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January 2002
Parish History Episode 9
CHURCHES OF STONEWe have several times remarked on the fact that, despite the importance, from the beginnings of the English conquest of Britain, of the Deiran kingdom at York and the Bernician kingdom at Bamburgh, there are no early written records of Anglian settlement in what later became County Durham. This lack of sources had been noted by ancient historians writing nearly a millennium ago. Simeon, a monk of Durham, who wrote, about 1130, a work called “A History of the Kings of England”, covering the period from 616 to 1129, noticing that there seemed to be nothing known, before the time of Bede, of any place between the Tyne and the Tees, suggests that this region “was then the haunt of wild beasts, and not of men”.
It was almost certainly inhabited by wild men as well as wild beasts, but one result of Oswald’s return from his exile on Iona, and his assumption of the joint crowns of Bernicia and Deira, was that he desired to link the two separate nuclei of Northumbria more closely together by encouraging Anglian settlement, under royal patronage, in the lands between the Tyne and the Wear. During King Oswald’s reign (633 to 641) and the longer reign of his brother, Oswy (641 to 670), a number of towns were deliberately planted in this frontier zone, and, amongst other resources, many of them were provided with stone-built churches, features which had been unknown in Britain since the departure of the Romans.
At Escomb, on the Upper Wear, one of these churches still survives, substantially unaltered since its erection in the middle of the Seventh Century. Another, closer to Houghton, is at Seaham, though St. Mary’s Church, a mile or so to the North of Seaham Harbour, has had its appearance much altered through the addition, in the Thirteenth Century, of a tower and other features. Also, though the original buildings do not survive, fragments of mid-Seventh Century stonework have been found in the churchyards of St. Oswald’s, Elvet, and St. Andrew’s, South Church, Bishop Auckland. Both those churches lie along the course of the River Wear. Further North, on the Tyne, lie the churches of Corbridge and St. Peter’s at Bywell, also probably dating to King Oswy’s time.
Later in the Seventh Century, the great stone-built monastic churches of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth and Hartlepool were erected. (No trace survives of other important monasteries of the time, such as those at South Shields and Monk-chester {Newcastle-upon-Tyne}, and they may have been built of wood.) But the sudden appearance, in a land previously almost untouched by Anglian settlement, of so many stone buildings, the first, perhaps, to have been constructed in England since Roman times, suggests a deliberate policy of “opening up” the lands between the Tyne and the Tees to settlement, and creating a nexus of townships to bind Bernicia and Deira together in a new Northumbrian unity.
Seaham lies South of the mouth of the Wear, and Monkwearmouth just to the North. Elvet, Auckland and Escomb all lie, relatively close together, much further upstream. There might well once have been one or two other such settlements in the gap between Monkwearmouth and Elvet. The old Roman site of Chester-le-Street is one obvious possible location. Another is at Houghton-le- -Spring, a few miles South of the Wear, but situated where springs of fresh water burst out from beneath the limestone cap which covers the hills between here and Sunderland.
But is there any evidence whatever for one of King Oswy’s townships having been planted here? There is certainly no written evidence, but archaeological discoveries, of the foundation of an early Anglian stone church, have been reported here in Houghton. It is said that traces of such a church were discovered during the reconstruction of our church which took place in Rector Thurlow’s time, in the 1830’s. Thurlow’s successor, Rector Grey, is also said to have glimpsed such foundations, under the chancel, during work there. Then, towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, it is claimed that workmen clearing ground for the erection of Houghton Racecourse (long closed; it was on what is now the Racecourse Estate) discovered traces of another “Saxon” church in the field known, perhaps significantly, as Kirk Lea.
So, were there two ancient churches here? Or is one of these reports false? Or both of them?
It is impossible to say what, if anything, actually was found. If anything of these discoveries was ever reported in any scientific publication, I have been unable to locate it. Canon Greenwell meticulously reported, in “Archaelogia Aeliana” (the journal of Northumbrian archaeology) the details of his “dig” at Copt Hill barrow in 1877, and so enabled me to read about his work, over a century after his death. The artifacts he unearthed were taken back to Durham Cathedral, and once displayed in the Monks’ Dormitory there. (Later they were placed in the Fulling Mill Museum, where I once saw them. They are not there now, the curator informed me. She said that they were despatched either to Sunderland Museum or to the Tyne and Wear Archives, she is not sure which, after the Copt Hill area was transferred to Tyne and Wear county in 1974. Neither of those authorities, however, have any record of having received them. It amazes me that such organisations, devoted to the preservation and study of the past, can lose such exhibits without making any note of what happened to them).
Unfortunately, hardly any scientific archaeological work has ever been under-taken at Houghton, other than Canon Greenwell’s dig at Copt Hill, and the more recent work done by Peter Ryder (as in his investigation of “the Stones of Mystery”, referred to in Part 1 of this Parish History - printed in the May issue of “Signpost”). Perhaps some current investigations at Copt Hill will be as well recorded for posterity as was Canon Greenwell’s work.
If the Nineteenth-Century reports of discoveries of the foundations of ancient Anglian churches under the present church or in Kirk Lea have to be treated with a certain amount of scepticism, can it be said that there is any possibility, or probability, of the parish of Houghton-le-Spring having its roots as far back as the Seventh Century? Well, as mentioned above, Houghton was a logical enough site for the planting of one of King Oswy’s new strategic townships. Furthermore, there was such widespread destruction of life and property in this region at the time of the Danish invasion in the Ninth Century, and then again at the time of the Norman invasion in the Eleventh Century, that it is entirely possible that a church of King Oswy’s time could be so completely destroyed, along with the people associated with it, that all memory of such a church could have been wiped out. Again, it is possible that the Empty Sarcophagus featured in Part 4 of this history was used for an interment in the walls of this hypothetical church, and the sarcophagus is not therefore of Roman date.
All these are possibilities. But none of them can be proven until a lot more hard archaeological work has been done at Houghton.Dick Toy
