Dame Rosemary Cramp
Archaeologist who excavated the monastic home of the Venerable Bede and recorded early sculpture
DAME ROSEMARY CRAMP, who has died aged 93, specialised in the archaeology and art of the Anglo-saxon world and was the first woman to be appointed to a chair at Durham University.
Her most notable work included excavation of the Monkwearmouthjarrow Abbey, a Benedictine double monastery founded in the late
7th century in the Kingdom of Northumbria. Over two centuries it became the leading centre of Anglosaxon learning, home to the Venerable Bede, earning an international reputation for scholarship before being sacked by Viking raiders in the 9th century and subsequently abandoned.
Though Bede, most famous for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, referred to the abbey in his writings, he gave no indication of its lay-out, and when Rosemary Cramp began her work there in 1959 there was almost no archaeological knowledge of the site.
Over nearly 30 years of excavations, as well as remains of the 7th- and 8th-century buildings, Rosemary Cramp found evidence of the abbey’s international cultural and economic links, including exotic pottery and the largest quantity of shards of 7th-8th century coloured window glass, “like jewels lying on the ground”, from any site of a similar date in Europe.
In an interview with the British Academy in 2019 she recalled that some areas of interest lay under the backyards of a neighbouring housing estate: “It was sometimes difficult to get access to them, but eventually you were nobody unless you had a trench in your yard.”
To encourage local interest she got young children to look after the trenches at night: “As a reward they were allowed to trowel through the barrows of excavated soil to see if any bit of pot had been missed; sometimes they found them. And when they had done three years of that, I had a special trench in which they could learn how to trowel properly.”
Her other major achievement was to establish and guide a long-running research project, supported by the British Academy and involving scholars and volunteers across England, recording pre-conquest stone sculpture. Since its foundation in 1977, the Corpus of Anglo-saxon Stone Sculpture, as it is known, has produced 13 (out of a planned 16) beautifully bound illustrated volumes, covering 32 English counties. Volume I was devoted to Northumberland and Co Durham.
Late 19th-century antiquarians were aware of only about 167 sites containing Anglo-saxon stone sculpture, Rosemary Cramp noted in 2019: “To date, we have recorded 3,528 stones from 1,101 sites.”
The sculptures told a story of the vibrancy of Anglo-saxon culture after the departure of the Romans: “My Italian friends are absolutely amazed... In Italy and in parts of France, professional carvers carried on working after the Roman period, and they kept on turning out the same stuff. But in England... a true vernacular in stone carving develops, producing a much greater variety.”
In a 2008 essay Rosemary Cramp observed that the distinctive development of figural representation in Anglo-saxon art illustrated its adaptiveness and its love of ambiguity. Changes in the depictions of human and divine figures from static icons to animated and individualised characters, she suggested, indicate a change towards a more intimate relationship between the human and the divine, and the growing importance of the individual in late Anglo-saxon piety.
She was glad that the Anglo-saxon period has come to be recognised as the origin of so much that has come to define England and the English: “So much of our laws and our statutes started there. Our parishes and our settlement patterns were laid down then. And in spite of the Norman Conquest, vigorously and rigorously people continued to speak and write in English, and maintained what had been some of the earliest vernacular literature in Europe.”
Rosemary Jean Cramp was born on May 6 1929 at Cranoe, Leicestershire, into a family which had farmed for generations near Market Harborough. From Market Harborough Grammar School she went up to St Anne’s College, Oxford, to read English.
In her 2019 interview she recalled that when she was about 12, her younger sister announced that she had found “some nice things” for the floor of a little house they were building together. After consulting a children’s encyclopaedia, Rosemary identified the nice things as pilae tiles (used in underfloor heating systems) of what she assumed had been a Roman villa.
Thinking she ought to report the find, she wrote to Kathleen Kenyon, the only archaeologist she had heard of. “She sent me back the first typewritten letter I had ever received, saying: ‘This is evidence, and you must not destroy it. You must stop what you’re doing, report it to a museum and leave it for the moment.’ ”
The site lay fallow until Rosemary was about to go to Oxford when a man claiming to have worked with Sir Mortimer Wheeler turned up at the family home. They dug a “wavering trench” into the site and found the remains of a wall.
The find was reported in the Market Harborough Advertiser, and when Rosemary arrived at Oxford she received a summons from the archaeologist MV (Margerie) Taylor, asking her to visit her at the Ashmolean Museum. Arriving in Miss Taylor’s office she saw, to her embarrassment, the newspaper on her desk “with this picture of me leaning on a spade and the caption: ‘She is going to Oxford.’”
“You think you have found a Roman villa. What makes you think it is a villa?” Miss Taylor demanded to know, and was unimpressed with Rosemary’s answer: “She asked if I had been taught to survey? No. Could I draw sections? No. She went through everything an archaeologist ought to be able to do, and then said, ‘I think you had better be trained.’”
Rosemary duly attended a course at Corbridge, and spent her leisure time as a student with the Oxford University Archaeological Society. During her English studies, meanwhile, she specialised in early literature “from primitive Germanic to Spenser”. After graduation she remained at St Anne’s teaching Anglo-saxon, combining her knowledge of language and literature with her growing expertise as an archaeologist, while working on a Blitt thesis, out of which came her first published paper on “Beowulf and Archaeology”.
In 1955 Rosemary Cramp moved to Durham University as a lecturer, and was instrumental the following year in the founding, with Eric Birley, of the Department of Archaeology. From 1971 to 1990 she served as head of department, laying the foundations for its international reputation as a leading centre of research, and continuing to work there as an Emeritus Professor until her final years.
In Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain, a Festschrift published in her honour in 2001, former students recalled, as one put it, her “combination of personal kindness, academic rigour and outrageous sense of fun”. One recalled how, on a dig, she had thrust a bag of tomatoes into his hand to supplement “a vitamin-deficient lunch” with the words: “I will not have scurvy on my digs!”
A second festschrift, Aeedificia nova, Studies in Honour of Rosemary Cramp, was published in 2008.
Rosemary Cramp served, variously, as a member of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, a trustee of the British Museum, a member of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (now Historic England), chairwoman of the Archaeology Data Service, president of the Council for British Archaeology, president of the Society for Church Archaeology and vice-president of the Royal Archaeological Institute.
From 2001 to 2004 she was President of the Society of Antiquaries of London, which awarded her its Gold Medal in 2008. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006.
She was appointed CBE in 1987 and DBE in 2011.