MEDIEVAL STANDING CROSSES IN LINCOLNSHIRE – The Website
Hilary was an archaeologist, a writer, a teacher, an historian, an artist and a champion of Lincolnshire and the Fens. Amongst her many interests was a passion for medieval standing crosses – she sought them out, photographed and drew them – and vigorously defended their rights!
I have long shared Hilary’s enthusiasm for standing crosses and, beginning in the late 1990s, Hilary and I began to organise crosses-survey trips . . . We would pick a group of Lincolnshire villages and spend a day exploring overgrown churchyards and sunny village greens – always with a good pub lunch involved to fortify the weary investigators. These excursions took place two or three times a year – until Hilary’s death in 2013. In many cases we were visiting and surveying crosses that Hilary had photographed ten, or even twenty, years before. Our initial techniques were not very rigorous, but as time went on, our measurements and observations improved to an almost professional standard! Over about fifteen years we accrued a large body of data and information on the crosses we visited
We had always intended to publish a book on Lincolnshire’s Medieval Standing Crosses, but with the passage of time, and as publishing viewpoints have altered, it now seems less likely that ‘Standing Crosses’ will get into print – on paper at any rate. Hence, this experiment into the world of websites and the presentation of our Crosses Data on the internet. I’m not sure what Hilary would think of our entry into cyberspace, but I know she would want me to promote Lincolnshire’s heritage in any way possible – and our medieval crosses are one small chapter of that big story.
For the book, it was always the intention to present a Gazetteer of all the known crosses in the historic county of Lincolnshire and I have maintained this concept for the website. For most of the gazetteer entries there is a brief report with a photograph; little further explanation or discussion is required as many examples present little more than a socket stone with, if you are lucky, a stub of shaft protruding. However, we do have a few prize exhibits, and also a few interesting oddities, and these are discussed in more detail. At the point of writing (May 2024) the data has been entered (in alphabetical order) for about 70 standing crosses – see gazetteer listing. I estimate that there are some 180 known standing crosses in all (including some known, but lost) so the project is not yet at its halfway point.
Lincolnshire is rich in pre-conquest carved stones which include the remains of some forty ‘Saxon’ crosses – and many more grave covers of varied design. It is not proposed to describe these crosses in detail on this website, for that has already been admirably done by Paul Everson and David Stocker in their Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture – Lincolnshire (Vol 5), published by the British Academy in 1999. You can explore the whole of this great publication HERE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Through the years, many, many people have helped us with this work. Of particular note I must mention Alison Peach – an archaeologist who worked for English Heritage in the 1990s and was engaged on the formal resurvey of the majority of the crosses presented here. Alison was surveying them for a major review of ‘scheduling’, this being the formal and legal process by which archaeological structures are preserved. Many of the formal descriptions presented in these pages are from the scheduling documents that Alison prepared during this work. Standing crosses that are ‘scheduled’ (and most are) have a link provided from our gazetteer page, through to the Historic England website where the formal details of each monument are recorded.
When Alison had finished her survey work she made her survey reports, drawings and photographs available to Hilary and me – this is a fantastic resource and an excellent example for the standards of research and recording at which we should aim. Alison’s survey drawings are available through links on the gazetteer pages – some with authentic raindrops and mud stains.
Amongst the other great supporters of this project is David Stocker, who is immensely knowledgeable on the subject of standing crosses and has been out on survey with me on many occasions. David is ever generous with his knowledge and advice and unfailing in his enthusiasm for this work.
In addition, my thanks must go to many others, too numerous to mention, who have delved, drawn, described, photographed, unlocked and assisted us in so many ways.