Richard Bailey is Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Saxon Civilization at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and an acknowledged expert in the study of Anglo-Saxon sculpture. Volume ix of the Corpus completes the coverage of the north west of England begun with the publication of Volume ii for Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire North-of-the-Sands (Bailey and Cramp Reference Bailey and Cramp1988).
The volume follows the established Corpus format, with introductory chapters on earlier research, the historical background to the sculptures and regional geology. In two further chapters Bailey discusses in detail the distribution, influences and forms of the sculptures of the Anglian (eighth/ninth centuries) and Viking (tenth/eleventh centuries) periods. The catalogues of individual carvings cover Cheshire and Lancashire separately. Roger Bristow's geology section, with distribution maps in colour, is immensely useful, and David N Parsons has contributed analysis of the runic and non-runic inscriptions.
Until the ninth century the area was split between Northumbria to the north of the Mersey and Mercia to the south and, although the boundary probably changed, the division between the kingdoms remained a feature in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Volume ix, therefore, not only completes the catalogue of Northumbrian sculpture in England, but also adds some important Mercian carvings to those pieces from London and the counties north of the River Thames that were included in Volume iv for south-east England (Tweddle et al Reference Tweddle, Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle1995), and to eastern Mercian sculpture from Lincolnshire (Everson and Stocker Reference Everson and Stocker1999). The coverage of western Mercian sculpture will be more fully addressed in Volume x (the western Midlands: Bryant forthcoming).
Bailey draws our attention to, and offers reason for, the marked imbalance between the quantity and spread of Anglian and Viking period sculptures. Finds of Anglian sculpture are rare and heavily concentrated in the Lune Valley in northern Lancashire, with virtually nothing from the rest of the county to the south and only three sites producing contemporary material in Cheshire. During the Viking period, however, there is a substantial increase in the number of carvings and they are spread much more evenly over the whole area. Furthermore, the Anglian sculptures of the Lune Valley are closely related to each other and stylistically linked to Northumbrian sites to the north and east, while the Anglian material in Mercian Cheshire betrays links to the Midlands and the south. To a certain extent this north/south divide continues into the Viking period. However, in the area around the Mersey and Dee rivers and on the Wirral peninsula, a significant level of influence from Ireland can also be detected.
There are 184 carvings in Lancashire and Cheshire, from about sixty sites, with an additional twenty-three Appendix A carvings (Saxo-Norman or uncertain date) from a further eleven sites. Most of the sites have one or two examples, but several have produced large collections, including Chester St John, Halton, Heysham, Lancaster St Mary, Sandbach and Whalley. Another collection, from Bromborough, was almost completely destroyed in the 1930s. The Sandbach crosses were broken up and the fragments dispersed in the seventeenth century. Some of the pieces were built into a grotto in the eighteenth century, but, unlike Bromborough, many of the Sandbach fragments were eventually recovered and carefully reassembled in 1816 in the town's Market Square.
The Sandbach crosses are sculptures of national importance and there are also major sculptures at Neston in Cheshire, and at Halton, Heysham, Lancaster and Whalley (all in Lancashire). As well as these and other larger scale monuments, there are delightful small-scale carvings such as the hook-beaked bird from Heysham (probably part of a chair) and the delicately carved beasts on the tiny hogback from Bidston. In the tenth and eleventh centuries circle-headed crosses form a distinctive monument group in the Wirral and Chester area, while round-shaft crosses, on which the lower shaft is round and the upper shaft square in section, are found in the Cheshire Peak District and in neighbouring Derbyshire and Staffordshire.
Any new book by Richard Bailey is good news. Here he is writing about the strategically important north-western border lands of Mercia and Northumbria, and the different influences at work on sculpture to the north and south of this frontier. This provides an added frisson to the discussions and descriptions of the sculptures featured in the catalogues and helps to give this volume in the Corpus its special character.
