund the production of the remaining volumes as well as digitising the entire output. This charity, with small teams based in Winchester and Oxford, is still led by the ever-dynamic Martin Biddle.<\/p>\n Our most famous living archaeologist, Biddle turned 85 this June; he was not yet 25 when the Winchester Excavations Committee was founded in 1962. At the age of 12, he dug for eminent archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler at Verulamium (the Roman town just outside modern St Albans); at just 20 he excavated at Jericho for Kathleen Kenyon, another hugely renowned archaeologist. His later projects include amazing detective work on the reputed burial place of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In the 1970s and 80s, he turned his attention to Repton in Derbyshire, with its incredible mass burial of Viking dead. He solved the riddle of the origin of \u201cKing Arthur\u2019s Round Table<\/a>\u201d in Winchester, dating it to the late 13th century, and addressed many other conundrums. Not least of these efforts was his brilliant untangling of late Roman St Albans, proving continuity from the Roman period to the Anglo-Saxons. No one in our lifetime has done more to expand our knowledge of Britain\u2019s early history.<\/p>\n But Winchester is still his baby. It took 10 years to dig and another 50 to publish the results \u2013 and the work is still ongoing. No other excavation has contributed more to our understanding of the urban past in Britain, bringing a lost world back to life. So we should celebrate Martin for a career of incredible exploration throughout which his drive, his expertise and his curiosity have never flagged. \u201cI was lucky enough to be there at the start,\u201d he says \u2013 never imagining, perhaps, that from those small beginnings in the car park by the cathedral would emerge one of the greatest urban archaeology projects in the world.<\/p>\nInternational Effort<\/strong><\/h3>\n
What were the findings?<\/h2>\n
The dig spanned some 2,000 years of history, from the Iron Age, the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons to the Norman conquest and beyond <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
Centre of gravity<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Winchester in the 10th century<\/h2>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>What we know about Winchester after the Norman conquest\u2026<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Astonishingly, it\u2019s possible to place medieval Winchester\u2019s inhabitants in their very houses and shops along the street <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
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