ABSTRACT
Within a generation or so of the conversion to Christianity, each Anglo-Saxon kingdom was divided into large parishes (parochiae) administered by a minster church. These minsters (from the Latin monasterium) were instigated by episcopal or royal initiative, and their siting was frequently coincident with royal vills. These early minsters of the seventh to eighth centuries housed communities of priests or monks who lived a collegiate or monastic lifestyle and had pastoral responsibility for the inhabitants of the parochia (Blair 2005). Welsh churches, by contrast, were established in association with secular llys (courts); the processes behind the establishment of Scottish churches are less well known, but it is likely that bishops or laypeople founded mother-churches that had authority over local chapels. Between the tenth to twelfth centuries, these high-ranking churches were supplemented by the proliferation of private, or proprietary, churches, with a resident priest who served a local community. The emergence of the local church developed alongside the reorganization of settlement patterns that took place between the ninth and twelfth centuries, when large estates fragmented into smaller, selfcontained local manors, and the development of the medieval village provided the social impetus for the local community church. These local churches, the ancestors of parish churches, did not immediately have full rights, such as baptism or burial. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the parochiae of the mother-churches across Britain were broken down into smaller territories of individual parishes, giving rise to the parochial system of the Middle Ages.
