Reconstructing the Development of Somerset’s Early Medieval Church: New Approaches to Understanding the Relationships between Post-Roman Church Sites, Early Medieval Minsters and Royal Villae in the South-West of England

The Somerset countryside holds traces of church communities that took shape long before the familiar network of medieval parishes. Carole Lomas follows them through the centuries after Roman rule, when royal estates, early churches and minsters did not yet fit the later map. It is tempting to read medieval boundaries backwards into that period; she instead tests what records, place-names and the landscape can actually tell us.

By bringing that scattered evidence together, she reconstructs early estates and parochiae, the larger territories once associated with important churches. The patterns differ from one part of Somerset to another. Later church administrative boundaries appear to preserve traces of older great estates, but the link between early minsters and the subsequent growth of towns proves weaker than might be expected. Somerset emerges as a place where worship, settlement and political authority changed together without following a single timetable.