Of this Scotch method, Bede says, " that Adrian, the first bishop of Lindisfarn, having departed this life, Final), sent and ordained by the Scots, succeeded him in the bishopric, where he built a church in the isle of Lindisflun, or holy Island, since called the bishopric of Durham, after the man lier of the Scots. This he made not of stone, but of hewed oak, and covered it with reeds; and the same was after wards dedicated in honour of St. Peter, the apostle, by the venerable Bishop Meadows. Eadbu•h, the seventh bishop of that place, afterwards taking off the thatch, covered it with plates of lead, that is, both the roof and the walls." It is probable, then, that the Saxons learned this method from their northern neighbours, against whom they had been brought over by the Britons, but with whom they hail after wards allied themselves, and by whose assistance they had been enabled to drive out the British, and establish them selves in their country. Whether the method had originally been brought from Ireland by the Scots, or whether it was a method common to both them and the Picts, is not certain ; but it would scent, from an incident which we shall afterwards allude to, that a similar mode of building was employed by both people ; or, at any rate, that the Picts were not acquainted with the method of building in stone.
These timber buildings were constructed of split or reft timbers, stood on their ends, and placed in close contact to each other. The ends were laid on an oak sill, and the heads framed together in a sort of lintel : of such simple construc tion were the walls ; and the roof consiste.1, in all probability, of nothing more than reeds or thatch. A description of a church of this kind, which there is good evidence to believe is of Saxon date, is given under the article Cneacn : it is situated at Greenstead, near Ongar (the Saxon Aungre), in Essex. In this village, they have a tradition that the dead body of some king once rested here for a short time, and that the first edifice was a wooden chapel, erected for its reception. This is supposed to have been the body of St. Edfnund, the king who was slain A. D. 940. In a manuscript, entitled The Life and Passion of St. Edmund, preserved in the library of Lambeth Palace, it is recorded, that, in the year 1010, and the thirteenth year of the reign of Ethelred, the body of St. Edmund was removed from Ailwin to London, on account of an invasion of the Danes, but that, at the end of three years, it was returned to Bedriceworth. And in another manuscript, cited by Dugdale in the Monasticon, and entitled "The Register of St. Edmund's Abbey," it is further added, "he was also sheltered near Aungre, where a wooden chapel remains as a memorial to this day." Now, the parish of Aungre, or Ongar, adjoins to that of Greenstead, where this church is situated, and the ancient road from London to Suffolk lay through it. It seems therefore not impro
bable, that this rough and unpolished fabric was first erected as a sort of shrine for the reception of the corpse of St. Edmund, which, in its return from London to Bedriceworth, or Bury St. Edmund's, as Lydgate, the monk of that abbey, says, was carried in a chest. Indeed, that the old oaken structure now called Greenstead church is this wooden chapel near Aungre, no doubt has ever been entertained ; and the very style and character of the building would claim for it a Saxon antiquity.
The missionaries who had been accustomed to the buildings of Rome, introduced the manner of building churches among the Saxons more substantially, with stone, and in the Roman manner. Thus we find the king of the Picts—a people inhabiting the northern parts of Britain—soliciting Ceolfrid, a monastic abbot, to send him architects to build a church in his nation, after the Roman manner, promising to dedicate the same in honour of St. Peter, the prince of the apostles: and that he and all his people would always follow the cus tom of the holy Roman and Apostolic Church, as for forth as, being so remote from the Roman language and nation, they could learn the same. Here we also see the deficiency of the Picts, as well as that of the Anglo-Saxons, in the knowledge of sacred architecture, one building with wood, and the other with rough unhewn stones : and these, as well as the Irish churches, are covered with reeds and rushes, and the walls with skins. The windows, in some instances, were funned with lattice-of-wicker ; in others, of horn and shells, oil-paper, ; and the rafts were of oak.
Buildings of this class, however, would seem to have been of very rude construction, the walls being composed either of coarse rubble-work, or of flints, piled up irregularly, and bound together by cement of some sort : such walls were, of course, obliged to be of great thickness. Sometimes we find Roman bricks worked up in the walls with other materials, but they are not laid in regular courses, as in the structures which had been erected by the Romans during their resi dencein Britain ; they are found built up with the other materials, without regard to order or regularity. By this means, the buildings erected by the Romans in this island may be distinguished from the works of the Saxons ; and it is curious that this test is similar to that applied to the buildings of Babylon ; for it is there noted, that in the earlier buildings, the bricks indented with arrow-headed characters are always placed in a particular position with respect to the inscriptions.