Gloucester Museum A2654, on display.

Found during excavations for house at 144 London Road, Wotton Pitch, in 1889 (British Museum reference card). The find spot is very close to a section of London Road that was repaired in 1655–6 with many hundreds of loads of stones and rubble taken from St Oswald's Priory, and it is possible that this cross came to Wotton Pitch as a part of one such load. The stone was used to repair 'the highway from the Gallous Lane to the first lane that goeth to Winmill Field' [i.e. from the end of Denmark Road westwards to Hyde Lane] and also to repairing 'the highway over and against the Margaretts and Maudling hospitall' (Gloucestershire Archives, GBR/F4/6).

Fairly good

A large piece of a cross-shaft, edged with a broad outer cable moulding and a narrower inner flat moulding.

A: Divided into two panels by a simple horizontal moulding. A second horizontal moulding (now badly damaged) survives across the bottom of this face to define the lower edge of the lower panel. This panel is covered by a large, well-carved ring knot of encircled pattern C. The upper panel carries a single, full-frontal figure. The head is lost. The shoulders are rather narrow. The figure wears a full-length, heavily pleated garment, the hem of which is lower at the back than at the front, exposing the shins and downward pointing feet. The figure also wears either a waist-length over-garment with a stiffly pointed hem or wide, exaggeratedly pointed sleeves. The arms are folded across the body. The fingers are clasped around the vertical shaft of a small cross of which only a small fragment of one cross-arm survives at the level of the figure's chest. A leaf-stalk appears from behind the upper part of the figure's right arm and terminates in a curving, hook-tipped triangular leaf. A similar leaf appears from behind the figure's left shoulder. At the level of the figure's right shoulder the border appears to curve inwards. This is too low to be the beginning of an arch over the figure's head, and is probably the remains of a third leaf.

B: Divided into two panels by a horizontal cable moulding. Only the upper part of the lower panel survives and contains the badly-weathered, rounded head of what is probably a small-snouted ribbon creature, very similar to the creature on the cross-shaft from Abson (no. 1). Beside the creature's head there are two concentric loops of interlace. The upper panel carries a carefully laid-out median-incised interlace of looped strands that incorporates an integral diagonal lattice (complete pattern A).

C: There is a plain horizontal moulding across the bottom, the rest of the damaged face being entirely covered by a large pair of linked ring knots of encircled pattern C.

D: The face is divided into three panels by a horizontal cable moulding near the bottom and a plain horizontal moulding nearer the top. Too little is left below the lower moulding to be able to offer any interpretation of the tops of the bold curves that survive there. The top panel contains the lower parts of two figures, probably human. Although at first glance they appear to be playing hockey, it is much more likely that the figures are enmeshed in looped strands of interlace. The feet of the right-hand figure survive; one is pointed forward and the other to the figure's left as if in motion.

The main panel on this face is covered by a large, S-shaped ribbon creature. The body is decorated with a half-round spine moulding flanked by two slightly wider half-round mouldings. The creature's head is bent vertically downwards to the right with long narrow jaws biting a subsidiary median-incised strand that is entangled around the creature's body. The large round eye is formed from the tightly curving terminal of a continuous, sweeping concave groove that also forms the creature's sunken cheek before rising and narrowing to become a fine incised line down the middle of the long, thin, forward-pointing ear which sits rather jauntily on the top of the creature's head. As the body curves through the lower part of the S, it widens slightly to form a tail on which the central spine is flanked by diagonally inscribed lines that looks almost like the vane of a feather. At the tip of the S the tail narrows sharply and from it sprouts a narrow, median-incised strand that bends around itself before angling diagonally into the lower right corner of the frame where it terminates in a four-toed foot. To the left of the creature, on the upper shoulder of the S, a second narrow, median-incised strand sprouts out at right angles before bending sharply to the right and heading diagonally for the top right corner of the frame where it too ends in a four-toed foot. The creature's other two 'legs' are drawn out diagonally from the ends of the subsidiary median-incised strand and end in the two left-hand corners of the frame. The strong diagonal elements on this face echo the diagonals on the opposite face, B.

E (top): The upper part is broken away, but there are the remains of a slightly off-centre socket 2 cm (0.8 in) in diameter and 2 cm (0.8 in) deep.

The London Road cross-shaft has been known since the late nineteenth century but has hardly figured at all in the history of the city. This may, in part, be due to Dobson who, in her 1933 article, mistakenly identified the location as Wotton-under-Edge rather than Wotton Pitch (Dobson 1933, 266–7). This is an important cross because it incorporates many separate diagnostic features.

The large ring knots of face A and face C (Ills. 356, 358) are exactly like a smaller ring knot on a ninth-century fragment from Glastonbury, Somerset, which also exhibits a horizontal panel divider with cable moulding (Cramp 2006, 153, no. 1, ills. 224, 226). A re-cut cross-shaft from Wherwell, Hampshire, dated to the tenth/eleventh century, offers two more examples (Tweddle et al. 1995, 270–1, ills. 479–80). Very similar linked ring knots, as on face C, can be found on the late eighth-/ninth-century impost Kirby Hill 12, in northern Yorkshire (Lang 2001, 134–5, ills. 369–70), on the tenth-century cross-shaft fragment Norham 7, Northumberland, and in a slightly different form on a late tenth- to early eleventh-century cross-shaft from Jarrow, Co. Durham (Cramp 1984, 108–9, 210–11, pls. 93.496, 205.1169–70). The hook-tipped leaf form that can be seen beside the figure on face A can be found on two of the late eighth-century crosses from St Oswald's (Gloucester St Oswald 1 and 2, Ills. 267, 275).

The figure itself (Ills. 356, 360) is more difficult to parallel although elements of the design can be found in several other figures. The long, heavily pleated garment is similar to the Virgin's full skirt on the tenth-century cross-shaft fragment from Sutton upon Derwent in eastern Yorkshire (Lang 1991, 220–1, ill. 868). The figure on the mid ninth-century Edenham cross-shaft, Lincolnshire, wears an ankle-length, stiffly-flared garment that exposed his outward pointing feet. He also has long full sleeves that hang down on either side of his body in many folds, and there are small sprays of foliage in the background (Everson and Stocker 1999, 157–60, ills. 162–3). The figures on the (mid ninth-century?) sarcophagus fragments from Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, all wear similar full-length garments with the hem higher in the front than at the back to show their feet. Several of them also wear shorter over-garments or long sleeves that flare out from the sides of their bodies through elaborate folds (Cramp 1977, 218, fig. 59). Rosemary Cramp noted the sense of motion that is apparent in all these figures, and similar motion may also be detected in one of the smaller figures on face D of the Gloucester London Road shaft (Ill. 359). Several of the late tenth- to early eleventh-century figures on one of the cross-shafts and two other fragments from Aycliffe, Co. Durham, stand full frontal and wear garments with flaring, heavily pleated 'skirts', but their treatment is flatter and more schematic than the Gloucester figure (Aycliffe 1, 3 and 7: Cramp 1984, 41–5, pls. 8.27–8, 11.33, 12.43). Although the composition on the late eighth- to early ninth-century cross-shaft from Auckland St Andrew (no. 1) in the same county is more carefully realised, some of the figures can also be related to the Gloucester figure. For example, the two higher figure on face A and the three figures on face A of the base wear heavily pleated or banded clothing that falls in deep, angular folds (Cramp 1984, 37–40, pls. 3.5, 5.15).

The looped pattern A interlace on face B (Ill. 357) resembles the loop-knots on a section of tenth-century string-course from Bisley (this volume, Bisley All Saints 4, Ill. 53), but the incorporation of the wide diagonal lattice makes it rather unusual and difficult to date precisely.

The sinuous, S-shaped ribbon animal on face D (Ills. 359, 361) is part of a varied menagerie of wonderfully strange creatures that are found on Anglo-Saxon metalwork and in manuscript illumination of the eighth century and later. The creatures also occur on Anglo-Saxon stone carvings across much of England, with a significant preponderance of examples occurring in western Mercia and Wessex. The phenomenon has been discussed by Plunkett (1984, i, 180–202), and more recently by Tweddle (in Tweddle et al. 1995, 34–40) and by Cramp (2006, 42–8, 71–2), where dates for the development of the creatures from the late eighth/early ninth to tenth centuries have been suggested. A cross-shaft from Steventon, Hampshire, offers late eighth- to ninth-century examples, while the diagonals ending in four-toed feet are exactly like the tail of a creature on the tenth-century cross-shaft from Bishops Waltham, Hampshire (Tweddle et al. 1995, 250, 267, ills. 421, 471–2). A similar three-clawed foot on the end of a thin diagonal is tucked into the corner of a panel on a small fragment of an eighth-/ninth-century carving from Glastonbury, Somerset (Cramp 2006, 157, ills. 247–8). S-shaped creatures occur on ninth-century cross-shafts at Ramsbury, Wiltshire (Cramp 2006, 228–9, ills. 485–6, 495–7) and Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire (this volume Tenbury Wells 1, p. 365, Ills. 662, 667). A pair of S-shaped creatures on one of the tenth- to eleventh-century shafts from Aycliffe mentioned above have long thin forelegs that end in small, three-toed feet (Cramp 1984, 41–3, no. 1, pl. 8.28). A figure-of-eight creature with two crossing diagonal strands across the upper part of its body and a coiled creature on which diagonal strands are drawn out of the tongue and tail occur on two tenth-century shafts from Gainford in Co. Durham. Both of these creatures have double-outlined bodies, very similar to the decoration on the body of the Gloucester London Road creature (Gainsford 2 and 5: Cramp 1984, 80–1, 82–3, pls. 60.284, 62.294). As well as the Tenbury Wells example mentioned above, related creatures occur in Gloucestershire at Deerhurst (on the font, Deerhurst St Mary 3, Ill. 141), at Abson (Abson 1, Ill. 1), and on two of the cross-shafts from St Oswald's (Gloucester St Oswald 3 and 4, Ills. 278–81, 288). All of these west Mercian examples are dated to the ninth century.

Parallels for the separate elements on this cross can thus be found from the late eighth to the early eleventh centuries, but in the west Mercian area certain features support a closer date range of late eighth to ninth century. In Gloucester specifically the S-shaped creature on the London Road cross would seem to be a development of the creatures on Gloucester St Oswald 3. A date in the middle of the ninth century would therefore seem most appropriate.

Interestingly there is another shaft from St Oswald's (Gloucester St Oswald 4) that is thought to be of similar date and which carries exactly the same edge moulding of a broad outer cable and a narrower inner flat moulding (Ills. 287–90). There are also similar cable-moulded horizontal panel dividers on both stones. Furthermore, both shafts are of a slightly irregular square plan, rather than the rectangular shape of the other three St Oswald crosses, and both the London Road (Wotton Pitch) shaft and St Oswald 4 have jointing sockets indicating that the finished shaft, in each case, was made up of several stones. The geology of both stones is also very similar. In terms of dimensions the London Road shaft would fit on top of the St Oswald 4 shaft with a c. 20 cm (c. 8 in) section missing in between. The angle of the edge cable moulding would require London Road 1 face A to come above St Oswald 4 face B or D, with face B offering the best overall match. If, therefore, the London Road shaft did originally come from St Oswald's as suggested above (see Evidence for Discovery), then it is possible that these two sections of shaft belong to one monument (see also Chapter IX, p. 105, Fig. 35).

Mid ninth century

Dobson 1933, 266–7; Plunkett 1984, i, 182, 190, 192, 196, 201, ii, 309, 362, pl. 71; Tweddle et al. 1995, 92, fig. 25b