Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Sites in the Landscape of South-West Wales

Abstract

This study integrates archaeological, documentary and place-name evidence for early medieval ecclesiastical sites in the counties of Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire (here defined as south-west Wales), and contextualises it through a spatial framework based on the landscape. Rather than focusing in detail on individual sites, it studies patterns and variations across the whole region, which are examined with reference to existing models of ecclesiastical and secular land organisation. A high overall density of sites and proliferation of high status early medieval ecclesiastical sites is seen as reflecting control by a local elite who held their land by hereditary right and managed ecclesiastical lands as part of their holdings, integrating them into existing patterns of land use and communication. The reuse of antecedent sites is interpreted as a mechanism to reinforce social identity and territorial claims by referencing a real or imagined ancestral past. Sites in apparently isolated locations are seen as a conscious attempt to create a ‘stylised wilderness’ as part of a wider Christian phenomenon seen across Britain and Ireland. Curvilinear ecclesiastical enclosures, in use from at least the seventh century onwards, are comparative in size and form to Irish examples and may have been modelled according to similar principles. Their incorporation of springs and watercourses may also have been integral to Christian ideals. The locations of early medieval ecclesiastical sites are understood as the product of a world centred on the agricultural landscape, but outward-looking to the Irish Sea with cultural connections to the Mediterranean world, and later to Wessex. In addition to perpetuating existing social relationships, they could help define rights to land and resources at a time when new identities and allegiances were being forged. Christianity provided a framework which incorporated land proprietorship into a belief system which could reinforce these rights into the future.