Peter Wade-Martins has visited all 649 of Norfolk’s surviving medieval churches to study the stone types used in their construction. As a result, he has identified the use of conglomerate, grey quartzite, millstone grit, and tile, much of it reused from ruinous Roman buildings.
There were few stone churches in that region of England until 1020. The Norman Conquest marks a watershed in the preference for stone for church-building rather than wood. Timber traditions did continue, but the 70-year period from 1070 to 1140 witnessed the phenomenon that has been termed the ‘Great Rebuilding’, when Norman rulers consolidated their power and almost every church, monastery, and cathedral in England was reconstructed in stone.
Below are some examples of some of those earliest stone churches.
You can read the original article at the-past.com
Extremely charming early medieval churches!