West Midlands Regional Research Framework for Archaeology, Seminar 5: Soden
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Coventry's archaeology: summary of the medieval
resource
Iain Soden
Coventry City Council
Iain.soden@coventry.gov.uk
In 1642 Nehemiah Wharton, a young Lieutenant in the Earl of Essex's army, arrived
in Coventry as a member of the parliamentarian garrison. He wrote to his former
employer:
30 August.
"Coventry is invironed with a wall co-equal, if not exceedinge, that of London for
breadth and height; the compass of it is neare three miles, all of free stone. It hath
four strong gates (8 were stopped up during the civil war), strong battlements stored
with towers (20), bulwarks, courts of guard and other necessaries. This city hath
magnificent churches and stately streets; within it there are also severall sweete and
pleasant springes of water built of freestone, very large, sufficient to supply many
thousand men. The city gates are guarded day and night with four hundred armed
men, and no man entreth in or out but upon examination. It is also very sweetly
situate."
By that time he was describing a Coventry well past its medieval zenith and already
bereft of its great monastic churches for over a century. Historians state that on the
basis of taxation, in the 14th century Coventry was ranked the fourth city in England,
behind only London, Norwich and Bristol. At its height, the medieval city covered a
third of a square mile.
Modern Coventry, at 38 square miles, encompasses an area many times that of its
walled medieval precursor. Its 19th- and 20th-century suburbs have come to overlie
numerous villages and hamlets of which, in some cases, little more than the parish
churches and churchyards are visible above ground today.
Together the medieval city and its suburbs contain numerous focal medieval
archaeological sites within a landscape which took in the walled city and a variety of
parochial villages and non-parochial hamlets whose fortunes were interdependent.
Some fell within the former County of the City of Coventry from the mid 15 th to the
19th centuries.
There are 20 scheduled ancient monuments in Coventry, all but one medieval; 507
Listed buildings, a small proportion of them medieval.
Major sites include, particularly:
Dozens of medieval street frontages containing hundreds of individual plots; the
Cathedral and Benedictine Priory of St Mary; Greyfriars Franciscan Friary;
Whitefriars Carmelite Friary; Charterhouse Carthusian Priory; a hermitage/Templar
Camera, later Hospitaller manor; four medieval hospitals; the two-and-a-quarter miles
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circuit of the 14th to 16th century town defences, comprising wall and ditch, towers
and gates; St Michael's Cathedral; Holy Trinity Church, with one of the few intact
charnel houses in England; St John's Collegiate Church; St Mary's Guildhall; three
castles and one probable siege-castle; sixteen Villages and hamlets; nine medieval
parish churches and the sites of at least one other parish church and a further eight
medieval non-parochial or guild chapels; five deserted medieval settlements; eight
moated sites; ten manor houses; twelve water mills; five windmills; four hunting
parks…..
Each year more sites come to light, existing sites become better known, some are
excavated. The development pressure on the surviving below-ground remains and
deposits matches the growing standard of living, the hopes and aspirations of the
300,000 people for whom Coventry is a vibrant home and workplace.
Medieval Coventry contained substantial enclaves and foci of distinctive character,
brought about by specific and assertive royal, baronial, church/monastic, guild and
severalty land holding, combined with domestic, mercantile and industrial use.
Coventry castle, lost to view since the medieval period, is characterised by massively
deep ditches, the fill of which retains probably the largest 11th- to 12th-century
deposits in the city, their size and depth leading to a comparatively undisturbed
volume. Where noted, the basal fills are preserved at a depth of over 5m in wet,
anaerobic conditions. Adjacent there is documentary evidence for a short-lived siege
castle of the 1140s. St Michael's Church and St Mary's Guildhall stand within the
castle. At the edge of the walled city stood the manor house of Cheylesmore,
comprising four imposing ranges around a courtyard. Its royal ownership and tenancy
by the Dowager Queen Isabella (widow of Edward II) and her grandson Edward the
Black Prince ensured royal favour for the city through the 14th century.
The archaeology and extensive documentation for the Cathedral Priory and other
monastic houses betoken an international flavour which owes more to the enduring
stability of their orders than the fortunes of the city alone. Close to the Cathedral, an
Episcopal Palace formed the temporal centre of the established church's activities.
The city wall, 180 years in the making, betrays the quirks of military construction
over six generations. The ditch which accompanied it, usually 7-10m wide and up to
3m deep, became a town sewer and dump, the contents of which sometimes closely
reflect the comparative wealth and material culture of the varied trading enclaves it
encompassed in its two and a quarter miles circuit. No single stretch was identically
treated. In two places the wall and ditch have been shown to have replaced an earlier
defensive line which otherwise remains elusive and little-understood. Long stretches
of the ditch were wet, fed by elaborate sluices or spayers which ensured that the fills
remain so, in anaerobic conditions conducive to good organic preservation.
Within the city is documented a plethora of manufacturing trades, a substantial
proportion of which contributed to the predominant trade in dyed blue woollen cloth,
woven in Coventry; this reached its zenith in the 14th century. The traders often
grouped together for mutual support and supply, a phenomenon which aided powerful
trading guilds to coalesce in the late medieval period. The trade groupings may
sometimes be detected in documents, at others suggested by street-frontage
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excavations; occasionally excavation and documentary research are in total
agreement.
Also supporting this medieval city was a host of medieval village-based rural
industries in todays suburbs. From the 13th century potters are known to have been at
work in Harnall (Hillfields), Wyken, Walsgrave and Canley, although only for the last
of these, Canley, has physical evidence yet come to light. In addition the medieval
floor tile industry of Stoke was without peer in the area and its products are known
throughout the midlands. Exploitation of Coventry's clay was widespread and this
industry survived to successfully transform itself into brickmaking by the 19th
century. Stone quarrying too was widespread, principally in Cheylesmore, Pinley and
Harnall. In particular the eastern side of the city was a magnet for minerals
exploitation, further emphasised by the extraction of coal from the early 16th century
onwards.
The modern city centre contains substantial areas in which environmentally rich
deposits survive, chiefly along the banks of the River Sherbourne, but also along its
western side where the later medieval city was built upon the infilled courses of leets
serving certainly three and possibly four water mills. Their watercourses remain
signposts to the nature of Coventry's proto-urban environment before wealth ensured
Coventry's transformation and intensive occupation in the 14th century. Their modern
suburban counterparts include preserved former rural medieval mill sites at Shortley
and Pinley which had no successors less than two miles away. Thus directly
comparable wet environments of urban and rural character lie cheek by jowl. This
abundance of former mills in today's suburbs, some of which had no post-medieval
successors, and which remain undeveloped to this day, is a concentrated grouping of
complicated water management which makes the Sherbourne and its tributaries, the
Radford Brook and the River Sowe, arguably among the best in the midlands.
A concentration of medieval chapel sites with attached graveyards having no postmedieval successors makes the city and its suburbs a valuable research tool for
palaeopathology and the study of medieval population trends, disease and nutrition.
Some chapel sites lie next to manorial centres, such as at Pinley, where the manor
house sites are also known.
The physical remains are complemented by a superb archival documentary resource.
Now computer-catalogued in the City Archives, there is also outlying material in
Warwickshire Record Office and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
The existing excavated material is curated by the City Council's Herbert Art Gallery
and Museum. The extensive collections and archives there derive from both
excavations since the 1950s and those donated to the city by local antiquarians since
c1900.
It is beyond doubt that the medieval city took a beating in the November 1940 and
April 1941 Blitzes, and some major planning decisions were taken before and after
the Second World War which would not necessarily have been taken in more recent,
better informed times. However, the below-ground archaeological resource of
Coventry remains very considerable, the product of some very intensive medieval
occupation. After 1945 the plans for the renewal of this great city became a matter of
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urgency and civic pride. The cycle of renewal and regeneration of each succeeding
generation is ensuring that the city's past is more and more a material consideration in
how its changing face continues to reflect its vibrant medieval roots.
For Coventry, therefore, any regional medieval research strategy needs an awareness
of at least the following aspects in order to begin to realise the city's potential
contribution and fill gaps in knowledge which will have benefits locally, regionally
and in certain cases nationally:
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Studies in urban origins
Medieval town planning
Monastic orders (OBen, OCist, OFM, OCarm, OCart, OTempl, OHosp).
The role of the church in medieval society
Patterns of local, national and international trade
Industrial/trading enclaves and the role of guilds
Urban production and urban consumption
Castle-related and military archaeology
The manorial system of land administration
Palaeo-environmental studies
Palaeo-pathological studies and burial archaeology
The interaction of town and country: food, fuel and manpower
Interdisciplinary work on the documentary record and the existing finds
collections
A great deal is already known about medieval Coventry and its outlying villages, but
the more can be seen, the more it becomes obvious that a still greater portion is still to
be discovered.
Coventry was a major medieval city. At the beginning of a still-ongoing urbanisation
process, it attracted the finest craftsmen. It produced the finest goods with an
international reputation. Its monastic orders travelled widely and foreign visitors
spread its fame across Europe. By far its strongest influence was in the surrounding
villages but this pull did not stop at the edge of the current boundary and individual
industries and trades exerted influence into what is now Warwickshire, the West
Midlands and beyond.
Our cities remain at the forefront of archaeological research. The enduring success of
our forebears' 10th-century urban experiment continues, ironically resulting in the
incremental loss of the self-same historic resource as redevelopment continues
nationwide. Threat-led research should be no poor relation to planned academic
rigour, so long as it is clear in its vision, to ensure today's archaeological decisions are
reasonable, well-conceived and exemplars of their type. Coventry has a place in the
vanguard of urban archaeological research. It comprises 38 square miles of rural
archaeological resource, a site of immense archaeological potential and opportunity,
all of which is subject to acute modern development pressures. At its centre is the
walled medieval city, comprising a third of a square mile of complex, often deeplystratified archaeological deposits.