12 - The church in the landscape

Summary

How did the monasteries and dioceses fit into their environment? Most regional studies start with such questions, and work ‘upwards’ from physical geography to the economic and social basis of the mentalities revealed by texts. The problem with such an approach is that, in Christopher Taylor's words, ‘it is still not clear what Saxon England looked like’. The varied landscape which one surveys from the Cotswolds, or from the Malvern hills, has been shaped not only by millions of years of geological and climatic change, but also by millennia of inconsistent exploitation by a fluctuating human population. In dealing with surviving artefacts, documents and manuscripts, we are dealing with specific, often tangible evidence. The surviving landscape, however, cannot yet be read like a book. Indeed, ‘the age between the fifth and ninth centuries AD’, to quote Taylor again, ‘despite an enormous amount of new work, seems to be more dark than ever’.

Nevertheless, it seems feasible to tackle two basic questions about the inter-relation of history and the environment: how were the monasteries sited in the early diocese-kingdoms; and how geographically coherent were those units?

THE DISTRIBUTION OF SETTLEMENT

The plausibility of answers to such questions depends on our impression of the disposition of settlement in the landscape. This impression is formed mainly by inference, because direct archaeological evidence of early Anglo-Saxon settlement is slight. The only relevant archaeological distribution which is full enough to be meaningful is that of the accompanied burials of the sixth to seventh centuries; and these burials cannot be taken to indicate the full extent of settlement, particularly in the seventh century when the rite of accompanied burial was in decline.