The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (review)

This ambitious book masterfully fulfills the expectations that it raises. Drawing upon many years of historical and archaeological research, Blair has produced a comprehensive history of the Anglo-Saxon church that presents a significantly fresh perspective that aims, above all, to focus on local and typical conditions, and to chart "what local churches and local communities meant to each other" (7). In essence, Blair offers a history of the rise and transformation of the network of minsters first established in England during the course of the seventh century, discovering in late Anglo-Saxon developments the roots of the small local parishes to which the minster system finally gave way. The minsters—the term refers to churches that were served not by a single priest but by religious communities that were often, though not always, fully monastic—gave the Anglo-Saxon church its special character, distinguishing it from the Italian and Gallic model of ecclesiastical development on the one hand and the Irish and British on the other. They also proved to be engines of social and economic development, playing a key role in the gradual urbanization of the English landscape: Practicing productive estate management, minsters attracted craftsmen and trade. It is no coincidence that so many English market towns developed out of settlements first established around the minsters.

As Blair shows, the Italian missionaries who arrived in England in 597 had initially intended to create an ecclesiastical system resembling the continental one with which they were familiar—that is, a system based on large urban episcopal churches dominating a subordinate network of baptismal churches and private oratories. Prevailing conditions in Anglo-Saxon England, however—notably the absence of Roman-style civitates and the existence of all-embracing kindred structures—encouraged in the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms the foundation of minsters that in most cases sprang up under royal or aristocratic patronage and were often ruled by relatives of their founders.

The first five of the book's eight chapters explore the development of this system until 850, noting the emergence of minsters as "central places" in their local landscapes, assessing the impact of Christianity upon pagan beliefs and practices, delineating the relationship of mutual interdependence that grew up between minsters and their local communities, and charting the ever-increasing hold that local magnates were able to exert upon the minsters' economic and material assets. The last three chapters document the gradual erosion of the minsters' autonomy between 850 and 1000; the progressive appropriation of their estates and sites for a variety of defensive, administrative, and tenurial purposes; and the construction, from the later tenth century, of a multiplicity of small manorial, village, and urban churches upon which twelfth-century bishops established the network of parishes that was to persist essentially unchanged in England until the twentieth century. The year 850, the turning point in Blair's narrative, also marked the intensification of Viking attacks upon England, which Blair sees as having played a merely contributory rather than a defining role in the process that he describes.

Blair views the works of the major Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical writers (Bede, Aldhelm, Ælfric, Wulfstan, Byrhtferth) as frequently narrow in focus and prescriptive, presenting ideals rather than norms. His major achievement is his successful integration of a mass of topographical and archaeological evidence with the documentary and literary material. He incorporates the findings of important recent excavations, and, more surprising for those familiar with his previous work, draws substantially upon the literature of comparative anthropology and ethnography. His premise is that a comparative approach offers the most fruitful possibilities for illustrating "what can happen when an alien and highly organized socio-religious culture, based upon elite ceremonial centres, implants itself into a relatively primitive society with fluid economic and settlement structures" (6).

The result of this approach is a series of arresting comparisons sprinkled throughout the book. Blair gauges the transforming impact that minsters had upon the religious and social life of their local communities through a comparison with...