Saxon Long-and-Short Work: Dating an English Church Before 1066

At the corners of a small number of English country churches, particularly in Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire, the corner stones are not laid in the regular Norman pattern. Instead, tall vertical stones alternate with broad horizontal ones, like the rungs of a ladder turned through ninety degrees. This is Saxon long-and-short work, and it dates the building to the late tenth or early eleventh century, before the Norman Conquest of 1066. It is one of the few clear architectural signatures that lets you date an English building to within a generation, just from walking round the outside.

What it is

Long-and-short work is a method of constructing the corner quoins of a stone wall using alternating large stones laid on end (the "long") and laid flat (the "short"). The long stones are typically a metre or more tall, set vertically; the short stones are perhaps thirty to fifty centimetres tall, set horizontally between the longs. The effect is unmistakable once you have seen one: the corner reads as a ladder, with the long stones forming the vertical rails and the short stones the horizontal rungs. The technique was used almost exclusively by Saxon masons; the Normans abandoned it for the regular alternating block pattern still in use today.

Where to find it

Saxon long-and-short work survives in around fifty English churches, concentrated in Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, and the south Midlands. The corners most likely to retain it are at the base of a tower, where later masons stopped short, or on a surviving Saxon nave that was kept when the rest of the church was rebuilt. Survival is good because once the corner is built, it does not need maintenance: the stones lock together and stay locked. Many Saxon churches were rebuilt in the Norman programme between 1070 and 1140, but where the foundation was sound the corners often kept.

The classic examples

The classic example is the tower of All Saints, Earls Barton, in Northamptonshire, built around 970. The tower has long-and-short work at all four corners and pilaster strips running up the faces between them – a separate Saxon feature decorating the wall surface itself. St John the Baptist at Barnack in Cambridgeshire is contemporary and similarly intact, and St Andrew at Brigstock in Northamptonshire has both the long-and-short corners and the rare survival of a Saxon stair turret. Other notable Saxon survivals include Sompting in West Sussex (with a Rhenish helm cap), Deerhurst in Gloucestershire, and Escomb in County Durham.

St Mary's at Reed

Closer to home in Hertfordshire, the small village church of St Mary's at Reed near Royston keeps its long-and-short quoins on the corners of the west tower. The tower is otherwise unremarkable: low, undecorated, plain limestone block. The quoin pattern is unmistakable once you walk round to look. Reed is one of the smallest surviving Saxon churches in the county and one of the few outside the Northamptonshire core to retain the long-and-short feature. The church is open by arrangement with the wardens; the quoins are visible from the churchyard at any time.

Pilaster strips and other Saxon features

While you are looking, the other Saxon features worth checking for are pilaster strips (raised vertical stone bands running up the wall face, often in pairs), small round-headed windows with deep splays (set high in the wall and narrow on the outside), triangular-headed openings (an unusual Saxon variant on the round arch), and carved interlace or cable mouldings around the doorway. Any one of these is a Saxon survival worth looking at. The Norman round arch is its own thing, distinct in shape and dating, and a Saxon foundation under a Norman rebuild often shows in the lower courses of a tower or in a single re-used doorway.

Reading the building

A Saxon church's corner is a thousand years old. The masons who cut and set those stones spoke a language closer to Beowulf than to anything you would recognise. They built without mechanised tools, without modern mortar, on a foundation that is still standing. Walk around the outside of any village church on a dry afternoon and look at the corners first. If you see the ladder pattern, you are looking at work that pre-dates the Norman Conquest, often by a hundred years, and at masonry that has survived a thousand years of English weather.

Sources: H. M. Taylor & Joan Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture (3 vols, 1965–78); Eric Fernie, The Architecture of the Anglo-Saxons (1983); Historic England, "Pre-Conquest Churches" Research Records; British Listed Buildings register.