The Pre-Conquest Church at Lydd, Kent

The' remarkable fragment of a pre-Conquest church at Lydd on Romney Marsh, Kent, has seemingly never had adequate treatment.The character of the remains was evidently unrecognised by Canon Scott Robertson when he wrote his account of Lydd church in Arch.Cant, xiii, pp.427-450, for he describes the architectural features hereafter dealt with as a mural arcade of late twelfth-or early thirteenth-century work.As the whole of the interior details were then obscured by thick plaster, perhaps this is excusable.The discovery of these vestiges of an early church, and their recognition as such, was due to the late Mr. J. T. Micklethwaite.In the latter of his two papers on Saxon church building (Arch.Journ.lv, pp.343-344) he gives a fairly detailed account of the remains, accompanied by a plan on a small scale, but he admittedly makes no attempt to reconstruct or suggest the original form of the church, or to give a date for the building.Professor Baldwin Brown, in the second volume of Arts in Early England, pp.245-246, deals briefly with this building, as one of the four extant pre-Conquest aisled churches in this country-Brixworth, Northants; Reculver, Kent ; and Wing, Bucks, being the others.He gives a plan of the walls in question together with elevations and sections, though again on a small scale.He does not describe in detail the fabric, nor does he suggest any original plan for the church.He does, however, fit the building into his chronological scheme, assigning it to the ninth or tenth century.It is the purpose of this paper to give a comprehensive account of the remains as they exist at present, and to make an endeavour to place this interesting building, whose value as an early Christian monument is incontestable, in its proper architectural relationship with other buildings of like character, and to give it a place in the line of development of pre-Conquest architecture.This is all the more necessary as since the

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · CONQUEST · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History