Select a site alphabetically from the choices shown in the box below. Alternatively, browse sculptural examples using the Forward/Back buttons.
Chapters for this volume, along with copies of original in-text images, are available here.
Object type: Socket-stone [1] [2]
Measurements: Not known. The socket hole is recorded by Cox as being 16 x 9 in (40.5 x 23 cm) and the depth as 5.5 in (14 cm). The estimated total height of the socket-stone from the British Museum photograph is 34 cm (13.5 in).
Stone type: Unobtainable
Plate numbers in printed volume: Ills. 55, 59
Corpus volume reference: Vol 9 p. 56-7
(There may be more views or larger images available for this item. Click on the thumbnail image to view.)
Cox's drawing (Allen 1894, 28, pl. XIII), together with the British Museum photographs, show a squared socket with a shallow raised area, some 20 cm (8 in) broad, surrounding the socket-hole. The photographs suggest that the edge of this raised area was decorated with chevron moulding in relief whilst the upper surface of the lower step carried incised step-pattern.
Cox plausibly restored this socket as part of the monument represented now by shaft Bromborough 1 above; the dimensions of the socket hole would certainly support this. Chevron mouldings are found elsewhere in the region on the socket-stone Whalley 13, and at the base of the Anderton cross, both in Lancashire (Ills. 401, 702–5). Step patterns are a well-known Viking-age pattern in Insular sculpture (Bailey 1980, 72).
[1] Most of the pre-Norman sculpture from this site has been lost. Its original discovery and subsequent history are recorded in a letter dated 13 May 1936, to the editor of the Bebington News, from Mrs A. Anderson, a copy of which is preserved in the files of the former Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities (now Prehistory and Europe) in the British Museum. This states that the stones were found in 1863 when the church — itself built in 1828 — was demolished; they had apparently been used in its foundations. The carvings were then placed in a pile on the lawn of the Rectory garden. This assemblage, of which photographs survive in the British Museum departmental files (Ills. 43–57), was dispersed in 1909. The transom fragment (Bromborough 3) along with two shaft fragments (no. 1) were then placed on the windowsill in the south porch of the church; a fragment of an 'upright grave cros' was set on the windowsill of the north porch, and the rest were distributed around the walls and rockeries of the Rectory. In May 1933 there was a proposal to develop the Rectory site and the Bromborough Society tried to intervene to save the stones. The Society was rebuffed and the builder who took over the property subsequently claimed not to have recognised any carvings. It was at this stage that most of the sculpture seems to have been destroyed. The later treatment of the surviving stones is described below.
[2] The following are general references to the Bromborough stones: Ormerod 1875–82, III, 899; (–) 1890, 250; Cox, E. 1895, 242–3; Anderson, A. 1934; Sylvester and Nulty 1958, 14; Higham, N. 1993b, 132. The following is an unpublished manuscript reference: BL Add. MS 37547, item 653 (Romilly Allen collection).
