We hypothesized that the important early second millennium churches in England may have been aligned using a magnetic compass. If true, the building orientations would enable the post sixteenthcentury geomagnetic observatory records to be extended back several hundred years. Directional data were collected from 143 sites, most of which were constructed between the mid-eleventh and late twelfth centuries, including all of the old English cathedrals and many large church buildings in use today, as well as numerous ruined monastic sites. However, processing the data revealed that the compass was not used to align the buildings. Attempting to explain the data, we exhumed Wordsworth's suggestion that church orientation was governed by the sun's position as it rose above the horizon on the feast day of the saint to whom the church was dedicated. The data obtained in the present study suggest that Wordsworth's basic hypothesis might hold for as many as 43 per cent of the churches if sunrise and sunset positions are considered; sun-based Easter Day and equinoctial day orientations could explain a significant majority of the remaining sites. SUNRISE ORIENTATIONSThe late first and early second millennium churches of north-west Europe are some of the largest and most spectacular constructions man has conceived and erected. An element common to these churches is that they were built in a cruciform shape along an east-west axis so that the congregation faced in the direction of the rising sun. 1 Is there a fundamental control that governed this orientation? This is a question upon which there has been speculation over the last two hundred years but the data collected so far and the conclusions reached have not been definitive. Perhaps the best known statement of early-nineteenthcentury assumptions regarding church orientation was that expressed by the poet William Wordsworth in 1822. In the introductory comments to his Miscellaneous Poem XIII he observed that, Our churches, invariably perhaps, stand east and west, but why is by few persons exactly known; nor that the degree of deviation from due east often noticeable in the ancient ones was determined, in each particular case, by the point in the horizon at which the sun rose upon the day of the saint to whom the church was dedicated. 2 This hypothesis was expanded upon in the text of the poem:Then, to her Patron Saint a previous rite Resounded with deep swell and solemn close, Through unremitting vigils of the night, Till from his couch the wished-for Sun uprose.

This article presents the results of an investigation carried out to determine the orientation of seventeen churches and one church plan that are directly or indirectly associated with the 1711 and 1712 Acts for Building Fifty New Churches (for London). The buildings represent an important episode in the history of western ecclesiastical architecture, the visible manifestation of a Tory government-High Church plan to rekindle a "purer form of Christianity" based on the "primitive churches" of the Near East. Our data indicate that few, if any, of the buildings were aligned using the rising or setting sun on important Christian feast days, the method adopted by many of the medieval church builders. Whether this break with tradition was deliberate or not is a matter for conjecture. Nicholas Hawksmoor seemed particularly keen on getting a "correct" alignment and did so for three of his six sole-author buildings. In fact, we suggest that two of Hawksmoor's churches at St. Anne Limehouse and Christchurch Spitalfields, and James Gibbs's St. Martin-in-the-Fields, were so accurately aligned that the only feasible technique for achieving this was through the use of declination-corrected compasses. We speculate that the scientist Edmond Halley provided information and logistical assistance to Hawksmoor.

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