St Albans Abbey: The Excavation of the Chapter House 1978

St Albans Abbey is one of the greatest of medieval England. The origins of the medieval abbey lie much further in the past, in the time of Roman Verulamium, and the early history of the abbey is that of the martyrdom of Alban, whose burial is associated with the area of the abbey itself. The creation of memorial churches over the graves of saints outside the walls of Roman cities is commonplace in the world of late antiquity. One has only to think of St Peter’s or St Paul’s without the Walls in Rome, but in Britain no single case is yet known, other than St Albans.

This book is about the excavation in 1978 of the site of the medieval chapter house of St Albans Abbey, a building second in importance only to the abbey church itself. The excavation took place in response to the impending construction of a new chapter house, on the exact site of its medieval predecessor, demolished following the suppression of the abbey in the sixteenth century.

Enigmatic finds had long revealed that this early Christian site on the hill, now dominated by the great mass of the Norman abbey church, is one of the most important for the study of the history of early England. In just four short months, excavations uncovered fragments of the decorated floor of the Anglo-Saxon abbey and associated burials, along with the magnificent floor of relief-decorated tiles of the medieval chapter house, and the graves of sixteen known figures of the late eleventh-to fifteenth-century abbey, including eleven abbots.

Martin Biddle is an Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was the first Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology in England, at the University of Exeter (1963–67) and has held many other distinguished academic positions worldwide. He is the Founder and Director of the Winchester Excavations Committee (1962–present) and the Winchester Research Unit (1968–present). Professor Biddle is also Chairman of the Fabric Advisory Committee (FAC) for Winchester Cathedral, Archaeological Consultant for St Albans Cathedral, and former Archaeological Consultant for Canterbury Cathedral. In June 2014, he was awarded a CBE for ‘services to archaeology’.

Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle was a Danish archaeologist who transformed approaches to archaeological excavation in England. She introduced metric measurements and imposed new standards of rigour in excavation, stratigraphic recording, and analysis. These were adopted throughout the work of the Winchester Excavations Committee which she joined in 1964. This technical brilliance provided the basis for her forthcoming posthumous publication of the archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon minsters of Winchester.

Megan Kirkpatrick is completing a DPhil. in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Oxford. This focusses on the medieval castles of Wales, but she has a keen interest in heritage in the Middle East as well as in Wales, and has collaborated with organisations such as the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East. She currently works for the Commonwealth Heritage Forum.

Francis M. Morris has a particular interest in the late Iron Age, Roman, and early Anglo-Saxon periods in Britain and in contemporary connections between Britain and continental Europe at that time. He took a DPhil in Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 2010 and subsequently worked at the Oxford Celtic Coin Index and on the publication of the Biddles’ excavations at the chapter house of St Albans Abbey (forthcoming). Since 2012 Francis has contributed to the publication of books in the Winchester Studies series, especially WS 3.i (this book), WS 4.i The Anglo-Saxon Minsters of Winchester (forthcoming), and WS 11 The British Historic Towns Atlas of Winchester.