THE EARLIEST purpose-built Christian churches in Britain to survive mostly date to the sixth century, but for the next two hundred years such buildings are rare in the extreme. The earliest Anglo-Saxon work that might be encountered when exploring will usually date from the late ninth century or afterwards.
In general, this style can be seen as an offshoot of contemporary architecture on the Continent. This was itself a version of Roman and Byzantine practice, though it had developed rapidly under the emperor Charlemagne (died 814) and his successors, resulting in a style known as Carolingian. But it also reflects a rich, but almost entirely lost, tradition of elaborate wooden architecture, which included many church buildings. It seems that architectural taste was so shaped by these lost timber buildings that stone ones were admired when they imitated them in various ways.
The hundred years after the late tenth century appear to have seen a building boom, perhaps partly a result of the division of the country into parishes, a process that continued into the twelfth century. Walls of Anglo-Saxon date are increasingly being identified in apparently later buildings, shorn of identifiable stylistic features. Signs of Anglo-Saxon style are rarer, but usually date from the late tenth to late eleventh centuries.
Though the resulting churches could be large – by about 1000 the Old Minster that preceded the current Winchester Cathedral was about 76 metres long (the current structure is about 170) – their interiors tended to comprise labyrinthine sequences of smallish interconnected spaces, very different from the large, unitary buildings that came later. One particular feature, though it rarely survives, is diagnostic here: the presence of a porch-like transept known as a porticus, connected (usually to the nave) by a relatively narrow arch. Simple basilican buildings were not unusual, either: an example is the eighth-century monastery at Brixworth, Northamptonshire, though even here the ‘arcade’ is more like a series of arches punched into a solid wall than a true arcade, supported on columns. Only a few east ends survive; these usually ended in a polygonal or semicircular apse, though rectilinear examples are also known.
This arch at Barnack, Cambridgeshire, has door-like proportions and blocky detailing. Typically, it is made up of irregularly sized segments of stone rather than the wedge-shaped voussoirs of the true arch.
Almost all Anglo-Saxon arches were semicircular, and though they might be very wide, and thus in outline indistinguishable from their Norman successors, more often they are thin and narrow, more like a doorway than an arch. More usefully diagnostic are the distinctive triangular-headed arches made by laying one piece of stone against another as if they were planks of timber. Also plank-like, and diagnostic, is the arrangement of straight, unmoulded pieces of stone into simple patterns, probably derived from those on timber-framed buildings and the shallow, flat, decorative columns sometimes seen in Classical architecture. These are called pilaster strips. Corners are often marked by sequences of very tall, thin pieces of stone alternating with flat ones, a technique known as long-and-short work, easy to diagnose only when it is very emphatic. Windows are small but sometimes arranged into pairs or rows separated by stumpy columns with simple, bulgy mouldings, called balusters for their close resemblance to wood that has been turned on a lathe. Once one has learned to recognise them, these too are diagnostic. Large-scale figurative sculpture and crosses covered in abstract knotted forms were both major features of Anglo-Saxon churches and can be of exceptional quality, but, in spite of this, mouldings, capitals and decorative sculpture in buildings often have a blocky, oddly primitive air, at once easy to recognise and hard to define.
A row of windows separated by balusters at Earls Barton.
A triangular-headed arch at St Peter, Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire.
By the 1150s and 60s Norman design had become lively and inventive, qualities exemplified by the range of capitals on this blank arcade in the chapter house at Bristol Cathedral, and the extraordinary abstract patterning of the wall above.