The Search for Winchester’s Anglo-Saxon Minsters

Martin Biddle’s The Search for Winchester’s Anglo-Saxon Minsters investigates the early churches that helped make Winchester one of the most important religious and political centres of Anglo-Saxon England. Archaeological, architectural and documentary evidence is brought together to identify and reconstruct minster sites whose histories are complicated by later rebuilding.

The Old Minster and New Minster once stood at the centre of the royal city, but both were demolished and their locations lost. Biddle traces how excavations between 1961 and 1970 recovered their remains and made it possible to reconstruct parts of their history, from the changing buildings to their place in Winchester’s royal quarter. Simon Hayfield’s drawings help make that process visible.