be celebrated in public view in the upper chamber and distinguished members of the congregation to watch from chambers on either side.13
Fig. 20 Sherborne Cathedral (now Abbey), Dorset. This reconstruction of the cathedral as it was rebuilt under Bishop Aelfwold between 1045 and 1058 shows the massive westwork with its own stubby transepts in which the bishop’s throne was situated. The whole church is over 200ft long with an apsidal east end.
What we learn from Winchester and Sherborne, and from lesser investigations at Wells, Exeter and Rochester, is that Anglo-Saxon cathedrals at the turn of the 10th century were large, complex and sophisticated structures of European stature, but with an external form and internal organisation unique to England.
Bishops were men of considerable wealth, power and standing, and must have occupied magnificent palaces; of these nothing remains, but we do know about high-status royal residential buildings. Alfred the Great’s biographer, Asser, writes of him having ‘royal halls and chambers marvellously constructed of stone and wood’. Of these, and of other late Saxon royal palaces, the remains of only one have been found. This is at Cheddar in Somerset, where Alfred the Great built a palace next to a large and prosperous minster (fig. 22). The buildings were his personal property and, later, became a favoured royal palace that continued to be used at least up till the time of Henry II.14
Fig. 21 Timbers from the Thames revetment at Vintner’s Place excavated in 1989–91 came from the arcade of a 10th-century hall. Attempts to reconstruct its appearance by its excavators show: a) a cross section of the hall; b) a hypothetical elevation of the arcade (the lowest tier are the timbers that were found) and c) a perspective view of how the roof may have looked.
Fig. 22 The royal manor of Cheddar in the 9th and 10th centuries showing: a) King Alfred’s hall; b) King Alfred’s bower; c) unidentified buildings of King Alfred’s time; d) 10th-century hall; e) 10th-century chapel; f) 10th-century bower.
The buildings were undefended and, like all high-status secular buildings, of timber. The principal structure was a bow-sided hall 76ft long and 18ft wide, with the main room on the first floor; it was entered by doors on its north-east corner and in the middle of its long sides. There were porches immediately inside the doors and at least one staircase leading to the main hall, which was heated by a central hearth towards its south end. Nearby was a separate private building, known at the time as a bower. This was presumably a separate chamber for the king’s personal use.
Alfred’s sons further developed the site, replacing the original great hall and building a new one, rectangular, with a more regular timber frame and planked walls. On the site of the first hall a stone chapel was built, which was subsequently rebuilt.15 These were without doubt high-status buildings, so it is particularly unfortunate that their upper parts cannot be recovered; presumably the timberwork would have been of the highest quality, painted and carved. Remarkably, however, the upper parts of a high-status timber arcade, contemporary with the later Saxon buildings at Cheddar, was excavated in London, where it had been reused in a river revetment. These timber components (fig. 21) make up an arcade with ogival arches – not necessary for structural stability but highly decorative. This single find confirms that the upper parts of high-status Saxon buildings were inventively and richly modelled and carved.16
Fig. 23 King Alfred’s burghs as listed in Burghal Hidage, a document dating from around 911–14 that calculated the number of men required to defend the town based on its size.
Towns
In the two centuries after 700 towns once more emerged as an economic, social and political force. The first to be re-established were a number of coastal emporia that perhaps began as seasonally occupied trading and craft centres (fig. 12). Hamwic (Southampton), Eoforwic (York), Gippeswic (Ipswich) and Lundenwic (London) were not like Roman towns, walled and adorned with civic structures, but they were functional places with a regular layout and a defined economic purpose.
Hamwic was founded, probably by King Ine of Wessex, in about 690. It became the economic engine of his kingdom and covered 111 acres, with a population of about 4,500. Surrounded by a deep ditch, the town was laid out on a regular grid of metalled roads. Buildings lay at right angles to the streets 12ft to 15ft wide and up to 40ft deep, most containing metal, bone and glass workshops. Behind the houses, in yards, were wells and timber-lined pits. The Mercian kings, particularly Aethelbald, similarly developed Saxon London – Lundenwic – after they regained control of it in 733. Sixty Saxon buildings were excavated in Covent Garden, the site of Lundenwic, in the 1990s. They were of timber, with wattle and daub walls, beaten-earth floors and thatch roofs; very few nails were found, showing that these structures were still pegged and jointed. Inside, many had partitions and most had in-built timber benches along their long walls. Most houses had one or more rectangular hearths, some with wattle and daub enclosures.17
The Viking raids, which started in the 840s, brought to an end the age of the undefended coastal wics but led directly to a second type of urban settlement, the burghs – ‘burgh’ meaning ‘defended place’. King Alfred’s defeat and subsequent peace with the Vikings led to the division of England between the West Saxon kingdom and the Danelaw. In the 880s Alfred populated his kingdom with a network of strategically located fortified places containing craftsmen, tradesmen, markets, minster churches and sometimes royal palaces. A minority of these were re-used Roman sites such as Winchester, Bath and Exeter; a few were recycled Iron Age forts such as Hastings or Chisbury; most were fortified settlements set up around existing successful minsters or small trade centres such as Shaftesbury or Oxford (fig. 23). Alfred’s burghs were laid out by highly capable surveyors and engineers expert in road building and the construction of earthwork defences. Some burghs, such as Winchester, had a grid layout, but many developed in a more organic way with winding lanes and alleys. The key feature of these places is that property boundaries were more rigidly defined than in the wics. This was necessary as these towns were owned by landlords in just the same way as the countryside, but with one important difference. In towns it would have been difficult and unnecessary for craftsmen and traders to provide labour services on the landlord’s estate, so there was a special form of land holding known as burgage tenure, which allowed men to pay cash rents to their landlord instead. A ‘burgage plot’ is thus the term for the land owned by a townsman (burgher) for rent and, initially, the term ‘borough’ described a town in which burgage tenure took place. Saxon towns, such as Oxford and Winchester, would be divided into miniature estates, with an aristocratic house belonging to a rural landowner, burgage plots for his tenants and often a church.
Later Saxon boroughs had many distinctive buildings, whose construction techniques and building types suggest a melting pot of architectural influences. A slightly better class of dwelling developed on the street frontages, with suspended timber floors over a basement or cellar indicating, perhaps, a shop with storage below. On the land behind these were commercial buildings designed for storage or warehousing. These were windowless and sunk some feet into
