Bill East wrote:
>
> there's usually no obvious logical reason why this one should be St Mary's, and that one St
> Luke's.
> >
> >If the church possessed a relic of the saint, that would surely be a reason. And would not the
> church be aligned on the saint? i.e. If it were dedicated to St Luke, it would be oriented on the
> line on which the sun rose on 18th October.
> Apparently churches were re-aligned to mark a change in dedication.
> As regards a dedication to All Saints, possibly the patron had purchased a bargain bag of
> assorted relics, very cheap?
Or perhaps they'd realised what the precession of the equinoxes was
going to do
to the church's dedication? Is there a negative correlation between the
number
of All Saint's churches and the belief in millenialism? (After all, if
the
world's about to end, it doesn't matter, but if the church will still
be there
in a couple of thousand years...)
On a more serious note, how many churches were dedicated because of
their
relics? I thought that there were plenty of St X's which didn't
necessarily
posess a bit of St X's thigh-bone
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