Page:Notes on the churches in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey.djvu/18

vii in Bircholt hundred, therefore distinct from Cliffe and St. Martin's near Canterbury. In Sussex at Boxgrove "the clerks of the church," and at "Epinges," now Iping, church dues, "circet," are mentioned, though a church is not specified in either case: and in the same county "a small church" is noted at Ovingdean, but none in the adjoining manor of Rottingdean, though there is reason to conjecture, that a church was standing at the latter place of at least the same date as the present church of Ovingdean; for which matter see the Note on Rottingdean. The Notes appended to the List will suggest further reasons for believing, that Domesday Book by no means includes every church, which had been erected when that Survey was taken; and it is highly satisfactory to me to know, that my conclusions on this particular are corroborated by much better authority. In the Archæologia, VIII, 218, Mr. Denne adduces Thorne's Chronicle, x Scrip. Col. 178 and 2091, to prove, that there was a church at Faversham in Kent anterior to the Domesday Survey; he also produces presumptive evidence, that several others, then in being in the diocese of Rochester, are omitted in that record. So likewise Sir Henry Ellis expressly says (Introduction to Domesday Book, I, 290), "Domesday Book cannot be decisively appealed to for the non-existence of parish churches" when it was compiled.

Though a knowledge of the art of masonry must certainly have been acquired from the Romans during their dominion in Britain, yet the early churches in this country were very generally constructed of wood. Bede mentions (Hist. Eccl. 1. 3, c. 4), as a rarity, a stone church erected at Whitherne in Galloway by Columba, about A.D. 565. "Ibi ecclesiam de lapide, insolito Brittonibus more, fecerit." This practice he testifies to have continued in the northern portion of Britain up to A.D. 710, when Naiton, king of the Picts, writing to the abbot of Wearmouth after his conversion to Christianity, requested, among other things, architects (or what we should now call builders) to be sent to him, to