Saints in the Landscape by Dr Graham Jones

Above:  Saints in the Landscape is published by Tempus (appalling cover, as you can see).

I have recently finished reading Saints in the Landscape by Dr Graham Jones, Senior Research Associate at Oxford University.  This is a wonderful book, so full of original insights that I am filled with admiration.  Many people have tried, and failed, to make sense of the pattern of saint-dedications in the British Isles.  Dr Jones is the first person to have developed a coherent theory and backed it up with lots of credible evidence.  Reading the book was a revelation.  I felt that the explanation I had been searching for had suddenly been handed to me, complete and convincing.

"...the origins of many churches may be earlier than is normally assumed, and that deeply ancient ways of seeing the world and calling on supernatural help survived to influence medieval and even modern attitudes...

"...John the Baptist can be associated with upland or woodland pasture...

"Many annual parish outings may well be the linear descendants of an intermediate category of local pilgrimage..."

"...extensive meadows were opened at Lammas of which (St) James' feast a week before was herald.

"(Holy) wells have their own patterns of naming, very different from those of churches.

"Hare Pie Bank is an Iron Age shrine characterised by the ritual deposit in the first century BC of thousands of gold and silver coins and a ceremonial helmet belonging to a high-ranking officer in the Roman army... Note:  I intend to track this helmet down - presumably it is in the British Museum.

"The King's Watch was one of the English processional customs which gave Midsummer its character.

"...the communal landscape and the maintenance of law through an ascending order of rituals, mutual societies, and an attachment to saints of the region and later the realm... symbolised a sense of identity...

"...ancestors were commemorated at the feast of All Souls...

"(St) Swithin's protection was sought by communities farming certain types of soil...

"Ellenmas... the beginning of the dairying season and of the movement of stock to summer pastures...

"Places with Michaelmas livestock fairs represent by their very nature agrarian systems which take us back to a period earlier than the introduction of farming for the sale of surplus crops...

"Peter and Paul appear to be frequent patrons at places in England which were under royal control...

These are just a few examples.  Every page of the book has similar illuminating facts and hypotheses.  Dr Jones has written a book that goes a long way towards explaining why the society in which we live is structured the way it is.

Above:  in Saints in the Landscape Dr Jones reveals that St Nicholas is often associated with locations related to mercantile activity, particularly fairs (invoking the saint in contractual oaths was supposedly a way of enforcing honest dealing).  Whilst reading the book I visited a village in the south west of the county where the church is dedicated to St Nicholas.  I asked the churchwarden, who was showing me round, whether any fairs were held in the village.  He said that until the 1980s there had been an annual fair held in the field next to the church.  In the picture above I am standing in the field where the fair used to be held, with St Nicholas' church in the distance and Church Farm beyond.  It could just be co-incidence, but to me it felt as if the Jones thesis was validated.