National Trust Histories: Wessex by Welfare Humphrey

Author:Welfare, Humphrey [Welfare, Humphrey]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781782811459
Publisher: G2 Entertainment
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Saxon ‘minster’ church at Breamore, near Fordingbridge. There have been some changes – notably the fourteenth-century chancel and some Norman doorways – but the church largely dates to about AD 1000.

At Canford Magna, near Wimborne, the Anglo-Saxon nave survives as the chancel of the Norman church but elsewhere the only indications of the minsters are their large parishes and some place-names: Beaminster, Charminster, Iwerne Minster, Sturminster and Warminster. Anglo-Saxon churches were not all as grand as the minsters; like the simple rectangular houses lived in by the members of the congregation, their places of worship were at first built of timber and roofed with tiles of stone or clay, or with thatch or shingles. These wooden churches are rarely found – they are buried under their stone successors – although one possible example was excavated behind Porch House in Potterne, near Devizes.

Some of the smaller stone churches survive, at least in part. One of the most famous is St Lawrence’s at Bradford-on-Avon, which before its rediscovery in 1856 had been converted into a school and a cottage; decorated with blind arches, its high but tiny nave, chancel and one surviving side-chapel seem to sit bolt upright. This is not, as the Victorians hoped, the church built by the poet St Aldhelm of Malmesbury in about AD700; it almost certainly dates from about three hundred years later. No-one need be disappointed, however, for on the inside, high in the holy darkness above the narrow chancel arch, two carved angels lie floating. Reflecting in their finely-sculpted robes the richness of contemporary Wessex, they probably formed a part of a Rood, or crucifixion scene, like that in Romsey Abbey. A similar angel still hovers at Winterbourne Steepleton, near Dorchester.

Many communities – perhaps those that could not at first afford to build a full church – invested in a carved cross where the Gospel could be preached. There is a fine one at Todber near Gillingham, its sides encrusted with leaves and intertwined scrolls. The strange ninth-century sculpture of the dancing man in the church at Codford St Peter, in the Wylye Valley, may be part of another such cross.

Churches, crosses and villages: these are some of the familiar constituents of the medieval landscape and of our ‘modern’ countryside. The heady days of prehistoric and Saxon supremacy were over; Wessex after the Norman Conquest was in many ways a normal, unexceptional piece of England: attractive, intricate and ever-changing.

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