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Manning's Curiosity Projected into the 21st Century by Brian Durham Percy Manning: The Man who Collected Oxfordshire, Ed. Michael Heaney, Pages 289-309 11: Manning’s Curiosity Projected into the 21st Century Brian Durham Had a man of Percy Manning’s breadth of interests been born a century later, what intellectual ramparts would he have manned in Oxfordshire? Now that his sort of collecting has been recognized as an essential record of humanity’s evolution, such that developments big and small will try to address their respective cultural impacts in a spirit of discovery and understanding, what questions would still have tantalized a Percy Manning a century on? This contribution looks into the mind of the man through his collecting, his writing and his collaboration with his peers, exploring his world with a newly available technique of landscape analysis that would have impressed him and could revolutionize the perception of his 21st-century successor. The original Manning saw to it that the millennium of Oxford’s first mention, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for AD 911/2, was commemorated (see Chapters 1 and 6). Since that time other Oxford millennia have passed unnoticed, including that of the slaughter of Danes in 1003. This would have seemed an unfortunate case for commemoration in 2003, but only five years later the ‘tumbled’ remains of 35 individuals, some with Scandinavian characteristics, were exhumed on the inner lip of a huge ring ditch under what is now St John’s College, Keble College and Keble Road. 1 The monument is identified as a ‘henge’, the upcast of which would originally have created a counterscarp six metres high, a massive auditorium – the deposition of an untidy heap of humanity in this context might therefore have been witnessed by an 11th-century onlooker from the weathered remains of this slope. Wallis presents this interment as the outcome of an Oxford ‘massacre’, and it has all the elements for generating a ghost story to match that which Percy Manning published in Folk-lore in 1903.2 In that case the ghosts of the three maidens Kendall, formerly resident in a place called ‘Rewley House’ (a name we will hear again), had haunted locations in the St Thomas area of Oxford for a period after 1714, and were only quietened by the actionsArchaeopress of nine bishops. Manning’s gentle Openaccount of these Access events is redolent of his almost avuncular words relating to Thomas Carter, his collaborator and agent in collecting other folklore in Oxfordshire (see Chapters 1, 7 and 8). Manning’s written fluency in his thirties belies his reported stuttering response as a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate at New College, reported as ‘N’n’n’no’ when asked if he was ready to part company with the college after a spectacularly bad examination performance. 1 Sean Wallis, Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre: With Medieval and Later Occupation at St John’s College, Oxford (Reading: Thames Valley Archaeological Services , 2014). 2 Percy Manning, ‘Stray notes on Oxfordshire folklore (continued),’ Folk-lore 14.1 (March 1903): 65-74 (pp. 66- 67). If nothing else, the henge atrocity seems to have ‘spooked’’the radiocarbon dating of the exhumed skeletal material, see A.M. Pollard, P. Ditchfield and E. Piva, ‘Comments on the skeletal radiocarbon dates’ in Wallis, Oxford Henge and Late Saxon Massacre, pp. 151-157. 289 Copyright Archaeopress and the Author 2017 Manning's Curiosity Projected into the 21st Century by Brian Durham Percy Manning: The Man who Collected Oxfordshire, Ed. Michael Heaney, Pages 289-309 290 Percy Manning: The Man Who Collected Oxfordshire The New College stutter is reported by J.L. Myres,3 who went on to become Wykeham Professor of Ancient History. There is however no hint of intellectual patronizing in Myres’s account, and indeed the two seem to have been close collaborators as joint secretaries of the OAHS. Manning was a friend of Henry Taunt, a commercial photographer of prodigious output (see Chapter 1). He was also close to the Parker family, energetic publishers of archaeological journals. Further, in respect of the purchase of some sculptural remains of Osney Abbey, Manning at age twenty-three persuaded Herbert Hurst to be a go-between with a builder (see Chapter 1) – Hurst as author of Oxford Topography is a considerable scholar, yet prepared to be subservient to a Manning 36 years his junior.4 The image we have might be of a dilettante, but perhaps the more mature picture from the present study is of a chameleon, able to present himself in different ways to different people? How then shall we commemorate this complex person? The approach taken here is a sequel to an essay that compared two 20th-century heritage careers on parallel trajectories, John Rhodes and the present author.5 It was argued there that addressing the Historic Environment appetites of a generation involves two services, scientific investigation by the ‘knights errant’ of field archaeology, and public presentation by museums. In presentation it was acknowledged that audience appetites would change, either ‘history will get better’ or there might be ‘random cycling’ between social accountability and the agenda of an authoritarian élite. Rhodes, in interpreting the information in front of him, used his wit and charm to mask an implied depth of perception that he never set down in writing – he would have regarded it as unprofessional to reveal his inner tastes. Manning may prove less inscrutable because his legacy takes the form of material collections made for himself (even if he passed them to the Ashmolean) – there would have been fewer constraints on his choices, which were certainly broad-ranging. We may ask therefore whether Manning’s limited literary output in a period of phenomenal output by his peers represents intellectual stifling by those around him? Was he perhaps saving himself for something that would outshine, for instance, Hurst’s Oxford Topography? Or was the rescue of the Osney sculpture evidence of a buccaneering spirit using the respectability of Hurst to deprive the builder of his property at minimal cost to ManningArchaeopress while to the benefit of the Ashmolean, Open as it were Access the ‘Lara Croft’ of his day? Three criteria offer a framework for assessment of his collecting, i.e. that: 1. He monitored locations where work was being done, or places where artefacts were being sold; 2. He put his own value on objects, whether for their intrinsic interest or his perception of their market value; 3 John Linton Myres, Praeterita: The Memoirs of the Late Sir John Linton Myres Kt OBE (Privately printed, 2012), p. 15. 4 Herbert Hurst, Oxford Topography: An Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Oxford Historical Society, 1899). 5 Brian Durham, ‘A Democratising of Heritage Services over Four Decades: The People of “Anyplace” and their Visitors’, in Martin Henig and Crispin Paine (eds), Preserving and Presenting the Past in Oxfordshire and beyond: Essays in Memory of John Rhodes, pp. 171-177, BAR British Series 586 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013). Copyright Archaeopress and the Author 2017 Manning's Curiosity Projected into the 21st Century by Brian Durham Percy Manning: The Man who Collected Oxfordshire, Ed. Michael Heaney, Pages 289-309 11: Manning’s Curiosity Projected into the 21st Century - Brian Durham 291 3. He adapted his collecting over his lifetime in ways that reflect his evolving perception rather than simply his personal resources. New knowledge comes via progressive investigation: collect; describe; compare; analyse; assimilate; predict. Manning’s collecting instinct would have been conditioned by his understanding of the landscape from which his trophies were sourced, which at the time would have been largely two-dimensional, i.e. mapped distribution. Fortuitously, 2016 has brought a remarkable additional dimension to UK archaeological collection, because for the cultivable and habitable floors of Oxfordshire valleys we now have free access to terrain-filtered LiDAR data that offers a way of reconstructing the landscape, inferring for instance how water would have behaved in such a landscape, likewise how people would have behaved, giving a platform on which a neo-Manning can indulge his personal curiosity – his curioscape. Loess, LiDAR and Landscape: 21st-century Approaches for the Neo-Manning Manning’s Oxfordshire is mainly a fertile landscape, but when first exposed by the retreat of the fourth Ice Age, say 11,000 BC, both uplands and lowlands will have been scraped clean, the surplus accumulating in moraines. As the flow of meltwater subsided, new valley floors would have been revealed, formed by sand and gravel brought from the Cotswolds, the beginning of the Devensian Stage. In some places, notably Oxford’s Port Meadow, the gravel is remarkably flat for a high-energy meltwater river, and it must be assumed that there had been a process of wind-planing that levelled out the braids, creating the so-called Northmoor Terrace. These valley floors, presently rich agricultural land, would initially have been infertile plains of gravel until there was a covering of finer material. The modern cultivation soil is described by geology as the Sutton Series,6 but where sealed beneath man-made earthworks its pristine version runs like a red watermark through any archaeological section, described by Manning’s mentor Herbert Hurst as ‘the red loam which caps the site of the city’. 7 Particle-size analysis shows that what survives on the Summertown- Radley Terrace under central Oxford is closely similar to that on the Northmoor Terrace at for instance Rewley Abbey (Saïd Business School), and perhaps therefore to that under the King’sArchaeopress Weir barrows 5 km upstream (FigureOpen 11.1).8 Access Hurst’s ‘red loam’ has been described by 20th-century Oxfordshire archaeologists as ‘old alluvium’, ‘brickearth’ and ‘supra-natural’, but increasingly with the German term Löss (Loess).

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