51
Dr. Rudge's Theory of Saxon Church
Naves - A Rejoinder
BY LAURENCE S. HARLEY
I AM grateful to Dr. Rudge for his references to my brief paper in the Essex
Naturalist for 1951, and for his adulatory remarks thereon. His tabulation
of all Essex Churches (and some in other counties) having this strange length
to width ratio of the square-root of three is most valuable, and far more
extensive than my own modest list. It has enabled me to do a statistical
analysis and to prepare what statisticians call a 'histogram,' showing the
relative frequencies of occurrence of the different ratios stated by Dr. Rudge.
If you examine the groups near the middle of the annexed diagram you will
see that whilst the most frequent ratios (median) lie between 1.70 and 1.74,
there are two other peaks nearby which are nearly as frequent, namely, 1.6-1.64
and 1.8-1.84. The statistical significance of a distribution like this is that there
are present not one but three species of church-nave ratio. I must conclude
from this as follows:
Most of the Saxon masons used their setting-out lines (whether obtained by
my simple 'cord' method, or some variant of it, or by Dr. Rudge's astronomical
—ritual method is not relevant in this context) as the inner edges of their
foundation trenches. Nearly as many used them as the outer edges, while almost
as many again dug wide trenches outside the lines, with the visible walls above
ground standing out from the setting-out lines by the width of the now-
invisible 'offsets' in the foundations underground.