Herefordshire Through Time
Herefordshire Through Time
All churches, as places of sacred worship, are dedicated to God but it is also usual for a church to be placed under the patronage of a particular individual, usually a saint. In Herefordshire there are two significant features of dedication. The first is the influence of the Celtic Church in the south and west of the county in the old British kingdoms of Ergyng (Archenfield) and Ewyas, with many of the churches retaining their Celtic saint connections.
The second feature is that Herefordshire has remained largely unchanged by the industrial growth of the 19th century onwards, which brought about population increases in many other areas of England. These population rises often meant that the parish would grow too big for its church and new ones would need to be built. In Hereford City four new churches were built in the 19th century and two in the 20th to serve the new suburbs that grew up, but all of the market towns of the county have managed not to outgrow their parish churches of the medieval period (see D.M. Annett,Saints in Herefordshire - A Study of Dedications, Logaston Press, 1999).
The first saints were martyrs, and the churches were usually built at the place of their martyrdom and then became places of pilgrimage. For example, Clodock church near Longtown marks the burial spot of Prince Clydawg who was murdered out of jealousy and made a martyr through his pious life. Later, two other classes of saint were added - confessors and virgins. Like martyrs, they were made saints because of their dedication to their faith.
There are many reasons why a church may be dedicated to a particular saint. The saint may have been a personal patron of the bishop or lord who consecrated the church, or the church may have been attached to a monastery or larger religious house and the saint was the patron of that institution (e.g. Little Cowarne church was re-dedicated in 1992 and given the saint's name of St. Guthlac to demonstrate the fact that it was once attached to St Guthlac's Priory in Hereford). The dedication might be to the founder or benefactor of the church or it may mark the death- or burial-place of a particular saint.
In cases where the church had originally been dedicated to a native saint (mainly Celtic), the dedication may have been changed at a later date to a more scripturally-related saint. Sometimes it was simply a case of adding the new saint's name to the existing dedication (e.g. Aymestrey had St. John the Baptist added to St. Alkmund), but in other cases the Celtic saint was superseded by the scriptural saint (e.g. at Kentchurch, St. Mary took over from St. Keyne).
One period when many dedications were changed was after the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Normans wanted to abolish the practice of using native saints, most probably for political reasons in order to suppress any feelings of solidarity among those they had conquered and to bring in their own way of doing things so that the native would recognise them as being in control.
Sometimes if a church was enlarged or rebuilt then it needed to be re-consecrated, and the bishop or person in charge of the consecration would often take the opportunity to change the saint's name to one that they favoured more.
[Original author: Miranda Greene, 2005]