Nice Day Out – Hartburn Church

The village of Hartburn is well worth a visit, mainly for the sake of its church. A small car park across the road has an honesty box, with all proceeds to the church.

The village is small, but its parish extends far to the north and south, and used to extend even further, taking in a wild tract of country towards Rothbury.

In Anglo-Saxon times the church – in fact the whole village – was a minster, a collegiate foundation of priests and lesser clergy. They travelled out to the farmsteads and hamlets of their district or parochia, preaching, baptising, hearing confessions and celebrating Holy Communion.

The present church is medieval, the only visible Anglo-Saxon fabric being outside at the northeast corner of the nave, but the late Denis Briggs, using dowsing, revealed the outlines of a typical Anglo-Saxon church beneath the floor of the present church. Then, during major alterations in 2011, archaeologists found buried stonework just west of the church, which they believed could be Anglo-Saxon or even Roman.

The model in our illustration is based on Briggs’s dowsed plan. The side extensions, which are found on both the north and south sides, were not aisles but porticus (plural, rhyming with ‘goose’. The singular is spelt the same but rhyming with ‘bus’.)

A porticus could be a porch but more often means a small side chamber entered from within the church through a low, narrow doorway, which might house holy relics or other valuables, or be used for the burial of important people.

John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, says, “Most minsters stood near water, whether rivers or the sea. Peninsulas enclosed by converging rivers, or sites on tributaries two or three miles above confluences, were especially popular.

“The main church complex was normally, to a greater or lesser extent, elevated, … In hilly areas there is a preference for sites with sheltering hills westwards and northwards, broad riverine views southwards and eastwards.”

Thus we have four landscape features indicating that a church may once have been an Anglo-Saxon minster:

· An elevated site,

· A peninsular location,

· Open to the south and east, and

· Sheltered from the north and west.

To these we can add two more, again following Professor Blair:

· The minster was a place set apart, but

· Would have access to the transport network, such as a Roman road, ford or navigable water.

A well-found minster thus trod a fine line between accessibility and aloofness, between being in the world but not of it. Blair refers to this as “a quality of boundedness.”

Hartburn has almost all of these features. The road as you approach it from the east along the B6343 is unremarkable until about half a mile before you get there. It then drops fifty feet into the valley of the Hartburn, crosses the bridge, and ascends steeply to the church and the village beyond.

On the north side of the village, the gorge of the Hart Burn is dramatic in its steepness. The ravine on the south side, which you can see from the car park, also falls steeply to a small, un-named burn below.

These two burns give the village its peninsular site, making the church and the old vicarage, which represent the heart of the ancient minster, at once elevated and cut off. It was only easily accessible from the west, so there would probably have been a fence or other artificial boundary about where the War Memorial is now.

Though not especially well sheltered to the north, the church has good views to the southeast, giving it the benefit of the morning sunshine, an important consideration when there was no central heating.

A Roman road, the Devil’s Causeway just to the west, gave it a limited amount of access to the north and south. It was never a very important road, but certainly better than nothing.

Hartburn Bridge was, and is, a vital link to the east, as anyone knows who has had to find their way back to Morpeth by some other way when it was out of action. Yet until the 18th century there was only a ford, with perhaps a plank bridge for people on foot.

The more you think about it, the more Hartburn’s ‘boundedness’ becomes obvious.

It’s worth emphasising that, unless a minster was a proper monastery inhabited by monks, it would have been served by secular clergy, meaning priests and others living and working in the ordinary world.

The secular Anglo-Saxon clergy, moreover, had a fine contempt for celibacy. Blair mentions a comment by an unknown priest in a copy of one of Archbishop Wulfstan’s homilies:

“Riht ist thaet preost him lufie claenlicne wimman to gobeddan” – “It is right for a priest to love and bed a cleanly woman!”

Celibacy in any case did not apply to lesser clergy and ordinary people, so the minster would have been much like any village, with men and women carrying on their daily work and children and chickens running about.

Hartburn minster can only exist in our imagination, but there is plenty else to see. The tower dates from about 1200. The feature like upside-down battlements is a corbel table – a ledge going all round the tower so that the part above can be made wider.

In our picture of the interior, the nearest two columns on each side stand directly on the foundations of the Anglo-Saxon church’s walls, and the font at the far end on the site of a tower or porch attached to its west end, so you can form a fair idea the size of the Anglo-Saxon minster.

The iron-bound chest is half jokingly called Cromwell’s money box. I can’t find much about it. Judging by the heavy construction of the stand, I should guess it’s Jacobean, viz. early 17th century. I hardly think Oliver Cromwell would have left his money box at Hartburn, so I suppose he borrowed it briefly while he was in the vicinity.

The white marble monument to Lady Bradford, d. 1830, is by Francis Chantrey, the leading portrait sculptor of the time.

She was born Mary Ann Atkinson, married General Sir Thomas Bradford in 1818 and had two sons. She died at sea in 1830 but is buried in a vault below the church.

Her uncle, Ralph Atkinson, was a wealthy timber merchant who bought the Angerton estate a little south of Hartburn, and built Angerton Hall. He left the estate to Lady Bradford’s eldest son, James Henry Hollis Bradford, on condition he took the name and arms of Atkinson, which he did.

This accounts for the memorials to various people of the names Bradford and Atkinson, and also for the banners of the Napoleonic wars, in which General Bradford served with distinction.

The last of the Atkinsons sold Angerton to Frederick Straker in about 1890. Both families were generous patrons, the Mr. and Mrs. Straker of the time paying for the village War Memorial, which is by Lutyens.