Landscapes of the Anglo-Saxon Conversion: Excavations at Lyminge

Project Director

Dr Gabor Thomas in collaboration with Dr Helen Gittos (University of Kent)

The Research Context

Kent, the kingdom which received St Augustine's mission to convert the heathen Anglo-Saxons in A.D. 597, is justly celebrated as the crucible of Christianity in England. In the two centuries following St Augustine's landing, the Kentish kings invested heavily in a group of monastic centres – led by St Augustine's, Canterbury, but with regional outposts at Reculver, Lyminge, Dover, Folkestone, and Minster-in-Thanet. These regional hubs initiated the grass-roots conversion of the Kentish populace, serving as a model for Christian conversion in neighbouring southern kingdoms.

From local information incorporated in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and Anglo-Saxon charters issued in Kent, we have a skeleton outline of the location, chronology and workings of these institutions, but our understanding of their physical appearance and wider archaeological context remains lamentably poor. Why are these broader archaeological perspectives important? Historical sources hint at the significant economic role of monastic institutions as consumers of imported luxuries and as centres of large, royally-endowed estates, where agricultural surpluses and raw materials were processed and redistributed.

New light on the subject has been provided by recently published monastery excavations within the kingdom of Northumbria, including Monkwearmouth/Jarrow, Whithorn, Hartlepool and Hoddom. This work has shown that monastic churches formed part of topographically discrete complexes involving not only other religious buildings but also wider zones of activity and production which reflected their dual role as centres of spiritual and economic life. It should also be remembered that at a localised level, monastic foundation witnessed the implantation of the first sizeable, permanent communities within the early medieval countryside, a process which will have had a dramatic impact on the character and development of surrounding landscapes and settlements. The lesson to be learned is that the study of Anglo-Saxon monasteries must move beyond an examination of focal churches to embrace wider landscapes and topographic settings, zones which embody mutually sustaining relationships between the cloister and the outside world.

The current project brings together archaeologists from the University and volunteer sectors and integrates previously unpublished work with new targeted excavation and fieldwork. It aims to establish a firmer archaeological knowledge of this group of sites so that their impact and significance as socially transforming institutions can be scrutinized by modern scholarship.

General Aims and Methods

The project will work towards meeting this general aim by operating at two scales of analysis: the first detailed and site-specific, and the second broad and comparative, over a projected life of five years including time to write up the final publication. The micro-scale will involve a detailed archaeological investigation of the monastic settlement of Lyminge, reputedly founded in A.D. 633 by Queen Æthelburga, daughter of the convert-king, Æthelberht of Kent, and widow of King Edwin of Northumbria. This site represents an ideal case-study because the churchyard is surrounded to its south by an extensive area of well-preserved Middle Saxon (7th-9th-century) archaeology (see below). This component will also bring to publication previous re-investigations of the Anglo-Saxon monastic church first excavated by the Canon Jenkins in the 1880s, augmented by a newly-commissioned Ground Penetrating Radar Survey.

The macro-scale, designed to integrate Lyminge within a wider contextual framework, will embrace comparable monastic foundations in East Kent, building upon the results of previous antiquarian research and recent unpublished fieldwork, and where necessary, plugging gaps in knowledge with targeted geophysics and test-pitting.

Aims and Objectives for 2008: The Lyminge Pilot Survey

The pilot survey is designed to evaluate the archaeological character and potential of a site straddling the precincts of the Anglo-Saxon monastery of Lyminge. This work builds on a feasibility study undertaken in 2007 which deployed geophysics and test-pitting to trace a zone of Middle Saxon occupation extending within a 200m radius to the south of the monastic church. The survey is intended to inform a strategy of open-area excavation planned for 2009-2011 which will run concurrently with the comparative work outlined above.

The specific objectives of the pilot are

• to determine the density of archaeological features within a target area, as a guide to assessing the likely density of occupation across the settlement
• to locate the ephemeral traces of timber structures and the associated survival of hearths, floor layers and middens undetected by geophysics
• to test methodologies for the sampling and recovery of faunal and archaeobotanical remains.

The objectives will be met by excavating two open areas within the zone of occupation, selected in relation to the results of the 2007 evaluation and according to variations in the depth of hillwash that are likely to effect the differential survival of ephemeral features and deposits. The excavation, which runs for a six-week period in July/August 2008, will provide training for undergraduate students from the Universities of Reading, Kent and California, Los Angeles, and will be open to members of the Kent Archaeological Society and other local volunteers. An educational programme involving primary and secondary schools in the locality was also built into excavation season.