The Lives of Stones

Earlier this month it emerged that yet another piece of unusually fine and well-preserved Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture has been discovered in an unexpected place - this time being used as a cat’s tombstone.

In December a gardener bulk-bought a pile of rubble for his rockery and found some carved stones which proved to be Anglo-Saxon.

These discoveries are by no means unusual – the British Museum holds an Anglo-Saxon carved stone cross which had been repurposed as a horse trough - but there has been a recent spate of particularly nice carvings found in particularly unusual places.

Of course, Anglo-Saxon and medieval objects turn up, it seems, all the time and frequently in vast hoards. But these pieces of stone are different from the huge discoveries like the Staffordshire Hoard, the Dumfriesshire Viking hoard and the recent Buckinghamshire coin hoard that was found in the New Year. All of these were buried, either purposefully for ritual purposes or preservation and safe-keeping, or unintentionally, perhaps following a battle or from neglect. Since then they were left untouched: static and unchanging.

The repurposing of stone is not a new phenomenon. As a material it is durable and practical when reused, unlike a piece of jewellery which will always have intrinsic base value and beauty, or a coin, which is always recognisably a coin. A carved stone, no matter how decorative, will just be a stone when removed from its context.

Roman buildings were dismantled and used in Anglo-Saxon buildings. Viking gravestones were similarly re-used and can now be seen as unusual decorative blocks in church walls, and the monumental stones at Avebury have, over the years, been removed for various reasons, both religious and practical. 

Each of these has been a result of changing times. What was significant to one culture or community ceases to have the same meaning to the next. And so, these small pieces of architecture and sculpture have long and varied lives. They cease being altar-pieces, crosses or doorways and are reinterpreted and remoulded to suit a new purpose. To their later users once their original function is lost their relevance is, at most, aesthetic. Instead, they gain new significance. To the visitors and worshippers at a church with a small block of carving in its wall, the block has value - perhaps spiritual or sentimental - regardless of its provenance. Likewise the owner of the cat who found such a beautifully carved grave-marker has emotional ties to the stone that are perhaps of more worth to them than the fact it was carved a thousand years ago. It is historians who, on finding it to be Anglo-Saxon, ascribe a new value to it and deprive it of the one it acquired. But rather than returning it to its original function, it then becomes a museum piece and an object of study, detached from any of its previous forms. 

It is for this reason that I like the British Museum’s description of the monumental cross / trough. It retains both its functions. During its life this piece of stone has been many things and like many of these pieces it bares the physical marks of its later life. But these are not forgotten or replaced.

My thanks to Alison Atkin and James Chetwood for bringing some of these pieces to my attention.

Kate Wiles is contributing editor at History Today.