The Roman withdrawal from Britain in the early fifth century left Canterbury without the administrative and military apparatus that had sustained it as a functioning city for three and a half centuries. What happened to the site in the years and decades that followed is one of the more interesting puzzles in the archaeology of early medieval England, and the evidence, such as it is, suggests that the answer is more complicated than simple continuity or simple abandonment.
The Roman city of Durovernum Cantiacorum had derived its importance from the convergence of three major roads at the crossing of the River Stour, roads that connected the Kentish harbour fortresses at Richborough, Dover, and Lymne with the great route to London. When Roman administrative authority collapsed, those roads remained, but the traffic they carried was no longer organized by an imperial system. The city that had grown from a wayside station into one of three named cities of the Cantii began to lose its name.
Writing in 1875, T. G. Godfrey-Faussett advanced a detailed argument for why Canterbury was probably left uninhabited for a considerable period after the Roman withdrawal. The principal evidence was negative: despite extensive disturbance of the soil around Canterbury through building, draining, and extraction works over many centuries, no pagan Saxon cemetery of any magnitude had ever been found in the immediate vicinity. In East Kent, where such cemeteries are found frequently, their complete absence from the Canterbury area strongly suggested that the city was resettled only after the conversion to Christianity had introduced different burial practices. The resettlement, in other words, came late enough that there were no pagan graves to leave behind.
Godfrey-Faussett added a second argument: not a single Canterbury street sits on the line of a Roman street. The beautiful pavements of the Roman city, found in well-preserved and unworn condition when excavation reached them, had been buried and forgotten rather than built over and continued. The medieval city was a new creation overlaid on an abandoned foundation, not a gradual evolution from what the Romans had left.
The very name confirmed this view. Large features of the Roman landscape, fortresses, rivers, hills, almost always retained their British names even after Saxon settlement. Richborough, Dover, Lymne, and Reculver all preserved recognizable versions of their Roman names into the Saxon period. Canterbury alone underwent a complete change, becoming Cantwarabyrig, the city of the Men of Kent, a name that implies both a deliberate founding and a people settled enough in their identity to name a capital after themselves rather than after a king or a Roman predecessor. The word Durovernum had been forgotten.
When history picks up the thread again, Canterbury is established as the royal capital of Ethelbert, King of Kent. Ethelbert’s court was already in place when Augustine arrived from Rome in 597, and the king’s palace stood within the city walls, in what had been the northward extension of the Roman city. Augustine and his companions were initially housed in a space on the opposite side of the street, in land that formed part of what became known as Staplegate.
The arrival of Augustine transformed Canterbury’s significance. Ethelbert gave his palace to Augustine, and on its site rose the monastery of Christ Church, which became and has remained the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Outside the walls, to the east, Augustine established a second monastery, later known as St. Augustine’s, intended primarily as a burial place for the kings of Kent. The city that had been a commercial crossroads became the ecclesiastical center of a new English church.
The area that would later be identified as the Manor of the Dungeon lay outside the Roman and Saxon city walls, to the south and southwest. The Dane John mound stood within the walls, but the land associated with what would become the manor was in the outer zone, in the parish that would eventually be called St. Mary Bredin.
This outer land in the Saxon period was almost certainly common ground or agricultural land rather than a developed settlement site. The Saxon city, like the Roman city before it, was concentrated north and east of Watling Street; the southern portion of the walled area had a notably smaller number of churches than the northern half, and the area outside the walls to the south was even less developed. Market places clustered outside the gates to the north and east; the gate that gave access to the southern road, the Worthgate, opened onto a route that ran southward along the river rather than toward any major settlement.
The mound within the walls was present throughout this period, a prominent feature of the landscape whose original purpose had been forgotten. There is no record of any specifically Saxon use of the mound itself during this period. It sat within the city, unexplained and permanent, as it would continue to do for centuries afterward.
The period that followed the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought the next major documented change to the site. The Normans, characteristically, saw immediately the military potential of the ancient mound and erected a timber motte-and-bailey castle on its summit shortly after the Conquest. This use was brief: by around 1123, the stone Canterbury Castle had been built to the north and west, and the motte on the Dane John mound was abandoned and presumably dismantled.
The Conquest also brought with it the administrative apparatus of English feudalism in its fully developed Norman form, and it is from the Norman period that manorial structures in Canterbury begin to be documented with the density that makes a history like this one possible. The names of early lords, the boundaries of estates, the obligations of tenants: these are the records of a feudal administration that the Normans systematized and the subsequent centuries preserved. The Manor of the Dungeon enters the historical record in this context, as a property held by the Chiche family within the feudal order of Norman and Plantagenet Canterbury.