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Wrest Park Bury St Edmunds collections store

Location
(52°0′26″N, 0°24′53″W)
Wrest Park, Silsoe, Bedfordshire
TL 089 355
pre-1974 traditional (England and Wales) Bedfordshire
now Bedfordshire
  • Ron Baxter
  • Steven Brindle
  • Ron Baxter
29 July 2021

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Feature Sets
Description

The English Heritage collections store at Wrest Park contains material from sites in the east of England. For ease of accessing the material by site, we have decided to treat each source site within the store as a separate site, despite the fact that all the stones are housed in the same buildings at Wrest Park, hence this report only includes the stones from Bury St Edmunds Abbey.

Wrest Park is an English Heritage property; a 19thc house built to look like a French chateau, set in formal 17-18thc gardens given a touch of wildness by Capability Brown in the later 18thc. Wrest Park was bought by the Minstry of Works in 1946, who leased it to the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering (later the Silsoe Research Institute). It was taken over by English Heritage in 2006, and in 2013 a large warehouse to the E of the house, formerly used to store agricultural equipment, was converted into the EH Collections Store. It is one of several EH stores in England, and contains more than 160,000 objects from sites in the East and West Midlands, East of England and London.

The material is stored on rows of tall shelves; each row identified by a letter and each bay within the row by a number. The Bury material that has been shelved is in Row Z, bays 3 and 4 (Z-03, Z-04).

The architectural stonework from Bury St Edmunds held at the Wrest Park store is estimated to consist of approximately 1,000 pieces, and before it came to Wrest Park it was held by the Suffolk Museums Service at their West Stow site. The Bury stones at Wrest Park are generally marked with numbers with a 7810 prefix, which is taken to indicate that they came from the Ministry of Works excavations at the east end of the abbey church in 1957-64. Unfortunately this excavation was never properly reported; all we have is a short summary report by Roy Gilyard Beer published five years after the end of the dig. It is clear from the state of the material that it was never assessed or sorted, and the numbers written on the stones tell us nothing about where they were found during the excavation. Many of the stones have little or no real evidential value. Most bear some evidence of tooling or carved motifs, but many are mere fragments; too small for their purpose to be identified. A grimacing head sculpture on display at the Moyses Hall museum also bears the 7810 prefix number, and can be assigned to the Ministry of Works excavation.

When the Wrest Park stones were examined by the authors they had not all been shelved. There were 90 crates stacked on pallets containing mostly small stones, bagged by volunteers but not assessed, and approximately 50 plastic boxes containing larger stones. These were all in the main store. In the Orangery basement were larger crates holding big stones. Not all of the material was Romanesque, and indeed a high proportion could not be confidently assigned to any date. The stones chosen for reporting here had to fulfil the criteria of being both Romanesque and of an identifiable type. The authors are grateful to Dickon Whitewood of English Heritage for arranging access to the store, and for his invaluable assistance in the recording process.

Features

Loose Sculpture

Comments/Opinions

The stones examined can be divided into two groups. The Barnack limestone pieces might at first sight be assumed to come from the fabric of Abbot Baldwin's campaign of 1081-97, and in most cases, including the cushion capital, the base and the billet stringcourse, that conclusion is acceptable. A few stones remain problematic because they are stylistically too late to belong to Baldwin's abbacy. The chevron voussoirs must be considered first. While the traditional account (see e.g. Moss (2009), 4) considers the vault ribs of the S transept of Durham Cathedral (c.1110-20) to be the earliest appearance of the motif in Romanesque sculpture, other sites, sometimes decades earlier, have been offered as alternatives, notably, in Canterbury, St Augustine's abbey, St Anselm's crypt at the Cathedral, the castle keep, and the nave aisle of Great Malvern Priory (see Fernie (2000), 276). It would seem that Bury could now be added to the list, but a caveat must be introduced. For the simpler types of chevron, as on stone 7810 3232 an 11thc date is possible, but the hyphenated form on stone 7810 3440 and the lozenges on stone 7810 3362 are certainly 12thc, probably no earlier than the second quarter of that century, and the same may be said of stone 7810 6343, the shaft section with cable and beading. We must conclude either that the site was disturbed before the excavation, so that some of the excavated material did not come from the part of the curch where it was found, or that at least one doorway was added in the eastern arm and transept area after Baldwin's death. Either is perfectly possibly: the site has a history of disturbance, and for the second alternative one only needs to look at the succession of changes made around the area of the Monks' doorway at Ely to find a nearby parallel.

No such problem arises with the high-quality foliage reliefs in clunch, which were certainly in an interior setting as church furniture - perhaps a font or panels from a screen. The latter seems more likely on account of the thinness of the panels and the presence of framing elements that indicate a fabricated article. Suffolk has a tradition of Romanesque clunch sculpture, e.g. in the Westhall group, but none of it matches this quality. More useful comparisons are with the Aylesbury font group, and most notably with the font at St Mary's, Saunderton; not carved to such a high standard as others in the group, but employing very similar foliage motifs to those found here, and dateable to c.1170-80.

Bibliography

R. Baxter, 'Romanesque Sculpture in the Chalk Belt', in J. Mace (ed.), A Medieval Legacy. The ongoing life of forms in the built environment: Essays in honour of Professor Malcolm Thurlby, Patrimonium 2020, 95-104.

E. Fernie, The Architecture of Norman England, Oxford 2000.

R. Gilyard-Beer, `The Eastern Arm of the Abbey Church at Bury St Edmunds', Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, XXXI, 1970, 256-262.

R. Moss, Romanesque Chevron Ornament, Oxford, British Archaeological Report No. 1908, 2009.

A. Xavier-Rowe, C. Newman, B. Stanley, D. Thickett, and L. Pereira Pardo. 2014. 'A new beginning for English Heritage’s archaeological and architectural stored collections', in ICOM-CC 17th Triennial Conference Preprints, Melbourne, 15–19 September 2014, ed. J. Bridgland, art. 1517, 10 pp. Paris: International Council of Museums. Online here.