page_title: St Mary's Church, Reculver
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: St Mary's Church, Reculver / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Interior of the ruined church of St Mary, Reculver, looking eastwards from the elevated gallery between the surviving towers. The main feature is the outline of the original church of 699, excavated by archaeologists in the 1920s and marked mostly by concrete strips in the grass. The curved strip near the top of the image represents the apse. Below that, two circles of concrete represent the foundations of two columns that formed a triple chancel arch. To the left and right of those, and slightly beyond, are doorways into the north and south porticus, which themselves had external doors on their furthest, eastern sides, visible as gaps in the corresponding strips of concrete. King Eadberht II of Kent was buried in the right-hand, southern porticus in the 760s. From the apse, the north and south walls of the original church extend towards the viewer as far as the doorways to the porticus, but then are almost entirely represented by concrete strips running to the bottom of the image, where they meet the western wall. This runs across the bottom of the image, the grassy gap indicating the western entrance to the church. The parched grass in the central, nave area of the church indicates the presence of the remaining area of the original concrete floor. Between the apse and the furthest, eastern wall of the chancel lies a burial vault created for Sir Cavalliero Maycote, who lived at Brook, Reculver, in the reign of Elizabeth I. The remainder of the standing walls and strips of concrete represent work of the 8th and 13th centuries, apart from the towers and west front, including the gallery from which this photograph was taken, which were added in the 12th. Part of the north tower, which held a ring of four bells until the church was mostly demolished in 1809, is visible on the extreme left of the image.
context_page_description: St Mary's Church, Reculver, was founded in the 7th century as either a minster or a monastery on the site of a Roman fort at Reculver, which was then at the north-eastern extremity of Kent in south-eastern England. In 669, the site of the fort was given for this purpose by King Ecgberht of Kent to a priest named Bassa, beginning a connection with Kentish kings that led to King Eadberht II of Kent being buried there in the 760s, and the church becoming very wealthy by the beginning of the 9th century. From the early 9th century to the 11th the church was treated as essentially a piece of property, with control passing between kings of Mercia, Wessex and England and the archbishops of Canterbury. Viking attacks may have extinguished the church's religious community in the 9th century, although an early 11th-century record indicates that the church was then in the hands of a dean accompanied by monks. By the time of Domesday Book, completed in 1086, St Mary's was serving as a parish church.
context_section_description: The first church known to have existed at Reculver was founded in 669, when King Ecgberht of Kent gave land there to Bassa the priest for this purpose. The author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle "clearly considered this to be a significant event", and it may be that King Ecgberht's intention in founding a church at Reculver was to create an ecclesiastical centre with a strong English element, to counterbalance domination of the Canterbury Church by Archbishop Theodore, from Tarsus, now in Turkey, Abbot Hadrian of St Augustine's, from North Africa, probably Cyrenaica, and their equally "non-native followers." Historians vary over whether to call the church a minster or a monastery – thus Susan Kelly uses the former term, but Nicholas Brooks uses the latter, commenting that:
  [w]e do not know whether the Kentish monasteries had been founded as communities of monks and nuns dedicated to the service of God [and living in monasteries and nunneries], or whether the male communities were from the start bodies of secular clergy [operating from minsters] who, like the archiepiscopal familia at Canterbury, accepted a degree of communal (or monastic) discipline and who were responsible for the pastoral care of extensive rural areas. ... [T]he distinction between the regular and secular clergy was blurred from the very beginning in England. Indeed the word monasterium does not necessarily refer to a house of monks in the eighth and ninth centuries, but like its English equivalent, minster ..., was also the normal term for a church served by a body of clergy. ... By the ninth century the communities of the Kentish monasteries were certainly composed of priests, deacons, and clergy in lesser orders, just like the cathedral community at the 'head minster', [Canterbury Cathedral].
  — Nicholas Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury, 1984
  The foundation of this church, sited within the remains of the Roman fort of Regulbium, exemplifies the "widespread practice [in Anglo-Saxon England] of re-using Roman walled places for major churches"; the new church was built "almost completely from demolished Roman structures". The building formed a nave measuring 37.5 feet (11.4 m) by 24 feet (7.3 m) and an apsidal chancel, which was externally polygonal but internally round, and was separated from the nave by a triple arch formed by two columns made of limestone from Marquise, in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France. The arches were formed using Roman tiles, but the columns were made for the church rather than being Roman in origin, and their form has been attributed to late-Roman and early Byzantine architectural influences, probably transmitted via the contemporary architecture of Merovingian France. Around the inside of the apse was a stone bench, and two small rooms, or porticus, forming rudimentary transepts were built out from the north and south sides of the church where the nave met the chancel, from which they could be accessed. The presence of a stone bench around the inside of the apse has been attributed to influence from the Syrian Church, at a time when its followers were being displaced. The walls of the church were rendered inside and out, giving them a plain appearance and hiding the masonry.
  Ten years after the foundation of the church, in 679, King Hlothhere of Kent granted lands at Sturry, about 6.2 miles (10 km) south-west of Reculver, and at Sarre, in the western part of the Isle of Thanet, across the Wantsum Channel to the east, to Abbot Berhtwald and his "monastery". The grant was made at Reculver, and the charter in which it was recorded was probably written by a Reculver scribe. The grant of Sarre in particular is significant:
  Sarre was a highly strategic place, overlooking the confluence of the Wantsum and the Great Stour, [and] directly linked to Canterbury ... In the early 760s it was the site of a toll-station, where the agents of the Kentish kings collected dues on trading ships using the Wantsum route ... The grant of Sarre to Reculver must be regarded as a sign of enormous royal favour to the [church
caption: Interior of the ruined church, looking eastwards from an elevated gallery between the towers in 2015. A curved strip of concrete towards the top of the image marks the line of the apse, and two circles of concrete represent foundations for the columns of the triple chancel arch. To the right of these is the southern porticus, where King Eadberht II of Kent was buried in the 760s. Parched grass in the central, nave area indicates the underlying presence of original, concrete flooring.
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