Donna Alfano Bussell
University of Illinois Springfield
BARKING ABBEY: A GIS MAP OF A MEDIEVAL NUNNERY
In this project, I worked with a GIS specialist at the University of Illinois Springfield
to create a GIS map of Barking Abbey based on Sir Alfred Clapham’s 1911 excavation
and ground-plan (published in 1913). The abbey was founded in Anglo-Saxon
England c. 666 in Essex (near or on the site of the church’s ruins in East London).
Barking was a royal foundation originally established as a double monastery by
Bishop Erkenwald for his sister Ethelburg who was the first of the abbey’s
illustrious abbesses. It was destroyed in the Viking invasions of the ninth century
and re-established as a nunnery in the tenth century and remained a female
monastic community connected to the ambitious literary cultures of London and
East Anglia until its dissolution in 1539. As Kay Slocum, Anne B. Yardley, and Jill
Stevenson have all recently shown in their studies of the Barking hymnal and the
Barking Ordinal and Customary, the nuns’ liturgical and para-liturgical practices (e.g.
in the Visitatio) were sites of innovation.
This presentation focuses on how we can gain insights into these innovative
practices and other facets of material culture by using GIS. In this paper, I will
outline how we defined the coordinates for the historical Barking Abbey on the site
of its ruins (which are on the grounds of the Barking Abbey green-space in east
London) without having to resort to further on-ground surveys (i.e. “on the cheap”
at a public institution not able to support this kind of study). I will then briefly
discuss the methodology that allowed us to integrate information from Google Earth
with ArcGIS to create a firmly anchored position for the historical abbey including
an outline of the surrounding compound and the interior as well as exterior
parameters of the main church. The end result that I will share is a geo-rectification
of Clapham’s ground-plan, i.e. an adjusted drawing that fits the site precisely.
Finally, I will suggest how the map layers could become the basis of further two and
three-dimensional studies of this space, for example, by inputting data that would
outline and perhaps animate images of processionals and so forth.
Additionally, I would like to highlight a process of inquiry that enables us to work
with specialists in GIS using flexible problem-based approaches, which free us to
work within our specialties and across disciplines without feeling that we must also
become wizards in technologies that often require considerable time and resources
to master.