Spatial Aspects of the Almonry Site and the Changing Priorities of Poor Relief at Westminster Abbey, c.1290-1540 (original) (raw)

2002, Architectural History

Thornholme Priory (Lincolnshire), which traced the development o complex located immediately outside the west gate of the abb appearance in the fourteenth century through to the Dissolution.6 access from the priory to the almonry became blocked off entirely, autonomous almonry space that had evidently been reallocated s entirely from the ritual spaces of the monastic precinct. Yet the reconstructions of spatial arrangements of almonry sites conjectural, and based, necessarily, on minimal evidence. There has, speculation as to whether the identification of the 'almonry' at indeed correct, or whether the building was not on the site of the o suggested by a post-Dissolution survey.7 Also, the two almonri Cathedral Priory and St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury (both B located immediately without the main gates of each house, but lack archaeological or documentary evidence means that there can be only of spatial reconstruction of the sites.8 Even when there is much surv

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Recent archaeological studies conducted at different scales, from the level of site through to landscapes and regions, have focused critical attention on the connections and interactions existing between secular and religious realms of life in Anglo-Saxon England. Settlement archaeology has made an important contribution to this re-evaluation by drawing attention to a series of high-status residences of the seventh-ninth centuries AD whose trajectories and lifestyle blur the boundaries between monastic and secular aristocratic culture in pre-Viking England. Recent excavations in the Kentish village of Lyminge extend an appreciation of this theme into a region which has hitherto suffered from a deficit of Anglo-Saxon settlement archaeology. Originally conceived to improve archaeological understanding of a documented pre-Viking monastery, the Lyminge Project has subsequently gone on to uncover the remains of a separate and spatially distinct royal focus – a rare example of a seventh-c...

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