Now set as part of an altar frontal in the chancel or east porticus of the Saxon church of St Laurence, just to the north of Holy Trinity.

Found in the nearby parish church of Holy Trinity (ST 824609). The largest fragment was discovered 'serving as a flat lintel over the south doorway in a wall of late Norman date' (Irvine 1877, 215).

St Laurence

One panel very worn; secondary hole cut right through. Much more damaged than when photographed in the early twentieth century.

Only one face is visible. This is framed by a band of double-stranded triangular knots linked by angular twists (Allen 1903, 291, no. 748 A), enclosed in plain flat bands. The two internal panels are divided by a similar frame. What is now the left-hand panel has a deeply cut diaper pattern in which small relief crosses are enclosed in serrated diamond frames. The pattern on the right-hand panel is now almost obliterated, but earlier photographs (see Ill. 408 and Brown 1937, pl. XLVII) show a complex and rather confused pattern of interlocking and incised peltas.

Although this slab is now set horizontally as if it were part of a shrine, there is some debate as to its function. Irvine (1877, fig. facing 216; see Ill. 409) provides a drawing showing the slab in the upright position decorating the revetment of a door. Baldwin Brown also considered it could be the revetment of a door (Brown 1937, 178, fig. 17), such as one finds at Britford (see below Britford, p. 206), and indeed it might fit the depth of an Anglo-Saxon wall. Brown presumed that this would have come from 'some more pretentious building that was the predecessor of the parish church which is hard by' (see Evidence for Discovery).

Whatever its original function, the decoration is best paralleled in manuscript art. The type of pointed triangular interlace is akin to but not identical with that found at Britford (Ill. 422), but is found also in the Vespasian Psalter (Ill. 527), and according to Romilly Allen (1903, 291–2) this type of triangular interlace is also found in the Book of Kells and a Carolingian gospel book, BL Harley 2788. The peltas with spiral terminals find their only sculptural parallel in England on the font from Deerhurst, Gloucestershire (Bailey 2005, pls. 6–8), but the crosslets in diamond frames are more difficult to parallel. They are most closely akin to a panel on a cross from Irton in Cumbria (Bailey and Cramp 1988, ill. 357), but as Romilly Allen said percipiently, the pattern resembles 'more nearly than anything else the silver plates pierced with cruciform openings that are used in the decoration of the Irish metal book shrines' (Allen 1894, 61). Although the shrines he compared it with are now considered Romanesque in date, patterns of crosslets in stepped frames also occurs on the Emly shrine which has been dated late eighth century (Cone 1977, 137, pl. 31). David Hinton (pers. comm.) has compared the decoration with that of the garnets and millefiori on the Sutton Hoo shoulder clasps (cf. Wilson 1984, ill. 7), in which case it could be of an even earlier date and indeed contemporary with Aldhelm. When painted this piece could indeed have resembled metalwork. Functionally, therefore, although it could have fitted a door opening, it seems more plausible to consider that it was part of a shrine or tomb, which perhaps had been located in the now lost church associated by William of Malmesbury (2002, 236) with St Aldhelm, and that it was not a late revival of Irish influence as suggested by Stone (1955b, 37).

Eighth century

Irvine 1865, 192; Pettigrew 1866, 164–5, pl. 9, fig. 1; Brock 1877, 218–19; Irvine 1877, 215–16, fig. facing 216; Jones 1877, 245; Allen and Browne 1885, 358; Allen 1888, 170; Browne 1891, 77–8; Allen 1894, 50, 60, 61, fig. facing 61; Goddard 1894, 47, 49; Browne 1897, 268–72, figs. 18, 19; Browne 1903, 177–8, fig. 13; Astley 1905, 223, 227–8; Browne 1906, 256, fig. 5; Clapham 1927, 225–6; Clapham 1930, 66; Brown 1937, 177–81, fig. 17, pl. XLVII; Kendrick 1938, 202, 206, 220, pl. CIV; Stone 1955a, 239; Stone 1955b, 37; Taylor and Taylor 1963b, 250–1, fig. 3; Taylor and Taylor 1966, 29–30; Cramp 1975, 186; Pevsner and Cherry 1975, 130–1; Plunkett 1984, I, 174, 176–7, II, 292, 384, fig. 37 (a); Cramp 1992, 150

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