Dutt, Markstones of East Anglis, Web section 2
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Christianity versus Paganism.
That many early British churches were erected on the sites previously
occupied by pagan temples and idols is a well established fact. We have
conclusive evidence that this was one of the proselytising methods of
the early Christian missionaries.
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Pope Gregory, in writing to the Abbot Mellitus in A.D. 601,
commands him to tell Bishop Augustine that “I have, upon mature
deliberation on the affair of the English, determined … that the
temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let
the idols that are in them be destroyed. … For if these temples be
well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of
devils to the worship of the true God; that the nation seeing that their
temples are not destroyed may remove error from their hearts, and
knowing and adoring the true God may the more faithfully resort to the
places to which they have been accustomed.”
In Britain, however, pagan temples were probably very far less numerous
than sacred sites on which stones or wooden idols were worshipped …
indeed, some writers have held that the stones themselves were the
temples often referred to. In spite of Gregory’s instructions
regarding the destruction of the idols, the Council of Tours, fifty-six
years later, ordered priests to refuse admission to the churches of all
“worshippers of upright stones,” and a year later the
Council of Nantes exhorted them to “dig up and hide those stones
which were worshipped” ; while nearly four hundred years later
Canute found it necessary to forbid the “barbarous worship of
stones, trees, fountains, and of the heavenly bodies.” Moreover,
historical and archæological evidence goes to prove that in many
instances the early Christian priests not only consecrated pagan temples
to the worship of the true God, but also permitted the “stones
which were worshipped” to remain on the sites, be embedded in the
walls or placed on the altars of churches, or made symbolic of the new
faith by carving or otherwise marking on them the sacred Cross. A like
course was adopted in Egypt by the priests of Heliopolis, who permitted
the archaic worship of stones so long as the over-lordship of the great
Ra was recognized.
Preservation of Pagan Stones.
Evidence of the preservation of pagan stones in their original positions
subsequent to the introduction of Christianity and the erection of
churches
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on sites of pagan worship is forthcoming from all parts of the country.
The rained tower of Constantine Church, Cornwall, is built on a large
rounded boulder weighing nearly quarter of a ton, and this boulder, Mr.
R. Ashington Bullen suggests, “marked probably the meeting-place
for whatever religious or ceremonial rites were practised.”
Professor R. Rupert Jones, F.R.S., considers the so-called Chair of
Bede, at Jarrow, to have been a sacred stone of early date, and it is
known to have been chiselled by modern masons into its present
rectangular shape. At the north-east corner of Maplescombe Church, Kent,
there is a large mass of tertiary conglomerate which probably is a like
significant relic, while during excavations at the ancient church of
St. Brelade, Jersey, a large granite block was discovered
in a precisely similar position at the angle of the north and east
walls. This last-named boulder was considered by the rector to be the
foundation stone of the church—an assumption to be considered in
relation with the remark of Mr. A. Watkins in The Old Straight
Track, that the foundation stone is “a symbol of the ancient
mark-stone which ‘founded’ the site.” It seems not
unlikely that some of these stones were associated with the pagan
foundation sacrifices, of which much evidence has been brought to light,
and that search beneath them might lead to the discovery of traces of
such sacrifices.
Among the instructive facts mentioned in The Old-Straight Track
is the custom of funeral processions passing three times round the
Funeral Stone outside Brilley Church, Herefordshire, and the finding of
a huge boulder embedded beneath the churchyard cross at Bosbury, in the
same county, and now placed under the church tower. In several instances
a pagan sacred stone has actually served as the base of a churchyard
cross, while others have been roughly shaped into such crosses. The Rev.
Baring Gould, in his Book of Dartmoor, has made clear that the
design of the ordinary churchyard gravestone has evolved from that of
the prehistoric menhir. The carving of the Cross, and in one instance of
the Instruments of the Passion, on prehistoric standing stones indicates
how such objects of pagan worship became symbols of the Christian Faith.
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Some East Anglian Boulders.
Bungay
Some of the noteworthy boulders in East Anglia are preserved in or
closely adjoin churchyards. That in St. Mary’s Churchyard, Bungay,
is known as the Giant’s Grave, also as the Druid’s Stone,
and there is a tradition that girls, after dancing round it twelve
times, placed their ears against it to receive answers to their wishes.
The preservation of this stone—which has lately been set up on end
in probably its original position—is the more interesting in view
of the fact that Outney Common, Bungay, was the site of a late Neolithic
settlement which was safeguarded from attack on all sides save one by a
horseshoe bend of the Waveney, while on the side without natural defence
a deep ditch was dug reaching at each end marsh levels that must have
been under water in prehistoric times. On the site of this settlement
the writer was fortunate enough to discover a fine polished flint axe, a
beautifully chipped triangular flint, knife, a leaf-shaped flint arrow
or javelin head, and some bones of a girl or small woman, including one
of the back vertebræ and a phalange of a toe. On Broome Heath,
about a mile away on the Norfolk side of the Waveney, there is another
prehistoric site with earthworks and barrows, and there, too, the
characteristic types of flint implements suggest a settlement of late
Neolithic or Bronze Age date. As there is general agreement that the
worship of standing stones was introduced into Britain during the
Neolithic period, the preservation of the large unhewn stone in St.
Mary’s Churchyard is the more significant for this unmistakable
evidence of extended prehistoric occupation of the immediate
neighbourood. Just outside the churchyard wall at Beccles, on the steep
slope down to the marshlands of the Waveney Valley, a glacial boulder is
deeply embedded,* and
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another, discovered about seventy years ago, during the digging up of
the foundations of the south aisle of the church at Holme-next-the-Sea,
is preserved in the churchyard there. Yet another boulder lies in
Thwaite Churchyard; but Wortham’s Sacred Stone, which formerly lay
just south-west of the tower of Wortham Church, has now been removed
into the church itself. In Bramford Church, at the west end of the north
aisle (according to a writer in the East Anglian Daily Times)
“a huge mass of stone juts out into the church from the
foundations at the corner of the north-east angle of the tower.”
In Church Lane, Gorleston, near by the church, there is a large granite
boulder.
Sacrificial Stones.
Some of the pagan stones were originally sacrificial, and in this
connection it is interesting to learn that a granite menhir at Holney on
Dartmoor was, until recently, the scene of a May festival known as the
Ram Feast.* A ram was caught on the moor, slain on the stone, roasted
there, and then divided into portions which were kept throughout the
year as mascots. Dancing, wrestling and drinking were kept up until
midnight. The saying about a “long stone” near Staunton, in
the Forest of Dean, that “if you prick it with a pin at midnight
it bleeds,” may be a faint survival in folk memory of sacrifices
on the site. Mr. Watkins is inclined to believe that the so-called
Sacrificial Stone near the Giant’s Cave, on the Malvern Hills, has
been artificially smoothed on one side so that—as a photograph in
his book makes clear—it so exactly fits “a human back that
almost every inch from neck to heel touched the stone when limply
reclining at an angle of 45 degrees.” A prostrate sarsen stone
within the earthwork circle at Stonehenge is popularly known as the
Slaughtering Stone; but, in the opinion of Mr. F. Stevens, the curator
of Salisbury Museum and the author of Stonehenge To-day
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and Yesterday, this name is “probably a picturesque piece
of nomenclature devised by certain bygone antiquaries.” Pope
Gregory, however, in the letter already quoted, suggests that
“because they (the Britons) have been used to slaughter many oxen
in the sacrifices to devils,” they should henceforth “kill
cattle to the praise of God in their eating, and return thanks to the
giver of all things for their sustenance;” and the evidence that
the sacrificing of oxen was preceded by, if not contemporary with, human
sacrifice, is too strong to be discredited.
An ancient Gaelic poem refers to the “king idol” of Erin,
called Cromm Cruaich, to whom human sacrifices were made and around whom
were “twelve idols made of stones” (probably a stone
circle), the poem adding that
“There was worshipping of stones
Until the coming of good Patrick of Macha.”
The worship of this pagan deity, with its attendant savage rites, is
considered by some authorities on Celtic Britain to be one of several
local cults of pre-Celtic origin which persisted after the Celts arrived
in our islands. Caesar’s reference to the wicker-work images
filled with living men and set on fire, and the assertion in the Celtic
poem that the worshippers of Cromm Cruaich poured out the blood of
one-third of their offspring to obtain the boon of milk and corn,
indicates that the human sacrifices were often on a large scale. The
Dartmoor Ram Feast was probably a “practice of symbolic human
sacrifice by those who had forgotten its meaning,” in this case
apparently associated with the original sacrificial stone. In
comparatively recent years there have been well authenticated instances
of the sacrifice of animals in England to avert cattle diseases and
ensure good luck on farms, and among the Samoyades of Novaya Zemblia the
sacrifice of a young girl to a stone image is known to have taken place
only a few years ago.*
Boundary Stones.
At a very early date boundary stones were looked upon as sacred, and
curses invoked on anyone who
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removed them. In the old Norse mythology the goddess Frigga was said to
apportion fields and consecrate landmarks, while the god Thor was
supposed to fix up the stones with his hammer.* The Swedish legend of
Jack-o’-Lantern is, Mr. Watkins tells us, that he was “a
mover of landmarks” and therefore doomed to be out at night for
ever and ever; the same writer quotes a folk tale about a man’s
ghost that used to “walk” and could get no rest because he
had moved a landmark; and of another man who could not rest in his grave
until the landmark he had removed was replaced in its original position.
That some of the standing stones erected by the early inhabitants of
Scandinavia were objects of worship seems clear from certain passages in
the Sagas, and as, in East Anglia, some of the ancient boulders are
preserved in parishes having Scandinavian names, they may have served
this purpose here even if not originally placed in their present
positions by Norse or Danish settlers. Some likelihood is lent to this
idea by evidence that the Scandinavian pagans treated such stones as
family gods. The Kristni Saga relates that “at Gilja (in
the north of Iceland) stood the stone that the family had worshipped,
and alleged that their ar-man lived in it. Codron declared that
he would not be baptised until he knew which was the more powerful, the
bishop or the ar-man in the stone. The bishop then went to the
stone, and chanted over it till it broke asunder. Then Codron considered
that the ar-man was vanquished.” A similar family ‘
stone appears to be referred to in the following passage from the
Story of Howard the Halt: “So when the boards were set,
Herstein, the bridegroom, leapt up and over the board to where was a
certain stone: then he set one foot upon the stone and spake:
‘This oath I swear hereby.’”
In England the application of the Old English adjective har
(grey, hoar) to such stones would seem to indicate that even in Saxon
times some of them were looked upon as objects of antiquity and, as
such, may have been chosen as boundary marks. The
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view has also been advanced that “from its use in har-stan
the element har may be descriptive of a boundary in other
compounds also.”* Mr. Watkins quotes from Heming’s Cattulary
an Anglo-Saxon boundary as running on to the haran stone from the haran
stone along the green way.” Among well-known stones there are two
Hoarstones in Oxfordshire, one in Gloucestershire and one in
Warwickshire. The Domesday Heroluestuna seems to be against any
suggestion that the Norfolk town of Harleston may owe its name to the
stone preserved there; but it, is at least noteworthy that in the
Suffolk parish of Harleston (often spelt Harlestone), near Haughley,
there is also, on Rush Green, a well-known boulder traditionally said to
mark the site of the burning of martyrs in Queen Mary’s reign, and
which the writer of the “Here and There” column in the
East Anglian Daily Times† suggests may have been chosen as
being the traditional site of human sacrifices in the days of paganism.
As there appears to be no record of any martyrdom having taken place in
this parish, the local tradition would seam to be due to vague
folk-memory of earlier burnings.
A convincing Norfolk example of an ancient stone is the Cowell Stone at
Beechamwell. It is embedded in the ground beside an ancient road which
thereabouts seems to have been known as Peddars Road and Salters Road,
at the point where another ancient trackway, Pincham Drove, runs east
from it in a straight line over three miles towards Southacre. This
stone, Mr. W. G. Clarke tells us,‡ is the Hundred
boundary and also the meeting-place of the boundaries of Narborough,
Marham and Swaffham, and, according to a Beechamwell estate map of 1766,
was then also the boundary of Beechamwell.” It is “a glacial
boulder with 10 inches showing above ground, an east and west axis of 3
feet 4 inches, and north and south of 2 feet 11 inches.”
Many writers on place names have drawn attention to the likelihood of
the common termination ton when
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immediately preceded by an “s,” being sometimes a corruption
of the Old English stan, meaning “stone.” This
difficulty renders the more valuable every instance where early
spellings of a place name make the subsequent corruption obvious, and
the preservation of the original stone enables us to see for ourselves
the ancient object or veneration after which the place is named. We have
this at Chediston, near Halesworth, which appears in the Domesday record
as “Cidestan,” and where the large stone (now broken into
two pieces, but said to have been from 6 feet to 8 feet high) from which
the name is derived, can still be seen.
Stockton
That other parishes and places in Norfolk and Suffolk owe their names to
ancient mark stones there can be no doubt; but until the English Place
Name Society is able to deal with these counties and give us, as in its
other volumes, full lists of early spellings of their place names, it is
hazardous to profess sureness about the many “ston” and
“stone” names. Munford, in his Local Names of
Norfolk, suggests that Geldeston is a parish which may derive its
name from some remarkable memorial stone which once existed there. He
notes that the place is not mentioned in Domesday Book, “being
included and accounted for under the lordship of Stockton”; but
apparently he was not aware that Stockton Stone—from which
Geldeston may be derived—is one of the best known mark stones in
the county. In several counties Hundred Courts assembled at ancient
stones. In Norfolk the Court for Gallow met in 1561 and 1568 at
Longfield Stone.
