The Earliest Times 7

It is well known that when the Saxons invaded, they came up the rivers. Probably in our district people thought they were safe, if they even heard of the invaders. Those who came down the English Channel, up the Bristol Channel, then up the Severn, and from there up the valleys of the Avon and the Aine, until they were stopped by impenetrable forest at Henley in Arden, were a tribe called the Hwicii, an offshoot of the West Saxons. We are to picture them settling down in Alcester, and after about a hundred years becoming somewhat more civilized. Later still they became Christians. How very awkwardly they copied the Roman invention of the round arch, even when they could pick up stores ready shaped for the purpose which we used to be able to see at Wootton Wawen Church. Under the Tower there, on the north side of the present altar, they put such stones into the arch upside down, with the thick end to the centre, and filled up the gaps with mortar. In quite recent years this work has been inadvertently concealed under a coat of paint and the way the springing of the Saxon arches has been laboriously cut out of solid stone is also impossible to observe now.

After the death of Penda, the fourth and last heathen king of Mercia, in 655 A.D., heathenism began to die out, and in 656 Diüma was consecrated first Bishop of Mercia, He was the first of that long episcopal line which afterwards settled at Lichfield in the time of Chad (669 - 672). While Sexwulf was Bishop of Mercia (675 691) he divided off its tribes into separate sees, and in 680 the Council of Hatfield decreed that the Hwiccans, whom they called “the most distant and troublesome” should be formed into a Diocese. Thus began our own Diocese of Worcester, to which all belonged until we were transferred to the revived Diocese of Coventry in 1918. The fact that our true Mother Church is Worcester rather than Coventry is still not forgotten. Our third Bishop, Egwin, visited the neighbourhood in 709, according to legend, and preached at Alcester with doubtful success, for it is said that tns many smiths in the place drowned his words with the noise of their hammers and anvils. It is said that he cursed them and that an earthquake swallowed up both them and their buildings. Bishops do not go around cursing people, and never did. The most likely explanation of the story is surely the discovery of Roman remains, both skeletons and buildings, by people who had no idea what they were or how they got there beneath the ground. Egwin had founded Evesham Abbey in 702.

Autumn 1985 Index