profits from their lands, increasingly began to commission their own churches. Many parish churches today have their origins as estate churches of an Anglo-Saxon landlord, which is why many parishes have boundaries that are the same as those of Saxon estates. The remarkably well-preserved church of St Peter, Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, is one such building. Built originally as an estate church next to a lordly fortified enclosure, it comprised a central tower flanked by a chancel in the east and a baptistery to the west (fig. 31). The chancel and baptistery were two-storeyed, and the tower had three storeys. This was not just a place of worship; it was a symbol of the lord’s status, a place for his heir to be baptised.
Fig. 29 All Saints’, Earls Barton, Northamptonshire. Like St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber, the tower of All Saints’ is set with a pattern of long thin stones used by the masons both structurally and decoratively as if they were timber beams. As at St Peter’s, the rest of the church is of a later date.
All Saints’, Earls Barton, Northamptonshire (fig. 29), is another example of a magnificent church conceived and built by a Saxon noble. What is now a parish church originally had its nave on the ground floor of the tower and a small chancel to its east. The floors above the nave are referred to as a belfry; the term today is solely associated with bells but in Middle English it meant something like ‘place of security’. This was perhaps where relics, vestments and plate presented to the church by its patron were stored.
Late Saxon stone-built church towers were not only status symbols and strong rooms for their patrons but were also linked to the evolving church liturgy. In the development of parish funeral rites the use of bells became increasingly important. Bells were rung as the body left the church as well as when it reached the graveside, drawing God’s attention to the prayers of the faithful and sending the deceased’s soul forth to heaven.30 Some belfries, such as the one at St Peter’s, Barton, were topped with timber spires. None of these survives today, but at St Mary’s, Sompting, Sussex, the late Saxon spire was rebuilt in the 14th century to the same pattern (fig. 30). Typically, such spires were supported by a central mast resting on a horizontal beam on the tower top; they were almost all shingled and had a characteristic shape known as a Rhenish helm. This type of pinnacle, and the central mast construction, link the design of these spires to those of Carolingian Europe.31
Fig. 30 St Mary’s, Sompting, Sussex. Although this church has a 14th-century spire, it captures the appearance of late Saxon examples. Like both St Peter’s, Barton (which would have had such a spire) and All Saints’, Earls Barton, stone is used on rubble walls like timber.
It is not known how many local churches were built by Saxon lords before the Conquest, but the majority of churches around which the parish system formed were in existence by around 1120. In total they numbered about 6,000 to 7,000 buildings. This was a major change to people’s way of life and to the appearance of the countryside. Previously, people had travelled perhaps as far as ten miles to one of approximately 800 minster churches to worship. Now, for most, there was a church in their village or town.
Building Techniques and Materials
As this chapter has demonstrated, building in England begins to diversify and become more complex from the reign of Alfred the Great. This was a process that was driven by richer, better-informed and more powerful patrons. According to King Alfred’s contemporary biographer, the king ‘did not cease … to instruct … all his craftsmen’, and King Eadred (946–955) specially went to Abingdon Abbey ‘to plan the structure of the buildings for himself. With his own hand he measured all the foundations of the monastery exactly where he decided to raise the walls.’ A manuscript from about the 1030s shows Anglo-Saxon craftsmen at work on a complex building (fig. 32), with a spectrum of craftsmen and skills.
Fig. 31 St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber. The tower and baptistery to its left date from just before 1000. The nave and porch to the right are late 13th-century. The Saxon tower was heightened in the later 11th century; before this date the tower was probably crowned by a timber spire very similar to that at Sompting (fig. 30).
The most important phenomenon must have been the rise of the anonymous (to us) master builder or architect. The Anglo-Saxons used the Latin term architectus, not to describe an architect in the modern sense but to describe people with creative responsibility for a structure. Early buildings such as Wearmouth and Jarrow (pp 34–5) could be erected with minimum skill and engineering, but as buildings became more sophisticated masons, carvers and quarry owners became crucial and the designers had a much more onerous task. It would have been impossible to build great churches such as Winchester Cathedral, or even smaller ones such as St Mary’s, Sompting, without drawings and small-scale timber models. Drawings might have been on parchment, but equally they might have been etched into large areas of plaster floor expressly laid for the purpose. In the 9th century masonry components began to be cut at the quarry, and so templates must have been made and passed to and fro. Late Saxon builders were still heavily reliant on salvaged Roman stone. St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber (fig. 31), is typical in that its stone dressings were constructed using blocks of millstone grit possibly taken from the nearby Roman site at Winteringham or from further afield in York. The crypt at Hexham Abbey, Northumberland, contains carved Roman ashlars with inscriptions, and the nearby tower at St Andrew’s, Corbridge, contains a reset Roman arch. In towns the ruins of Rome were upstanding and visible, and at Winchester, for instance, provided most of the materials necessary to construct the cathedral. In the late Saxon period it is likely that there were well-organised salvage contractors, perhaps acting under royal licence, deconstructing Roman ruins and selling on the materials for reuse.
Whilst masons were not numerous in early Saxon England, by 900 there must have been hundreds of craftsmen working in stone. The most skilled were re-cutting large Roman ashlars into window heads, balusters and quoins. Most, however, were little more than labourers. Given the relatively small number of stone buildings in Saxon England and the proximity of most to Roman ruins, the quarrying industry remained underdeveloped. Most Saxon quarries were merely shallow diggings producing huge quantities of rough rubble – the most common stone-walling material. Rubble walls could be built with a small number of technicians and a large number of unskilled labourers; such walls also relied on the skills of joiners rather than masons. Rubble was mixed with mortar and shovelled into timber shuttering; a third of the mix was mortar and this had to dry before another layer of rubble mix could be added on top. Sometimes levelling courses were put between layers of rubble, and these were often of Roman brick or tile, or perhaps herringbone masonry. Corners were now and then strengthened and straightened by stone quoins, this being known as long-and-short work. A church tower such as St Katherine’s, Little Bardfield, Essex, was entirely built of rubble in diminishing stages. Here not even the window openings had stone dressings.32
Most rubble walls were originally plastered inside and out, concealing the original construction method. This provided a canvas for surface decoration as seen at towers such as All Saints’, Earls Barton, or St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber (figs 29 and 31). This decoration, whilst imitating Roman arcades and
