Historic churches and other Christian sites in South Wales

Lost Medieval Churches and Graveyards

Medieval churches still in use do not represent a full picture of what would have existed in the Middle Ages. The ecclesiastical landscape was not static, and churches and chapels came and went according to circumstance.

Sometimes it is the historic parish church which has been lost because the villages in which it stood had been completely abandoned. This happened at places like Howick near Chepstow and St Andrews Minor in the western half of the Vale of Glamorgan. It is often put down to the Black Death, but although this may often have been a contributory factor, there were probably a complex of reasons, not all of which would necessarily have left any record; both Howick and St Andrews Minor actually survived as parishes into the 19th century. On the South Wales coast, a whole seroies of settlements and their churches were abandoned in the later Middle Ages because they were eventually overwhelmed by encroaching sand dunes. In this case, the villagers gradually moved inland, and either built a new church or adopted an existing chapel as the parish church. Sometimes the old parish church fell out of use because it was difficult to get to, and the parishioners built a new one somewhere more convenient. Although some services may have continued to be celebrated in the old church, usually the trouble and expense of maintaining two buildings eventually became too great to justify.

However, it is more likely to be some of the chapels that disappeared. Whereas tithes (10% of the income from every household) had been set up to finance the parish church and its priest, chapel finances could be more precarious. Chantry chapels were set up to pray for the souls of the dead, either within an existing church or as a new build on a greenfield site. They were provided with endowments to pay for a priest to say masses, but these endowments were confiscated by Henry VIII and Edward VI by Act of Parliament in 1545 and 1547. This left these chapels without any source of income, and in the case of a stand-alone chapel, not only would there be no money to pay the priest, but there would also be nothing to maintain the building. There were also pilgrimage chapels which had to close when the cult of saints was suppressed.

When a church or chapel fell out of use, its long-term survival would depend on whether a new use could be found for it. Many of them ended up as farm buildings – barns or cow houses – which gave their new owners an incentive to keep them in repair. Empty buildings with no use will eventually fall into disrepair, tumble down, and end up as quarries for their stone. Where enough survives for us to be able.