The Winchester Studies - TrustNews Sept 12
The Trust has asked me to write a brief report on the progress of The Winchester Studies, the series of volumes being produced by the Winchester Excavations Committee as a result of the great excavations conducted by Martin Biddle (now Emeritus Professor) in the sixties and early seventies.
After a lull in publication, brought about by lack of funding, illness, and the untimely death of Birthe Kjolbye-Biddle, volumes are now in the process of being published at regular intervals. First out, in March this year, was The Winchester Mint, a volume unprecedented for the scope of its analysis and illustration of any English city's moneyers. The volume illustrates 3,200 coins between the reigns of Alfred and Henry Ill, including coins and jetons found in the Winchester excavations.
Going to the press in October are Winchester: the Historic Town Atlas and The Peoples of Early Winchester. The former is a boxed volume of maps, with gazetteers and discussion, of ten periods in Winchester's history between its Belgic beginnings right up to 1800. A foretaste of this is a wonderful little pocket map of Winchester in 1800, with special sites explained and illustrated. It can now be found in Winchester bookshops. The Peoples of Early Winchester gives a unique and unfolding picture of how the inhabitants of a city (whether Romans, Saxons, Normans, and others) changed over a period of a thousand years from early Roman Times to the Late Medieval Period.
Two works describing and discussing the very bedrock of the modern city will be sent to press in 2013: The (royal) Anglo-Saxon Minsters of Winchester and Winchester Castle, the home of The Domesday Book.
So far seven volumes in the series have appeared over the years, including one whose typescript was produced by none other than Sione Carden! This was the Winchester schools' dig at Lankhills, a wonderful (and now famous) volume illustrating all kinds of cross-bow brooches, belt fittings, ornaments, and strange funerary practices. Other volumes discuss Medieval Economics, the Cult of St. Swithun, the Winton Domesday, and Property and Piety.
Still to come, with the help of the University of Winchester, are volurne:-:, on The Animals of Early Winchester; The Environment, The Pottery of Medieval Winchester, and Wolvesey Palace.
The volumes in this series are very large and scholarly. People ask whether books more suited to people's pockets and general understanding could be produced. These excavations, however, were carried out before the days of "developers' contributions", a fact that bumps up their price, but arguably decreases the sort of pressure that leads to fallibility. The Committee does have in mind a slim volume (written by a local historian) containing general conclusions and asking further questions. But in the meantime the Winchester Museum Service and other historians depend on these basic scholarly works for a proper understanding of the city's growth and development.
According to The Times Millenium Edition of 1 January 2000 the excavations that underpin this series were "one of the most important archaeological excavations worldwide of the twentieth century".