Minsters and Parish Churches

Abstract

Abstract The spiritual needs of the laity in Anglo-Saxon England were provided for by a system of minsters, (‘minster’ being derived from the Old English form of the Latin monasteriupz), which included houses of secular priests as well as those of monks. In the eleventh century, because of economic growth in the countryside and the demands of the Gregorian reform for ecclesiastical control of church appointments, the areas served by the minsters began to be broken up into parishes based on manors and villages; new churches were built, each in the charge of a resident priest, an argument which was to be standard for the rest of the Middle Ages and which remains so today. It has: been estimated that there were almost 10,000 parish churches in England by the sixteenth century, and that the majority of those which survive have a core datable between 1050 and 1200.1 The buildings of the first seventy years of this span are in many respects a continuation of Anglo-Saxon practice, in plan types, especially two-cell churches, often with a square east end and a western tower, and forms of decoration adapted to new uses and in new combinations.

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