Gone Medieval - Anglo-Saxon Cave Dwellings

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

The unusual Anchor Church Caves in south Derbyshire were, until quite recently, thought to have been follies cut into the rock in the eighteenth century. But new research has revealed that they could date from the early ninth century - making them probably the oldest intact domestic interiors in the UK. They may well have even been lived in by a king who became a saint.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Professor Edmund Simons who been making use of innovative methods to date and understand better this and other Medieval cave dwellings.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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to World War II. Just visit history hit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm your host for today, Dr. Kat Jarman. Now if you were to take a boat along the river Trent into Derbyshire, past Derby and southwards towards the village of Repton, you come across a bit of a cliff of redstone. And if you got off your boat and walked along the edge of this cliff, you'd find a cave, a peculiar looking one, because it looks like it has been. windows or doors cut into the rock. A quick Google would tell you that this cave is called Anchor Church and may once have been the home of a hermit or an anchorate, who was a sort of

religious recluse. But when was this dwelling first cut into the rock? Was it actually just a 17th or 18th century creation made for parties or could it, as legend has it, have a considerably longer history and even be linked to an early medieval king. Now we might possibly have some of those answers. Today's guest is Edmund Simons, who is an associate professor at the Cultural Heritage Institute at the Royal Agricultural University. And Edmund has used some brand new, innovative methods to investigate this and other cave dwellings. Edmund, welcome to God Medieval. Hello, hi. So great to have you here today. I'm dying to get a chance to talk to you about this project. So, first of all, though, I want to tell you, I mean,

this cave dwelling, this is the only one I've seen like this in England. Are they actually quite rare, or do we have a few of them around? Ah, well, that is a very good question, because there are lots and lots. And I've been interested in cave dwellings for a very long time. I'm originally from Kinver and Staffordshire, which has lots and lots of cave dwellings. And there were as a child I learned archaeology, so I'm originally a buildings archaeologist. And weirdly, I developed my techniques for understanding buildings archaeology and understanding rock-cut buildings. So they have been a lifelong interest, but they've always been there in the background.

I've always presumed, taken the history that we sort of know of them, that they're 18th and 19th century. And I've never had time before lockdown to properly look at them and to look at them as a group nationally. and they are everywhere. So all over the Midlands, the biggest concentrations along the Seven Valley,

so Staffordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, into Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, but there's outliers up in Cumbria, Northumberland, Bristol, West Sussex, there are lots and lots of them.

They are specifically, I'm not talking about caves, I'm talking about rock-cut buildings. So I will call them caves throughout this talk, and I will be wrong. They are not caves, they're buildings. We need to consider them as buildings,

but they're buildings that are simply cut into rock. So that's usually soft sandstones, occasionally limestones, and in a couple of places, Tufa. So they are buildings. They are all over the place, and I have been looking over the last two years now at literally hundreds. They're everywhere.

Oh, Yorkshire. That's the other southern Yorkshire, Nersborough, loads of them. So I just missed something. Clearly, I've not really seen many yet, apart for Manco Church. But, I mean, in terms of dating these, I mean, that must be quite tricky. As we'll get into when we talk about your work, but are they easy to date? I mean, presumably we can't use normal methods like radio coven dating or anything like that.

It's sort of like you would date another building, like you would look at the features. Is that the only way to do it? Well, you can. What I've had to do is develop methodologies for understand. them and it's been done before but people who do the archaeology of minds for example you're looking at negative spaces cut into negative spaces you're looking at the relationship between voids so a normal building is built upwards rock cut buildings are cut inwards of course and there are ways you can understand the sequence that happens in and that will give you

an idea of what happens before what so sometimes it's very obvious you'll see there's a room a rectangular rock cut room and they will have dug a new bit in it and you can see where they've done it's cut into that feature. So it's sort of conventional archaeology, buildings archaeology in a way, but backwards. But there are diagnostic features, and there are lots and lots of known sites with medieval origin and medieval features.

So there are ones with accounts from the Middle Ages or from soon after. There are ones where we know, Lehmann, who wrote Lehmann's Brut was the priest at one. John Rouse, who wrote the Rouse roll, the illustrated history of the Kings of England, England, we get all of our images of late medieval Kings wrong. He was a chantry priest at

Guyscliff in Warwick. So there are lots of sites. If we treat them as conventional buildings, you can go to some of them and you can see, you can go, that's a 12th century round-headed door, that's late 15th century, you know, light, but they're just cut out of the rock. And there are lots and lots of sites like that. There are ones with, again, Guy's Cliff in Warwick has a rock cut figure, probably from the 1340s, which is cut out of the rock. Like, an upright effigy, which is the hero guy himself. And at St Mary La Crague in Yorkshire, in Nersborough, again, you've got like a similar knight carved.

So you've got figures, you've got columns, you've got all of those things you would find in conventional buildings. So let's go to Anchor Church or Anchor Cave, as it's sometimes known then. Now, I have to sort of declare my personal interest here because this is located at a place called Foremark, just down from Repton, where some of the listeners will already know, I've done a lot of work on the Great Army's presence. So this is literally around the corner in the 9th century.

And this cave we sort of assumed was sort of later really. But what did we know actually before you started your work there about Anker Cave? Well, Anker Cave is just one of the case studies I have been looking at as part of this work. So it's a reasonable amount was known about it. So it's a listed building, even though it's underground. A lot of these sites aren't listed or scheduled or protected in any way, but this one just happens to be a listed building. And the listing description was wonderful.

It was a natural cave made by the River Trent and used in the 18th century as a folly. And of course, rivers don't make doors and windows. So immediately, one suspicion is a rouse. You know, it is not natural anyway. It's entirely rock cut. So there are odds and ends of history that were known or suspected. And it's totally unrelated to your own.

work up the road. It just happened to be that it's right next to where you've been working. And it was clear, even from an initial visit, sometimes you're looking at these, just as you would with any piece of buildings archaeology, going, oh, there's one of those and one of those. But you could see it's clearly been altered, probably in the 18th or 19th century. The spaces have been knocked into one, but you could see it was originally three small cells, is a loaded word, rooms on one side and a smaller, detached sort of cave on the other. So there's some history known. We know that in the 18th century it was used by Sir Robert Burdette and he's the fourth baronet. So he's living in Foremark Hall which is very nearby and he's having parties in there.

And there's a painting by Thomas Smith from 1745 Thomas Smith of Derby which shows the baronet and his guests. There are ladies in big sort of sackback dresses and gentlemen in hats and a piper and they're standing outside the front of the caves having a party by the river. 18th century sort of very earliest sort of, you know, it's the picturesque movement in its very earliest form. But you look at that picture and it's diametrically correct. You can see that the place isn't terribly different from how it is now. And yet it was genuinely assumed to have been cut at that date, yet we know that in the 1680s there is a fool living in anchor church. The name, of course, itself, it's something recognizable as a church. It's anchor as an anchorite and church.

So it's mentioned in the 17th century, possibly mentioned in 1545. So John of Tamworth, he's writing about St. Modwin of Burton, the lady of Burton, possibly Welsh or Irish saint. And he puts in there that there's a cell in a cliff a little from the Trent. And in there lives St. Hardolph. And there's only fragments of that story. That's written down first, well, our earliest version of it is from the 1540s. But in the 13th century, the site's named as Anchor Church. So there's something there, as early as the 13th century, that is recognisable as a church of an anchorite.

So there is a history, it's fragmentary, but compared to a lot of these sites, it's actually pretty good. And do we know much about this Saint Hardolf in terms of him being there? Well, we know very little, and I shall be very careful, because I'm not a historian of early medieval kings. It's a very different field. but we know that Hardolf, this Saint Hardoff, we have this little mention of him and we know that he's the patron saint of the Church of Saints Mary and St. Hardoff at Breeden on the Hill, which is an unbelievably beautiful site about eight miles away from Anchor Church on top of an enormous great hill

and it was the site, of course, of an important early medieval monastery, Benedictine monastery. So we know very little of him. He's been identified, strongly identified with Erdwulf, a deposed, king of Northumbria, who may have ended up spending his exile in Mercia, in the land of his enemies almost. But it's unclear how certain that identification is, but there are people who know more of this than I, who are fairly certain that they may be the same person. So we have a link to a possible historical figure in the early medieval period, which is interesting in itself. Okay, so that's what you knew beforehand. So you then got to the

pandemic, got into lockdown, decided to go and investigate this. How exactly did you go about investigating this particular cave? This particular one, the methodologies I'm using for some of this work are very simple. You can record, you can laser scan something. We use drones here and we did sort of traditional survey as well as a slightly more advanced survey. Archaeologists, of course, we're obsessed with recording things. We like recording things and I did all of that. But really, it's looking at the phasing.

So it's looking at what is cut into what and looking at diagnostic features. but the important thing to remember with a cave is the cliff there will have been formed at the end of the last glaciation. So it's melt waters, it's the downwashing of the last sort of fluvial downwashing. It's the end of the glaciation, the glaciers are melting. What's now the trend would be an enormous great channel of water and it's scoured away those cliffs. And weirdly, even though they appear to be soft sandstone, cliffs like that are pretty stable. you'll get frost shattering, you get water erosion, you get people quarrying them away. But generally, there are stable sort of form over thousands of years.

So anything that is cut into a cliff like that by humans will survive unless it's quarried away, unless it's completely removed. Even if it collapses in on itself and you have a sort of cavefall, it'll still be there. So one of the important things to remember is these are buildings, but they have the preservational qualities of caves. So I looked inside for diagnostic features and I compared it to sites elsewhere. So one of the things I've done is develop a typology,

something that happened for conventional buildings about 150 years ago. And weirdly, I'm having to sort of do it from scratch now. So I could see features that you see elsewhere, sometimes at known medieval caves. The form there is very unlike the 18th century folly examples we see, or 17th, 18th century houses. And it's as simple as features that if you found them in a building that you suspected may be early medieval,

you'd go, well, this must be early medieval. So there are two very narrow doors, which now appear as sort of sides of a pillar, because at some point the internal walls have been removed. Possibly when they were having parties in the 18th century, so the ladies and the big sackback dresses could move around in there. And there are features like there's an 18th century fireplace, but you can see it cuts through a very small, tiny, blocked, round-headed window. window. And one of the key things is it's very organic and very crude, but there's a almost

blind double arch with one a door in one side and a pillar with a pilaster cap on it that's very distinctly Romanesque. It's not unlike a very crude example of the ones just down the road at Repton Church. So there are features in there that you could say are broadly Romanesque. and then for dating, of course, well, with your Viking great host turning up, monasticism in that part of the world doesn't do well, does it? No, no. I mean, what do they do to Repton? It's pretty, I mean, it's not completely destroyed, but they did a pretty good job at it, absolutely. Yeah, I don't think hermits down the road are going to do terribly well.

So these are Romanesque features, and that gives a huge time span, you know, and they're very crude Romanesque features. monasticism in that particular area doesn't really take off again. The Benedictine houses at Breeden and Repton are destroyed, and it doesn't take off until the late 12th century when Cork Abbey starts again, and Repton Priory, you know, it's refounded as a Priory. So these features could be from as late as that, but by the 13th century it seems to be abandoned

and is already called Anger Church. So it raises alarm bells. I'm not saying they are necessarily early medieval features, but if you found them in a conventional building you suspected had early medieval origins, there wouldn't be a problem, really. It's just very odd to find them there. And comparing it to other similar sites, you can see that there's actually sites where there are much,

much older than early medieval features surviving in these rock cut buildings. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? And it's very interesting to think about why it's Caesar in particular when there have been many political assassinations in the past millennia. Caesar's has been the one that is brought up again and again. Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs?

In the Jurassic you see dinosaurs get bigger and you see meat-eating dinosaurs grow into things like the size of buses. And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships? She is always derided as this sort of terrible adulterish, but at least as old as Homer, at least the 8th century BC, is a counter-tradition in which Helen doesn't go to Troy. She's never Helen of Troy. She's Helen of Egypt.

Well, you can expect all of this and more from The Ancients on History Hit. Join us twice a week, every week, as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the Ancients, wherever you get your podcasts. I think that sounds pretty compelling

because if we accept this as a method for looking at normal buildings, then I think we have to accept it for cave dwellings as well. I mean, that sort of makes sense to me. me, definitely. Yeah, the difference with rock dwellings is there's this idea of sort of primary space. If you're cutting into a cliff, whatever you make survives. You can make it bigger, but there's a limit to how much bigger you can make it because if you make caves too big, they fall down and land on your head. So whatever is cut initially generally will survive. A lot of places they're quarried

away. So we have this potential for really rather early, should I call it fabric? It's not really fabric really early evidence surviving. So I suppose when you were using these methods as well, so things like laser scanning is quite exciting because that's become quite standard now, almost. You know, you can very quickly and easily scan and get a sort of 3D shape of the inside. Was that one of the things that really helped you understand the shape of it on the inside? Yeah, it helps record it. And it's a way of almost taking the building home with you and putting it on your computer and sort of enjoying it. understanding it at your leisure. But this is really quite simple buildings archaeology compared

to typologists. And there are difficulties. We've been looking at scientific dating techniques we can use like OSL dating and things, which may be applicable, may have limitations. But one of the problems with these sites is the archaeology is often very poor. Because as I've explained at somewhere like Anchor, people move in and people move out. So there are sites here in Kinver where we can see I've got photos from the 1880s of places that are completely ruinous with bare doors and windows

and then from 1900 people have moved in again and all you have to do is put the doors and windows back in. So they have very, very long histories of people moving in and out and every generation cleans out the floor and you can just clean it down to bare stone. So it's really unlikely to find archaeology in it. So at St.

Mary LaRoshe in Nottingham that was excavated a few years ago. Completely sort of sterile inside. Conventional archaeology won't work. So if you want to understand them, you've got to look at them as a group and in a way just do really quite simple, analytical techniques to understand the phasing of them, understand how they develop. And occasionally there are giveaways like you find a carved cross or a saint. Which is a little bit of a giveaway. So I mean, you just said then, and I know you mentioned it briefly earlier as well, looking at them as a group, looking at different examples. If we look at this early medieval period, do we have many across

the country that we can sort of quite securely date to, say, 9th century or something like that? Oh, well, so I've been looking at rock-cut dwellings. I'm not looking at cellars or malt houses. So, for example, Nottingham is full of rock-cut things. It's utterly fantastic. Apart from some examples from Nottingham, I'm almost leaving that. I'm looking at raw, rock-cut sites on the whole that have been inhabited at some point. And I expected most of the story to be that they were 18th or 19th century as the sort of received wisdom has been about them. What I've discovered is that at least half of the sites that I'm looking at are much, much earlier, potentially. So one of the things, as I mentioned, creating a typology, which is a

beautifully old-fashioned exercise, and you have to create something robust as a typology. You have to support why you think something belongs to a particular type. And so I've been looking at known reasonably dated examples and comparing them. The earliest we know of people, there are rock-cut sites, rock-cut buildings in Britain, which probably date back to the late Roman. And the earliest we definitely know, if there are, particularly in the west of Britain and in Ireland, we have lots of early monastic use of caves. And some of these, like the examples on the 5th Coast in Scotland, the Pictish caves, the St. Ninian's Cave, Samson, St. Kevin's Bed in Ireland,

St. Patrick's Purgatory, St. McClaneth in Wales at Pennett McClangeth. She's 6th, 7th century. The people we know about who are associated with caves, and not all of these, there's always been a presumption that when the lives of saints are rewritten in the 12th century, The erymitic hermit-like characteristics of that age are sort of imposed back into the past and the lives are rewritten.

But we've got early lives of saints that clearly mention them living in caves and that's completely explicable. It happens all over the Christian world from Iran to Ethiopia all the way, even before St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers, there are people seeking life in the desert and living in caves. And at the same time, there are people digging caves

all over the early Christian world, it's just something that happens. If you haven't got a cave, you can dig one. So, Kiev, for example, there's the great cave monastery there where you get one saint lives in the cave, more disciples join him, and you get this pattern of the disciples can't all live in the cave with him, so they dig new caves next to him until eventually you have a whole community.

So we've got these mentions of early hermits, and sometimes they're Lenton hermitages. There are a holy person, perhaps for just for Lent or even for a period of years but they're not just somebody choosing to be a hermit, they're somebody who's known to be holy already and they may go with disciples, they may be a community,

they're not somebody alone in a cave eating nuts and berries and crying. So we've got these very, you know, fifth, sixth, seventh century all over these mentions of people retiring to caves, but it goes into what's now the English Midlands. So we have people like St. Walsy in the 10th century. There's a revival of people who have been,

caves. He lives in a cave somewhere near Evesham, which is now lost. Again, Guy of Warwick, if he existed, which I'm pretty sure he did. Again, 10th century, he's retiring to a cave. So it's not something that's that unusual. It's a known phenomenon that hermits would retire to caves and they're not living necessarily alone. It's more like in Eastern Orthodoxy, you have a skeet where there will be a hermit, but they may have disciples, they may have, they may have servants, they may be visited by people. So perhaps in its very earliest phases, we do have sort of people living alone for periods. You know, there's all these tales of discovering a hermit living in a cave. The prince discovered a hermit and gave him land for a monastery. So later on,

by the 9th, 10th century, we have a revival in hermits, but they seem to have been small communities. So, yeah, there's quite a known history. So, I mean, I find that really exciting. And the other thing that is interesting that came out of your research there is, well, this point that this is known as a church, so not just a hermitage for one person, but as a church. And the slight possibility that one of the rooms, because there's a sort of separate room, was maybe at an oratory or something like that. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So Godrick of Throckenholt, for example, and there's a good description of his hermitage. And he has a house he lives in, seemingly with his disciples. And he has a house. He lives in. And he's

He has a consulting room, for want of a better term, where he meets people. He might be a hermit, but he is a holy person who dispenses advice, and he has an oratory. And that does seem to be one of the features from the very earliest sort of hermit communities. They may be living as communities. You have a chapel, even if your oratory is a tiny individual cell or a niche, you have a chapel. And at anchor, there is a detached cave, for want of a better word, with three very pronounced, in it. I suspect that's the contender to be an oratory. But at other sites, so like Bridge North Hermitage, there are mentions of from as big, I think again, it's 10th century, although

some people have doubted that, but there is a rock-cut chancel arch there, which again, if you found it in a conventional church, it's very sort of elongated, could be very late, Anglo-Saxon, or early Norman. I mean, yeah. I do find this extremely exciting. actually, and having listened to you talk about it, I'm even more convinced than it was before, I have to say. And I think what's really interesting if he put this into the 9th century context, so the work I've been doing is just literally around the corner. So you have this cliff, which is right next to the river. So in the 9th century, that, as you already said, the river has changed the way it is now. But in the 9th century, that would have probably gone right up to the edge.

And just beyond this cliff, it sort of flattened out and the landscape changes completely. And it looks like there's a sort of beachy sort of area. And as I was exactly aware, I found some evidence of a Viking camp that relates to the 9th century Viking Great Army. So you sort of go past this cave and then you have a place where you can pull up your boat, which is probably what exactly what they did. But it also, if this was actually quite a significant site in the 9th century, presumably the hermit or whoever was in there was long gone by the time they turned up, but the fact that this site in itself, which we now know, became an important site for the Great Army, also had some kind of religiously. significance beforehand. That actually makes it even more exciting for the sort of great army presence, I think. Yeah, I've only sort of spoken about early hermits. A lot of these sites are the heyday of hermits in the, you know, 12th, 13th century where hermits doing a

different job. But those hermitages, particularly, they always have a boundary. Often well-built boundaries, they are taking a chunk of the desert and putting a wall around it and they operate in that landscape. But I think with some of the places like Anchor where we're seeing hints of earlier arometic use, there are, again, banks, walls at Anchor, there are rock-cut steps that take you from the church, from the cave, up to the top of the cliff. You get that again and again. So, yeah, the whole question of what kind of landscapes these things are sitting in is one that is yet to be answered. But how that fits with people, like your Vikings, if it was, was there at that point, how they're reacting to a strange building in the rock would be very

interesting to know. Absolutely, but it seems likely that a sort of place they might target. And we also don't know if there was a village there beforehand. They could have been a village on top of the cliff. We actually don't know. There's a great big four mark hall is right on top of what might have been an island medieval village possibly. But I think this really opens up a whole new opportunity.

So I'm really excited about it, I have to say. So what's next now, then? Where are you going to go from this? What else are you working on with these cave dwellings? Well, this is the first part of a sort of a larger project, of course. So it all started from looking at a small number and realizing that people had looked at them individually, sometimes in detail, but never as a group. And of course, it's that mission creep, isn't it? I had to look at more and more, and then you see more and more parallels.

So I'm writing a monograph, a book at the moment. It's not going to say what these things are. It's going to say they exist. Here's a very broad typology. Here are ways of understanding them. What do we do next? Because they're far more in number than even I suspected when I started this. And we've got concentrations of them all over the place.

And there are questions like, why are they so similar? Why is a known medieval hermitage in Worcestershire pretty much the same design as one in Noseph, Cumbria, what's going on? It's not just the materials dictating that. Do they have a sort of blueprint? Do they have a sort of an architectural grammar for this is what they look like? So the book will do that. It will pose these questions and it's a way of sort of opening up the debate on these things. And I'm also working on a corpus of them. And I'm working on ways I'm working with geologists and I'm working with, I've just done a paper with the wonderful Mary Jane Osborne at

University of California, Davis, who is a great scholar of early English literature. And she sees in some of the things that I've noted with these parallels with Anglo-Saxon poetry, particularly the wife's lament, which talks about exile in a cave. And people have presumed that to be a bad thing. The poor wife is being sent to suffer in a horrible, nasty cave. Whereas you can read it through this work, because she's sent into exile in an existing hermitage because that's what Anglo-Saxon aristocrats often did. You would retire as a monk, or you would be sent away and spend periods in monasteries and nunneries. I think it's probably a

more realistic explanation. So there's that wonderful sort of cross-disciplinary work that sheds lights on these as well. But it's the beginning of a process. I think there's an awful lot to be done on these things. And this is the start in a way. Fantastic. Well, I'm delighted you have made this start of it. And I can't wait to see the result of it. Edmund, thank you so much for coming. It's absolutely brilliant to talk to you about this today. Oh, thank you for having me. It's been enjoyable. Thank you. So thank you all for listening as well. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode.

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