The English century of the round churches
An unusual church of great charm stands at Little Maplestead in rural Essex. It is best approached from the west. Seen across the fields, which in north Essex style bear no hedges separating them from the road, the distinguishing mark of the church of St John the Baptist is striking: it is round.
Little Maplestead is the last of the 16 round churches built in the 12th century in southern England (as far north as Temple Bruer, Lincolnshire). In fact it is an outlier, unlike the rest not being built till 1240. Indeed it is often said to be from a century later than that, but research by the historian Professor Michael Gervers established the earlier date.
St John’s is built of flint and pebbles, with ashlar dressing. Its conical roof of weathered red tiles rises to a wooden belfry topped by a pyramidal roof, with a gilt weathercock catching the sun. The church was restored with painful thoroughness in the 1850s, when a Norman font was discovered, dating from the 11th century, before the present church was built.
It is one of four churches still in use with rotundas from this period, the other three being the Temple Church, London; Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge; and Holy Sepulchre, Northampton. The other 12 were at Chichester, Dover, West Thurrock, Bristol, Woodstock, Garway (Herefordshire), Hereford, Ludlow, Aslackby (Lincolnshire) and Temple Bruer, with two more in London: the Old Temple Church at Holborn, and St John’s Clerkenwell.
Why were they round and why were they built in one century? Catherine E Hundley, of the University of Virginia, who devoted her doctoral studies to round churches, links them firmly with the Crusades.
Her observations form part of a splendid new book, Tomb and Temple edited by Robin Griffith-jones, Master of the Temple in London, and Eric Fernie, doyen of Romanesque historians.
In 500 pages, with 18 contributors, it examines the place of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple of Solomon in medieval thought. Dr Hundley acknowledges that only with the Third Crusade from 1189 did Englishmen play a part in larger numbers, but she points to Christopher Tyerman’s work showing that more men from England than had been thought, went on Crusade from 1095, the start of the First Crusade.
The round churches were undoubtedly meant to refer to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It made sense. Each Mass made present the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Calvary and the tomb from which he rose were recognised as sites within the church in Jerusalem built by Constantine in the fourth century. Pilgrims and Crusaders saw the rotunda and dome that sheltered the aedicule, the stone shrine covering the tomb of Christ.
Dr Hundley notes that the round church movement, as she calls it, had the most impetus, surprisingly, in the chaos of Stephen and Matilda’s reigns (1135-54), not during the years of stability under Henry I (1100-35).
She remarks that English round churches were truly round, not octagonal (like Charlemagne’s royal chapel at Aachen). Not all of them were linked to the Templars or the Hospitallers: the appeal was wider.
The round churches would have stood out as unusual in their day. Even small examples, such as Bradden chapel above the cliffs at Dover, would have seen large numbers of pilgrims, cumulatively.
England had no history of round churches before 1100, and after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, the movement dwindled, apart from the late flowering at Little Maplestead.