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THE SKULL OF BEDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2015

Joanna Story  and
Richard N Bailey
Joanna Story
Affiliation:
School of History, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. Email: js73@le.ac.uk
Richard N Bailey
Affiliation:
22 Ridgely Drive, Ponteland, Newcastle upon Tyne NE20 9BL, UK. Email: rnbpont@hotmail.com
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Abstract

In 1831 Dr James Raine excavated Bede’s tomb in Durham Cathedral, revealing a partial skeleton accompanied by a medieval ring. Three casts were made of the skull; the recent re-discovery of one of these casts provokes an examination of the authenticity of the remains and of antiquarian interests in craniology in the mid-nineteenth century.

Résumé

En 1831, le chanoine James Raine fit ouvrir le tombeau de Bede, dans la cathédrale de Durham, et mit au jour un squelette incomplet, accompagné d’un anneau médiéval. Il fit réaliser trois moulages du crâne; la redécouverte récente d’un de ces moulages conduit à examiner l’authenticité des vestiges et l’intérêt porté à la craniologie par les archéologues au milieu du xixe.

Zusammenfassung

1831 ließ der Chorherr James Raine die Grabstätte des Beda Venerabilis in der Kathedrale von Durham öffnen, in der ein teilweises Skelett und ein mittelalterlicher Ring gefunden wurden. Einer der vom Schädel angefertigten drei Abgüsse wurde jüngst wieder aufgefunden und er diente dazu, die Authentizität der Überreste und auch das antiquarische Interesse an der Kraniologie in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts zu prüfen.

Type
Papers
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 95 , September 2015 , pp. 325 - 350
Copyright
© The Society of Antiquaries of London 2015 

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References

1 Raine 1828; Battiscombe 1956; Bailey 1989; McCombe 2014.

2 Raine 1833, 79–82; Raine’s draft text is contained in his annotated copy of Raine 1828, which is now Durham, Durham Cathedral Library, Add ms 148, fols 178a–b.

3 Raine 1833, 80; an identical listing appears in Mackenzie and Ross 1834, ii, 384–5.

4 Mackenzie and Ross 1834, ii, 385; Longstaffe 1860, 28.

5 Annotations to Durham Cathedral Library, Add ms 148, fol 178.

6 Accession no. 1859.4; see also Longstaffe 1860, 28; Archaeol Aeliana, 1869, 2nd ser, 4, 33.

7 Hardcastle 1859; Longstaffe 1860, 28.

8 Bailey 2001, 181.

9 Thurnam’s manuscript catalogue is Original File Reference 017 and the fair copy is Original File Reference 018 in the Duckworth Laboratory archives. The original catalogue often contains much more information about the archaeological context of the specimens than the fair copy, especially for the specimens added later in the list.

10 Cambridge, Duckworth Laboratory, John Thurnam’s ‘Catalogus Craniorum’, Original File Reference 017, p 91, and Original File Reference 018, p 67: ‘Plaster Casts, no. 4’.

11 Urquhart 2004.

12 Marsden 1999, 84–94. Cambridge, Duckworth Laboratory, John Thurnam’s ‘Catalogus Craniorum’, Original File Reference 017, pp 1–4, and Original File Reference 018, pp 1–3. Lamel Hill, York (nos 1–5); Danes Dale Barrow, nr Driffield (nos 7–11); Arras, nr Market Weighton (no. 12). Item 6 in Thurnam’s collection came from excavations conducted a decade before, in 1838, in the cemetery of the Anglo-Saxon monastery at Hartlepool (Cross Close, when digging the foundations of a house); his notes concerning the woman’s skull acquired from there record the presence of ‘graves opened in 1838 with head-stones inscribed in part in Runic, in part in Roman characters’. A single inscribed stone, bearing the name berchtgyd, was found in these 1838 excavations, adding to those recovered nearby in 1833. The Gent’s Mag (1838, 2nd edn, 10, 536) records that this stone was uncovered on 15 Oct, and adds that ‘During the previous week the workmen had found several human bones, and under each skull was a flat stone’. The author of that report noted that the cemetery where these stones were found was ‘not more than fifteen or twenty yards long, and that the burials had been placed in two rows only, north and south’. The skull that Thurnam acquired was presumably from one of this small group of graves. The ‘Berchtgyth’ stone is now in Durham Cathedral, Monks Dormitory, no. xxviii: see Haverfield and Greenwell 1899, 93–4; Cramp 1984, 100, pl 85 (no. 444). The Hartlepool skull is item no. 46 of 50 of Anglo-Saxon skulls measured for (but not illustrated in) Davis and Thurnam 1856–65, i, Table vii, 252–3.

13 Power 2004.

14 Cambridge, Duckworth Laboratory, manuscript catalogue of ‘Crania and cranial bones in the Museum of Cambridge University’, Vol 1, 1–2678, no. 580: ‘Cast of calvaria of Venerable Bede from Durham Cathedral XXIII5’.

15 R Gowland, pers comm (25 Feb 2015); the authors are very grateful to Dr Rebecca Gowland and Dr Anwen Caffell for their expert osteoarchaeological evaluation of the cast, on which these comments are based.

16 Gowland 2007.

17 Raine 1828, 214; reproduced and discussed by Raine 1833, 63.

18 Plummer 1899, esp pl 1; reprinted in Fowler 1900, 19–24.

19 Urquhart 2004.

20 Cambridge, Duckworth Laboratory, John Thurnam’s ‘Catalogus Craniorum’, Original File Reference 017, pp 1–2, and Original File Reference 018, pp 1–2; Thurnam 1855, esp 101–2 and pl 3; Davis and Thurnam 1856–65, i, Table vii, 252–3 (nos xxvi–xxviii and lxix–l). Modern scholarship is less certain than Thurnam that these remains were of Anglo-Saxon date: Meaney 1964, 293; Geake 1997, 190.

21 British Museum, Register of Antiquities, British and Medieval. February 1873 to December 1878: ‘12–19 (items 1–323), purchased from Mrs Frances Elizabeth Thurnam, widow of John Thurnam MD FSA. £100.00’, including ‘no. 223 boss of an Anglo-Saxon shield, found with skull no. 232’. See also Marsden 1999, 85–6.

22 Manias 2012, 919–21, stressing the importance of the role of deep time admixture in Thurnam’s theories of the development of race.

23 For an account of the adoption of the ‘three age system’ by craniologists in England (including Thurnam) in the 1840s and 1850s, see Morse 1999, esp 9–11; see also Giles 2006.

24 Davis and Thurnam 1856–65, i, esp 44–155.

25 See, for example, his comments on a woman’s skull from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Long Wittenham, Berks: ‘The well proportioned ovoid skull is such as could hardly be distinguished from the bony casket for protecting the tender central mass of the nervous system of an Englishwoman of the present day … She was interred in the full costume of a matron with her keys attached to her side, as usually worn, and testify to the tender respect in which she was held, most likely by a husband deploring her early fate’: Davis and Thurnam 1856–65, ii, pl 47 (p 2).

26 As such, it fits into a broader mid-19th-century debate about the peopling of Britain, and the extent of ‘Germanic’ influence on its population both before and after the Roman invasion. See, for example, Thomas Wright (1852), who argued strongly that Saxon migrations to Britain had evolved from earlier tribal movements of the Belgae, whom he considered to have been more Germanic than Celtic. Our thanks to R Sweet for this reference.

27 Weber 1830; Davis and Thurnam 1856–65, i, 3–4.

28 The lithographs were produced by G H Ford, who later supplied illustrations for Darwin’s Descent of Man; see Prodger 2009, 44.

29 Davis and Thurnam 1856–65, i, 5: ‘The female skull, except in races equally distinguished by forms strikingly impressed, does not exhibit the gentilitial characters eminently’. Measurements of women’s skulls were included in Table ii (‘Ancient Britons’: 81 men, 30 women), Table iii (‘Aboriginal people of Sweden and Denmark’: 33 men, 13 women), Table v (‘Ancient Romans and Romano-Britons’: 31 men, 12 women) and Table vii (‘Anglo-Saxons’: 30 men, 20 women).

30 Ibid, i, Table vi, nos iii–iv and x. These are listed as nos 20, 87 and 15 respectively in Thurnam’s catalogue.

31 Ibid, ii, ‘Anglo-Saxon skull from cemetery at West Harnham, South Wilts’, 4 (and i, Table vi, pl iii.9).

32 Ibid, ii, 6 (note) and ‘Fairford’, pl 20 (p 8), quoting Walker 1851, 150 and 202.

33 This distinction is often overlooked by modern scholarship, which tends to focus on the racial aspects of later 19th-century antiquarianism: Williams 2008, 70–3.

34 Davis and Thurnam 1856–65, i, 235.

35 Ibid, ii, ‘Litlington’, pl 49/50 (p 3).

36 Raine 1833, 80.

37 Bailey 2001; Bailey and Cambridge forthcoming.

38 Raine 1828, 178; see also Fowler 1903, 103.

39 Smith 1722, pl facing p 805; Carter 1801, 7, 13, pl ii; Fowler 1903, 103; Greenwell 1905, pl iv.

40 Bailey 2001, 179.

41 Southey 1826, 91.

42 Fowler 1903, 60.

43 Rollason 2000, 166; see also 56–8, 68.

44 Ibid, xlii, xliv, 53, 167; Raine 1835, 84.

45 Arnold 1882–5, i, 252–3; for the date, see Rollason 2000, lxxv–lxxvi.

46 Arnold 1882–5, i, 228; Battiscombe 1956, 113; Rollason 1998, 26.

47 Edwards 1866, 279; Hamilton 1870, 275; Doble 1940, 13; for other 12th-century views, see Bailey 2001, 174.

48 Arnold 1882–5, i, 255; Raine 1835, 85.

49 Raine 1839, 11; Fowler 1903, 45.

50 Shelf mark: Ff i.27.

51 Rollason 2000, xxvii, 322.

52 McCormick 2001, 283–4.

53 Colgrave 1927, 66; Bruckner and Marichal 1985, 84–108; Bruckner and Marichal 1987, 40–59; Connor 1993, 172; McCormick 2001, 286–318.

54 Fowler 1899, 427, 430, 431, 433.

55 Fowler 1903, 45; Halsey 1980, 61.

56 Fowler 1903, 44–5, 96, 103–4, 105.

57 Rollason 2000, 165–7.

58 Raine 1835, 57–8.

59 Arnold 1882–5, ii, 33; Rollason 1989, 212; Bailey 2001, 173. On medieval relic theft, see Geary 1978.

60 For example, Kendall 1984 and 1988; Ward 1998; Higham 2006, 29; Blurton 2008; Grossi 2012.

61 For this edition, see Dobbie 1942, 27. Post-1104 arguments depend heavily on Kendall 1984 and 1988 together with Evan 2013. Widespread acceptance of this dating can be exemplified by Greenfield and Calder 1986, 249; Bragg 1991, 65; Fulk and Cain 2003, 187–8; Blurton 2008; Magennis 2011, 29; Grossi 2012.

62 O’Donnell 2014; Bailey and Cambridge forthcoming.

63 As argued by Offler 1962 and accepted by Rollason 2000, 167.

64 Kendall 1984, 18; Ward 1998, 142.

65 Piper 1986, 37; Piper 1989, 437; Piper 2007, iii, 134.

66 Arnold 1882–5, i, 248; Cambridge 2015.

67 Rollason 2000, 162–3; Aird 1998, 120–2; for the importance of Symeon’s links with the pre-1083 community at Durham, see also Rollason 2000, lxxxi–lxxxiii, 21, 105, 147, 151, 160, 163, 174, 188; Meehan 1975, 57–8.

68 Kendall 1984, 16.

69 Cramp 1984, 107, 109; Cramp 2005, 115–17, 229–30, 237–41, 242–5; Cramp 2006, 200, 203, 272.

70 Rollason 2000, 170, 192–4; Meehan 1975. For a recent succinct summary, see Woodman 2012, 310–16.

71 Rollason 2000, 68; Cramp 2005, 34.

72 Battiscombe 1956, 113–14; Rollason 2000, 162–4.

73 For Boisil see Rollason 2000, 164.

74 Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 580–7; McCready 1995, 77–9; Bailey 2001, 165–7; Rollason 2010, 196.

75 Tangl 1916, 250 (letter no. 116).

76 Godman 1982, 102–4; Dümmler 1964, 208.

77 Bailey 2001, 167–8; Pfaff 1993.

78 Cambridge 1984, 73; Rollason 2000, 125 n 80; South 2002, 89, 109–10.

79 Mellows 1949, 64; Rollason 1978, 70–2; Butler 1987, 94–9.

80 Raine 1833, 80.

81 Hughes 1925, 89; Brown 1978, 30.

82 Mackenzie and Ross 1834, ii, facing p 385.

83 For the image of Bede in the Nuremberg Chronicle, fol 158, see the digital facsimile at <http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-INC-00000-A-00007-00002-00888/362> (accessed 2 June 2015).

84 See Bailey 2001, 178–9.

85 A local parallel for later deposition of a ring in a shrine is provided by the 13th-century ring that Nicholas Harpsfield claimed to have been found in St Cuthbert’s coffin in 1537: Tonnochy 1956. Offerings of rings are a well-known feature of medieval shrines: see Nilson 1998, 109.

86 Raine 1833, 80.

87 York, York Minster Chapter Library, xvi. i. 12, printed in Raine 1839, cccxxix; for Richard de Segruk’s list, see Fowler 1899, 429.

88 Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections, Medieval Seals in the Durham Cathedral Muniments; reference code: GB-oo33-DCD.

89 Blair 1910; 1923; 1924; 1927; 1942; 1944; 1945; 1949.

90 Blair 1910, 132, 157 and pl IV facing p 132; Blair 1945, 72.