St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church
What is an Altar?
The altar is a very symbolic item and represents the tomb of Christ or the table at the last supper (Eucharist table).
The altar is the most important item in the church. In medieval churches it was usually in the form of an ornate stone slab. Altars were considered sacred, and were subject to a consecration ritual to deem them sacred. This ritual involved various acts, including the anointing of the altar and other surfaces with holy oil, and the placing on the altar stone of five consecration crosses. The crosses represent the Five Wounds of Christ, a significant symbol in Christian faith.
How old is Gosberton’s stone altar, and why is it relegated to a side wall?
The altar stone is medieval – we can’t pin down even a rough date as to when it was installed in the church, but it must have been by the early 1500s at the very latest. After the Reformation in the mid-1500s, idolatry in churches was frowned upon, and thus many stone altars were removed and broken up. They were usually replaced by a wooden communion table which could then be brought from the east end of the chancel closer to the nave. Gosberton’s stone altar suffered this fate.
For around 250 years, the fate of the altar stone was lost to time. Then, in June 1895, Walter Jenkinson Kaye, a schoolmaster at Gosberton Hall school, and a keen historian, found it serving as a flag-stone at the West end of the church. He had noticed that the stone bore two inscribed crosses, and realised that this was a fragment of a larger pre-Reformation altar-stone, which would have borne the standard five crosses. As Kaye states in his book, ‘A Brief History of the Church and Parish of Gosberton,’ (1897):
“Considered Popish in Puritan days, this stone had been broken in two and one part placed in the floor where it would suffer the greatest possible indignity, to be trampled under foot.”
The slab was repositioned against the north wall of the chancel, to serve as a Credence Table (a small side table in the sanctuary of a Christian church which is used in the celebration of the Eucharist).
The whereabouts of the other half of the altar stone is unknown.
