JOHN GRUNDY uncovers evidence of
fortified churches which harks back to a more
violent, dangerous time.
JUST to the side of the chancel arch in the church of St Gregory the Great at Kirknewton, north of Wooler, there?s a rather extraordinary carved panel set into the wall. It shows the three wise men offering their gifts to the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus.
I call it “extraordinary” because the three chaps don'tlook awfully wise - in fact they look rather wild, and even Mary looks a bit of a tough lass, not someoneyou'd be eager to share a dark alley with. This is a marvellouslittle bit of sculpture, I might add, but you'd call it rough rather than sophisticated. It almost certainly dates from the 12th century and its primitive nature is typical of 12th century art all over Europe.
Behind it, through the chancel arch, lies the chancel itself which is, in its entirety, equally extraordinary and not typical of anywhere but the Borders. It's vaulted in stone, like a stone tent - not one of those posh continental tents with built-in kitchens and billiard rooms and suites of assorted bedrooms, but like a small ridge tent with low side walls as favoured by tough chaps in shorts in the Lake District. You feel you ought to get on your knees and crawl into it. The walls start to slope inwards at ground level and meet at the ridge just a few feet above your head.
In terms of wildness, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the vault and the sculpture, and yet the chancel was built long after the carving was done - hundreds of years after. It acts as a reminder that medieval Northumberland, unlike most other places, didn't get more settled and civilised as the centuries passed by: it got rougher, hairier and more dangerous... because of the Border wars.
Let me remind you that the wars between England and Scotland started at the end of the 1200s and that they went on pretty solidly, not for a week or two or even a year or two, but for at least 300 hundred years - a hefty slice of history which has left an indelible mark on the Northumbrian landscape. Everybody knows about the castles that litter our skyline, making the county (as Nikolaus Pevsner said) the castle county of England, but fewer know that the wars also left us (and also the Cumbrians, to be fair) with a unique legacy of fortified religious buildings.
Brinkburn Priory was built in a secluded valley in an attempt to escape the attention of invaders.
People needed to strengthen and fortify their churches because they were no safer than any other buildings and, being richer, probably less so. Marauding armies were no more respecters of sanctity in those days than they are today (almost literally weapons of mass destruction in Roman Catholic days). There are loads of stories which prove that this is true.
That nice Mr Braveheart, for example, killed all the nuns and burnt down their nunnery at Lambley in the Tyne valley. He locked the schoolboys from the school at Hexham Abbey into their building (“a herd of little scholars”, says the chronicler picturesquely but inappropriately) and burned them to death. South of Wooler, in the (private) grounds of Lilburn Hall, is the beaufiful and dignified ruin of a Norman church which is said to have been abandoned because it was desecrated by blood when the priest was murdered at his altar. Over in Cumberland, Robert the Bruce even sacked Holm Cultram Abbey where his own father was buried. They were hard times, and hard times demand desperate measures.
All of the monasteries seemed to have taken steps to defend themselves in one way or another. Some hid. Brinkburn Priory and Blanchland were both built in deep and secluded valleys, presumably in the hopes of keeping their heads down - though it is said that the inmates at Blanchland, chuffed to escape detection by the Scots on one occasion, rang their bells too soon and got discovered as a result.
Instead of hiding away from danger, the monks at Tynemouth chose the most exposed and defensible spot they could to build, protected on three sides by mighty cliffs, but on the unprotected landward side they took special measures. As one of the builders put it: “Our house is confined to the top of a high rock and is surrounded by the sea on all sides but one. Here is the approach to the monastery through a gate cut out of the rock, so narrow that a cart can hardly pass through.”
Other monasteries built strong tower houses to protect themselves in the event of attack. Lindisfarne had one. The tiny monastic cell started by the monks from Durham on the Farne Islands had a defensive tower for the monks to live in which was far bigger than its churches. Hulne Priory, in the middle of the Duke of Northumberland's park at Alnwick, not only has a mighty tower built in 1488, but also a perfectly preserved set of 12-foot-high medieval walls entirely surrounding the whole complex of buildings - a vivid example of how much effort monks felt they needed to put into protecting themselves.
The narrow aisles at St Cuthbert's Church, Elsdon
Villagers with exposed parish churches couldn't afford work on the same scale as the monasteries, though it's amazing how many of them felt the need to provide a strong tower for the vicar to live in (Corbridge, Rothbury, Alnham and Elsdon, to name but a few).
The village of Ancroft, frighteningly exposed on the coastal plain near Berwick and unnervingly close to the border, went one rather odd stage further. They had a nice little Norman church which had been built long before the wars started, but when the danger arrived, they built a hacky great pele tower right in the middle of the church. If you were being charitable you could call it a fortified church tower, but whatever you call it, it blocks up the original Norman door. It has walls millions of feet thick, a mighty vaulted basement, a spiral staircase and all the trimmings of a northern tower house - inside the walls of the parish church. Presumably it acted as a churchtower- of-last-resort in the event of attack.
The blocked up Norman door at St Anne?s Church, Ancroft - evidence of defensive measures to keep intruders at bay.
In some ways Elsdon is even odder. In the 14th century, Elsdon had quite a large and impressive church with aisles and a nice arcade of arches but, a couple of hundred years later, the aisles were demolished and rebuilt in the most bizarre way. The new side walls are only about four feet from the arches. They must be the narrowest aisles in the country. Not only that, but their roofs have got half stone vaults (lean-to vaults, quadrant vaults if you're being technical) and, most unusually of all, the new side walls had no windows! The north wall still has none and the south wall was only given windows in 1835; until that time the nave of the church seems to have been a windowless stone box. How attractive it must have been.
One final church which deserves a special mention for its defensive qualities occupies a similar position to Elsdon. Raiders coming down the valley of the River Rede hit on Elsdon; those preferring to use the North Tyne valley soon reached Bellingham, and the place must have often seemed awfully insecure. You can understand the villagers adding defences - that much is clear. What is less obvious is why the people of Bellingham should only have felt the need to fortify their church as late as the year 1609, which was six years after England and Scotland had become joined together under one king. And yet they did.
As at Elsdon, they pulled down the aisles of their substantial church and covered the nave and transept of their new bite-sized building with an astonishing barrel-vaulted stone roof. The flagstones of the vault rest on 22 stone ribs or arches, and the absolutely massive flagstones of the outer roof rest directly onto the vault. It's a wonderful sight from outside or in - not pretty in any accepted or traditional sense, but a perfect illustration of how dangerous this beautiful landscape must have felt for hundreds of years •