Magdalene College
A talk by David Stocker on ‘Antiquarians, architects and archaeologists: rediscoverers of early stone sculpture in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire‘
The fourteenth volume in the British Academy’s Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture series on Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire was published at the end of 2023 and it finds the area very rich in early stone sculpture – particularly of the Anglo-Scandinavian and early post-Conquest periods. This large mass of material can be sorted into large groups of standardised monuments that appear to have been mass-produced at the well-known quarries near Barnack, including those famous examples from the large late pre-Conquest cemetery buried below Cambridge Castle. Such studies cannot be undertaken without a painstakingly analysis of the work of previous antiquarians, working from the late eighteenth century onwards, and including a review of Cyril Fox’s landmark 1922 survey. Our paper will focus, particularly, on these earlier recorders of stone sculpture and their analysis, and – in the process – it reveals new thinking about the entire topic – and particularly about Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in the late tenth and eleventh centuries.
David Stocker, MA (Cantab) MA (York) DLItt DUniv FSA MCIfA studied History and History of Art at St John’s College Cambridge before completing an MA in Medieval Studies (archaeology) at York University and starting (but not completing) a PhD at Newcastle University, which was, nevertheless, published as a monograph in 1999. David worked, first, as an independent specialist consultant, and then as an English Heritage officer (1986-2012), before taking up governance positions within the National Heritage Memorial Fund, culminating in his appointment as a Trustee of NHMF by the Prime Minister in 2018. David was appointed Honorary Visiting Professor at the Institute for Medieval Studies at Leeds University in 2010 and has also held Fellowships and Research Associate positions at the Universities of York, Wales Trinity Saint David, and St John’s College Cambridge. David has also held appointments with many academic and educational charities including: Director, British Archaeological Association; Secretary, CBA Churches and Buildings Committees; (founding) chair, CIfA’s Building Recording SIG; Vice-President, Society for Medieval Archaeology; Chair, Society for Church Archaeology; Trustee Heritage Lincolnshire; President of the Tennyson Society and President, Lincoln Record Society.
David has published a total of nearly 200 papers and authored or co-authored 17 books. These deal mostly with landscape and ecclesiastical archaeology and medieval architectural history, though recent publications have dealt with topics as diverse as World-War-Two diaries (2023) and Arts-and-Crafts ceramics (2019). David has shared a prolonged and productive research partnership with Prof. Paul Everson, covering a wide range of topics within medieval archaeology, including his most recent papers ‘Guthlac at Medeshamstede?’, published in Early Medieval Europe, Vol. 31/4, 2023, and ‘Continuity and Revival. Twelfth Century Standing Crosses in Huntingdonshire’, in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 176, 2023. Their major volume on the Anglo-Saxon Sculpture of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire for the CASSS series (OxfordUP/British Academy) which forms the backdrop for this talk was published in 2023.
