Pre-Norman Stone Crosses in the British Isles

Escomb is a tiny village lying just to the north-west of Bishop Auckland in Durham. At the heart of the village, the houses are arranged around a walled oval enclosure. Within the wall stands Escomb church, first used for worship in the closing years of the seventh century. The fabric of the church is almost all as the Saxons built it, with many pieces of building stone having been salvaged from a nearby ruined Roman encampment, some of them bearing Latin inscriptions to prove it.

This, as they say, is the real thing: a building where worship has been offered during most of the period that Christianity has been practiced in England. Like Iona, Escomb is a thin place, where centuries of worship have hallowed the surroundings, and only the most insensitive of folk would not feel how little separates heaven and earth.

Unusually for such an old church, this one is not dedicated to any saint, being known simply as Escomb Church - the caption to this picture is itself a photograph of the church noticeboard. If the church building appears tall and narrow, tapering in slightly towards the top, rest assured that is not an illusion, but it is how the building is. The walls are thick, but the building is thin - perhaps that is how one should build if the intention is that the edifice should stand for more than thirteen centuries: indeed, the building, like the faith that is expressed by and within it, is solid enough to stand for another thirteen centuries, and another...

The south porch is a later addition to the structure, with an even later sundial inserted above the doorway. Above and to the right of the porch, another, much older sundial can be seen. A close-up view of this is shown on the right here. This is an Anglian sundial, and many varied attempts have been made to explain the curious imagery to be seen on it, and its association with the prominent block above it.

The sundial, missing its gnomon, has three gradations which therefore divide the day up into four parts.

Around the perimeter of the sundial is a simple plait, while around the top of the dial is a creature usually interpreted as a serpent, even though it has a pretty obvious fish-tail, and may be an eel.

The block seems quite similar to a corbel-stone (on the right here is one from the Norman church at Adel in Leeds for comparison) for the two reasons that it stands proud of the structure and also that it appears to be carved with a face. Stretching it a bit, one can argue for the presence on the stone of two eyes, a nose and a mouth, but it has to be remarked that the Anglians were capable of far better representational carvings than the dull features on that stone, unless the whole point of the carving is that it should present a monstrous face.

I offer an altogether simpler and more functional explanation for the projecting stone above the sundial. It was there, both by its physical presence, and also with its ugly face working on the scarecrow principle, to stop birds perching on the gnomon!

for comparison,
a Norman corbel stone
from Adel, Leeds

(October 2002)

	The slender impression of the church from the outside is confirmed on the inside. The whole of the inside has recently been whitewashed as part of a community service effort. One area left free of the coating is the underside of the chancel arch, on which some reddish lines mark the remains of some Norman painting. Interestingly, the chancel arch, being semicircular, may suggest a Norman date: in fact, it is made up of stones salvaged from the nearby Roman fort, transferred here stone by stone. An early effort at conservation, perhaps.
		The simple communion table (above) stands in the chancel, with a Saxon pillar-cross behind it. The north door in the nave has recently been covered with a quilt, of which the image below is the central section, showing the Latin name for this community.

The east window in the north wall of the church is one of the original Saxon windows in the building - the taller windows visible in the exterior view of the church above are from a later time. The image on the left demonstrates the solidity of the walls of this slender church.

There is a story to this window, for one of the blocks (just above the lower-left corner) carries a Latin inscription (right) which was discovered by a schoolboy during the 1960's. It says: BONO RE(I)
PUBLICI
N(...)

("for the good of the republic, N...")

The pillar cross (left) that stands behind the communion table in the chancel is one of several pieces of carved stonework from the Saxon period.

Also in the chancel, on the right hand side, is a piscina, built into the wall. This is a bowl traditionally used by the priest to wash his hands in when celebrating communion.

One cannot help thinking that perhaps there were some other parts of the interior apart from the underside of the chancel arch that would have benefited from being left un-whitewashed, and these two survivals from Saxon times are to be included in that - indeed, it does appear as if someone has tried removing the whitewash on the piscina to reveal the underlying stone.

There is also an ancient stone font in this church, but it is both fairly plain and likely to have been added by the Normans, so it is not featured here.


In the south porch, a number of other pieces have been put on display as part of an exhibition illustrating the Saxon heritage of this church. The far-left piece above is a fragment of a pillar that may have originally been a door jamb, or else, as the local exhibition commentary suggests, may have been part of the surround for an altar-screen (though this latter suggestion is difficult to envisage in such a small church building). The remaining images above (and the two on the right are different faces of the same piece) show parts of a cross-shaft that had been used as building stone, and was discovered during alterations to the church in the 1870's. On the faces that have survived, the carving s of a very high order, seeming very fresh today.

The small Saxon church building at Escomb receives many visitors over the course of a year. Some go there out of historical curiosity, while others go there on pilgrimage, hoping to find something more. To develop a celebrated remark by a former bishop in whose diocese this building stands, the church at Escomb is not just a conjuring trick with old stones: it is both the expression of the Christian faith of those who erected it all those centuries ago and the continuing home of a living Christian community who share the same continuing hope. Seek, friend, and you shall find...

Escomb is fairly close to Bishop Auckland, and also well-signposted.
The purple square with the dot in it on the map above is Bishop Auckland railway station.

Buildings with significant pre-Norman fabric
Escomb	Barnack, Bradwell-on-Sea, Deerhurst, Escomb, Wing
Whilst many fragments of crosses have survived to our day from before the Norman Conquest, with the occasional place where the crosses have survived largely intact, the survival of pre-Norman stone buildings is much rarer. Quite a few buildings have the odd Saxon architectural feature in them, a doorway, a window, and so on, but there are not many where there is a significant amount of Saxon fabric still in evidence. Most church buildings have a nave and chancel, some have towers, some have aisles and transepts, though aisles and transepts tended to come along later in the life of the buildings. Those churches where the chancel, or nave or tower, or some combination of those, are largely or entirely Saxon are featured in this list.

Inscriptions
Nevern/Nanhyfer (The inscription has been picked out in yellow for clarity.)	Latin	Eliseg's Pillar/Piler Eliseg, Escomb, Llanddewi-Brefi, Nevern/Nanhyfer
	Ogham	Nevern/Nanhyfer
	Old English	Great Edstone, Kirkdale, Wensley
	Runes	Bewcastle, Old Byland, Urswick
	Welsh	Tywyn
Inscriptions come in several recognisable forms. They may be in different languages, including Latin and Old English, and they may use different scripts, including Ogham, runes, and the alphabet which evolved into the one in current use (though Old English has extra letters compared with today). In some cases, the same inscription is given in more than one form, and such monuments are particularly useful, as they can provide information about the decipherment of such scripts, much like the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphics. The inscriptions can tell various things: sometimes they give the name of the person commemorated by the monument, sometimes its maker. Occasionally, they convey information about historical circumstances; these are often the most valuable inscriptions, because they allow definite dates to be assigned to the objects. In the case of those inscriptions which appear simply to be a name, some discretion has been applied in categorising them; generally, they are classified according to the language that uses a similar script.

Sundials

Old Byland
(N.B. The sundial is built into the wall upside down,
so this picture is inverted to show it the right way up!)

Bewcastle, Escomb, Great Edstone, Kirkdale, Old Byland, Sinnington

Sundials come in several flavours. There are those which have a horizontal surface, and usually stand on top of a plinth of some sort. Others have a vertical surface and are generally built into the external walls of buildings. Some sundials are interesting because they bear inscriptions that illuminate their history, though many are mute in this respect.

Unusually, the cross-shaft at Bewcastle also has a sundial carved on one face. Scandalously, one might think, one of the great Viking crosses at Gosforth was cut down in the eighteenth century to provide a plinth for a modern sundial - such modern sundials do not feature in this list!

Sites with miscellaneous artefacts
Lastingham (either grapes grew differently in Saxon times, or this piece is displayed upside-down!)	CHRISTIAN Bakewell (various items), Escomb (?door jamb, piscina), Hovingham (altar screen), Lastingham (door jambs), Wirksworth (various items)
	NON-CHRISTIAN Escomb (fragment of Mithraic altar reused as building stone), Ilkley (Roman altar stones)
There are many other kinds of carved stone remains that have survived to our day, such as fragments of architectural features (door-jambs, window frames, columns etc) and indeed whole doorways and windows, or even whole buildings. Occasionally, these shed some light on the Christian thinking of the people who created them (like the altar screen at Hovingham), but more often than not, they speak of other aspects of the culture of the time (like, for example the representation of a King and his consort at Wirksworth), if indeed they carry any message at all. The second group above, labelled "non-Christian" include various artefacts that happen to be at the sites mentioned, but have no demonstrable connection to the Christian history of those places. Such items are only noted if the locations already feature at this site for other reasons. A mention of them here does not indicate they are necessarily illustrated or even mentioned otherwise at the relevant pages.

* The Ordnance Survey National Grid Reference (and corresponding Latitude/Longitude) given at the top of the pages describing individual sites usually refer to the location of the closest or most prominent entrance to the site where the monument is to be found - e.g. a gate into a churchyard. For monuments located in open country, or at a significant distance from the site entrance as just defined, the co-ordinates usually refer to the exact location of the monument.
Please allow for a small error in the co-ordinates of up to a couple of dozen metres.

Thanks to the people at streetmap.co.uk, if you click on the Grid References in the magenta boxes on the site pages,
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As the official mapping agency of the United Kingdom Government, the Ordnance Survey produces the definitive maps of the country. They contain a wealth of information.
For more details, visit www,ordnancesurvey.co.uk/leisure

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