Early churches and Anglo-Saxon (Englisc) culture

     For three centuries after Christ’s crucifixion Christians gathered secretly in houses to pray together. Baptism would be with water in the house or done discretely in the local bath-house. When Constantine I legalised Christianity in 313 (The Edict of Milan) worshippers could gather in Roman basilica buildings, now an assembly hall-church, adapted with an altar in an apse, separation of men and women and those who had been baptised and those who had not and, perhaps, with a simple baptistry. Christianity did not have an architecture of its own.[1] For Christians a specific church building considered holy would be idolatrous. In Britain such house-churches appeared in late Roman times.

Drawing of a bronze bowl with a Christian motif, the Chri-Rho sign, found at the Roman mansio of Letocetum, now Wall. The bowl could have belonged to a Christian. It has since been lost. There was a pagan temple at Letocetum, was it succeeded by an early house-church?

 

Anglo-Saxon immigrants to Britain built Germanic-style halls of timber in the 5th and 6th-centuries. They were simple rooms used for worship and feasting. Some might have been converted pagan temples. By the 7th-century timber churches occurred at Lindisfarne (Bishop Finan’s church of oak), at Bamburgh (Bishop Aidan’s chapel), Hartlepool (Aidan again), Yeavering (King Oswald), Ripon, Whitby and Whithorn. Escomb might have originally been constructed of timber. All were small, rectangular buildings, perhaps with a large flat stone for an altar, but little else is known.

Perhaps the early timber church was something like this house at Maelmin, Milfield, Wooler, Northumberland.

There was a change of architecture in the late 7th-century in which the timber and thatch room became a ‘church’ building with some decoration and adaptations for various liturgical functions. Speculation is necessary on the architecture of the Anglo-Saxon churches because none exist above ground in original form. Shapland is adamant,[2] “We should also not think of a ‘church’ in this period as a coherent building class, as a variety of naves and chancels, but one encompassing crypts, low towers, gatehouses, baptisteries and mausolea, all of which drew their form and symbolism from the buildings on which they were based, or from which they had been adapted.” The church was subject to kings and nobility, and not clergy. Significantly, the building was now constructed with stone, metal, plaster and reclaimed Roman tiles. The earliest Anglo-Saxon church still in use is St Martins, Canterbury, dating from the 590s. Its chancel is built of Roman brick, and its later nave is of reused Roman stone and brick, “laid in the Roman manner.” 

Possible original plan of St Martins, Canterbury. St Augustine is holding the church where he arrived in 697.

Some early churches had a stone foundation, but a timber superstructure. St Paul-in-the-Bail, Lincoln was a 5th or early 6th-century church built on the courtyard of a Roman forum. The line of foundation trenches contained fragments of paving slabs thought to have come from the paved surface of the forum.[3] It is uncertain whether the above-ground building was of stone or more likely it was timber with plaster.

Indicated shape of St Paul-in-the-Bail, Lincoln. The building was 9 m wide, and at least 2I m long. The foundation trenches of the nave were between 0.80 and 1.20 m wide and the apse at the end had a foundation trench 0.6 m wide. The apse was thought to have been separated from the nave by a quadruple arcade or screen, probably of timber.

 

            The use of recycled Roman tile or brick which was crushed and mixed with mortar to create a distinctive pink floor has been noted at Glastonbury, Reculver, Canterbury and Jarrow. It has been suggested early churches declared their Romanitas through plastered masonry buildings and terracotta-coloured floors in stark contrast to the timber and earth constructions of vernacular tradition.[4]

 

Excavated Saxon church at Glastonbury, c. 700

            The reason for the changeover to stone churches has been much speculated. Churches in Wales and Ireland did not change to stone construction for another three centuries. The Roman mission culminating in the Synod or Council of Whitby, 663–4,[5] is clearly a critical influence. Bishop Wilfrid had Ripon and York churches rebuilt in stone. This was repeated at Hexham, Hartlepool and most likely at Lindisfarne. Shapland made the point, “There is persuasive literary and archaeological evidence that English Anglo-Saxons perceived stone as the material not just of Rome and the Roman Church, but as the material of permanence. Timber was the perishable material of the cyclical natural world and transient human life.”[6] God’s house was permanent and so was stone. It also differentiated them from the Celtic/Folk churches of small communities.

Lyminge Ango-Saxon church with apse and triple arch to the nave.

             It is thought Anglo-Saxon stone churches lasted a long time with many only disappearing when the Normans came. Shapland explained this by suggesting the Anglo-Saxons valued the sacredness of the church with its history of worship, its ‘embodiments of the past’. They did not cherish the building and instead with wear of the stonework they either expanded the building or built a new one with reused stone and timber from the worn church. Many of the early churches went through several phases of development all on the same site with much the same material. In contrast, the Normans did not mind demolishing old and trusted churches of the past and replacing entirely with monumental buildings.[7]

Deriving the early church at Lichfield (Licetfelda).

            Accepting Shapland’s ideas on the building culture of the Anglo-Saxon Church and applying them to the early church at Lichfield raises the following notions. 

1.    The cathedral churches of the first four bishops of Mercia, 656–667, were timber buildings much like a house. They would be very simple, rectangular structures within the Anglo-Saxon settlement, not necessarily at Lichfield. Baptism would be in the adjacent stream or river.  

2.    King Wulfhere and Bishop Wilfrid’s selection of a site called Licetfelda, 667–8, would be considered with a view to the ground being sacred. The area would be numinous and free of things considered sinful. Much blessing of the site would have occurred before any construction. Wilfrid would have insisted on a stone building and this could have applied to the main church of St Peters and, perhaps, to the lesser church of St Mary (unless this was an earlier church). The church would have had a rectangular nave and possibly an apsical chancel. It would have been constructed from recycled Roman material, most likely from Wall (Letocetum). The roof would be Roman tile. The location of these two churches cannot be determined from known archaeology. See the posts, ‘Making sense of Chad's grave, St Peter's cathedral, St Mary's church and a shrine tower’ and ‘Two churches in 672 and a shrine’.

Speculated appearance of St Peters.  

3.    The site of Chad’s grave, near the church of St Mary according to Bede, is most likely at the east end of the retractable, nave platform. Which means Bede’s ‘little house’ of timber surrounding the grave is on this spot. The comparatively long episcopacy of Wilfrid as bishop of Mercia would indicate the building of the stone, shrine tower as a mausoleum for Chad; late 7th or early-8th century. This would be with collaboration from Bishop Headda. The pilgrimage centre would have been valued by King Offa. 

4.    The mausoleum tower would be east of the main church. Shapland gives nine possible examples of Anglo-Saxon mausolea being small square, or rectangular buildings east of the church.[8] Some of the examples are not without dissension, especially in regard to their existence. He drew a comparison with Charlemagne’s imperial mortuary chapel at Aachen and derived the mausolea from early dynastic burial mounds and tombs. Many of the examples given are Mercian. This spatial arrangement disagrees with the idea of early church sites resembling the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. See the post, ‘Early Lichfield set out like Jerusalem.’ That is because Christ’s rock tomb was west of Constantine’s basilical church.

 

Shapland concluded with, “the materials from which the Anglo-Saxons made their churches, as well as the forms they took, made them as much eloquent statements of belief and political allegiance as they were practical spaces for worship.”      

NB There is a problem with naming the people Saxon or Anglo-Saxon (the preferred title in academic publications). Based on surviving texts, early inhabitants of the region were commonly called englisc and angelcynn. From 410 A.D. when the Romans left to shortly after 1066, the term only appears three times in legal charters in the entire corpus of Old English literature and all in the tenth century. Anglo-Saxon has been kept because it is understood.

  

[1] M. Shapland, ‘The Cuckoo and the Magpie: The building culture of the Anglo-Saxon Church.’ Chapter 5 in The Material Culture of the built environment in the Anglo-Saxon World, eds. M. C. Hyer and G. R. Owen-Croker, (Liverpool: 2015), 92.

[2] Ibid, 93.

[3] B. Gilmour ‘The Anglo-Saxon church at St Paul-in-the-Bail, Lincoln,’ In Notes and News, Journal Medieval Archaeology, (1979), 23, 1, 214–18.

[4] R. Gilchrist and C. Greeb, ‘Glastonbury Abbey archaeological investigations 1904–79. The Society of Antiquaries of London, (2015), 418.

[5] The importance of this council has been argued. Essentially it was a local gathering of the leading clergy of the Northumbrian church with some national bishops and presided over by King Oswiu. It was symbolic. It marked Romanisation of the church, but the changes were not fundamental. Perhaps, the most surprising aspect was the hosts were the nuns of the monastery at Whitby (Bede names it as Streanæshealh, which means ‘the bay of the lighthouse’.) It was a testimony to Hild s influence, both as a member of the royal family of Northumbria and as abbess of the monastery. Those who exalt the early Celtic (Ionian) church see Whitby as a disaster, mainly from the perspective of Roman control and order. The Roman church, unlike the Celtic, was seen to be obsessed with sin.

[6] M. Shapland (2015), 100.

[7] Ibid, 104. The ‘Great Rebuilding’, 1050–1150.

[8] Ibid, 108. Notable kings or saints were buried in either a porticus on the side of the nave (Canterbury, Wearmouth, Hexham and Ripon) or in a separate mausoleum east of the church (Glastonbury, Whithorn, Hexham, Wells, Worcester, Winchcombe, Repton, Gloucester and possibly Bradford on Avon).

Early Lichfield set out like Jerusalem

     Columba (Colm Cille), 521–597, aged 42, left Donegal, Ireland, c. 563, in a small wicker and animal skin currach boat with twelve others and landed on the island of Iona, off Mull, on the west coast of Scotland where they built a monastery. Adomnán (Adamnán), born c. 625 in Donegal , probably a relative of Columba, joined the monastery at Iona c. 669, and ten years later became the 9th abbot. Around 680, he wrote De Locis Sanctis,[1] ‘On the Holy Places’, describing Jerusalem, Bethlehem and other holy cities. He was impressed by the layout of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.[2]  

Reconstructed sketch of Adomnán’s layout for the church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, taken [rs1] from a 9^th century drawing in Paris. There are similar drawings archived in Vienna, Brussels and Zurich. It has 4 circles representing the rotunda; the Vienna drawing has 5.

Adomnán’s drawing of the Holy Sepulchre showed a pilgrim in Jerusalem would arrive from the east and enter an outer room. This led westwards into a basilican church constructed by Emperor Constantine, c. 325. From the church a pilgrim crossed an open, paved courtyard, where they contemplated heaven, to then reach a rotunda held by 12 columns overlying the empty tomb of Christ. On the southern side of the courtyard was a chapel at the end of the Via Dolorosa, in which the rock of Golgotha held a large silver cross. Adomnán gave a book to the king of Northumbria who then wanted copies given to scholars in his kingdom. In 702/3, Bede wrote about the Holy Sepulchre complex,[3] using the same title as Adomnán’s book and later added a description in his Historia Ecclesiastica (book 5 chapter 16).[4] The ground plan of the church must have become familiar to many throughout northern Europe.[5]  Its description was a model for emulation[6] and copies were built throughout Europe. Many centres in Ireland[7], on Iona and at Lindisfarne have been cited as good possibilities. Possible sites in England have been reviewed.[8]

Route of pilgrims through Constantine’s church of the Holy Sepulchre

Iona

A sacred landscape at Iona was first suggested in 2001.[9] Adomnán, when the abbot of the monastery, listed the buildings and recent archaeology has revealed much of this landscape[10]. The site has a 7th and 8th century formidable inner and outer vallum, a mid-7th century shrine chapel probably to house the relics of St Columba, and the floor of a burnt wattle building (3.8 m x 2.8 m internally) on a rock known as the Tòrr an Aba. This building is now thought to be the hut  where Columba wrote and oversaw the community.[11] On the day before his death Columba compared the Iona monastery with Jerusalem[12].

Pilgrims would arrive on the east shore of the site and enter through a southern gate in the double vallum boundary, simulating the walls of Jerusalem. They entered the early monastic church (thought to be under the Nave of the Benedictine Abbey, but still has to be located). From here, they moved westwards and entered the plateola, equivalent to the Jerusalem courtyard, in which were high crosses, prayer stones and a well, perhaps used for baptising. The south side was connected to a 7th or 8th-century paved roadway labelled the ‘Street of the Dead’ linking three chapels and having alongside at least 7 standing crosses. Finally, the pilgrim reached Columba’s shrine chapel, of which only the lower courses have survived, reminding them of Christ’s tomb. Pilgrims were visiting a comparable Jerusalem and completed several times was equal to the hazardous journey to Jerusalem.

        

Pilgrimage route envisaged at Iona

 Lindisfarne

It is conjectured  a similar landscape existed at Lindisfarne substantiating its name of Holy Island. Pilgrims arrived by boat on the east side of the island and then moved to the church. Isolated sculptured stones found in and around the remains of the Norman priory (1080) could mean the early St Peter’s church is located within or by the priory.[13] This church built by Finan, 651 x 661, held the relics of Aidan and Cuthbert. To the west of this possible church now stands the parish church of St Mary and perhaps this is over the earlier church that held Cuthbert’s relics. Between the two churches is an early cross base within an open place. This is a little evidence for two church structures, holding important saint’s relics being in an east-west alignment with an open place (plateola?) possibly containing standing crosses.

Pilgrimage route at Lindisfarne

  Ripon and Hexham

            The crypts at Ripon and Hexham have longed been connected with Bishop Wilfrid.[14] They are often said to resemble catacombs in Rome seen by Wilfrid on his pilgrimages, but a more nuanced view is now understood. They embody architectural allusions to one of the seminal buildings of Christian architecture, namely the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem.[15] This measured statement indicates some difficulty in fully proving a connection between the three buildings. Adamnan’s drawing shows a grave surmounted by a rotunda and the crypts are rectangular. Bailey pointed out the earliest descriptions of Christ’s tomb chamber is rectangular. Also,  Wilfrid in his copying of the tomb might not have intended to be precise. Despite this, entry would be from the east and the central area surrounded by passages. There is a first room and then a main chamber. This chamber was vaulted and ‘big enough for 9 people’. The roof was low and could be touched. Chisel marks were all over the tomb walls. Wall to wall dimension is c. 7 feet. Positioning of lights was similar. All these constituent parts are at Ripon and Hexham. 7 feet is the well attested length of Christ’s tomb.[16] This architectural invocation of Jerusalem remains speculative.

Wilfrid’s crypt at Hexham

 Lichfield

With Bishop Wilfrid’s close involvement with Mercia, it raises the hypothesis of a sacred landscape at Lichfield.[17] If eight of the first bishops at Lichfield were connected with and familiar with Lindisfarne and Iona,[18] then a similar layout would be plausible. The revealed foundations of buildings at Lichfield have been seen to be falling into this same pattern of churches, chapels, tombs, standing crosses, wells and other liturgical features and all having a near alignment.[19]  Churchmen, especially Northumbrians who had visited Rome, were interested in processions between buildings as part of their liturgical practices.[20] Bishop Wilfrid of Ripon, when in Rome between 703 and 705, had every opportunity to participate in these new papal processions and presumably from 706 imitated this at Hexham.[21] Did he introduce the liturgical celebration to Lichfield? Did he organise a sacred landscape numinous to pilgrims and ensure the enduring cult of St Chad? Was Lichfield a Mercian Jerusalem?

Speculative layout of a 'sacred landscape' at Lichfield. It was a monasterium or religious community.   

    Archaeology in 2003 in the nave revealed three sides to a foundation of a building around a semi-subterranean pit-chamber approximately 2 m square and 800 mm deep.[22]  The presence of the left end of a shrine chest known as the ‘Lichfield Angel’ and the surrounding graves of priests who would have wanted to be buried near to Chad, indicates this was his grave. The surrounding building was c. 7 m (23 feet) wide north-south[23] and the walls approximately 1.2 m (4 feet) wide suggesting a tall tower building. The pit-chamber was offset to the north and this was noted to be similar to Christ’s tomb. A length of 2 m (6.6 feet) is close to the size of Christ’s tomb. If it was lined, timber was thought likely, this would account for a smaller pit. The similarity to Christ’s hypogeum is tenuous, but with Wilfrid being Bishop of Mercia and apparently encouraging the cult of Chad any architectural invocation of Jerusalem has to be considered. Indeed, Wilfrid’s church building endeavours have to be uppermost when considering the archaeology at Lichfield.

Arrangement excavated at Lichfield at the east end of the nave.

 Postscript

Bishop Walter Langton moved Chad’s relics to the retroquire in front of his Shrine Chapel.[24] This autumn the shrine location will be updated with a hanging corona above a relic of Chad. This means a pilgrim arriving today will enter a nave (narthex equivalent) and moving eastwards enter the inner church (choir – presbytery – high altar) and finally reach a shrine. Apart from being a reverse orientation (west to east) this is similar to Adomnán’s drawing, Iona layout, possible Lindisfarne line of churches, early church arrangement at Ripon and Hexham and the postulated sacred landscape of early Lichfield.

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[1] British Library, Imago mundi (part II, 1r–78r); Adomnán, De Locis Sanctis (part II, 78v–93v). It is part of Cotton MS Tiberius D V, part II, ff 1–93 and was copied in the 4th quarter of the 14th century.

[2] Though to have been described to Adomnán by a Gallic bishop, Arculf or Arculfus, from his pilgrimage to the Near East, 679–682.

[3] G. H. Brown, A companion to Bede (Woodbridge: 2009),71.

[4] J. McClure, and R. Collins, Bede. The ecclesiastical history of the English People (Oxford: 1994), 264. Bede’s abridged account had a few minor differences with Adomnán’s version, see P. P. O'Neill,     'Imag(in)ing the Holy Places: A comparison between the diagrams in Adomnan’s and Bede's De Locis Sanctis', Journal of Literary Onomastics.(2017), 6, 1, 42–60.

[5] T. O'Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Place (London: 2007), 175–203.

[6] J. Blair, The church in Anglo-Saxon society (Oxford: 2005), 201.

[7] D. Jenkins, Holy, holier, holiest. The sacred topography of the early Irish Church. In Studia Traditionis Theologiae. (2010) Brepols Publishers,  claimed at least four early Irish monasteries resembled Jerusalem.

[8] H. Gittos, Liturgy, architecture and sacred places in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: 2013) 19–54.

[9] A. MacDonald, 'Aspects of the monastic landscape in Adomnan’s Life of Columba', in J. Carey, M. Herbert and P. O' Riain (eds.) Studies in Irish hagiography: Saints and Scholars (Dublin: 2001),15–30.

A recent Statement of Significance for Iona Abbey given by Historic Environment Scotland 2019, states Adomnán’s work provides a framework for understanding how the planning and development of Iona and its liturgical landscape was conceived as a reflection of the heavenly Jerusalem.

[10] E. Campbell and A. Maldonado, ‘A new Jerusalem 'at the ends of the earth': interpreting Charles Thomas's excavations at Iona Abbey 1956—63’, The Ant. J. (2020),1–53.

[11] ibid. 20. It has been suggested Columba’s shrine chapel was the first of its kind and built mid-8th century, see T, Ó Carragáin, 'The architectural setting of the cult of relics in early medieval Ireland', The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, (2003), 133,130–176. This date could indicate the time of construction for Chad’s shrine.

[12] ibid. T. Ó Carragáin (2003), 144.

[13] D. Petts, D. ‘A place more venerable than all in Britain: The archaeology of Anglo-Saxon Lindisfarne', in R. Gameson (ed.) The Lindisfarne Gospels: New perspectives (Leiden, 2017), 7.

[14] T. H. Turner, ‘Observations on the crypt at Hexham Church, Northumberland’, Archaeol. J. (1845),  2, 240–1. J. Walbran, ‘Observation on the Saxon crypt under the Cathedral Church at Ripon,  commonly called St Wilfrid’s needle’, Royal Archaeological Institute, York Meeting 1846 (1848), 4.

[15] See Conant (1956), Krautheimer (1971), Biddle (1994) and Wilkinson (2002) all quoted by R. N. Bailey, ‘St Wilfrid – a European Anglo-Saxon’, Wilfrid Abbot, Bishop, Saint. Papers from the 1300th Anniversary Conferences, ed. N. J. Higham (Donington, 2013), 120.

[16] Ibid. Bailey (2013) 121–3.

[17] See the post ‘Wilfrid of Ripon and Mercia’.

[18] Diuma (Irish), Ceollach (Irish or Scottish), Trumhere or Trumheri (Yorkshire), Jaruman or Jurumannus (possibly Irish), Chad or Caedda (Northumbrian), Wynfrith (Chad’s deacon and probably from the same background), Headda (associated with Yorkshire), Wilfrid (Northumbrian), see R. Sharp, Drawn to the light. A history of dark times, (Studley: 2018),109, 113.

[19] W. Rodwell, Archaeological excavation in the nave of Lichfield Cathedral. (Unpub. report held in Lichfield Cathedral Library) (2003), 6. Also W. Rodwell, J. Hawkes, E. Howe and R. Cramp, ‘The Lichfield Angel: A spectacular Anglo-Saxon painted sculpture, The Ant. J. (2008), 88, 50–1.

[20] H. Gittos, Liturgy, architecture and sacred places in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: 2013), 107.

[21] É Ó Carragáin and A. Thacker, ‘Wilfrid in Rome’, Wilfrid Abbot, Bishop, Saint. Papers from the 1300th Anniversary Conferences, ed. N. J. Higham (Donington, 2013), 227–8.

 [22] W. Rodwell,  Archaeological excavation in the nave of Lichfield Cathedral, Unpub. report in Lichfield Cathedral Library, (2004).

[23] The east-west axis could not be determined since the excavation had to finish before the east wall was possibly found.

[24] See the post ‘St Chad’s shrines’.

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