Anglo-Saxon Monastic Landscapes: A reconstruction from Lyminge, Kent

The Lyminge excavations have been shortlisted for the British Archaeological Awards 2012 under the category ‘Best Archaeological Project’. The winner, selected from the three shortlisted projects, will be announced at a ceremony at the British Museum on July 9th.

This resource provides the latest information on an exciting programme of archaeological research examining the Anglo-Saxon monastic landscape of Lyminge, Kent.

On these pages you can read an overview of the project, its aims and objectives, summaries of completed fieldwork campaigns, and future plans 2012-14. Reports based upon the assessment of cultural and environmental assemblages recovered from excavations 2008-10 are also available for downloading (see right-hand menu).

• Overview
• Aims and objectives
• Future plans
• Completed fieldwork campaigns

Overview

The conversion of the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity was spearheaded by the spread of monastic culture across England between the 7th to 9th centuries AD when a series of emergent kingdoms began to exploit the new faith as an ideological weapon in the war for political supremacy. This process laid down a new tier of monastic settlements more complex in physical, social and economic organisation than traditional forms of habitation found in the Anglo-Saxon countryside. In the absence of detailed descriptions in contemporary historical sources, only archaeology can provide an informed impression of how that complexity was given physical expression in the layout and material practices of Anglo-Saxon monastic institutions. Potential of this kind has been tested by recent archaeological work at Northumbrian institutions such as Hartlepool and Hoddom where there have been opportunities to glimpse craft activity, domestic occupation and satellite cemeteries at a considerable distance from the core monastic buildings. Although the importance of these peripheral zones is now firmly established, our conception of how they relate to the totality of a monastic landscapes remains poorly defined owing to the small scale of the excavations and the poor preservation associated with the outer precincts of documented monasteries.

This project redresses this imbalance through the detailed archaeological examination of Lyminge, Kent, the site of a documented double monastery (a mixed-sex community presided over by a royal abbess) founded in the 7th century. The historic core of the village has been evaluated systematically in intricate detail by geophysical survey and excavation undertaken during a pilot phase of fieldwork 2008-10. This work demonstrates that Lyminge has excellent horizontal preservation covering an extensive swathe of the outer precincts of the monastic settlement, combined with an unbroken vertical sequence spanning both monastic-phase occupation and a settlement precursor of the 5th-7th centuries AD. As such, the project has potential to answer a suite of questions on the process of monastic foundation in the kingdom of Kent, a region crucial to the earliest stages of the Anglo-Saxon conversion.

Aims and Objectives

The project's main objective is to pioneer a holistic approach to the archaeological examination of Anglo-Saxon monastic landscapes. Although it has long been recognised that it is essential to relate the core buildings of early medieval monastic communities to their wider landscape context, few opportunities have arisen to examine sites on a sufficiently large scale. This project will address this need by generating a high resolution reconstruction of the physical organisation and material practices of Lyminge's documented monastic community, tracked through space and time from the 6th through until the 9th centuries. At the same time, it will bring a fresh Kentish perspective into an academic arena currently dominated by Northumbrian and northern British case-studies. Lyminge's geo-political context, key to the primary stages of the Anglo-Saxon conversion, will be exploited to lay new emphasis on the social antecedents of monasticism in pre-Viking England and to provide better understanding of regional and institutional diversity within the early Anglo-Saxon church.

The specific research objectives are to:

• Determine the nature, date and extent of Lyminge's monastic antecedents and its influence on subsequent developments in the evolution of the monastic community.
• Reconstruct the physical organisation of Lyminge during its documented period as a monastic community and to elucidate how its appearance changed between the 7th and 9th centuries A.D.
• Determine the spatial organisation of monastic life by examining what activities took place in different parts of the precinct and how space was zoned according to social access, everyday activities, and conceptions of sacredness.
• Explore the extent to which Lyminge's special status as an Anglo-Saxon 'double monastery' can be reconstructed archaeologically, for example, through the zoning of female-gendered material practices.
• Compare Lyminge's archaeological profile with that of other double monasteries in Kent to determine the extent and nature of the interconnections between them.
• Elucidate the role of monastic settlements as territorial centres in Anglo-Saxon Kent through a detailed consideration of the monastic economy covering food provisioning networks, the conversion of raw materials, craft production and the consumption of imported commodities

Future work

The intention is to mount a further 3-year campaign of excavation on Lyminge village green (Tayne Field) 2012-14 with funding from the AHRC (decision expected April 2012). This phase of research will also complete a ground-penetrating radar survey within and without the footprint of the parish church of St Mary and St Ethelburga to help re-interpret the core buildings of the monastic complex as initially brought to light by mid-19th-century antiquarian investigations in the churchyard (Thomas 2005).