The Dedication and Orientation of Tickhill St. Mary’s

Part 3

Sunrise on the festivals of the Virgin Mary

Diagram to show the east-west alignment of St Mary’s at the spring equinox 2019 from: http://suncalc.net/.

The number of different feast days celebrated in connection with the Virgin Mary meant that, in his survey of dedications and church alignments, Hinton considered them together in a quite separate category. He concluded that over 84% of those dedicated to St. Mary were aligned within ±15° of due east. [5 (2006), p. 211]

However, the Nativity of the Virgin Mary is celebrated on September 8th and this might therefore be thought a likely date for a church dedicated to St Mary to have been aligned. On September 8thin 2018 in Tickhill the sun should have risen in a position 10.6º north of east.¹ So a church could have been aligned deliberately with sunrise on the nativity of the Virgin Mary today and still be categorised simply as facing east according to this classification.

An important factor influencing modern calculations about the orientation of any medieval building is what is known as ‘calendar drift’. This “progressively affected the relationship between the calendar date and the solar date in Britain until AD 1752, when the error was corrected by deducting eleven days from the calendar. The error grew steadily after the introduction of the Julian calendar in 45 BC”. In fact, the very slight inaccuracy in this calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, compared with the actual solar year (which is based on the observed equinox times) caused a gain of one day every 128 years or around three days every 400 years. Thus, “from the middle of the tenth century to the middle of the fourteenth, the period when most churches were being built, the error varied from six to nine days”. [2, p. 1] Correcting for ‘calendar drift’ for corresponding dates in the middle ages means that “sunrise on a feast-day celebrated on, say, 1 May in the twelfth century, is in the same position as sunrise on 8 May today”. [5 (2006), p. 207; 4, p. 417]

The effect of this on the position of the sunrise on the two major festivals of the Virgin Mary would be that sunrise on the Nativity of the Virgin Mary celebrated on, say, September 8th 1150, would correspond to sunrise on September 15thtoday. On the latter day in 2018 the sunrise should have been at a point approximately 6.2° north of east. If the elevated horizon effect also applied it would mean that the sun appeared to rise further south, but it would still be over 4 ̊ north of east; so, even taking both these adjustments into account cannot produce a result which would allowthe chancel of St Mary’s to be aligned with sunrise on the 8thSeptember in a year when we may assume that it was laid out some time between 1100 and 1300, because the sun is still rising some degrees north of east before the autumnal equinox. [4, p. 417]

Applying the same adjustments to sunrise on the festival of the Assumption on the 15thAugust, which in 2018 should be at a position 25.3° north of east, and adding the days for ‘calendar drift’ takes it to sunrise on the 22nd August and to 21.3° north of east, which, with the possible elevated horizon effect, becomes around 20° north of east.

Of these two likely dates, an alignment at dawn on the festival of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary is closer to the actual alignment of the building, although it is still 6° different from it and on the wrong side of true east.

The dates at the time of year in 2018 when sunrise at Tickhill was closest to true east should have been 24th and 25th September (at 0.45° north of east and 0.25° south of east respectively). Not unnaturally, this is just a day or two after the official date of the autumnal equinox. ‘Calendar drift’ would make these dates the 17th and 18th September in the twelfth century. Unfortunately, these are ten days later than the feast day celebrating the Nativity of the Virgin Mary and a month after Assumption.

Of course, the spring equinox is close to that other significant Marian festival, the Annunciation, on 25th March. At the spring equinox in 2018 sunrise at Tickhill was closest to true east on 18th and 19th March, this time a day or two before the official date of the equinox (at 0.54 south of east and 0.12 north of east respectively). Applying ‘calendar drift’ would make these dates the 11th and 12th of March, which are, this time, a fortnight before the festival of the Annunciation.

Nor can the dates of any of the other major feast days dedicated to the Virgin later in the year (i.e. Salutation on 2nd July, Presentation on November 21st, Conception on 8th December and Purification or Candlemas on February 2nd) be made to fit with this alignment towards the sunrise.

It looks therefore as though, when the site of St Mary’s chancel was being marked out, far greater importance was attached to aligning it with true east than with the position of the sunrise on any of the six festival days of the patron saint to which it was dedicated. Its orientation due east ties more closely to sunrise on one or other of the two equinoxes (officially on 22/23rdSeptember or 20/21st March in 2018) than to eitherof the two late summer festivals of the Virgin Mary.

It is possible that the spur of sandstone already mentioned, which juts out at the crossroads at the foot of Spital Hill and rises above the surrounding marshy landscape, had been a traditional indicator for the timing of the equinox since prehistoric times, perhaps marked in the ancient past by a standing stone.

Writing recently about the wide number of examples of stones positioned to mark both the summer and winter solstices in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age stone circles, G. T. Meaden suggested that “because of their intelligent positioning these and other select stones take part in the annual round. In all, an eight-part calendar of the full year is represented, devised by the shrewdness and ingenuity of the astronomer-priests”. [6, p. 3]

Since prehistory the east has been connected with light, the good and life. During the Christian era, as well as the coming of dawn light after night’s darkness, symbolic connections with the direction in which “God . . . ascended up to the heaven of heavens and of the ancient situation of paradise” were mentioned in an early fourth century text, which also laid down “let the building be long, with its head towards the east”.²Associations for the western church with the general direction of the Holy Land and the expected source of Christ’s Second Coming can still be observed in the direction of burials in today’s graveyards, where the dead are laid to rest ‘that they may face the rising sun’. And, although in many early Italian churches the altar was placed at the west end so that the priest faced eastwards, in this country churches were orientated towards the east from the Saxon period onwards. This is certainly the case with the pre-Conquest church of All Hallows in Tickhill.

It seems that the same is also true of St Mary’s.[1 (1995), p. 10 3; 3, p. 77]

Bibliography & References

1. T. W. Beastall, Portrait of an English Parish Church: the Blessed Virgin Mary Tickhill, Yorkshire, 1987, and Tickhill, Portrait of an English Country Town, Waterdale Press, 1995

2. Cheney & Jones, A Handbook of Dates for Students of British History, Cambridge, 2000

3. G.H. Cook, The English Medieval Parish Church, Dent, 1954

4. Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Ephemeris and The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, page 417, HMSO, 1961 (available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ElectronPdf&page=File%3ATable+of+equivalent+dates+in+the+Julian+and+Gregorian+calendars.JPG&action=show-download-screen (accessed 06/08/18))

5. Ian Hinton, “Do Chancels Weep?”, Church Archaeology, Volume 5-6, 2004 pp. 42-54; and “Church Alignment and Patronal Saint’s Days”, in The Antiquaries Journal, 86, 2006, pp 206–26

6. G. Terence Meaden, “Advances in understanding megaliths and related prehistoric lithic monuments”, in Journal of Lithic Studies (2017) vol. 4, nr. 4, p. 1-4

¹ All calculations are based on information at https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/solcalc/, and on a position for St Mary’s of: Latitude 53.431257; Longitude -1.1106276 (accessed 23/07/18)

² “Constitution of the Apostles” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7, p. 421, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886 at: https://lf-oll.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/1974/1333.07_Bk.pdf (accessed 13/08/18)

³Referring to the limited excavation carried out in 1988; also at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1016947 (accessed 14/08/18)