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Object type: Turketel's Cross
Measurements: N/a
Stone type: N/a
Plate numbers in printed volume: N/a
Corpus volume reference: Vol 5 p. 295
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Later medieval and later boundary stones and markers: Turketel's Cross.
This shaft still exists, although it was moved from its original position in the late 1980s. It is a fine tapered octagonal shaft rising from a square base decorated with shields of arms, and is probably of fifteenth-century date.
Appendix B item (stones wrongly associated with pre-Conquest period).
Crowland nos. 3–13. Later medieval and later boundary stones and markers
The boundary of the island monastery of Crowland was demarcated by dykes and watercourses from at least the twelfth century. At key points along these dykes, often at the points of access to the island by water or by causeway, or in lines across the most featureless parts of the fen, crosses were erected. The earliest purported reference to the existence of any of these crosses is in a spurious charter given by King Wiglaf of Mercia in 833, collected and transcribed in the Historia Croylandensis – the so-called 'Pseudo-Ingulphus' (Fulman 1684; Riley 1854; Birch 1883; Canham 1892–4, 241–4), where their locations are given in some detail. They were described in greater detail in a charter purporting to be granted by King Eadred c. 950, where it is said that the crosses had recently been re-erected or replaced by Abbot Thurketel (ibid.). These documents are widely considered to be forgeries made c. 1300 (Riley 1862; Searle 1894; Darby 1940, 43–5), but David Roffe has recently shown that, though they are late copies, they do replicate some important original material (1995). Furthermore, Marjorie Chibnall was able to show that the account of the re-establishment of the monastery by Thurketel in the mid tenth century is essentially valid (1969–80, II, xxv–xxvii), including perhaps the account of the demarcation of the island by crosses. The first independent evidence for the boundaries themselves dates from 1142, however, and the earliest documentary reference to the crosses elsewhere than in Pseudo-Ingulphus is in the fourteenth century, following 1389 (Riley 1854, 334–6; Darby 1940, 89–90). Nevertheless, the earliest of the crosses to survive is of twelfth-century date, namely St Guthlac's Stone at Brotherhouse (Crowland 2, p. 323).
Therefore, whilst the island monastery itself was defined from the seventh century by watercourses (Stocker 1993, 101–6), and there might have been crosses set up along its boundaries in the ninth century, it seems that there may have been a group of dykes and crosses marking a 'sanctuary' or 'precinct' area by the mid tenth century, although exactly where the boundaries were at that date remains unknown. The tradition fostered by Pseudo-Ingulphus was that the boundary crosses visible in the late medieval period were either themselves of very great age, dating from the ninth or tenth century, or were replacements of examples of those dates on the original sites (e.g. Canham 1890; id. 1892–4).