Coddenham and West Heslerton archaeology - an alternative theory

 Some time ago I published a blog in which I suggested that the Coddenham bed burial might be suggestive of an early Christian double monastery.

 I have been reading Francis Pryor’s book Britain AD in which he explores the evidence from the site at West Heslerton and I have drawn the conclusion that this is perhaps another such site. 

 West Heslerton is in the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire.  The Vale of Pickering was once occupied by a huge body of water forty miles long known to archaeologists as ‘Lake Pickering’.  At a later date it became a series of smaller lakes and marshes, not the sort of area that a marauding army would choose to settle.  The site has been extensively excavated by a team led by Dominic Powlesland from 1977 onwards. 

 Points to note about the Anglian village, which is my period, are

 ·         The post Roman village is close to an Iron Age settlement with Iron Age/Druidical religious associations.  This repeats the pattern found at Coddenham further north.  Pryor suggests this is a deliberate choice as barrows and earthworks would have been clearly visible in Saxon times.  I agree with him but it begs the question  as to why Saxon migrants would want to associate themselves with an early British sacred site? Pryor suggests this is a form of validation and that it might be the church rather than the civil authority that wishes to make this validation.  Again I think he is right but it is not the Roman church that would wish to make such a validation but the ‘Celtic’ Christian Monastic/ Druid Church

·         Stable isotope analysis of 24 bodies found in the cemetery show 4 Scandinavian (3 adult women and a juvenile female), 10 local people and 10 from the other side of the Pennines.  Francis Pryor suggests this result is ‘unexpected’ but I would suggest it is only unexpected if you are looking for evidence of Saxon raiders and a male-dominated community.  If you are looking for a Celtic double monastery then this result is precisely what you would expect.  

·         The examination of the cemetery also suggested poverty to the archaeologists, no grave-goods such as you normally find in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, but again it would be what you would expect from an early Christian community which has taken vows of poverty.

·         As with the Coddenham site we have a service village alongside to house the tenants and servants of the monastery.  The presence of Grubenhauser (a type of rectangular dwelling associated with Saxon settlements which have a level below ground for storage/protection of livestock in winter) suggests a rural community.

·         It’s interesting to note that here the monastery seems to have adopted the local building style and that the model of dry-stone beehive huts found on the west coast where there are few trees is not repeated here).  Given the lakeside setting it is probable that the monastery was in fact a crannog.  The important monastery at Bangor in Northern Ireland was constructed in this style with the monastic huts extending out into Strangford Lough.

·         Most excitingly this is an early settlement dating from roughly 450 AD (when the merger between the Christian Monastic movement and the Druid Church took place) and is evidence that the combined church which we call Celtic spread very quickly across the whole country suggesting that the Christians were able to avail themselves of the infrastructure the Druids already had in place.  The cemetery both here and at Coddenham ceased to be used after about the middle of the seventh century (650 AD).

These sites are important not because they show evidence of a Saxon invasion, which they don’t, but because they confirm what we can learn from the historical documents. In the mid-seventh century the Synod of Whitby saw a shift in religious power.  Oswiu, the king of the North East, backed the Roman Church represented by Wilfred. 

What the archaeology tells us is that after the Synod of Whitby several Celtic monasteries, especially it seems those double monasteries run by women, were disbanded, the communities segregated and resited on sites more conducive to Roman control, probably to existing Roman churches were the Roman church owned the land and the Metropolitan bishops had more authority.

Both Coddenham and West Heslerton are in the area controlled by Oswiu and within the diocese of York of which Wilfred became Archbishop.  There is evidence of the same process happening elsewhere in the country.


At St Albans there is a 7^th/8^th century cemetery in King Harry Lane on the opposite side of the valley to the present Abbey which records show was founded in the very late 8^th century.  The present Abbey is on a site between the Roman Town of Verlamium at the foot of the hill and what would have been the Roman fort on the summit.  It is probably  therefore on the site of a then existing Roman church.

Many of our mediaeval cathedrals date their earliest phase of building from the late seventh/early eighth centuries when Wilfred’s influence and power were at their height. 

The sites at Coddenham and West Heslerton are therefore I believe of great importance not as evidence or the lack of it of Saxon invasion but indicating a significant shift in the religious balance of power and with it a change in the dominant ideology which had very practical social and political consequences for the rest of the early mediaeval period which deserves further investigation.

I am on the case!