Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES)

Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES) is a research project focused on Christian churches established in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England before 1100. It brings together historians, archaeologists, art historians, and experts on place-names to identify the different types of evidence for those churches. It aims to produce a more comprehensive picture of the nature, location, distribution, and landscape settings of those churches. Ultimately, it will produce a website housing national databases of the evidence, allowing users to search and map that evidence.

The project is significant because churches have played a central role in economic, social, cultural, and political change. Christianity is a global faith, but it is practised locally: churches have always been places where local Christian identities were constructed as aspects of that global faith interacted with local economic, social, cultural, and political conditions. Christian worship has involved communal participation. Churches have therefore also been places where members of local communities could show off their economic wealth or social standing to one another, or where rulers could seek to exert power over those communities. Thanks to their roles in local society, churches have often received land to support the work of the clergy and gifts from members of the local community, making them unusually wealthy and long-lived institutions. This has enabled churches to become the focus for local settlements and to drive economic development. The result is that churches always present key evidence for the history of the local communities within which they were located.

Despite the significance of these churches to academic researchers and to local communities, our knowledge of Christian churches in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England before 1100 is incomplete. It is only from about 1100 onwards that our evidence for churches of all kinds becomes more common, as a result of the foundation of reformed monasteries, the great rebuilding of local churches, and the inception of diocesan and parish records. First, there is no comprehensive catalogue of the different types of evidence for churches established before 1100, so we do not know how many churches once existed. Second, though we know that there are regional variations in the evidence for early Christian churches, we do not know whether this reflects the original distribution of churches or is down to differences in the types of evidence available or the destruction of evidence in intervening periods. Third, in the period before 1100 the modern nations of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England did not exist, but the evidence for churches is often inappropriately researched according to those modern national boundaries. Fourth, the evidence for those churches is usually under the care of heritage agencies, ecclesiastical bodies, or charities, but there is no publicly accessible resource where they can identify that evidence, discover its significance, or obtain advice about preserving it or presenting it to the public.

ECCLES will remedy these problems. It will bring together academics from Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England to establish what evidence should be recorded. It will bring together representatives from those groups who care for that evidence to see what they would like to know. It will thereby design a suitable website and databases to make that evidence available to everyone with an interest in looking after our early Christian churches.

Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES) is a project investigating the evidence for churches before 1100. It will create a web portal housing comprehensive national databases of the evidence for churches in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England before 1100. These databases will allow users to search for the evidence for those churches and produce digital maps of that evidence. The proposed research network will facilitate the necessary groundwork for beginning the research of those databases, which will be a crucial resource for an enormous range of non-academic beneficiaries.

Above all, because churches have been some of the most enduring local institutions, they have been foci for the formation of local communities and identities. Indeed, they often remain central to local community life. They provide spaces for marking fundamental transitions in the life of individuals (birth, coming of age, marriage, death) and for communal activity at significant points in the community's seasonal calendar. They thereby act as repositories for family and community memory.

Reflecting this crucial role in local community life, it is widely acknowledged that churches, and the evidence relating to their history, must be carefully preserved and presented to local communities, but also that the churches must be adapted to the continuing requirements of those local communities. Those heritage agencies, heritage charities, and ecclesiastical bodies with responsibility for the curation of churches and the evidence relating to them must balance these sometimes conflicting demands. Moreover, to do so they must navigate planning regulations, co-operate with commercial archaeologists, and employ architects.

ECCLES will benefit these non-academic stakeholders in three main ways. First, the research network will bring together representatives of the heritage agencies, heritage charities, and ecclesiastical bodies at a series of workshops to discuss their strategic, educational, and infrastructural interests in churches. These workshops will highlight for participants existing policy frameworks, examples of best practice, resources, and the full range of stakeholder interests in these areas. Second, the research network will produce the first version of the ECCLES web portal, including publicly accessible resources for researching the evidence for churches pre-1100 and their historical significance, which will be advertised to these stakeholders. Third, the research network will result in an adapted database framework taking account of these stakeholder interests, so that when the databases are completed they will provide an ideal resource for stakeholders to research the significance of the churches in which they have an interest and the most suitable ways to balance the conflicting demands of curation and continued use.