John Magilton

 John Magilton

John Magilton died on 24 March 2011 just short of his sixtieth birthday (he was born on 26 June 1951). The following appreciation was contributed to SALON by Fellow Paul Buckland.

John began his digging career in Chester in the days when medieval and later deposits were mechanically removed to get at the Romans. Proud of his Irish ancestry, he preferred to take note of the evidence in the ‘topsoil’, and it was perhaps also inevitable that he chose the University of Southampton, then the most active department in the field, for a degree in archaeology and medieval history, where the influence of Peter Addyman was to shape his later career. Spending his vacations digging in places as diverse as the Sparsholt Roman villa and urban Doncaster, he made one last attempt to lead a normal life as a temporary clerk with Chester Constabulary. John was not, however, cut out for a humdrum existence and he joined Peter with the nascent York Archaeological Trust in 1973.

His career from that point was mapped out. John directed the excavation of the small medieval church of St Helen’s-on-the-Walls, revealing important Roman deposits beneath, including a pavement whose imagery might have led mistakenly to the medieval dedication. It was, however, the meticulous excavation of the numerous medieval burials and the subsequent careful evaluation of historical, as well as archaeological, evidence which made his reputation in medieval archaeology.

Whilst work in York was progressing towards publication, he moved to Doncaster, initially to prepare what was essentially an architectural survey of the local authority district, as well as to continue excavations on behalf of what is now English Heritage. Most of this research has been published, although he had always said that, in the absence of funding, the Roman fort would have to wait for his retirement.

His interest in the development of towns, evident since early days with David Palliser in York, continued with David Hey in south Yorkshire, where the study of the planned settlement at Tickhill was supported by limited excavation, and at Birmingham University, where working with Terry Slater on the plan of Doncaster caused him to wonder why so many holes had been dug in the urban landscape, when careful map analysis could provide better results more cheaply. John later applied similar techniques in his study of Midhurst in West Sussex.

Birmingham, however, provided other opportunities and whilst directing excavations on the Roman temple site at Coleshill, in Warwickshire, he completed a much lauded thesis on late Roman religion in Britain, with Simon Esmonde Cleary. This provided the background for a major report, long in publication, if not gestation, on the temple site.

The report appeared long after his move to Chichester, where he took over from the late Alec Down, steering several of Alec’s projects to publication before the dissolution of local authority archaeology on the altar of privatisation. It was again the York connection that provided a safety net, before the problems of many small units — those of cash flow and the growing reluctance of increasingly stretched local government to supplement developers’ pence to obtain that bigger picture — led to the demise of Southern Archaeology.

Survival thereafter depended upon John’s ability to cut through the Gordian knots of other people’s recording and produce meaningful reports. The monograph on the Fernhurst furnace, substantially updating earlier work on the Wealden iron industry, and the still-to-appear study of the Dorchester Roman bath-house for English Heritage will long stand as examples of life being breathed into the dead. And indeed the same could be said for his own excavation and publication (with Frances Lee and Anthea Boylston) of the leper hospital of St James and St Mary Magdalene outside the walls of Chichester, which extends John Magilton’s reputation beyond medieval archaeology into science and the history of medicine. Meticulously researched and related to the broader context, the report, like all his work, lives up to the definition of archaeology as truly multi-disciplinary (rather than Wheeler’s definition of archaeology as a vendetta).

John had always been holoptic in his approach, able to show that archaeology could make a very real contribution to many other fields, from historical geography to the history of disease. He was a very real academic who seldom worked in an academic environment, perhaps much to his advantage. His knowledge stretched geographically from his beloved County Clare to the eastern Mediterranean, from the mythology of the Celtic West (leading to contributions on the Lindow Men), to post-medieval archaeology, through what I would have to call regional ethnography to the music of the Morris. An accomplished melodeon player, he introduced many of his digging crew to the likes of Billy Pig, the Northumbrian piper, and Salopian traditional singer Fred Jordan, long before ‘folk’ became the de rigueur musical style on the archaeology circuit. It is a great pity that Life did not renew his contract with John for at least a few more years. Survived by his wife Eleanor and son Tim, he will be sorely missed.