There are some credible suggestions that Botolph’s Ikenho, which was also recorded as destroyed by the Great Heathen Army, may have been today’s Hadstock.įirstly, the name. Rodwell’s proposed evolution of Hadstock’s church (black lines indicate still extent elements) – church guide This is usually associated with another St Botolph’s church in today’s Iken, on the Suffolk coast but this has – again – no remains of a Saxon structure, although a reused Saxon cross was found in the tower’s structure during a modern renovation. So what was this church? It’s dedicated to St Botolph (Botwulf), an early Saxon missionary referenced in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle as having built a church at ‘Ikenho’ (Yceanho) in 653/654. Dating of charred timbers found in the dig indicated this firing could have been the late 9th century, contemporaneous with the Great Heathen army’s rampage and sacking of the monasteries at Ely, Peterborough, and Thorney in 869. Discolouration on some of the stones suggested destruction by fire. For the lower parts of the walls – still visible in the nave – and extensive remains below the floors date to a much earlier church, as early as the 7th century. The 1973 excavation found something else exciting beneath the late Saxon building. But little Hadstock’s importance goes deeper still.Įxposed stonework from the earlier church (south wall) If correct, for me this in turn returns us to our initial profound mystery – what is an enormous Saxon church doing in this tiny Essex village?ĭiscussions of angle rolls and sapwood rings moves me well beyond any pretence at expertise and only able to hold my hands up in ignorance suffice to say the church’s identification with Cnut remains intriguing and far from conclusive, but also a fascinating excuse to read further into the last hurrah of Danish conquest in the British Isles. Macabrely, the door was also coated with a tanned leather which was reputed to be the skin of a Viking slain for violating the church modern tests were also used here, which found it was (much more prosaically) an oxhide.Īs ever, this isn’t the end of the story the most persuasive counter-argument being made by Eric Fernie in 1983 which compared the door’s upper moulding to a Norman church in Caen, dating it later than Cnut’s post-Assandum church. This would also make the door and its metal fittings – still used as the church’s main entrance – the oldest in the country, pipping the much better known Chapter House door in Westminster Abbey (fitted under Edward the Confessor in the 1050s). So in 2003 dendrochronologists were called in, a series of microcores establishing the door’s timber as from trees felled around 1034 – slightly after Cnut’s foundation, but perhaps consistent with a door being fitted within his reign. But the door had been moved Rodwell’s excavations found it originally sat further west and was moved closer to the transept in the early 13th century. The moulding on the jambs and arch looks Saxon. The beautiful north door would offer the most exciting part of the story. The stunning north door – the oldest in Britain So could this actually be Cnut’s church – if so, one of but a handful of surviving Scandinavian-built buildings in England? On closer inspection, the massive church’s nave and transepts have clear diagnostic features for the pre-Norman church I’d come to look for: quoins (corner stones) made from large, alternating long and short blocks small, narrow windows to reduce draughts into the ancient church and, inside, mouldings on the arch columns and door frames lacking the grandeur of Norman artifice but instead full of a more intimate vernacular charm. First impressions are of its size, entirely out of proportion with the tiny village over which it presides, and a higgldey-piggldey jumble of restorations – including a hideous Victorian attempt to render the outside in concrete. I stumbled into the churchyard after a surprisingly gruelling day hiking the Icknield Way – there are almost a half dozen Saxon churches in this part of Essex. But more intriguing hints come from Hadstock’s church of St Botolph, which has a pedigree far longer than anything at Ashingdon.
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