Cambridge Antiquarian Society - Monthly Talk
'Peterborough Abbey in 1116' by Jackie Hall
Monday 6th January 2020 at 6pm
The Runcie Room, Faculty of Divinity, 25 West Rd, Cambridge, CB3 9EF
In 1116, most of Peterborough Abbey and town burned down. The church was one of the last Anglo-Saxon great churches still standing, two generations after the conquest. Almost eight centuries later, it was rediscovered, along with a substantial assemblage of early stonework, stratigraphically below the Norman church, which was well-recorded but mostly unpublished. Recent work for the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture has rediscovered this assemblage, although only relatively few of the stones are clearly Anglo-Saxon on a stylistic basis. The stones can be used to address matters such as the zoning of burials, 11th-century architecture and the relationship between building and sculpture at Peterborough, while more of the abbey can be seen in a series of unpublished excavations of the 1970’s and 80’s. All in all, it’s possible to establish a more secure idea of one of the most important Benedictine abbeys in 11th-century England, prior to its destruction in 1116.
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