My eye was caught by a report on the BBC News
website about the church, or as it is now designated, Minster at Stow in Lindsey between Lincoln and Gainsborough.
The church at Stow is far less known than it should be built as it was between about 975 and the late twelfth century. In those years it served on occasion as, in effect, a pro-cathedral and as a Benedictine abbey, which later moved to Eynsham in Oxfordshire.
Stow demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon churches could be conceived and built on a grand scale, and that the Normans would on occasion retain and enhance them, and that a church on an episcopal estate could be given a lavish eastern arm in the later twelfth century.
It is a building of dignity and grandeur and contains the tallest central crossing to survive from the Anglo-Saxon centuries. The only really comparable one is at Cholsey near Reading, which is of similar date, but there the arches are much lower.
The nave, crossing and chancel of Stow Minster
Image: Stow Minster
The feature said to be from the Viking era in the article, the longship, is inscribed into one the the eastern tower piers. It is illustrated and discussed in Stow Minster longship graffiti holds clues to Viking past
The Wikipedia entry about the church is disappointing so I will suggest readers look at one from the parish which can be seen at History
StowMinster from the south east
Image: Joanna Hughes on Facebook
Stow Church before restoration in the mid-1860s
Image: Wikipedia
One feature of the history of Stow that the websites do not mention is the fact records by his biographer that when St Hugh of Lincoln, bishop from 1186 until his death in 1200, visited his episcopal manor house with its fish ponds a particularly fierce male swan became attached to the Carthusian bishop, accompanying him round the grounds and guarding him whilst he slept. No-one else could approach the bird, and when St Hugh died the swan flew away, never to be seen again. The swan is, of course, the emblem of St Hugh.
St Hugh of Lincoln in his Carthusian habit
with his swan
Charterhouse of St Honoré,
Thuison-les-Abbeville, France
Image: liturgies.net
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