Feasting with Latinus: the earliest Christians of Whithorn

Abstract

• The excavations led by the late Peter Hill at Whithorn, Dumfries and Galloway are widely understood as revealing one of the earliest monasteries in Britain. New analysis and dating evidence by the Cold Case Whithorn project is forcing a rethink of the earliest phases of the sequence. A poorly-understood late Roman phase was followed by an early medieval settlement marked with a fifth-century AD Latin-inscribed stone bearing a Christian invocation. The fifth to seventh-century sequence is characterised by feasting activity, including copious amounts of luxury imported ceramic and glass vessels from Gaul and the eastern Mediterranean, alongside metalworking and ephemeral timber structures. The archaeological signal is reminiscent of early royal and proto-royal settlements in northern and western Britain, rather than a monastery. The precocious adoption of the Christian faith and the Latin language at Whithorn can instead be explained a the seat of a Late Antique regulus or perhaps a wealthy bishop – it is not clear that the two would be distinguishable archaeologically. This raises new questions about the conversion to Christianity beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire, and the dominance of the monastic model for our understanding of the events of the mid-first millennium AD in northern and western Britain.