Talk report – Behind the scenes at the Saxon Church
July 2025 – The Saxon Chapel – Rob Arkell
The third talk in the summer lecture series was given by Rob Arkell, amateur archaeologist and historian, well-known to the Museum for his work with the Museum Research Group. In a fascinating and witty talk Rob tackled simultaneously the history of the Saxon church together with the story of its rediscovery and restoration in the later nineteenth century, the two difficult to disentangle because incorrect assumptions about the history blanketed the story from the moment of rediscovery. The desire that the church should be the monastery founded by St Aldhem in 705 and recorded by William of Malmesbury in 1125 was understandably strong, they being two towering figures in English history. It was repeated well into the twentieth century. Only over time did attention shift to the likely building date being c. 1003 – to house the relics of St Edward specifically mentioned as needing safe housing away from Danish raids –when Ethelred the Unready made the gift of the royal manor of Bradford to the Abbey of Shaftesbury in 1001.
The little church disappeared from view, becoming a charnel house for storage of disinterred bones, then a free school. Canon Jones, the forceful vicar of Bradford, put about the story that he had spotted the Saxon chapel looking over the town from St Mary Tory in 1856. Gently Rob pointed out that not only had the Rev. Lukis, curate in the 1840s, already spotted it, but Jones knew this as he had Lukis’s drawings. In describing the story of the repair under a disharmonious committee, Rob highlighted a classic Victorian conflict between repair and restoration, a conflict playing out in the wider Victorian world. George Gilbert Scott’s clerk of the works at Bath Abbey, the Shetland-born J.T. Irvine represented the side of cautious repair, with J.H. Parker, the prolific Oxford-based author on medieval Gothic. But Irvine and Parker were not really on the spot, and Canon Jones and his Bradford architect, Charles Adye were, assisted by the Rev. Edward Barnwell, a wealthy clergyman who had retired to Melksham House from a long career as headmaster and distinguished antiquarian in Wales. They broadly wanted a functioning and recognisable church building and broadly they won. Irvine resigned over the demolition of the house that had replaced the southern porticus or porch. Adye rebuilt the west wall almost entirely, as it had eighteenth-century schoolroom windows and a door. But it seems to have been his builder who pointed out that he had misunderstood the spacing of the blind arches. And the the two lovely relief angels were removed, left outside, and then reinstated inside in not necessarily their correct positions.
It was all, to say the least, cavalier. But we must be grateful for the survival of the chapel at all, for Irvine’s careful drawings of what was there before work began, and for the use of the church for the storage of miscellaneous pieces from the earlier restoration of Holy Trinity, from which the lovely Anglo-Saxon stones now in the Saxon chapel altar-front come – quite possibly the only fragments from St Aldhelm’s church, almost accidentally saved.
Julian Orbach