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Wednesday, 02 March 2005 |
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The Collections ...Small finds suggestive of the way of life at the farm house are preserved in the museum. They include brooches, a pair of tweezers, fragments of painted wall plaster, and a fish hook. The Romano-British way of life in the Vale, though economically decaying after the imperial legions had left Britain in the early 5th century, is unlikely to have been disturbed by pagan Saxon invaders before the late 6th century. The Christian faith introduced by the Romans probably survived there until that time. There were isolated Saxon enclaves by the 6th century but the Vale remained for a long while on the "border between British and Saxon territory. Cuthwine and Ceawlin of Wessex defeated the local British kings at Dyrham (Glos.) in 577 and the Vale was afterwards absorbed, first by Wessex, then by Mercia. Pagan Saxon cemeteries and burials, of which a number have been discovered in the Vale, are our chief evidence for the presence of the newcomers. The men were buried with their shields and weapons, the women with beads and brooches. The museum has grave goods from early-6th-century cemeteries at Beckford (Glos.) and Broadway (Worcs.) and from a late-6th-century or 7th-century burial at Fairfield (near Evesham) investigated by the Vale of Evesham Historical Society in 1953. Two of the Fairfield brooches are of Celtic 'annular' (ring-shaped) design and illustrate the late survival of British culture in the Vale side by side with the Saxon. A century or less after the Fairfield burial Christianity was reintroduced into the Vale by missionaries from the newly-founded church of Worcester. A monastery was founded at Evesham c. 701 by Ecgwine, bishop of Worcester. It was endowed with estates covering most of the Vale and, surviving threats of extinction in the 10th century, remained the centre of spiritual and economic life in the Vale until its suppression in 1540. Despite an almost total destruction of the monastic buildings at Evesham, a surprising amount of evidence for their arrangement has survived in charters and chronicles, and a large part of the ground plan was discovered in excavations from 1811 to 1834. The museum houses a large model of the abbey buildings constructed over a period of twelve years by Mr. Terence Knight and based on an examination of all the available evidence. Within those buildings the monks' principal duty was the worship of God. |
