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.
pengepast 