Anglo-Saxon period

The Anglo-Saxon period is the earliest historical layer attached to Banfield in Gerry Fenn’s account of the village. Its significance lies not only in the settlement’s first recorded church endowment, but also in the story that Christian worship took root over an older pagan sacred site—a buried past that Monsignor Delgard treats cautiously rather than as proof of anything supernatural.

Landscape and Early Settlement

Fenn places human movement through the area before the arrival of the Saxons: a prehistoric track ran east to west across the county and through the settlement that became Banfield. He describes the surrounding country as almost entirely forested, with the early settlement probably occupying a clearing. This account makes the village’s later history part of a landscape shaped first by routes and woodland, rather than by a clearly documented town.

The village’s earliest official mention, as Fenn recounts it, dates to A.D. 770. A Saxon castle stood nearby at Stretham, and Osmund, King of the West Saxons, granted the lord of the manor a charter assigning fifteen hides of land to endow a church in Banefelde. Fenn considers St. Joseph’s Church the likely recipient because he knows of no record of another church there at that time. The grant supplies a specific administrative trace of the settlement, though the identification of the church remains an inference rather than a certainty.

Conversion and the Older Sacred Site

Fenn’s account presents Sussex as one of England’s last pagan strongholds, geographically separated from the north by forests, from the east and west by marshes, and from the south by the sea. Augustine and his followers from Rome initially met resistance. In the story Fenn relates, the bishop Wilfred was driven onto the Sussex coast by rough seas, resolved to return and convert the inhabitants, and did so twenty years later. Banfield, then called Banefelde, is described as one of the last settlements to hold out; the account gives no precise date for its conversion.

The key claim is that the first Christian church in Banfield—presumed to be St. Joseph’s—was built over the pagans’ place of worship and their burial ground. The location thus joins two religious histories in the same ground. Fenn’s discovery gives Banfield’s landscape a deep historical layering, but the evidence presented is a village history related in conversation, not an independently verified account of the site’s archaeology.

Historical Record and Its Limits

Fenn identifies the Domesday Survey of 1085 as Banfield’s second-earliest official mention, placing it after the Saxon-era land grant and beyond the period itself. The sequence distinguishes the settlement’s sparse documentary record from the much older claims about its forest setting and religious past. The account also makes clear that the church’s identity in the 770 grant and its continuity with the later parish are presumed, not conclusively demonstrated.

Delgard responds to the report of a church built over a pagan altar by observing that Christian churches were often placed over pagan worship sites as a symbolic rebuttal, and that burial grounds held sacred meaning for Christians and pagans alike. His response neither disputes the local account nor treats the shared site as inherently extraordinary. It limits what can be inferred from the overlap: the location may register religious succession and deliberate appropriation without, by itself, explaining the novel’s later disturbances.

Historical Language and Distinct Periods

The period also serves as a useful chronological distinction in the novel’s investigation of Alice Pagett’s sleep speech. Her words initially sound garbled to Monsignor Delgard, and Mother Marie-Claire wonders whether years of deafness might have affected her speech. The accent is later recognized as an unfamiliar English regional accent, but Delgard eventually connects the language to Elizabethan English after recalling a theatrical production in which actors had been taught a period accent. He remains uncertain and stresses the puzzle of Alice’s apparent knowledge of a language she had neither heard nor, as far as he knows, read.

That interpretation points to a later historical period, not to Anglo-Saxon speech. The novel’s history therefore contains distinct layers that should not be conflated: the pre-Saxon track and woodland settlement, the Saxon-era grant and conversion narrative, and the much later language associated with Alice’s sleeping words. The Anglo-Saxon past matters chiefly as Banfield’s earliest recorded and religiously contested stratum, not as an established explanation for her speech.