Deerhurst, Gloucestershire

Saxon Severnside

This is the other Saxon church at Deerhurst, to which I referred in the previous post. It’s now the parish church of St Mary, though it began life as a Saxon minster, becoming a Benedictine priory a few years before the Norman conquest. The building has been much altered over the centuries, and architectural historians have traced many phases of construction, including several in the Saxon period as the church grew form a small, narrow building without a tower to the larger, wider structure, with its tall west tower, that we see today. The tower is a real local landmark, visible from a long way across the low-lying Severnside country.

From the outside, the building doesn’t look that much like a Saxon church, because most of the windows are late-medieval. But many of the walls they pierce are Saxon, and inside there are the outlines of numerous earlier blocked window openings that allow one to imagine what the building must once have been like.

The interior is full of fascinating details from the Saxon period and later. Here are just a couple, first a detail of the carved design on the font. This kind of spiral motif also appears on English manuscripts of the 9th century and before, and Anglo-Saxon jewellery of the same period, leading experts to date the font to before 875. I once read that it had disappeared for years before being found in a farmyard in use as a trough, but I’ve been unable to verify this story.

There are several other outstanding pieces of Saxon carving in the church, including an angel, a Madonna, and this animal head projecting from a wall at the west end. Those incised lines reveal a sure touch, as does the way the stone is slightly asymmetrical, in sensitive and lifelike counterpoint to the stylized lines. This may have been a remote, provincial church, but a thousand years or more ago it played host to some fine artists.

Deerhurst, Gloucestershire

Lost and found

Saxon churches are rare, but in the village of Deerhurst, not far from the River Severn, there are two. This is the smaller, Odda’s Chapel, a very simple stone building now attached to a timber-framed farmhouse. For years – indeed centuries – it vanished from view, incorporated into the house, the stone nave serving as a kitchen, the small chancel divided into upstairs and downstairs rooms. No one knew that it was anything other than an old part of the house.

In 1675, a stone with a Latin inscription was discovered nearby. The text says that ‘Earl Odda ordered this royal chapel to be built and dedicated in honour of the Holy Trinity, for the soul of his brother Aelfric who left his body in this place,’ and goes on to date the building’s dedication to 12 April 1056. A dated foundation stone like this for such an early building is very unusual, but back in 1675 when it was found, no one knew the whereabouts of the building to which it referred.

Then in 1885 someone doing some repair work to the farmhouse discovered an old window and the truth began to dawn. Archaeologists unpicked the two buildings in the 1960s, restoring the chapel’s separate entrance and repairing the roof. The small, bare space inside is lit by tiny, narrow windows, the chancel arch is a simple stone horseshoe design, details that would be familiar to masons and worshippers almost a thousand years ago.

Repton, Derbyshire

Here is a hidden marvel, a gem of Anglo-Saxon architecture that is familiar to scholars of the early history of English buildings, but not well known to non-specialists. It is the crypt of St Wystan’s church, Repton, a building with a history stretching back to the 7th century.

It’s quite unusual for a parish church to have a crypt. You usually find these underground spaces beneath large cathedrals, where they housed sacred items such as the remains of saints. Parish churches didn’t often run to such precious relics, but monasteries sometimes did, and the church at Repton began as a monastic church, and an important one, that became the burial place of the kings of the Saxon Midland kingdom of Mercia. King Ethelbald of Mercia, who died in 757, was buried here; so was King Wiglaf (died 840). When Wiglaf’s grandson Wystan was murdered, he was laid to rest here too. When Wystan was canonized, Repton became a place of pilgrimage.

To house these hallowed remains the Saxon masons built a crypt about 16 feet square. The crypt was probably first constructed in the 7th century, but was rebuilt in the 9th century, when it took the form that it still has today – a square space with a vaulted ceiling held up by four columns, each made from a single stone and each encircled with decorative spiral bands. It’s quiet, dark, and small, but there would have been space enough for the royal tombs and the saint’s shrine, and there are two staircases so that pilgrims could file down one and up the other, in a steady one-way traffic of devotion.