more important evidence of St John’s abbey church

Yesterday (17th June), during a very small excavation by the Trust in the grounds of the Officers’ Club, on the site of St John’s abbey in Colchester, we uncovered part of the wall foundation of the east end of the abbey church. The excavation was undertaken ahead of the construction of new tennis courts at the club. This is an important archaeological discovery, as it confirms the geophysical evidence and establishes the position of the east end of the church and, therefore, its length, as we have already identified the position of the west end. The foundations at the east end were not fully robbed out and no floor levels survived. The making of the new tennis courts will not impact on the remains of the church.

The great abbey church was started in 1095 and completed in 1115. Eudo Dapifer, the Norman magnate of Colchester, founded St John’s abbey and built the castle in the town. He was buried in St John’s abbey church on the 28th February 1120, and his remains are likely to lie very close to where we were digging. Most of the church was demolished in the 16th century following the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII. The central tower of the church survived but was demolished in the following century. Nothing more was seen of the church until some of the remains of the nave were discovered by the Trust in February 2011 during some exploratory archaeological excavations. This was a major discovery. The investigation was taking place on the site of the Officer’s Club house which was burned down in 2010.

During a watching brief conducted by the Trust in 1986 in the grounds of the Officers’ Club, we found medieval foundations and graves, and our excavations during the building of an extension to the Officers’ Club in 1988 revealed a stone wall foundation which was thought to be part of the abbey church. An evaluation carried out by the Trust in 2007 to the west of the Officers’ Club uncovered a few sections of monastic foundations, and also Roman, medieval and post-medieval deposits buried beneath deep deposits of topsoil and demolition material. This work was  important but the exposures were limited and the results inconclusive.

So the site of the abbey church was only definitively discovered during our evaluation on the site of the Officers’ Club in 2011. We cut three evaluation trenches, and then another two when the structural remains were discovered. The evaluation produced evidence of the foundations as robber trenches for the west, north and south walls of the nave and the colonnades which formed the north and south aisles. The only wall which survived was the very bottom of part of the west wall of the nave. When the church was demolished, all the floors and almost all the walls were taken down and the most of the foundations dug up for their stone. However, we found painted glass and decorated floor tiles, probably deriving from the church. (Read more about the 2011 discovery in CAT Report 601 in the Trust’s online archive.)

The current excavation was undertaken by Trust archaeologist Chris Lister.

The images show a drawing of the church based on an original probably dating to c 1500 and the remains of the east end of the church foundations being recorded.

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