Lying loose at the east end of the north aisle of the nave

See Wareham 5. First noted by Robinson (1876, 144) in the crypt together with Wareham 8

Lady St Mary

Two opposite faces have been redressed to provide flat surfaces, presumably for reuse as a building stone; part of the second line of the inscription has been cut away as well as the right-hand edge.

This is part of a colonette or baluster in which the swelling outline is pinched in with a rounded band in the manner of an astragal. It is probably Roman.

Inscription An inscription in two lines incised into a reused architectural fragment (R.C.H.M.(E.) 1970b, 308, no. ii; Radford and Jackson 1970, 311). The right-hand end of both lines has been lost.

IVDN[N . ] —

[F . . .]QVI—

Only the upper parts of the first few letters in the second line remain. Nevertheless, enough remains of the first letter to make its identification as Insular half-uncial F very probable. What is left of the following strokes would fit the reconstruction of the first part of the second line as Latin FILI ('son' in the genitive) (Radford and Jackson 1970, 311). The nominative FILIVS is also a possibility. The first word can be explained as an incomplete Brittonic masculine personal name (Radford and Jackson 1970, 311; Sims-Williams 2003, 129, 192, 234 and n. 1482). Radford and Jackson (1970, 311) take the QVI— as the beginning of a second name. The spelling would exclude a Welsh name but could be either Irish or Latin, although neither would be expected. Sims-Williams (2003, 214, n. 1326) doubts the second I of Radford and Jackson's FILI and raises the possibility that the QVI 'may be the middle not the start of a name'.

The lettering is closer-packed and more regular than that of Wareham 5. It was cut with a U-section and is now worn and damaged. Letters are approximately 3.8 cm high. Radford and Jackson noted forked serifs on a few of the letters. This is uncertain and they can never have been as distinct as those on Wareham 5. The letters are a mixture of forms deriving from Roman capitals (D, I and the first N) and from Insular half-uncial (the probable F, the probable second N, Q and V). (Too little remains of the sixth letter in line 1 to confirm the reading of it as a rounded form of E (Radford and Jackson 1970, 311).) The squarish treatment of Roman D and halfuncial V is distinctive. Radford and Jackson were probably right to see this inscription, with its mixture of Roman and Insular forms and squarish treatment, as contemporary with later examples of Nash-Williams' Group I and earlier examples of his Group II, although 'probably late 7th-century' is an unjustifiably precise dating. Sims-Williams assigns the text of this inscription to his Brittonic period 14–26, which implies a phonological date range between the second half of the sixth century and the middle of the ninth (Sims-Williams 2003, 285, 289, 291, 294–5, 366).

Inscription The inscription on Wareham 6 commemorated an individual with a probably masculine Brittonic first name, and analogies for the lettering can be found amongst Welsh inscriptions. Probably seventh or eighth-century.

Seventh to eighth century

Hutchins 1861–73, I, 115–16; Robinson 1876, 144; Rhys 1892, xxv, fn.; Stuart 1892, xxiv–xxv, fig. 5; McClure 1907, 729; Gasquet and Bishop 1908, 55; Macalister 1929, 195–6, fig. 11.3; Johnston 1932, 75; Macalister 1949, 188–9, no. 1063, pl. LXIII (1064); R.C.H.M.(E.) 1970a, l, no. ii; R.C.H.M.(E.) 1970b, 308, no. ii, pls. 165, 166; Radford and Jackson 1970, 311, no. ii; Newman and Pevsner 1972, 436; Brown 1989, 7, fig.; Hinton 1992, 260; Okasha 1993, 348; Thomas 1994, 218; Yorke 1995, 71, fig. 19; Sims-Williams 2003, 129, 192, 214n, 234, 265, 366, 383, no. 1063/Dor.ii

[1] The unique collection of sculpture from this site includes some possible Roman stones, as well as five Brittonic inscriptions which have generally been dated between the seventh and ninth century, and thus seem to have been produced within the period of the Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Although these have been included in recent catalogues and discussions of the inscriptions by Celtic specialists (see the Celtic Inscribed Stones Project on-line database and Sims-Williams 2003), they were excluded from Okasha's south-western corpus (Okasha 1993, appendix D). They have therefore been considered in some detail here (see Wareham 5–9 below), and are discussed in John Higgitt's chapter of the introduction, p. 65.