Ancient churches: St Peter’s, Petersham

St. Peter’s church at Petersham, just outside Richmond, overlooking the Thames, has a fascinating history to which today’s building fails to do justice. Pevsner thinks it “charming” but I have to disagree. The district of Petersham contains mansions built for the gentry and aristocrats of the eighteenth century, and at first sight we might be forgiven for supposing that the church itself was of a similar age, a prim red-brick structure of neo-classical appearance. But its bizarre shape hints at something more complex, for this church is wider than it is long, its nave and chancel dwarfed by its transepts.

But even if the building does not appear to be ancient, the site is: today’s church is the third to stand here. The first was Anglo-Saxon, and is recorded in the Domesday Book where the place-name is given as Patricesham. As usual with Saxon churches, we have no idea when or by whom it was built. We do know however that in the seventh century this area was granted by Frithuwold, a ‘sub-king’ of the Mercian king Wulfhere, to Chertsey Abbey. The charter which sets this out is famous for being the first known document to refer to ‘Surrey’ – although the precise location, extent and status of this seventh century ‘Surrey’ are all unclear.

No trace of the Saxon church survives; it was replaced after the Conquest by a second building, put up in the twelfth and/or thirteenth century. The sole remaining visible relic of this medieval phase is a blocked-up lancet window on the north side of the chancel.

The window dates to the late thirteenth century, which gives us a terminus ante quem, a latest possible date, for construction of the church as a whole.

By this time Petersham church had become a token, a playing-piece in ecclesiastical power-games. Since the seventh century the manor – and presumably the church – had belonged to Chertsey Abbey, a connection which was confirmed in the Domesday Book in the eleventh century. But some time after this the church was re-designated as a chapel belonging to the important church at Kingston. And then in the thirteenth century Kingston itself, together with the Petersham chapel, was acquired by the increasingly powerful and acquisitive Priory at Merton.

This arrangement continued for three hundred years and was still in place in 1505 when the medieval church was largely demolished and replaced by the third church. It is unclear what prompted this: the early sixteenth century was not a particularly busy time for parish church renovation. But as things turned out, Petersham’s new church was probably one of the last built in Catholic England; less than forty years later Merton Priory was swept away by the Reformation, and the former chapel embarked on a new career as an Anglican parish church.

The church built in 1505 forms the core of the building which stands today. But it has been continually added to, and eventually overwhelmed, by numerous extensions in the seventeenth century (new south transept and west tower), eighteenth century (new north transept) and nineteenth century (south transept enlarged, north transept heightened). Hence the building we see today, which contrives somehow to be both prim and eccentric.    

SOURCES

Bridget Cherry & Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2: South, Penguin Books, London, 1994, p. 514.

John Cloake, Richmond Past, Historical Publications, London, 1991.

A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 3. Victoria County History, London, 1911.

Ancient churches: Lumley Chapel, Cheam

On entering the small Lumley Chapel in Cheam, the immediate impression is of cool classicism, white plaster walls with ornate mouldings, containing an extraordinary profusion of elaborate tombs and monuments.

If asked to put a date on the place, judging purely from the interior, I think many of us would go for the seventeenth century, though in fact it dates from the very end of the sixteenth.

But step outside again, and we are immediately in a different era. The external walls, with their impressive patchwork of flint, stone, old brick and new brick, representing hundreds of years of mending and repair, make it very clear that this building is old.

It is in fact the sole surviving fragment of the medieval church which was demolished in the nineteenth century to be replaced by an entirely new church, a few yards to the north. The chapel was originally the chancel, the east end, of the medieval church, and it probably only escaped demolition itself because of its collection of tombs and monuments.

We are concerned, however, with the chapel’s age. The Domesday Book records that there was a church at Cheam in 1086, and given that the Domesday Book pre-dated the Norman church-building boom, it follows that the Cheam church, like others listed in Domesday, was almost certainly Anglo-Saxon. The question therefore arises: might the Lumley Chapel include any fabric dating back to this Anglo-Saxon church?

We know the history of the church in broad outline. In phase one, it was a simple nave and chancel. In phase two, the nave was enlarged and an aisle and chapel were added to the south.

According to the Victoria County History, the church was built “not later than” the thirteenth century. It derives this date from the Early English style of a blocked-up arch which can still be seen in the chapel’s south wall.

But this arch belongs to phase two: it was one of five arches making up an arcade which gave access to the south aisle, and it was built at the same time as these. The arch is indeed Early English in style and does indeed help us date aisle and arcade to the thirteenth century – but this takes us no closer to fixing a date for the nave-and-chancel building which preceded it.

Pevsner was prepared to go further back; with his usual economy of expression, he classed the chapel as “possibly C12”, implying that the medieval church was originally built in the Norman style.

But I confess that I am drawn to Herbert Dunk. Writing in the 1950s, he put forward a detailed argument in favour of an Anglo-Saxon origin for the chapel. He did so by reference to three specific features.

Firstly, he highlighted two blocked-up square-headed windows in the east wall, which he dated to the second half of the tenth century.

When I visited recently I could only find one of these, but part of the east wall was covered in dense foliage so perhaps the other was hidden behind it. The opening I did find was clearly ancient and deliberately made, with its own small stone lintel. It hardly qualifies as a ‘window’, for it is tiny, a few inches square, and would have admitted little if any light. But that is secondary: the important point is that it is an architectural feature which is difficult to attribute to either the Norman or Gothic traditions.   

Secondly, Dunk drew attention to two blocked-up round-headed windows in the north wall.

In principle, we might expect round-headed windows to be Norman, but Dunk insisted that the arches and jambs at Cheam are typical of late-Saxon work and quite unlike Norman work.

Thirdly, he pointed to the quoin running up the chapel’s north-east corner in which stones are arranged so as to present alternate long and short sides. This, he said, is an example of the Anglo-Saxon ‘long-and-short’ style of masonry.

I am not aware that Dunk’s detailed arguments have been challenged. If they have, I would love to know where and by whom.

Until then, I am inclined to believe that, baroque interior notwithstanding, the chapel in Cheam was originally the chancel of the Anglo-Saxon church recorded in the Domesday Book.

SOURCES:

Cherry, Bridget & Pevsner, Nikolaus (1994), The Buildings of England: London 2: South, London, pp. 651-2.

Dunk, Herbert (1954), ‘The Lumley Monuments in the ancient church of St. Dunstan, Cheam, Surrey’, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, new series, volume 2, pp. 93-107.

Malden, H.E. (ed.) (1912), A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 4, London, pp. 194-9. 

Ancient churches: Kingston

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.

Source: Owen Manning & William Bray. 1814. The History & Antiquities of the County of Surrey. London.

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. 

Ancient churches: All Saints, Orpington

All Saints, Orpington, is the second in our sequence of pre-Conquest South London churches. It occupies a prominent site on Church Hill, rising to the east of Orpington High Street, and most of the site today is taken up by a large church in a modernist Gothic style, dating from the late 1950s. I quite like its airy spaciousness, unlike the Pevsner guide which dismisses the design as “flimsy and unconvincing”. But whatever one’s opinion of the modern church, the focus here is upon the smaller, older structure which now serves as its northern ante-chapel.

This was the original All Saints: a striking west door, a short and narrow nave with chancel, with a tower to the north at the nave’s east end. The tower thus occupies approximately the same place in the overall design as the northern chapel at St. Paulinus, covered in the previous post.

At first sight the west door appears emphatically Norman, with beautifully deep and clear chevron decoration over the entrance. But the arch is pointed, where a Norman arch would be round. Pevsner’s view is that this door, plus the chancel arch, and the north tower with its tiny lancet window, were all part of a “remodelling” which took place around 1200, when early Gothic design was just starting to challenge the Norman/Romanesque hegemony. If this is right, then we might choose to see the west door as transitional: looking back to Norman in its decorative motifs, and forward to Gothic in its overall framing.  

But there are also two other features, one rather obscure and the other in clear view, which confirm that this church has a history stretching back into the Anglo-Saxon period. The obscure feature concerns the delicacy of the nave walls, which lack the breadth and bulk which any Norman builder would have insisted upon, given their height. This is a common difference between Saxon and Norman masonry: the Normans were obsessed with thickness and bulk, pouring vast quantities of rubble into their walls and columns, producing a brute strength which made possible their most spectacular constructions, such as the cathedral at Durham. Saxon churches were smaller and less ambitious.

All Saints’ second Saxon feature is a sundial, missing the top third of its circular face, which was discovered within the nave’s old south wall when it was demolished to make way for the new church in the 1950s. The sundial was then placed on the new south wall where it can still be seen – but it was unfortunately fixed upside down. I have reversed some of the images below so that it is seen as originally intended.

Anglo-Saxon sundials are rare enough, but this one is even more precious because upon its face is writing. Inside its rim run two lines of patterned moulding, between which are inscribed familiar letters from the Latin alphabet, although the language they represent here is Old English. The words describe the sundial’s function.

There are also four Latin characters inside the inner moulding, in the segments formed by lines which radiate from the centre.

These read “OR …. VM” and it has been suggested that they are abbreviations for ORLOGIUM VIATORUM or perhaps ORLOGIUM VIATORIS. Orlogium seems to be an alternative spelling of horologium, the Latin for a timepiece such as a sundial; while viator’s primary meaning is ‘traveller’ but it can also mean ‘messenger’. So overall this may be a declaration that the sundial brings a message or news about the time of day.

Finally, within some of the other inner segments, are characters which are not from our familiar alphabet.

These are Anglo-Saxon runes, and discussion of runes runs a risk of straying into dangerous territory. The fact that runes are associated with various early medieval Germanic cultures in north-west Europe has persuaded some present-day white supremacists to seize upon them as emblems of the ‘white race’ to which they think they belong. This is of course a delusional racist fantasy. But it is important to spell it out, and to distinguish between runes themselves, and the lies which racists tell about them. Runes are not racial markers or emblems of a mythical ‘white race’; they are an important early medieval form of writing, a source of historical information. We cannot allow racists to define their significance; we must preserve a rational space in which to discuss runic writing calmly and sanely in a spirit of historical enquiry.

In the case of the Orpington sundial, we have no idea of the meaning of its runic characters, but we can say something about its context. It was found in a church, which makes it part of a wider pattern. Almost all Anglo-Saxon ‘rune-stones’ have been found in or close to churches, and on some of them, such as the famous Ruthwell cross, the script itself recounts stories from the Bible. Romantic notions that Anglo-Saxons were pagans, so runes must be pagan too, are simply wrong. Anglo-Saxon culture persisted in England for more than five centuries, during which time it was in constant flux and became thoroughly and devoutly Christian; and inevitably, the content of its runic writing reflected these cultural changes.

For those who are absolutely determined to find Christian-pagan conflict, the All Saints sundial might seem to offer encouragement, because when it was found in the 1950s, it was enclosed within the church’s Anglo-Saxon south wall, facing inwards into the fabric of the wall, as if to prevent any possibility of its dial or inscriptions being visible. Could this have been a case of deliberate concealment by the church’s Christian builders, intended to thwart the sundial’s pagan power?

It’s highly unlikely. Both the sundial and the stone church almost certainly date to the late Anglo-Saxon period, the tenth or eleventh centuries, by which time England was a thoroughly Christian society. The sundial’s interment probably has a more mundane explanation: human error perhaps, or personal spite.

And on the upside, the long centuries spent locked inside the wall meant that when it was finally discovered, the sundial was in pristine condition.     

Ancient churches: St. Paulinus, St. Paul’s Cray

In 2016 and 2017 this blog explored the network of roads, built by the Romans, which run through the territory which we know today as South London. Some of these, such as the road to Lewes, have left few traces in the modern townscape; but others, such as Stane Street (a.k.a. the A24) or Watling Street (the A2), have been used continuously for two thousand years and are still in use today,

These Roman roads are an example of long-term continuity of place and use, a direct functional connection between ourselves and people who lived centuries ago. Ancient churches are another example. In Pevsner’s London 2: South guide, Bridget Cherry dismisses outer London as a whole as “one of the least rewarding areas in England” for anyone interested in ancient churches, but our focus here is different from hers. The Pevsner guides are concerned with extant buildings, standing structures whose architecture offers itself for analysis. But we are concerned with historical continuities of place and function, a broader conception which may draw upon the evidence of extant structures but is not limited to them. To explain what I mean, let me refer again to those Roman roads.

The A24 is an entirely modern road, constructed of modern materials. It shares no physical fabric with the original Roman Stane Street. And yet for long stretches the A24 faithfully follows the course of Stane Street, a course mapped out by Roman engineers; and it serves the function envisaged by those engineers in that it is a road, a highway, a ribbon of worked surface intended to facilitate rapid movement. It would simply be perverse to deny this continuity between Roman road and modern road, despite the absence of shared fabric. Continuity of place and function does not require continuity of physical fabric.

So: this is the first in a series of posts about ancient churches in South London; churches whose sites represent a sustained human religious presence over many centuries.

We start with South London churches which are listed in the Domesday Book.

The small church of St. Paulinus stands in St. Paul’s Cray, but is the only viable candidate for the church which the 1086 Domesday Book records at ’North Cray’. St Paulinus was ‘retired’ as a parish church in the 1970s, and over the past 50 years has provided a home for various community organisations, charities, and currently a group of Pentecostalists. Yet it remains a delight: a neat stone church, a stocky western tower, an impressive timber lych-gate, a well-tended graveyard.

Much of the external visible fabric, including the tower, probably dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century, the time of the earliest Gothic, with its experiments in simple pointed arches and tiny lancet windows. But this thirteenth-century work enlarged upon an earlier stone building dating from the eleventh century, almost certainly before the Conquest. Surviving fragments of this eleventh century church can be seen on the north side, on the upper layer of the nave wall, and the north-east corner of the small porticus or chapel. In both of these places ancient fabric survives, incorporating Roman bricks and tiles.

The north wall has had a complex history. The original eleventh-century stone church was a simple structure comprising a nave, a chancel to the east, and a small chapel to the north-east. The external north wall which we see today was the external north wall of this original building. But in the thirteenth century the whole church was broadened, with aisles added both north and south, so that the external north wall now became an internal wall, separating the nave from the new aisle, pierced by arched openings to allow access between them. Some centuries later the north aisle was demolished, thus returning the wall to its original external function, exposed to the outside world once more. Today we can still see the arches of the openings that used to give access to the aisle, now blocked up, and in one place providing a setting for a new window.

And if we look up, above the line of the arches, we see a layer of original eleventh century masonry which carries a scatter of red Roman tiles, still clearly visible.

Red Roman bricks also appear in the north-east external corner (the quoin) of the chapel, grouped to mark its rising line.   

This use of Roman material is not surprising. There are several Roman sites along the Cray valley, and from the fifth century onwards their bricks and tiles and dressed stone would have been looted by local farmers. But the stone church of St. Paulinus was built not in the immediate post-Roman period but in the eleventh century, 600 years after the end of local Roman culture. The historical distance between the builders of St. Paulinus and the Romans, was as great as the historical distance between ourselves and the Wars of the Roses. And it is clear from the way in which Roman materials were incorporated in the church’s fabric, in small quantities in one or two places, that by this time they were valued not as items of practical utility, but rather for purposes of decoration and mystique.

The decorative aspect is still visible today, the rich red of Roman bricks and tiles standing out against grey stone and mortar. As for the mystique: in the eleventh century these Roman fragments were already very old, scraps of antiquity; and what’s more they were Roman, remnants of that fallen empire of which the Roman Catholic Church was the institutional successor. By incorporating Roman material into the fabric of St. Paulinus, the church’s eleventh century builders acknowledged this continuity.

Finally: there is no reason to assume that this eleventh century stone church represents St Paulinus’s first foundation. It is entirely possible that the stone church was the successor to an earlier wooden church on the same site, because across southern England local churches were being founded by local landowners and bishops from the ninth century onwards.

The site of St Paulinus, a few yards from the River Cray, may therefore represent a continuity of Christian worship going far back into the Anglo-Saxon period, when this area was part of the kingdom of Kent, and the kingdom of England was unheard-of.