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February 2002

Parish History Episode 10

THE ENGLISH CHURCH AND NATION

Whether or not King Oswy ever built a stone church at Houghton-le-Spring, English settlers soon came in to take possession of the lands between the Tyne and the Tees. There is no record of this colonisation, nor any evidence for what happened to the preceding Celtic population. The fact that the Wear, the main river of the area, still bears a Celtic name may suggest some continuity of population; the paucity of other Celtic place-names in what later became County Durham (the first syllable of “Penshaw” is one of the few exceptions - “pen” is the word for “hill” in Welsh and other related languages) suggests the opposite.

The names of villages and towns of course can provide some clues to the early history of the English. What, for instance, does the name “Houghton” mean? “Hough” in Old English meant a rock (the “gh” representing a guttural ending, like the “ch” in Scottish “loch” or the “gh” in Irish “lough”), and “ton” an en-closure. The “hough” might be one boulder, or perhaps, more likely, the rocky hillside which rises up above Houghton on the East, and “ton” would imply a palisade or something round the settlement. Such a name does not probably come from the earliest age of English settlement in Britain. The first English settlements in this island seem to have borne tribal names ending in “-ing”, for instance Ealing, Yeading, Sonning and Reading in the Thames Valley. These names seem to go back before English kingdoms began to develop. The next oldest group appear to be those names ending in “-ingham” or “-ington”. Local examples include Billingham, Easington and Washington. These would be the “ham” of the tribe of Billa, and the “tons” of the tribes of Essa and Wassa. A “ham”, a word which is still preserved in our modern word “hamlet”, was a home, a farm, perhaps a village, and the name would imply that it, unlike a “ton”, was unfortified. The “ton” then was simply an enclosed space, surrounded by a fence, a palisade or a stockade. It might contain nothing but a field or fields of crops or livestock, it might contain a single farmstead, or it might contain a village or town. The extremes of meaning can be seen in the modern Frisian or Dutch word “tuin” which means a walled garden, and nothing more, and the English word “town” which means a great deal more. Generally speaking, a “ton” would be bigger than a “ham”.

These forms, “-ingham” and “-ington”, are still tribal, and seem to assume a state of affairs where, though the tribe does not see itself, as in the Thames Valley examples, as being totally marked out from an alien environment, the “hams” and “tons” still see themselves as primarily part of a tribal unit rather than of a united kingdom. Later on names are given on a non-tribal basis, and so, perhaps a generation or more after the settlement of Washington and Easington, English colonists occupy the site of the former Neolithic village below Copt Hill, which lost its - possibly unpronounceable - native name (and the natives themselves may have been exterminated), and the English referred to it as “Houghton”, the “ton” on the side of the “hough”.

It was later noticed that there were many similar names in the area - and confusion can still occur between Houghton and Horden, for instance - and so the village names came to be given suffixes. Yoden (on the site of modern Peterlee) died out early, and Horden is still plain Horden, but Hutton became Hutton Henry, and Hetton became Hetton-le-Hole. Houghton, for its part, added to its name a reference to those springs which first attracted Neolithic farmers to the site.

All this area was of course from the start part of the Kingdom of Northumbria, formed from the union of the older kingdoms of Deira (Yorkshire) and Bernicia (Northumberland). Northumbria had adopted the Iona version of Christianity during the 630’s, and by the 660’s almost all the English kingdoms (together with all the Celtic kingdoms) had adopted one or other form of the Christian faith. Kent was still loyal to the Roman Mission, but the Church in most of the other English kingdoms owed more to Irish than to Roman missionary enterprise: but there were at least two types of Irish missionary - those who came straight from Ireland, and those who came via Iona and Lindisfarne. Finally, the Celts themselves were not united. The practices of the Irish Church diverged in some respects from those of the Welsh and Pictish Churches (though the Picts owed, at least partially, their conversion to Irish monks from Iona).

The actual differences between the various Churches of the British Isles may seem small and inessential, but just as modern churchgoers often seem to be indifferent to heretical ideas presented to them in sermons, but are likely to explode with indignation if the times of services are altered, or the Communion Table is moved to a new position, so people in those times became greatly concerned when they realised that the different Churches were calculating the date of Easter by different means, or if the clergy in different areas dressed or looked different - in particular, if different types of monks bore different types of tonsure.

The Iona monks, for instance, seem to have gone in for shaving an ear-to-ear band across their heads, as shown in the illustration, while Roman holy men shaved a circular patch on the crown of their heads, thus appearing like Malcolm Foster, editor of the Signpost. Such differences appear trivial to us, but they caused a great deal of worry in the Seventh Century. In addition Rome had great prestige (politically, the city of Rome was still an outpost of the Byzantine Empire, but the ruins of Roman cities and walls were scattered all over England, and men thought of Rome as the source of all wisdom) and many men insisted that, where there were differences, the Roman way must be the right way. At a meeting held in A.D. 664, the Synod of Whitby, the churchmen of Northumbria agreed to do things the Roman way.

Although the Synod was only of the clergy in one kingdom, the prestige of Northumbria was such that in time the whole of the British Isles followed suit. The other English kingdoms followed the Northumbrian example almost immediately. By 700, the kingdoms of North Britain (including Iona itself) and of Ireland had fallen into line. The Welsh waited a century until the Synod of Bangor in 768, before making the same changes. The Cornish waited another century beyond that.

Adopting the Roman system brought with it acknowledgement of the Roman Primacy, and also of the Primacy of the See of Canterbury, founded by Rome, within the English nation. Archbishop Theodore (at Canterbury from 669 to his death in 690) made this Primacy a reality, dividing the whole of England into geographically distinct dioceses, with one bishop as pastor of each (in contrast to the chaos of the Celtic system, where bishops resided in major monasteries, but there was no agreed boundary between one bishop’s territory and the next). He also introduced liturgical changes into the English Church, largely based on Roman or Byzantine custom, but also accepting some Celtic practices, such as Auricular Confession of sins to a priest before the granting of Absolution.

By the beginning of the Eighth Century, the English Churches had become united under the leadership of Canterbury, and, though there were still many rival kings in England, the English were coming to see themselves more and more as one people. By 731, it was possible for Bede, a monk of Wearmouth, and later of Jarrow, both in Northumbria, the premier English kingdom, to write a history, and to entitle it “the History of the English Church and Nation”.