Ancient churches: St Mary, Beddington

Rivers have always been magnets for human activity: barriers, highways, sources of water, food, energy, and plants with a thousand uses. Hence the endless busyness, going back millennia, in the landscape around Beddington, just west of Croydon on the River Wandle.

Over the years archaeologists have found traces of Bronze Age ditches; a Roman villa under the sewage works to the north of the river; a Roman lead coffin found on the south side which is now housed in the church; and Anglo-Saxon cemeteries on both sides of the river, with a tenth-century coin of King Aethelstan to the north, and burials to the south which date back another four or five hundred years, to the first period of Germanic settlement.

The place-name may derive from the Old English ‘bedd’ meaning, predictably, a bed. This led in the past to antiquarian speculation that the original village offered accommodation for travellers on Stane Street, the old Roman road, which was believed to pass close by. This notion of an Anglo-Saxon hotel or coaching-inn is beguiling, but unlikely, because Stane Street was not close by. Its nearest approach was at Cheam, about four miles to the west. The Roman road to Brighton was closer, though even that was about two miles away as it passed through Croydon Old Town.

Whether or not it could boast an hotel, we know that Anglo-Saxon Beddington had a church, which is recorded in the Domesday Book. A hundred years ago the Reverend Thomas Bentham argued that this church must have been standing by the late ninth century because Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, died at Beddington in 894. Bentham thought that a bishop was unlikely to visit a village unless it had a church, so there must have been a church at Beddington at the time of his visit, during which he unfortunately died. I’m not convinced. This argument seems to me to assume that the church in Saxon Wessex a thousand years ago, at a time of recent war against the Danes followed by an armed truce, operated along similar lines to the suburban Anglicanism of the 1920s, with gracious episcopal visitations to diocesan churches. I do not believe that we can fix the date of Beddington’s Saxon church any more precisely than to say that it must have existed by the late eleventh century in order to be recorded in Domesday.

However, it is generally accepted that this Domesday church was on the same site as the present church, just south of the Wandle. The present church is described pithily in Pevsner’s 1960s guide to Surrey as “Perp throughout”. This is not quite true: its style is very largely Perpendicular, but it is also significantly Victorian, each reflecting a moment of rebuilding and renovation, one orchestrated by local lord Sir Nicholas Carew in the late fourteenth century, and the other by local priest Canon Alexander Bridges in the nineteenth. Both men were wealthy, and it shows; St. Mary’s is unusually large and impressive for the size of the parish which it serves.

The Perpendicular style is best known for its large windows with shallow pointed arches, with stone mullions and metal tracery often containing panes of stained glass. The confidence, the audacity, to construct such windows derived from a sophisticated appreciation of the load-bearing capacities of the pointed arch, and its ability to direct and manage great downward stress even when the wall beneath consisted largely of glass.

Carew’s project was ambitious, but he was not starting from scratch. He was essentially re-modelling a Norman church which in his day was already about two hundred years old. Just as nothing remains of the original Saxon church, so little survives of this Norman successor – except the font, squat and solid on its sturdy pillars, harking back defiantly to an era before pointed arches and painted glass.

Canon Bridges’ nineteenth century work was mainly, and predictably, inspired by romantic medievalism. I say this not as criticism, but in affectionate appreciation. For instance, the extensive Victorian painting on walls and pillars and ceiling on and beyond the chancel arch is wonderful, rich in colour and detail. We cannot know if this is how the original medieval church looked, but this is surely how it ought to have looked.

To conclude: the first church at Beddington was built in Anglo-Saxon times, recorded in the Domesday Book, and stood on the south bank of the River Wandle in a landscape which had been settled for thousands of years. It was close to the sites of one or more pre-Christian cemeteries. No physical fabric from this Saxon church survives, but the present-day church is in the same place, and to that extent bears witness to it, and to the continuity of a human presence in this place.

SOURCES

John Addy (1874), ‘Account of a Roman villa lately discovered at Beddington, Surrey’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 6.

Anon (1792), The Environs of London, T. Cadell and W. Davies, London.

Rev. Thomas Bentham (1923), A History of Beddington, John Murray, London.

John Wickham Flower (1874), ‘Notices of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Beddington, Surrey’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 6.

H,E. Malden (ed.) (1912), A History of the County of Surrey vol. 4, Victoria County History, London.

Ian Nairn & Nikolaus Pevsner (1962), The Buildings of England: Surrey, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Sarah Porteus et al. (2019), ‘Archaeological investigations at the former George Payne Ltd site, 57 Croydon Road, Beddington’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 102.

Ancient churches: All Saints, Carshalton

All Saints Carshalton stands prominently above the local High Street, overlooking ponds from which rises the River Wandle. Seen from here it clearly belongs to the nineteenth century, a neo-Gothic parish church of dressed stone and flint, tall windows with complex tracery, the creation of a single mind. The mind in question belonged to Reginald Blomfield, a late Victorian and Edwardian architect mainly known for his country houses and gardens.

Viewed from this vantage point, we might expect that All Saints as a whole is Blomfield’s work, but it isn’t. Walk around to the south side, facing the churchyard, and things look very different. The wall here lacks the uniformity of the north side. It is instead a riot of different materials speaking of a complex history: old stone, newer stone, old brick, newer brick, flint.

Here on the south side, in the quiet of the churchyard, it is clear that All Saints has a story to tell. And given that the Domesday Book records a church at Carshalton (which it referred to as Altoun or ‘Old Town’), we are entitled to suspect that the story has an Anglo-Saxon beginning.       

Interpreting any church is an exercise in mental archaeology. This doesn’t mean that we should dig up our ancient churches; it means that we should apply a version of archaeological interpretation when we try to understand them. It means working backwards through time, backwards through the successive phases of their building and alteration, just as archaeologists interpret an excavated site by working backwards through its layers of human presence, the more recent underpinned by the earlier.

At All Saints, the most recent (fifth) phase is Blomfield’s church, built just over a century ago. He was brought in because the old medieval church was in trouble: its northern side was collapsing. But Blomfield’s brief was not just a rescue job: he was also charged with making the whole church much larger, in response to a growing population as Carshalton transformed itself from small Surrey village to busy modern suburb.

Domesday tells us that there was already a church somewhere on this site at the time of the Norman Conquest. We do not know its overall ground-plan, but we believe that it included a tower (first phase). Around 1150, this pre-Conquest church was demolished, except for the tower, and a new nave was built to its west (second phase). After about forty or fifty years a north aisle was built (third phase); and a south aisle, and redesigned chancel effectively sitting beneath the tower, were added some years later (fourth phase). After this, as far as we know, the church’s basic structure remained untouched until Blomfield’s arrival seven hundred years later, though of course there were alterations to windows, fittings, monuments and the like.

Blomfield demolished the north aisle and replaced it not just with a new aisle but with a whole new nave and chancel, which effectively dragged the church’s centre of gravity a few feet to the north. This involved the relegation of the old medieval nave to the status of south aisle; and given that the old nave had already possessed its own south aisle, the overall result was to create two south aisles, inner and outer, which is what we see today. The nicely preserved arcade between them bears witness to their former more elevated status.

By the same token, a new chancel at the east end of the new nave replaced the medieval chancel, which now found itself at the east end of the inner south aisle. It was redesignated as a Lady Chapel, and in that role today it is rather intimate and lovely.  

But what of the tower, which is the church’s oldest part? To the casual eye today, viewed from outside, it doesn’t look particularly old.

But its claim to a Saxon origin lies within, where there is an old window, not accessible to the public, which seems to date from the eleventh century. The base of this window may be even older. This means that the modern-looking tower which we see today is the latest iteration of a tower which has been standing here since Anglo-Saxon times. And if this is the case, then it may also mean that the relation between tower and church has changed dramatically since it was first built.

Across England as a whole, about a hundred Anglo-Saxon church towers survive, in whole or part. They vary in size and design, but there is one feature that the great majority share: they stand to the west of the nave. In Carshalton, however, the tower stands at the east end of the nave. Why the anomaly?

We have to remember that the tower was originally built to accompany a Saxon church which no longer exists; it was replaced in the twelfth century by a new Norman church. When one church directly replaces another, we tend to assume that the new church occupies the same ground, that it is in effect built on the foundations of its predecessor. Very often this assumption is justified, but not always. And in this particular case, whether or not we make this assumption, we are faced with a problem. If the Norman church was built on the same ground as the Saxon church, that must mean that the Saxon masons built their tower to the east of the nave, breaking with all their own traditions and conventions – and why would they do that? Alternatively, if the Saxon tower originally stood at the west end of the nave, then the Norman masons in the twelfth century must have gone out of their way to change the whole layout, demolishing the Saxon church which lay to the east of the tower and building their own new church to its west – but why would they do that?

Forced to choose between with these two options, the second seems to me more likely. I can see no good reason why Anglo-Saxon builders in Carshalton would choose to scandalise their contemporaries by erecting something as outrageous as an eastern church tower.

But I can see why Norman builders, a century or more later, would have chosen a new site for their new church. They might of course have been influenced by local conditions; perhaps the land to the west of the tower was better, firmer, flatter. But I think it more likely that they were making a political and ecclesiastical point by deliberately breaking with Saxon tradition, deliberately breaking with the old convention of western towers, deliberately emphasising that both state and church now had new rulers and new rules.

If this is what happened – and it is no more than an informed speculation – then it would mean that traces of the original Anglo-Saxon church may lie today not under the existing church, but to the east, between the tower and the junction where the modern High Street meets The Square.

SOURCES

Cherry, Bridget & Pevsner, Nikolaus (1994), The Buildings of England: London 2: South, London, pp. 645-6.

Malden, H.E. (ed.) (1912), A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 4, London, pp. 178-188. 

Milbourn, Thomas (1880), ‘Notes on the Parish and Church of Carshalton’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 7, p. 125

Skelton, Andrew C. (1996), ‘New light on the development of Carshalton Church’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, vol. 83, pp. 1-19.

Taylor, H.M. (1978), Anglo-Saxon Architecture (vol. III), Cambridge, chapter 9.