Epidemics During the Anglo-Saxon Period (Reginald Taylor Prize Essay)

Abstract

Archaeological analysis of the fabric suggests that the nave of the Romanesque church was built from east to west in the usual way and not, as the current literature proposes, from west to east. This conclusion has implications for the iconography of the architecture in that various features in the two eastern bays of the nave can be assessed, not as pure decoration, but as liturgical markers for the position of the nave altar. Comparative study of individual features and related buildings suggest that the master mason was trained in East Anglia but worked to a brief drawn up in the ambient of the ‘school’ of Durham Cathedral. The same evidence confirms the established date bracket of the first two-thirds of the twelfth century, while the case for identifying the lost eastern half as part of Harold's mid eleventh-century foundation is rejected in favour of its belonging to the same twelfth-century build as the start of the nave.