The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (34 page)

Several minster churches certainly benefited from the patronage afforded by early eleventh-century kings, nobles and lesser lords. Those at Dover (St Mary’s, Kent) and Great Paxton (Huntingdonshire) incorporate late-Saxon features apparently endowed by Kings Aethelred II and Edward the Confessor. Others at Coventry and Stow St Mary (Lincolnshire) were reportedly rebuilt by Leofric Earl of Mercia (died 1057) and his wife Godiva. And at Kirkdale (Yorkshire) an inscription of about 1060 survives on a sundial to record that Orm Gamalsson had a ‘completely broken and fallen’ church ‘newly built from the ground’.
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Among lesser churches, a ‘Great Rebuilding’ has been identified from about 1040, mainly but not entirely in eastern England, so that structures began to be built to last, using stone in place of timber, according to a standardized ‘two-cell’ plan of nave and chancel, sometimes with west tower. This layout is apparent for example at Kirk Hammerton and Wharram Percy (Yorkshire), Burnham (Lincolnshire), Wittering (Northamptonshire) and Deerhurst (‘Odda’s Chapel’, Gloucestershire); the last is known from an inscription to have been dedicated in April 1056, the others probably straddle the Norman Conquest in a way which makes conventional categorization into ‘late Saxon’ and ‘early Norman’ irrelevant. Much of this was paid for by local lords, but there is evidence – from wills, for example – to suggest that many freeholders were also keen to participate in the endowment of local
churches. Enthusiasm for founding churches flourished in a context where they were seen as ‘proprietorial’ assets from which the owner was entitled to a rent: to the extent that in some rural communities more than one church came into being and in an urban context, as we have seen, they were liable to proliferate even if serving only tiny congregations (
Figure 29
).
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Figure 29: Two Churches in one Churchyard, Swaffham Prior (Cambridgeshire)
.
This unusual survival is associated with townships, especially in East Anglia, where more than one manorial lord or substantial freeholder wished to endow his own church. St Mary the Virgin with its Norman tower (right) continues in use but SS Cyriac and Julitta (left) is redundant.

Despite the papacy’s attack on lay proprietorship of churches during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries – an attack taken up by diocesan bishops – ecclesiastical building and rebuilding continued, as new parishes were designated to keep pace with rising population and the creation of new settlements: possibly 1,500 of England’s 8,000 medieval parish churches were newly built during the course of the twelfth century, mostly in the earlier decades. The result was that, by the end of that century, arrangements whereby a local ‘parish church’, authorized by canon (church) law to perform the sacraments essential to the neighbouring population (including baptism, marriage and burial), drawing a corresponding income from the tithes and offerings of the parishioners, and with ‘glebe’ land set aside for the upkeep of the priest, had become well-established. Yet this is too simple a picture since by 1200 about a quarter of all parish churches in England, and by 1300 over half, had been ‘appropriated’ by religious houses – normally where the church lay on an estate which had been granted to a monastery; rather than leave the parish priest in receipt of the tithe and other funds, the monastery took on the role, in effect, of an absentee rector, collecting the revenues for itself and engaging a ‘vicar’ (substitute) to serve as priest. Although bishops initially encouraged this practice, seeing closer monastic control as a means to exclude lay interference and raise standards among the clergy, by the late middle ages they came to deplore it, with monasteries being accused of treating their churches as a mere source of income: a further source of hostility in the decades prior to dissolution.

Several approaches can be adopted to the study of churches as features in the English landscape. One is to examine the factors behind their siting, and their physical relationship to the settlements they served. The medieval Church was adept at utilising features associated with alternative belief systems – the proliferation of crosses along routeways, for example, was at least partly attributable to a drive to replace sacred trees and other folkloric waymarkers – so it is no surprise that sites of past ritual significance were sometimes chosen for the building of churches. Dedications to St Michael (the Archangel who overcame Satan) are worth investigating in this context, especially if they occupy hill-top sites such as at Wadenhoe (Northamptonshire); in St Albans, the church of this name occupies the site within Roman Verulamium where the martyr was believed to have been condemned to death. Elsewhere, the church at Rudston (Yorkshire) was built next to a prehistoric monolith almost 8 metres tall, that at Knowlton (Dorset) within a neolithic henge. ‘Holy wells’ – springs believed to have had curative or other miraculous powers – also seem to have influenced the siting of several churches of pre-Conquest origin, such as St Margaret’s, Binsey (Oxfordshire), St Mary’s Stevington (Bedfordshire) and the church at Holywell (Huntingdonshire), whose dedication to St John the Baptist suggests that the water here may have been used for Christian baptisms before the church was built. All this does, however, need to be kept in perspective. Striking though these examples are, instances of churches built over known pre-Christian sacred sites are not in fact widespread, and ecclesiastical authorities were as likely to condemn continuing popular devotion to springs and trees as to attempt their incorporation into formal worship. In particular, the supposed significance of ‘ancient yews’ in churchyards has been much exaggerated, partly because they can rarely be dated with conviction to a period earlier than the churches alongside which they grow, and partly because the species cannot be proved to have had any association with pre-Christian ritual in any case (
Figure 30
). In this, as with much else in the historic landscape, it is right to be cautious in drawing conclusions.
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Figure 30: Rotherfield Churchyard (Sussex)
. The church’s north-eastern chapel (to right) was probably built in the eleventh century, with other parts added later. The massive yew tree on the extreme left, with split and hollow trunk, implies greater longevity for the site as a place of worship but does not demonstrate a pre-Christian origin.

Where there are grounds for saying that a church occupies a ritually important position – simultaneously a continuation and an obliteration of what
had gone before – it is generally safe to assume that some ecclesiastical authority, such as a minster or bishop, had played a key role in the decision to build on that spot, whoever the formal founder of the church might be. Even here, however, there are exceptions, such as the field outside York where Archbishop Scrope was executed as a traitor against Henry IV in 1405; having become a focus of popular veneration laced with hostility to the Lancastrian dynasty – against the Church’s wishes – it had a chapel built on the site once the Yorkist king Edward IV came to the throne. Late-medieval enthusiasm for erecting chapels at or near wells or springs, as at Ingestre (Staffordshire) and St Cleer (Cornwall) around 1500, seems to have derived from the wish of the founders to profit from the pilgrimage trade.
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But where there were no such considerations, local lords, and those peasant communities left to arrange their own settlements, placed the church where it suited their own day-to-day convenience. The close involvement of a manorial lord in the establishment of a church, before or after the Norman Conquest, is often to be recognized today by its proximity to a former castle or manor house. Nearly 50 instances of churches standing within 200 metres of a motte (the surviving mound of an earthwork castle) have been identified in Herefordshire – Lingen near the border with Shropshire is a good example – and cases can be found, with less
frequency, all over the country (
Figure 12
). Of course, neither the present-day church building nor the surviving domestic remains may date back to the origins of this arrangement and – here again – care needs to be taken over the interpretation. It is tempting to assume that a place of worship initially provided by the lord for his family and retainers, in the plot of land which embraced his own residence, was later converted into the focus of parochial worship and revenue. However, excavations of such complexes at Goltho and Raunds, both dating to the tenth century, clearly show the church with its graveyard to have been built adjacent to, but outside, the manorial enclosure: while they were very conveniently placed for the lord, they were intended from the outset for wider community use.
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In many planned ‘row villages’, the church and manor house are frequently found together at one end: the lord chose to live where there was plenty of available space, semi-detached (as it were) from his peasant tenants, the church he built was positioned alongside, and the villagers looked in the same direction for both secular and spiritual authority. Where this is not the case – where a parish church is integrated within a planned settlement, rather than at one end of it – we may have an explanation in absentee lordship, with the peasant community being left to locate the church to suit itself: Chobham and Great Bookham (Surrey), which we encountered in
Chapter 3
on the estates of Chertsey Abbey, are possible cases in point.
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Elsewhere, in the context of dispersed settlement, the site may have had some symbolic significance or may simply have been chosen as the least inconvenient option. Thus, the small church at Shocklach (Cheshire), dedicated to an Anglo-Saxon saint (Edith), with eleventh- or early twelfth-century nave and fourteenth-century chancel, stands in isolation; the farmsteads and hamlets which still house the parishioners lie up to three kilometres away. This position led to the inclusion of Shocklach in the list of deserted villages in the pioneering book on this subject published in 1971.
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But no trace of a settlement adjacent to St Edith’s has ever been found, and it seems more reasonable to conclude that the church, which stands at the confluence of a network of public footpaths linking the dispersed settlements of the parish, has from the outset occupied an isolated site. Even so, the place name, which is recorded in Domesday Book and means ‘the goblin stream (or bog)’, implies that there may well have been a folkloric reason behind the selection of this precise location.

Most studies of churches focus on the development of their plans, which can tell us a great deal about fluctuations in the population to be served and the wealth and commitment of those responsible for the fabric. Archaeological excavation of redundant churches consistently shows their evolution to be more complex than is apparent from the standing structures alone: at Asheldham (Essex), 11 phases were identified from a simple two-cell timber church of the pre-Conquest period through to a stone church with chancel,
nave, tower and rebuilt porch of the nineteenth century, while at Wharram Percy (Yorkshire) there were 12 phases over a similar timespan. Much can be read from extant buildings, however, even if few retain their original plans. The commonest arrangement before the twelfth century was the single- or two-cell plan: that is, one space without architectural differentiation for both priest and laity, or a building divided into a chancel at the east end for the priest and a nave for the congregation. Surviving examples of the former are to be found at Harlowbury and St Helen’s Colchester (Essex), which are rectangular (
Figure  31
), and at Maplescombe (Kent) and Nately Scures (Hampshire), D-shaped with the east end in the form of an apse. Two-cell churches are more commonly found. This is often because a chancel was added much later to a Saxon or Norman single-cell church – as at Shocklach (Cheshire) mentioned above – but those in which both sections apparently date to the twelfth century at latest include Bengeo (Hertfordshire), Hadleigh (Essex) and Heath (Shropshire), the latter with a rectangular east end, the others terminating in an apse (
Figure 15
).
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