Angles, Danes and Norse in the District of Huddersfield
By W. G. Collingwood

DEWSBURY (Page Two of Two)

The next seven stones are with others at Dewsbury church.

(l m) Part of a late ninth century cross, giving enough of the pattern for restoration. It is elaborately interlaced on both sides. The ornamental boss, the angular twist around it, and the figure-of-8 plait (not a Carrick bend but a closed double loop) show that this design is like i j k (see previous page) of the period following the finest developments of the Anglian school.

(n) The best part of a cross-head of Anglian form and with the Dewsbury cable-edging, but without pattern on either side. There is an incised line, an "Anglian moulding," round a plain surface, such as we shall see in other fragments evidently of very late Anglian work.

(o p) This rude head bears the random plaitwork of the tenth century, and an unusual centre on one side, formed of a Latin cross surrounded by an oval, instead of a circle. The Latin cross is much battered, but there can be no doubt that this is what the form was originally, or that the monument was set up some time well on after A.D. 900.

(q,r,s,t) A piece of cross-shaft with the cable and stiff scroll of late Anglian, with remains of what was pretty certainly a crucifix-figure on one side, and on the other a curious grotesque creature. Only the lower part of the head is left, but it is not human; and the creature holds something like a rudely carved man in its clumsy paw. It has been suggested that this is one of the symbols of death, which sometimes appear under the head of a late monument, as if dominated and subdued by the cross.

(u,v,w) This piece of cross-shaft is interesting from its elaborate tree scroll growing out of a foundation not unlike those used in the designs of thirteenth and fourteenth century gravelslabs, but seen also in other stones undoubtedly Anglian. The tree-scroll is derived from the early Northumbrians, but in this late form it is stiffened and robbed of much of its charm, though still forming a decorative pattern. On the edge of the shaft there are plain Anglian mouldings such as we have seen in Dewsbury.

(x) This bit of a shaft again shows the plain mouldings with a small panel of late Anglian scroll and berries.

(y,z &) The last of the figures gives two sides and the end of a broken stone of much importance, restored in a model at the Museum. Late in the ninth century the recumbent monument was introduced in imitation of a form used in Italy; the shrine tombs of Ravenna are well known to antiquaries. In Yorkshire there are similar monuments of this period at Crathorne (North Riding), York and Leeds; and fragment also at Crambe; this at Dewsbury seems to be the earliest of its class in the North, and by its ornament seems to date before A.D. 900. during the tenth century the idea was taken up by the Danes – that of a little house of the dead, with walls and gables and tiled roof; the Danes added figures of bears at the gable-ends and ornamented the walls with their own kind of basket-plait and dragons; and so invented the tenth century “hogback” seen at its finest at Brompton, near Northallerton, and in highly interesting and well-known examples at Heysham, near Lancaster, at Penrith, and at Gosforth, Cumberland.

We find then at Dewsbury monuments from about A.D. 850 to considerably after 900, showing that the minster lasted so long. Then, apparently, it came to an end as an abbey-church, for the Anglian abbey-system died out in the tenth century, replaced by the parochial system. There is at Dewsbury a head-stone which may be of the eleventh century, as well as the ornamented crosses n and o p. And in 1086, Domesday Book tells us, there was here a priest and a church, the church of a great parish extending westward to the Pennine watershed. This must have been the district over which Dewsbury ruled in the pre-Norman age.

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