# Greensted Church

church in Greensted, Essex, England, UK

Ongar, United Kingdom

Sacred place. 1001 CE

## Story

• The Church of St Andrew at Greensted-juxta-Ongar is a working parish church whose nave is a wall of split oak trunks.
• Tree-ring dating places the felling of those oaks after 1063, and probably before about 1100, which makes this the oldest known standing timber building in Britain.
• A dig in the chancel in 1960 found traces of earlier wooden buildings, one of them earth-fast, from before the flint chancel.
• A tradition that the body of Edmund, king of East Anglia, rested here in 1013 cannot date the standing nave, whose timbers are later than that year.
• The nave was taken down and partly renewed in 1848, given a new oak roof in the 1890s, and was still in weekly use when chancel repairs began in 2024.

## Visiting

The church is open from around 10.00 am to 4.00 pm in winter and from around 10.00 am to 6.00 pm in summer.

## History

The Church of St Andrew at Greensted-juxta-Ongar stands about a mile west of Chipping Ongar, in Essex. It is still a parish church of the Church of England, with services every week, and the building is listed at the highest grade. The nave is a wall of large split oak trunks set upright, the remains of a palisade or early stave church in what was once the Kingdom of the East Saxons.

A stave wall is a continuous row of vertical timbers, closely butted, that carries the roof. It is a different thing from the later framed wall of posts and panels, which spent far less timber. Few pieces of the earliest structure remain, yet the church has been claimed as the oldest wooden church in the world and as probably the oldest wooden building in Europe still standing, even if only in part.

Christianity came and went in this kingdom before these oaks were felled. Mellitus reached London in 604 and King Sæberht was baptised, but after the king died the bishop was driven out. A second conversion followed in the 650s through Cedd, a Northumbrian trained at Lindisfarne, who founded houses at Tilbury and at Bradwell-on-Sea, interpreted at the Synod of Whitby, and died of plague at Lastingham on 26 October 664.

People have guessed that a permanent church here began soon after that mission. A dig in the chancel in June 1960, directed by Brian Hope-Taylor and never fully written up, was later read as an earth-fast timber wall on the north and a possible sill on the south, both older than the flint chancel. Other accounts place two simple wooden buildings in the sixth or seventh century, around the years of Cedd’s work, without proving that he founded this church.

The dedication is to St Andrew, the fisherman of Bethsaida and brother of Simon Peter. That choice has been taken as a hint of an early Celtic foundation, and the hint is only a possibility. The label Celtic Christianity is now used carefully, because it can imply one organised church set against Rome, which the evidence for these islands does not support.

A stronger legend says that the body of Edmund the Martyr rested here in 1013, on the way from London back to Bury St Edmunds. Edmund, king of East Anglia from about 855, was killed on 20 November 869 after the Great Heathen Army wintered at Thetford, and later telling has him beheaded and his head guarded by a wolf. His shrine was moved to London in 1010 and returned three years later, and the church still holds glass and a carving in his honour.

The standing nave cannot be that shelter. The story is first printed from a letter of 1789, and the early account of the return from London does not mention a wooden chapel near Ongar. The oaks were felled after 1013, though an older building on the same ground remains possible.

For a generation the timbers were dated to about 845, from rubbings made in 1960 by a method that later tree-ring work could not accept. Ian Tyers sampled the staves for a study published in 1996, and twelve of them formed a sequence from 878 to 1053. With the sapwood gone, the felling falls after 1063, and the cluster of end dates points to about 1063 to about 1100.

A parish account says the planks a visitor sees date from about 1060. The two accounts meet in the middle of the eleventh century and then differ by a few decades. The old year 845 is set aside.

The trees were not ancient giants. Some were probably under a hundred years old, and the oldest were likely two hundred to two hundred and fifty, and they were not cut from one trunk. Even so, no other standing British timber building dated by tree rings is as early, and Greensted can still be argued to be the earliest timber building in northern Europe.

The new nave may have been the chapel of a lord who arrived just after the Norman Conquest. That reading comes from the dates, not from a charter. Norman masonry does survive in the flint footings of the chancel and in a pillar piscina, and a coped stone by the porch marks a knight whose name is lost.

The brick chancel is of the sixteenth century. Cracks beside the east window were already worrying a visitation in 1683, and the south-west wall still leans. The low opening in the north nave wall, once called a leper’s squint, is now read as a window beside the original door, for seeing who approached.

That door was blocked long ago with reused timbers. The earliest wall memorial names Jone Wood in 1585, and a scrap of fifteenth-century glass in the west window was reset during the Victorian repair. A Flemish panel of Edmund was stolen a few years before 2023 and has not come back.

The white boarded tower is a seventeenth-century addition, and one bell reads that William Land made it in 1618. Dormers and a south porch arrived in the same period. Antiquaries from a manuscript of 1719 onward knew the walls were strange, and they argued over oak and chestnut, and over earth-fast posts and sills.

In 1848 the sill was rotten and beetle was in the wood. The staves were taken down, shortened, and set on new oak sills and low brick walls, under the architect Wyatt, with James Barlow as builder. Accounts differ on how many inches were cut away, and the tree-ring work later found that at least ten staves had been renewed.

The roof was rebuilt in 1848 because the old ties left less than six feet of headroom. In the 1890s Frederick Chancellor of Chelmsford replaced that softwood roof in oak, since nothing of the earlier roof remained. A carving of the wolf that guarded Edmund’s head was set in a spandrel while the timbers lay on the ground, in the same season that an oak at Hoxne, tied to the king’s death, fell.

The west wall is the same kind of stave work, weathered, shortened, and partly rebuilt, with grooves cut by drilling a line of holes and chiselling out the waste. Cecil Hewett in 1980 traced the joints and the tie beam the nave needed. Tar on the outside, plugs from insecticide in the 1950s and 1960s, a stabilising campaign in 1990, and a new oak covering on the spire in 2005 all belong to the effort to keep the wall standing.

In 1839 the church entered another history. James Brine, one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs who had been transported in 1834 and pardoned in 1836, married Elizabeth Standfield here on 20 June, and the register still shows the entry. The Brines later left for Ontario.

In 1972 the church was put on a postage stamp in a set of village churches. In 1987 Hugh Casson designed an oak font, made by Russell Thomas and noted in the Essex volume associated with Nikolaus Pevsner and James Bettley. A review in 2023 left the first form of the wall undecided, whether earth-fast or on a sill, and whether an English survival or a single commission after the Conquest.

An inspection in 2020, and a survey of the chancel roof, called for repairs. In October 2024 work began on the chancel masonry, the lead, the rainwater goods, and the windows, while services and visits went on. The split oaks remain the core, felled after 1063 and probably before about 1100, still carrying a roof and still in weekly use.

## Photographs

- [St Andrew's parish church, Greensted, in the civil parish of Ongar, Essex, England, seen from the churchyard footpath at the southwest — Acabashi](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted%2C_Ongar%2C_Essex_England_-_from_the_south-west.JPG)
- [Greensted Church. The nave walls are Saxon-period split oak trunks. — mym](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Greensted_Church_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2503.jpg)
- [Greensted Church. The church of St Andrew over 1000 years old with a nave constructed from oak trees, the oldest wooden church in the UK. — Andrew Pickess](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Greensted_Church_-_geograph.org.uk_-_47643.jpg)
- [Greensted Church - South Side The main body of this Anglo Saxon church seen from the south. The vertical oak log construction can be seen in the walls, and the — John S Turner](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Greensted_Church_-_South_Side_-_geograph.org.uk_-_284420.jpg)
- [Greensted Church, Essex, England — Ken Eckert](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Greensted_Church_Corner.jpg)
- [St Andrew's Church, Greensted, in the civil parish of Template:WOngar, Essex, England: buttressed brick chancel seen from the northeast — Acabashi](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted%2C_Ongar%2C_Essex_England_-_chancel_from_northeast.JPG)
- [St Andrew's Church, Greensted, in the civil parish of Ongar, Essex, England: buttressed brick chancel from the southeast with trees including yew — Acabashi](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted%2C_Ongar%2C_Essex_England_-_chancel_from_southeast.JPG)
- [Chancel south door of St Andrew's Church, Greensted, in the civil parish of Ongar, Essex, England — Acabashi](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted%2C_Ongar%2C_Essex_England_-_cnacel_south_door.JPG)
- [St Andrew's parish church, Greensted, in the civil parish of Ongar, Essex, England, seen from the northwest — Acabashi](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted%2C_Ongar%2C_Essex_England_-_from_the_northwest.JPG)
- [Nave and south porch of St Andrew's Church, Greensted, in the civil parish of Ongar, Essex, England — Acabashi](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted%2C_Ongar%2C_Essex_England_-_nave_and_south_porch.JPG)

## Sources

- [Greensted Church](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensted_Church) — Wikipedia
- [Tree-ring analysis of timbers from the stave church at Greensted, Essex](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/14-1996) — Historic England
- [Greensted Church Revisited](https://www.esah1852.org.uk/library/files/essex-journal-spring-2023-24916103946.pdf) — Essex Society for Archaeology and History
- [St Andrew, Greensted](https://www.nationalchurchestrust.org/church/st-andrew-greensted) — National Churches Trust
- [The Wooden Church of St Andrew at Greensted, Essex](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquaries-journal/article/abs/wooden-church-of-st-andrew-at-greensted-essex/37F93F675E2D1C1DBB4F269A1FED0B96) — Cambridge University Press
- [Cedd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedd) — Wikipedia
- [Edmund the Martyr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_the_Martyr) — Wikipedia
- [Kingdom of Essex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Essex) — Wikipedia
- [Tolpuddle Martyrs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs) — Wikipedia
- [St Andrew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Andrew) — Wikipedia
- [Celtic Christianity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Christianity) — Wikipedia
- [Hugh Casson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Casson) — Wikipedia
- [Nikolaus Pevsner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolaus_Pevsner) — Wikipedia
- [New conservation project at St Andrew’s Church, Greensted-juxta-Ongar](https://universalstone.co.uk/new-conservation-project-at-the-oldest-stave-built-timber-building-in-europe-st-andrews-church-in-greensted-juxta-ongar/) — Universal Stone
- ['Church of St Andrew' Greensted, Ongar, Essex England - from the south-west.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted,_Ongar,_Essex_England_-_from_the_south-west.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Greensted Church - geograph.org.uk - 2503.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greensted_Church_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2503.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Greensted Church - geograph.org.uk - 47643.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greensted_Church_-_geograph.org.uk_-_47643.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Greensted Church - South Side - geograph.org.uk - 284420.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greensted_Church_-_South_Side_-_geograph.org.uk_-_284420.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Greensted Church Corner.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greensted_Church_Corner.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- ['Church of St Andrew' Greensted, Ongar, Essex England - chancel from northeast.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted,_Ongar,_Essex_England_-_chancel_from_northeast.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- ['Church of St Andrew' Greensted, Ongar, Essex England - chancel from southeast.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted,_Ongar,_Essex_England_-_chancel_from_southeast.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- ['Church of St Andrew' Greensted, Ongar, Essex England - cnacel south door.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted,_Ongar,_Essex_England_-_cnacel_south_door.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- ['Church of St Andrew' Greensted, Ongar, Essex England - from the northwest.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted,_Ongar,_Essex_England_-_from_the_northwest.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- ['Church of St Andrew' Greensted, Ongar, Essex England - nave and south porch.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Church_of_St_Andrew%27_Greensted,_Ongar,_Essex_England_-_nave_and_south_porch.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Greensted Church stands in the village of Greensted, about a mile west of Chipping Ongar in Essex. Its full title is the Church of St Andrew, Greensted-juxta-Ongar, though people usually call it Greensted Church. It belongs to the Church of England, it is still a working parish church, and it holds services every week. The building is listed at the highest grade.

The nave is made of large split oak trunks set upright, a way of building long associated with the Anglo-Saxons. Those trunks are often described as the remains of a palisade church or, more loosely, as an early stave church. A stave wall, in the sense used by later students of the fabric, is a continuous row of vertical timbers, closely butted, that carries the weight of the roof. It is not the later post-and-infill frame, which used far less timber and labour. Few sections of the earliest wooden structure remain, and the church has been claimed as the oldest wooden church in the world and as probably the oldest wooden building in Europe that is still standing, even if only in part.

The land around Ongar lay in the Kingdom of the East Saxons, one of the kingdoms of the early English period. That kingdom took shape in the sixth century and, at its widest, covered the later county of Essex together with Middlesex, much of Hertfordshire, and for a short time west Kent. London and Colchester, both former Roman centres, stood inside it. The dynasty claimed descent from Woden through Seaxneat, and the kings are notable for names that begin with S. For most of its life the kingdom had an overlord, at different times a king of Kent, of East Anglia, or of Mercia. The last king, Sigered, ceded it in 825 to Ecgberht of Wessex. In the later ninth century the territory passed for a time into the Danelaw, and after the reconquest it was treated as a shire.

Christianity had a foothold in this country more than once before any standing timber at Greensted was felled. Bede records that Mellitus, sent from the Roman mission at Canterbury, reached London in 604, and that Æthelberht of Kent helped bring King Sæberht of the East Saxons to baptism. After Sæberht died, Mellitus was driven out and the kingdom returned to the old rites. A fresh conversion came in the middle of the seventh century through Cedd, a Northumbrian monk and bishop. Cedd was born about 620 and was brought up on Lindisfarne by Aidan. In 653 Oswiu of Northumbria sent him, with other priests, to the Middle Angles, whose ruler Peada had accepted baptism in order to marry Oswiu’s daughter. Cedd was then sent to the East Saxons at the request of King Sigeberht, called the Good, who had himself gone to Northumbria to be baptised by Finan. Finan ordained Cedd bishop. Cedd founded monasteries at Tilaburg, probably East Tilbury, and at Ithancester, almost certainly Bradwell-on-Sea, where his chapel still stands on the site of the Roman fort of Othona. He interpreted between the parties at the Synod of Whitby, accepted the Roman dating of Easter, and died of plague at Lastingham on 26 October 664. After his death some of the East Saxons relapsed, and Wulfhere of Mercia sent Bishop Jaruman to restore the faith.

The first permanent church on the Greensted site has been thought to belong to the years soon after Cedd began that work among the East Saxons, around 654. What the ground has actually yielded is older, or at least is placed earlier. In June 1960 an excavation in the chancel looked for an earlier timber chancel, and for whether its posts had stood in the earth or had been tenoned into a sill. The dig was hampered by later masonry, by the trenches of Victorian brick underpinning, by dwarf walls under the choir stalls, and by graves and burial vaults. The director, Brian Hope-Taylor, never wrote the excavation up, because of a long illness. Plans and sections were left with the Society of Antiquaries. When they were read in 1979, they were taken to show an earth-fast timber wall on the north and possible evidence of a timber sill on the south, perhaps of different periods, both of them earlier than the flint-rubble chancel. A parish account places two earlier timber buildings in the sixth and the seventh centuries, around the time Cedd’s mission began. Another account places the same two simple wooden buildings in the late sixth or early seventh century, and pictures them as upright timbers dropped into a trench. Those readings sit beside one another. They do not prove that Cedd himself founded this church, and the tree-ring study later judged the remains too slight for a dig in the nave to settle whether an earlier building stood there.

The dedication to St Andrew has been offered as a hint that the first sanctuary was a Celtic foundation. St Andrew was a fisherman of Bethsaida in Galilee, brother of Simon Peter, and one of the twelve. In the Gospel of John he is a disciple of John the Baptist who follows Jesus, recognises him as the Messiah, and brings his brother to him, which is why the Eastern churches call him the first-called. The suggestion that an Andrew dedication at Greensted points to a Celtic origin is a possibility, not a documented foundation. The wider label Celtic Christianity is itself now used with caution. Historians of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries have set the term aside when it implies one organised church, shared by all the Celtic-speaking peoples and set against the church of Rome. Patrick Wormald put the objection plainly: there was not a Roman church to which a Celtic church was nationally opposed. What can be described are practices that were strong in the Irish and British churches of the sixth and seventh centuries, among them a distinctive reckoning of Easter, a form of monastic tonsure, a system of penance, and the custom of exile for Christ. Cedd was formed in that Irish tradition at Lindisfarne, and he was also the man who, after Whitby, took the Roman Easter back to Essex. A dedication and a missionary climate can be stated. A separate Celtic church at Greensted cannot.

The body of Edmund the Martyr, king of East Anglia, is said to have rested at Greensted in 1013 on its way to reburial at Bury St Edmunds. Edmund ruled from about 855 until his death on 20 November 869, a year that some reckonings of the chronicle place in 870. Coins show that he followed Æthelweard and used the same moneyers. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that the Great Heathen Army rode across Mercia into East Anglia, took winter quarters at Thetford, and that Edmund fought them, that the Danes had the victory, killed the king, and conquered the land. It is not known whether he died in the fighting or was killed after capture. A later life by Abbo of Fleury tells a fuller story: Edmund refused to renounce Christ, was shot with arrows, and was beheaded, and the head, thrown into a wood, was found guarded by a wolf. That life has been judged a gathering of familiar saintly patterns, though the wolf has no exact parallel. Edmund was buried in a wooden chapel near the place of his death. His body was later taken to Beodericsworth, the modern Bury St Edmunds, probably in the reign of Æthelstan, who became king of the Anglo-Saxons in 924 and founded a monastery there in 925 to care for the shrine. In 1010 the remains were moved to London to keep them from the Vikings, and they stayed there for three years before they returned to Bury. The Greensted halt belongs to that return journey in the telling that has grown up around the church. There are many tributes to Edmund inside the building, including a stained-glass image and a nineteenth-century carving of the wolf with the severed head. When the timbers were taken down in the restoration of 1848, the rector, Philip Ray, wrote that they were lying on the ground when an oak at Hoxne, long called King Edmund’s oak, fell in a field where the king was said to have been martyred. A stone cross at Hoxne now marks that traditional spot, and an arrowhead was found in the fallen tree. Hoxne is only one proposed place of death. Others are Dernford in Cambridgeshire and Bradfield St Clare near Bury, and the place-name argument that ties Hoxne to the Haegelisdun of Abbo’s life has been rejected.

The tradition cannot be the date of the standing nave. The earliest published link between Edmund and this church is a letter of Smart Lethieullier in 1789, and Lethieullier has been judged the likely author of the story. The earliest written authority for the return of the body from London toward the end of the eleventh century does not record a rest in a wooden chapel near Ongar. Tree-ring dating puts the surviving timbers after 1013. An earlier building on the same ground remains possible, which is as far as the evidence goes.

The oaks themselves were for a long time given a much earlier year. In 1960 an unpublished study by J. E. Crawford Stringer, made from rubbings of the end grain and described as dendra-magnetism, claimed a date of about 845. Reliable British tree-ring sequences for this period did not exist until the early 1980s, and the narrow rings in these staves are hard to read even with modern methods, so a rubbing was a poor way to measure them. Before that claim, an eleventh-century date had been the usual view. The 845 figure spread quickly, and not everyone accepted it. A fresh study was asked for.

Ian Tyers carried out that study and published it in 1996. Cores about 15 millimetres across were taken from below the internal panelling, so that the holes would not show inside, and each hole was plugged with bog oak from Rustington in West Sussex. That bog oak dates from 2835 to 2620 BC and was chosen because its colour and surface matched the weathered outside of the staves. There are 53 probably original timbers, all oak. Twenty were selected. At least ten others were unsuitable, among them the timber that carries the so-called leper’s squint and the entrance door post, or because they had too few rings. Nineteen samples had enough rings to measure. Twelve of them matched one another and formed a site chronology running from 878 to 1053. No two of the useful samples came from the same tree. The dated samples have no sapwood. The latest heartwood ring is 1053. Adding the minimum of ten missing sapwood rings expected for British oak gives a felling date after 1063. The end dates cluster in the 1040s, and on that clustering the likely felling range for the group is about 1063 to about 1100. If the full sapwood allowance of ten to fifty-five years is applied to the single latest ring, the outer bound falls in 1108, which is the span sometimes quoted as 1053 plus ten to fifty-five years. The report’s own reading is the narrower one: after 1063, and probably before about 1100. A parish account says that the 51 planks a visitor sees today date from about 1060. The two statements meet in the middle of the eleventh century and then diverge by a few decades. The 845 date is set aside.

The same analysis describes the trees. Most of the staves are half-round, split through the centre, and the pieces that survive are mostly less than two metres long, because they were shortened later. Growth was often between one and two millimetres a year. Some trees were probably under a hundred years old in all. The longest combined sequence is 176 years, and with missing centres and lost outer rings the oldest trees were likely 200 to 250 years old. Nothing in the rings supports the popular claim that the oaks were six hundred years old, or that they were already growing when Christ was alive, or that one enormous tree supplied the whole church. A few trunks have a slight corkscrew grain, and some have epicormic knots, which may mean that the canopy opened at times and let side shoots grow. The stand was of uneven age. The south-wall sequences tend to end a couple of decades earlier than the northern ones, which may mean that sun or the prevailing wind wore away more of the outer wood on that side. Only one timber, on the north, keeps any sapwood, and it could not be dated. It may have been left exposed only at the restoration of 1848. The absence of matching halves may mean that both halves of a trunk were not routinely built in, or that many more timbers have been lost, or, as one suggestion has it, that the staves began as whole round trunks and were cut flat on the inside later. That last idea is hard to square with the adze marks on the inner faces, which run unbroken across later patches and so belong to a later preparation for plaster, not to the original splitting.

On these dates Greensted remains the oldest known standing timber building in Britain, and it can still be argued to be the earliest timber building in northern Europe, even though it is at least two centuries younger than the old 845 claim. No other standing British timber building that has been dated by tree rings comes close. The standing pine stave churches of Norway are mostly of the twelfth century or later. The oak material of southern Scandinavia belongs to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and most of it survives only as reused pieces. The earliest standing oak church in that group, at Hedared in Sweden, dates to the early thirteenth century. Fragments reused in Sweden and Denmark are contemporary with Greensted. Hewett noted a likeness between these staves and the grave chamber of the Gokstad ship, excavated in the Oslo fjord in 1880 and dated by tree rings to the early tenth century. Stave construction also appears on London waterfronts from the eleventh century to the fourteenth. The technique was once widespread. What is rare is a wall that is still carrying a roof.

Greensted is closer to Swedish than to Norwegian practice. Norwegian walls use pine and flanged joints. The southern oak churches, and Greensted, use an inserted tongue in a groove. The inner quadrant of the round corner posts has been cut away, which Scandinavian work often left intact. The west wall lacks the beam that, in Scandinavia, tied the wall plates across the outer face of the gable. The nearest structural cousin is the church at Hemse in Sweden, known from about fifty staves and other timbers found in 1896, reused as the floor of a later church and attributed to the second half of the eleventh century. They share the semicircular outer face, the edge slots for fillets, and the oblique chamfer at the top. At least three Danish churches, Flinterup, Saeby, and Framlev, have staves of the same type. In England there is no second standing example, but excavation has found the ghosts of similar walls: rectangular impressions of earth-fast staves in a tenth-century building at Goltho in Lincolnshire, a pressure shadow of a stave wall on a sill at Potterne in Wiltshire in 1964, and another at Beeleigh Abbey in 2019. Twenty-two twelfth-century staves, about two and a half metres long, were found reused as floor joists in a Lincolnshire farmhouse and published in 2021. Their ends had been trimmed, so the joints were gone, but pegs had once linked the butting edges, and the wood was unworn, as if it had stood inside or under deep shelter. Whether the method began in Scandinavia and crossed the North Sea, or the other way, or grew up on both sides, is still open. Norwegian visitors noticed Greensted early. Dietrichson came in 1884, and Shetelig in 1902, and Shetelig’s notes fed later Scandinavian writing, including Emil Ekhoff’s study of Swedish stave churches.

How completely a timber church can disappear is shown by later losses as well as by these reused fragments. In May 1994 a Norwegian court convicted Varg Vikernes, a musician born Kristian Vikernes and later known as Louis Cachet, of murder and of the arson of four Christian churches. He was sentenced to twenty-one years and released after fifteen. Those convictions belong to the 1990s, not to the building of Greensted, but they are a modern measure of how little of a wooden church world survives once fire and neglect have passed through it. A short news note of December 1995, which carried the revised Greensted date to a wider public, was later kept by the Wayback Machine, the digital archive opened to the public in October 2001.

The tree-ring report also offers a possible historical setting for the new nave. From the dates, it seems possible that the church was built as the private chapel of a new lord of the manor in the years immediately after the Norman Conquest. That is a suggestion, not a charter. What is certain is that the standing oaks are of the Conqueror’s generation or the one after it, not of Edmund’s lifetime and not of Cedd’s.

Norman work does survive, but not in the oak. In the chancel, the flint footings of the wall and the pillar piscina inside the sanctuary are all that remains of it. Near the porch, a large coped stone marks the grave of a knight whose name is not recorded. The original chancel was small and timber-built. The present brick chancel belongs to the sixteenth century. An archdeacon’s visitation in 1683 already found cracks on each side of the east window and doubted whether newly inserted beams would stop the movement. The south-west part of the chancel wall still leans outward, and the removal of an eastern stave wall when a chancel arch was inserted in the sixteenth century may have made that lean worse.

A small opening low in the north nave wall was long called a leper’s squint, a place where people excluded from the congregation might receive a blessing. It sits beside the original doorway, and on that position it has been re-read as a window for seeing who was coming to the church. The north doorway itself was blocked long before the nineteenth century. Early drawings show it closed, and the opening is now filled with three lengths of reused squared timber that had been shaped for some other job. Tree rings could not date them. They may be old sill or wall-plate timbers put back during the restoration of 1848. One of them, unusually, still had sapwood.

Other fittings accumulate through the later Middle Ages and the Tudor years. The earliest wall memorial is to Jone Wood and is dated 1585. A fragment of fifteenth-century glass sits in the centre of the quatrefoil window at the west end, but it was placed there in the Victorian restoration, not left there from the Middle Ages. A painted wooden panel of Edmund, 24 by 10 and a half inches, probably Flemish work of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, was once in the church. A later editorial doubted that it had belonged to a lost rood screen. It was stolen a few years before 2023 and has not been recovered. A shaft piscina illustrated in the 1840s had left the building and was back by the time of the county inventory of 1921.

The white weatherboarded tower, which is what the eye meets first from the lane, was added in the seventeenth century. One bell is inscribed “William Land made me 1618”, and its frame fits that date. The church had two bells in 1552, so the surviving bell, and perhaps the tower’s older timbers, may have been reused. The tower is boarded inside and is hard to date more closely. Around the same Stuart period, three dormer windows were added to the nave, and a south porch was built. There are other medieval timber towers in this part of Essex, so the boarded belfry is a local kind of building as well as a later cap on a much older nave.

Antiquaries had already noticed the oddity of the walls. The earliest written account is a manuscript of Holman dated 27 January 1719, which calls it a little church, very old, with walls of wood split apart and set in panels like old wainscot. Salmon, about 1740, called it a very uncommon building whose walls were massy trees split in two, each receiving and received by the next. Lethieullier, of Wanstead, drew a plan and elevations in 1748 and sent them to the Society of Antiquaries. They were engraved only in 1789. Philip Morant, in 1768, repeated that the walls were trees split or sawn, and he wrote that they were set into the ground. A drawing by Buckler in 1810 shows that by then the staves stood in a substantial ground sill, so Morant’s phrase may not describe the church of his own day. Buckler again in 1824, and Suckling in 1845, agree with Lethieullier in general, though each drawing counts the uprights differently, which is more likely a sketch than a campaign of replacement. A visitor around 1770 found carpenters at work and was told that the wood was chestnut, not oak. That mistake lasted well into the nineteenth century, until members of the Linnean Society told Rector Ray that the staves were oak, warned him of the fan-bearing wood-borer, and pointed out that weather had eaten the sapwood more deeply on the south-west, where sun and rain hit, than on the sheltered north. Suckling, just before the great repair, still thought the building generally sound. His knife would not mark the west wall. He saw the outer faces furrowed about an inch deep into stringy ridges, the north door blocked, and plaster over the inside of the walls and the underside of the roof. Brick buttresses then held a south wall that leaned a little outward and toward the east.

Ray repaired the chancel in 1845 under the architect T. H. Wyatt, underpinning the flint, adding to a patchwork of brick, and partly rebuilding the upper east end. In 1848 he turned to the nave. Beetle and, more urgently, a rotten ground sill had let the staves drive down through their base under the weight above. James Barlow, the Ongar contractor who did the work, thought that only the ends of the wall plates, buried in the chancel brickwork, had kept the tiled nave from collapse. The timbers were taken down. Barlow said he cut about six inches off the feet and tenoned them into new oak sills on dwarf brick walls twelve inches high. The old sills had rested on bare earth and a scatter of unmortared flints. An anonymous account in the same year, perhaps from the architect’s office, and naming the direction of Messrs Wyatt and Brandon, gives smaller losses: about an inch off the north staves and about five inches off the south, and it counts twenty-five staves on the north and twenty-one on the south. Modern counts are twenty-eight and twenty-three, apart from the corner posts, and the difference may come from narrower replacement pieces. The sill was eight inches square, with a slot an inch and a half deep. The wall plates were rough, from seven to ten inches square. Internal plaster was stripped from walls and roof. The roof was rebuilt because the old tie beams left less than six feet of headroom. The great brick buttresses at the south-east and south-west corners, drawn by Lethieullier, came down. Ray set a carving of the wolf guarding Edmund’s head into one of the spandrels. A. H. Burkitt, writing in 1849, feared that a primitive relic had been demolished and that the beetle had so far defeated every attempt to clear it from attacked timber. Barlow answered, in effect, that the rot in the sill was the real danger and that rector and architect had meant to keep as much original wood as they could.

Later memory softened the loss. An editorial claimed that only one or two staves were replaced in 1848 and that a single one was patched. The tree-ring work, which could tell original from renewal and did not sample the replacements, points to at least ten renewals, four on the north and six on the south. By 1892 the softwood roof of 1848 was badly decayed. Frederick Chancellor, a Chelmsford architect, designed a new oak roof and followed Wyatt’s replacement, because nothing of the pre-1848 roof remained. At the same time a brick buttress in the middle of the north wall, added at or soon after 1848 and not seen in earlier views, had pulled away. It was removed, and the timbers behind it were sound. Insect damage increased sharply between 1903 and 1904. The three timbers blocking the old north door were freckled with worm holes, and the advice was to paint them with equal parts of benzine and linseed oil. The same commentary regretted the large opening cut through the west stave wall into the tower, the loss of the unusual shaft piscina, and the unsympathetic brick repairs to the chancel.

The west wall, examined despite the tower that hides it, was of the same stave construction as the sides. Its outer faces were badly weathered and attacked by dry rot. The staves seem to have been shortened at both ends and then built up at the top with short pieces of other staves. The longest unjointed stave still visible was 3.3 metres, long enough to have reached the gable rafters without an intermediate plate, which would have been the usual Scandinavian arrangement. These end staves lack the external splay found at the tops of the side staves. One squared piece had been reused, perhaps from a wall plate. Another kept an angled mortice and its peg, perhaps from a rafter with a collar. A row of large horizontal holes with the remains of dowels may be a primitive ladder to a belfry. The two western corner posts, one of them dated to the 1848 rebuild, have had their inner quadrant cut away. Where a gap allowed a look at the tongues between staves, the visible ones showed saw marks and were taken to be of 1848. The grooves that take the tongues were made by drilling a line of holes about two centimetres across, ten to fifteen centimetres apart, and then chiselling out the waste. Cecil Hewett, in 1980, set out the joints in detail, including the corner posts and a tie beam that must have crossed the middle of the nave at wall-plate level. He found enough peg holes in a line to confirm that beam. He would not decide whether the west gable had once had an inner skin of planks, as Ray had suggested.

Traces of tar were noticed on the outer faces in the 1979 study, with no verdict on when it was applied or whether it was meant to stop rot or insects. The bevel on the outer upper end of the side staves was thought to be original. The upper inner face of some staves is slightly tapered, perhaps to fit the wall plate. A line of plugged holes at that level dates from injections of pentachlorophenate and dieldrin in the early 1950s and again in the middle 1960s. In 1990 further work stabilised the church as it stood. In 2005 the spire was completely re-shingled in oak.

The church also holds a nineteenth-century memory that has nothing to do with Edmund. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were six farm labourers from Tolpuddle in Dorset, led by George Loveless, who in 1833 formed the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers when wages were being cut toward six shillings a week. Unions of that kind were lawful, but in 1834 they were convicted of swearing a secret oath under an act of 1797 and sentenced to transportation. The six were James Brine, James Hammett, George Loveless, his brother James Loveless, Thomas Standfield, and Thomas’s son John Standfield. After public protest they were pardoned in 1836 and came home between 1837 and 1839. Some of them were then given farm tenancies near Chipping Ongar. On 20 June 1839 James Brine married Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Standfield, in this church, and the entry can still be read in the register. In 1844 the Brines moved to London, Ontario.

In 1972 the church appeared on a British postage stamp in a set of village churches. In 1987 an oak font was added, designed by Hugh Casson and made by Russell Thomas. Hugh Casson, born in London on 23 May 1910 and died on 15 August 1999, was the director of architecture for the Festival of Britain and president of the Royal Academy from 1976 to 1984. The font is recorded in the Essex volume of the county architectural guides associated with Nikolaus Pevsner, revised with James Bettley and published in 2007. Nikolaus Pevsner, born in 1902 and died in 1983, was the historian whose series, The Buildings of England, set out to describe the buildings of each county. The 2023 review of the church thanks James Bettley among the people who helped it.

That 2023 review, by Michael Leach, gathers the scattered accounts and sets them against newer finds of stave construction elsewhere. It leaves the main structural questions open. It is still unclear whether Greensted began with earth-fast staves or with a sill, whether the corner posts were originally round and only later trimmed, and whether this is the last survivor of an English way of building or a single commission, perhaps for someone with Scandinavian knowledge, after the Conquest. The transition from earth-fast staves to timber sills in Scandinavia is placed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so the original footing here, if it could be known, would matter well beyond Essex. Leach’s hope is that future excavation, and careful watching of repairs on other medieval buildings, will add to the small stock of evidence. He also notes how much has already been lost for want of a written record, above all Hope-Taylor’s dig.

A quinquennial inspection in 2020, and a detailed survey of the chancel roof that followed it, identified repairs. In October 2024 a conservation programme began on that basis: stone cleaning, rebuilding and repair of masonry, renewal and improvement of the leadwork, including a security marking paint, repair of the roof, refurbishment of the rainwater goods, redecoration, and repair of windows. The church was to stay open for services and for visitors while the work went on. The announcement of that programme repeated a nave date of about 1060, and also a span from 998 to 1063, which the tree-ring results do not support. The scope of the repairs can be separated from that dating.

What a visitor meets, then, is a palimpsest with a known core. The split oaks of the nave were felled after 1063 and probably before about 1100, shortened and partly renewed in 1848 and 1849, capped by a seventeenth-century boarded tower and by Chancellor’s oak roof of the 1890s, and joined to a brick chancel of the sixteenth century that itself sits on Norman flint and on the disturbed traces of older timber. The Edmund story explains the wolf, the glass, and the stolen panel, and it does not date the wall. The earlier wooden buildings under the chancel, the mission of Cedd, and the dedication to St Andrew explain why people have looked for a seventh-century beginning, and the rings explain why the standing wall is a Norman-age one. The church is still used for worship every week, which is why the lead, the rainwater, and the windows were being repaired in 2024 rather than studied as a ruin.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/greensted-church