Early Christianity in South-West Britain

Wessex, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and the Channel Islands

Elizabeth Rees

• Publisher: Windgather Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781911188568
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a new assessment of early Christianity in south-west Britain from the fourth to the tenth centuries, a rich period which includes the transition from Roman to native British to Saxon models of church. The book will be based on evidence from archaeological excavations, early texts and recent critical scholarship and cover Wessex, Devon and Cornwall. In the south-west, Wessex provides the greatest evidence of Roman Christianity. The fifth-century Dorset villas of Frampton and Hinton St Mary, with their complex baptistery mosaics, indicate the presence of sophisticated Christian house churches. The fact that these two Roman villas are only 15 miles apart suggests a network of small Christian communities in this region. The author uses evidence from St Patrick's fifth-century 'Confessions' to describe how members of a villa house church lived. Wessex was slowly Christianised: in Gloucestershire, the pagan healing sanctuary at Chedworth provides evidence of later use as a Christian baptistery; at Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire, a baptistery was dug into the mosaic floor of an imposing villa, which may by then have been owned by a bishop. In Somerset a number of recently excavated sites demonstrate the transition from a pagan temple to a Christian church. Beside the pagan temple at Lamyatt, later female burials suggest, unusually, a small monastic group of women. Wells cathedral grew beside the site of a Roman villa's funeral chapel. In Street, a large oval enclosure indicates the probable site of a 'Celtic' monastery. Early Christian cemeteries have been excavated at Shepton Mallet and elsewhere. Lundy Island, off the Devon coast, provides evidence of a Celtic monastery, with its inscribed stones that commemorate early monks. At Exeter, a Saxon anthology includes numerous riddles, one of which describes in detail the production of an illuminated manuscript in a south-western monastery. Oliver Padel's meticulous documentation of Cornish place-names has demonstrated that, of all the Celtic regions, Cornwall has by far the highest number of dedications to a single, otherwise unknown individual, typically consisting of a small church and a farm by the sea. These small monastic 'cells' have hitherto received little attention as a model of church in early British Christianity, and the latter part of the text focuses on various aspects of this model, as lived out in coastal and in upland settlements, on islands, and in relation to larger Breton monasteries. Study of 60 Breton sites has demonstrated possible connections between larger Breton monasteries and smaller Cornish cells.

CHAPTER 1

House churches in Roman villas of rural Wessex

The name Wessex denotes the area conquered by the West Saxons, which includes parts of Wiltshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Devon and Somerset. One might also consider Cornwall as part of Wessex: it was conquered by the Anglo-Saxons in the reign of King Ecgberht (reigned 802–39), but not fully absorbed into the administrative system until the reign of Æthelstan (924–39), by which time Wessex was in process of being subsumed into England. In this chapter we shall examine the evidence for Christianity in the Roman villa house churches of rural Wessex, and also consider the type of worship that took place in them and the styles of Christian leadership that we might expect to find.

Although written evidence is relatively sparse, archaeology provides considerable evidence of Christianity in Roman Britain, particularly from the fourth century onwards. A useful synthesis of discoveries prior to 2003 is made by David Petts in his book Christianity in Roman Britain, his end-point being the mid-fifth century.1 Christianity was forbidden until it became the imperial religion under Constantine (reigned 306–37), and so public churches in towns are unlikely to have existed before then.

At this point, there is little conclusive evidence for urban churches, apart from the discovery in 1992 of a large and impressive mid-fourth-century basilica that is likely to have been a church on Tower Hill, in the south-east corner of Roman Londinium.2 We know, however that there were bishops in the principal towns of late Roman Britain: in AD 314 three British bishops attended the Synod of Arles in southern Gaul. Small churches are found in northern Britain on Hadrian’s Wall (at Vindolanda, for example) and at former pagan shrine complexes in the south-west, including Chedworth and Uley, which will be described below.

Over the last fifteen years, ongoing study and discoveries have deepened our knowledge of early Christianity, and this is particularly true when we focus on Wessex. During the Roman occupation, starting in the first century AD, numerous rural villas were established across Wessex; the earliest detailed evidence of Christianity in south-west Britain is found in what appear to have been Roman villa house churches. In the villas at Frampton and Hinton St Mary in Dorset, the highly developed theology of their fourth- and fifth-century occupants can be seen in the complex imagery depicted on the mosaics of their chapels and baptisteries. The fact that these two villas are only 15 miles apart suggests a network of Christians who were theologically aware; other villas in the region present similar but more fragmentary evidence of this.

Symbolism in the mosaics

The significance of the mosaics at Frampton and Hinton St Mary was first seriously explored by Jocelyn Toynbee in the 1960s.3 Thirty-five years later, the villas that contained them were thought to be less significantly Christian. Petts considered these rooms ‘unlikely to have been churches in which Mass was celebrated’, although he conceded that ‘they may have had other quasi-religious functions on occasions’.4 Writing in the same year, Dominic Perring assessed the imagery in the mosaics as arcane examples of Gnostic heresy, favoured by an unorthodox Christian elite.5 Neither author fully addresses the fact that there were by now very many Christians in rural Britain, who would have celebrated the eucharist in appropriately decorated indoor spaces.

Today, fifteen years on, we are more aware of the extent to which Christians drew upon pagan symbolism, and used it to illustrate their own beliefs. This is largely the result of more detailed analysis of symbolic art in Western religious contexts. There has been ongoing study of how Christians developed a symbolic code whereby pagan gods symbolised aspects of Christian theology. As well as pagan mythology serving as a teaching tool, it is also possible that by depicting Christ as Orpheus or Bacchus, for example, persecuted Christians could conceal their faith more easily, at a time when Christianity was a forbidden religion.

Parallels in Israel and Greece

At the same time, our understanding of Judaeo-Christian art and theology in the Near East has deepened. Italian Franciscan archaeologists working in Judaea and Galilee collated surviving early Christian visual evidence with texts from the same era, including the midrashim, rabbinic literature containing commentaries upon the Old Testament and other sources, which covers a wide variety of subjects such as angels, or how God created the universe.6 Common images in villa mosaics such as rosettes are widespread in eastern as well as western early Christian art; for Judaeo-Christians, for example, rosettes often symbolised angels.7

Meanwhile, archaeologists in Greece began to focus on early Christian sites, in a country where previous British and French governments had largely funded the excavation of classical sites in the hope of discovering more statues and temples. Thus in Ancient Corinth, Christian material had been blasted away in order to reach classical remains beneath them. It is largely due to the patient work of a Cornishman, Dr Guy Sanders, Director of Excavations at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and his training and supervision of students and scholars, that a more detailed understanding of early Christianity in Greece is beginning to emerge.8

Early Christian leadership

Again, it was unclear how Christian leadership functioned in its diverse forms in the early Church. In the twentieth century, some historians still thought in terms of ‘bishops’ and ‘monks’, and often looked to the Desert Fathers of Palestine, Syria and Egypt for the origins of the latter, following Derwas Chitty’s seminal The Desert a City.9 Certainly, the Lives of the Desert Fathers, as conveyed through the writings of John Cassian, were widely read in early monasteries, and their subjects became heroes – models, even – but Syriac scholars such as Robert Murray and Gabriele Winkler have presented us with evidence for a wide variety of styles of ministry and service in the first Christian centuries, 10 which correspond in some degree to the hints that we find nearer to the western edge of the Christian lands. In this chapter, these various developments will be taken into account as we survey the rural house churches of Roman Wessex.

The earliest account of a British Christian’s conversion, call and subsequent ministry is the fifth-century Confessio of St Patrick. Its title employs a word frequently found in the psalms, and means ‘Acknowledgement [of God’s marvellous works]’.11 Near the beginning of the Confessio, Patrick relates:

My family own a small estate near the village of Bannavem Taburniae. My father was Calpornius, a deacon, and my grandfather was Potitus, a priest.12

This presents a rural model of church, not an urban one. It describes a house church in the countryside (though we do not know the location of Bannavem Taburniae), with its priest(s) and deacons, since Patrick later tells us that he, too, became a deacon.13

This Christian community was in existence for at least three generations; its spirituality and theology were of sufficient depth to produce a Christian of Patrick’s calibre, though he tells us that he did not begin to pray to God until his conversion while he was a slave in Ireland.14 Patrick tells us that in Ireland ‘the Lord opened my understanding to my unbelief’, when ‘at that time I was ignorant of the true God’, previously, he had ignored priestly teaching, presumably including that of his grandfather.15 Since only adults were baptised, after rigorous preparation, it is possible that he was not baptised until after his conversion. Patrick does not tell us where he was born: one possibility is Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall; another is the area of western Scotland near Dumbarton, in the Romanised area south of the Antonine Wall. A slightly greater weight of probability suggests somewhere in the south-west, perhaps Wales or Cornwall.16

A house church in Frampton, Dorset

Frampton is 4 miles north-west of Dorchester, while Hinton St Mary is 8 miles north-west of Blandford Forum. We know that both villas served as house churches because of their unique mosaic floors. Frampton’s mosaics are now lost, but were carefully drawn by Samuel Lysons in 1813; they came from the same workshop as the mosaics at Hinton St Mary. In both villas, the mosaics are closely ornamented, and not intended to be covered with couches or dining room furniture. The designs are arranged to be viewed from different positions, and suggest a dynamic use of space involving movement, procession, and the designation of some spaces as more important than others (see colour plate 1).

The larger room at Frampton was shaped like a church: there was an apse facing east, with a chi-rho symbol of Christ occupying a place of honour on its threshold (illus. 1). During the eucharist, the priest is likely to have stood before a portable altar in the apse, facing the gathered Christians across the chi-rho symbol. In the apse mosaic, a large cantharus or chalice forms a centrepiece. This was originally the wine cup in which a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. House churches in Roman villas of rural Wessex
• 2. Roman Christian sites in central Somerset
• 3. Coastal sites in Somerset and Devon
• 4. The Life of Samson
• 5. Early Christian sites in east Cornwall
• 6. Pre-Norman sites in central Cornwall
• 7. West Cornwall, the Scilly Isles, Guernsey and Jersey
• Plate section