A palisade church is a

church building A church, church building or church house is a building used for Christian worship services and other Christian religious activities. The earliest identified Christian church is a house church founded between 233 and 256. From the 11th thro ...

that is constructed with palisade walls, standing split logs of timber, rammed into the ground, set in gravel or resting on a sill. The palisade walls form an integral part of the load-bearing system.

Construction

This type of construction is often believed to predate a construction method with posts set directly into the earth, sometimes called a

post church Post church (Norwegian: ''stolpekirke'') is a term for a church building which predates the stave churches and differ in that the corner posts do not reside on a sill but instead have posts dug into the earth. Posts are the vertical, roof-bearin ...

, and the later stave construction method, or

stave church A stave church is a medieval wooden Christian church building once common in north-western Europe. The name derives from the building's structure of post and lintel construction, a type of timber framing where the load-bearing ore-pine posts a ...

. A palisade church often had its walls set fully or partly in

gravel Gravel is a loose aggregation of rock fragments. Gravel occurs naturally throughout the world as a result of sedimentary and erosive geologic processes; it is also produced in large quantities commercially as crushed stone. Gravel is classifi ...

and therefore they can be detected in archaeological surveys. Sometimes a new church was built around an existing one, and remnants of the old church can be found under the floor. The palisade church construction itself consisted, in its simplest form, of posts set closely together into a trench in the earth, with the roof resting directly on top of the logs. Later the logs were split in two halves, with the flat side facing into the enclosed room. The edges could be straight, or tongued and grooved. To prevent rapid deterioration, the logs or ''stave-planks'' were charred at the lower end and impregnated with pine-tar. The rows of stave-planks also rested in a ditch of gravel. Nevertheless, they were still susceptible to damp and eventually deteriorated. For a long time it was assumed that this style of church building had disappeared before the year 1000, yet later research has shown it to be quite common as late as the 13th century. No such church exists in

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...

, nor is there found any remnants of any such church, even though most of the stave churches in existence today are located in Norway. Only one palisade church is known to survive:

Greensted Church Greensted Church, in the small village of Greensted, near Chipping Ongar in Essex, England, has been claimed to be the oldest wooden church in the world, and probably the oldest wooden building in Europe still standing, albeit only in part, since ...

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and G ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, which still has its massive palisade walls. Although much debated, it is often classified as the remnants of a palisade church or, more loosely, as a stave church. For a long time this church was assumed to be the world's oldest wooden church, as a dendrochronological dating estimated its construction to 845 CE. A later analysis has reset the date of the timbers to 1053 CE (+10/55 years).British Archaeology, no 10, December 1995: News
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References

Literature * Christie, Håkon, 'Middelalderen bygger i tre' ('The Middle Ages build in wood'), Oslo 1974 {{ISBN, 82-00-01395-2 Scandinavian culture Types of church buildings

Construction

See also

References