What Remains

After yesterday's peek through the window of what has become known as St.Mary's Chapel in Cockley Cley, let's check out some more of it.

Meandering through the woods away from the reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village, the more adventurous wanderer might come across this sight.
Is it an old barn? Let's take a look.

That ain't no barn. And that door and window are pre-Norman, so we're looking at a Saxon church here. Cockley Cley already has a big late Saxon church only a few minutes across the fields, and that was probably built when this small church could no longer cope with the growing population.

 It was still in use between 1000 and 1100, as this Saxo-Norman doorway tells us, though by the time of the Reformation it had fallen into disuse and became derelict until squatters started living in it. People were still living there in 1952, with no water, drains or electricity.

Mercifully, someone realised what was hidden underneath all the decay and it has been slowly recovering since then, though it still has a temporary roof as the people who call themselves Christians these days prefer to waste their time and money on tax fraud, tawdry TV shows, pædophilia or bitching about one another's culty little cliques and so a few grand for some timber and thatch to protect one of the first places in Northern Europe to hear the word of Jesus is not a priority.

 Below the floor of the main body of the church are the remains of an earlier church and below those the remains of a Roman temple. The early Christians usually re-used old pagan sites as a derelict building is cheaper to repair and use than building something from scratch, and these were places where people had been coming to worship for centuries, so there was a ready made congregation ripe for conversion. Saint Fursey and his followers would have preached here because there was already an old ruined temple on the site which would act as a focus to draw people and as a shelter to live in.

The stone jambs to the opening are later, tenth or eleventh century additions to both shore up and decorate the old walls. The original building was all flint.

 This is the Roman lead coffin I was telling you about yesterday, dating from 350AD and sitting on some Roman floor tiles found locally.

 The sign over the wooden box in the apse explains that four feet below that spot were found the bones of the brother of Saint Fursey who lived and preached here and died on pilgrimage in 650AD (check him out if you have a copy of Bede's "Historia Ecclesiastica" (yes, of course I do; you know better than to ask) - he's in book III, chapter IXX.

The people who first heard about Jesus in this little space in a woodland clearing would have been aghast at what horrors their religion unleashed upon the world in the ensuing centuries. Fortunately this tiny chapel really does retain a sense of the innocence and hope of the early church and it's nice to pop in there from time to time to step back into a simpler world. I don't feel the message of Jesus in any modern church but I do in here.