Leavings or Legacies? The Role of Early Medieval Saints in English Church Dedications beyond the Conquest and the Reformation

Abstract

Every English church is dedicated to some aspect of the godhead or to a patron saint, often commemorated in the place names, such as St Albans in Hertfordshire, Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and St Osyth in Essex. Many of the earliest missionaries and those princesses who founded nunneries have been reviewed by Barbara Yorke in work which has done much to reveal the early medieval legacy of the landscape of Britain.1 The dedications of parish churches are among the most obvious elements of that legacy but they also reveal much of the perceptions of that legacy in the later Middle Ages. Although this paper focuses on Anglo-Saxon dedications before the Norman Conquest, the discussion also includes native British saints or Celtic dating before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, some of later date, Anglo-Saxon saints who operated within England and abroad (e.g. St Boniface), universal and Roman saints venerated within England, and some others, notably the 11thand 12th-century Vikings King Olaf Haraldsson and Earl Magnus. This paper considers these early contributions to the pool of dedications current in today’s churches and how and why the dedications have multiplied and then were curtailed in the millennium since the Norman Conquest. Thus St Petroc was the most popular native/British or Celtic saint in the West Country, to judge from his fourteen dedications in Cornwall and Devon; there was another church of St Petroc at Winchester.2 A much venerated Anglo-Saxon saint was St Botulph (Abbot Botwulf of Iken, Suffolk, c.610–70), who is still commemorated at over seventy locations, most notably the Boston stump in Lincolnshire, St Botolph’s Priory in Colchester (Essex), the parish church at Botolphs in Sussex, and the four London parish churches of St Botulph Aldgate, Aldersgate,