Kingston was an important place in early medieval times. The name itself says why: it was the King’s Place, the King’s Town, and legend has it that no fewer than seven Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned here.
However, most of these seven coronations are no more than legends. They are not even ancient legends: the claim that seven kings were crowned at Kingston seems to go back no further than the nineteenth century. The only coronations for which there is contemporary evidence (from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) are those of Athelstan in 925 and Ethelred in 958. Even so, to play host to two coronations is quite impressive, especially when one of them involved a figure as significant as Athelstan.
Whatever the precise number, too much emphasis on these tenth century coronations may understate Kingston’s larger importance, because it was a significant place at least a century earlier. In the early ninth century the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex was gaining the upper hand in its long rivalry with Mercia, and its king Egbert sought to consolidate his position. He convened a ‘great council’ at Kingston in 838, at which he made a pact with the archbishop of Canterbury in which the church effectively aligned itself with Wessex, giving it an enormous ideological advantage. The fact that Kingston was chosen for such an important event means that it was already a significant site – one source refers to it as “that famous place” – and the fact that the event involved an archbishop suggests that it already possessed a considerable church, perhaps a minster church.
It is generally assumed that this Saxon church stood on the site now occupied by All Saints church, on Kingston’s ‘central island’ bounded by the Thames to the west, the Downhall or Latchmere stream to the north, and the Hogsmill to the east and south. And it is also generally assumed that as a place of royal importance, this island must have contained important secular buildings, a ‘royal vill’, in addition to the church. But despite diligent search and excavation, no such vill has yet come to light.
The Domesday Book of 1086 records a church at Kingston, which is what we would expect. We might also expect that the church referred to in Domesday was the same Saxon church as had hosted the great council in the ninth century, and the coronations in the tenth century. But not everyone agrees.
For instance William Finny, local historian and mayor of Kingston, took a different view. In the 1920s he excavated the remains of a building known as St. Mary’s Chapel, which had been built in the eleventh century and collapsed in the eighteenth century. St. Mary’s stood immediately to the south of the site where All Saints church stands today. The location is clearly marked by a series of stones and plaques, a testament to Finny’s work a century ago.
However, in my view, he allowed his enthusiasm for St. Mary’s Chapel to run away with him. Finny insisted that St. Mary’s was the church referred to in the Domesday Book, but this required him to make two large assumptions. Firstly, he had to assume that because St. Mary’s served as a chapel in later years, it must have been intended as a chapel or church when it was first put up. And secondly, he had to assume that the earlier Saxon church, which had hosted the great council and the coronations, no longer existed by 1086; here, he speculated that there must have been a Danish raid in which the Saxon church was destroyed, thus justifying the construction of St. Mary’s as a replacement.
I’m not convinced. Firstly, Finny’s Danish attack leading to the destruction of the Saxon church is pure conjecture. I suspect that he introduced this notion in order to clear the decks and leave St. Mary’s as the only possible candidate to serve as Kingston’s Domesday church.
Secondly, I’m not convinced that St. Mary’s was built as a church at all. It collapsed in 1730, so all we have to go on are some nineteenth-century copies of eighteenth-century sketches. In these sketches, at first sight, it looks like a church – but that is mainly because of the late medieval windows with their mullions and tracery, installed many centuries after construction. If we ignore the windows, we are left with a small rectangular box, with pitched-roof and gable-ends, simple and functional in design.
It is true that many local Saxon churches, especially early ones, were small and simple in design. But a new foundation in a place as important as Kingston would not have been a small local church. It would have been a significant building, probably with side-chapels and a tower. And the likelihood of it being large and elaborate would be even greater if it was erected as late as the eleventh century, when St. Mary’s was first built, because by this time Saxon church architecture was fairly sophisticated.
St. Mary’s, however, shows no such features. It is small, modest, and simple, which leads me to believe that it was not originally built as a church at all but was intended to serve some secular function. This is what Hawkins suggests, and it makes sense to me.
Of course, if this is right, then we have still not answered our original question: where was Kingston’s Domesday church?
The likeliest answer is the one that we started with and that Finny was determined to reject. The church recorded in the Domesday Book was probably the original Saxon church, which had not been destroyed in a speculative Danish raid, but was still standing. However, it did not have many more years left to it. At some point in the first half of the twelfth century this venerable Saxon building was demolished to make way for an entirely new church, on the same site, which we know today as All Saints.
Sources:
Cherry, Bridget & Nikolaus Pevsner. 1994. London 2: South, London, pp. 311-312.
Finny, W.E. St. Lawrence. 1943. ‘The Church of the Saxon Coronations at Kingston’ in Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 48, pp. 1-7
Hawkins, Duncan. 1998. ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingston: a shifting pattern of settlement’ in London Archaeologist, vol. 8, pp. 271-8.
Lewis, Hana. 2009. ‘The elusive vill: in search of Kingston’s late Saxon manor’ in London Archaeologist, vol. 12, pp. 119-26.
Victoria County History. 1911. ‘Kingston-upon-Thames: Introduction and borough’, in A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 3, London, pp. 487-501.
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