Excavations in the Camery Garden, Wells Cathedral

About 1500 years ago, there was no town or village of Wells and no bishop. However, near the springs were the remains of ancient and Roman occupation and a few scattered farmsteads. Also, some muddy tracks led to Bristol and Bath to the north, Shepton Mallet to the east, Glastonbury to the south, and Cheddar and Axbridge to the west. So, how did the city of Wells arise, and why was the bishop its lord? The Early Beginnings The early beginnings of Wells and its church are unclear as the ancient charters and documents sometimes give contradictory information. It is uncertain, but there was possibly a chapel near the ancient cultic spring called Wielea around the 400 and 500s. It is also uncertain if the early Wells church had monastic connections, although a 766 charter says Cynewulf, king of the West Saxons, gave land to the church of St Andrew to augment the monastery by the great spring called Wielea.1 King Ine was believed to have founded the Wells church in 705,2 and he might have done, but this is not certain as there may have been a Christian foundation before this date. It is sometimes best to keep an open mind and not be dogmatic when the mists of time cloud the matter. The ancient documents show that the area surrounding the spring, Wielea, was called Tidington, Cideston, Tidesbury, Tideston, not Wells.3 So, was it the Wielea that gave rise to the name Wells? We do not know for certain. Early chapels and churches, such as the one by the Wielea, were often administered by monks, as only a wealthy lord or a monastery could afford to fund resident priests.4 Irish monk missionaries circulated in the area in the 600s and were at Beckery (Glastonbury) in the 400 and 500s.5 However, any direct monastic influence in Wells had gone by 1090 when the cathedral canons were forced to live outside the church complex. Until 909, Wells was in the large Diocese of Sherborne until the Diocese of Somersetshire (Wells) and its bishop Athelm 909-914 came into existence. The new bishop of Somersetshire was given some estates in the county to supply him with an income; hence he became a secular lord. However, we do not know where the bishop lived. The early bishops probably lived in one or more of their manors, such as Wedmore, Banwell or Congresbury, given by the king but sometimes reclaimed by other kings.

2015

In recent years, much has been written about the subject of holy wells (e.g. Bord 2006; Bord 2008; Harte 2008; Rattue 1995; Weldrake 2013; Weldrake n.d. 1; Whelan 2001). The material is of varying quality and with few exceptions seems to concentrate on the folklore elements of the subject. This interest is reflected in English Heritage’s Single Monument Class Description which defines a holy well as follows:

Internet Archaeology, 2013

The supply of fresh water is a central requirement for human settlement. This paper discusses evidence associated with the construction, use and demise of a late-Roman well recently excavated at Heslington East near York, UK. It seeks to suggest that, by a holistic analysis of all archaeological evidence, we can distinguish the ideological from the functional dynamics that made up the site formation processes within this feature. The assemblages that evidence these activities might be considered mundane in some respects but their integrated assessment, along with a detailed examination of depositional and formation processes in the feature, produces compelling evidence for what has been termed 'structured deposition'. Water supply, ritual activity and structured deposition Water and Ritual Access to water, alongside food acquisition and shelter, is fundamental to human existence, being arguably the most critical engagement between 'culture' and 'nature'. Thus how this was organised in past societies has been, unsurprisingly, of considerable interest to archaeologists for a long time (Clark 1944). A significant stage in this process occurred when people started to make use of subterranean, rather than surface, sources via the digging of wells. This required technical knowledge e.g. depth of water table, the ability to revet the sides of any intrusion and make equipment such as ropes and containers. It also implies control of the well's immediate landscape setting, and is thus likely to correlate with increased social complexity and perhaps sedentism (Thomas 2003). These relationships are clearest in desert regions such as Arabia (Al-Thenayian 1999, 101ff) and the Sahara (Mattingly 2003, 235ff) which lack surface water. Yet can be equally important in other contexts, for example the Yorkshire Wolds near our site, where dew ponds and other artificial features have greatly influenced settlement and movement of animals from prehistory onwards (Fenton-Thomas 2005). Many studies of water access have focussed on technological matters (Wikander 2000) but a symbolic element is often apparent in creating, using and curtailing supplies. In the Roman period, social control of water was clearly of general significance (Ellis 1997), although most studies have focused on the use of aqueducts (Hodge 1992). Creating these hugely expensive systems in the city of Rome itself, for example, was of decisive interest to those remaking its image during the age of Augustus (Favro 1996) and later. Elsewhere, in Pompeii, the arrival of pressurised water from aqueducts had considerable social impact, fountains being set up in the streets to give inhabitants a sense of district identity (Wallace-Hadrill 1994) and piped water used in the 'House of the Vestals' to increase, and express, the social status of the owners (Jones and Robinson 2005): water clearly mattered to Rome. Our knowledge of the core of Empire and its elite has influenced expectations of how water and society interacted in more peripheral regions and at lower social levels. Thus general commentaries on archaeological evidence from towns in the marginal province of Britain list places where there are good grounds for the use of aqueducts (Dorchester, Leicester and Lincoln) and others where such features can be postulated on the basis of evidence for bathhouses or related infrastructure: fountains, sewers, distribution pipes etc.. This has led at least one author to expect aqueducts in 'quite small towns and villages' (Wacher 1976, 100). In reality, however, their impact seems limited in British civilian contexts (Stephens 1985), such restricted supplies explaining, for example, the rarity of water-features in townhouse gardens (Perring 2002, 182). Where major urban centres have been intensively investigated, it is quite clear that wells fulfilled most needs. Thus in York, adjacent to our case study, a bathhouse and associated sewer system within the fortress, plus possible fountain base and lead pipes beyond, have led to the suggestion that the town must have been supplied by an aqueduct, leading to speculation on possible sources in the region (Whitwell 1976, 29). However, even that author admits that there have been no archaeological finds to support this notion, an absence reinforced by a similar lack of evidence in a recent synthesis of findings from 30 years of work in the city (Ottaway 2011). What we do find in York are wells, ranging from the very simple (and thus difficult to distinguish from pits) to the much more sophisticated, for example the fine timber-lined feature at Skeldergate (Carver et al. 1978), inserted as part of a development involving a riverside road and terracing of the hillside to allow construction good-quality townhouses. Elsewhere in Britain, recent work in the centre of Silchester (Eckardt 2006, 2011) shows that wells existed in some profusion in association with properties developing there over time. Even London, the provincial capital, used timber-lined wells (Wilmott 1982 and 1984, Williams 2003), although the city did invest in sophisticated bucket-chain mechanisms to raise that water in specific contexts (Blair et al. 2006). If this was the case in large towns, such features must have been even more common in the countryside. Thus in order to explore the symbolic associations of water supply, and decide whether they were influenced by the trickle down of core practices or the continuation of pre-Roman approaches, it is to wells that we must turn.

LS Archaeology was commissioned on January 2013, by Mrs Pamela Hudson, to undertake a series of watching briefs at Old Wells, Terrington, North Yorkshire. This was due to the erection of a new dwelling adjacent to the old property. Due to the building being located in the core of the village, a watching brief was justified to ensure any potential Medieval or earlier archaeological remains were recorded. The watching brief took place in three separate phases spanning from 2013 to 2016. No archaeological features were present within the limits of the monitored areas.

2022, Archdeacon Newton Medieval Village Site, Darlington, County Durham: Archaeological Excavation, 2022

Landscapes, 2016

View related articles View Crossmark data review in its own rightthe authors argue that what had not yet emerged, and would not until when in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the population level rose steeply, was large-scale true openfield systems. Strip fields, documented earlier, were something different. This is an important and extremely useful studyit has a long bibliography and excellent indexwhich all future researchers will start with and be grateful for.

Britannia, 2006

I t is humbling but at the same time gratifying to be asked to contribute in some minuscule way to this splendid, indeed Holmesian, analysis of clues to Londinium's water supply. The gratitude stems from the pleasure of knowing that my work done so long ago still has value, but the humbling comes from the reminder that it was so inadequately completed. The 1956 salvage work that Blair describes took place in the Dark Ages of urban archaeology when the recovery of eye-catching artefacts was still the yardstick for successful salvage. At the Guildhall Museum, which was responsible for archaeological efforts within the City limits, I was its lone field archaeologist supplied with neither transportation nor transit, indeed, with no tools beyond a trowel, tape measure, ranging pole, and camera. With more time and a team of hard-hatted helpers so much more could have been learned about the Cheapside building that turned out to be a second-century bath-house. Nevertheless, and in spite of the primitive conservation procedures performed in a Guildhall attic, two enigmatic wooden boxes from the bath-house well have survived sufficiently intact to make their contribution to the present study. Now, half a century later, they are an enigma no more-and a reminder to modern archaeologists that if you don't know what it is, don't throw it away. It may have been part of something interesting.

Durham Archaeological Journal, 19, 2014

A programme of archaeological fieldwork was undertaken at the church of St Michael and All Angels, Houghton-le-Spring (Figure 1 and 2) between January and June, 2008 in advance of the installation of a new underfloor heating system, which principally involved the excavation of the floors in the nave, crossing and north transept. Subsequent to the main phase of groundworks, parts of the nave wall were recorded when the plaster was stripped to reveal cracked masonry, and a basement space underneath the organ was examined when it, too, became available for inspection. The findings of this work suggest that the structural history of St Michael’s may be considerably older and more complex than hitherto believed, since it now appears likely that Roman building stones were used in the construction of the medieval church and features of pre-Norman and Norman provenance were also evidenced

1997

Research Report No. 16, Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reports in this series discuss the findings of archaeological excavations and research projects undertaken by the RLA between 1984 and present.