The Towers Of St. Michael’s

The earliest Romanesque towers of Lincolnshire constitute one of the most remarkable groupings of architectural remains at parish level, of the era of the Norman conquest of England. Forming west towers to a series of ordinary parish churches rather than parts of cathedrals or great monastic institutions, they are a distinctive feature of a number of the county's towns and villages. They have been variously described - as a group or individually - as Late Anglo-Saxon, Norman, or Overlap in period. The fieldwork on which this study was based was undertaken as part of the British Academy's Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture series. Given their late date, however, (all the sculptural material post-dated, and was probably stylistically derived from, work on the new Lincoln Cathedral of 1073 onwards) it was recognised that the value of the Lincolnshire material, and the way to extract a rich understanding from it, lay in treating the architecture of the towers as a whole, rather than soley cataloguing items of sculpture. The present book, while fully reporting on the sculptural details, also addresses the towers as whole architectural artefacts. It seeks an understanding of the social context in which late 11-Century buildings were erected, and explores the role of towers in the contemporary liturgy.