Local parish churches were the most ubiquitous permanent structures of the English Middle Ages, but they are now the most poorly understood. Previous scholarly engagement with the topic has largely privileged formal over social concerns, and has perpetuated the assumption that medieval parochial architecture simply derived from that of larger, more important churches. My dissertation, “Civil Service: English Parochial Architecture, 1150-1300,” aims to challenge this assumption by proposing the parish church as a distinct genre, examining its emergence and codification in response to the changing needs of the medieval laity. This project, which arises from a survey of hundreds of buildings across Britain, rejects a disciplinary emphasis on royalty and prelates in order to read the traces of daily lay life in the fabric of local church buildings. It argues that the changes it identifies in the architectural typology of the period were driven by social, economic, and spiritual factors, particularly the emergence of a new gentry class and the solidification of the doctrine of Purgatory.

Chapter 1 establishes the progression of the parish church to 1150, explaining the process that lead to the development of the parish as a discrete genre of buildings. It argues for a “parish church mode” motivated by architectural decorum. I establish set of formal characteristics that become understood as acceptable for parish churches and continue to be used throughout the parish church, regardless of how grand or lavish a building was intended to be. Chapter 2 is dedicated to new spaces built for and by lay people in parish churches, aisles and transepts; it argues that low-level members of the local gentry used their patronage of parish churches to establish themselves socially. A discussion of purgatory and the parish church shows how the nascent doctrine of purgatory which was being solidified in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries impacted parish church design, expansion, and ritual. In Chapter 3, I respond to the persistent claim that parish churches are imitations of friary churches by looking closely at the chronology of the friars’ first decades in England and the distinctions between these buildings and parishes.

Most medieval laypeople left little evidence of their lives. Few of their homes survive, and only a small percentage of their names can ever be gleaned from written sources. Archaeology has shed some light on the average medieval lifecycle, but without documentation, the society of the non-elite remains largely a mystery. I employ a focus on “total history” inspired by the Annales School, and draw from theories of space and the everyday to centralize the laity in the dynamic space of the parish church. My dissertation interrogates architecture for insight into the daily pulse of an English village during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and considers the parish church as both the backdrop for and end result of contemporary social and religious paradigm shifts.

At the close of the eleventh century, Ávila emerged as a strategic Christian city on the arid Castilian Meseta as part of the centuries-long struggle for control of the Iberian Peninsula. Along with other nearby polities, Alfonso VI granted Ávila the privileged status of founded city as part of the program of frontier settlement (repoblación). This period of urban development, which spanned the end of the eleventh century to the end of the thirteenth, witnessed a construction and population boom responsible for the erection of over two dozen parish churches, a small handful of monasteries or convents, a fortified cathedral, city walls, bishop’s palace, alcazar, and number of mosques and synagogues that no longer survive. Despite Ávila’s exceptionally preserved medieval architectural landscape, studies on medieval Castile tend to privilege documentary sources at the expense of art-historical evidence. Moreover, Ávila’s existing architectural scholarship primarily focuses on stylistic analysis and construction history, overlooking the unusual distribution and utilization of local stone, and to a lesser extent, brick, across Ávila’s medieval monumental landscape—a scholarly lacuna I correct in this dissertation. This dissertation takes a novel approach to the medieval city’s art history, one that engages with the materials of each of the city’s surviving monuments to argue that material was used as an expression of status, social division, as well as solidarity for Ávila’s Christian society. The city walls, cathedral, and urban churches all prioritize different local building materials in construction—a topic as yet unstudied in the scholarly literature— which I argue symbolized the structures of authority responsible for their building. That is, spolia in the city walls conveyed ancient glories for the emerging city’s nascent lay government, the concejo; piedra sangrante, or “bleeding stone,” in the cathedral’s sanctuary bolstered episcopal status through associations to Christ and wartime victories; the pragmatic employment of combining piedra caleña and grey granites in the city’s parish churches paralleled the solidarity of the city’s parish-militia organization; and brick was used in a single parish church outlier to affirm the parishioners place of origin. Looking beyond traditional studies of Ávila as a “frontier city,” my project instead analyzes urban social boundaries through a material lens.