Rethinking the Ruthwell Monument: Fragments and Critique; Tradition and History; Tongues and Sockets

The ‘Ruthwell Cross’, put together from fragments between 1802 and 1823 by Reverend Henry Duncan and reconstructed in the church at Ruthwell (Dumfries) in 1887, is generally accepted as one of the most important sculptural survivals from Anglo‐Saxon Britain and arguably from early medieval Europe. The monument is made of several peculiarities or anomalies which, seen and understood as they are here, confirm Duncan’s assumption that it had, ‘since its first erection, undergone a great change; that it consisted at first only of one block … the upper stone containing the cross having been added at a later period.’ The oral history or ‘common tradition’ seems also to confirm this. Documents provided by the mason who moved the monument into the church indicate something of its construction and how it was amended in the nineteenth century with the addition of at least one of its two joints ‘made in the most approved masonic form with a socket and a tongue’. It remains a moot point as to whether the Ruthwell Monument came together entire in the Anglo‐Saxon period or subsequently. What has to be insisted on and puzzled is its composite character as a column and a cross.