Saxon cathedral emerges from its Norman shadow

By Maurice Weaver

ARCHAEOLOGISTS believe that they have discovered the remains of the largest Anglo-Saxon cathedral in Britain, which was demolished in the 11th Century on the orders of William the Conqueror.

The buried yard-thick walls of a circular building 80 feet in diameter were first detected in the grounds of the Norman cathedral at Worcester when workmen were digging a trench for a gas pipe 18 months ago.

Ancient documents tell of a great pre-Norman cathedral near the River Severn in Worcester but its whereabouts were not known. Realising what the wall might be, the cathedral's archaeologist, Christopher Guy, called in specialists from Birmingham University who used ground-probing radar to draw an outline of the building. Excavations have now been in progress for the past month.

A cathedral was built in 961 by the Anglo Saxon bishop, St Oswald. Almost all his major building works were knocked down and built over by the Normans as a display of strength.

The discovery may answer a 1,000-year-old architectural mystery of why the Norman Chapter House at Worcester was built to a circular design - a technological breakthrough in its day.

The newly discovered wall apparently encircles the Chapter House and Dr Sally Crawford, a medieval archaeologist at Birmingham University, believes that it is the outline of the apse of the original cathedral, suggesting that the Chapter House was deliberately built within its foundations. She describes the find as "completely rewriting our understanding of ecclesiastical archaeology. The Normans ordered a clean sweep of castles and cathedrals and we will never know what St Oswald's great cathedrals looked like.

"We don't know, for example, if they were thatched or tiled. If we have the outline of one it will be an immense addition to our knowledge of a important period in ecclesiastical history," she said.

The scale of the find suggests that in Anglo-Saxon times Worcester's cathedral was bigger even than those at Canterbury and Wells.