My Study of Round Towers

In the late 1960's my attention was drawn to this subject during an interview to gain admittance to a School of Architecture, where I demonstrated my total ignorance of the basic facts about Round Towered Churches stated at the head of this page. I was not awarded a place at that particular School!

I did eventually gain admittance to the North East London Polytechnic to study architecture and during the early years of this course I took part in a project, with fellow student Barry Trowse, which began my study of the round towers. Many of my photographs, which can be viewed via links on the database, were taken at this time.

My study continued and in 1973 I completed a dissertation on the subject of Round Towers of East Anglian Churches as part of my final examinations to qualify as an architect. My research at that time led me to believe that the subject was more complicated than some of the more dismissive narratives I was reading, however, examination deadlines prevailed and the dissertation was completed and submitted on time, but with the intention of returning to the subject to carry out a more comprehensive study and put my hypothesis on the origins of the towers to a more rigorous test.

Resuming my residence in Norfolk in 2009, I thought that it was about time, and an ideal opportunity, to pursue this aim. Although I had continued to read more on the subject, my intention at that time was to visit, or revisit the churches, organise my growing file of study notes and produce the definitive website on subject of Round Towered Churches. The hypothesis I proposed for the origins of the towers at the conclusion of my dissertation I still consider to be a quite reasonable one. But now there is much more written information available, some of which I have already consulted, and, of course, the seemingly infinite resource of the internet. Although the website development was begun, I now think it is unlikely ever to be completed. It is no longer public on the internet, but I intend to include fragments of the information intended for that website within this section of my personal website.

Much of my further reading has been concerned with understanding the history of England up to and during the period when the towers were built. The dating of the elements of early church building in East Anglia is a difficult problem, more so than in other areas of Great Britain. But it is a problem that needs some degree of resolution if any attempt is to be made to understand the origins of the round towers, for without this how are they to be placed in any chronological context with geography, history, religion and architectural style? I do not think I resolved this problem adequately in my earlier study. I was too dismissive of those that glossed over the subject and possibly read too much into the vague terminology used by others. How could I have arrived at my precise dating of Periods A, B and C from classifications used by others such as "Saxon", "Saxo-Norman", "Romanesque", "Norman", "Pre-Conquest" and "Post Conquest"? In the Map of East Anglia and Database of Churches I have modified my original approach by simply referring to the century in which it is believed that construction of the tower commenced and will leave any possible refinement of dating to the future. I have also compiled into a document some Historical Maps of England relevant to this period in an attempt to dispel the myths that the towers were built by Saxons and that the reason that the towers were round was that East Anglia was too poor to build square towers at that time.

When I originally studied the round towers I read many poorly researched or unsubstantiated assertions about their origins that I felt a needed to establish definitive answers to these. But my own original study and further writing by others on the subject has not significantly advanced the cause. I hope I can, eventually, summarise my conclusions and provide some answers. When this may happen and whether these will be convincing enough to be regarded as definitive, time will tell.

Cliff Jordan 2019