The Churches of Albion

[This is an extract from a lecture which is published in full in the Transactions of the South-Eastern Union of Scientific Societies for 1929. The author, A. H. Allcroft, who was a well-known archaeo- logist and student of the classics, passed away suddenly last Decem- ber, and the subject of this lecture is part of a wider study which is unfolded in his work The Circle and the Cram (Macmillan).] MOST of us nowadays, presumably, are familiar with the accepted belief that before the ancient churches of these islands took shape in stone they were built of timber. Perhaps we do not so generally realize how slowly the older fashion gave place to the newer, or we remember that We-still have one or two churches which are almost entirely of wood, scores which yet retain porches, towers, or even pillars of wood. The term " church " is, a wide one, covering structures as different as York Minster at the one end and at the other the smallest and least pretentious of buildings. Each of us has his own idea of what a church is. The question with which I pro- pose to deal here in outline is, What was a church ? What did the term denote in the days before there were any churches of timber ?

A " church," as it was understood in these islands in the first few centuries of Christianity, was not a build- ing of any, sort. It was a burial-place, a " church-yard," if you please to call it so ; but churchyards are greatly older than are structural churches of any kind, even as the soil upon which stands a church is greatly older than can be any building reared upon it.

Our Christianity came to us from the West, not the East ; it was Irish—the more correct, but somewhat confusing epithet, is Scotie—not Latin. Other differences apart, and there were many, the two differed noticeably in the fact that, whereas Latin Christianity regarded as most important the structural building which we call a church, and paid little attention to the place of burial, with Irish Christianity it was exactly the other way about. Irish Christianity concerned itself first and fore- most with the burial-place : for centuries it looked with disfavour on any building ; for longer centuries it pro- tested against any elaborate buildings ; and to this day it has not produced any remarkable achievement in ecclesiastical building.

So far as is known, paganism in Europe, of whatever race, did not originally rear any buildings for worship. Greek and Roman " temples " were not places of worship : they were ornamental appendages to the unroofed enclosure in which was the altar of one or other god, and all worship and ritual was performed under the open sky. Indeed, the word " temple " strictly and originally meant merely the sacred enclosure, and was only in later times transferred to any building. Old Germans, Old Celts, Old Saxons, all shared the same dislike of any structural place of worship, and the " church " in which they worshipped when they first learned Christianity was merely a particular piece of open ground set apart for that purpose. We still possess the rules which governed the early Christians of Ireland in their worship, and those rules make provision for the performance a every act of Divine Service al fresco, not excepting even the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Confession.

A circular mud-wall and a few rude huts within it were the external features of all " monasteries " of these islands for some 200 years, and in many localities there was little change for centuries after. But there was one further essential which was not so obvious to the eye : the monastery must include a place of burial ; for unless and until a Christian was buried there, the spot did not become consecrated ground. So fixed was this idea that, when natural causes failed to provide what was needed, the earliest Irish Christianity did not hesitate to get it by other means—by the deliberate sacrifice' of a human life. For reasons easily understood the references to this extreme practice are few and usually far from explicit, but the case of St. Columba at Iona (Hy) is explicit enough : having decided to found a monastery at Iona, he reminded his companions that " it is necessay that some one of you should go down into the earth, in order that we may here have root." St. Oran at once volun- teered " to go to Heaven," and was duly buried on the spot selected for the new monastery. This was in the year 568, a century after St. Patrick was working' in Ireland. It should be added that this very unhallowed fashion of consecrating hallowed ground was superseded within the next hundred years, though the feeling that human relics were essential to any monastery, and indeed to any church, persisted unaltered. When the Saxon St. Guthlac required (699) a site for his monastery of Crowland in Lincolnshire he deliberately selected what he knew to be a pagan barrow—so says the monk who wrote Guthlac's life only fifty years later, and excavation has shown that the story is absolutely correct. Through- out the larger part of the Christian world the same feeling persists to this day : there can be no church where there are no relics-i.e., the reality or the symbol of a burial.

St. Oran was . buried in a grave which externally was precisely like any of a thousand other graves of pre- Christian date. The change of creed made no smallest difference to the fashion of the grave, nor was there any good reason why it should do so.

Even more explicit is a yet earlier text—viz., the account in the Life of St. Patrick of the burial of two of his very earliest converts, the princesses Ethne and Feidelm, daughters of the pagan King of All Ireland. Their conversion gave great offence to their kindred, and when both of them incontinently died they were buried, we are told, in a barrow " because such was the way of the heathen." With this St. Patrick did not—probably could not—interfere, but he forthwith claimed the barrow " for God and St. Patrick for ever " ; and " there he made a church of earth." The explanation—the only explana= tion—of the statement is to be found in the view that the barrow in which the two princesses were buried was itself a " church." Here, however, the point to be empha- sized is that the first of Christian graves in these islands to be 'described was confessedly neither more nor less than a barrow of precisely the same form and fashion as were thousands of pagan barrows of that age. • Barrows are of many varieties, but there is one feature which is common to all barrows which were constructed in our islands in the fifth century, and seemingly for many centuries before : all are circular in plan, for the circle was the mark of sacred ground. In the great majority of cases they are also mounded up.

Now there is a mass of evidence to prove that the normal plan of every old churchyard in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and England was originally a . circle. The changes brought about in the course of a thousand years have left few in England, although it is yet possible to find examples more or less perfect in every county. In Wales there are scores of them ; in the remoter parts of Scotland and Ireland there are hundreds, in very many instances entirely unaltered. The Welsh Laws of Rowel the Good (tenth century) explicitly declare that a church- yard must be circular ; that is to say, any new churchyard made at that date must be of circular plan. It is to be inferred that all older churchyards then existing were also of that plan, and the few details which can be gathered from other writings, such as the Lives of the early Welsh Saints, show that it was so.

More often than not an old churchyard is mounded up. There is no satisfactory way of accounting for these mounds except that they were purposely raised to serve as burial-places.

A mound raised to serve as a burial-place is a barrow, for " barrow " is merely the Saxon beorh, " a mound." And the barrows of the time when Christianity came here were uniformly circular. So were all churchyards of those days. It follows that the first churchyards were barrows— circular places, usually mounded, expressly intended to serve as burial places.

Now to these Christian barrows was originally applied the name now written " church," and the proofs of this assertion are manifold. Only a few can be mentioned here. • (i.) One of the laws of King Edmund (940-7) runs as follows ;— " We have also ordained that every bishop repair the houses of God (Godes hus) in his own [district]; and also advise the King that all God's churches (Godes cyrcan) be well ordered."

Obviously Godes hus and Godes cyrcan meant different things.

(ii.) The Venerable Bede completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People shortly before his death in 785. It was later translated into Anglo-Saxon, apparently about the middle of the tenth century. Twice at least where Bede wrote the Latin word coemeterium, " burial- ground," the Saxon translator deliberately writes " church." So at that date it appears that the customary meaning of the word " church " was " burial-ground," " church-yard," and the law of Edmund is at once explained.

(iii.) To much the same date (King Edgar, 958-975) belongs the much discussed canon forbidding a man to bring " into church " any dog, or more pigs than he can keep under control. Dogs and pigs were out of place in church-yards because they scratrth and root in the soil.

(iv.) So with yet another early law which directs that stray animals shall be taken to the " church " and there kept until their rightful ownership be established. Here too must be meant " church-yard."

(v.) One of the legends in the Tripartite Life of St.

Patrick tells how that Saint, in a fit of anger, drove his chariot over the body of a priest (St. Secundinus) while the latter was ceebrating mass " in a church." There are at this present date but few structural churches large enough to admit a man's driving into them. Again, by " church " one must understand " burial-ground." Early Irish liturgy provided for the celebration of the mass al fresco.

(vi.) In some localities the earlier meaning of " church " lingered on into the last century. In Whitby, for example, so late as 1850, anyone who said he was going "to the Kirk "—Kirk is, of course; an older form of Church— was uncleistood to be going to the church-yard, not into the structural church.

(vii.) To this day many obvious barrows are called " churches." So are stone circles in Cumberland and Scotland. So, too, in the Isle of Man, where the name is given to any and every spot where is supposed to have been a burial, though there be no smallest reason to think that there was ever a building there.

The circular plan of the original churchyards has been spoilt, usually by enlargements, and as for the mound; that has vanished under constant rebuilding and enlarge- ment of the church which stood upon it, for the purpose of securing wider and surer foundations. The tithe maps are evidence that about 1840 there was still a multitude of churchyards which were either wholly or partly cir- cular ; and old drawings show that they were still circular in plan and mounded in elevation.

A " church " was a barrow ; a barrow—if it was Christian—was a " church " ; and the first village churches of this country were the barrows in which the villagers laid their dead. On those barrows came pre- sently to be reared buildings—timber huts at first, stone structures at long last; and to these was at last transferred the name of " church." But this transfer had only begun to take place when King Alfred was dying. (901). It did not become general until some three centuries later. It had- not become universal eighty years ago ; witness the case of Whitby. I am not prepared to assert that it is universal even at this day. The structural church, before it came to be called by that name, was spoken of as " God's House," a " bedehouse," or a " minster."

- A. HADRIAINT :ALLOROFr. • -