Abstract
Our understanding of the alignment of English medieval parish churches, after more than three centuries of research, is far from complete. The arrangement of relatively few structures has been explained beyond reasonable doubt, and tests of the overwhelmingly popular festival orientation theory are often insufficiently rigorous to provide convincing answers. Much work remains to be done, including verifying and analyzing some of the existing raw data, determining whether the present church was dedicated at the time of construction, examining wills for evidence of early dedications, measuring the effect of eastern horizons on sunrise azimuths, and consulting excavation reports to assess whether earlier buildings may have influenced the arrangement of those churches that replaced them.
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Notes
- 1.
St. Catherine’s feast day is 25 November. By the mid-fourteenth century, the accumulated discrepancy of dates between the Julian calendar and solar years amounted to eight days; the date of her festival at this time was therefore equivalent to 3 December according to the Gregorian calendar which was introduced in 1582 (but not adopted in Britain until 1752) (Cheney and Jones 2000, 1, 17–18).
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Acknowledgements
Grateful thanks are extended to Anne Milton, Caroline Sweet, Hans Ketel, and John McCullough.
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Hoare, P.G. (2015). Orientation of English Medieval Parish Churches. In: Ruggles, C. (eds) Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8_174
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