“Big?”, I hear you saying. “It’s half the size of my local church”. Right. But this is an unextended early Norman church and it is surprisingly hefty. You might feel that this is reinforced by the fact that the parish has never felt the need to extend it.
When I talk to people about the history of the English parish church one of the first things I say to them is that they must not run away with the idea that churches were built by the Church. Justin Welby and his predecessors, it is true, treats them as his to tax and dispose of as he sees fit. Most churches, however were built by lay patrons and parishioners in differing measure and, it is easy to forget, usually centuries before the Church of England was even established. Monasteries sometime built churches outside their monastic precincts, but mostly they preferred to be gifted churches so that they could plunder their tithes!
Worth Matravers Church will certainly have been built by the local bigwig and here the Domesday Book becomes useful because this church was built less than twenty years after it was compiled. At the time of the survey (1086) the land was held by one Roger Arundel. The book lists several holdings. Some were held by him “of the King”. Others - including Worth - were held “himself” and others were held “of him”. Thirteen are listed in all. Worth was the largest of these. There was land for “twelve ploughs”. In demesne (that is, farmed by Roger himself) four ploughs. He had eight slaves, which is sobering. Serfdom is something most people hear about at school, but less so about outright mediaeval slavery. There were eight villeins (serfs) and nine “bordars” which were much the same thing. There was a mill “rendering 7s 6d”, fifteen furlongs (nearly two miles) of meadow and the same of pasture, as well as woodland. The whole was worth, Domesday reckoned, £16 7s 6d.
In Saxon times it had been held by one Aethelfrith and interestingly he paid geld - tax - for sixteen and a half hides. A hide was sufficient land to support a tenant farmer and was about one hundred and twenty acres in Norman times, although probably somewhat less in the pre-Conquest period. The sixteen ploughs, however, tallies very neatly with the sixteen and and a half hides and certainly amounted to the same thing.
So Roger was a wealthy man, and his biggest holding seems to have been Worth Matravers. The church would have been built solely by him and - again. something hard for people to understand today - would have been owned by him. Churches then were private property. That was probably why they were sometimes listed in Domesday Book. Roger was probably making a statement here by building a church that on the face of it was over-large for its community.
Incidentally, you can see on this website the church of Melbury Bubb, also held by Roger Arundel at that time, and which has a very important tenth century Anglo-Scandinavian font.
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