Anglo-Saxon architecture

Anglo-Saxon architecture. English architecture from the end of C6 to the Norman Conquest (1066), also called Saxon. Much Anglo-Saxon building was of timber, but from c.672 the more significant structures were of masonry, usually rag or rubble. Later, freestone dressings, including quoins set alternately horizontally and on end (known as long-and-short work), raised lesenes (as at Earl's Barton Church, Northants.), horizontal string-courses, blind arcades on vertical strips, paired semicircular headed openings separated by baluster-like colonnettes in towers, triangular-topped openings, and roughly carved outsized elements framing doorways, were common motifs. The raised lesenes, strings, and long-and-short work suggest that the rubble panels thus created were originally intended to be rendered with plaster or some kind of stucco. Occasionally, rubble was laid in a herring-bone pattern. Window-openings were usually small. Churches consisted of a nave (often with a storey over (e.g. Deerhurst, Glos.)) and a chancel divided from the nave by an arch (e.g. Wittering, Soke of Peterborough) or by three arches (e.g. Bradwell-juxta-Mare, Essex). Northern chancels were usually square-ended, but in the South were sometimes apsidal. All Saints Church, Brixworth, Northants., has nave-arcades partly made of recycled Roman bricks and tiles: this suggests a basilica, but it appears the ‘aisles’ were subdivided by walls to form chambers, called porticus, although there seems to have been an apse at one end and a two-storeyed porch at the other, with chambers on each side. Thus Brixworth is one of the grandest surviving examples of Anglo-Saxon architecture, although certain structures, such as the New Minster at Winchester, Hants. (begun 903–destroyed), seem to have been more ambitious, owing much to Carolingian precedent.

Bibliography

Cruickshank (ed.) (1996);
Stoll (1967)