Abstract. Early 7th century churches followed a pattern in layout and design. Applying these norms to the early church at Lichfield suggests how it might have looked.
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 (now known as Englisc or Early Medieval people) 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.
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 in the past). 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. It is now called Early Medieval.
[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).
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