Darlington’s Forgotten Ancestors

The Pagan Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Dodds Street

On the morning of Friday 28^th January 1876 Patrick Foley, a labourer working for a Mr. Prior, a subcontractor for the builder Mr. Haxby Dougill,¹ was digging a drain in a field to the north of Darlington where infrastructure was being put in place ready for the building of housing for the new ‘Greenbank’ estate.

The field was on the side of a small hill overlooking the valley of the River Skerne to the east. If he took a rest from where he was digging at a spot near the top of the hill and looked up towards the Skerne, Patrick would have been able to see the trackway known as Four Riggs Lane in front of him and behind it the large fishpond and mature trees in the grounds of North Lodge, the villa that had belonged to Edward Pease’s nephew John Beaumont Pease, who had died three years previously. Beyond that, on the other side of Northgate, the busy road leading into the centre of town, was the 120 foot spire of the recently built St. George’s church and more grand houses, their gardens sloping down to the River Skerne, including one that had been owned by Edward Pease himself, where he had first met with George Stephenson in 1821.

When Patrick had dug about two and a half feet down, through the layer of builders sand on the site and into the earth below, his spade hit something hard. Bending down to discover what it was, he found that he had struck the bone of a human skull.

Tools were downed and the police were called. Two skulls and the bones of three skeletons in total were found, those of a man, a woman and a child, which had been buried with their feet to the east and their heads to the west. Also found with the skeletons were grave goods including the remains of a spear head and some bronze ‘rings’.

The Northern Echo broke the news of the find the following morning:

SINGULAR DISCOVERY OF ANCIENT HUMAN REMAINS AT DARLINGTON

Yesterday morning, while Mr Prior’s labourers were making a drain in a grass field on the Greenbank estate, a man named Patrick Foley discovered a quantity of human bones. They were embedded in the sand about two and a half feet from the surface, and to the simple-minded finder suggested a Whitechapel tragedy on the spot. No time was lost, but information was conveyed to the police, and Supt. Rogers, accompanied by Dr. Easby, at once went to the spot. After carefully removing the soil, a large quantity of bones were found, including two human skulls, thighs, arms and smaller bones. In addition to these were found a bronze spear head, some bronze rings and the metallic lid of some vessel. The spear head and rings were evidently of great age, but the lid was, though much corroded, apparently of a later date. The bones were very much decayed, being quite “honey-combed” and easily crumbled away. The teeth, however, were in a wonderful state of preservation, one jaw of beautifully pearly teeth being quite complete, and others, though loosened from the jaws, were in excellent order, a fact which must be interesting to those who study the causes of the widespread decay of teeth in the present day. Dr. Easby made a close examination of the remains, and came to the conclusion that they were those of three bodies, a man, a woman, and a young person, and had been embedded for a long period. The spear head, rings, and vessel, were taken to Mr J. T. Abbott, who examined them, and compared them with some ancient specimens in his own possession, and stated his belief that the spear head and rings were at least 2,000 years old, and very probably of a date anterior to the visit of Julius Caesar, which, of course, took place in B.C. 55. The other article, however, he did not think had any connection with the weapon or the remains, and had got into the earth at a very much later date. During the day, a large number of persons, local antiquarians, visited the spot where the remains were found; but the bones and the other articles, too, were, soon after their discovery, removed to the police office, where they now are.

It quickly became apparent from the obvious age of the bones and from the artefacts that the bodies had been interred with that these were not the result of a deranged serial killer stalking the streets of Darlington but were in fact ancient burials. A Mr. J. T. Abbott of Darlington, Pharmaceutical Chemist and Distributor of Stamps, who ran a chemist shop at No.2 Bondgate and was a well-known antiquarian in the town, was called upon to identify the artefacts.²

The eminent archaeologist Canon William Greenwell also arrived shortly after from Durham and may have been one of the “large number of persons, local antiquarians” who “visited the spot where the remains were found” on the Friday afternoon.³

The following Thursday, February 3^rd 1876, Greenwell wrote to the Editor of The Northern Echo, William Stead, to correct some errors in their previous report:

CANON GREENWELL ON THE GREENBANK SKELETONS, &c

The Rev. Canon Greenwell of Durham, one of the first living authorities concerning the remains which are from time to time unearthed from the burying places of the ancient inhabitants of Great Britain writes to us as follows concerning the skeletons lately discovered on the Greenbank estate:-

Durham, February 3, 1876

“DEAR SIR, – The discovery of skeletons at Greenbank seems to require a fuller notice than has already been given of it, and therefore the more occasion for this on account of some errors which occur in the only paragraph I have read in which the discovery is mentioned.

Three bodies appear to have been buried at this spot, those of a man, a woman and a child. There can be no difficulty in attributing them to one of the principal stocks which have occupied Great Britain, if the precise date cannot itself be ascertained. The burials are those of Angles, one of the branches of the Teutonic family, which began to settle in England in the fifth century, and I should be inclined to consider them Christian Angles of, perhaps, the seventh century. It is a circumstance not easily to be accounted for, that very few interments of these people have been found in the Northern Counties of England, although they have been discovered in great numbers in Norfolk, Suffolk, and East Yorkshire, whilst burials of Saxons and other kindred tribes are numerous in those parts of the country which were occupied by these respective peoples. I know of only one other burial, of about the Saxon period, having occurred in the County of Durham, and that was near Whitburn.

The people who were interred at Greenbank had been buried with some of the articles which it is common to find associated with this class of interment. The man with his spear and shield, the first represented by the iron head, the other by its iron boss, and perhaps with a bronze brooch, though that might equally have accompanied the woman. She had been buried with the house key (at least the fragmentary piece of iron remaining seems to represent that article), the appropriate adjunct of the housewife. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ women are not unfrequently found buried with the house key, though the spindle is, perhaps, of more frequent occurrence, whilst the ordinary accompaniment of the man is the spear. In Bavaria, at the present day, male or female descent is spoken of as coming through the spear or spindle side. And our own medieval grave covers have the sword on that of a man, whilst the shears designate that of a woman, though the house-key again is sometimes found instead of it, and in some cases both the shears and key. In one instance with which I am acquainted, there are one pair of shears and two house-keys on the grave cover, as if to say that one woman was there interred but that she had been twice a housewife, having had two husbands.

Greenwell’s letter on the Thursday mentioned some additional discoveries which had been made by that point – a shield boss (this may in fact have been the “metallic lid of some vessel” which J. T. Abbott had failed to recognise on the Friday morning⁴), a bronze brooch and an iron key.

The Greenbank burial site turned out to be the richest Anglo-Saxon cemetery found north of the River Tees at the time.⁵

Another Skeleton Found

By March 1876 the Greenbank Estate, advertised as “beautifully-situated” and occupying “an elevated position, commanding magnificent views of a richly wooded residential country”, was being sold in lots to “Builders, Capitalist, and others.”

It appears that no more discoveries were made until Wednesday 6^th September 1876 when another skeleton was found in the same field as the first three, reported the following day by The Sunderland Daily Echo:

DISCOVERY OF A HUMAN SKELETON AT DARLINGTON

Yesterday afternoon, while some labourers were engaged on the Greenbank Estate, Darlington, which is being laid out for building purposes, one of them, Patrick Riley, came upon a human skeleton embedded in the sand about two feet below the surface. Beside the remains were a spear head and a dirk without the handle, and there was every appearance of the skeleton and other articles being the remains of a prehistoric age. This is the fifth skeleton which has been found in the same field during the last five months.

The final sentence of the report about this being the fifth skeleton found in the field is puzzling. Three skeletons (but only two skulls) were initially found on Friday 28^th January 1876 – those of a man, a woman and a child, as confirmed by both Dr. Easby and Canon Greenwell. Then this skeleton (which, accompanied by a spear head and a “dirk” – most likely a seax – was probably a male skeleton and presumably was found complete with its skull) was found on Wednesday 6^th September 1876. So that makes four skeletons (but only three skulls) in total. But despite searching The British Newspaper Archive several times, I could find no further reports in the local press of the discovery of another skeleton or skull between 28^th January and 6^th September 1876.

The comment about the skeleton being the fifth found in the last five months should have said in the last seven months (from the end of January to the beginning of September 1876). Here I think the mistake is simply down to the reporter focusing on the figure of five in connection with the number of bodies and therefore making a genuine error.

Then Two More

In January 1877, a further two complete skeletons (bizarrely described in the local press as “healthy”) were discovered, both with a vase or urn placed by their head, together with a bronze brooch:

ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES AT DARLINGTON

During the recent excavations for the new drain through the Greenbank Estate several interesting objects have been disinterred, in addition to the former discoveries enumerated in our columns. A few days since a couple of fine healthy skeletons were met with, and at the head of each was an ancient Saxon vase or urn, a ladies’ bronze brooch, and a nondescript piece of bronze, which most probably has been a portion of ancient armour. These latter have been placed in the possession of Mr Abbott, F.S.A.⁶, of Darlington.

Dodds Street

By September 1878 most of the houses on the south side of Dodds Street⁷, built by Thomas Wray & Co, were finished and up for sale for the grand sum of £225 each.

Almost all of the houses on the north side of Dodds Street were built by Haxby Dougill, but unlike those on the south side these were built piecemeal – four in 1878, six in 1884, six in 1891, nine in 1892 (plans here and here) and sixteen of them – numbers 2 to 32 from the bottom of the hill upwards – were not built until 1893. There were no more reports in the local press of any further Anglo-Saxon discoveries on Dodds Street though.

The Lost Proceedings

J. T. Abbott had been elected a member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne on 7^th May 1856. Frustratingly, there is a large gap in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne from 1858 to 1883 and these seem to be lost, so we don’t know if Abbott exhibited the Greenbank finds with the Society in 1876 and/or 1877 or even just sent some information about them to be read at one of their monthly meetings in the library of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne’s castle keep. But there was nothing in the local press such as The Northern Echo to show that Abbott even exhibited the finds in Darlington, for example at any meetings of the Darlington Naturalist’s Society, which was formed in 1860, let alone taking them up to Newcastle.

J. T. Abbott’s Letter

What we do know is that on Saturday 1^st February 1879, J. T. Abbott gave an anonymous account of the Greenbank discoveries, under the pseudonym “J.T.A”, to the letters page of The North Eastern Independent, a short-lived Conservative weekly newspaper published in Darlington. In his letter, he listed the total finds from the graves:

The following particulars respecting a find of Saxon skeletons etc. at Greenbank Darlington in the year 1876 may probably be interesting to your readers, as they are about 1,500 years old and a very great addition to our local history, as no such discovery has been made previous and our present annals commence with the Saxon Thane who gave his lands to St. Cuthbert some centuries after.

(I) Six male and female and child’s skeletons buried with the feet to the east, at the head of each a small urn or vase of native burnt clay, evidently a rude copy of the classical Greek vase; both were preserved and another destroyed. The skeletons were left in the ground except the skulls.
(2) Several beautiful bronze fibulae, large and small, the larger ones evidently intended for the soldier’s belts; they have been gilt.
(3) Two circular brooches either for a man or woman, a pair of bronze tweezers for the ladies to pull away superfluous hair out of their faces or noses.
(4) Broken brooches and bodkins, all bronze, two crucial (sic) brooches.
(5) A large necklace, composed of amber, glass and stone beads and a chalk talisman or charm which may have been round the neck of one of the skeletons.
(6) Two swords, one very perfect and several spearheads.
(7) Two iron bosses from ancient shields and an iron key.

Quoted in Miket, R., Pocock, M., Myres, J. N. L., & Swanton, M. J. (1976) An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Greenbank, Darlington. Medieval Archaeology, Volume 20, Number 1, pages 62–74, page 63 ⁸

The “two circular brooches” mentioned in point 3 above were probably the “bronze rings” referred to in The Northern Echo report on 29th January 1876. These would have been copper alloy annular brooches, typically worn by Anglo-Saxon ladies in pairs as shoulder dress fasteners, which often had a string of glass and amber beads strung between them similar to the one mentioned by Abbott in point 5 above. One annular brooch from the Greenbank site was in Canon Greenwell’s collection of antiquities and is now in the British Museum.

Abbott’s total of six skeletons in his letter tallies with the local press reports at the time: three skeletons – those of a man, a woman and a child (but only two skulls) discovered on Friday 28^th January 1876, a complete skeleton (presumably of a man) discovered on Wednesday 6^th September 1876 and two complete skeletons (one presumably female, the other sex unknown) discovered in January 1877.

However, there appears to be some confusion in Abbott’s account as he identifies a small urn or vase as being found at the head of each of the six skeletons (presumably even the one that didn’t have a head?) – but then goes on to say “both were preserved and another destroyed.” As Miket and Pocock point out in their paper – “the lack of clarity about the number of urns (three or six?) hardly inspires full confidence in his account.”

We now know from contemporary newspaper reports that it was the two skeletons from 1877 where “at the head of each was an ancient Saxon vase or urn” which was “placed in the possession of Mr. Abbott, F.S.A., of Darlington.” So these two urns would be the “both” that “were preserved”. A third may have come from one of the earlier finds in 1876 and been accidentally destroyed during attempts to extract it from the ground, perhaps by Patrick Foley, Superintendent Rogers or Patrick Riley. None of the newspaper reports from 1876 mention that any vases or urns were found though and no sherds of pottery are amongst Canon Greenwell’s collection of antiquities from the Greenbank site, which were sold to the American banker J. P. Morgan in 1908, who then donated them to the British Museum. (And if any sherds of pottery had existed they might have been amongst the British Museum’s collection from the site as this does include “Iron and wood fragments; two bags”).

The sentence in question:

Six male and female and child’s skeletons buried with the feet to the east, at the head of each a small urn or vase of native burnt clay, evidently a rude copy of the classical Greek vase; both were preserved and another destroyed.

does appear to be mangled. It appears that a sentence containing a general description of all of the skeletons in total that were found has been conflated with a sentence giving a specific description of the last two skeletons which were found. Crucial information seems to be missing at the point where the comma is placed between “east” and “at”.

At first I thought that the confusion about the number of urns might simply be down to hurried and slapdash editing of Abbott’s presumably much longer letter than the one actually published in The North Eastern Independent newspaper by its proprietor and editor, William Alexander Wooler of Sadberge Hall. As well as being editor of the paper, Wooler was involved in a number of other activities, being a land owner, mine owner, solicitor, property developer and founder in 1879 of Darlington Conservative Association.⁹

However, on closer inspection it seems that J. T. Abbott may have written all, or at least part of, the newspaper report on January 25^th 1877 concerning the last two skeletons that were discovered, which was equally as confusing. This report contained exactly the same phrase as Abbott’s letter: “at the head of each” when describing the position of the urns. The use of the word “enumerated” and the very odd phrase “a couple of fine healthy skeletons were met with” do not sound like something a newspaper reporter would write. Also the inclusion of the letters F.S.A. (Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London) after Abbott’s name, which Abbott was not (see Footnote 6), suggests that Abbott did write it. The newspaper report, like the letter, is badly worded, badly punctuated and unclear, with two possible interpretations. Were “a ladies’ bronze brooch and a nondescript piece of bronze, which most probably has been a portion of ancient armour” at the head of both skeletons, along with an “ancient Saxon vase or urn”, or were these objects only present once? There is a comma after “ancient armour”, then an extra space and then the start of the new sentence: “These latter have been placed …” so it appears there are some words missing (maybe these are “were also discovered”, as the most logical reading does seem to be only one brooch and one nondescript piece of bronze being present as otherwise the report would be suggesting that both bodies were wearing both a ladies’ brooch and armour – possible, but certainly not in the world-view of J. T. Abbott). Perhaps the lack of coherence in J. T. Abbott’s letter about the number of urns was not down to William Wooler’s editing after all (although it would certainly have helped if Wooler had bothered to proof-read it).

Skulls to London

Probably the most curious aspect of Abbott’s account in The North Eastern Independent newspaper, as recounted by Miket and Pocock in their paper, is his sending of some of the skulls (Abbott did not specify in his letter how many) to the Natural History Museum in London to be examined. This, as they point out, was probably influenced by Canon Greenwell, who was a strong advocate of craniology – the now dubious science of measuring the shape and size of human crania to determine their racial heritage:

The general idea was that the ‘superior’, long skull was similar in shape and size to an English gentleman’s, which was indicative of an Anglo-Saxon race, whereas the ‘inferior’ round skull, that belonged to the ancient people, was linked to crude ideas of subordinate intelligence and class.

The Revival of Uncleby: An antiquarian excavation of an Anglian Cemetery (Volume 1), Abigail Reid Hansen, November 2017, page 58

Intriguingly, the report from the Natural History Museum suggested that one of the skulls “may have belonged to an earlier Briton”, but Miket and Pocock were not able to find any record of the report or any trace of the skulls in the museum’s collection.¹⁰

Sotheby’s Auction

In 1888, a year before his death¹¹, Abbott’s auctioned his collection of antiquities, including the Greenbank artefacts, at Sotheby’s. Roger Miket and Michael Pocock located the sale catalogue, held in the British Library, for the auction that took place on 20^th July 1888. In their paper they listed the lots that appeared under the title Anglo-Saxon Antiquities found at Greenbank, Darlington in 1876. This outlined in detail the items from the Greenbank find, including those that were bought at the auction and subsequently lost. Sadly the “large necklace, composed of amber, glass and stone beads” was one of them. The two swords – one “very perfect” – never even seem to have made it to auction and are also lost. One of these “swords” may have been the “dirk without the handle” that was found on Wednesday 6^th September 1876.

Lot 463 from the Sotheby’s sales catalogue lists “Pair of iron bracelets, iron spear head, bronze celt, stone celt, four stone arrowheads, portion of an iron pot, three lower jawbones etc” and indicates that Abbott may have sent a total of three skulls from the Greenbank finds to the Natural History museum in London for examination. As craniology, which supposedly differentiated the ‘superior’ Anglo-Saxon skulls from ‘inferior’ Celtic ones, mainly focused on the size and measurements of the cranium – the upper and back part of the skull and whether it was ‘long’ or ’round’ – the jaw bones were not considered to be as significant. Abbott would not have needed to send those for analysis, so must have kept them in his collection.

Edward Wooler

After Abbott’s death in 1889 all went quiet about the Anglo-Saxon discoveries in Darlington and they seem to have been largely forgotten. This was until Wednesday 22^nd March 1905 when The North Star newspaper in Darlington published an article about them which appears to have been written by Edward Wooler and which plagiarized part of J. T. Abbott’s 1879 letter to The North Eastern Independent newspaper. The North Star was the successor to the The North Eastern Independent and William Alexander Wooler was also its proprietor. Edward Wooler was William Alexander Wooler’s nephew and was a wealthy Darlington solicitor and town councillor and also a keen antiquarian.

The article identified a Mr George Hastwell as at that time owning three spear heads, a cruciform fibulae brooch and an iron key from the Greenbank finds. It’s not clear how these came into Edward Wooler’s possession¹² but as soon as they did he enthusiastically set about displaying and publicising these artifacts, exhibiting them at the March 21^st 1905 meeting of The Darlington Naturalists’ Field Club, of which he was president at the time:

At a meeting of the Darlington Naturalists’ Field Club, held last night, Mr Edward Wooler, the president, exhibited three iron Saxon spear heads, a very fine bronze fibula, and an iron key found on Greenbank some years ago by Mr Haxby Dougill, and now in the possession of Mr George Hastwell. It was stated there had no doubt been a Saxon burial ground on Greenbank, as some of the former generation would remember a find made there in 1876, which went into the possession of the late Mr J. T. Abbot [sic]. There were then found beautiful bronze fibulae, large and small – the larger one evidently intended for soldiers’ belts – two circular brooches, a pair of bronze tweezers, broken brooches, bodkins – all of bronze – a necklace composed of amber, glass and stone beads, two swords, and several spear heads, two iron bosses from ancient shields, and an iron key. It is supposed that there was an early Saxon church at Greenbank, although there has undoubtedly been a Saxon church on the site of the present St Cuthbert’s church. That is confirmed by Saxon remains that have been found there and now exist in the church … It is interesting to note, in connection with the Greenbank find, that a number of skeletons were found during the digging of a sewer there, and at the head of each was a small urn or vase. Many supposed that food was placed in these urns, and the key, spears, etc, so as to provide for the “resurrection day”.

Newcastle Society of Antiquaries

The week after the Darlington Field Club meeting, on 29^th March 1905, Wooler travelled north to the grand surroundings of the library of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne’s castle keep to exhibit the artefacts at the monthly meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne.

By Mr. Edward Wooler of Darlington: – Three iron spearheads, (i) 15½in. long (with socket 4in. long) and 1in. wide at widest part, (ii) 12in. long (remains of socket 4in.) and 1in. wide, and (iii) 10½in. long (remains of socket 4in. long) and 1⅛in. wide; a bronze brooch of pre-conquest date; and and iron key. All are part of a find made at Greenbank, Darlington, in 1876, by Mr. Haxby Dougill, contractor, Darlington, in laying a sewer between Dodds Street and Selbourne Terrace. Other objects discovered consisted of skeletons, male and female, with feet to the east, at the head of each a small empty urn of native burnt clay; bronze brooches, large and small, two of them circular, a pair of bronze tweezers, broken brooches and bodkins, all of bronze; a large necklace composed of amber, glass and stone beads and a chalk charm; two swords, very perfect; two iron bosses from ancient shields, &c. No account has previously been published of this ‘find’ so far as I know. The other portion of the find went into the possession of the late Mr. J. T. Abbott of Darlington, and was sold at Christie’s on his death. There was, no doubt, an extensive cemetery on Greenbank, as other human remains were found there a short time ago.

The final sentence about human remains being “found there a short time ago” is puzzling and as yet I have been unable to find any other reference to any further Anglo-Saxon skeletons being discovered in the vicinity of Dodds Street, Selbourne Terrace or Greenbank Road around 1905. It is possible that Wooler is referring to the discovery of the two skeletons in January 1877, but most people would not call 28 years earlier “a short time ago”.

Yorkshire Gazette

By the beginning of April 1905 Wooler had graduated to a lengthy, illustrated article in the Yorkshire Gazette:

Interesting Exhibition of Saxon Antiquities

Remains 1,500 years old which throw considerable light upon the habits of the people in the Saxon period.

The exhibition of a number of Saxon antiquities to the members of the Darlington Naturalists’ Field Club has created so much general interest that we give here – with representations of the articles shown, accompanied by a more copious description than has yet been made public.

The exhibits (says Mr. Edward Wooler, who has written this description) included three iron spear-heads, an exceptionally well preserved bronze fibulae (or clasp), and a large iron key, all of which for some years have been in the possession of Mr. George Hastwell, of Darlington, and originally formed part of a very extensive find on the Greenbank Estate in 1876. At that time whilst Mr. Haxby Dougill, a well-known Darlington contractor, was excavating for a sewer between Dodds Street and Selbourne Terrace, he discovered a large quantity of remains of great antiquity – probably nearly 1,500 years old.

The find included:-

(1.) Six male and female and child’s skeletons, buried with the feet to the east, and at the head of each a small urn of native burnt clay, a rude copy of the Greek vase. The skeletons, except the skulls, were left in the ground.

(2.) Several beautiful bronze fibulae, large and small, the larger apparently intended for warriors’ belts. They had been gilded.

(3.) Two circular brooches; a pair of bronze tweezers for removing superfluous hairs.

(4.) Broken brooches and bodkins, all bronze – two of them crucial brooches.

(5.) A large necklace composed of amber, glass and stone beads, and a chalk talisman or charm, which may have been round the neck of one of the skeletons.

(6.) Two swords (very perfect) and several spear heads.

(7.) Two iron bosses from ancient shields and two iron keys.

Eminent antiquaries who examined the various articles came to the conclusion that the place where the discovery was made was an ancient Anglo-Saxon burial ground in use prior to the building of the Saxon Church which is known to have preceded the present Church of St. Cuthbert on the east side of Darlington Market-place.

What is known of the antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon period is derived almost entirely from the one source – the graves – but fortunately for the study of this period it happens that the contents of the graves are particularly rich, varied, and interesting, and enables a tolerably accurate estimate to be formed of the civilisation of our Anglo-Saxon progenitors.

In general the Saxon graves have a character very distinct from those of the Britons or Romans – they are, indeed, the prototypes of our modern graves. A rectangular cist or pit was cut in the ground, varying in depth from three or four feet to seven or eight, on the floor of which the body was laid on its back, in full dress, surrounded with a variety of articles, which no doubt the deceased had valued when alive. The grave was then filled up and a mound of earth raised above. This mound was termed “hloew,” a hillock, the modern word “low,” which is still used in Derbyshire, and “beorh,” “beorg” or “bearw,” a word having the same signification, from which is derived our modern name of “barrow.” In Sussex they are still called “burghs.”

In the graves of the Saxon period, as in those of the Romans, there are found two modes of interment – cremation and the burial of the body entire. The custom appears to have varied with the different tribes who came into England. In the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Kent, cremation was the rare exception to the general rule, while it seems to have been the predominating practice among the Angles from Norfolk into the centre of Mercia.

Saxon1

(The exact date in April written on the press cutting in Edward Wooler’s Cutting Book 3 held at the Centre for Local Studies at Crown Street Library in Darlington is indecipherable but, based on the chronology of the other cuttings before and after, it appears to be 1^st April 1905 and no later than 5^th April 1905).

Victoria History of County Durham

Later in 1905 information about the finds was published in The Victoria History of the County of Durham Volume 1:

The discovery at Darlington, perhaps the most important, was made in 1876, by Mr. Haxby Dougill, a builder of that town, when making excavations for a sewer, to be laid between Dodd [sic] Street and Selbourne Terrace on the Greenbank estate, which lies to the north of the parish church. The importance of the find was fortunately realized by a local antiquary, Mr. J. T. Abbott, who made observations on the site, and collected a number of objects found associated with the burials. About a dozen skeletons of males, females and children were found, and, at the head of each, was a small urn, of burnt clay. The bodies had been laid with the feet to the east. Among the articles accompanying them were a number of brooches, of various sizes, some of which showed traces of gilding; two circular brooches; a pair of tweezers; a number of broken brooches and pins; and two large cruciform brooches, all of bronze; also a necklace composed of amber, glass, and stone beads, and a chalk object, no doubt a spindle whorl, which may have been round the neck of one of the persons interred. The weapons found were iron swords and spear-heads, and two or more iron bosses of shields. The period to which these articles point is that of the very early Anglian occupation, possibly before the introduction of Christianity in Northumbria. Three spear-heads preserved measure respectively 10½ inches, 12½ inches, and 16 inches in length. They are of the early Anglo-Saxon form, the sockets being split up to show part of the shaft. The three spear-heads and a fibula are in the possession of Mr. Edward Wooler of Darlington, the shield bosses are in that of Canon Greenwell of Durham, and some other objects are in the collection of Sir John Evans.

The Victoria History also included images of the three spear-heads and the fibula “in the possession of Mr. Edward Wooler of Darlington”:

How Many Skeletons?

It’s interesting to note the variations in the number of skeletons found at Greenbank in Wooler’s various accounts. He starts off by by being deliberately vague, saying that “a number of skeletons were found” in The North Star report, then “skeletons, male and female” in his presentation to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne. In the April 1905 Yorkshire Gazette article, which states that it was mainly written by Wooler but was clearly mainly written by J. T. Abbott, it is “Six male and female and child’s skeletons“. But by the time Wooler spoke to the people from The Victoria County History it becomes “About a dozen skeletons of males, females and children“, which is the number it remained at when he co-authored the children’s history textbook Historic Darlington, published in 1913:

The Story of Darlington Chapter VI – The Foundation of Darlington

What led to the foundation of Darlington, and how did it get its name? That Darlington existed in very early Saxon times there is no doubt, for in 1876 a pagan Saxon burial ground was discovered on the Greenbank estate. From this about a dozen skeletons were unearthed; at the head of each was a small urn of clay, such as it was the custom to place in graves in those early times. There were also found iron swords and spear-heads, and iron bosses for centres of shields – the weapons of the dead warriors. The spear-heads were from 10½ to 16 inches in length.

At best, Wooler’s suggestion of around 12 skeletons could be seen as a deliberate mis-reading of Abbott’s slightly unclear (but clear enough) original account of “Six male and female and child’s skeletons” in The North Eastern Independent as being six male and six female (including one child’s) skeletons, instead of Abbott’s apparently intended, and the now accepted, meaning of six skeletons in total. It’s also interesting to note that in Wooler’s version of J. T. Abbott’s original account the one “very perfect” sword out of the two found became both swords being perfect, and the singular iron key became two iron keys. A very experienced solicitor, Wooler was used to presenting evidence in the best light to argue a case, but it seems he was definitely stretching the truth here. It probably never occurred to him that over 100 years later his exaggerations would be caught out. In his defence, I do believe that Wooler wanted to ensure that this significant archaeological discovery in Darlington appeared as important as possible so as to increase Darlington’s prominence on the national stage, and he probably believed that a little exaggeration on his part helped this along. It’s also worth noting that in 1905 Wooler had ambitions to become a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and so be able to put the letters F.S.A. after his name, which he achieved on 27th June 1907.¹³

When Charles C. Hodges wrote his chapter on Anglo-Saxon remains in County Durham for The Victoria History of the County of Durham Volume 1, Wooler’s exaggerated version of the number of bodies in the Greenbank cemetery was the one that was officially recorded. By 1915, when the Greenbank find was published in the eminent British art historian Gerard Baldwin Brown‘s important six-volume series of scholarly books entitled The Arts In Early England, this version was set in stone:

At Darlington a few miles north of the Tees, within the limits of the present town and on comparatively elevated ground there were discovered in 1876 about a dozen skeletons of men, women and children, laid with their feed to the east and accompanied by tomb furniture. Iron swords, spear heads, and shield bosses were in evidence as well as beads and several brooches in different forms. Three spear heads and a cruciform bronze fibula, in the collection of Mr. Edwards Wooler of Darlington are shown … The latter is of a VI type, dating about 550 A.D., and the interments were in all probability of the pagan period.

An image of the spear heads (labelled number 4, bottom right) was published in The Arts In Early England Volume 3, 1915:

and an image of the bronze cruciform fibula (labelled number 8, left) was published in The Arts In Early England Volume 4, 1915:

“About a dozen skeletons” was then repeated by Audrey Meaney in her 1963 book A Gazetteer of Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Sites:

1876 During excavations for a sewer between Dodd [sic] Street and Selbourne Terrace on the Greenbank Estate to the N of the Parish Church, some AS burials were found. J. T. Abbott kept watch on the site. About a dozen skeletons were found, of men, women and children, heads to the W, and at the head of each was a small urn of burnt clay. With them were also a number of bronze brooches of various sizes, some showing traces of gilding, including 2 circular brooches, 2 large cruciform brooches, one of which is dated by Brown to about 550 and some broken brooches and pins. There were also a pair of bronze tweezers, a necklace of amber, glass and stone beads, a chalk object, perhaps a spindlewhorl, which may have been hung around the neck of one of the bodies, and some weapons – swords, at least 3 spearheads with split sockets, and 2 or more shield bosses.

Another Skull Unearthed

Another skull from the Greenbank site came to light in a newspaper report from August 1925. On Saturday 22^nd August 1925 a human skull was found by a pig near to where the Darlington to Barnard Castle railway line crossed Newton Lane at the Mount Pleasant level crossing (now roughly where Jedburgh Drive meets Newton Lane – some of the track bed still remains, connecting West Auckland Road to Newton Lane and beyond to the west). On the following Monday, 24^th August 1925, a Mr Joseph Pallister, who lived on Brinkburn Road in Darlington, came forward and admitted that around 50 years earlier as a young boy he had found the skull “in a sandpit during the development of the Greenbank estate”.

MYSTERY OF A SKULL

Police Accept Explanation at Darlington

A good deal of interest was aroused during the week-end by the discovery of a portion of a human skull, which was recovered from a garth adjoining the Mount Pleasant railway crossing at Cockerton, Darlington.

It was unearthed by a pig whilst rooting around in search of food. The police began digging operations on Saturday, and these were continued on Sunday and again yesterday in the hope of finding the remainder of the skeleton, should there be one.

The sequel came yesterday afternoon, when Mr Joseph Pallister, of Brinkburn Road, Darlington, volunteered a statement to the police to the effect that he buried a skull in the vicinity, which he had had in his possession some 50 years since boyhood. The skull, he stated, was supposed to have been originally found in a sandpit during the development of the Greenbank estate.

He further stated that he only buried the skull in about a foot depth of soil. The police are understood to accept this version as a satisfactory solution to the matter, so closing the incident.

Could this possibly be the missing third skull from the original discovery of “Two skulls and the bones of three skeletons” on Friday 28^th January 1876? This very well may be the case. However, we know from the inclusion of “three lower jawbones etc” in Lot 463 in the Sotheby’s sale catalogue for the auction that took place on 20^th July 1888 of J. T. Abbott’s collection of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities found at Greenbank, Darlington in 1876 that he almost certainly sent away a total of three skulls to the Natural History Museum in London to be analysed. Although it’s possible that Abbott didn’t send the skulls until after a further skeleton (complete with skull) was discovered on Wednesday 6^th September 1876, it seems unlikely that he would have waited so long, especially as there was no guarantee that any further bodies would be discovered. It looks like the missing third skull might have been found quite soon after the initial discovery on Friday 28^th January 1876.

So could this be a fifth skull, proving that there were indeed five skeletons in total discovered by September 1876, as the newspaper report dated Thursday 7^th September 1876 stated? Could the bones of four people been in the initial discovery of “a large quantity of bones” on Friday 28^th January 1876? The newspaper report the following day does say that “The bones were very much decayed, being quite “honey-combed” and easily crumbled away” so it is possible that a number of bones had completely decayed, possibly destroyed due to ploughing. This may have lead Dr. Easby to think that there were just three skeletons instead of four.

Young Joseph Pallister may have heard about the discovery of the ancient burials on Friday 28^th January 1876 and gone over to the building site that evening under cover of darkness seeking buried treasure and taken the skull¹⁴. Inadvertently, he might have removed the evidence that there had been a fourth body buried at the initial find spot.

J. T. Abbott’s 1879 account in The North Eastern Independent newspaper stated that a total of six skeletons were found. For Abbott six skulls obviously equalled six skeletons. He clearly wasn’t aware of a seventh skeleton as its skull had been taken away and hidden. It appears that whoever it was that the newspaper reporter spoke to on the Greenbank building site on Wednesday 6^th September 1876 might have known more than J. T. Abbott did.

Museum Donations

After George Haswell’s death in 1922 his widow lent the three spear heads, the bronze cruciform brooch and the iron key from the Greenbank find to the town’s Public Museum in Tubwell Row.

A letter from a Mr. F. Dallimore, curator of the Public Museum, Darlington, dated February 22^nd 1935 was published in The Yorkshire Post on Tuesday February 26^th. In it he asked if any of the paper’s readers might be able to provide the museum with any information as to the whereabouts of the rest of the finds:

SAXON RELICS

Inquiry as to Darlington Finds in 1876

Sir, – During the course of the construction of the Greenbank estate in 1876, while Mr. Haxby Dougill was excavating for a sewer between Dodds Street and Selbourne Terrace, Darlington, he discovered a large number of very interesting remains of the Anglo-Saxon heathen period.

The finds were associated with burials and consisted of : –

(1) Various skeletons each with a small urn of burnt clay at the head.
(2) Several bronze fibulae.
(3) Two circular brooches.
(4) Broken brooches and bodkins, all bronze, and a pair of bronze tweezers.
(5) A large necklace of amber, glass and stone beads.
(6) Two swords and several spear heads.
(7) Two iron shield-bossed and two iron keys

We have in the Darlington Museum three spear heads, a bronze fibula and a large iron key, all belonging to the above find and lent by the widow of the late Mr. George Hastwell. But there seems to be no record of what happened to the other articles found.

If any of your readers could throw any light on the whereabouts of the rest of the find I should be very grateful. – Yours, etc.,

F. DALLIMORE

Public Museum, Darlington, Feb. 22.

Sir John Evans acquired all of the other bronze brooches and one of the urns from the Greenbank finds after the Sotheby’s sale on 20^th July 1888. When he died in 1908 these were inherited by his son Sir Arthur Evans who donated them to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

The two iron shield bosses from Greenbank plus an annular brooch and what was probably a spear head from the site that were in the possession of Canon Greenwell were sold by him to the banker J. P. Morgan in 1908 as part of Greenwell’s huge collection of antiquities. J. P. Morgan then donated the entire collection to The British Museum.

Everything else on Dallimore’s list is now lost – see Roger Miket and Michael Pocock’s paper An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Greenbank, Darlington pages 65-67 for a run-down of the full inventory.

Darlington & Stockton Times

As Roger Miket and Michael Pocock note in their 1976 paper An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Greenbank, Darlington: “By far the most thorough account [of the Greenbank finds] is that by R. Scarr in the Darlington & Stockton Times, 20 Oct, 1862 [sic]“. R. Scarr must also have been psychic to have written an article about an archaeological find in 1862 that was not discovered until 1876; this typing error caused much wasted time in The Centre for Local Studies at Crown Street Library in Darlington scrolling through endless microfilm of the D&S Times and also The Northern Echo, but thankfully the brilliant librarians there located Scarr’s article the following day, which was actually written in 1962:

ANGLO-SAXON RELICS DISPERSED FROM DARLINGTON

Labourer’s discovery when digging a drain at Greenbank

One of the most interesting archaeological discoveries made in the area which now forms the County Borough of Darlington was that of January 28, 1876, when an Anglo-Saxon cemetery was rudely disturbed during the building on the Green Bank Estate.

A labourer, Patrick Foley, working for Mr. Prior, building contractor, while excavating for a drain on the highest point of the west bank of the Skerne Valley – where is now Dodds Street – cut into a number of ancient graves, containing skeletons and grave furnishings, deposited by some early civilization.

Fearing that the bones might belong to some victims of foul play in the area, the police were immediately informed and Supt. Rogers accompanied by Dr. Easby made their way up the hill to examine the site of the strange discovery.

Carefully removing more of the soil, they found what was later pronounced to be an Anglo-Saxon burial ground, dating from the seventh or eighth century A.D. The news of the discovery spread throughout the town, and large numbers of people visited the site to inspect the centuries old sepulchre.

Unfortunately no systematic scientific excavation was carried out at the time, but much of the material taken from the graves – after being first taken to the police station – passed into private hands and has later found its way into some of our museums. Anglo-Saxon burial grounds have been discovered in other places in the North of England, mainly at Yeavering, Whitburn, Catterick, Hartlepool and Hurbuck.

GRAVES FURNISHED

The Darlington site consisted of a number of rectangular pits or graves and the bodies, fully clothed, as was the practice in pre-Christian times, had been laid in the ground facing the east.

At the head of each grave was an earthenware food vessel, and objects of personal adornment, or weapons used during the lifetime of the deceased. These consisted of bronze brooches, buckles from warriors belts, amber necklaces, iron spear heads, glass beads, tweezers, swords, rings and bosses belonging to ancient shields.

The series of graves no doubt formed part of a large “barrow”, and the high mound of earth raised over the graves as a memorial of the departed gradually disappeared during succeeding centuries of agricultural and forestry activity.

The exact date when these burial places were used is now impossible to define. While some are of the opinion that they may date from the Pre-Augustinian era – up to the year 600 – others place them a century later.

Long after their conversion to Christianity, some of the tribes continued the pagan method of burial. There seems to be little doubt that the “hilltop cemetery” was used before the first Christian churchyard was provided in Darlington, and it is not difficult to picture the funeral processions of centuries ago, leaving the fortified Burgh of Darlington, set on the west side of the river, and slowly making its way up the hillside to the communal burial ground. There in the well furnished grave, replete with objects the dead had valued during their earthly existence, and provided with nourishment for their long journey to the spirit world, the body was laid in the grave amid the wailing and distress of the remaining relatives.

LONDON SALE

The bones discovered were again covered in, but some of the skulls were sent to the British Museum and Dr. Woodward F.R.A.S., formed the opinion that one of them might have belonged to an earlier Briton. Mr. J. T. Abbott, a local chemist and a keen antiquarian, obtained possession of many of the objects taken from the graves, and from time to time they were shown to various societies in the town.

Shortly before his death, Mr. Abbott sent his valuable collection of coins and antiquities to be sold at Sotheby’s, London. An advertisement in “The Atheneum” of July 14, 1888, announces the sale at Sotheby’s Auction Rooms on July 18 and the following three days, of the collection of various antiquities belonging to Mr. J. T. Abbott of Darlington, and Robert Richmond, a clergyman. The Sale Catalogue, preserved in the British Museum, gives the details of several lots which were sold as “Anglo-Saxon Antiquities found at Greenbank, Darlington in 1876.”

Four lots, which consisted of five bronze brooches, including both the square-headed, cruciform and circular designs, were sold to a person called Rollin, for £10 19s., and other lots, including two earthenware vases were sold to a person named Ready, for £6 11s.

These objects afterwards came into the possession of Sir John Evans, a noted archaeologist, and after his death in 1908 they were presented to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, by his son Arthur, who was at one time keeper of the antiquities at the museum. The objects still form part of a large collection at the museum and the fine cruciform brooch, shown in the illustration, belongs to that collection.

Large numbers of these mass produced brooches or fibulae have been recovered in this country and on the continent, and they are evidence of the high standard of Anglo-Saxon jewellery. These examples of the metal worker’s art are probably contemporary with the well known gold pectoral cross found in the coffin of St. Cuthbert.

A representation of this fine piece of ecclesiastical symbolism in gold with red garnet embellishment and typical Anglo-Saxon decoration has been part of the adornment of the Darlington Mayor’s chain for 90 years, and has recently been given a place of honour in the town’s coat of arms.

Canon Greenwell, a Durham archaeologist, who visited the Greenbank site a few days after the discovery of the cemetery, had a number of relics in his possession including some iron bosses from shields. The shield was an indispensable weapon of defence in pre-gunpowder days. It consisted of a disc of wood, often covered with hard leather with a conical iron boss, riveted in the centre.

In March 1905, Mr. E. Wooler showed some objects – then owned by Mr. G. Hastwell – to the local Field Club. These comprised three leaf-shaped iron spear heads, a bronze cruciform brooch and an iron key. These articles were given to the Darlington Museum in 1922 and have recently been transferred on loan to the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, where they provide an interesting and valuable exhibition in the newly furnished Archaeological Room.

An inscription informs the visitor that they were taken from the Saxon cemetery near Greenbank, Darlington, and probably date from the sixth century A.D.

In Saxon times the chieftains and the landowners carried valuable swords, but the ordinary people used a spear. The sharpened metal head was socketed to a long wooden shaft, and the weapon was in constant use, both for the chase and on the battlefield. The shafts have all perished, but the metal heads, much corroded, still remain.

The key, and often the remains of a chatelaine, denote the grave of a housewife, and where two keys have been found in the same grave it may be evidence that the husband had two wives.

By R. SCARR

Anglo-Saxon-Relics-Dispersed-From-Darlington

Two Spears from Darlington

In 1974 M. J. Swanton published A Corpus of Pagan Anglo-Saxon Spear Types which included two of the three spear heads from Greenbank that were then in the Darlington Museum collection.

One, the longest, which measured 39.5 cm was classified as a type ‘C3’ spear:

C3: The largest of Anglo-Saxon leaf-shaped blades, most commonly measuring between 30 and 50 cms, present lengthier more slender profiles with the sockets taking up only something like a quarter or fifth of the length. This type has no identifiable pre-migration antecedent and seems to have developed only with the sixth century. Characteristically found with low-cone and sugar-loaf shield-bosses and objects decorated in Style II, the majority will probably have belonged to the seventh century. And this type also survives to form a familiar late Saxon type.

The other, the better preserved of the two shorter spear heads, which measured 31.4 cm in length (but was incomplete at the tip and the socket end) was classed as a type ‘E3’ spear:

E3: The largest of straight-sided angular spearheads have long, tapering blades taking between two thirds and three-quarters of the whole length, their angles close to the socket-junction. The sockets are invariably cleft up to a short solid neck. Most range from between 35 and 45 cms long, although some – especially in iron-rich areas like Kent – are very much longer. Well-dated examples are relatively rare, but as with its equivalent leaf-shaped form, the pattern seems to have been one of rapid development during the sixth century and established favour during the seventh; many are found with low-cone and sugar-loaf shield-bosses. The commonest of late pagan types, it seems strongly to have survived the abandonment of pagan funeral customs to become a characteristic late Saxon type. Scattered widely throughout the entire area of settlement, no type exhibits a broader geographical distribution – save that relatively few are found in the upper Thames.

The ‘E3’ type spear head was attributed to “Grave 2” and the longer ‘C3’ type spear head was attributed to “Grave 3” of the Greenbank burials. Both spear heads were listed as being held by “Darlington Museum”. Tantalisingly, this suggests that some kind of list attributing certain grave goods to specific graves may have been made back in 1876 when the burials were discovered (perhaps by J. T. Abbott?) and this list was held by the Tubwell Row museum in the early 1970s. If it did exist, where is that list now?

If we map ‘Grave 2’ and ‘Grave 3’ back onto what we know about the finds from 1876 then we can say that Grave 2 was the male grave which held the shorter spear head and one of the two shield-bosses which Patrick Foley disturbed on the morning of Friday 28^th January. Grave 3 must have been the one which Patrick Riley disturbed on Wednesday 6^th September which contained the longer spear head and also the seax without a handle. So ‘Grave 1’ must have been a female burial (perhaps together with a child, although the body of the child could equally have been in Grave 2 – two graves at Norton were those of adult males which also contained the remains of a child – page 24) which Patrick Foley also discovered on 28^th January 1876. As stated above, I think there may also have been another burial there, let’s call it ‘Grave 2a’, which was missed at the time due to a combination of bones disintegrating over time or being destroyed by plough damage (or both) and young Joseph Pallister stealing away with a skull.

Fascinatingly, Stephen J. Sherlock and Martin G. Welch note in their report on the early Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Norton that there appears to be a correlation between age at death and length of spearhead placed in the grave, with older males having the longest spear heads.

According to this, the Swanton type ‘E3’ spear measuring 314 mm found at Greenbank in Grave 2 would have been most likely to have belonged to an adult male aged 26-30, while the Swanton type ‘C3’ spear measuring 395 mm found in Grave 3 together with the seax would have been most likely to have belonged to an adult male aged 36-40.

Poster

The Centre for Local Studies at Crown Street Library in Darlington still holds a poster about the Greenbank finds that was on display in the Darlington Public Museum before it closed in 1998:

One of the major archaeological finds in Darlington was the unearthing of an extensive Anglo Saxon cemetery in January, 1876, whilst a local builder was excavating a drain between Dodds Street and Selbourne Terrace, Greenbank.

The burial contained six male, female and child’s skeletons all laid in the traditional pre-Christian manner with their feet to the east. At the head of each was a small earthenware food vessel and personal possessions including several bronze brooches, belt buckles, beads, an amber necklace, three iron spear heads, a pair of tweezers, an iron key and two shield bosses.

The exact period of the burial has never been established as the initial examination of the site was rather casual in approach but it is thought to be of the period between 500 and 700 A.D. when the Burgh of Darlington was fortified to the north, west and south by a ditch and bank and to the east by the River Skerne. It is feasible that the Greenbank discovery, situated only a few hundred yards outside the defensive bank, was part of the communal burial ground of the ancient town.

It is unfortunate that during the last century the Greenbank finds were dispersed amongst various private collectors. After changing hands several times, some items eventually found their way into the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The three spearheads, an iron key and one of the fine bronze brooches have remained in this museum and can be seen displayed here.

This is probably the ‘bronze celt’ identified by Roger Miket and Michael Pocock as being in Lot 463 of J. T. Abbott’s collection sold at Sotheby’s in 1888. There doesn’t appear to be any evidence that it did in fact come from the Greenbank site though.¹⁵

Ashmolean Museum, The British Museum & The Bowes Museum

The artefacts donated to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford by Sir Arthur Evans remain on display there to this day¹⁶ and the museum’s website has photographs of them, including some high resolution images.

Greenwell’s artefacts from Greenbank are still in the British Museum but none are currently on display.¹⁸

According to R. Scarr’s report, the artefacts that George Haswell’s widow lent to the Darlington Museum were loaned in the early 1960s to The Bowes Museum. It seems likely that on the closure of the Darlington Museum in 1998 they were permanently transferred there, but if so they now seem to be in storage as they are not currently on display.

Lincolnshire Connection

Roger Miket and Michael Pocock tentatively concluded in their paper that from the grave goods at the Greenbank site it appears there were a minimum of two male ‘warrior grave’ burials due to the two swords, two shields and the spears found (which now appear to number five – Wooler’s three, the one sold by Abbott in Lot 463 at Sotheby’s and Greenwell’s probable one). They also suggested that as the different types of brooches (square-headed, cruciform, small-long, and the now lost circular / annular) were all found in pairs this may indicate at least two and possibly more female burials (as Anglo-Saxon women wore brooches in pairs, pinned at the shoulders to secure their simple tubular outer dress called a ‘peplos’ to their linen under-tunic). They dated most of the grave goods to around AD 550-650, but believed that the small-long brooches could possibly be dated to earlier than this.

They pointed to a probable link between the Greenbank site at Darlington and the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Fonaby near Grimsby in north east Lincolnshire, discovered in 1956, based on the strong resemblance between the highly decorated square-headed brooches found at both sites. Below is an image and a drawing of the brooch from Fonaby. It came from Grave 38 at the site and it was in the grave of a woman.¹⁹

The foot-plates of both brooches strongly resemble each other as they feature an anthropomorphic mask with a tightly curled moustache flanked by animals.²⁰ 

A close up of the brooch from Darlington (below) shows that on either side of this face with its curled moustache there appears to be what looks like a wolf – its front paw and the curl of the moustache combined. Could this perhaps be a representation of Woden and his wolves Geri and Freki? The hind leg of each wolf is combined with the head of a bird – could these be Woden’s ravens Huginn and Muninn?²¹

Dodds Street Demolition

In 1986 all of the (apparently quite miserable) houses on the north side of Dodds Street (including the unusual ‘back and front’ terraced houses²²) were demolished and replaced with modern warden controlled flats for the elderly.

Stephen J. Sherlock and Martin G. Welch (rather optimistically) suggested on page 3 of their 1992 report on the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Norton that the small number of graves found at Greenbank might be only part of a far more substantial cemetery of a similar size to the one at Norton, where a total of 117 inhumations and 3 cremation burials were discovered, but “unfortunately recent redevelopment in an area adjacent to the Greenbank site produced no further burials or artefacts.”

The original terraced houses on the southern side of Dodds Street are still there and can be seen on Google Street View:

A Summary of the Greenbank Finds

Sherlock and Welch in their review of previous discoveries of Anglo-Saxon burials in north-east England summed up the number of graves and the grave finds at the Greenbank site, as accepted by the ‘archaeological establishment’ in 1992:

The 1876 finds from Greenbank, Darlington (Co. Durham) represent a minimum of six well-furnished inhumation graves … The weapons consisted of two swords, two shield bosses and three or four spearheads; two Group IVa and two Class C2 cruciform brooches, two cross-potent small-long brooches and two circular, presumably annular brooches, and beads; together with a buckle, bronze tweezers, bronze bodkins, an ornamented chatelaine, an iron key, two iron bands, what might have been a spindle whorl, and three pottery vessels.

An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Norton, Cleveland, Page 3

But as I’ve outlined above, I think there might have been more than six bodies buried there.

How Many Bodies Might There Have Been and What Grave Goods Did They Have?

Although Roger Miket and Michael Pocock in their 1976 paper An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Greenbank, Darlington quite rightly concluded that “it is now impossible to reconstitute the original grave groups associated with the six skeletons (including a child’s)”, perhaps we can now say something slightly more than just “a minimum of two male burials” and “a minimum of two females.” Thanks to The British Newspaper Archive and its search facility, I have been able to fairly quickly locate some local newspaper reports that would probably have taken Miket and Pocock days, if not weeks, of scrolling through microfiche to have discovered. We also have the numbering of the first three Greenbank graves in M. J. Swanton’s 1974 book A Corpus of Pagan Anglo-Saxon Spear Types, which does seem to map on to what we now know about them being those of a female and a male close to each other and then the third one being that of a male (including a seax). If some kind of list attributing certain grave goods to specific graves did exist and was held by the museum at Darlington (and it seems it did, even if it was just concerning the spear heads, otherwise how could Swanton have known which spear head came from which grave?) then it is puzzling that Miket and Pocock don’t refer to it, especially as they acknowledge Swanton for contributing to their paper by discussing in more detail the two Greenbank spear heads which he mentioned in his earlier book.

So although it can only be conjecture at worst and an educated guess at best, here is my suggested summary – based on an assumption that what Wooler claimed was in fact correct and that his artifacts (the three spear heads and one cruciform brooch) were also found in 1876-7 along with J. T. Abbott’s (see Footnote 14):

Grave 1: Adult female. Discovered 28^th January 1876. This grave may also have contained the body of the child. We know that the grave contained “bronze rings”, an iron key and a bronze brooch. Two of the bronze rings were probably annular brooches. The chatelaine may have also been some of the “bronze rings” found in this grave, from which the iron key might have hung. The bronze bodkin and bronze tweezers may also have hung from this. Greenwell stated that the bronze brooch may have been the man’s but “might equally have accompanied the woman.” We now know that brooches are usually found in adult female Anglo-Saxon graves and they seem to be an indication of a woman’s married status. J. T. Abbott’s assumption in his letter that the larger brooches were “evidently intended for the soldier’s belts” does, I think, indicate the patriarchal attitude of the time and so if the brooch was considered by Greenwell as equally possible to be the man’s as the woman’s it would indicate that this woman was wearing one of the larger, cruciform or square-headed, brooches rather than one of the smaller, and to middle-class Victorian eyes more ‘feminine’, small-long brooches. As this appears to be quite a wealthy and fairly high status grave the “large necklace, composed of amber, glass and stone beads” may have come from here as well.

Grave 2: Adult male. Discovered 28^th January 1876. Possibly aged aged 26-30 due to length of accompanying spear head. The body of the child could have been in this grave instead of grave 1 – Sam Lucy in The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial Rights in Early England, page 82, gives three examples of a child buried with an adult male in an early Anglo-Saxon context. Grave 2 contained a Swanton ‘E3’ type spear head and a shield boss. Judging by the report of its discovery in The Northern Echo, the body in grave 2 seems to have been located very close to the body in grave 1 – perhaps they were side-by-side or maybe even one was on top of or below the other. Possibly this is a close family group of wife, husband and child. As it contained a shield, this grave would seem to be the best candidate for containing the other ‘sword’, (probably another seax), although if a sword or a seax had been found in this grave it is strange that Canon Greenwell’s letter does not mention it (but maybe Greenwell was not aware at the time of writing). Could this grave also have contained the other ‘E3’ type spear head (the smaller one measuring 27.6 cm) not listed by Swanton in his book? In Miket and Pocock’s paper, Swanton writes that it could:

If there were only two adult male burials, it is probable that two spearheads came from one grave. In such cases the spearheads commonly are of the same size, although by no means always of the same or similar types.

Micket and Pocock, page 72

As the two seem to match, this would make sense. Two spears are rarely found in the same grave (in only 1.1% of weapon burials in Heinrich Härke‘s sample of forty-seven 5^th-7^th/8^th century Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in his paper Warrior Graves? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite). The much larger contemporary Anglo-Saxon cemetery nearby at Norton did not contain any examples, but four graves from another nearby contemporary early Anglo-Saxon cemetery at West Heslerton near Pickering in North Yorkshire each contained two spears (West Heslerton Volume 1, page 123). If this grave did contain a seax, a shield and two spears it would have been quite a high-status one, matching only 0.4% of Härke’s sample.

(Conjectured Grave 2a: Adult female? Skull taken by Joseph Pallister on the evening of 28^th January 1876 and not discovered until Saturday 22^nd August 1925. Perhaps one of the “bronze rings” was an annular brooch from this burial? If this grave existed then it was located very close, perhaps adjacent to, graves 1 and 2).

Grave 3: Adult male. Discovered 6^th September 1876. Possibly aged aged 36-40 due to length of accompanying spear head. The grave contained a Swanton ‘C3’ type spear head and a ‘dirk’, probably a seax. Seaxes are rare in graves (in only 1.1% of weapon burials in Heinrich Härke‘s sample of forty-seven 5th – 7th / 8th century Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in his paper Warrior Graves? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite). Only one seax was found at the much larger cemetery at Norton and that grave also contained a shield boss. I think it is likely that grave 3 at Greenbank would also have contained a shield boss as it contained a seax and was quite a high-status burial. It appears Canon Greenwell may have returned to Greenbank in September 1876 to inspect this find and add this second shield boss to his collection. We don’t have any details about the now lost spear head that was sold by J. T. Abbott in Lot 463 at Sotheby’s but could this have been another Swanton ‘C3’ type spear head? If Grave 2 contained two spear heads then perhaps Grave 3 also did.

Grave 4: Adult female. Discovered January 1877. Urn probably containing some kind of food or drink offering (as it is quite tall and has a small opening it might have contained beer) found at the head. The author of the newspaper report of the discovery (probably J. T. Abbott) stated that a “ladies’ bronze brooch” was found in this grave. As outlined above, the fact that it was viewed to be a “ladies’” brooch would indicate that it was probably one of the two ‘cross-potent’ small-long brooches discovered at Greenbank. Sam Lucy in The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial Rights in Early England, page 31, writes that small-long brooches were often worn in pairs at the shoulders so perhaps the other one was found later in the location of this grave. This grave may have also contained the key which was in the possession of George Hastwell and then Edward Wooler. J. T. Abbott’s letter only mentioned one ‘iron key’ which Canon Greenwell referred to in his letter dated 3^rd February 1876 stating: “She had been buried with the house key (at least the fragmentary piece of iron remaining seems to represent that article).” But the key pictured in The Yorkshire Gazette in April 1905 looks far better preserved than a “fragmentary piece of iron”. Miket and Pocock believed that the key was Roman. It’s not unusual for Roman keys to be found in pagan Anglo-Saxon graves dating between AD 400 and 700 (20 Roman keys were recorded from 14 graves and 9 cemeteries in this study, see pages 77-80). This key might have come from Grave 1 and so the woman in that grave might have matched Greenwell’s recollection in his letter of an Anglo-Saxon woman who had had two husbands, but I’m going to assume that this Roman key was discovered with this second female burial and that both women possessed this symbol of high female status.

Grave 5: Sex unknown. Discovered January 1877. Urn probably containing some kind of food or drink offering (as it is quite tall and has a small opening it might have contained beer) found at the head. No other grave goods were reported except perhaps a “nondescript piece of bronze which most probably has been a portion of ancient armour”. Due to the vagueness of the report this might have been in grave 4 but seeing as it was considered to be armour this would suggest it was in a separate grave to the brooch, which at the time was (correctly) perceived to be a women’s brooch. It is possible this “nondescript piece of bronze” might be the “iron object with substantial traces of wood at one end, possibly part of spear-head” that is in the British Museum – number OA.4936). If so then this would indicate that it was a male grave (although spears have been known to be found in female Anglo-Saxon graves – see Sam Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial Rights in Early England, page 89). The skeleton in Grave 4 also had an urn at the head and due to the presence of a brooch appears to be female. There was another burial containing an urn, which was destroyed. I was wondering if this was in Grave 1 and whether in this community urns containing food or drink were only placed with adult female skeletons buried in a normal way, so enabling a continuation of their nurturing role in the otherworld. In three other regional cemeteries, Norton, West Heslerton and Sewerby, graves containing urns (when the skeleton could be identified) were placed mainly with children or females. There were only two instances of an urn a male grave – one at West Heslerton and one at Sewerby. However in another cemetery further south in Great Chesterford in Essex the graves of 10 men, 7 women, 3 juveniles and 7 infants contained urns (page 21). On balance, the third urn is more likely to have been included in Grave 1 with the female burial or with the body of the child, who could have been buried either in Grave 1 or Grave 2, but statistically more likely to have been with the female in Grave 1. Going back to the “nondescript piece of bronze which most probably has been a portion of ancient armour”, the two broken bronze brooches found at Greenbank are clearly brooches, so I am going to opt for this being the badly corroded iron spearhead and therefore this probably being a male grave, perhaps another close family group of husband and wife buried next to each other. However, this is pretty much a guess and less secure than the other graves.

So this is two adult females, two adult males, one child, one sex unknown (very tentatively suggested adult male) and one conjectured burial (suggested adult female).

In terms of brooches, there still remain three cruciform / square-headed brooches. As the two cruciform brooches and the two square-headed brooches found at Greenbank match fairly closely, the woman in Grave 1 might have had a matching pair. Large brooches though were usually worn singly to secure cloaks and two cruciform or two square-headed brooches are rarely found together in the same grave (only one grave from Norton [grave 61] and two graves from West Heslerton [grave 78 & grave 95] contained a pair of cruciform or square-headed brooches) but this is possible. The woman in Grave 4 may have had one of the cruciform or square-headed brooches to fasten a cloak together with her pair of small-long brooches. That would leave one cruciform / square-headed brooch ‘left over’ (although if the adult in grave 5 was female it might have come from there), plus the chalk talisman and some iron bands. Could these be connected with my suggested ‘Grave 2a’? I will come back to this in part 2.

Deornoth’s Grave?

So who might the Anglo-Saxon people in the graves found where Dodds Street now is actually be? The first written name we have for Darlington is ‘Dearthingtun’ (Darlington council’s website has it as Deathington but this seems to be incorrect and has the ‘r’ missed out), recorded around AD1003 when Styr Ulfsson of York granted the land to the community of St. Cuthbert, the monks who had carried Cuthbert’s coffin around the north east before its final resting place at Durham, and had supposedly passed through Darlington on their journey.

One suggestion for the original meaning of the name Dearthington was ‘the settlement of Deornoth’s people’ – ‘Deornoth-ing-tun’ (‘ing’ meaning folk, family or tribe, and ‘tun’ meaning enclosed farmstead or village).

We know that ‘Deor’ was a man’s name in the 10th century due to the Anglo-Saxon poem Deor from The Exeter Book, where a bard of that name laments that he has lost his position and lands as he is no longer in his Lord’s favour and has been replaced by another.

Deor can mean “brave, bold” but also “grievous, ferocious.” As a noun it means “wild beast.”

Craig Williamson, The Complete Old English Poems, page 521

Deer can be traced back to the Old English word deor, but the word’s use in Old English was somewhat different than deer’s is today. To the Anglo-Saxons, a deor was not necessarily the gentle, forest creature signified by the modern deer, but the word could be used for any undomesticated, four-legged animal, including fabulous beasts of legend. The word carried a connotation of wildness and ferocity …

Dave Wilton, Wordorigins.org

‘Noth’ means courage or daring.

In his 2008 Darlington & Stockton Times article Unearthing the beastly past of Darlington, historian Simon Young wrote:

And what do we know about Deornoth?

Unfortunately, absolutely nothing. No records have made it down to us, no tomb survives.

But the word Deornoth does tell us something about the times that he lived in, for as with almost all early English names Deornoth is really two words jammed together.

Deor meant ‘beast’ – our word deer comes from here. Noth, on the other hand, meant ‘boldness’.

So Deornoth was Beast-boldness.

And this gives us an insight into the militarised tribal society in which Beast Boldness was born: for this was a time when a mother would be proud to call her son a bold beast, thinking of his future battles. And when did Beast Boldness live?

Well, the Settlement Named for Beast Boldness was first recorded in the eleventh century, but it may have been five hundred years old by then.

So Deornoth translates as he who is as brave, ferocious and courageous as a wild beast. It certainly creates an image. You really, really would not want to get on the wrong side of him, or his family.

Simon Young states that no tomb of Deornoth survives. But what if it did – and the bodies found in 1876 and early 1877 were those of Deornoth and his kin? We can never prove this of course, it’s just a romantic notion – but the high status, prestigious grave goods of swords and beautifully decorated bronze brooches must have belonged to a powerful and successful warrior and his family – who may possibly have been Deornoth, the founder of Darlington.

We don’t know whether the graves at Greenbank were covered by one or several small burial mounds or whether they were marked in some other way. R. Scarr writing in The Darlington & Stockton Times on 20th October 1962 was of the opinion that there was one barrow covering all of the graves:

The series of graves no doubt formed part of a large “barrow” and the high mound of earth raised over the graves as a memorial of the departed gradually disappeared during succeeding centuries of agricultural and forestry activity.

There is no tumulus marked on the OS map circa 1860 and there is no local story or legend of anything being in that location but it seems likely that they would have had some kind of marker.

The burials were discovered at a spot just slightly below the top of a small hill, facing east and overlooking the valley of the river Skerne. Being slightly below the top of the hill wasn’t a mistake when those who might have been Deornoth’s people dug the graves for their dead kin. This is because this location is on what is called a ‘false crest’ or a ‘military crest’ – that spot can be seen from the bottom of the hill and looks like it is the top of the hill, even though it isn’t. The very top of the hill that Dodds Street goes up can’t actually be seen from the bottom – try standing on Easson Road and looking up and you will see what I mean.

The graves were situated to be seen by people in the Skerne valley below, and due to the lie of the land could be better seen from Northgate than they could from Bondgate. Perhaps they were placed to be seen by people moving north-south above the marshy plain of the river Skerne – where Northgate now is – and perhaps Northgate lies near or along an ancient routeway. It might be that the first Anglo-Saxon settlement of Darlington was somewhere in this area. So whether the graves were marked by a large barrow, a series of smaller barrows, by wooden posts or by some other means, they were placed to remind those passing by at the bottom of the hill that this land belonged to the descendants of Deornoth, and they had better not forget it.

But whoever the people buried at Dodds Street were they walked this land around 400 years before Styr Ulfsson of York, who probably never even set foot here. It is these people who are amongst the first we know of to have lived in the place we now know as Darlington.

This first part of the article is where we have covered all of the sources we have found and made some suggestions based on what seem to be the facts, or as near as it has been possible to get to them. In part 2 we are going to focus on a puzzling discovery from the site and explore a few wilder theories …

Part 2 – Darlington’s Dangerous Dead? (Coming soon!)

Footnotes:

¹ Haxby Dougill (1836-1907) was the builder who developed the first phase of the Greenbank estate from 1875 to 1881. He also farmed at Hurworth Moor outside Darlington and built the Imperial Hotel on the corner of Grange Road and Blackwellgate in Darlington (which was later owned by Edward Wooler and is where Manjaros restaurant now is). His will is available to view online and shows that he owned houses number 14 and 20 Greenbank Road North (now renumbered to 158 and 164 Greenbank Road) and a shop at number 112 Greenbank Road North (now 254 Greenbank Road right at the top on the corner of Greenbank Road and Widdowfield Street – which explains the outline of an advertising hording on the gable end of the house). His gravestone can be found in West Cemetery in Darlington. For information about the development of the Greenbank estate The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Durham Volume IV Darlington page 45 is probably the most comprehensive account available. This is not yet available online but there is a copy in the Centre for Local Studies in the Crown Street Library in Darlington, and also one in the Learning Resources Centre at Darlington College (if I haven’t got it on my desk!). There are some errors in it though, as it states that Greenbank villa, after which the estate was named, was demolished in 1875 – it clearly wasn’t as The Darlington and Richmond Herald on Saturday June 23rd 1877 on page 8 published a long and effusive article about the new Darlington Liberal Club which was to have its new home at “the magnificent building at Greenbank.” The article gave a highly detailed and fascinating account of the layout and decoration of the villa.

² While researching this article I discovered this antique bookplate on eBay showing the crest of a J. T. Abbott of Abbeville, Darlington, dated 1860:

Intrigued as to whether it might be the J. T. Abbott from this story, I looked up ‘Abbeville’ (a house name I didn’t recognise) and found this photograph from the Darlington Centre for Local Studies at Crown Street Library:

Abbeville was one of the ‘lost’ houses on the southern side and western end of Victoria Road, demolished in the early 1970s to make way for the dual carriageway. It’s location was roughly where the exit road from Sainsbury’s now is.

I also found a record for a ‘John Thomas Abbott’ in the West Cemetery Headstone’s Database, who died on 3rd September 1889 aged 65. I went to have a look and here is his headstone:

The crest on the headstone with its three pears and Abbott family motto of Age Officium Tuum (which apparently means ‘Act Your Office’, i.e. act in accordance with your duty or responsibility) matches the one on the bookplate, so we have found the final resting place of our J. T. Abbott.

³ Although the first patent for the telephone was granted to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, telephones were not common even in affluent homes in Britain until the 1930s. Despite this, it is possible that Canon Greenwell could have heard about the discovery quite rapidly via telegram, as by 1864 there was a telegraph office on the ground floor at what is now Darlington’s North Road railway station. Greenwell could have been contacted by telegram (maybe by J. T. Abbott?) by around lunchtime on the Friday. Greenwell could then have taken a North Eastern Railway train from Durham railway station and arrived at Darlington Bank Top railway station by mid-afternoon and so have arrived at the Greenbank site before it got dark. It seems likely that Greenwell would have visited on the Friday afternoon, as with it being a building site work would almost certainly have commenced again on the Saturday morning and it probably would have been his only opportunity.

⁴ Greenwell obtained both shield bosses that were found at Greenbank for his own collection (see the section on the Victoria History of County Durham and also Footnote 18). I can’t help thinking that he only managed to secure the first one because J. T. Abbott didn’t know what it was and thought that it was some kind of lid. Abbott’s mistake can be understood from this image of a male burial with a shield boss from the nearby Norton Anglo-Saxon cemetery and this early Anglo-Saxon shield boss found in Oxford which has been recreated by the Ashmolean Museum.

⁵ The Greenbank site at Darlington was superseded as the richest Anglo-Saxon burial site north of the river Tees by the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Norton which was discovered in 1982. Another local site of interest (although not north of the Tees) is the Street House Anglo-Saxon cemetery discovered in 2005. Stephen J. Sherlock in his 2018 paper ‘Space and Place: Identifying the Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries in the Tees Valley, North-East England’ gives a good over-view of the region.

⁶ The post-nominal letters ‘F.S.A.’ stand for Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. But despite searching the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London from the start of its publication in April 1843 until 20^th June 1889, less than three months before Abbott died, (Vol. I April 1843-April 1849 & Vol. II April 1849-April 1853, Vol. III April 1853-June 1856, Vol. IV November 1856-June 1859, Second Series Vol. I November 1859-June 1861, Second Series Vol. II November 1861-June 1864, Second Series Vol. III November 1864-June 1867, Second Series Vol. IV November 1867-June 1870, Second Series Vol. V November 1870-April 1873, Second Series Vol. VI April 1873-April 1876, Second Series Vol. VII April 1876-December 1878, Second Series Vol. VIII January 1879-June 1881, Second Series Vol. IX November 1881-June 1883, Second Series Vol. X November 1883-July 1885, Second Series Vol. XI November 1885-June 1887 & Second Series Vol. XII November 1887-June 1889) I can find no record of Abbott having been elected a Fellow of that society. Abbott did become a member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne on 7^th May 1856 and was also was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on 13^th February 1871. As a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland he was entitled to use the post-nominal letters ‘F.S.A. Scot’ after his name, so I did consider that the journalist (probably from The Northern Echo) simply forgot to add the ‘Scot’ part in this report. However, Volume 1 of the ‘Franks Bequest’ catalogue of a large collection of British and American bookplates bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks in 1897 contains details of several of J. T. Abbott’s bookplates. An armorial, item no. 24 in the catalogue, is listed as: “Abbott, J. T., F.S.A. Darlington” so Abbott was at one time using the letters F.S.A. deliberately minus the ‘Scot’ in order to give the impression he was actually a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Another armorial in the catalogue, no. 27, is listed as: “Abbott, J. T., F.S.A. of N.C.” presumably meaning ‘Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle’. However the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne has only ever had ‘members’, not ‘Fellows’. It’s interesting to note that J. T. Abbott was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland just over a year after a Francis Abbott Esq. of 25 Moray Place, Edinburgh was elected one of the three Vice-Presidents of the society on 30th November 1869. The Yorkshire Bibliographer Volume 1 published in 1888 gave a short biography of J. T. Abbott which only gives ‘F.S.A. Scot’ and not ‘F.S.A.’ as Abbott’s post-nominal letters (although by that date he had let his Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which had cost him a guinea per year, lapse for the previous nine years – the last entry for him in the Proceedings of the Society is on 30th November 1878 when he is recorded as living at Chelsworth House, Darlington, but I can find no information on where that house is or was). The list of Abbott’s publications indicates that his interests were mainly concerned with genealogy, especially that of the Abbott family, and especially links to Bishop George Abbott, whose will he published and wrote a preface for in 1869. There were no obvious connections to Scotland or Scottish history, required for Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in any of J. T. Abbott’s publications as far as I can see. It appears that an influential relative (possibly a cousin) may have sponsored him and ensured his election as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Abbott seems to have had no such connection with the Society of Antiquaries of London, although he appears to have wanted to give people the impression that it was this society of which he was a Fellow. As an aside (of an aside!) The Yorkshire Bibliographer also gives the name of J. T. Abbott’s father – Thomas Eastoe Abbott, who was apparently a noted poet in Darlington. William Hylton Longstaffe gives Thomas Eastoe Abbott significant praise in his book The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Darlington, in the Bishoprick and compares some of his poetry to that of Wordsworth. Three of his poems – Peace, The Triumph of Christianity, and The Soldier’s Friend are available on Google Books for anyone who might wish to evaluate the comparison.

⁷ These were nine houses plus a stable with a coach house built in 1876-77 (plans here) and then numbers 23-47 built in 1877-1878 (plans here) so 21 houses in total. I did wonder if the name ‘Dodds Street’ might be some oblique reference to the bodies discovered there, perhaps in a similar way as Dod Lane in Glastonbury is thought to mean ‘Dead Man’s Lane’. However, it seems that although it is recorded on the 1892 map as “Dodd’s Street”, much more prosaically the street is named after Messrs Dodds & Co, Solicitors, of Finkle Street in Stockton who were involved in handling the sale of the Greenbank Estate land for housing development. I do wonder though if whoever was in charge of naming the streets chose that particular one to be ‘Dodds Street’ due to the closeness between the words ‘Dodd’ and ‘Dead’.

⁸ The paper is freely available to download on the ADS – Archeology Data Service – website and also on Roger Miket’s page on Academia.edu. Please don’t pay the extortionate amount of £41.00 on the Taylor & Francis site to read it! The version on the ADS and on Academia.edu are both the same and miss out Plate VII, Plate VIII and Plate IX which the paper refers to and are in the original paper edition of Medieval Archaeology Volume 20. I have obtained a copy of this and scanned it, and it can be accessed here. 

⁹ William Alexander Wooler (1831-1891) was a friend of Charles Darwin and Wooler’s first edition copy of Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was sold at Sotheby’s in 2005. Four letters by Wooler to Darwin dating from between February 1861 and December 1868 are recorded in the Darwin Correspondence Online Database. These all discuss the behaviour of various animals and plants. Chris Lloyd in The Northern Echo notes in one of his articles that: “His obituary in The Northern Echo also contained this fantastic sentence: “Mr. Wooler’s life was stormy in many respects and his public work was married by peculiarities of temperament and character which rendered co-operation with him difficult and often embittered controversy.” In another of his articles, Chris Lloyd also notes that William Wooler “formed the Darlington Conservative Association in 1879 and then the North Star newspaper in 1883 to act as a counterbalance to the horrible Liberalism of The Northern Echo 100 yards away.” The precursor to the North Star was The North Eastern Independent. Wooler seems to have been primarily concerned with using his newspapers as vehicles for his political agenda rather than anything else. J. T. Abbott signing his letter as “J. T. A.” was not in fact unusual as many of the letters printed in The North Eastern Independent‘s letters page were either completely anonymous or just had the initials of the author at the end. It seems that being a known Conservative in Darlington while the Pease family still held sway could be bad for business. J. T. Abbott, meanwhile, seemed perfectly capable of writing fully coherent letters even a year before his death, such as this one published in July 1888 in Notes and Queries: A Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, Etc.

¹⁰ In their paper, Miket and Pocock state that Dr Smith-Woodward at the British Museum of Natural History produced a report on the skulls. This would have been impossible as Arthur Smith-Woodward was born in May 1864 and in 1876 would have been 12 years old. It must in fact have been Henry Woodward, who was at the time the assistant curator of the Geology Department at the Natural History Museum. It’s entirely possible that the three skulls are still there, mis-placed somewhere in a storeroom. If Miket and Pocock were looking for a report on the skulls by Arthur Smith-Woodward then it is no surprise that they did not find one. Henry Woodward’s report may still be extant. I would agree with Miket and Pocock that Abbott was probably influenced by Canon Greenwell to send the skulls for analysis, but this may not have been in the supportive and collaborative way that they probably meant. Greenwell’s letter to The Northern Echo correcting Abbott’s initial dating of the three skeletons as being from a time prior to Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain (which, given the artefacts he was shown, was not in fact a bad guess) would have been a public humiliation for Abbott, who was well-known in the small town of Darlington as an antiquarian and a supposed authority on relics. Abbott may have sent the skulls away in the knowledge that some Anglo-Saxon burial sites re-used earlier, prehistoric, earthworks in the hope of being vindicated that at least one of them was declared to be from the Iron Age or the Bronze Age. His mention in his letter to The North Eastern Independent newspaper that “one [of the skulls] may have belonged to an earlier Briton” may have been an attempt at some kind of public vindication.

¹¹ Miket and Pocock state that the sale took place eleven years before J. T. Abbott’s death, which is another error. Abbott died on 3rd September 1889 aged 65 and this can clearly be made out from his headstone in West Cemetery in Darlington.

¹² George Hastwell is recorded on Ancestry as born in 1855. He joined his father Hutchinson Hastwell’s successful tailoring business in Darlington in the 1880s. H. Hastwell & Son’s shop was at 13 Northgate (next door to what had been the Stockton and Darlington Railway offices and was by then the North Eastern Railway offices at number 17 on the corner of Northgate and Union Street – now demolished and where Boots is located) before moving across the road to 14 Northgate around the turn of the century.

On Saturday 1^st July 1876 The Darlington & Richmond Herald reported that Hastwell entered a mile walking race at Thirsk cricket ground in an attempt to win the prize money of £3 and 8 shillings but dropped out on the fourth lap as the pace was too much for him. In July 1891 the Northern Weekly Gazette reported that he was charged with employing a boy under age without a labour certificate and was fined 5 shillings plus costs. Despite this minor setback, Hastwell became a respected member of the community in Darlington. By February 1899 he was a member of the Freemasons (The Northern Echo Wednesday February 15^th 1899 – Funeral of Mr. C. J. Walton, page 4) and The Northern Echo on Friday February 23^rd 1900 (page 4) records how he was one of 200 attendees alongside the great and the good of Darlington at a prestigious army veteran’s dinner at Larchfield Street Drill Hall where the assembled company was treated to a novel banquet cooked in a full regimental field kitchen with portable roasting ovens and a ‘kettle trench’ set up in the building especially for the purpose. There is no doubt that Hastwell would have known Edward Wooler socially and this was almost certainly how Wooler got to know about the existence of the cruciform brooch, three spear heads and the key from the Greenbank finds. If Hastwell was born in 1855 he would have been old enough to have possessed the artefacts from the date when they were discovered in 1876 or 1877 as he would have been 21 or 22 at the time. If they had come into Hastwell’s possession later on then why a tailor with no apparent interest in antiquarian relics would have these objects is anyone’s guess – perhaps part payment towards a suit?

¹³ Probably the most interesting thing I discovered about Edward Wooler is that his ghost supposedly haunts the Yorkshire Museum in York. In his will, Wooler left a large part of his library “numbering upwards of 1,600 volumes of work relating to the antiquities and archaeology of Yorkshire, Roman archaeology, and numerous pamphlets, etc.” to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, whose library was in the The Yorkshire Museum in York (where the gift shop is now located). So large was the “Wooler Collection” that it “necessitated a rearrangement of a great part of the library” and “three new store book-cases” had to be “added for the reception of this important and valuable donation.” (Report of the Museum Committee For The Year 1927, page 25).

Peter Hogarth, honorary librarian and archivist of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, takes up the story – which goes on for six pages – so don’t forget to click on the ‘next page’ button at the bottom left!

Ghost-in-the-Library-by-Peter-Hogarth

Wooler’s copy of Antiquities and Curiosities of the Church edited by William Andrews was eventually moved next door to York Library in Library Square, just off Museum Street. Contrary to some reports, it is not lost but is still there to this day. There are two copies of the book in the library, which has caused some confusion in the past. One (on the right) is in quite good condition. The other (on the left) has been clearly well used, is a bit tatty and has some loose pages.

Someone has, at some point, written the following in the book on the right:

DO NOT WITHDRAW

This book was bequeathed to the Yorkshire Museum by Alderman Edward Wooler of Darlington who once lived in Harewood House. This book is associated with the Yorks. Museum Ghost.

(Wooler once owned Harewood House in Darlington, not Harewood House near Leeds. His childhood home was number 6 Harewood Hill, but as far I know he never lived in nearby Harewood House, he occupied Danesmoor most of his adult life – and if he had had a grave (he campaigned vigorously for the introduction of cremation in Darlington) Wooler would probably be spinning in it if he knew that one day Danesmoor would become a nursery; Darlington antiquarian bookseller Jeremiah Volkes has informed me that, ironically for someone who at one point was on the Education Committee of Darlington Council (or ‘Corporation’ as it was back then), Wooler was well-known in the town for disliking children.

Someone has then quite vigorously crossed this out in black pen and written THIS IS ANOTHER COPY. They were right.

It is the slightly tatty book on the left that was Wooler’s. In what looks like the same handwriting as the person who crossed out the incorrect information in the other book, is written “THE HAUNTED BOOK”.

But the creepiest part is when you turn the page. In his story, Peter Hogarth noted that when Wooler’s ghost was first encountered by the caretaker George Jonas in September 1953 he was muttering “I must find it; I must find it.” and that Wooler was “much in the habit of using his books as an informal filing system for letters, notes, and other memorabilia. Many of these items still remain in situ, although none, alas, within the pages of Andrews’ Curiosities”. What can clearly be seen on the title page is the outline of something, perhaps a photograph, that had been kept between the pages of the book for so long that the paper surrounding it is yellowed, but the space it occupied remains white – something that Edward Wooler’s ghost was desperately searching for …

¹⁴ Joseph Pallister must have done some digging when he went over to the site, perhaps even taking a shovel with him, as The Northern Echo report states that: “During the day, a large number of persons, local antiquarians, visited the spot where the remains were found” – so if another skull had been apparent it would have been spotted then. It’s also likely that Joseph did not go alone. I did wonder if perhaps Joseph Pallister and George Hastwell were schoolfriends and went there together that evening – Pallister getting the skull and Hastwell taking the cruciform brooch, spear heads and key. But, as noted above in Footnote 12, Hastwell is recorded on Ancestry.com as being born in 1855 so he would have been 21 or 22 at the time. Also the fact that J. T. Abbott was aware of “several spearheads” in his letter and that the three spear heads apparently came from at least two separate graves found at two different times – Grave 2 found in January 1876 and Grave 3 found in September 1876 – would indicate that Hastwell’s possession was legitimate. Wooler in his article in The North Star on Wednesday March 22^nd 1905 says that the cruciform brooch, spear heads and key were “found on Greenbank some years ago by Mr Haxby Dougill”. Dougill was main building contractor for much of the Greenbank work but it is doubtful whether he found the artefacts personally. Perhaps they came into Dougill’s possession from an employee working on the Greenbank site before being passed on to George Hastwell later on? Haxby Dougill built 41 houses on the north side of Dodds Street between 1878 and 1893. Could the construction of some of these houses be where Hastwell’s artefacts came from? If the three spear heads and the cruciform brooch were found later than 1876 during the building of the houses this would mean that Dougill may have built on up to four more graves than the six or possibly seven which were initially discovered in 1876-77. Could Wooler’s vague comment at the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne meeting on 29^th March 1905 about more human remains being “found there [Greenbank] a short time ago” relate to more bodies being discovered by Dougill’s workmen when they were building the houses? It would not be surprising if more bodies had been discovered and if it was as late as 1893 this would make Wooler’s comment about it being “a short time ago” make more sense. Perhaps Wooler was correct when he said there were a total of twelve graves? I cannot find anything in the local press at the time about any more bodies being found though.

¹⁵ The presence of a “bronze celt”, probably this Bronze Age palstave, amongst the items in Lot 463 of J. T. Abbott’s Sotheby’s sale of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities found at Greenbank, Darlington in 1876 could indicate that the Greenbank Anglo-Saxon burials may have been incorporated into an earlier, prehistoric, burial mound. Around a quarter of all Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are associated with ancient monuments and the most common of these are Bronze Age round barrows (Sam Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial Rights in Early England, page 124). Like many Bronze Age barrows, the Greenbank burials were located on a false crest so any mound or grave marker could easily be seen by people moving through the Skerne Valley below. If this axe head did come from the Greenbank site its puzzling why Abbott did not list it amongst the finds in his February 1879 letter to The North Eastern Independent newspaper. This would surely have backed up his claim that one of the skulls “may have belonged to an earlier Briton”. The fact that it was not mentioned does suggest it didn’t come from Greenbank but was probably an item in Abbott’s eclectic collection obtained from elsewhere, which got mixed up with the Greenbank artifacts.

¹⁶ The topic of the Anglo-Saxon burials at Greenbank has been brought up on a few occasions in a Facebook group concerned with Darlington’s history. One or two people have made comments regarding the artefacts being “stolen” from the town and “whisked off” down south. To be clear, Sir John Evans acquired the Greenbank artefacts that are now in the Ashmolean Museum from a company that dealt in coins, gems and antiquities called Rollin & Feuardent (numbers 3, 8 & 9 in the list), which bought them completely legitimately from Sotheby’s auction house. In addition, the urn from Greenbank in the Ashmolean Museum was bought from William Talbot Ready (number 75 in the list), who again purchased it completely legitimately from Sotheby’s. Sir John Evans son, Sir Arthur Evans, inherited his father’s extensive collection of antiquities after his death and could have sold it at auction for a considerable sum of money but instead chose to donate much of it to the Ashmolean Museum. Because of this generosity it is still possible to see Darlington’s Greenbank Anglo-Saxon antiquities in an English museum today. If anyone could be said to have ‘stolen’ the Greenbank artefacts it is J. T. Abbott, a man who although not born in Darlington had his business there and made the town his home for many years. Despite fully understanding the artefacts’ importance in the history of Darlington, writing that they were “a very great addition to our local history” in The North Eastern Independent newspaper in 1879, Abbott chose to sell them nine years later to the highest bidder. (He made £15 and 10 shillings – about £1,736 in today’s prices according to the Bank of England inflation calculator). Although Darlington wasn’t to have a museum of its own for another 32 years after his death in 1889, Abbott (who appears to have been a fairly wealthy man) could have chosen to donate the Greenbank artefacts to the Black Gate Museum in Newcastle, which had opened in 1884 and held the archaeological collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne, a museum Abbott would almost certainly have been aware of as he was, or at least had been, a member of that society.

¹⁷ During my research I found a company called Potted History which makes a really nice replica of the Darlington Anglo-Saxon Urn. Below is a video of the urn being decorated:

J. T. Abbott mentioned in his letter that when the urns were found they were empty so it seems more likely that they were used to place offerings of food or drink in the graves rather than holding cremated ashes. It’s been suggested that the U-shaped stamps which much Anglo-Saxon pottery was decorated with is actually a representation of a horse’s hoof and when used on pots selected for a funeral context might reference the horse as a totem to help the dead journey to the afterlife (Chris Fern, Horses in Mind, 2010). This pot, being quite tall and having a small opening, might have contained an un-hopped ‘gruit’ sour ale such as the Great North Museum: Hancock’s Atrecti Discipulus (which I have tried and would describe as an ‘acquired taste’).

¹⁸ The full list of the artefacts from the Greenbank burials that were in Canon Greenwell’s collection and are now held in the British Museum are an annular brooch (museum number OA.4932), two bags of iron and wood fragments (museum number OA.4937), an iron object with curved piece of iron attached by two small rivets (museum number OA.4935), a badly corroded iron ring (museum number OA.4933), two iron shield bosses (museum numbers OA.6576 & OA.6577), an iron object with substantial traces of wood at one end, possibly part of spear-head (museum number OA.4936) and an iron rod of rectangular section, tapering to a point at one end (museum number OA.4934). Abigail Hansen’s fascinating account of Canon William Greenwell in her PhD thesis The Revival of Uncleby: An Antiquarian Excavation of an Anglian Cemetery is worth a look, especially the ‘Greenwell’s Legacy’ section (Volume 1, page 70-72) which highlights Greenwell’s unreasonable demands when selling his entire collection to the American banker J. P. Morgan in 1908, who did eventually secure it and donate it to the British Museum.

¹⁹ From Alison M. Cooke, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Fonaby, Occasional Papers in Lincolnshire History and Archaeology Number 6., 1981, page 37 (not available online) but there is scan of the description of the brooch below:

Bronze square-headed brooch: length 12 cm. A hybrid type, showing influence from florid cruciform brooches of Aberg’s Group V. Head-plate has no cruciform knobs, but its sides are in the form of wings, as on cruciform brooches. The three borders of the head plate have schematic central mask with large eyes flanked by beaked heads in profile. Short, steeply curved plain bow. Projecting lappets on either side of upper part of foot plate, similar to those on florid cruciforms; decorated elaborately with rampant creatures with beaked heads, the details of which are now obscured. Lower part of foot plate is roughly oval with a schematic mask at top with triple bands across forehead; similar mask at bottom, but very simplified. Intervening spaces at sides filled each with a single fusion-style animal, with fore and hind limbs and interlacing bodies, whose beaked heads form the eyes of lower mask. Hinge arrangements for pin well preserved; iron pin broken; catch-plate damaged. Leeds (1949) Type C2.

The Fonaby brooch was last known to be in North Lincolnshire Museum in Scunthorpe, but that was in 1971. (‘A Survey of the Anglo-Saxon Cruciform Brooches of Florid Type’, E. T. Leeds and Michael Pocock, Medieval Archaeology Volume 15, 1971, Issue 1, pages 13-36, page 31). There is a very short article about the Fonaby site on the North Lincolnshire Museum website, so it may still be there. Historic England have an interesting report on the textiles found at the site dated October 1978 by Elisabeth Crowfoot.

²⁰ Michael Pocock also identifies the foot-plate of a “curious” square headed brooch in the museum at Alnwick Castle as being very similar to those of the Darlington and the Fonaby brooches, but this one is of unknown provenance and is very worn. (For more details see Michael Pocock, ‘A Note on Two Early Anglo-Saxon Brooches’ in The Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, Volume 42, 1970, pages 407-409 and with photographs on the plate facing page 406). In that paper Pocock identifies the Darlington and Alnwick brooches as being “distinguished by the presence of flanking animals on the foot” which he goes on to describe as “incomprehensibly garbled” (page 408). Certainly in the case of the Darlington brooch this is quite an odd statement as it clearly shows two wolves and two birds flanking the anthropomorphic mask / face.

²¹ Toby Martin in his fascinating paper Women, knowledge and power: the iconography of early Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches says that “direct comparisons between this iconography and mythology are tenuous. In Norse mythology, Óðinn is associated with two ravens, Huginn and Muginn. On cruciform brooches, the bird is not a raven, but a raptor” (page 11). He does go on though to say that the iconography of cruciform brooches may reference some form of Anglian mythological tradition. Compellingly, he suggests that as cruciform brooches were mainly worn by women, and in particular older women in the age-range of 26-40 years old who would have been considered elders in their community, this could indicate a relationship between these women and specialist, restricted mythological knowledge. This knowledge may have been related to ritual practices, practical magic and divination. Personally, I think that bird iconography on cruciform brooches may have represented either birds or prey or raptors depending on the context. In the case of the Darlington brooch the two ‘crouching beasts’ which appear to be wolves combined with both an anthropomorphic mature male face and two birds is likely to give a context where the birds could be understood to be ravens – all three combined into one hybrid image would surely have had resonances of Woden / Óðinn and the deity’s close relationship with his animal helping spirits? The hybridity could also be suggestive of Woden / Óðinn’s powers of shapeshifting into animals – Johan Nicolay’s paper Wodan’s mythical birds: Symbolic language on a small-long brooch of the Domburg type from Heiloo is very interesting in this regard. Óðinn shape shifted into an eagle to obtain the Mead of Poetry. The symbolism of the Darlington brooch could easily be a long article here in itself – and very well may be, watch this space!

²² From Julie Marie Simpson in the Darlington As It Looked 1880-1980 Facebook Group, 21^st June 2013: “Dodds Street was a terrace of 48 houses which became something of a local curiosity in Darlington. This Victorian terrace consisted of an unusual house type known as ‘back and front’ or ‘front house and back house’. Unlike the more familiar ‘back to back’ houses these ‘back and front’ houses had both back and front doors. Each house in each pair had a long passage: the passage in one house led to the living room and in the other house from the living room to the scullery. The two sets of stairs ran together and sideways, separating the two houses. The houses were scheduled for demolition for many years and were finally bulldozed in 1986, after facing some opposition from the remaining residents.” For more information see Vera Chapman, ‘Front house and back house: houses and small terraced houses in Darlington’, Durham County Local History Society Bulletin, number 29, 1983, pages 21–39 (available at The Centre for Local Studies at Crown Street Library in Darlington). The description of Dodds Street as “a terrace of 48 houses” must refer just to the houses on the north side of the street. The houses on the south side were not demolished and are still there to this day, including number 47 Sun Luck which used to be the best Chinese takeaway in Darlington (R.I.P. Chef Paul).

Further Reading & Viewing / Bibliography:

Brown, Gerard Baldwin, The Arts in Early England, 1915

Härke, Heinrich, Warrior Graves? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial Rite, Past & Present, Volume 126, Issue 1, February 1990

Hodges, Charles C., The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of Durham Volume 1, 1905, page 211

“J. T. A.”, The North Eastern Independent newspaper, Saturday 1st February 1879 – unfortunately I have not been able to get a copy of this – The Centre for Local Studies at Crown Street Library in Darlington only has a few copies from 15th February 1879 onwards and it’s not held by The British Newspaper Archive or even the British Library. Ironically, it seems that the only existing copy in the world of a newspaper run by a man who made it his mission to earn “the undying envy and malice of the Northern Echo” is held by North of England Newspapers – which owns The Northern Echo.

Keys to the Past – Greenbank Anglo-Saxon cemetery, Darlington (see especially Source of Reference)

Lucy, Sam The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial Rights in Early England, 2000

Toby Martin, Women, knowledge and power: the iconography of early Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, Volume 18, 2013

Meaney, Audrey A Gazetteer of Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Sites, 1963, page 83-84

Miket, R., Pocock, M., Myres, J. N. L., & Swanton, M. J. (1976) An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Greenbank, Darlington, Medieval Archaeology, Volume 20, Number 1, pages 62–74

Newman, C. M., ‘Origins to 1600’ in The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Durham Volume IV Darlington, 2005, page 10 (not available online but there is a copy in The Centre for Local Studies at Crown Street Library in Darlington and also in the Learning Resources Centre at Darlington College)

Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Buildings of England: County Durham, 1953, page 139

Scarr, R, ‘Anglo-Saxon Relics Dispersed From Darlington’, Darlington & Stockton Times, 20th October 1962

Yorkshire Gazette, ‘Interesting Exhibition of Saxon Antiquities’, April 1905

The Darlington The Way We Were DVD produced by the Northern Echo mentions the burials very briefly but is not worth bothering with, especially as they have filmed it in entirely the wrong place – strangely at the corner of Greenbank Road and Widdowfield Street and in the Play Dene next to it. The burials were not found there, they were found around the junction between Selbourne Terrace meets Dodds Street, around 350 metres to the south east.

Last updated 06/08/25 at 14.38