All images and text are Copyright 2003 Terry Faull.

There was opposition to well worship from the early church led from Rome and which was established in England following Augustine’s mission. In AD 963 during the reign of Edgar, the clergy were enjoined to be diligent in extinguishing heathenism by withdrawing people from the worship of fountains and in AD1018 there was a further prohibition on the worship of rivers and fountains. However the devotion of people to their traditions proved to be impossible to extinguish and so the church moved from banning the veneration of holy wells and instead brought it under its authority. In 1102 it was decreed that any reverence to a fountain could only be given by the authority of a bishop and from that time onwards the sanctity of holy wells was very much the business of the church authorities. A further example of the continuation of this central control may be see in the 12^th and 13^th centuries when a number of Devon church dedications seemed to have lost their link with their Celtic founders and been replaced by more main stream patrons (the folklorist Sabine Baring -Gould even claims that the 14^th century Bishop Grandisson of Exeter was still positively anti-Celtic and took every opportunity of renaming churches away from original links with their Celtic founders).