Cover Q3 23/1/2003 11:36 am Page 1 ECCLESIOLOGY TODAY Journal of the Ecclesiological Society, successor to the Cambridge Camden Society of 1839 Registered Charity no. 210501 Issue 30, January 2003 Interior view of Cockayne Hatley Church, Bedfordshire, 26th-27th December 1827. Pen and ink drawing by J.C. Buckler. B.L. MS 36356, f.30. By permission of the British Library. Inside Front Cover Q3 23/1/2003 11:12 am Page 1 CHAIRMAN’S COMMENTS With this issue you will find the Society’s programme for the year.Thanks again to Christopher Webster for organising this. He is always open to suggestions for future events. My apologies that there is no date for the AGM and its accompanying lecture. Pressures unconnected with the Society have meant that I am a little late in organising this. Full details will appear in the next edition.The date will be a weekday evening in May or early June. Our Annual Conference goes from strength to strength. This year it will be held on Saturday 4 October. The topic will be the post-Commonwealth and early Georgian church interior.We will concentrate on the period 1660–1720 - a time which saw a degree of con- sensus emerging about how a church should be arranged, which was to last until the upheavals of the nineteenth century. Details will follow in the Spring edition of Ecclesiology Today. Incidentally,those who suffered the heat and stairs of the last conference will be pleased to know that a new venue has been found, with just one shallow flight of stairs, and modern, silent air- conditioning. We had thought that this issue would be the first in our new format, but this change has been unavoidably held over, and we now hope to launch the new design in the Spring issue. However for this and the previous issue we have been using a new typeface, which we hope you find lighter and easier to read than the previous one. Tucked inside this issue you should find a Gift Aid form (as I write, it is not quite clear whether it will be enclosed or not - if not, it will be in the Spring issue).As you will know,this allows the Society to reclaim tax (further details on the form). Please spare a moment to fill this in and return it to the address shown - it will help our finances considerable. Incidentally, there is no need to wonder if you have filled one in before on behalf of the Society because a) this is the first time we have issued it, so you can’t have! and b) it causes no problems if you fill in more than one. As I mentioned in a previous issue, a volunteer has stepped forward to distribute the Society’s publications.We are now moving our stock to the new location. I hope to give you more details in the Spring, including a list of back stock for sale. Our programme and publications do not happen by themselves. I am sure you will want to join me in thanking all those - members of Council and the many others - who have con- tributed to the Society’s activities in 2002.The steady growth in the Society is surely a vote of confidence in their efforts. The new and updated edition of the catalogue of Stained Glass Marks and Monograms is now available from NADFAS, at a cost of £12.50 inclusive of post and packing. Cheques, payable to NADFAS, should be sent to NADFAS House, 8 Guilford Street, London, WC1N 1DA. It provides a very full listing, with diagrams and index. The sale of an important collection of books on ecclesiology and the Gothic Revival (to be sold as an intact collection) is being handled by Nancy Sheiry Glaister from whom further details are available at 18 Huntingdon Street, London, N1 1BS. Trevor Cooper January 2003 Eccles 30 ver 2 Q3 23/1/2003 11:14 am Page 1 CONTENTS THE MONASTERIES OF SHIRE, NORTHERN 3 ETHIOPIA Niall Finneran ODDS & ENDS 10 CHURCH CRAWLER REPORTS 11 Phil Draper A TRAFFIC IN PIETY:THE LURE OF CONTINENTAL 22 CHURCH FURNITURE IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY Charles Tracy LETTERS 31 HISTORIC CHAPELS TRUST 35 THE TWELFTH-CENTURY ENGLISH PARISH CHURCH: 42 A REVIEW OF THE SOCIETY’S 2002 CONFERENCE Bruce Watson LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 44 ST SAVIOUR, COALPIT HEATH 45 Eric Bray ODDS & ENDS 48 BOOK REVIEWS 49 1 Eccles 30 ver 2 Q3 23/1/2003 11:14 am Page 2 2 Eccles 30 ver 2 Q3 23/1/2003 11:15 am Page 3 THE MONASTERIES OF SHIRE, NORTHERN ETHIOPIA Niall Finneran THE HIGHLANDS of Ethiopia have been Christian since at least the end of the fourth century. According to the early church histories and Ethiopian tradition, the king of the Aksumite Empire of northern Ethiopia, Ezana, presided over a kingdom that in its heyday in the first half of the first millennium AD enjoyed extensive trade links with the eastern Mediterranean world; Ezana was converted to Christianity by a Syrian named Frumentius, and the new faith was enthusiastically embraced. Soon churches were built, pre-Christian motifs on coinage were removed and replaced by crosses, and burial traditions changed.With the arrival of the so-called Syrian nine saints in the sixth century, Christianity took hold in the more peripheral regions of the Aksumite polity, and monasticism became firmly established.The processes of evangelisation, going hand-in-hand with political conquest, survived the predations of the raids by the pagan queen Gudit at the beginning of the 1000s, and the jihad of the Muslim warlord Gragn in the 1500s. Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, rigidly monophysite, retains a number of idiosyncratic cultural and ideological traits, and remains proudly identified with the state itself. In terms of sources for the study of ecclesiastical art and architecture, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is fairly well catered for. The magnificently illustrated African Zion (1993) catalogues a recent exhibition of Ethiopian church painting, icons and processional crosses, and is integrated with a very useful overview of the history and development of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church by a number of noted scholars.This remains the standard work for understanding the cultural his- tory of the Church. Specific research on the architecture of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has tended to concentrate geographically upon the northernmost province of Tigray, the Aksumite heartland and home of some of the earliest churches and monasteries in Ethiopia.The late Ruth Plant’s 1985 work Architecture of the Tigre, Ethiopia represents the culmination of many years’ trav- el and work in that province, and the book contains a number of descriptions of rock-hewn and free-standing churches from that historic region, although the western portion of Tigray (which we consider here) is under-represented. Finally, in connection with monasticism, the key work on the famed monastery of Debra Damo remains that of the British architect Derek Matthews, who helped restore this important hill-top settlement in the 1940s (Matthews, D, 1959,The Monastery of Debra Damo, Ethobia, Archaeologia 97: 1-58). In summary, much work has focused upon the churches and monasteries of Aksum and the countryside to the east, but little is known about that corner of Tigray that spreads westwards towards the Sudan border.This brief contribution seeks to shed some light on the ecclesiastical history of a hitherto poorly understood area --the region of Shire, northern Tigray (figure 1). Moving some 30 kilometres to the west of the ancient ecclesiastical centre of Aksum, the landscape becomes perceptibly lower closer to the Sudanic steppe lands.This is the historic region of Shire, centred upon the town of Inda Selassie. In November 2001, the present writer directed an archaeological survey in this area with the goal of identifying as many multi-period sites as possi- ble. In practice, this meant a great deal of coverage of prehistoric and early historic-period sites, but 3 Eccles 30 ver 2 Q3 23/1/2003 11:15 am Page 4 Above: Figure 1. Location of the Shire region within Ethopia Opposite: Figure 2. Sketch plan of the monastic complex of Giorgis. Key: a: male church; b: graves; c: food store (lower) and refectory (upper); d: new concrete meeting building; e: circular dwelling huts (tukuls); f: beehives; g: belfry. 4 Eccles 30 ver 2 Q3 23/1/2003 11:15 am Page 5 5 Eccles 30 ver 2 Q3 23/1/2003 11:15 am Page 6 Figure 3. The painted refectory building/store at Giorgis. it soon became clear that extant church and monastery sites could tell us a great deal about the nature of settlement in the area during medieval times (i.e. after the end of the Aksumite period at around 1000 until around 1600). As a rule, the three monastic establishments considered here date from the era of King Dawit I (1382-1413) when the region --hitherto inhabited by the pagan Kunama pastoralist peoples-- was finally subjugated and brought into the sphere of the Christian state.The founding of these monas- tic communities had at once political and religious connotations. The monasteries formed the spearhead of the evangelisation effort, and the Christianisation of the emperor’s new subjects allowed for speedier political integration. Monasteries were very well endowed materially by the Emperor and his cohorts; ecclesiastical land-holding systems (gult) played an important role in the generation of revenue for these newly-established monasteries. Many studies have emphasised the role of gult awards in the socio-economic life of rural Ethiopia up until its abolition under the Marxist Junta or Derg in 1974 .