Winchester City Museum, Historic Resources Centre, Hyde House, Winchester, accessions no. 2943 WS 451

Found in archaeological excavation north of Winchester cathedral in 1966 reused in Medieval Grave 255; Final Phase 73 (Provisional Phase 1426), early to mid thirteenth-century

Old Minster

One bed face survives; the carved surface is battered, the hollows filled with whitewash and pink mortar.

The stone is roughly cut into shape to be reused as a slab in a medieval cist grave. The surviving original bed face is taken as being the top of the stone. The surfaces are damaged, but not by wear. Neither the step nor the face with guilloche are at right angles to the original bed face, but the line between the clear stone surface and the finely rendered surface on the step side is at right angles to the bed face.

A: There is a frame, 4 cm wide, to the right, flanking part of a three-strand guilloche composed of flat bands, 3 cm wide. The surviving section of the pattern is 4–5 cm wide. The relief is 16 mm deep. Thick whitewash survives in the grooves, in one place overlain by pink, tile-mixed mortar.

B: A step, 22 mm deep, lies 11 cm away from the corner at the top, and about 8.5 cm away from the (broken) corner at the bottom. The step is thus diagonal to face A. Thick whitewash survives in the angle of the step, which is slightly undercut. About 15 cm from the top of the stone the whitewash overlaps and covers the surface of a fillet of pale yellow mortar, c. 5 mm wide, containing occasional tile flecks. The thick whitewash does not extend behind this mortar: in other words, when the thick whitewash was applied, the lower 5 cm of the step had already had mortar added, bringing the edge of the step nearer the lower (now broken) corner of the stone. From this corner there is an area, 5 cm wide at the top and 4 cm wide at the bottom, which is clear stone, with chisel marks visible, but entirely without any render. Between this area and the step the stone has a fine render, pale yellow in colour, finished with a very thin layer of whitewash. This render runs below the fillet of mortar in the step and has one surviving splash of the pale yellow mortar with tile flecks, with its associated thick whitewash. The top of the step is pink in places, probably because it had been painted, perhaps directly on the stone.

This fragment may have been part of a frame comparable to Winchester (Old Minster) no. 42, but it is very complex. It would seem that the primary carving is the step which slopes back in relation to the vertical, and perhaps the guilloche which slopes forward in relation to the vertical. The area to the right of the step was visible, because it was painted. The unrendered area may have been hidden behind another stone or perhaps a wooden frame. The splayed area, with the fine render, may then have held something. At some stage the stone was reset with pale yellow tile-flecked mortar, sealed by a thick, uneven whitewash. A similar wash was applied to the guilloche, perhaps at the same time. The pink mortar is the latest element on the stone, suggesting a secondary Anglo-Saxon use, since this mortar was not found in the medieval walls and graves at Winchester. Lastly the stone was cut down for use as a slab in a cist grave of the first medieval grave-generation, dug into the area of the tenth-century west end of Old Minster, immediately west of the seventh-century nave, and east of St Swithun's shrine. The stone could have come from any of these parts of Old Minster.

Seventh century or later

Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle forthcoming a, fig. 145, no. 43