The W G Hoskins Lecture 2001

‘The church in the early English landscape: old problems new approaches’ presented by Dr John Blair of Queen’s College, Oxford

The twelfth Hoskins lecture

2 June 2001

John Blair, Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, always seems to have something new to say, and treated his audience to a wide-ranging account of his current view of the Anglo-Saxon church and its relationship to society and popular religion in his paper ‘The Church in the Early English Landscape: Old Problems and New Approaches‘. Those hoping for controversial comments related to attacks made on the ‘minster hypothesis’ a few years ago may have been disappointed since, though perhaps contributing to the refinement of the theory, the arguments put forward by Rollason and Cambridge in the mid 90s did not, in the event, lead to long-lasting academic debate.

However, the historiography of the subject, with reference to Dr Blair’s first theme, the territorial role of the church in pre-Viking society, was a starting point, and he pointed out that, although churches were not a major interest for Hoskins an article on parishes was amongst his earliest publications and that his approach to ‘the unpicking of the landscape’ was of importance in developing the context of investigating churches in the context of developments in landscape and society. Dr Blair then briefly outlined his defence of the minster system which he acknowledged would have been subject to variation between regions and over time, but noted the correspondence between minsters for which early documentation survives and mother churches of the eleventh century onwards, found frequently enough to indicate continuity in the sites of locally important churches. North Gloucestershire, where good documentation shows the stable structure of ecclesiastical geography, provides an illustration. At Beckford, for example, where churchscot payments are recorded early in the period, they are found to have survived tenurial changes of the late ninth century.

A layout of mother parishes, then, was an organisational model, moulding itself to various local conditions including land use and settlement. In fact the mother churches or minsters were the centres of settlement and administration as well as religion, and their importance in these roles was actually enhanced even as their wealth and ecclesiastical role declined and to illustrate the kinds of places he meant we were reminded of Everitt’s Banburys and his own work on Bampton (Oxon) where the minsters were the principal foci for urbanisation.

This view contrasts with the older theory that royal centres were the initial and significant focal places. in fact, Dr Blair argued, it is dangerous to extrapolate too far back in time from Domesday Book, since earlier diplomas show that royal vills were transient features, relatively undeveloped, unlike the minsters which, endowed with lands, were stable, central, market places. The identification in Alfred’s day between minsters and urban sites was such that the translation of the time used the term “minster places” to render Bede’s “urban places”. Domesday Book’s royal vills at minster sites show how royal power had recognised the potential of such places and attached itself accordingly.

With these developments increasing enforcement of the laity’s obligations, although it is unclear what influenced their behaviour before these new controls were applied. Probably there had been much less regulation, with custom playing an important role. With the payment of churchscot included in Ine’s laws, it is likely that most people knew where their local minster was, and felt some obligation towards it, by the ninth century. It is simply unknown, however, how baptism had been regulated – a ‘continental’ system of baptismal churches is not in evidence in England, except in ‘abnormally Frankish’ Kent, and the lack of evidence for such may reflect the relative lack of importance of bishops in England. Burial at the minster, meanwhile, was perhaps not a common right or obligation but a privilege, explaining why outlying cemeteries seem to continue in use well beyond the adoption of Christianity, but had then fallen out of use from the ninth or early tenth century, as the laity were brought more and more into connection with the church. Another apparent difference between England and the continent, and the Celtic areas, was the lack of widespread small churches, seen elsewhere from the sixth century, reflecting again variation in circumstances, with England’s conversion comparatively late and beginning at the upper levels of society – the levels from which church foundations were first funded and endowed.

Until a layer of manorial churches was established, there were, nevertheless, ritual foci: a variety of sites in the landscape – granges, retreats and hermitages among them – linking the minsters and the peasantry. The ‘ritual landscape’ was complex and extended and lay participation in religious activities such as processions to these sites may have been enthusiastic, with the record of the Council of Clofesho in 747 showing the incorporation of pre-Christian ceremony while Christian ceremonies were in danger of becoming too “indigenised” as suggested by Alcuin’s concern over drinking bouts at hilly places on religious occasions: the coniurationes were not pagan brotherhoods but symptoms of aberrant popular Christianity, leading in turn to a desire among ecclesiastical reformers for greater control and supervision. Popular beliefs, whatever Alcuin and Boniface might think of them, had the new religion at their core, rather than survivals of paganism, and were served by the incorporation into the religious landscape of a range of undeveloped ritual foci.

In due course, though, small local churches were founded, with the first written reference, in the laws of Edgar, distinguishing those with a public function, having graveyards, from private chapels. This picture is mirrored in the archaeological evidence, as at Raunds (Northants) where a manorial chapel graduated from the latter to the former, and in other examples whose relationship to manorial complexes shows their ambiguous status as both lords’ possessions and the ritual foci of their communities. in time many of the little churches acquired land and were rebuilt in stone. They, too, show regional variation, with many more evidenced in eastern England than in the west, and consequently mother church rights were more likely to survive in the west.

But until the eleventh century, it was taken for granted that parish churches were minsters, although it is hard to know what the term for parish was: it should, John thinks, have been ‘church soke’, carrying meanings of both obligation, towards a particular church, and jurisdiction, with the concept of a parish-community deriving from a fusion of the two. With greater use of the churches including for baptism and burial, the local parish gradually became the main religious focus from the mid- tenth century and particularly between 1040-1080, and the minsters’ monopoly declined and was largely lost by the time of Domesday Book, a process compounded by the new Norman lords who, not too concerned about the minsters’ rights, alienated tithes to Norman houses. Lay ritual behaviour, then, had been refocused onto the churches, whether surviving minsters or new local churches, as reflected by the sudden increase in the occurrence of fonts from the late eleventh century, whereas very few survive from the preceding period when use of portable vessels seem to have been usual practice.

This is not to say that ritual activity in the landscape ceased. Many ‘holy’ or ‘magical’ sites – wells, trees, stones – had been inherited from the past and continued to be regarded as such, not in specificaly Christian or pagan, but rather folk-loric ways. With increasing Christianisation, regularisation and definition, from the tenth century, such sites were either ruled out of approved religious activity, or conversely adopted with Christian dedications, the institution of processions to them or even the building of churches. Such adoptions might lead to objections from stricter religious figures, such as Wulfstan of Worcester who, according to William of Malmesbury, objected to a nut tree standing by a church, the implication being that the tree held some religious significance for the locals of which Wulfstan disapproved. Exactly this kind of site has been excavated, at Keton (Rutland), where a very large tree, apparently a focus for burial, was developed by the building of a small church, which then fulfilled the religious function. A polytheistic background remained close in these ‘access points’, in the landscape, to the other world, and the fragmentary evidence allows a glimpse of an inclusive religious culture, a continuum, between the sacred as seen by clerics, and as seen by the laity.

With little having been said about the well-known debate of the mid-90s, the ensuing discussion was comparatively short, although Dr Blair had challenged some traditional views about the survival of paganism, the role of early royal centres and the value of the well-documented ecclesiastical system in Kent as a model for the rest of the country, and drawn new attention to the importance of the laity of numerous early sites across the landscape: he had given his large appreciative audience too much to think about for extensive thought-out discussion to ensue immediately. Afterwards the speaker and many of his listeners made their way to Marc Fitch House for tea, cake and the famous booksale, which, thanks to the generosity of many Friends in donating books as wel as buying them, raised a record £422.

From an original report by Jonathan Pitt.