After last month’s column on Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, and Canterbury Cathedral, I will continue my ecclesiastical theme this month by exploring three of the great religious buildings in the north of England: York Minster, Durham Cathedral, and Whitby Abbey. All have played significant roles in both the religious and political history of our nation, and Current Archaeology has been there to tell their stories down the years.
York Minster
York Minster is, after Canterbury Cathedral, the most-important cathedral in England, since it is the seat of the Archbishop of York, the second-highest office of the Church of England. The oldest record of a church there dates to AD 627 and the earliest surviving fabric dates to c.1160, but the bulk of the building was constructed between 1220 and 1472. Current Archaeology has paid repeated visits to the Minster since the magazine’s earliest days, commencing in CA 17 (November 1969), at the time when its central tower required underpinning. This restoration necessitated an extensive programme of excavation that told us much about its early history and relationship to Roman, Viking, and Anglo-Saxon York, including the discovery of a late Anglo-Saxon cemetery beneath the later South Transept, intriguingly aligned north-west to south-east rather than the conventional east to west. This, together with other evidence, suggests that the original Anglo-Saxon minster was built to match the alignment of the underlying Roman fortress, while its successor took a new orientation in line with later Christian theology. The full report is well worth a read, and it should also be highlighted that one of the key individuals responsible for interpreting the mass of evidence accumulated in this 1960s fieldwork was Brenda Swinbank. One of the first women in Britain to become a ‘professional’ (that is, salaried) archaeologist, she is better known for her work on Hadrian’s Wall; CA 338 (May 2018) reviews her biography, while she is also counted among the ‘Mothers of Romano-British Studies’ celebrated in CA 427 (October 2025).
From the 1980s onwards, the magazine paid regular visits to the Minster to report on finds both large and small. For example, CA 103 (January 1987) described superb work on establishing the source and date of Roman glass reused in some of its 12th-century windows; CA 215 (February 2008) featured the find of a medieval clockmaker’s seal, representing an individual who had worked for the Minster c.1300; and CA 275 (February 2013) recounted the rediscovery of a Roman road (the Via Quintana) beneath the Minster’s undercroft, which would originally have been a back street of the Roman fortress headquarters. CA 277 (April 2013), meanwhile, covered discoveries made deep beneath the Minster. Work in advance of a new exhibition space shed light on the 400-year period between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Vikings in York, including coins in sealed contexts that provided detailed phasing, alongside evidence of post-Roman but pre-Viking settlement. After that, Current Archaeology’s coverage of the Minster became more scarce – but do turn to p.36 of this issue to read about the results of recent ground-penetrating radar surveys in the Minster precinct and other areas of York.
Ian Nairn’s Morris Minor