St Gregory's Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire: Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context - Lorna Watts, Philip Rahtz†

St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire: Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context is the result of c.20 years of work on and around the Anglo-Saxon church of St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire. It is primarily concerned with material relating to approximately the late 8th century onwards, detailing the fabric as well as excavations around the church and in the fields immediately adjacent. A succession of three church buildings are linked to a putative focus on the north side of the church, to which, it is argued, pre-Conquest elite burials were orientated. A pre-Conquest ‘building site’ to the north of the churchyard overlay an area of earlier burials. While the building is best-known for its mid-11th century inscription, the report extends the time-period of this isolated site, particularly for the post-Roman to middle Saxon period, but also as an earlier probably religious landscape. The volume integrates archaeological, landscape, place-name and historical approaches to consider the church in its wider setting, exploring the changing character of lordship from post-Roman to Anglo-Saxon and proposing an explanation for the long use of this non-settlement locale.