Making a Christian Landscape: How Christianity Shaped the Countryside in Early-Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex / Edition 2 available in Paperback
Making a Christian Landscape: How Christianity Shaped the Countryside in Early-Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0859897850
- ISBN-13:
- 9780859897853
- Pub. Date:
- 07/14/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Exeter Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0859897850
- ISBN-13:
- 9780859897853
- Pub. Date:
- 07/14/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Exeter Press
Making a Christian Landscape: How Christianity Shaped the Countryside in Early-Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex / Edition 2
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780859897853 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Exeter Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2006 |
| Series: | Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.70(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Making a Christian Landscape
The countryside in early medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex
By Sam Turner
University of Exeter Press
Copyright © 2006 Sam TurnerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85989-785-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Churches and the early medieval landscape
The kingdom of Wessex was probably first converted to Christianity in the early seventh century, and the rulers and people of the British kingdom of Dumnonia (including Cornwall) had probably been converted around 150 years earlier. Bede recorded only the barest details about Wessex in his Ecclesiastical History, including the names of Birinus and Cynegils, supposedly the first bishop and the first Christian king of the West Saxons. The exact mechanisms and influences that brought about these events are far from clear; it seems possible that there were some Christians among the population before this, particularly in western regions that had only recently been conquered by Wessex such as Devon. As for Cornwall, the names of the protagonists are lost to history forever, as no written account survives. Whoever convinced these men and women to convert and whatever their motives, the religion they promoted was to exert a massive influence on the form of both early medieval society and the early medieval landscape.
This book is an investigation of the early Christian landscape of south-western Britain from the conversion period to the Norman Conquest (AD c.450-1070). Rather than focusing on individual sacred sites, it aims to study the impact of Christianity across the whole landscape. Changes in the structure of the landscape are inferred from sites, monuments, place-names and the wider patterns of fields and farms. These changes are mapped and studied, and then interpreted as reflecting the social, political and ideological changes that resulted from a range of practical adaptations to the new religion. The foundation of churches is the most obvious of a range of changes that encompass the structure of agricultural resources, distributions of settlements, and patterns of minor sacred and ritual sites.
The study focuses on the early medieval ecclesiastical landscapes of Cornwall and western Wessex, here defined as Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire (Fig. 1). For many people today, these two neighbouring regions of south-western Britain have historically and culturally distinct identities. The modern county of Cornwall forms the long tapering western end of the south-western peninsula. The Cornish language was spoken here until the eleventh or twelfth century AD in the east and until the eighteenth or nineteenth century AD in the west. This language was a close relative of Welsh and Breton, and all three appear to have developed from the same Brittonic root. In fact, archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests the culture of Cornwall remained fairly stable in the first half of the first millennium. Whilst it was part of the Roman Empire, Cornwall was never as thoroughly integrated into the Roman world as most of eastern England: there are no Roman towns in Cornwall, for instance, and only one small villa-like settlement has ever been discovered (O'Neill 1933). Today a 'Celtic' Cornish identity is reinforced by a pattern of distinctive place-names which contrast sharply with the English place-names of Devon to the east. By contrast, Wessex saw several major episodes of cultural and political transformation in the first millennium. First, it was integrated into the Roman Empire much more fully than most of western Britain, with all the attendant trappings of Roman culture including towns, villas, a road system and a money economy. After the fall of the western Empire, it witnessed the establishment of the new kingdom of Wessex under a Germanic warrior aristocracy whose immediate ancestors had come to Britain from continental Europe. Wessex became an Anglo-Saxon heartland, and it was under the kings of Wessex that a united kingdom of England eventually emerged. Thus the early history of the two regions is quite different: Cornwall was part of the 'Celtic' west that included other British kingdoms in Wales and Brittany, whilst Wessex was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom sharing more in common with others in the east of Britain like Sussex, Kent and East Anglia.
Despite the differences between the Anglo-Saxons of Wessex and the Britons of Cornwall, the dividing line between them was not fixed. At the time Cornwall was converted,Wessex did not really exist and the British kings of Dumnonia probably still controlled much of Devon. The conquest of the South West by Wessex was a gradual process, beginning in the sixth century and not complete until the tenth century at the earliest. Various regions counted in this book as parts of Wessex (particularly Devon and western Somerset) are in some ways transitional, since certain key developments in the landscape like the establishment of the very earliest ecclesiastical centres may have taken place under British rather than Anglo-Saxon kings.
Scholars of early medieval Britain have historically been divided into schools of 'Anglo-Saxon' and 'Celtic' studies. This may in part be due to the scholarly difficulties involved in undertaking literary studies and documentary history in several ancient languages, though the strong influence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist traditions are probably also significant. Although some scholars studying medieval Cornwall have recently begun to break down these divisions, others were content for their work to rest in the 'Celtic' category. Likewise, scholars of Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England have only rarely ventured into the 'Celtic' west. Whilst this separation is not always inappropriate, a lack of comparison between neighbouring regions can sometimes lead to the overemphasis of local distinctiveness and a failure to appreciate how regional changes relate to the wider world.
This book uses early medieval Cornwall and Wessex as neighbouring regions that can be usefully compared and contrasted. The study of early landscapes in Cornwall and Wessex suggests that the development of ecclesiastical structures in the 'Celtic' west and 'Anglo-Saxon' east were rather more similar than some of our current models allow. These models have sometimes explained differences in the ecclesiastical landscapes of early medieval Britain with reference to ethnicity and predisposition towards certain forms of religion. It is hoped that the comparative landscape approach adopted here will allow a better understanding to emerge which explains changing practice in terms of social and political adaptations to the new Christian ideology. By analysing the early medieval countryside it is possible to see converging trajectories of landscape change in the centuries after the conversion to Christianity.
Making a Christian Landscape
An important theoretical principle for this book is the concept that changes in religious or political ideology, like the conversion of Britain to Christianity, can result in physical changes to the structure of the landscape. The way the people who live in a landscape understand it results from a range of influences. The natural environment is one of the most important: climate, topography, geology and soils all affect what activities will be possible in a landscape and the ways people will support themselves. Some scholars have chosen to stress the importance of environmental limitations and mundane activities like food production in the shaping of the landscape, and it is clear that the nature of agricultural production will deeply affect it (Williamson 2003). However, within these constraints it is the extent and nature of human action that will determine the appearance of the 'cultural' landscape, and the long-term history of a country like Britain shows that there are many different ways the same landscape can be inhabited and structured. It is clear that the things people believe and the way they express their beliefs have influenced not only people's perceptions of the landscape but also its physical form.
A few examples will show the impact of different societies' beliefs on different types of landscapes. Some groups have made little in the way of physical alterations, even if landscapes are of fundamental importance to their ideas and beliefs. The cosmology of the North American Mescalero Apache explains the physical and spiritual worlds as two parallel dimensions. Natural features such as rock outcrops, springs and caves act as special places where one dimension can be accessed from the other. Whilst these sites are regarded as very potent, they are normally not altered in any physical way (Carmichael 1994: 92-5). In Scandinavia, Saami sacred places encompass a similar range of locations. Whilst they tend to occupy distinctive positions in the landscape, they were often neither elaborated nor altered by the people who used them (Bradley 2000a: 5-13); nevertheless, they could provide an important vehicle for the expression of Saami identity (Welinder 2003). Richard Bradley has also suggested that Saami beliefs about nature and the world provide an appropriate analogy for those of people in Mesolithic Europe (Bradley 1998: 33).
In contrast to these examples, the belief systems of many other societies have resulted in significant alterations to the physical landscape. At the end of the Mesolithic period, there was a great change in some European landscapes when people began to build monuments. This seismic shift should probably be seen as a reflection of changing ideas about the world and how it should be ordered (ibid. 160-4):
They were changing their attitudes to nature and the wild by domesticating plants and animals, and they were changing their whole conception of place by building megalithic tombs. Both attest a similar change of attitude, but the link was in the mind, not in the ploughsoil.
(Bradley 1993: 17)
In India, the sacred geography of great Hindu holy sites like Benares have been reproduced at smaller scales in hundreds of lesser places, which take on some of their sanctity through imitation (Gold 1988; Coleman and Elsner 1995). Similarly, epigraphic evidence from west Africa shows how early Muslims in the region Islamicised the landscape, to the extent that one town came to be considered as a mirror of Mecca (Moraes Farias 1999). Idealised landscapes are occasionally realised in concrete form. In central America, elements of the landscape around the Classic Maya settlement of La Milpa in Belize appear to have been organised according to a 'cosmogram', which placed satellite pyramid and plaza groups at regular intervals around the central city (Tourtellot et al. 2002). Although complete reorderings of the landscape sometimes occur, it is more common for utopian models to be adapted to accommodate pre-existing features, whether mental or material. Normally, existing features are not wholly cleared away, but are given new meanings according to the guiding ideology (Snead and Preucel 1999). The cosmology of the Keres people of the northern Rio Grande region envisages a series of nested regions containing different landscape resources; at the centre lies the village, and at the margins a dangerous region inhabited by powerful supernatural creatures. Snead and Preucel's case studies show how this model could be adapted to fit local topographical settings and pre-existing patterns in the 'natural' and 'cultural' landscape (1999: 176). Other examples are provided by the ways early medieval Muslim societies Islamicised elements of Christian and pre-Christian religious landscapes (Carver 1996), or the way East Asian Buddhists assimilated local ideas about sacred mountains into Buddhist ideology, resulting in the creation of new kinds of Buddhist sacred landscapes (Barnes 1999). Changes of this kind are certainly a feature of the early Christian landscapes of Europe, where previous sacred topographies were altered to accommodate the new ideology rather than being swept away in a wholesale fashion (Orselli 1999: 186).
The sources and methods used in this book to investigate religious change and its wider impact are those of landscape archaeology. Whilst some recent studies have approached the religious traditions of early medieval Britain from literary and theological points of view (e.g. O. Davies 1996), the relative scarcity of relevant material makes this difficult for the South West and for Cornwall in particular. Previous studies of the region have often used archaeological or topographical approaches (e.g. Preston-Jones 1992; Thomas 1994), and one of the advantages of a landscape study is that it allows direct comparisons to be made with previous work.
Chapter 2 outlines a methodology for combining these sources and illustrates the way they can be used to investigate changes in the landscape. Chapters 3 to 7 discuss the role of Christianity in the developing landscape of early medieval south-west Britain by analysing the relationships between churches and other sites using archaeological information, place-names, maps and written sources. Chapter 8 explores the reinvented Christian 'ideology of settlement' which emerged from the new contexts created when the late Roman world was converted to Christianity.
The remainder of this chapter touches on some of the topics that will be investigated later in the book and discusses some of the previous work that has addressed them.
The lann Model of Church Development in Western Britain
The most influential model for the development of ecclesiastical sites in western Britain was developed over thirty years ago by Charles Thomas (1971a: 49-51). It envisages that after the conversion to Christianity, traditional unenclosed burial grounds underwent a series of changes. First, a site would be enclosed with a small curvilinear boundary (sometimes known as a lann), and in time it would be further embellished with the addition of a cross, a chapel, and then a parish church (ibid.: 49-51). Some scholars have suggested that this process took place early in Cornwall. On the north coast, for example, various churchyards are thought to have originated as Christian settlements founded by travellers from Wales or Ireland (Preston-Jones 1992: 122; see also Pearce 1982; Brook 1992). Although Ann Preston-Jones has pointed out that not all medieval churches with burial grounds have very early origins, the suggestion that the lann-sites date to the early post-Roman period has been frequent (Pearce 1978: 92; Preston-Jones 1992: 105; Thomas 1994: 305-326):
With Christianity came a whole package of ideas ... associated site-types, place-names, monuments ...
and:
The earliest Christian foundations, or lanns, were settlements of people dedicated to a religious life.
(Preston-Jones & Rose 1986: 155, 160)
Recent work has continued to examine the form of early medieval cemeteries in the South West. Examples include the recently discovered site in Kenn parish (Devon) where post-Roman dug graves with east-west alignments may represent Christian burials (Weddell 2000). In Cornwall, St Endellion and nearby Treharrock are similar sites, both with apparently linear cemeteries of long-cist burials which in the case of St Endellion follow the course of the adjacent road. Although the later parish church stands near the site, the cemetery is far more extensive than its graveyard and crosses the parish boundary, showing that it is likely to pre-date the division of the area into two ecclesiastical units (Trudgian 1987). No evidence suggests that these cemeteries were enclosed at any date.
Recent research by David Petts on early medieval burial in western Britain has questioned the relevance of Thomas' model to the period before AD c. 800 (Petts 2001, 2002a). Although several sites in Wales have been excavated and radiocarbon dated, such as Tandderwen (Clwyd), Atlantic Trading Estate (Glamorgan) and Plas Gogerddan (Dyfed), there appear to be very few examples of western British cemeteries that were enclosed in the post-Roman centuries (Petts 2002a). Similarly neither in Cornwall nor in Devon does excavated evidence suggest that any simple cemeteries were enclosed before the ninth century. Thomas' own excavations at St Dennis and Merther Uny show that these sites were only used for Christian burial from the tenth century at the very earliest (Thomas 1965, 1968b). Even on the Isles of Scilly, where several early church sites were investigated in the mid-twentieth century, there is little evidence to prove that fully developed local churches had appeared before AD c. 800 (Thomas 1980, 1985; Ratcliffe 1994).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making a Christian Landscape by Sam Turner. Copyright © 2006 Sam Turner. Excerpted by permission of University of Exeter Press.
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