Easington, All Saints

The Streoneshalh (modern Whitby) estate church dedicated by Cuthbert in 685-6 is likely to be at All Saints, Easington.

The site of what is now All Saints church, Easington, may have been the focal point in an estate acquired by the religious community at Streoneshalh (Whitby) in the seventh century and the site of a church established for that estate by 685-6 (Pickles 2016). The seventh-century cemetery at Street House, Loftus, may relate to this estate (Pickles, 2019). The history of this estate and the dedication of its church is known from two Lives of St Cuthbert written in the early eighth century (VCA iv.10 [pp. 126-9]; VCB c. 34 [pp. 260-5]). One of the Lives refers to it as an estate (Latin possessio) and implies it was a smaller religious community (Latin monasterium). One or more churches related to this estate/ community may lie beneath the present church, but there is as yet no evidence for their form. Fragments of stone sculpture discovered on the site of the present church during rebuilding in 1888-9 perhaps derive from monuments erected in association with that church between the seventh and eleventh centuries (CASSS VI, pp. 103-6, Easington). In Domesday Book (1086x1088) there was at South Loftus what seems to be a royal estate on loan to an earl, including two groups of dependent lands (sokelands): the entry for South Loftus mentions a church without a priest, which is likely to be All Saints church Easington (GDB fos 305r, 380v, I, 305a, 4 N 2; II, 380c, SN L 10-13 and 19-24).

Probable.

Identification details.

• Administrative Region – Yorkshire and the Humber
• Administrative County – North Riding of Yorkshire
• Diocese (Historic) - York
• Diocese (Current) - York
• Parish – Easington
• Historic vill/ township/ parish – Easington
• Dedication (Current) - All Saints
• Dedication (Historic) - All Saints
• Ownership – Church of England
• Designation Status – Grade II Listed Building (No. 1139699, 20th Jan., 1967)
• Church Environment Record - No Entry
• Post Code –TS13 4NT
• Coordinates - Longitude: -0.850499, Latitude: 54.551883
• Elevation: 146.1m/ 479.4ft

Context of the church.

According to both the anonymous Life of St Cuthbert and Bede’s Life of St Cuthberth, Abbess Ælfflæd of Streoneshalh (Whitby) invited Cuthbert during his episcopate to dedicate a church (Latin ecclesia) on land belonging to Streoneshalh called Osingadun, in 685-6. Bede described the land as an estate (Latin possessio) and referred to Streoneshalh as the abbess’ larger religious community (Latin maius monasterium), implying that Osingadun was considered a smaller religious community; it included servants of Christ (Latin famuli Christi) or brothers (fratres). A messenger is said to have travelled between Streoneshalh and Osingadun, leaving later on one day and returning the next day in time for the dedication mass (VCA iv.10 [pp. 126-9]; VCB c. 34 [pp. 260-5]).

Based on these accounts we are looking for a place within half a day’s travel of Streoneshalh (Whitby), with a place-name deriving from Osingadun, which was an estate centre supplied with an early medieval church. The most plausible identification is Easington. A twelfth-century document uses the name Ossington for Easington (GC II, p. 354, note 2) and the earliest forms of Easington demonstrate that it was originally in the same form as Osingadun – Es-inga-tun (Smith 1928, p. 140). The hill on which Easington sits fits the profile of hills to which the Old English term dun was applied. In line with other examples of parallel place-names of this type, the likelihood is that there were originally two names, one referring to the hill and estate as whole – Osingadun – and one to the estate centre – Osingatun: the hill subsequently became known as Old Norse Boulby Bank. By the eleventh century Loftus was the estate centre for two groups of dependent lands (sokelands), but Easington was the focal point in the southern group and controlled a mother parish encompassing these lands (GDB fos 305r, 380v, I, 305a, 4 N 2; II, 380c, SN L 10-13 and 19-24; Kain and Oliver 2001, pp. 96, 126, 145, 149, 186, 194, 227): these lands and this mother parish may reflect the extent of the earlier estate of Osingadun on which the church was founded and for which it became pastorally responsible (Pickles 2016).

Three alternative suggestions have been made for the location of Osingadun. Two of these – Ovington in County Durham and Kirkdale in North Yorkshire – are too distant for the story of the messenger’s journey to be plausible. The third – St Oswald’s, Lythe in North Yorkshire – is possible, because Whitby and Lythe are three miles distant, Whitby Abbey and St Oswald’s church at Lythe are inter-visible, and there are stone fragments from Lythe suggesting the existence of a church in late seventh or eighth century (Cambridge 1984, p. 74; Cambridge 1995, pp. 140-4). However, the place-name evidence makes Easington most likely.

The estate on which the church was founded may have included the site of a Roman signal station. An analysis of the distribution and form of Roman signal stations on the coastline of Yorkshire has argued for the existence of an additional site on Boulby cliffs, originally inter-visible with those at Goldsborough and Huntcliff, but lost to alum mining in the seventeenth century (Bell 1998). More recently it has been suggested that the signal station was north-east of Easington on the Staithes side of the hill (Steve Sherlock, pers. comm.). This is notable because Streoneshalh (Whitby) was apparently founded adjacent to another lost Roman signal station.

<Excavation Plan following Sherlock>

To the north of Easington, one mile distant, adjacent to Upton (Old English, ‘the higher tun’), the estate on which the church was founded may have included the seventh-century cemetery at Street House. A rectangular Iron Age settlement enclosure was re-used for a cemetery of 109 burials, including a focal furnished female bed burial and two timber structures interpreted as a ‘mortuary house’ and ‘mortuary chapel’, perhaps together forming a ‘shrine’, some further burials with high status items, and other lower status furnished and unfurnished burials laid out in pairs and delineating a rectangle on a new alignment. The bed burial has been interpreted in light of Christian ideas of the afterlife, rest, and sleep. Several of the items deposited in the grave project Christian identifications – a pendant with two Iron Age coins of the Corieltavi with crosses on their reverse; a pendant with a scallop-shell motif; a circular pendant with a cross pattern; a knife and whetstone laid to form a cross. From the comparative examples of bed burials and the Bayesian seriation for Anglo-Saxon grave assemblages this cemetery seems to date to the period 650-670 (Sherlock 2012). Given the connection between Osingadun, Easington, and Street House, this may be a cemetery established after the religious community at Streoneshalh (Whitby) acquired some or all of the Osingadun estate – sometime after its foundation in 657 – and then superseded when the church was dedicated at the estate centre of Osingatun/ Easington in 685-6 (Pickles 2019).

Building

A religious community’s estate church or the principal church of a smaller religious community?

General Information.

<Plan of modern church>

The evidence does not allow us to identify a stone building with distinct phases.

Crosses:

Nine stone fragments discovered during restoration of the present church in 1888 under the floor of the eighteenth-century church represent parts of perhaps six cross-shafts and three recumbent grave-markers known as hogbacks. One of these fragments – Easington 5 – is a cross-head of free-armed form with plain faces provided with a simple incised triple edge-moulding, which bears comparison with the Whitby plain cross series: it could have been erected as early as the seventh, eighth or ninth century and like those crosses to stand within a church of this date. The remaining cross-shafts and hogbacks are dated on art-historical grounds to the late ninth or tenth century, suggesting that any earlier church remained a focus for commemoration in this period.

The establishment of a church in 685-6 depends on the association between the Streoneshalh (Whitby) estate of Osingadun and modern Easington.

The idea of the continuing existence of a church depends on the dating of stone crosses according to the art historical date framework established for Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture.

Key Primary Sources

Historical sources

GC: Cartularium Prioratus de Gyseburne, ed. W. Brown, 2 Vols (Durham: Surtees Society, 1880, 1891).

GDB: Great Domesday Book, ed. and trans. M. L. Faull and M. Stinson, Domesday Book: Yorkshire (Chichester: Phillimore, 1986).

VCA: Anonymous Monk of Melrose, Life of Cuthbert, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940).

VCB: Bede, Life of Cuthbert, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940).

Archaeological sources

Sherlock (2012): Sterlock, S., A Royal Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Street House, Loftus, North-East Yorkshire, Tees Archaeology Monograph Series 6 (Hartlepool, 2012).

Sculptural sources

CASSS VI: Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, Vol. VI: Northern Yorkshire, ed. J. T. Lang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Onomastic sources

Smith (1928): Smith, A. H., Place-Names of the North Riding of Yorkshire, EPNS 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928).

Parochial sources

Kain and Oliver (2001): Kain, R., and R. Oliver, Historic Parishes of England and Wales: an electronic map of boundaries before 1850 with a gazetteer and metadata (Colchester: History Data Service, 2001).

Key Secondary Sources

Bell (1998): Bell, T., ‘A Roman Signal Station at Whitby’, Archaeological Journal, 135 (1998), pp. 303-22.

Cambridge (1984): Cambridge, E., ‘The Early Church in County Durham: A Reassessment’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 137 (1984), pp. 65-82.

Cambridge (1995): Cambridge, E., ‘Archaeology and the Cult of St Oswald in Pre-Conquest Northumbria’, in C. Stancliffe and E. Cambridge (eds), Oswald: Northumbrian kings to European saint (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), pp. 128-63.

Page (1923): Page, W. (ed.), A History of the County of York North Riding: Volume 2 (London: Victoria County History, 1923), pp. 340-43.

Pickles (2016): Pickles, T., ‘Streanaeshalch (Whitby), its Satellite Churches and Lands’, in T. Ó Carragáin and S. Turner (eds), Making Christian Landscapes in Atlantic Europe: Conversion and Consolidation in the Early Middle Ages (Cork: University of Cork Press, 2016), pp. 265-76.

Pickles (2019): Pickles, T., ‘Conversion, Ritual, and Landscape: Streoneshalh (Whitby), Osingadun, and the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Street House, North Yorkshire’, in M. Boulton and M. D. J. Bintley (eds), Insular Iconographies: Essays in Honour of Jane Hawkes (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019), pp. 81-101.

Thacker (1992): Thacker, A., ‘Monks, Preaching and Pastoral Care in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, in J. Blair and R. Sharpe (eds), Pastoral Care Before the Parish (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 137-70.

Heritage Gateway: https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/gateway/

Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England: www.pase.ac.uk

Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture – Volume VI: https://chacklepie.com/ascorpus/catvol6.php

Digital Survey of English Place-Names: https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/

Key to English Place-Names: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/ins/resources/kepn.aspx

Information About the Entry

26/06/24

Thomas Pickles

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Verified.