Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission Stores, Dover castle (reg. no. 78203098)

Found in 'recent' excavations when first recorded in 1917 (Hope 1917, 24)

St Augustine's abbey

Heavily damaged below; otherwise crisp

The decoration is divided into three zones of which the lower is the principal. This is of square plan above and circular plan below, each of the angles being rounded and decorated with a narrow, parallel-sided, upright leaf having a rounded, out-turned end and carved as if composed of a number of receding layers. On the vertical axis of each face is a similar shorter leaf separated from those at the angles by a pair of similar, but recessed leaves with their tips truncated. The leaves at the angles support a narrow block of square plan, in the lower corners of each face of which is a tight volute. The volutes on each face are linked by a band carved as if it were composed of several overlapping layers, which curves down in a swag to pass below a rosette on the vertical axis of the face. The upper and lower elements of the capital, linked by the leaves at the angles, are elsewhere separated by a narrow recessed zone decorated with narrow relief bands forming a zig-zag pattern. Each of the triangular fields thus created has two vertical facets.¹

This capital is decorated on all four faces and must derive from a free-standing column. Such columns are unusual in the pre-Conquest architecture of south-east England; they occur elsewhere only at Reculver no. 4 (Ills. 123–38) and Canterbury (St Pancras) no. 1 (Ills. 59–60). Unlike other pre-Conquest sculptures from the site, it seems that this capital came from somewhere other than the foundation of the Romanesque screen which overlay the western part of Abbot Wulfric's rotunda. Hope's description of the discovery of the sculpture is, however, remarkably vague and ambiguous, 'The remarkable capital shewn in Fig. 13 and another like it, may have been part of Wulfric's work: the smaller fragments, which are also pre-Conquest, were embedded in the destroyed screen foundations' (Hope 1917, 24).

Ninth century

Hope 1917, 24, fig. 13; Peers 1927a, 215, pl. XXVIII; Clapham 1930, 126; Cottrill 1931, appendix; Rice 1952, 145; Taylor and Taylor 1966, 48 - 9, fig. 20; Gem 1973, ii, 439, 455; Tweddle 1983b, 35 - 6, pl. Xa; Tweddle 1986b, i, 58 - 9, 157 - 9, ii, 362 - 3, iii, pl. 29a; Webster and Backhouse 1991, 34 - 5, no. 18