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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2011
Excavations at St. Oswald's Priory, Gloucester, showed that the site was occupied in the second century by the Roman municipal tile works which was abandoned by the fourth century. The ruined church which now stands on the site shows two successive building phases pre-dating a Norman arcade; excavation established part of the plan of this late Anglo-Saxon church and also uncovered part of the tenth- to thirteenth-century cemetery. Documentary evidence suggests that this was the ‘new minster’ built by Æthelflæd and Æthelred of Mercia. Taking other historical and archaeological evidence into consideration, Gloucester can be argued to have had, in the late ninth to early tenth century, a special significance for the rulers of Mercia.
Specialist reports are offered on the stratified medieval pottery, and on the inscribed bell-mould from the tenth-century church.
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38 Ibid. 104; the original survey is in the Register of Archbishop Zouche, f. 224V. Enclosure map of 1799, Gloucester Records Office QRI 70.
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74 See the editor's gloss in the Gesta Pontificum, p. 34, and Hamilton-Thompson, op. cit., p. 129, note 2. The latter was satisfied that Æthelflæd was buried at St. Oswald's, but this mus t remain doubtful.
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95 Transliterated according to the following system: A indicates a clearly legible letter; A a letter damaged but legible; [A] a damaged lette r where the restoration is fairly certain; A/B ligatured letters; [] one letter lost; —text lost at beginning or end; / the end of a complete text.
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97 Okasha, op. cit., p. 117, no. 115 and fig.
98 Some of these appear in Okasha, op. cit., pp. 128–9, no. 142 and fig. They will all appear in Biddle, M. and Keene, S., ed. The Crafts and Industries of Medieval Winchester, part ii: Crafts and Industries Other than Ceramics (Winchester Studies, vii)Google Scholar.
