ANGLO-SAXON ARCHITECTURE,
ILLUSTRATED FROM ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS.
The subject on which it will be my endeavour to throw some additional light in the present paper is one of great obscurity. Old writers on architectural antiquities carelessly jumbled together almost all monuments distinguished by the absence of the pointed arch under the title of Saxon. Some more recent antiquaries have gone into the opposite extreme of asserting that there are now remaining no specimens of Anglo-Saxon buildings. The difficulty attending this question arises from the absolute impossibility of identifying existing structures of an early period with historical dates. This difficulty has been increased by the adoption of several general assertions, which I am inclined to believe altogether incorrect. It has been stated that parish churches were very rare among the Anglo-Saxons, that they were small unsubstantial buildings, and even that they were built of nothing but wood. I think the notion that Anglo-Saxon churches were all built of wood will now hardly find supporters. We know that there were structures of this material; a few wooden churches are mentioned in Domesday Book; Ordericus Vitalis mentions a wooden chapel on the banks of the Severn, near Shrewsbury, which was probably built a very short time before the Norman conquest[1]; and there was a wooden church at Lytham in Lancashire, which was destroyed, and a stone church built by its Norman lord, as we learn from Reginald of Durham[2]. This last writer, only two pages after, mentions a church of stone at Slitrig in Teviotdale, although only a chapel dependant on the church of Cavers, and which must have been older than the Conquest, for in the twelfth century it was a roofless ruin[3]. The notion that the Anglo-Saxon churches were few and small, is chiefly founded upon some
- ↑ Illic nimirum lignea capella priscis temporibus a Siwardo Edelgari filio, regis Edwardi consanguineo, condita fuerat.—Ord. Vit. ed. Le Prevost, vol. ii. p. 416.
- ↑ Nam prædicti militis avus ecclesiam præfatam quondam asserum viliore compage constructam, a fundamentis diruerat; pro qua et aliam lapideam in honore sancti confessoris, licet non omnino in eodem loco confecerat.—Reginald. Dunelm. (Surtees' Publication), p. 282.
- ↑ Reginald. Dunelm. p. 284.
