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Object type: Grave-cover?
Measurements: L. 150 cm (59 in); W. 52 cm (20.5 in); D. 23 cm (9 in)
Stone type: Limestone, pale yellow-white, medium to coarsely ooidal and bioclastic. Middle Jurassic, Bajocian, Upper Lincolnshire Limestone Formation, Ancaster Hard White Stone?
Plate numbers in printed volume: Ills. 119, 172
Corpus volume reference: Vol 12 p. 182-5
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Good; though broken into four pieces through settlement, it has been removed and conserved to good modern standards. Most importantly, the form and decorative scheme of the early monument have been obscured by at least three subsequent phases of reuse, which are set out graphically in Stocker 2001a, 247, fig. 13.2 (here Ill. 172)
[1st reuse] The original stone was re-cut to form a shallowly gabled door lintel. In his discussion Stocker observed that 'on the underside of the lintel the carving displays a series of stylistic anomalies, that suggested to some at the [Thirteenth Viking] Congress that this face, also, has been the subject of some partial recutting' (ibid., 246). Specifically it was suggested that its run of decoration had a small recumbent human figure cut in shallow relief into one end of it, as a secondary development. The idea both that the carving on the underside belonged to the first phase of the stone's use and (therefore) that it might have been re-cut during its second phase (Southwell 15 below) are debatable, and are questioned below in the entry for Southwell 15 (p. 233). The broad face — a.k.a. 'top' — had a shallowly recessed, gabled decorative panel cut into it in this second phase, with the scene of St Michael in combat with a dragon and David taming lions (Ill. 172). The other broad face was either originally undecorated and roughly trimmed as the monument's base, or was re-dressed in this operation. Both facets of the other long side were also rendered blank.
[2nd reuse] The lintel was cut down at one end and cut back at the other to form the lintel within a new two-centred super-arch over a doorway of the period c.1170–c.1250. This had the deliberate effect of placing the St Michael and the dragon centrally over the doorway and destroying part of the scene of David and the lion.
[3rd reuse] Later again, a narrow door rebate 97 cm (39 in) long was cut into the rear arris of the lintel's underside, as the stone continued with the same function but in a different location again.
The form and locations of these successive reuses in different parts of the north-west sector of the cathedral, and their relevance to the management of the early spring pool alongside which the church developed, are elucidated in Stocker 2001b, 258–64.
There is clear evidence of burning on the front arris of the lintel and onto its underside, affecting an area about 80 cm (31.5 in) in horizontal dimension and central to the present size of the stone. This presumably reflects a fire in the vice in its latest location.
The early phase of this monument was identified by Stocker as a grave-cover, so it is described in that way here.
A (top): The only element of decoration now visible is a pair of deeply incised — perhaps slightly curving — lines to the right of the St Michael panel (for a description of which, see Southwell 15, pp. 232–3 and Fig. 32) and set at approximately 60 degrees to the lower edge of the stone. They define a plain narrow moulding, about 4 cm (1.5 in) wide, which in one direction terminates against the edge of the stone and in the other is cut by the recessed field of the St Michael panel.
B (long): The decoration of the present underside of the lintel is not certainly contemporary with face A (see the Discussion below, pp. 184-5), but, following Stocker 2001a, is described here as if it were. It comprises an undivided, shallowly recessed panel, with narrow plain borders. The ornamental elements are a mixed bunch, but quite systematically organized (Ill. 175). Beginning at the left (south) end, there is truncated symmetrical plant-scroll of a single strand with loops and a single elongated tongue-like leaf. Then comes a cable-moulding or two-strand rope twist, which opens out into leaf fronds extending out to the border on either side. To either side of the spine represented by this twist, lie balancing runs of guilloches in the form of square panels with irregular loops like small leaves. Next, a run of quite ambitious acanthus trail, beginning between the extended ends of the rope twist, assumes the role of spinal element. To one side is a simple three-strand plait and it may be reasonable to presume that a matching run of plait originally lay to the other side, now removed by the later door rebate. Finally comes a recumbent figure: evidently human in the upper half, where head and shoulders are raised to the vertical; perhaps animal in the lower half, winged and contorted through 180 degrees so that the feet are raised to press against the border above, legs are bent and the posterior is prominently displayed. A tail curves between the hind legs, crosses the body and is truncated by the later rebate.
C (end): The north end is perhaps the original end of the stone; but now built in.
D (long): Built in, but presumably both facets of the gabled form are undecorated since no comment was made when the stone was taken out of the wall in 1983–4.
E (end): Built in, but clearly reworked to create the curve of the two-centred door-head c.1170–c.1250.
F (bottom): Built in, but presumably undecorated since no comment was made when the stone was out of the wall in 1983–4.
The short stretch of plain moulding defined by inscribed lines surviving outside the recessed panel with St Michael and David is quite clearly extraneous to that design and equally clearly is cut by the panel, and so is stratigraphically earlier. It is clear evidence that the stone that became the highly-decorated lintel (Southwell 15) was a reuse of an earlier sculpted monument, presumptively one of pre-Conquest date. However, the St Michael panel removed much of the remaining decoration, and the adaptation associated with the modification to fit a doorway with two-centred arch — involving the removal of the surface to a depth of 2 cm (0.8 in) at one end and truncation at the other — obliterated whatever else might have survived outside the recessed St Michael panel to either side of it.
Even the form or type of the original monument may be open to debate. The strongest candidate is a grave-cover. The overall size, taper and moderate thickness of the stone suit that suggestion well. Most significantly perhaps, in the East Midlands, numbers of early grave-covers were reused as lintels to doorways and windows such as those at Hawksworth (p. 111), East Bridgford (p. 106), Church Warsop (p. 95) and Winterton, Lincolnshire (Everson and Stocker 1999, ill. 388). Furthermore such reuses as lintels are not solely instances of functional reuse, but arguments can be made that some also conveyed important symbolic messages, as at Hougham in Lincolnshire (ibid., 186–7, ill. 215; Stocker 2001a). Some such monuments were reused as lintels of doorways which were part of a distinctive funeral ritual, as at Upton or Springthorpe, both Lincolnshire (Stocker and Everson 2006, 90, 225, fig. 2.36). In these cases, the display of ancient funerary relics at significant points of the burial process seems to have been a marker of the function embodied in the architecture, and a calculated symbol of the doorway's marking the soul's passage from earth to heaven (ibid., 90). This pattern of reuse as lintel stones adds plausibility to the interpretation of Southwell 1 as a reused grave-cover. More than that, it raises the tantalizing thought that at Southwell, too, this selected reuse was more specifically in relation to the doorway of an egress to the burial ground or the access point to a bell-tower or bell-turret. Both were characteristic features and foci of the new funerary ritual promoted, top-down, by the Norman ecclesiastical hierarchy in the last quarter of the eleventh century and first of the twelfth (ibid., 79–91). Furthermore, here the exposed decorated face of the former cover was superseded most appropriately by an image of the dynamic psychopomp, St Michael, who was summoned to aid souls in their perilous final journey. In reuse, as Stocker has properly emphasized (2001b, 263), the same association of St Michael with death and burial made the lintel and his image an appropriate marker for doorways giving access to baptismal facilities, baptism itself being a symbolic death and rebirth.
That having been said to justify an identification as a grave-cover, little can be said of its character or date. It was very probably slightly tapering, supplying from that form both one complete edge (the soffit) and part of a second edge as one facet of the gabled lintel made from it (as envisaged by Stocker 2001a, fig. 13.2; here Ill. 172). The original might therefore have been about 170 cm (67 in) long by a maximum of 58 cm (23 in) wide; flat, not in any degree coped (Ill. 119). In decoration, it clearly had no border, whereas borders (flat and plain or moulded and cabled) are pretty well universal on all the standard products of the Lincolnshire quarries into the eleventh century. Even such decoratively austere items as Lincoln St Mark nos. 26 [II/45] and 27 [II/46], whose forked foot and plain mouldings suggest them as parallels for what we can see of Southwell 1, have border mouldings (Everson and Stocker 1999, 285–6, ills. 413–17). The simple moulding and forked foot of St Marks 25 [II/47] decorate a flat cover without border mouldings, which can be viewed as a poor-quality equivalent of those Lincoln items and clearly of no earlier than eleventh-century date (ibid., 285, ill. 407). A possible parallel in the Lincolnshire corpus is the now illegible cover at Stallingborough (ibid., 291–2, ills. 427–8), and examples as far afield as Bedfordshire and west Sussex suggest that simple covers with angular mouldings were a widespread fashion of the overlap and early Norman era (Tweddle et al. 1995, 188–200, 232, ills. 220–55, 361). If the Southwell moulding were slightly curving, however, it might be read as some form of derivative of the fashion for a decorative splayed foot to the axial cross-shaft on covers, which is well-evidenced in later tenth- and eleventh-century Lincoln in items such as Lincoln St Mark 6 and 13 and a Lindsey cover excavated at St Martin-at-Palace-Plain in Norwich, in a tradition going back to the elaborate early examples Hackthorn and Lincoln Broadgate (Everson and Stocker 1999, ills. 187–9, 231, 243–4, 253–4; Everson and Stocker 2015). Oddly, nothing quite like either of these variations seems to have been produced by the Ancaster quarries, but the lithology of the Southwell cover points clearly to that source.
Stocker reported the view, advanced at the seminar during the Thirteenth Viking Congress, that the decorated edge that latterly formed the soffit of the lintel (face B above, Ill. 175) could be considered to be the original decorated edge of this early cover (Stocker 2001a, 246), drawing attention, for comparison, to the decoration on the flanks of chest-like grave-covers of mid-Kesteven type and their like. However, at Southwell, in reality there is little comparison between this panel of decoration and that on the sides of the mid-Kesteven covers; no asymmetry in the decoration and width of borders of the sort that is typical of the sides of the mid-Kesteven covers and no sign of the characteristic plinth (Everson and Stocker 1999, 36–46; p. 53 above). This stone scarcely has the depth characteristic of those chests and, furthermore, the probability that the surviving length of the other edge of the cover (face D) was undecorated makes it unlikely the decorated edge belongs to the early cover. Those chest-like monuments, like the analogous hogbacks, were designed to be free-standing funerary monuments and there is no single surviving example decorated on one side/edge only.
Positive arguments, both formal and stylistic, can also be advanced for associating this soffit decoration in toto with the St Michael panel and the stone's re-cast function as a lintel; and we set those out in our assessment of that separate monument, Southwell 15, in Appendix G, p. 231.
On balance, therefore, the early monument here is likely to have been a simply marked grave-cover. Its most likely decoration was perhaps on the pattern of a cross with forked or splayed foot picked out in incised outline, as proposed by Stocker 2001a; but with no decoration on the sides of the cover. The main importance of the latter point is that it shifts that aspect of the stone's decoration on to its next phase, as a doorway lintel (Southwell 15). Furthermore, its original tapered form surely points to its being a very late pre-Conquest item. This funerary monument was re-cycled within perhaps as little as fifty or sixty years of its first deployment — probably no more than a century. There is no inherent surprise in this timescale, which is repeatedly the case in the corpus of Lincolnshire sculpture (Stocker and Everson 1999, 86–7), and especially in the circumstances at Southwell, where a pre-Conquest minster of quite modest dimensions was replaced in the second decade of the twelfth century by a vastly larger church, built initially alongside it and finally engulfing it, and presumably occupying the location of a large part if not the whole of its graveyard (Dixon 2001; Everson and Stocker forthcoming).
