Whitby Abbey occupies a prominent position on the top of east Cliff (NGR NZ 9030 1120), to the east of the town of Whitby. It is on the end of a spur, bounded to the west by the river Esk and Whitby Harbour and to the north and east by the North Sea. The ground falls away sharply on all sides except for the south and southeast, where the spur looses height as it broadens out. The site proposed for excavation is situated on the headland that forms the East Cliff and lies 120 metres to the south of the extant remains of the Benedictine Abbey. The site straddles the shallow crest of the ridge running north south along the spine of the Headland. It lies to the east of Abbey Lands Farm within the scheduled area.

Glacially derived boulder clay caps the underlying Jurassic geological sequence. The majority of the area has been under a mixed arable and pastoral cultivation regime until 1996, when Abbey Lands Farm was vacated.

Project background

A Conservation Plan for the Whitby Headland was developed as part of the preparation for the submission to Heritage Lottery Fund for a new scheme for visitor interpretation (English Heritage 1997). This document outlines the importance of the headland, and sets out the strategies for managing the monument and its visitors. The Headland project, which involves the complete renewal of visitor facilities including the provision of a new visitor centre in the shell of the seventeenth century Banqueting House, has as one of its main objectives the removal of car parking from the visually and archaeologically sensitive area of Abbey Plain. After the extensive archaeological evaluation of Abbey Lands Farm it was confirmed that a new car park and visitor access point (The Southern Visitor Centre) to the Abbey would be situated to the south of the area open for visitors, and the southern medieval monastic boundary. The car park was constructed in 1997, and the Southern Visitor Centre is scheduled to open in July 1999.

The area to the north of the car park boundary wall is that which covers the Southern Anglian focus. While not directly affected by construction of the car park and ticketing point, this area, which is both uneven and boggy, will require considerable ground works (paths and drainage) to enable visitors to cross easily and safely. It is the starting point for visitors entering the monument from the south, and will be crossed by a number of pedestrian paths. Whilst it is possible that solutions could have been designed that mitigated against disturbance of the underlying archaeological deposits, it was felt that this solution would leave the sensitive archaeology vulnerable to loss due to attrition over the forthcoming years.

The results of the recent (1993-95) archaeological evaluation work in advance of the Southern Visitor Centre construction work, together with a series of archaeological recommendations, were circulated in an Assessment Report in January 1996 (Wilmott 1996). These evaluations, together with the associated assessment of previous archaeological work on the Whitby Headland, have shown the undoubted potential of the deposits, and clearly demonstrated that the site is of national archaeological importance. Paradoxically, the recent archaeological findings have served to raise a number of important questions but have done little, if anything, to provide answers. Therefore the current level of understanding makes the interpretation of the important early monastic development of the Headland exceedingly difficult.

While this project is not directly part of the Heritage Lottery Fund funded Whitby Headland project, it is clearly complimentary. The results of the research excavations will inform both the developing interpretation of the Headland, and the site interpretation to be located in the Banqueting House visitor centre.

Archaeological potential and background

Although the 1999 excavation season will concentrate on the Anglian cemetery area, as the overarching project also concerns later periods, it is thought appropriate to include limited background information in this project design.

Anglian period

The Abbey at Whitby was founded in 657 by King Oswy of Northumbria after the battle of Winwaed, fought against Penda of Mercia in 655. The Abbey, a double establishment of men and women, it was under the aegis of the first Abbess, Hild. The account of the foundation comes largely from the writing of Bede (Colgrave and Mynors 1992, 405-415), the eighth-century Northumbrian ecclesiastical historian. The place was then known as Streonaeshalch, interpreted by Bede as fari sinus, "the haven of the watch tower" (and indicating to modern scholars the probable existence in the area of a Roman structure). The Abbey developed an early reputation for scholarship, and became important as a Royal burial place. In 664 Oswy summoned the Synod of Whitby. The Syond, hosted by Hild, decided upon the dominance of the Roman as against the Celtic Christian rite in Northumbria. This period also saw the career of the vernacular poet Caedmon, a farm worker at Whitby who became a poet through divine inspiration. It is this period which makes the Abbey a place of modern pilgrimage.

Whitby has assumed importance in the archaeological literature because it is one of the very few excavated sites which is associated with a known Anglian monastic establishment. Consequently, like Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, it has assumed the status of a type site. However, old certainties about the archaeological characterisation of settlement sites of the 7th-9th centuries are now melting away, and it is becoming apparent that there is no simple correspondence between an archaeological signature, and the (very few) settlement terms known from written sources; that the status and character of a settlement were not immutable, and that sites such as monasteries may have had a variety of economic and social functions, which changed over time.

Bede says little of the form, or buildings, of the site; there was apparently a building set aside for those approaching death, and a remote part of the monastery was used to instruct and test the vocation of the novices. There was also a church or porticus dedicated to St Peter the Apostle, which became an important burial place for the Northumbrian Royal family. The monastery at Hackness, with a church and a dormitory for the sisters, was built by Hild in the same year and can be compared to Whitby, as has Bede’s description of the monastery at Coldingham (Peers and Radford 1943, 28). The cartularies of the later Abbey provide some hints about the extent of Hild’s holdings. She originally held some of the properties transferred to the new Abbey, such as the church at Hackness together with holdings in Whitby itself. The historian Atkinson notes that the boundaries of Whitby Strand were ‘originally set out by Lady Hilda about the year 660, and on the east side thereof she made certain dykes and ditches which continued to be know as St Hilda’s Dykes, though all the dykes have now lost that name and are most of them gone to decay except one called green Dyke’ (Atkinson 1894, 426). The ruined remains of the earlier monastic site still stood on the Whitby Headland when, some two hundred years after the Danish raids, a monk called Reinfrid described the site. ‘There were at that time in the same place, as aged countrymen have informed us, monasteria oratories to nearly the number of forty, whereof the walls and altars, empty and roofless, had survived the destruction of the pirate host’ (Burton 1992).

Thus we are left with a confused picture of the establishment, which in one description involves isolated cells, and in another, by inference, suggests the model of communal dormitories and shared facilities of later monastic communities, while the origins of the site and Hild’s own background suggest that it may perhaps have resembled the early Irish sites in form.

A number of excavations have taken place in the Abbey and its immediate vicinity. The earliest archaeological work, to the north of the existing church, was undertaken by Sir Charles Peers and CA Raleigh Radford (Peers and Radford 1943) during 1920-25, following the acquisition of the site by the Department of Works. The plan they produced was thought to represent six small cells, interpreted by the excavators as the remains of small domunculae, each occupied by a single inhabitant, and separated from a larger building, perhaps a guest house, by a road. A curvilinear feature to the north east of the present Abbey church was interpreted as a boundary, and a number of graves, originally thought to be twelfth century, were found adjacent to the present church. A large number of pre-Conquest artefacts was also recovered, including metal tags, bookends, domestic items, bone objects, and a number of inscribed and decorated stones. Two of these were tombstones which are believed to record the deaths of Aelfled, Abbess of Whitby, daughter of Oswy of Northumbria, and Cyneburga, the wife of King Oswald. The results of the excavations are debatable, and attempts at reassessment have been made by Cramp (1976a, 1976b) and Rahtz (1976). The Anglian finds appear to extend well beyond the area of the buildings, suggesting a larger area of occupation than hitherto thought, and Cramp submitted that some of the burials to the north of the church were Anglian in origin. Rahtz suggested the area contained more buildings than originally recognised, and identified a series of paths, with buildings in a roughly rectilinear layout, and the vallum monasterii to the northeast.

In 1958 Rahtz excavated an area to the north of the monastic precinct, discovering medieval and post-medieval evidence and identifying some Anglian pottery and possible buildings (Rahtz 1962 & 1970), the first indication that the Anglian site extended beyond the Guardianship area. In 1998 a trench excavated (by Northern Archaeological Associates) on the cliff edge, well north of the Abbey ruin, revealed further Anglian material (Richard Fraser pers comm).

The recent evaluations in the area east of Abbey Lands Farm, the area with which this project design is concerned, have identified evidence for a southern Anglian focus (Wilmott 1996, Figures 3 and 4). This incorporated a cemetery with at least one internal subdivision in the form of a stone wall. The cemetery was apparently used over a long period, with multiple intercutting graves. Though there was some evidence for burial in strings rather than rows, the trenches excavated were too small to give any idea of cemetery layout, morphology, extent, or sequence. The east-west alignment of the graves, and the lack of grave goods, suggests that the cemetery was Christian. Though there were few finds, an eighth century sceatta from a feature cutting one of the latest burials gave some indication of date, and the evidence for the ritual use of quartz pebbles gives a connection with a practice typical of Celtic monasticism (Wilmott 1996, 45), which might suggest an early date.

To the north and east of the cemetery lay a substantial ditch, associated with (or succeeded by) a boulder wall. This feature runs southwards towards the site of the new car park. Watching brief work in 1997 demonstrated that, although there was evidence for Anglian metalworking in the area, the enclosure was contained by the wall to the north of the car park, thus lying entirely within the scheduled area. Finds from the ditch were very few, though it contained a bun-shaped loomweight. Posthole structures of some kind occupied areas within this ditch, hinting at structures as well as the cemetery.

Although it is possible to speculate, the character, date, and relationships of these individual elements is wholly unknown. The apparent major boundary is not the absolute boundary of the settlement of this phase; a ditch, containing a number of bun-shaped loom weights and a large post-hole, were found outside the ditch and boulder wall to the east, and approximately 150m to the south east, within the area of the car park, further pits, possibly with an industrial function, and apparently Anglian in date, were found.

The unexpected evidence for the early periods on the Abbey Lands site has clearly demonstrated that our understanding of the Anglian period at Whitby is not merely incomplete, but virtually non-existent.

These evaluations have opened up almost every question which it is possible to ask of the earliest monastic settlement of the site (Wilmott 1996, 47). The evidence is consistent with an extensive settlement which may have one or more foci of this period; one at Abbey Lands and one beneath the later Abbey but, if so, we do not know whether these were successive or contemporary; if the former, which came first, whether one or both are monastic, or what the internal arrangements of either were. It is also quite possible that the apparent foci are actually part of a continuous Anglian settlement extending from the northern cliff edge to the car park site to the south.

Whatever the truth of this, the archaeological importance of the site proposed for excavation must be considered to be of equal ranking to the immediate environs of the thirteenth century Abbey Church.

Medieval monastic period

Around 1078, a monk from the Benedictine house of Evesham, one Reinfrid, having been granted the land by William de Percy, re-established the monastery as a Benedictine house in honour of St Peter and St Hilda. Reinfrid had travelled north with the express wish of visiting the lost centres of Northumbrian monasticism, and thus the refoundation was part of a much wider northern revival which was to include the reintroduction of monastic life to Jarrow, Monkwearmouth, and Lindisfarne. Burton (1992) has suggested that Reinfrid's initial aim was to establish a community based on poverty, solitude, and simplicity, and that it was only in c1109, after Reinfrid's death, that the community became settled, and that construction of the larger Abbey on any scale might have begun.

The late eleventh century church, the eastern three apses of which are laid out beneath the later presbytery of the Abbey church, was probably built by a later William de Percy, son of the grantor, and the first Benedictine abbot. The Whitby cartulary tells us the church(?es) was known variously as St Peter’s, St Hilda’s, or both and that burials were taking place in the cemetery of the monastery by 1125.

Though there is no direct evidence for the construction of the present Abbey church, it seems on architectural grounds that it was probably begun c1220. At the visitation of 1320 the monastery was heavily in debt, and by the end of the century there were about 20 monks.

Of the other buildings, there was in 1322 a 'Chamber called the camera Astini with the cellars and closes which belong to it', which was given to Abbot William on his resignation. An account of 1394 notes buildings in need of covering with lead, with a gutter, and the record of disbursements for 1394-5 also included references to chamber, our hall, the brewhouse, the hall, the kitchen, and the New Hall, and gifts to the porter, the abbot's cook, the servant of the hall, the sergeant, the miller, the baker, the brewer, the laundress of the convent, the swineherd and the cellarers servant (Burton 1992, 23). Other references which suggest buildings include a lock and key for le Kylne, a lock for the gate of the brewhouse, a hinge for the window of the abbot's chamber, a knob for the window of the dormitory, a window case for the refectory window and the expenses of a glazier and plumber.

At the dissolution in December 1539 the manor of Whitby included the site of the monastery together with all its houses, buildings, dovecotes, yards, orchards, gardens, ponds and other casements within the precinct of the former monastery, and was worth £437 2s 9d.

The excavations of Peers and Rahtz have elucidated these periods to some extent, and to the south east of the church small scale excavations by Rahtz and Pacitto in 1958 (Rahtz 1967) revealed several skeletons, presumed to be part of the lay cemetery of the thirteenth century monastery. A full fabric survey of the standing ruin has been undertaken by English Heritage Yorkshire and Humberside Region (formerly HP North), and both aerial photography and geophysics demonstrates the existence of monastic buildings between the Abbey church and Abbey Lands Farm.

The 1993-95 evaluations located the precinct boundary of the thirteenth century Abbey. This was found to run beneath the farm track from Abbey Lane to Abbey Lands Farm, and then down the slope to the west of the farm, where it is visible as a substantial earthwork. The boundary had an extremely complex morphology, resulting from chronological development. As far as can be seen this consisted of a stone wall overlain by a mound, with a stone wall built upon the mound. To the south, at least on the downhill slope, was a ditch. The relationship between these features, and their relative date, however, is currently poorly understood due to the limited areas of excavation within narrow evaluation trenches.

To the south of this boundary lay ridge and furrow contemporary in date with the monastic phase. To the north, however, a system of terracing runs southwards from a natural ridge, showing that major earthmoving was an important element of the shaping of the headland to accommodate the Abbey. Abbey Lands Farm stands on the edge of a terrace on the west side of which the artificial terrace dumps are 1m in depth.

In terms of the thirteenth century and later Abbey, the presence of a well preserved sequence of boundaries is important, particularly in spatial terms; the division between the monastery, with its artificial terracing, and the fields outside is more starkly apparent than might be expected. To date no entrance to the monastic precinct has been defined, and the Abbey Lands area is a possible site for such an entrance. This is important not merely on a site scale, but on the greater landscape scale. The potential of these features to address questions relating to the monastic use and alteration of landscape is manifest. The morphology and phasing of monastic boundaries appears to be a "poor relation" of monastic archaeology, where emphasis has tended to be placed upon the church and monastic buildings. The boundary is, therefore, one of a class of monastic structures which are not widely explored or understood. This is still more true of the alteration of landscape by large scale earth movement within monastic boundaries. A parallel for this behavior may be seen in the Abbey at Battle.

After the dissolution the site was leased to the Cholmley family, who lived in the Whitby House (known as Abbey House), to the south of the ruinous Abbey Church. The Cholmleys made various alterations to the headland landscape over the centuries, most notably the remodeling of the monastic terraces around Abbey House and the construction of the formal courts and gardens centred on the Banqueting House. This terracing reaches to the northern limit of the proposed area for investigation over the four year project.

The Abbey church ruins were subject to slow deterioration after the dissolution. This was hastened in 1914 by shelling from German ships. The only monastic buildings to survive above ground are incorporated in the fabric of the later Abbey House, though these are currently recognised but not fully understood.

Within the excavation area in question there is no evidence of important post-dissolution archaeology, save perhaps elements of early-modern water supply to Whitby town and Abbey House.

Condition of archaeological survival

The archaeology in the proposed excavation area survives in a very fragile state. The attrition of the archaeology in the past, mainly through the ploughing which created the existing ridge and furrow and the more recent leveling of this ridge and furrow, has been severe.

The 1993-5 evaluations indicated there was more than one early phase of ploughing resulting in the underlying strata being cross-scored with plough marks. Stone from the cemetery dividing wall has been dislodged by ploughing, and in many cases human bone was clearly visible protruding through the surface of the grave fills, attesting to a severe degree of truncation. Despite this, the cemetery area does seem to retain some element of horizontal stratification, though the extent of its survival is unpredictable. The graves are so intercut, and so closely packed, especially to the north, that it was not possible within the narrow confines of the evaluation trenches to establish the stratigraphic sequence between graves. The fills of the graves were similar both to each other, and to the boulder clay into which they were cut. Three features were examined during the evaluation, these being the only three features which could be identified with certainty, given the restricted area under examination, as the latest of their respective sequences.

The most important aspect of the cemetery area is its potential link with the ditch and boulder wall enclosure to the north and east. The only possibility of relating the two is by the establishment of a stratigraphic link. Such a link is only likely to the north of the cemetery, beneath or adjacent to the extant farm track. It is unlikely that any linking stratigraphy would be substantial, robust or easily visible in a small area. In this area any disturbance above 200mm in depth would be certain to cause further attrition of the archaeology of the cemetery.

Level of archaeological response

The area beneath and around Abbey Lands Farm is of enormous archaeological sensitivity. It seems to be the site of an early medieval centre within a substantial boundary which includes a cemetery and timber buildings. It is clear that this early occupation is not limited to the area within the ditched boundary, and that it also includes at least one substantial stone building. The early medieval site is crossed by the medieval monastic boundary, and within this boundary is sealed by evidence of extensive medieval terracing and earth-moving.

The archaeological remains at Whitby represent one of the very few bodies of data from a historically identified monastery of the period, and as such Whitby has become a site type. The interpretation of such sites has, however, rarely been tested by excavation aimed at answering fundamental research questions.

The questions of significance, potential, state of preservation, vulnerability and legibility, which are outlined above, mean that the response to any further attrition must be full excavation. Evaluation has shown that the archaeology of this area cannot be understood or adequately recorded in narrow trenches, not least because such work would destroy the legibility of crucial spatial aspects of interrelated features (cemetery, buildings and boundary).