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...