BUILDINGS ARE ENCOUNTERED in a number of ways, principally (and most affectingly) by first-hand experience but also through their translation into words and pictures. Historically contextualising our understanding of them requires all three types of encounter, which shift and interact in constant dialogue. Conversations about porches revolve around the use, translation and transmission of a single Latin word: porticus. In Old English this becomes portic, referring to a ‘porch, portico; enclosed place; place roofed in; arch recess in a church.’ In modern English a porch is either ‘an exterior structure forming a covered approach to the entrance of a building’ or, less commonly, ‘an interior space serving as a vestibule or hallway’. The interiority of the latter evokes something of the Anglo- Saxon portic. Words have their meaning through shared recognition of their cultural application, people who use them aim to be understood by their listener or reader; the agreement of both parties is implicit. Exploring the historic use of the vocabulary of buildings, combined with analysis of their structural form, provides a ‘back-story’ for the late medieval church porch. As we will see, although neither porticus nor porches maintained a single architectural form, the social conventions and meanings identifiable within them allow for a unified and coherent class of building. Taking this longer view of the English porticus reveals significances which were largely concealed by mid-sixteenth-century liturgical and sacramental changes.

The Anglo-Saxon Porticus

Bede, living at the Benedictine monastery at Jarrow in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, is not renowned as an architectural historian, but in recording the location of high status burials at SS Peter and Paul Canterbury, his Latin text includes a valuable account of the Anglo-Saxon porticus. The Northumbrian monk-chronicler's record reveals that the porch was an internal space providing for elite and precious corporeal interments. According to Bede, in the year 604, ‘the beloved of God, Father Augustine, died, and his body was deposited without, close by the church of the apostles, Peter and Paul … by reason that the same was not yet finished, nor consecrated, but as soon as it was dedicated, the body was brought in, and decently buried in the north porch (portico) thereof.’