Francis M Morris – författare

This is a detailed study of the archaeology of Roman Winchester—Venta Belgarum, a major town in the south of the province of Britannia— and its development from the regional (civitas) capital of the Iron Age people, the Belgae, who inhabited much of what is now central and southern Hampshire. The archaeology of the Winchester area in prehistory is considered, and so too is the later evidence from the town, between the end of organized Roman life shortly after 400 and the foundation, c.650, of the church later known as Old Minster. At the heart of this account is the publication of the relevant phases of the sites excavated in 1961–71 by the Winchester Excavations Committee, and of the finds recovered from these excavations.Volume 1 (Excavations) outlines previous work of relevance, and describes the WEC excavations and the post-excavation analysis of the discoveries, including full reports on the prehistoric, Roman, and post-Roman (to c.650) phases of the 14 sites excavated in 1961–71, with gazetteers for Roman Winchester, listing and describing all significant observations of the defences, and the streets and buildings within the walls.Volume 2 (Finds) presents about 4000 of the finds from the excavations of 1961–71, with additional significant objects from earlier excavations in Winchester or other Winchester collections. Finds are described and discussed by era and type, with coins and selected pottery followed by objects grouped by industry or purpose. Concordances list these finds by site and phase or by material.

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.