 Right, so in this talk I'm going to explore aspects of the process of prokial formation in the 10th to 12th centuries in Northern England through an examination of evidence from one county in North Yorkshire. Most studies of the prokial system have focused on documentary evidence and we don't yet fully understand the material implications of that process. But by bringing stone objects such as grave monuments and fonts and architectural fabric into the interrogation of prokial development, we can illuminate the important and often overlooked role that material culture had in the creation and stabilization of the prokial system. We also get a much better sense of the complexity and the time scale of that process. So I'm hoping this presentation will give you a window into how parishes and churches developed in one part of England, but what I also like it to do is hopefully spark comparisons and contrasts in discussion about prokial development and its material implications in different parts of Europe so that we can better understand which aspects were universal and which ones were locally or regionally continued. So I'll start with some definitions because I know some of these terms might be peculiar to England and also to being a church archaeologist. So ministers were mother churches, important churches, usually established between the 7th and 9th centuries and they oversaw large pastoral territories and sometimes subsidiary minor churches. Parish churches are the main mother church of a parish, usually a much smaller territory than that that had been overseen by a minister and which had pastoral rights of baptism and marriage and burial and they collected tithes from their parishioners and dues from their subsidiary chapels. And the parish block is that building block. The parish is the building block of late medieval church organization. Prokial chapels or chapels of these are dependent churches within a parish church's territory. They usually owe dues to the parish church and they're not supposed to carry out the major sacraments. And traditionally we've thought of chapels as foundations of the later Middle Ages. They show after parish churches they're supposed to be responding to population expansion as people move away from the core villages and they need somewhere closer to go to mass. And then the local church is an umbrella term for minor churches and chapels that are often closely tied to settlement and menorial structures and have the primary duties of pastoral care. So they're not cathedrals and not abbeys. And this encompasses early medieval churches which are founded before the Prokial system crystallizes as well as those after it has been established. In England, Prokial rights and structures are undergoing a really intense process of change in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. They're evolving from the early Minster-based system to the familiar parish framework of the later Middle Ages and which still more or less exists today. So this is a formative period. And that general pattern appears to show the establishment of Minster churches in the seventh to ninth centuries. And in the 10th century, that system begins to break up as a large number of local churches tied to manors and settlements sprang up and eventually challenged the old Minsters for rights of pastoral care and patronage and tides and congregations. And this 10th century, this mixture of old Minsters and new local churches became the seeds of the later medieval Prokial system. But in documentary evidence, it's really the 11th and 12th centuries when those churches began to shake out in something like a formalized hierarchy about which churches are subsidiary to others, who can vary and perform sacraments and who owes dues to whom. And the steady increase in the number of local churches really slows down by the end of the 12th century when canon law plays an important role in stopping new church foundations. But disputes between churches over who had rights and status begin appearing in this period as well. So even once the map of parishes is formed, it's not particularly settled. And alongside these institutional changes, and I don't think this is an accident, we also see physical changes. Stone church building starts in England in the eighth and ninth centuries, but it becomes increasingly common in local churches during the 11th and 12th centuries. In baptism, the late 11th century and into the 12th saw a shift from more flexible baptismal places to a stone font that was focused in the parish church or in the local church. Burial in churchyards had become standard by the ninth century, but using stone monuments to mark high status burials was established by the 10th century. So stone commemoration started with standing crosses that are well known from the Viking Age and hogbacks and things like that. But it continued through the late medieval period, primarily in the form of planar monuments like this one, which are usually called cross slabs and for those of you familiar with picked-ish cross slabs that are much grander, these are a little more boring, but no less interesting. So we have this formative period of transition between Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Skin and Avian and Anglo-Norman England in which lots of infrastructural changes are happening. And in that environment, the materiality of stone, its permanence, its expense means that fonts and grave markers could have particularly powerful agency in this emerging network. They were functional liturgical objects, but they're also tangible proof of a church's right to baptize and bury. And they're also tools of social display. A patron could deploy them to flaunt their wealth and status, but simultaneously contribute to the advancement of their local church. So I don't wanna get into the detailed evidence to see what these centuries of formation actually look like on the ground. And for these maps, I've combined evidence from the surviving remains of stone churches, grave monuments and baptismal fonts with documentary evidence, mostly from Charters and Doomsday Book in order to piece together a series of maps of church foundations and patronage showing us how this system evolves over time. So this is the final parochial map of North Yorkshire at its full late medieval extent. And we have surviving evidence for 254 parish churches and chapels by the end of the Middle Ages, of which 187 are parish churches and 67 are designated as chapels. Of these, we have evidence for 38 of them existing in the 7th to 9th centuries. And these are likely once these minsters or their subsidiary churches. But by the end of the 10th century, we have 81 of them. Most of this evidence comes from Anglo-Scan and Avian grave monuments. So we know that not only was there a proliferation of churches, but that there were churchyards, burial grounds attached to these churches. And by 1100, we have 125 churches, just about half of what's there in the later Middle Ages. And it's clear that the basic skeleton of the late medieval parochial structure is very much formed by about 1100. At least 60% of the eventual parish churches are in active use at this point. A century later, that map is basically fully formed. 82% of all the churches here have evidence for their existence by about 1200 and the missing ones are mostly chapels that we know are founded in the late Middle Ages. So 90% of North Yorkshire's parish churches are here by this point. And it's very likely that late medieval building programs have erased that other 10%. I'm pretty confident that all the parish churches are in use by this time. And what's interesting too is only a few sites, only 17 sites have only documentary evidence at this point for their existence. All the others have some sort of stone material culture attached to them. So now I wanna break down what physical evidence we're actually seeing that produces this surge in churches in about 100 years. And the first notable source of evidence is architecture. So three quarters of churches have evidence for some investment in stone architecture by 1200. The 12th century is also when we see the first widespread use of stone fonts. And I'm indebted to Carolyn Toomey for this font data. 74 Romanesque style fonts survive in North Yorkshire churches and chapels and none of them date to definitely earlier than 1100. So all of them seem to appear in that 100 year span. Alongside fonts, we have a proliferation of grave monuments of these cross lab monuments which are likely patronized by menorial lords, their families and the clergy. We have 253 monuments, so lots of them at 82 sites. And the vast majority of those monuments date to the 12th century. And this is a really interesting pattern as that surge in church investment has normally been attributed to the influence of the Norman conquest and its aftermath as it was in most big churches, cathedrals and abbeys. But what we're seeing here in parish churches is a much longer term process and may have had much more to do with the negotiation of procealization and Anglo-Norman lords using ecclesiastical patronage to solidify their status rather than the Battle of Hastings. And it's important to note that this wealth of material evidence dating from the 10th to 12th centuries is not just an indicator that this period produced a lot of evidence, but also that it produced evidence that has survived. And I don't think that's accidental. Parish communities and patrons were in many cases making deliberate choices to keep and sometimes purposefully display at least some of these old things throughout the later Middle Ages, perhaps as a way of signaling their church's history and the antiquity of its foundation. And this phenomenon is something I wanna explore in looking particularly at the parochial chapels. What the material evidence shows is that the origins and early development of chapels is much more complex than the general assumption that they're late medieval foundations responding to expanding some. In North Yorkshire, none of the known late medieval chapels are in existence by the end of the 9th century, but nine are there by the end of the 10th, 11 by the end of the 11th and 34 by the end of the 12th. And they're not uniform in terms of their foundation date or their pastoral rights. Some chapels don't have any rights and they remained that way throughout the Middle Ages. Others seem to have held rights from the start and kept them and others began as full dependencies and acquired baptism and burial rights. And the acquisition of rights sometimes meant that they got elevated to being parish churches, but other times they remained technically dependent even though they had these pastoral responsibilities. So the status of a church and chapel could often be really unclear well into the 12th and 13th centuries. And these relationships were complicated because chapels were closely tied to patterns of manners and landholding, not just ecclesiastical relationships. So for instance, in the late 12th century, there's a little red highlight down there, the Church of Mighton on Swale was claimed by the treasurer of York Minster to be a chapel dependent on his parish church at all, which is this one there, but the Abbot of St. Mary's maintains that it's a parish church owned by the Abbey. And it seems that St. Mary's won that argument because right around that time, we see the first burial monument go in at the church and then they get a full rebuild right around 1200. In North Yorkshire, many churches which were designated as chapels by the later Middle Ages had been in existence from the 11th and 12th centuries or even well before. In addition, perhaps due to this ancient foundation, some of these old chapels seem to have acquired rights of baptism and burial very early. So Pickering's dependent chapel, so Pickering is the P here in the middle, and its dependent chapels of Allerston, Eberston, and Ellerburn all become independent parish churches in the middle of the 13th century, but Eberston and Ellerburn already have fonts from about a century earlier. Eberston also has five grave monuments that date to before 1200, and Ellerburn has a grave marker from the 10th century. Another example is Lockton, which you could see here is LO, which was a chapel of Middleton throughout the Middle Ages, but it's recorded in the 16th century that burials, marriages, and baptism had been practiced there since time out of mind, even though we don't have any material evidence for that. So some of these chapels were clearly doing the work of a parish church. And we see a similar pattern at the parish of Gilling West where Hutton Magna, there, Fawcett, Barton, Erieholm, and South Coutin are all documented as dependent chapels in 1396, but Fawcett has an exceptionally large number of burial markers dating to the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries, and Hutton, Magna, Barton, and Erieholm all had fonts by the 12th century. So the character of these chapels as places of elite patronage and rights seems to have been established before canon law could put them in their proper places in the parochial structure. So even though they had a dependent kind of connotation or their assigned place was dependent, once their rights to baptized and buried were recognized to be of antiquity, it was probably very difficult to take those away. And if we only looked at documentary evidence for parochial formation, we would miss entirely that these chapels were early centers of elite patronage and pastoral care. The reality of their position and the complexity of their history only becomes visible when we bring in material evidence. 54 of the early stone fonts we have are found at parish churches, while 20 are located at chapels. But the relative rates of survival at parish churches and chapels are interesting. About one third of parish churches retain a 12th century font, while over half of chapels, which were in existence by 1200, happened. And there's a significantly stronger tendency for early chapels to retain their original font through the later Middle Ages compared to parish churches. And so here are some examples of fonts at chapels, possibly because of the font's role as a powerful symbol of how long the church had held pastoral rights or the chapel had held pastoral rights. Parish churches also have 12th century fonts more often than those of any other medieval date. So preserving the original font was clearly very important to churches across the board. But in many cases, parish fonts were supplanted by new, more stylistically up-to-date, fashionable fonts at some point in the later Middle Ages. But in contrast, none of the chapels that are in existence before 1200 have a late medieval font. They either have a 12th century font, a post-medieval one, or they don't have one at all. So this indicates that either those chapels didn't achieve baptismal rights in the Middle Ages, or if they did, it was likely their original font that the modern one replaced them. So many fewer early chapels apparently held barrier rights than baptismal ones, only nine of them. Probably because burial came with a mandatory fee, which baptism did not. So parish churches had a real incentive to hold on to that right. 58 parish churches feature funerary sculpture from the 10th century, but only nine chapels still possess commemorative evidence from before 1200. What we do see, however, is a high degree of continuity of burial rights. If you have it in the 10th century, you tend to have it in the 11th and 12th centuries. And so these are examples of churches that have both. And one interesting example that doesn't feature this continuity is Haxby, and that's down here. But what it does have is a 10th century monument. It doesn't have any from the 11th or 12th centuries, so Haxby may have lost its burial rights at some point during the Anglo-Norman period. It definitely didn't have burial rights in 1328 because they were petitioning for rights from their parish church because they had lost a dead body into the river when they were trying to bring him to the parish church to be buried. So they had this great sob story of why they needed to be able to bury at their church. And in general, because it was unusual for chapels that had gained early burial rights to lose them, even when they did lose that right at some point, having preserved their ancient commemorative sculpture may have helped them get it back. So losing a body to the river is a good argument, but it gets bolstered by the fact that they can point to the fact that they were burying at Haxby about 350 years before. So to sum up, the material culture of North Yorkshire's churches and chapels tells us a lot about when and how the churches came into being, revealing the intricacies of the formation of the parochial system. It also tells us about how patrons and parish communities deliberately utilized material culture to claim rights and status and historical legacies. Although Canon Law certainly played an important role in stabilizing the parochial system, on a practical level it seems that material evidence of rights could be more powerful than legislation. The deliberate preservation of Romanesque fonts and Anglo-Scaninavian and Anglo-Norman commemorative sculpture into the later Middle Ages indicates their values to the church community. They were tangible, durable embodiments of the church or chapels history and rights which could be physically produced as evidence if someone questioned them. And this was essential prior to the dominance of the written record, but these objects obviously maintained their authority even after the documentation of parochial status was standard. When we look at a map of the fully formed late medieval parochial system, it appears orderly and static, but that hides the fact that its formation was often a highly uncertain process. The survival of a particular church in its privileges wasn't guaranteed and material culture was an essential part of establishing and maintaining a church's place in society. Thank you.