The open-air museum at Cockley Cley near Swaffham in Norfolk, consisting of a reconstructed Iceni Village, a 17th century farmhouse and an alleged ‘7th century church’ is an eccentric private collection created by Sir Peter Roberts, 3rd Baronet of Cockley Cley Hall, in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Sir Peter appears to have fancied himself as something of an antiquary, and I was delighted to find that the memorial to this gentleman (who died in 1985) in All Saints’ church is one of the few modern examples of a proper heraldic monument, even if its description of Sir Robert as ‘Historian’ is questionable. The late baronet appears to have left more questions unanswered than answered, since Cockley Cley is indeed a fascinating site buried in misinformation.
In the first place, the Iceni village (heralded by a friendly wicker man) has no apparent warrant for its location – the guide to the village merely states that the Iceni lived in villages like this near here. Quite true, but unlike West Stow the village does not seem to be based on any nearby post-hole discoveries. Furthermore, the reconstruction is both small and highly speculative. Its situation, with a little stream forming a moat and a larger stream bubbling behind the village, is thoroughly delightful, and viewed from a distance through trees and reedbeds one can indeed imagine it as an Iron Age settlement. A closer inspection, however, is a little more disappointing. The buildings are constructed using machine cut timber and they are as far from the original building methods as they could be; the tree-post in the roundhouse, for instance, has been haphazardly shored up by pieces of plank from a builder’s yard. The appearance of a ‘longhouse’ is puzzling – yes, there were longhouses in Iron Age settlements but they tend to be associated with high status late Iron Age contexts; the Romanised aristocracy of the south and south east began to favour rectangular architecture before the invasion, and the likelihood of a longhouse existing in an Icenian village is slim. The guidebook describes the ’sharpened posts’ of the pallisade but they look rather more like ordinary flat wooden posts at a modern farm. What we do know about the Iceni is that they tended to rely on earthworks to raise the height of a palisade (even if only low ones as at Stonea), and those are distinctly lacking at Cockley Cley. The gatehouse and guard towers are entirely speculative, and the well in the centre of the village is amusingly filled with gory remnants of sacrifice – the inhabitants clearly not interested in whether they contaminated their water supply. The inhabitants themselves are dubious manikins with pasted on beards and blue paint, draped in tartan picnic blankets and looking very sorry for themselves. Even more unfortunately they have been given Welsh names (e.g. ‘Cynric’ – only a little research would have produced Cunorix).
The 17th century farmhouse is likewise a reconstruction of slightly dubious merit; diamond-glazed glass is pinned over Victorian windows and a number of modern features (including a letterbox) intrude. At the top of an avenue of trees is the church claimed to be ‘7th century.’ Sir Peter appears to have based his outlandish claim for the church’s age on the theory that it is ‘Byzantine’ in form, and there was a Byzantine influence on English architecture only for a brief period – from 597 to the arrival of the Celtic missionaries. These Celtic missionaries, Sir Peter argues, built rectangular churches (he is presumably thinking of St. Peter-on-the-Wall). Therefore he extrapolates that the church was built in the early part of the 7th century, 628 to be precise (one expects him to give the date to the very day…). Sir Peter’s grounds for thinking that English architecture was ‘Byzantine-influenced’ in the early 7th century is flimsy indeed – he claims to have found correlations between this building and others in Asia Minor. He goes further and claims that it might have been overseen by a Syrian monk escaping persecution in Persia, a theory in the realm of the truly bizarre. What Sir Peter has not considered is that there was very little point going to the effort of constructing a stone church in the early days of Augustine’s mission, and that apart from the Cratendune episode there is no evidence of a Christian mission being established in East Anglia that would have been sufficiently important to justify a stone structure.
However, I am not willing, as some are, to pour water completely on the idea that the chapel of St. Mary is a Saxon church. Yes, certain parts (the door on the south side and the stonework of the chancel arch) are clearly Norman. However, other aspects of the church, in particular the undressed flint windows and the long and short work at the west end, could well be Saxon. Yes, the apsidal east end resembles Norman Hales, but Hales does not have windows as tiny and crude as these. Saxon minsters also favoured an apsidal groundplan, and this church could possibly, notwithstanding the Norman features, be as early as the 9th century. The date of the church needs a great deal more investigation to be established, and for the present the lurid assertions of Sir Peter Roberts go unchallenged.
