Early Medieval Manchester

This paper reviews the exiguous evidence for the development of Manchester between the Roman period and 1300. It does not present new archaeological data, but reassesses known data in the light of new perspectives on early medieval ecclesiastical topography, place-names and regional building culture. The duality of Manchester’s two early foci – the Roman fort, and the Hanging Ditch enclosure around the collegiate church – is reassessed, and the natural suitability of the latter as an early ecclesiastical site is highlighted. The collegiate church is tentatively identified as an Anglo-Saxon minster, which probably became a seigneurial college of clergy under the lordship of the Grelley family during the twelfth century. The initially surprising location of the minster – near a Roman fort but not actually in it – is shown (by comparison with Hope, Warrington, Catterick and other sites) to conform to a regional pattern in northern and especially north-western England. Alport (‘old port’), between the two foci, is identified as one of four occurrences of this compound on a probable route across the Peak District between Manchester and central Mercia; it offers a context for the early eighth-century coin hoard found there. The tenth- or eleventh-century cellared structure(s) excavated near the Roman fort are reinterpreted as a single earth- or cob-walled building, belonging structurally to Atlantic-zone traditions while belonging functionally to Anglo-Saxon ones. Manchester is identified as the focus of a cluster of satellite places with names of the ‘functional- tūn ’ kind, probably formed in the eighth or ninth century. It is suggested that the name Mameceaster was transferred from the Roman fort to the town site at a relatively late (probably post-Conquest) date, in an initially ecclesiastical and then seigneurial context. Finally, Manchester’s emergence as a minster-focussed small town is assigned to the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.