Archaeological Survey Report
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TVAS EAST MIDLANDS A newly uncovered vault at Town Church of St Andrew, Rugby, Warwickshire, Archaeological Assessment by David Sanchez and Andrew Mundin Site Code: ACR20/151 (SP 5204 7521) Town Church of St Andrew, Rugby, Warwickshire An Archaeological Assessment For the Incumbent and the Parochial Church Council by David Sanchez and Andrew Mundin TVAS East Midlands Ltd Site Code ACR 20/151 October 2020 Summary Site name: Town Church of St Andrew, Rugby, Warwickshire Grid reference: SP 5024 7521 Site activity: Archaeological Assessment Date and duration of project: 30th September 2020 Undertaken by: David Sanchez Site code: ACR 20/151 Summary: During excavations associated with an electricity cable, contractors disturbed the edge of a slab covering a buried vault. This vault is situated inside the railings of the churchyard, adjacent to a paved pedestrian access east of the church. The small hole created exposed a void allow a view into the vault, showing it contained articulated human remains at its base. The brick structure of the vault contains bricks considered to be pre-Victorian (pre- 1840), though the steel beams and sandstone slabs suggest in was capped after 1880. Location and reference of archive: The archive is presently held at TVAS East Midlands, Wellingborough and will be deposited with Warwickshire Museum Service or Archaeology Data Service in due course. This report may be copied for bona fide research or planning purposes without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. All TVAS unpublished fieldwork reports are available on our website: www.tvas.co.uk/reports/reports.asp. Report edited/checked by: Steve Ford 12.10.20 Steve Preston 02.10.20 i TVAS Ltd (East Midlands, Unit 4, Bentley Court, Finedon Road Ind. Est, Wellingborough, NN8 4BQ Tel. (01933) 277 377; email [email protected]; website: www.tvas.co.uk/eastmidlands Town Church of St Andrew, Rugby, Warwickshire An Archaeological Assessment by David Sanchez and Andrew Mundin Report 20/151 Introduction This report documents the results of an archaeological assessment on a vault recently uncovered by contractors, at the Town Church of St Andrew, Rugby, Warwickshire, CV21 3DU (SP 5204 7521) (Fig.1). The work was commissioned by Mr Andrew Perkins, Conservation Architect of Acanthus Clews Architects, 57 Hightown Road, Banbury, Oxfordshire, OX16 9BE, working on behalf of the Incumbent and the Parochial Church Council (PCC). An Emergency Faculty is required from the Diocese of Coventry to repair and make safe a vault which has been accidentally exposed during the excavation of a cable trench, in the south-eastern corner of the churchyard. As advised by the Diocesan Archaeological Adviser, assessment of this structure is required before the exposure can be covered or infilled. The excavation of the cable trench has ceased, and the safety of its continuing also requires a rapid archaeological and structural assessment of the vault in its existing context. A specification for this work (WSI) was prepared for Diocese Advisory Committee (DAC), outlining the archaeological approach required by this assessment. The fieldwork was undertaken by David Sanchez on 30th September 2020. The site code is ACR 20/151. The archive is presently held at TVAS East Midlands, Wellingborough and will be deposited with Warwickshire Museum Service or Archaeological Data Service (ADS) in due course. Location, topography and geology The Town Church of St Andrew (a Grade II* listed building; 1183695) is central to the town of Rugby, standing to the south of Church Street (Fig. 2). The church is located in the centre of an area of River Terrace Gravel, known as Dusmore Sand and Gravel, that overlies Charmouth Mudstone (BGS Geoindex; BGS 1984). Church Street is at height of 114m above Ordnance Datum (OD) with the churchyard slightly raised above this level. 1 Archaeological background A settlement, referred to as 'Rocheberie', was recorded in Domesday Book (1086) (William and Martin 2002, 660). St Andrew’s Church is east of the historic market, that dates from 1255, and a church documented from the 12th-century probably had ties to the Augustinian Abbey of Mary de Pratis, Leicester. In the 13th century, it was attached to the Cistercian Abbey of Pipewell, Northants. An earthwork ditch associated with either a manor house, or an early medieval monastic grange, was described as visible until the 18th-century, adjacent to the church to the south-east. St Andrew’s Church gained a chapel-of-ease, Holy Trinity after 1779. The surrounding area is densely urbanised. A number of properties nearby are Listed, based on 18th century development. Immediately south of the churchyard is its boundary with the 18th century Herbert Grey College and location of the former Rectory (Grade II; 1035047). The church was largely rebuilt in the late 19th century (between 1877-9), in Gothic Revival form to a design by the architect, William Butterfield (Pls.1 and 2). The oldest part that was retained from the ‘Old Church’ was the west tower, assumed to date from the 14th century (VCH 1951). Earlier disrepair was noted from as early as 1652 (Wait 1893, 27). According to his account (1893), the interior of the old church was arranged with box pews and galleries by 1767, such as a non-Conformist church and remained as such until 1830. The Church petitioned to expand the attached graveyard in the late 18th-century, until Holy Trinity was built, relieving this requirement. According to Pevsner (1966), the footprint of the ‘Old Church’ nave and north aisle were retained, without a south aisle mentioned. The exterior, based on earlier drawings and a photograph of 1870 (Pl. 2), shows a nave, two-side aisle building and extended chancel, part of the east end, and existing south aisle and chancel ‘renovation’ that saw the ‘original chancel pulled down’ by 1814 (Wait 1893, 29). The south aisle windows display 15th-century design in the tracery and Wait describes the destruction of a 14th-century south door in rebuilding of 1830 (Wait 1893, noted that most of the memorials in the churchyard were of 18th- century date, the earliest a ‘table memorial’ to the wife of James Nalton who died in 1641, which was placed in the south-east churchyard. The tomb of Richard (I) Elborowe, a popular mercer and benefactor to the church once had a vault in the south aisle dated 1707. On rebuilding the south aisle in 1830, the burials were found and later ‘reinterred, though no stone marked the position’ (Wait 1893, 27). Memorials on the interior wall of the west tower of the church, have been reset since rebuilding, though one dates to the 18th-century, to Thomas Crossfield, a Rugby School headmaster (d.1744) (Pickford and Pevsner 2016, 532). 2 Objectives and methodology The aims of the project were to assess the condition of the exposed vault, in order to provide information about its date and any relevance on its location in the present or historic churchyard. Results Contractor excavations had previously occurred in the south-east corner of the churchyard, in an area with no existing memorials and adjacent to modern brick-paved pathway. The view outside the churchyard, in the south- east, shows the relative changes that occurred to the setting of the churchyard, pre-and-post the 1870s (Pls 1 and 2). What had been exposed was the top of a 0.07m thick tooled sandstone slab. Under this was a continuation of light-coloured brick of several courses. This created a void to the south underneath the slab. It is estimated the void is contained within a structure 2m long (E-W), 1.2m wide (N-E), and approximately 1m deep. The top of the slab was 0.6m below the top of the pathway. This vault, of multiple-occupancy, underlay the pathway in this part of the grounds. The top of the slab was directly overlain by the route of an existing electricity cable trench. With the limited inspection of the interior, corroded ferrous metal beams supported the underneath of the slab, passing through its uppermost course. The depth below the surface of the slab was in itself is no indication of date, in fact potentially a later cap to the vault during the major Victorian redevelopment works (1877-1890). Soil levels are usually falsely raised in churchyards in order to gain capacity for new burials, however, this does not seem the case here, due to document account of the chapel-of-ease meaning St Andrews graveyard was closed in the late 18th-century. The hole made in the slab measures 0.4m x 0.5m, exposing the north east edge of the slab (Pl. 3). Several courses were visible extending lower into the interior of the vault. Human remains were visible and articulated, especially the orientated remain at the south of the chamber (Pl.5). Rubble debris had fallen on to northern remains from above during the exposure of the vault. At the base, the remains were in an organic deposit, suggesting the deposit was sealed. Only fragmentary remains of possible coffins were visible. It was unclear if the rectangular recesses in the vault walls (Pl. 6) were supports for shelves for planned future burials or were the remains of shelves which had rotted away and collapsed, with one of the burials below falling from this position. Six fragmentary bricks were recovered from the upper coursing of the structure and photographed to be analysed off-site. A single brick dimension was 225mm x 113mm wide x 73mm thick. The fabric was hand- made, but evenly fired. The colour of the material across six sample pieces varied from two that were light buff, 3 another pinkish and two others reddish buff (Pl.