“You don’t believe in God,” someone said to me recently. “Why do you visit so many churches?”
The first statement is certainly true. I’m an atheist – a humanist, to be precise. The second part is also true. Anyone looking at my social media feeds will see many pictures of churches or churchyards. The answer lies in a love of history.
(I talk of England in this post as I am less familiar with the position in Wales, and particularly Scotland and Ireland, whose religious history has been largely separate and very different.)
The truth is that for most of us the nearest truly historic building is a church. Most English villages have one. Sometimes neglected, struggling to fight the damp and decay. Sometimes loved and at the heart of the community. Yet thousands of them are centuries old, and tell the history of the place better than any brief summary in a county history book.
An hour or two walking the building and graveyard will tell you so much. You’ll learn who the local families were, both those at the upper end of the social scale, whose monuments and memorials may fill a church they paid to build or expand, and those lower down the scale with a local name whose graves fill parts of the churchyard generation after generation.
Inside the building, you can often see history in stone and wood. Most churches dating from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries will have been rebuilt and altered several times over their lives. Firstly perhaps when original simple structures were rebuilt by the local lords for the saving of their heavenly souls (and displaying of their earthly power).
The Reformation brought further change. If a church was associated with an abbey or monastery, it may have suffered at the hands of the king’s assessors. Over the following years, as allegiances changed and changed again during the ‘Vicar of Bray’ years, many churches lost their ornate decorations, their wall paintings and rood screens. Essentially, most things with colour.
The civil war years brought another religious upheaval, and what remained of the decorative splendour of our churches was destroyed by Cromwell’s followers, often whitewashed over, allowing a remarkable few to be re-discovered in a less hostile age.
The final major changes are likely to have been Victorian. There is hardly a church in England which does not bear the sometimes heavy hand of their restoration efforts. Well aware that the fabric of their religious buildings had been neglected for some time, they poured a lot of their zeal and wealth into putting that right.
They didn’t always get it right from our perspective, sometimes destroying or over-repairing the very things they set out to protect. But without them, a lot of our older churches might not have survived at all. It’s also worth remembering that they also built most of the churches and chapels which fill our towns and cities. The majority come from the nineteenth century, and are a fascinating record of life in our growing urban centres.
Churchyards change as well. Tombstones and graves are far from eternal, suffering from the elements, shortage of space over the centuries, and the ravages of time. A walk around an old graveyard is a reminder of our own mortality and the passing of time. The epitaphs can be inspiring, moving, and sometimes more than a little alarming. That is if you can still read them. You will often find a long pile of moved stones resting against a back wall where they’ve been placed after a re-organisation.
But the reality is that most graves no longer have anything to define them. I remember visiting my father’s family’s grave as a child. One of those double graves with a low stone edge, raised corners, and gravel-filled with an urn in the centre. It is no longer visible, everything above ground swept away and destroyed. If that has happened to something less than a hundred years old, you can only guess at how many others have disappeared.
Finally, whoever you are, whatever your beliefs, there is something in a church and churchyard which speaks to us as human beings. If you are a believer, you’ll know of the touch of faith. But even if you’re not, you are surrounded by history. This place where you are quietly sitting has seen the baptisms, marriages and funerals of thousands of people. It was the centre of their world for hundreds of years.
If I were to be cynical, I could say it was the expression in stone of man’s vanity, particularly viewing our grander churches and cathedrals. But even if that is true, it still tells us so much about our ancestors, their view of the world, and how we came to be as we are.
Next time you walk past a church, go in if you can spare the time. Take an hour to lose yourself in its history, its light, and its pillars and pews. You’ll leave with new understanding, and a lot calmer than when you went in. And leave a few pounds if you are able. Most churches are beyond the means of their congregations now, and if we want these historic buildings to survive, we must all recognise their value.
