Dedications of Essex churches to St Peter: a glacial hypothesis

This paper advances a hypothesis which suggests that there is a concentration of dedications to St Peter among Essex churches which corresponds to the edge of the ice sheet during the Anglian glaciation 450,000 years ago. 

The hypothesis and its two assumptions There is a twofold connection between these apparently disparate facts. The first is the assumption that many early churches were established on pre-Christian sacred sites, and that dedications to appropriate saints were used to ease people accustomed to older forms of worship into the new faith. The second connection is the episode in the New Testament (Matthew 16:18) in which Jesus recruited Simon as his first disciple, renaming him "Peter" (rock): "thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it".^[1] My hypothesis depends upon the fusion of these two elements: that saints' names were used to Christianise heathen places of worship, and that some of these had been located to venerate rocks, known as erratics, that had been deposited by the ice sheets of the Anglian Ice Age.^[2] The combination of early-Christian marketing techniques and glacial debris dumped almost half a million years ago pointed to dedications that invoked St Peter to provide pious continuity for sacred sites.

A word may be useful in defence of my use of the term 'hypothesis'. In popular usage, it can mean 'wild guess lacking supporting evidence'. I hope it is not so employed here. I regard a hypothesis as a possible explanation which is sufficiently plausible to merit discussion, but which may be countered by critical arguments that render it unproven or even compel its rejection. In that spirit, I consider also limiting factors and obstacles that tend to undermine my Ice Age interpretation.

The list of church dedications I have used a list of Essex church dedications compiled by a local history enthusiast called Jim Kimmis, which first appeared in 1981 in association with an ephemeral publication called Essex Landscape Mysteries.^[3] Kimmis experimented with theories about ley lines (the "old straight track" school of thought that believed in ancient road networks) and sought underlying interconnections in possible derivations from Indo-European. His papers appeared in magazines with titles such as Journal of Geomancy and Ancient Mysteries.   His last piece of research, published after his death in 2006, traced the Neolithic origins of the concept of genius loci ('sense of place'), which he sought to locate "within a cultural tradition which is domestic, intimate, chthonic and genealogical". It appeared in a publication called Northern Earth, which combines interests "in archaeology, folklore, antiquarianism, phenomenology and psychogeography".  Clearly, there would be reason for caution in relying upon Kimmis as a guide and interpreter, but we can be grateful for the commitment that produced the list of Essex church dedications. He also commented on local patterns among them, for instance pointing out that churches honouring St Mary the Virgin (with 107 examples, about one-quarter of the total number in the county) were particularly concentrated in a defined area on the west side of Essex. 

Church dedications: problems and possibilities  Mellitus, the first bishop of London, arrived in England in 601 with instructions from the Pope to take over existing shrines, destroy any idols and purify them to become churches. This is an important shred of evidence but it is not without its problems. Mellitus was sent from Rome to join St Augustine, who – so the well-established legend has it – had begun the conversion of England four years earlier. Christianity was a new religion to most Anglo-Saxons, but it had been practised in Roman Britain at least three centuries earlier, and it had taken root beyond the borders of the Empire in Ireland, whence it spread to southern Scotland and later to Northumbria. Although it probably lost ground when the legions withdrew around the year 410, there was a functioning church in Canterbury when Augustine arrived in the capital of the kingdom of Kent in 597. Augustine made some progress, but Mellitus faced a tougher challenge among the East Saxons. By 604, he had a headquarters in London, the original St Paul's cathedral, and he was consecrated as the city's first bishop. However, it seems unlikely that he made much headway in winning over the people and, in 616, he was driven out altogether.  If he established any churches, it is likely that they reverted to pre-Christian rituals for the next forty years. When the gospel did come to Essex, it arrived from the north, introduced by a Northumbrian missionary, Cedd, in 654. Cedd made the East Saxon kingdom officially Christian but how deeply the people had adopted their new faith may be questioned. His mission lasted for just a decade and, although he assembled an evangelical team, he himself frequently visited Northumbria and seems to have spent the last year of his life in retirement in Yorkshire, where he died of plague in 664. The epidemic also hit the East Saxons, who concluded that it was a sign of displeasure from the gods they had forsaken. According to Bede, England's first historian, they "began to restore the temples that had been abandoned, and to adore idols, as if they might by those means be protected against the plague". Another bishop was sent from Northumbria who successfully stemmed the tide of apostasy: soon "forsaking or destroying the temples and altars which they had erected, they opened the churches, and gladly confessed the Name of Christ". The phraseology suggests that Cedd had preferred to bypass existing sacred sites and erect wholly new churches but, writing a century later at the other end of England, Bede may not have known what had happened on the ground.^[4] If dedications to saints formed part of the inculcation of the new set of beliefs, they did not include Cedd, who – like most Christian pioneers in those times – was canonised by consensus among the faithful. He would not be so commemorated in Essex until the mid-twentieth century.^[5]

There is one fundamental problem about the theory that dedications to saints were used to ease the people of Essex from one set of beliefs to another: we simply know very little about their religion before they were converted. The idea that the Anglo-Saxons were persuaded that the gods they had previously venerated were in fact Christian saints would be more persuasive if we had detailed knowledge about the gods who were displaced. Unfortunately, the victorious missionaries had no interest in perpetuating the beliefs that they aimed to extirpate. (One possible connection between old and new, at Thundersley, is noted below.) There is some evidence from Essex place-names that Thunor (the Norse Thor) and Woden were associated with particular localities, but there were other deities whose memories were totally effaced by the priests of the new religion. Eostre is assumed to be a fertility goddess associated with a spring festival: she was evidently sufficiently popular for English Christianity to adapt and adopt her name for its own central celebration of the Resurrection, but there the trail virtually ends.^[6] The East Saxon kings – another shadowy element in the story – were said to have claimed descent from a god called Seaxnet but, again, we know nothing of their divine progenitor, who has left no trace in place-names.^[7]

The lack of specific information has long been compounded by an overall conceptual barrier. Because the pre-Christian belief structure in England was "impenetrably vague",^[8] historians have referred to it by such terms as "heathenism". This classification implicitly treats the old religion as a kind of mirror image of its supplanter, as if there were heathen bishops and vicars, pagan prayers and scriptures. In reality, we have no idea whether the Anglo-Saxons conceptualised their practices as a specific faith, giving it a name and endowing it with a set of fundamental dogmas. Although, as noted, place-name evidence indicates that Thunor and (probably) Woden were venerated, there is no reason to assume that every sacred place was dedicated to an established deity. Three Essex place-names suggest association with spirits, entities that we can only translate by such dismissive terms as 'goblins' or 'sprites'. But these may have been allusions to local gods about whom there were legends and who merited highly specific rituals of worship. In the absence of any knowledge about such divinities, we can hardly link them to the veneration of particular Christian saints.

To add to the vague complexity of the subject, I advance here a loosely linked line of thought. We have no idea whether there were any twin gods among the Anglo-Saxon deities. Greek and Roman mythology included the Dioscuri / Gemini, best known as the brothers Castor and Pollux, although they were worshipped under other names. There were parallels in Hindu tradition, and an analogue pair called the Alcis mentioned by the Roman historian Tacitus as venerated by Germanic tribes.^[9] Norse mythology is generally close to what we know of Anglo-Saxon beliefs (e.g. Woden / Odin; Thunor / Thor), but in Scandinavia the twins Freyr and Freyja were brother and sister. The point is potentially relevant here, for the existence of twin gods in the Anglo-Saxon pantheon could explain the widespread use of the joint dedication of churches to St Peter and St Paul. We are so used to the Peter / Paul pairing that it may come as a surprise to realise that the two evangelists had little contact, probably never worked together and certainly represented alternative – indeed, opposed – approaches to the development of Christianity. Peter was a contemporary witness to the Resurrection; for Paul, it was a seismic experience of spiritual renewal. Before moving –  according to tradition –  to Rome, Peter was a prominent figure in the Jerusalem Church, which almost certainly sought to capture and remodel its traditional base, Judaism; Paul was the brilliant marketing person who aimed to disseminate a new religion throughout the Greek and Roman world.

Since their roles in the formative history of Christianity were so different, it seems curious that they should have become perhaps the most enduring double act among church dedications. However, this apparently discordant partnership would be less of a problem if they had been used to supplant heathen twin deities. Castor and Pollux, treated here as a plausible analogy, were by no means identical: the first brother was confusingly human, the second divine, and – even more mysterious – they had different fathers. (They dealt with these problems by turning themselves into stars.) If (the conjunction must be italicised) the Anglo-Saxons practised some similar cult, it would have made sense for missionaries to offer as substitutes the veneration (and protection) of two major Christian pioneers who embodied contrasting themes in Church history. This, in turn, would mean that there is no need for a single hypothesis that would account for both the veneration of St Peter alone and also joint dedications to Peter / Paul. But here the pitfalls of speculation must be faced. The argument begins by implying that the Anglo-Saxons ought to have worshipped twin gods (if only because other faiths seem to have done), before moving on to assume that these deities might both have been male (which was not so in culturally similar Scandinavia) and finally suggesting that they could have been replaced by St Peter / Paul. The approach may be pleaded as creative, but it undoubtedly lacks any real evidential base.^[10]

There are other problems in the speculative elucidation of church dedications. By the end of the Middle Ages, Essex had over four hundred churches. To have created a network of this size, St Cedd and his team would have needed to consecrate a new building every eight days: difficulty of travel alone would have rendered this impossible. Some churches were probably founded in later Anglo-Saxon centuries; many more were constructed by the Normans as private chapels, functioning as tithe collecting points or simply to place their conquering boot prints on the landscape. In a few instances, there is evidence that a church dates back to earliest times; in others, proximity to a manor house and remoteness from a village may constitute the tell-tale indication of an invader building his personal stairway to salvation. Unfortunately, in many – maybe most – cases, we cannot be sure when locations that later generations called "God's acre" were first identified for religious use, let alone which deities they initially honoured.^[11]

In 1768, the Essex historian Philip Morant published an account of the ceremony of the Wardstaff, derived from a manuscript written in 1543 but obviously based on a much older source. The Wardstaff was a structured annual ritual which in effect served as a militia muster, with men from a succession of villages in Ongar Hundred spending a night at specified locations, each group handing on a strip of willow to their neighbours as a symbol of authority. By the end of the Middle Ages, Ongar Hundred comprised 26 parishes, but the Wardstaff stopped at only ten locations. Hundreds seem to have been created in the tenth century – Ongar Hundred, for instance, includes three of the eight villages of the Rodings, which are believed to have formed a single unit in early in early Anglo-Saxon times – so the account of the Wardstaff ceremony may be dated to the hundred years or so before the battle of Hastings. It is easy enough to explain in general terms how ten communities became 26 parishes: the Norman conquerors constructed proprietary chapels on their estates, which in due course became the focus of separate parishes. In some cases, we may reasonably identify the original church whose territory was carved out of a larger unit: tiny Chipping Ongar almost certainly split off from High Ongar. However, in Ongar Hundred, there are three Theydon parishes, three Lavers and two Staplefords, and it is impossible to say which was the original place of worship in each case. Some Essex churches undoubtedly belong to the first wave of Christian temples that were sanctified to blow away the cobwebs of heathen times, but it is not easy to say which ones.

It is important to remember that, in Catholic times, churches were dedicated to saints to ensure that patrons and parishioners had lobbyists in Heaven. (This explains, for instance, why there are only nine Holy Trinity churches in the county: the Trinity was part of the central mystery of Christianity, but it was harder to see how it might deliver specific favours.) Hence it is not surprising that one quarter of Essex churches (107 in total) honoured St Mary the Virgin who, as the mother of Jesus, was regarded as exceptionally well-placed to secure divine benefits. This emphasis was unlikely to reflect an echo of the Anglo-Saxon female deity, Frig (remembered in Friday), who – if place-names are our guide – does not seem to have been much regarded in Essex. Nonetheless, it is useful to bear in mind the concentration noted by Kimmis, that dedications to St Mary are clustered in the west of the county. We should also bear in mind that Saxon kings and Norman barons would have had their own special protectors, and probably chose to honour them in churches under their control.

The second largest category, All Saints (52 churches, one-eighth of the total), obviously reflected an earthly desire to hedge heavenly bets: surely somebody in the celestial chorus would respond to the entreaties of prayer? Kimmis offered an interesting suggestion here. All Saints' Day, on 1 November was celebrated as a connection between the living and the dead: even now, in Ireland it is customary to visit family graves at that time. Kimmis linked this to the Celtic festival of Samhain, which began at sunset on 31 October, the origin of the modern commercialised nuisance called Halloween. Noting that there is a concentration of All Saints' churches in the Blackwater valley in mid-Essex, with a small cluster in the north-west of the county, he wondered whether the dedication was chosen to appeal to the Celtic populations who are assumed to have remained in Essex as new settlers flowed in around them. Although he did not spell out the connections, Kimmis was presumably aware of the place-name evidence that indicated the persistence of a Celtic-speaking population in the valley of the Blackwater, a river that retained its older name, Pant, cognate with the Welsh word for a valley. [Saffron] Walden, in the north-west, probably means "valley of the Britons" although, given that the Celtic population probably became second-class citizens, it might also mean "valley of the serfs". Further plausibility is also lent to the Kimmis suggestion by the fact that there is an All Saints' church at Dovercourt, one of the few Essex place-names to incorporate a Celtic element (related to the Welsh "dwfr", meaning water), and at East Hanningfield, where a Pan Farm also preserved the Celtic word for a valley.^[12] However, the theory is undermined by the complication that Celtic people were not unique in holding an early November festival. In a rare attempt to preserve pre-Christian traditions, Bede listed the months of the Old English calendar. The year had begun on 25 December, which meant that the months were about a week out of kilter with the Roman year. Hence the eleventh month included the last few days of October plus most of November. Named Blotmonath, the month of sacrifice, it was a time when farmers slaughtered livestock that they could not feed through the winter months, a phase in the rhythm of the year that was apparently used to propitiate the gods. If the sacrifices were indeed made to the whole pantheon of heathen deities, then the East Saxons would have found the transfer of allegiance to the company of saints as satisfactory as their Celtic neighbours.

St Clement and St Mary Magdalene It is suggested here that there may be particular explanations for some of the less frequent dedications. For instance, St Clement was only honoured twice in Essex, at Leigh-on-Sea on the Thames estuary, and upriver at West Thurrock, where the estuary of a small stream, the Mardyke, widens into a sheltered anchorage called Purfleet. St Clement was the patron saint of mariners, and these unusual dedications tend to confirm that both communities were home to seafarers at a very early time. One of the eight Essex dedications to St Mary Magdalene, perhaps the major mystery about the church at North Ockendon is why it should be there at all. The parish has never been home to many people, and it would be easy to assume that St Mary Magdalene originated in Norman times as a proprietary chapel alongside North Ockendon Hall. However, it existed in 1075, when property was acquired by Westminster Abbey, and had probably been a sacred spot for centuries earlier. The manorial charter that acted as the Abbey's title deed included "the church in which the examination of the judgement of fire and water is held by ancient custom".^[13]  This refers to various forms of trial by ordeal, and certainly suggests that the church site had been sacred place before Christianity had arrived in Essex. The explanation may lie in a feature in the churchyard that is often overlooked, "a well that gushes out cool and clear water". In 1951, a local historian recorded a tradition that it was "one of the baptisteries established by Saint Cedd when he came to Essex to reconvert the East Saxons". We need not take this tale too seriously, as it could well be a modern invention, but its very ingenuity perhaps suggests an inherited sense that this apparently unvarying water supply had some spiritual connotation. A more curious tradition claimed that the spring "originates in Kent and travels under the Thames to gush forth in Essex".^[14]

It is possible that this strange illusion represented a secular translation of an older belief that the North Ockendon spring represented a gateway between this world and a subterranean afterlife, which would explain why people wished to be buried alongside it. It is also probable that the constant supply of pure water conjured the idea of a female deity, representing fertility. Hence, it seems likely that it is the churchyard spring that accounts for the dedication to St Mary Magdalene. One can imagine Mellitus or St Cedd puzzling over this strange sacred spot and wondering how to squeeze it into the Christian story. One plausible solution could be found in Luke 7:37-38, the story of an unnamed woman, "a sinner", who threw herself before Jesus and washed his feet with her tears. The medieval Church identified her, very unfairly in fact, with Mary Magdalene, a handy equation that made it possible to explain to the heathen peasants of North Ockendon that they had been commemorating one of the most moving events in the New Testament without being aware of it. As late as 1102, an ecclesiastical Council that met at Westminster denounced the "unheard-of boldness" of those who venerated "springs, or other things … without permission of the bishop".^[15] At North Ockendon, it seems likely that, very early in the process of Christianising Essex, the Church had decided to operate on the principle that if you can't beat them, join them.^[16]

St Andrew and the persistence of pagan practice at Hornchurch In its name, nearby Hornchurch preserves the memory of one of the most remarkable survivals of pre-Christian belief in England. The parish church of St Andrew (one of 32 such dedications in Essex) has a representation of a bull's head on the east end of its chancel roof.^[17] Only a particularly stubborn attachment to some kind of animal cult could possibly explain the incorporation of such an obviously pagan symbol in a Christian edifice. There is documentary evidence that the bull's head decorated the building as early as 1610, and it is obvious that its horns were a prominent feature. It is also clear that they were no novelty in the early seventeenth century. In 1222, the church had been recorded as "Monasterium cornutum" (the horned minster), and it was known as "Hornedechirche" in 1291, a version streamlined into its modern form by about 1400. Indeed, it is likely that the local form of Christian belief was severely infected with some vestige of heathen worship, and twelfth-century Church reformers resorted to a drastic solution in the hope of eradicating the embarrassment.

Sometime between 1159 and 1160, a 'cell' (branch or dependency) of the Savoyard Hospice of St Bernard of Mountjoux was established in Hornchurch. The Hospice (in those days, a general term for a place of refuge) had been founded in the high Alps by St Bernard of Menthone (also called Bernard of Montjoux), after whom the Pass is named. (He is perhaps best remembered today in connection with the dogs that delivered emergency supplies of high-altitude brandy to travellers at risk from hypothermia, but these friendly creatures were not bred until the seventeenth century.) Various suggestions have been put forward to explain why Hornchurch should have become the Mountjoux Hospice's only English offshoot. These include the hope of securing the Count of Savoy as an ally against the King of France, and gratitude for the generous treatment recently given to English envoys as they journeyed through the mountains in midwinter on their way to negotiations with the Pope in Rome. But the real clue surely lies in the name 'Montjoux'. Originally named Mons Jovis, the mountain of Jupiter, the Alpine pass had been sacred to the greatest of the pagan gods of ancient Rome. The Hospice did indeed perform the worldly function of helping travellers, but far more important was its otherworldly role as Christian presence in the high country where lingering echoes of paganism were still to be eradicated: St Bernard himself was said to have destroyed the remains of a nearby temple of Jupiter. Surely this was the reason why Mountjoux was imported to Hornchurch, and this – so I argue – accounts for the dedication of the church to St Andrew.

Although Andrew was one of the Apostles – and, incidentally, the brother of St Peter – not much is known about him. However, one tradition stands out: Andrew was crucified on an X-shaped cross, at his own request, it was said, because he did not feel worthy to share exactly the same death as Jesus. The legend was widely known and believed. At the battle of Athelstaneford in 832, the Picts resisted the invasion of southern Scotland by a very large Anglo-Saxon army from Northumbria. Responding to their desperate prayers, St Andrew signalled his support by forming the white clouds into an X-shaped cross against the background of the blue sky. The Northumbrians were defeated and, to this day, the flag of Scotland, its Saltire, shows a white cross against a blue background. Andrew's relevance to the problem of Hornchurch heathenism was more mundane: his X-shaped cross was the closest symbol in the Christian repertoire to the bull's horns that were the focus of the stubborn local cult. It is important to note that the community of religious imported from the Alps – at first there were thirteen of them – were not monks but priors. They did not live in cloistered seclusion, but could go out into the world and work with ordinary people. It is now generally accepted that the brethren lived at Hornchurch Hall, across the road from the church, which was handed to their control at about the time of their arrival. There is no evidence that the property was ever provided with a chapel, which means that we may imagine these holy men processing several times a day into the church with the intention of literally prayer-bombing its heathen associations. They would no doubt have carried the familiar cross of Jesus at the head of their group, but they may well also have brought up the rear with the cross of St Andrew, to assure the people that their bull-worship had always been a disguised form of Christian veneration.

It is possible that the problem – as the Church would have seen it – of the survival of heathen practices at Hornchurch had become more challenging and required confrontation in the eleven-fifties. The reign of King Stephen, from 1135 to 1154, had been a time of civil war, which at times had created widespread misery. According to the chronicle kept at Peterborough Abbey, people "said openly, that Christ slept, and his saints". If that was true, it is possible that Hornchurch people might have decided that St Andrew was no longer offering them protection – assuming this was already the dedication of their church – and that they should revert to older forms of worship – just as the inhabitants of seventh-century Essex had turned their backs on the new religion when its advent was followed by an outbreak of plague. However, there are reasons for caution in accepting such an explanation. Historians have long suspected that the Peterborough chronicler was describing short-term disruption in the Fenland region: monkish scribes were prone to exaggeration, and indulgence in victimhood was a useful aid to fund-raising.^[18] Until the nineteenth century, Hornchurch was part of the diocese of London, where Richard de Belmeis had become bishop in 1152. He seems to have been an efficient administrator, and one of his principal officials, the Archdeacon of Essex, was a close relative – possibly, indeed, his brother. If he was doing his middle-management supervision job properly, the Archdeacon would have known about irregular practices at Hornchurch. The twelfth century in England was a time of religious reform, with an emphasis upon the establishment of monastic institutions: even in the disturbed reign of King Stephen, well over one hundred were established. It would not be surprising if the two clerics had decided that this backsliding village needed a religious community to sanctify local forms of worship – but this alone  might not explain why they chose to approach an obscure and distant Hospice in the Alps. As a young priest the bishop had journeyed to Rome, and he may well have known about the pagan-busting activities of the priors of Mountjoux. Perhaps the English ambassadors who crossed the Alps in the winter of 1158-9 were commissioned to invite their hosts to obliterate an embarrassing survival of animal worship within fifteen miles of London.^[19]

Although the Mountjoux cell suffered some setbacks, the community remained at Hornchurch for 230 years – but they never dared to remove the bull's head from the horned church. Nor did New College, Oxford, which rebuilt the chancel in the early fifteenth century.^[20]

Danes and Normans  Some of the less popular dedications were almost certainly adopted several centuries after the official conversion of the East Saxons to Christianity. In the late- ninth century, England was repeatedly subjected to violent incursions by the Danes. In 869, they murdered Edmund, king of the East Angles. Although the Danish leader Guthrum agreed to be baptised as part of a peace deal with Alfred the Great in 878, churches particularly suffered from their predations – but the churches themselves were organised on a principle that is unfamiliar to us. The religious houses that Henry VIII would sweep away were the product of a twelfth-century monastic movement; the parish structure took root in the thirteenth. In Anglo-Saxon times, Church organisation was based on minsters, district churches which were home to communities of religious who could be thought of as a cross between monks and team ministries that served subordinate local chapels. Attacks from Scandinavia resumed in 892: the Danes occupied Benfleet, Shoebury and Mersea in 894-5. Minster churches at Waltham and Mersea Island ceased to exist at some point around the time. The nuns abandoned Barking Abbey, a convent established two centuries earlier: one tradition says that they were burned alive in their church in 870. These foundations had been re-established by the time of the Norman Conquest. Waltham became an Abbey, dedicated to the Holy Cross, which had been miraculously transported there from Somerset. Mersea was re-established as a priory, while the nuns returned to Barking. Other dedications also suggest a direct legacy of the Danish trauma. East Mersea church is dedicated to St Edmund, King and Martyr: local tradition claims that the Danish armies camped on that spot.^[21] There are two other Essex dedications to St Edmund. One is at Abbess Roding, a possession of Barking Abbey from early times, and the other at Tendring, a village midway between Colchester and a small enclave of Danish settlement at the coast, still known by the Scandinavian name of the Sokens.^[22]

Echoes of Danish terror tactics may also be heard in the small number of Essex dedications to St Laurence, who is best remembered as the martyr who was roasted on a gridiron. Kimmis noted a curious concentration on the south side of the Blackwater, at Asheldham, Steeple and a village which actually bears the name, St Lawrence Newland. This cluster, opposite Mersea Island, would be consistent with a subsidiary Danish incursion. Temporary occupation of the Iron Age fortification at Asheldham which would have given control of the Dengie peninsula, thus protecting their main base on its flank. The Asheldham camp was for long regarded as Danish in origin, on the basis of axeheads and other artefacts found there, although their presence could be explained in other ways.  West Newland, part of the parish of St Lawrence, came into the possession of the priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, before the Norman Conquest. The priors were perhaps responsible for building a church here, with a dedication that may have been intended to exorcise the trauma of Danish cruelty. Place-name evidence points to two more notable early church communities, at Southminster and Upminster. The former was probably named in apposition to the church in the Roman fort at Bradwell, said to have been constructed by St Cedd (which was returned to religious use in 1920 after long use as a barn). St Peter-on-the-Wall seems to have been abandoned at an early period, and the Southminster community, possibly an offshoot of Cedd's original missionary endeavour, may have come to an end at the same time. However, the manor of Upminster Hall formed part of the endowment which Earl Harold bestowed upon Waltham Abbey in 1062, suggesting that the property had an earlier religious association, a tradition reinforced by a nineteenth-century report that skeletons had sometimes been found buried nearby.^[23] The parish church at Upminster is dedicated to St Laurence. Perhaps most remarkable is the case of Waltham Abbey. Its association with the crucifixion story was so overwhelming that the adjoining Hertfordshire town still bears the name Waltham Holy Cross. Part of the monks' church was taken over the parish of Waltham Abbey at the Dissolution: it is dedicated to the Holy Cross and St Lawrence (Waltham uses the –w– spelling). Since it is difficult to see why an extra saint would have been tacked on to a major brand-image identification, it seems likely that the veneration of St Laurence predated the eleventh-century refoundation. The nuns of Barking remained faithful to the veneration of their founding saint, Ethelburga. However, when they established a Hospital (hospice / refuge) for women in the town of Barking, it was dedicated to St Laurence and not, as might have been expected, to some more obviously appropriate female saint.^[24] It is argued here that each of these dedications to the gridiron martyr – in Dengie and at Upminster and Waltham – preserved the memory of death by fire during Danish terror raids.

There can be little doubt that the Normans considerably increased the number of churches in Essex, building proprietary (i.e. private) chapels which probably originally doubled as tithe-collecting points. In many places – especially parishes with 'Little' in their title – a parish church standing next to a manorial Hall with no adjacent village points to a Norman intruder taking control of the destiny of his soul. Naturally, the patron would choose to associate the place of worship with whatever saint he hoped would protect him. This added some new names to Essex hagiography. At Chipping Ongar, the parish church is dedicated to St Martin, the warrior saint who took the place of Mars, the Roman god of war. It stands immediately alongside the Castle mound, and was almost certainly a garrison chapel.^[25] At Mountnessing, between Brentwood and Billericay, the church nestles alongside the ancient hall, defiantly remote from population. The place name means 'Mountney's Ing', indicating a slice of an ancient district, and we may deduce that some member of the baronial clan had a soft spot for St Giles, who does not make many appearances in Essex. Willingale has the distinction of being the only village in the county to have two churches sharing the same churchyard. They owe their names, Willingale Spain and Willingale Doe, to Norman adventurers: Hugh D'Eu owned property here in the mid-twelfth century. If he was indeed journeying between his Essex estate and the town of Eu in Normandy, we may sympathise with his decision to dedicate a place of worship to St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, who is honoured in only one other Essex church.^[26] If every Norman buccaneer who erected his own proprietary chapel had been a devotee of previously unhonoured saints, the task of the speculative historian would be made much easier. Unfortunately, most of them seem to have venerated the popular members of the heavenly circle, and at least one Essex church (now lost) probably owes its St Peter dedication to a family of Norman barons.

By the thirteenth century, market centres along Essex main roads were growing into small towns, some of which acquired chapels subordinate to established parish churches. This development made it possible to honour more recent saints, and probably represented a useful way of distinguishing the newcomers. Around 1140, the nuns of Barking Abbey established a hospital in the village of Great Ilford, a hospice which presumably also functioned as a place of worship for outlying residents in the massive parish of Barking. With perhaps a certain lack of imagination, it was originally dedicated to St Mary. However, the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170 quickly added a new recruit to the celestial pantheon. As part of Henry II's reparations for his part in a particularly crass assassination, Becket's sister was appointed Abbess of Barking, and the Ilford hospital soon received an additional dedication to the slaughtered Primate. In 1220, another south Essex main-road town, Brentwood, acquired its own chapel, which was also dedicated to St Thomas Becket. A strong tradition asserts that it was so named to serve, and to attract donations from, pilgrims on their way to venerate the martyred Archbishop at Canterbury. In fact, there is no particular reason to assume that anyone travelling to a cathedral city in Kent would pass through Brentwood. The cult of St Thomas Becket was the only safe way of expressing hatred for England's rapacious kings: the Brentwood chapel was established just five years after Magna Carta. Becket's popularity was at its height fifty year after his death: 1220 was the year in which his remains were translated to a magnificent new shrine.^[27] Between these two towns, a third market centre, Romford, had long been served by a chapel of the parish church at Hornchurch, with which it probably shared the dedication to St Andrew. However, between 1408 and 1410, a powerful local landowner masterminded the relocation of the place of worship from a district still known as Oldchurch to a site beside the Market Place. The new chapel was dedicated to Edward the Confessor who, according to legend, had practised his devotions in the royal palace at nearby Havering-atte-Bower. Romford, then, was making a statement about itself, by honouring a saint who was commemorated in only one other Essex church. Sad to relate, the legend was almost certainly a fable. Domesday Book makes clear that, on the eve of the Norman Conquest, the royal estates in Essex had all been taken over by Earl Harold, and the Confessor would have had nowhere to pray in the county at all.^[28]

Dedications to St Peter  By the Middle Ages, 21 Essex churches were dedicated to St Peter alone, eleven to the Peter / Paul combination, two to St Mary and St Peter and (possibly) one to St Peter and Thomas Becket.^[29] As suggested above, where early dedications superseded heathen deities, the choice of the Peter / Paul twosome might not have arisen from same considerations that pointed to the invocation of St Peter alone. In the two pairings of St Mary and St Peter, at Fairstead and Wennington, the order of veneration suggests that the Apostle was added later. This would also seem to be the case at Stambourne, where Thomas Becket has been joined with St Peter, an amendment that must postdate the Archbishop's murder in 1170 – but here, as discussed below, there is much uncertainty. As already noted, in seeking to account for the dedications en masse, we face two insoluble conundrums.  First, there may have been many reasons, including long-lost individual preferences, that explain why a particular church came to honour a specific saint; second, we cannot be sure whether it was erected on a pre-existing sacred site or came into being centuries later. On the question of motive, Kimmis pointed out that St Peter was the patron saint of fishermen, which could explain why he was invoked at three coastal locations, Bradwell, Goldhanger and Paglesham, and two on the Thames, Grays Thurrock and Wennington. (Kimmis also made an interesting suggestion about Thundersley, which is discussed below.)

One line of enquiry worth pursuing in the investigation of church dedications in general is the identity of religious houses and the estates that they owned. It is curious that London's two greatest churches are referred to in contrasting formulae. Everyone refers to "St Paul's", never to "London Cathedral" which, by analogy with almost every Anglican diocesan headquarters, ought to be its formal title. Yet its counterpart is always "Westminster Abbey", and it is likely that very few people know that it is dedicated to St Peter (possibly in his role as a protector of Thames fishermen).^[30] At the time of Domesday Book, 1086, the Abbey owned surprisingly little property in Essex, and some of its estates were recent acquisitions during the turbulent years of the Conquest. One of the few to which the scribes applied the formula "semper", meaning that it had "always" been in their possession, was Wennington, a thinly populated marshland area on the banks of the Thames, which was almost certainly farmed to supply food to the monks upriver. The addition of St Peter here to the earlier dedication to St Mary was probably a gesture of ownership. A similar  interpretation may apply at Paglesham, where the church bears the single dedication to St Peter. Here Westminster Abbey was one of four landowners – although probably the most important – and was said to have received the estate as a gift from a Saxon thegn who was part of the army that King Harold led to Yorkshire early in 1066. The donor evidently feared that he might not come back, and was probably killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge. Like Wennington, Paglesham was located on the edge of largely unpeopled marshland. The church of St Peter stands next to a large farmhouse, and both the building and its dedication may have owed their origins to the Abbey.

There can be no doubt that St Peter was a popular saint, and hence likely to be invoked for churches established after the early missionary phase of the seventh century. The two Essex multi-parish pre-Conquest boroughs, Colchester and Maldon, both had churches dedicated to St Peter – as had other early urban centres in the wider region, Cambridge, Ipswich Norwich and St Albans. London had four churches dedicated to St Peter before the Great Fire of 1666, plus a chapel in the Tower and the suburban monastery at Westminster. Both the Colchester and Maldon churches were located on hilltops, and the church of St Peter at Colchester is one of the few in Essex to have been specifically mentioned in Domesday. It was of interest to Norman bureaucrats because it owned land and a watermill, a property portfolio that suggests a long pedigree. The Apostle who controlled the gates to Heaven (and, by implication, to Colchester) was naturally attractive to townspeople who craved protection from marauders. He was equally likely to appeal to Norman interlopers who perhaps felt a particular need to secure an influential protector as they imposed themselves on a resentful population. One example that can be confidently assigned to post-Conquest times was at the church at the splendidly named hamlet of Snoreham. Described in 1650 as a "donative" (the absolute property of a patron), its territory – its status as a full parish was doubtful – was entirely surrounded by the much larger parish of Latchingdon, with which it was eventually amalgamated in the nineteenth century, long after the building had collapsed. As the pioneer Essex historian Philip Morant put it, Snoreham church was "undoubtedly built by some of the noble family of Grey of Wilton", who held the property for several centuries during the Middle Ages.^[31] Other churches on the Kimmis list may also owe their origins to the Normans: Little Bardfield and Little Warley, both tucked alongside an ancient manor house, as well as Grays Thurrock, one of three Thurrock parishes and now known simply by the name of the Norman interlopers. But it can equally be argued – as with North Ockendon – that an isolated church owed its origin to a heathen place of worship – perhaps focused on a spring or a stone – and that the later manor house was built close by. The glacial hypothesis has to wrestle with a host of imponderables.

The glacial hypothesis   Around 450,000 years ago, much of Essex was covered by the ice-sheets of the Anglian glaciation. The map seeks to demonstrate that there is some approximation between St Peter dedications and the outermost extremities of the glaciers. As will be discussed in considering objections to the hypothesis, a great deal of debris and rubble was dumped across the north and west of the county – the predominant soil is, after all, known as boulder clay – but it may be argued that the biggest rocks were bulldozed to the edge of the ice field and left when the glaciers retreated. Making no claim to be an expert in this highly specialised subject, I have relied on the GeoEssex website for basic information.^[32]

A few 'background' facts may convey something of the sheer scale of the Anglian Ice Age phenomenon. Glaciers may have been as much as one kilometre in thickness, powerful enough to divert the Thames (and its northerly extension, the Thames-Medway) from an earlier course through Chelmsford and Clacton. Glaciation may have lasted for 50,000 years, about twenty-five times the length of the recorded history of Essex. Obviously, even accepting the underlying point that it was very cold, there were probably climate fluctuations and cycles within those frigid millennia, which probably explains why different authorities show varying detail when they map the edge of the Essex glaciers. It may be best to think of the outer limit of glaciation as a fluctuating corridor rather than as a precise frontier. Indeed, in his categorisation of the Essex landscape, John Hunter identified a Mid-Essex Zone, a strip between five and ten miles wide. It runs from Brentwood to Colchester, roughly along the line of the Great Essex Road, now prosaically known as the A12. Landforms in this area were much influenced by glacial outflows.

Prior to the arrival of the Anglian ice-sheet, a ridge ran east-west across south Essex, composed of Claygate and Bagshot Beds, alternate layers of sand and clay up to fifty metres thick. This was solid enough to put up some resistance to the ice, but the glaciers broke through in several places, leaving south Essex with isolated outcrops of hills, on which woodland later grew.  The ice seems to have flowed around the Epping Forest ridge, but broken through further east, for instance at Hornchurch, leaving lumps and bumps of higher ground south of Brentwood and around Laindon and Rayleigh. As the Anglian glaciation came to a close, the outflows from a thousand-metre high wall of melting ice would have been awesome, powerful enough to carry large boulders long distances from the positions into which they had been bulldozed and dumped.^[33]

An assessment of the impact of the Anglian Ice Age on the distribution of erratic boulders in Essex should also take account of two other elements. The first is that the Medway had previously flowed north-north-east across Essex to join the proto-Thames near Clacton. In the process, it deposited chalk boulders that had originated in the North Downs. Its course has been traced through Paglesham, Bradwell-on-Sea and St Osyth: all three have churches dedicated to St Peter (or Peter / Paul at St Osyth). Second, it is also worth remembering that even the largest megaliths can be relocated by human agency: the giant sarsens of Stonehenge came from Pembrokeshire. This certainly happened at Alphamstone, in north Essex, where the church was built within a prehistoric stone circle composed of much smaller rocks.

Remarkable, too, is the fact that, even after centuries of intensive human occupation, the fields of Essex have continued to yield boulders deposited so long ago. Sometime apparently early in the nineteenth century, a Dedham farmworker called Edward Ward "while following at the tail of his plough across a fallow field, heard the sharp ring of the share against a mighty stone". Further investigation uncovered a "big boulder … such as is frequently found in the Essex boulder clay". He succeeded in arranging for it to become his gravestone, and it can still be seen in Dedham churchyard, propped about one metre high against a wall.

Edward Ward's gravestone at Dedham: he discovered the glacial erratic while ploughing. It stands about 0.6 metres above the ground, a typical example of the larger debris dumped behind the frontier of the Anglian ice sheet. The face is intriguing. Photograph kindly supplied by Jonathan Tompkins. 

Around 1874, a three-foot long, 15 cubic-foot (0.4 cubic metres) boulder was discovered in a field at Stondon Massey. In 1898, a similar stone damaged a steam-powered mole-draining implement which was being used for deep drainage there. Sometime about 1900, a boulder was dug up at Roxwell and set up as a feature on a local farm: it stood five feet (1.52 metres) high. At North Weald, "huge" puddingstones could be seen on farmland and in the Cripsey Brook: it seems they were broken up during the Second World War, probably to form part of the defences of the nearby RAF Fighter Command aerodrome. In the nineteen-eighties, farmworkers were aware of a boulder beneath the surface of a field nearby, and no doubt kept their equipment clear of it. In the late-twentieth century, a very large conglomerate boulder, called a puddingstone, was discovered at Navestock, and was erected as a Millennium monument: to this erratic I shall return. All four places are close to the edge of the Anglian ice-sheet. The rector of Stondon Massey thought that "such discoveries are very unusual in this neighbourhood, but have no doubt been forthcoming from time to time". It may be that we have only occasional reports of such finds, simply because they were taken for granted as part of the local geology.^[34]

The distribution map suggests that churches founded perhaps 1,500 years ago and dedicated to St Peter (the "rock" of the Matthew 16:18) tend to be located close to the extremity reached by the Anglian ice sheet 450,000 years ago. Map kindly drawn by Bernard Cope.

The distribution map discussed In identifying the churches associated with St Peter, I divide Essex into three districts. The first is south of a line from Roydon to Maldon. There were twists and turns in the edge of the Anglian glacier here, before it switched to a more direct north-easterly front. Hence the north-east of the county forms the second district, while the largely empty north-west is the third.

In south Essex, there are four joint dedications close to the Thames. Three of these, at Dagenham,^[35] Grays Thurrock and Horndon-on-the-Hill, are to St Peter and St Paul. In the case of the fourth, at Wennington, it has already been suggested that St Peter was coupled with St Mary, probably an earlier dedication, as a mark of ownership by Westminster Abbey. There are two inland Peter / Paul dedications, not far behind the line of the ice sheets, at Stondon Massey and Shellow Bowells. Closer to the line of the glacier stand Roydon, Shelley (near Chipping Ongar), South Weald, Little Warley and South Hanningfield, all dedicated to St Peter alone. South Weald has a hilltop location, with access from the main road by Wigley Bush Lane. On the analogy of Weeley, in north-east Essex, the name suggests a heathen temple or sacred grove, but it was not recorded until 1777, so no certainty can be possible.^[36] Little Warley is one of a series of north-south parishes that were probably originally large estates, laid out to combine access to woodland on higher ground – the edge of the glacier – with arable and grazing at a lower level, where it borders the former fenland of the Mardyke: they are sometimes called "ladder parishes". Little Warley church stands next to an ancient manor house at the south end of the parish. However, its location does not necessarily counter the glacial hypothesis: the predecessor to the humble stream that feeds into the Mardyke nowadays was very likely a rushing torrent as the ice-sheets retreated, powerful enough to have carried a boulder the mile or so downstream to the future location of the church.^[37]

Three more dedications to St Peter are found a short distance to the south and south-east of the outer edge of the Anglian glacier, one at Nevendon, and two on a plug of high ground in south-east Essex, sometimes referred to as the Rayleigh Hills, at Hockley and Thundersley. All three churches were located away from any parish population centre (Nevendon never had one) and stood alongside manor houses. There are three further examples in the marshland country alongside the Crouch and the Blackwater. Paglesham, as already discussed, can call upon a triple theory: it might honour St Peter as a fisherman or commemorate its connection with Westminster Abbey or sit on a boulder deposited half a million years ago by the proto-Medway. More economically, Snoreham may be regarded as almost certainly a medieval proprietary chapel. However, St Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell can claim a certain pride of place, as the fragment of the minster constructed by St Cedd himself in the six-fifties. The wall referred to was the rampart of the Roman coastal fort of Othona. It is reasonable to assume that Cedd was building his church in a Petrine sense on the foundations of rubble. We may conclude the south Essex tour by noting that one of the three churches in the burgh of Maldon was dedicated to St Peter, as was common in medieval towns.  Edward the Elder created a burh, or fortified town, here in 916, as part of his reconquest of Essex from the Danes. Whether St Peter's was the town's original church, and whether it – or some forerunner – had existed before the tenth century remains unknown.

The line of the Anglian ice sheet runs more or less straight across north-east Essex from Maldon through Colchester to Manningtree. On high ground near Maldon, the churches at both Great Totham and Wickham Bishops bear the single dedication to St Peter, as did the marshland parish of Goldhanger.^[38] Deep hollows along parts of this section of the former glacial frontier formed meltwater lakes during the Hoxnian interglacial period, around 400,000 years ago, which lasted for about 30,000 years. It is possible that boulders were deposited in the marshes by the glacial outflow, for Goldhanger is only about four miles from the outer edge of the ice sheets. This would also account for the St Peter dedication across the Colne estuary at Alresford, where a geological deposit known as the Upper St Osyth gravels was the result of outwash in the warming phase at the end of the Anglian period.

In St Osyth itself, a preposterous legend may indicate that the Peter / Paul dedication of the parish church dates from the early missionary period. In the twelfth century a priory was founded here, in the village formerly called Chich, in honour of Osyth / Osgyth, who had been associated with the place several centuries earlier. The Osyth / Osgyth legends are hopelessly entangled with other traditions, leading modern scholars to doubt the alleged prehistory altogether. Even the implied dating is muddled, since it confuses events that could only have dated from around 700 with the later Viking incursions. In short, Osyth was a princess who fled to become a nun when she was forced to marry a king of the East Saxons. She was permitted to establish her own community of holy women, but its coastal location encouraged an attack by pirates who beheaded her.  The truncated princess picked up her head and walked to the church, where she knocked formally to be granted admission and interment. Whoever applied this tale to Chich, freely purloining elements from other medieval folk traditions, was presumably anxious to assert the primacy of the parish church, and this may suggest that its dedication  dates from the early period of the Christianisation of the East Saxons. There are two geological layers of gravel beds associated with St Osyth, one from glacial outwash, the other from the earlier course of the Medway. The presence of a sacred boulder would not be a surprise.

Nearby, the parish church at West Mersea, with its Peter / Paul dedication, stands on the site of a Roman villa. In the eighteenth century, extensive mosaic floors were reported to be located under the churchyard, and the Essex historian Philip Morant was told by the sexton that "most of the coffins are placed on these Pavements".^[39] The church of St Peter in Colchester was built within the Roman town, and may also have incorporated earlier stonework into its foundations.^[40]

Slightly behind the line of the Anglian glacier, but within the zone of mid-Essex heathlands, churches are dedicated to St Peter at Boxted and Great Coggeshall, the latter a town on the Roman Stane Street. Great Coggeshall church itself almost certainly stands on the site of a Roman building, possibly even a villa.^[41] The Peter / Paul dedications at Black Notley and Little Horkesley stand close to manor houses, and the latter was assumed by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments to have originated as the chapel of a twelfth-century priory. The combination of St Mary and St Peter at Fairstead suggests the relatively late addition of the Apostle by a medieval admirer.

Across the rest of the county, the map is strikingly blank. North-west Essex was simply not St Peter country. There are two single dedication churches, at Sible Hedingham and Ugley. The pairing with St Thomas Becket at Stambourne is something of a mystery. White's Directory of Essex in 1848 simply attributed it to St Thomas, and a medieval bell in the tower carries an inscription appealing to him to pray for the parishioners. Other nineteenth-century reference works followed suit but, sometime between 1886 and 1908, Kelly's Directory switched from St Thomas to St Peter, and it was by that single dedication that the building was described by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. Peter / Paul dedications are even scarcer: Bardfield Saling is contested, the evidence pointing to St Katherine until modern times, leaving Foxearth as the only undisputed example in that large slice of the county.

In summary, it can be argued that there is an apparent concentration of church dedications to St Peter close to the edge of the Anglian ice sheets, which may plausibly lead us back to the Biblical "upon this rock I will build my church", although it is freely admitted that it is almost impossible to determine, with a few exceptions, whether Essex churches originated in the seventh century or after the Norman Conquest.  However, it may be noted that a considerable number of churches dedicated solely to St Peter contain Roman brick and tile. They include Alresford, Boxted, Goldhanger, Great Coggeshall, Nevendon, Paglesham, Sible Hedingham, Thundersley and Wickham Bishops. There are fewer among joint dedications: Roman brick is prominent at Fairstead (where St Peter may have been a late addition) and used at West Mersea, which is not surprising given the nature of the site.^[42] There are problems in taking this evidence as proof of the location of an early church. First, Roman brick and tile are found in many Essex churches. Second, it is generally assumed that Saxon churches were constructed from timber and only later, generally in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, replaced by stone buildings.^[43] However, in a county that was deficient in durable building materials, it seems likely that there were more abandoned Roman sites available to be pillaged in the seventh century than there would have been four or five centuries later. Could it be that Roman bricks and tiles were employed to make shrines in the early timber churches, and were re-used later as rubble?

Objections to the glacial hypothesis  It must be recognised that there are obvious major objections to the glacial hypothesis. First, there seems to be no sign of any prominent or unusual stonework in any of the St Peter churches to be observed in modern times. More to the point, several Essex churches are associated with boulders, only one of which is dedicated to St Peter. St Mary and St Edmund at Ingatestone has already been mentioned: the place-name, Ing-at-stone, draws attention to the erratics, one of which is built into the wall of the church, although not in the chancel where it might have been expected had it been an object of veneration. The church at Beauchamp Roding may be portrayed as a classic example of a Christian take-over of a pagan site, for it stands among glacial debris in the midst of fields and away from any centre of population. Yet its dedication is St Botolph, an East Anglian saint from the seventh century, who appears three times in Essex. (Botolph gave his name to Boston in Lincolnshire, and hence to the largest city in New England.) There is place-name evidence from the mid-thirteenth century confirming the antiquity of the dedication for, although they managed to muscle in on the locality, it is unlikely that the family of William de Beauchamp would have chosen a Saxon saint had they built the first place of worship here.^[44] Most remarkable of all is the example of Alphamstone, close to the Suffolk border. As the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments observed: "There is a considerable collection of sarsen stones in and about the churchyard, which appears to have been brought by human agency."^[45] Yet the church at Alphamstone is one of a handful in Essex where the original dedication was forgotten. In modern times, it honours St Barnabas, perhaps because he was a martyr who allegedly stoned to death. In his 1912/14 paper on Essex erratics (discussed below), A.E. Salter noted a sarsen built into the wall of Hadleigh church, and listed stones close to churches at Gestingthorpe, Great Chrishall, Lamarsh, Sible Hedingham and Twinstead. Only one of these, Sible Hedingham, has a St Peter dedication, while Foxearth is dedicated to St Peter and St Paul.^[46] Also disruptive of the general theory that Christian dedications were designed to harness and purify pagan associations is Salter's comment that the stones at Beauchamp Roding and Twinstead were "mammilated". This unusual word, usually spelt with a double-L, discreetly indicated that the pebbles set in the surface resembled nipples. We might expect both churches to be dedicated to chaste female saints selected to sanitise some pagan fertility cult. This is not the case.

However, the difficulties involved in accommodating the hypothesis to individual churches seem minor compared with a very basic facts of Essex geology. The Anglian ice sheet did not simply bulldoze rocks to its greatest extent and dump them. Behind the front line, the glaciers littered Essex with lumps of stone and deposited till (soil) known as boulder clay across the north and west of the county. In 1912, A.E. Salter, a member of the Essex Field Club, published a paper listing sarsens and glacial boulders that he had noted while travelling around the county. He mentioned over one hundred locations, mostly in north and west Essex, in a loose quantification that referred to perhaps as many as five hundred pieces of rock. In fact, his list was incomplete: he was apparently unaware of the Alphamstone sarsens, almost certainly the only stone circle in the county, and he also missed the well-known Leper Stone at Newport, which stands alongside the main road to Cambridge. Yet, despite the nature of Salter's work – both intriguing and incomplete – very little attempt seems to have been made to explore its implications. As John Hunter, historian of the Essex landscape, remarked in 1999, "it is not a subject which seems to awake much interest today".^[47] The glacial hypothesis suggests that pre-Christian religious sites where rocks were venerated were eased in to the new faith by dedicating them to St Peter. Yet the segment of Essex, around the half the area of the county, that is littered with glacial debris is the very area where dedications to the rocklike Apostle are conspicuous for their absence.

How might the hypothesis account with this anomaly? One possibility lies in the paradox that glacial erratics were so common in some areas that they did not inspire any particular awe. The landscape historian John Hunter described them as "particularly numerous" across north and west Essex. "They can be seen used as road markers, footings for buildings, bollards and mounting-blocks."^[48] Furthermore, the stones deposited behind the front line of the glacier were generally relatively small. The Leper Stone at Newport, upon which travellers were encouraged to deposit coins for the medieval hospital nearby, is about one metre in height. The sarsens in the Alphamstone circle are even smaller, so much so that thumbnail sketches of the village in reference works often fail to mention them. These smaller erratics are mostly composed of a single material, often sandstone. However, there were also much larger boulders, conglomerates known as puddingstone. These consisted of miscellaneous rocks and pebbles cemented together by iron oxides, and hence sometimes called ferricrete.^[49] Puddingstones seem to have been left at the edge of the glaciers, where they had been pushed before the ice retreated. It is among these that the glacial hypothesis will seek its pagan forerunners to the first Apostle.

As it happens, there is bizarre confirmation of this pattern in the eclectic researches of Dr E.A. Rudge, who died in 1984. With a First Class Honours degree and a doctorate in Chemical Engineering from London University, Rudge was an impressive personality: in 1946, he became head of West Ham Municipal College, which is now the Stratford campus of the University of East London.^[50] An active member of the Essex Field Club, he studied ancient trackways as a hobby. As already noted, the subject can be something of an intellectual minefield. There are certainly good reasons to assume the existence of prehistoric trackways, but tracing potential routes on the ground can become a happy hunting-ground for eccentric theories – a danger also to be borne in mind in connection with this hypothesis. Enthusiasts were inclined to take a ruler and pencil to the Ordnance Survey map and draw lines linking the site of ancient churches. With over four hundred medieval ecclesiastical sites in Essex, it was not surprising that some churches could be grouped in (more-or-less) straight lines. There was, too, a wholly positive complication, the existence of a network of secondary Roman roads across the county. Most are long vanished, but some sections of their former routes can indeed be tentatively identified from features on maps. (The church at Mountnessing, already mentioned, almost certainly stands on a largely lost Roman road from London to Maldon, which may help to explain its location away from any settlement.) Rudge developed a theory that an ancient trackway across Essex had been marked by giant puddingstones and he traced its slightly curving line from Epping in the south-west to Little Horkesley in the north-east. Apparently discouraged by doubters, he never published his research – but there seems little doubt that his map had inadvertently confirmed the edge of the Anglian glacier and the huge conglomerates associated with it.^[51]

Here we should return to the Navestock Millennium monument, a puddingstone unearthed in the later twentieth century. It not only stands about five feet (1.52 metres) tall but, from some angles, it has the profile of a human being, with a terrifying girth reminiscent of King Kong. It would have been understandable if pagan Anglo-Saxons had interpreted such megaliths as gods, and it may be here that we have a link with subsequent St Peter dedications. Indeed, perhaps it was the second half of Matthew 16:18 that clinched the connection. A godlike conglomerate dug up from a field might well have been feared as a guardian of the underworld who could block access to the afterlife. It was here that St Peter carried a spiritual trump card, not only in the formula "upon this rock I will build my church", but also through the Gospel guarantee that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it".^[52]

Navestock's Millennium Memorial is a 1.5 metre high puddingstone unearthed in the late twentieth century. It is easy to imagine how such a stone might have become a focus of Anglo-Saxon religious observance fifteen centuries earlier  – although, of course – no evidence survives of any such form of heathen worship nor, indeed, of any details relating to pre-Christian beliefs and practices in England. Photographs kindly supplied by Bernard Cope.

Of course, we are still left with the challenge that Essex churches dedicated to St Peter show no signs of having been built around ancient stones. Yet this problem, too, may not be insuperable. The oldest fabric in most of them dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries: it is generally assumed that they originally built in wood, to be replaced by stone constructions after the Norman Conquest.^[53] (At Greensted, near Ongar, where the timber church was never replaced, dendro-dating has established felling dates for the tree trunks after 1063, indicating that even the Norman proprietary chapels that added so many additional places of worship were originally built in materials that were easily assembled and quickly erected.) The predominantly Protestant cultural context surrounding the story of the English Reformation has always portrayed the medieval Catholic Church as corrupt and inviting revolutionary defiance. This is certainly a defensible view of sixteenth-century religion, but we should not forget that in earlier centuries, which coincided with the great wave of ecclesiastical rebuilding, the Church was subjected to waves of reform. For instance, it was in this era that Rome attempted to enforce clerical celibacy, an awesome example of control over individual behaviour. As discussed in the case of Hornchurch above, by the twelfth century there was a determination to stamp out remnants of pagan practice. In a county with limited building materials, it was doubly tempting to break up large puddingstones, both to provide rubble for construction and to eliminate possible sources of superstition. Puddingstone was widely used in east Essex churches,^[54] and it has been specifically noted at Boxted, Goldhanger, Great Totham and Thundersley. These instances are particular importance, since the church dedicated to St Peter at Boxted was probably located slightly behind the line of the Anglian glacier, while Goldhanger and Thundersley were situated slightly in advance of its greatest extremity – and place-name evidence definitely points to Thundersley as a sacred place in pre-Christian times. There may well have been other instances: Hunter illustrated how medieval masons worked glacial boulders into walls of flint and rubble, with their careful craft work destined to be hidden behind layers of plaster.^[55]

It is also important to bear in mind the extensive internal remodelling of churches since the Reformation. In particular, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century liturgical revolutions targeted altars, which were removed and replaced by communion tables. The attack on the altars began in 1550, during the reign of Edward VI, when England was governed by an advanced Protestant party in the name of the teenage monarch. In 1550, a commissioner toured Essex to enforce Protestant edicts in the reign of Edward VI to destroy "superaltars, altars, and such like abuses".  At St Osyth, four men were paid for "breaking down the altar, and making the Church clean". There is documentary evidence that altars were also removed at Hockley and Paglesham, and the destruction was probably general. The process went into reverse between 1553 and 1558 when Mary Tudor determinedly attempted to reimpose Catholicism. In 1559 Elizabeth reverted to the Edwardine policy, prescribing an orderly removal of altars, and this time they went for good. At Hornchurch in 1577, a parishioner asked to be buried "before the place where the high altar sometimes did stand".^[56] What happened to the stone from the altars? One attractive option might well have been to use the material to repave the floors of church buildings, which were frequently dug up for the interment of prominent parishioners. Over the centuries, floor levels tended to be raised, sometimes to mark off the chancel as the incumbent's personal sphere from the communal area of the nave, but also as part of ongoing repair work.  A visitation (church inspection) in Kent in 1557 took a close look at floors, checking that no sacred slabs were being trodden underfoot. At Dagenham in 1552, money was spent on "taking down the alters" and "the laying of pavyng in the chauncell & in the church". Three centuries later, during restoration in 1878, the link between the two items was uncovered when workmen dug up a large slab of Purbeck marble, about two metres by one, and 1.33 inches (3.38 centimetres) thick. As it was decorated with engraved crosses, it was assumed to have originated as an altar slab. This had been obviously been a luxury import to the village, probably the gift of some wealthy medieval parishioner, and it had been regarded as too valuable to be broken up or dumped.^[57] If there were sacred stones left untouched from pagan times, they might well have been covered as floor levels rose. However, glacial debris, even if once the source of fear and awe, would probably have been simply smashed. In 1555, Parliament made parishes responsible for repairing their highways. A piece of Ice Age rubbish that was the focus for superstitious reverence would have been a tempting source of raw material. 

Above all, Essex churches have been subject to considerable rebuilding. It is conventional to censure the Victorians for their savage 'restorations', but we should also remember that, by the nineteenth century, many medieval churches were literally rotten with damp. Stone churches in Essex often lacked solid foundations, and centuries of grave-digging close to their walls made many of them dangerously unstable. Indeed, the crises had begun long before the Victorians blundered in. St Peter's church in Maldon ceased to be used in the late sixteenth century, collapsed in the mid-seventeenth century and was erected anew – in brick – in 1699 as the town's library. Snoreham's church disappeared during the decades that followed. St Peter and St Paul at Shellow Bowells was completely rebuilt – also in brick – in 1754, and the town church of St Peter in Colchester remodelled in 1758. The tower of Dagenham's parish church toppled over on to the nave in 1800, forcing a utilitarian reconstruction. St Peter at Shelley was replaced in 1810 by a Gothic building that was so awful that it, too, was swept away in 1888. Grays and South Weald were entirely changed by Victorian restorations. Little Horkesley was destroyed by a stray bomb in 1940. There had probably never been a case for a church at Little Horkesley on grounds of population, but – in a splendid gesture of pig-headed determination – it was replaced in 1957. The chances of walking into any Essex church and being confronted by a lump of pagan rock sanctified by St Cedd are close to zero.

There is, too, one other wider comparative objection to the glacial hypothesis. This would simply note that churches across the whole of England were dedicated to St Peter, and probably from earliest times. Many of these are to be found in counties south of the Thames which were not touched by the Anglian glaciation, or in parts of the country which lay deep beneath the ice sheets. I have used The Buildings of England volumes for Hertfordshire and Suffolk to identify appropriate churches. In Hertfordshire I find nine dedications to St Peter and two jointly with St Paul. This is a small number on which to base any theory. Although they roughly stretch through an east-west band across the county, which was also partly subject to the Anglian Ice Age, but I do not know enough about the local extent of glaciation to venture any conclusions. In the large county of Suffolk, I count over fifty churches that honoured St Peter, and seventeen joint dedications, of which one is also to St Mary.^[58] The hypothesis would require some concentration of them in the Ipswich-Woodbridge-Aldeburgh in the south-east of the county, where the edge of the Anglian glacier followed a north-easterly line towards what is now the North Sea. The absence of any such concentration naturally throws some doubt, by implication, upon the hypothesis in relation to Essex.

Conclusion  Once again, it must be emphasised that a hypothesis is not some revelation that is to be imposed as orthodoxy in defiance of all objections. It is a tool for probing a subject that may throw up new interpretations, but which must be discarded if it proves unsatisfactory. The general argument is advanced here that historic dedications of churches call for investigation, even if the reasons behind them are necessarily subject to unproven guesswork.  The central point remains: Essex church dedications to St Peter, whether single or joint, tend to cluster along the line reached by the Anglian glaciers 450,000 years ago. Perhaps the inter-relationship may be explained through the rebranding efforts of seventh-century Christian missionaries, who chose the first Apostle as a symbol designed to capture the loyalties of pagan people who venerated giant erratic boulders. But perhaps, too, the relationship is entirely coincidental. The most that can be claimed is that the discussion has the potential to explore explanations and connections in patterns that may add to our understanding of the Essex past.

ENDNOTES My warm thanks go to Bernard Cope and Jonathan Tompkins for their help and support in the preparation of this essay. 

^[1] It is unfortunate that this verse, perhaps the best-known one-liner in the Bible, has not translated well: in modern English, only the word 'petrified' embodies the derivation, and its meaning had gradually made the transition from 'turned to stone' to 'terrified'. There was, of course, ambiguity about the term "church" in the Matthew text: its use in an architectural sense was metaphorical. It was first cited to claim institutional primacy for Rome in 256, during a dispute between Bishop Stephen and churches in North Africa. D. MacCulloch, A History of Christianity … (London, 2010 ed., cf. 1^st ed. 2009), 137. The text came to be very well known. After listening to a sermon based upon it in 1601, a Wisbech tailor adjourned to an alehouse where he greeted a friend named in honour of the Apostle ("Thou art Peter"), before raising his tankard to announce: "But upon this rock I will build my church". He was reported to an ecclesiastical court. Whether Matthew 16:18 had made such an impact a thousand years earlier, it is impossible to say. K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic … (Harmondsworth, 1973 ed., cf. 1^st ed. London, 1971), 192

^[2] The stones are variously described as boulders or erratics. Most were composed of a single mineral, usually chalk or sandstone, but some – including very large examples – were conglomerates, known as puddingstone. Where stones were infused with some human purpose (i.e. moved or given meaning), they are also termed sarsens or megaliths. These are further discussed below.

^[3] https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/kimmis_ecd/pages/front_cover.html is the 'way in' to the dedications list. For information on churches I have mainly relied upon the four Essex volumes of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (1916-23) and James Bettley's 2007 revision of the Essex volume in The Buildings of England series ("Pevsner"), first published in 1954.

^[4] The historian Keith Thomas blamed the (thousand-year) survival of popular superstitions on "the notorious readiness of the early Christian leaders to assimilate elements of the old paganism into their own religious practice, rather than pose too direct a conflict of loyalties in the minds of the new converts. The ancient worship of wells, trees and stones was not so much abolished as modified, by turning pagan sites into Christian ones and associating them with a saint rather than a heathen divinity." Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 54.

^[5] Accounts of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons all derive from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written about 731 (various modern editions and translations). Cf. F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (3^rd ed., Oxford, 1971), 103-21.   Barbara Yorke pointed out that the progress of Christianity among the East Saxons could not be separated from the question of overlordship, since their kingdom was usually dominated by more powerful neighbours, Kent, Mercia and Wessex. B. Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London, 2002 ed., cf. 1^st ed., 1990), 45-57. The curious dedication of a Colchester church, to St Runwald, associated with Buckinghamshire, probably belongs to a phase of Mercian domination.

^[6] The Essex villages of Good Easter and High Easter derive their name from the Old English "eowestre", meaning a sheepfold. P.H. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex (Cambridge, 1935), 478-9. Reaney discussed pagan names at xxi, which cross-referenced individual examples. 

^[7] For Anglo-Saxon pagan gods, I have used two well-tried sources, Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 96-102 and P.H. Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (2^nd ed., Cambridge, 1977), 120-4. A useful 2023 Gresham College lecture by Professor Ronald Hutton (https://archive.org/details/anglo-saxon-pagan-gods-lecture-by-ronald-hutton) confirms that nothing more is likely to be culled from documentary sources. Archaeology may throw additional light on pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon religious practices, but is unlikely to yield the names of deities worshipped. Our ignorance of heathen nomenclature similarly limits the scope to secure insights from place-name studies. Professor Hutton listed three other deities, each mentioned once in later Christian accounts: Ing, Geat and Hreda / Hretha. The last of these is assumed to be an Earth goddess. Essex place names that include the element 'ing' (e.g. Ingatestone) derive from an alternative element, a term meaning 'people of'. In any case, it is likely that a deity would be known by different names in different places.

^[8] Stenton's phrase, Anglo-Saxon England, 96.

^[9] The Hindu Ashwins may have given their name to the Germanic Alcis, but nothing is known about the latter.

^[10] To push creative imagination still further, I note that, at several periods, the East Saxon royal house seems to have accommodated joint kings, reigning in some kind of loose confederacy. Possibly these pairings represented the (later) county of Essex east of the river Lea and the territory in Middlesex (plus part of Hertfordshire) to the west. The joint kings were sometimes brothers, but at one phase they were distant cousins. The apparent stability of these relationships might have been compatible with a dualistic cult.

^[11] "God's acre" is traced in English to 1605.

^[12] It was also the dedication at Childerditch, which may be a Celtic place-name: J.T. Baker, Cultural Transition in the Chilterns and Essex Region, 350 AD to 650 AD (Hatfield, Herts, 2006), 161, and 144-6 for other possible Celtic names in or near the Blackwater valley. I use the no-doubt loose (but linguistically defensible) term 'Celtic' for the pre-Anglo-Saxon population of Essex; Baker prefers 'Brittonic'. The derivations referred to are taken from Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex.

^[13] C. Hart, ed., The Early Charters of Essex (Leicester, 1971), 35.

^[14] G.H. Morgan, Forgotten Thameside (Hadleigh, Essex, 1951), 110.

^[15] R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings… (Oxford, 2000), 472.

^[16] I add here a speculation by H.W. King, a Victorian antiquary who was secretary of the Essex Archaeological Society from 1866 until his death in 1893. He had a particular interest in church architecture, and offered this opinion: "Churches dedicated to S. Michael the Archangel are almost invariably situated on a hill, usually one of considerable elevation." King was thinking of Fobbing, and specifically noted that low-lying Aveley was an exception. Essex has 14 single dedications to St Michael, and three joint examples (with All Angels), one of which may be comparatively modern. Few seem to fit King's theory, and Essex is of course deficient in prominent hills. Quoted in W. Palin, Stifford and its Neighbourhood ([London], 1871), 167; Essex Review, iii (1894), 19-24 for King, who worked for the Bank of England.

^[17] "It is the only church in the kingdom which has a large carved bull's head and the horns on the point of the east end, where a cross would naturally be." Essex Review, xxvii (1918), 53.

^[18] The apocalyptic quality of the Peterborough account has been discounted by historians for about 100 years: Cambridge Medieval History, v (1926), 549.

^[19] F. Neininger "Belmeis [Beaumais], Richard de (d. 1162)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Bishop de Belmeis suffered a debilitating stroke in 1157, but his kinsman, the Archdeacon, might have masterminded the establishment of the Hornchurch cell.

^[20] There are 31 ancient churches dedicated to St Andrew in Essex (plus one joint dedication), making him the fourth most popular saint in the county. This suggests that various motives would explain his selection in particular places. However, it may be worth noting that he was also favoured at Weeley, a village whose name indicates the presence of a pre-Christian place of worship, although – as usual – nothing is known of any cult practised there.

^[21] The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (North-East Essex volume, xxiv) insisted that the tradition was "almost certainly incorrect", arguing that the site (a moated enclosure protecting both the church and East Mersea Hall) was too high above sea level and too far from the shoreline. This would no doubt be true in relation to Danish ships, but the accompanying army would have camped on drier ground where they would have a view of the nearby countryside (which the Essex historian Philip Morant charmingly called the "continent"). Occupation of the eastern end of the island would have allowed the Danes to seal off both the Blackwater, giving access to Maldon, and the Colne, the gateway to Colchester. In any case, East Mersea church is within a few hundred metres of the shore.

^[22] Ingatestone church is dedicated to St Mary and St Edmund. It is likely that St Edmund was added at this main-road village to attract offerings from travellers to and from Norfolk and Suffolk, who perhaps regarded their local saint as a form of travel insurance. It was referred to simply as the church of St Edmund in a 1538 Will. E.E. Wilde, Ingatestone and the Great Essex Road … (Oxford, 1913), 50.

^[23] T.L. Wilson, History and Topography of Upminster… (Romford, 1881), 187-8.

^[24] Because it had no independent existence, little is known about the Hospital of St Laurence in Barking, but it was mentioned in Abbey records and its site remembered in a 1609 survey of the town. J.E. Oxley, The Reformation in Essex… (Manchester, 1965), 159.

^[25] A connection with St Martin's-le-Grand in London has also been suggested.

^[26] The dedication to St Christopher is recorded in 1248. Willingale Spain recalls a Domesday landowner from another Norman town, Épaignes. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 500.

^[27] The complication here is the hamlet of Pilgrims Hatch, a mile north of Brentwood. Popular etymology assumes that travellers to Canterbury passed through a gate (hatch) from the forest here, reinforcing the notion of an established route in honour of the saint. The first recorded example, Pylgremeshacch, dates from 1483, a relatively late date. It is more likely that the gate took its name from a neighbour or owner, who had acquired a surname that referred to his participation in one or more pilgrimages.

^[28] This study focuses upon the principal dedications by which churches were known. But it should be remembered that, in the Middle Ages, most churches had side chapels and altars that honoured other saints.

^[29] Of the Kemmis list of dedications (single and joint) to St Peter, I have discarded Chingford, where the church of St Peter and St Paul was built in 1844, on a new site to replace the medieval All Saints. I have also ignored Chelmsford, where St Peter and St Cedd were added to the dedication of the cathedral in 1954. Following the restoration of the parish church at Great Canfield in 1876, the diocesan bishop decreed that its rededication should be to St Peter, "all traces of the original dedication ... having been lost in lapse of time". However, this does not seem to have been carried out, and the church became St Mary's. (Essex Archives Online.) Kimmis included Bardfield Saling (Little Bardfield) in his Peter / Paul list, while noting a possible earlier dedication to St Margaret. This may have been an error for St Catherine, the dedication recorded by Morant (1768) and reported well into the 20^th century by Kelly's Directory as St Katherine. In 1916, the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (Essex, i, 11) gave the dedication as St Peter and St Paul. It is possible that the church had a popular name (Catherine) derived from medieval wall paintings. As there are very few St Peter dedications in north-west Essex, I have retained it. Similarly, the church at Stambourne in north Essex was usually called St Thomas in the nineteenth century and seems to have switched to St Peter in the early twentieth. There is an evocative collage of photographs of Essex churches dedicated to St Peter on https://essexchurches.wordpress.com/category/dedications/st-peter/.

^[30] R. Cavendish, "The Consecration of Westminster Abbey", History Today (2015).

^[31] H. Smith, Ecclesiastical History of Essex… (Colchester, n.d.), 264; P. Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex… (2 vols, London, 1768), i, 357.

^[32] E.g. http://www.geoessex.org.uk/the-early-ice-age/.

^[33] J. Hunter, The Essex Landscape … (Chelmsford, 1999), 1-33.

^[34] Essex Review, xvi (1907), 2-3; E.H.L. Reeve, Stondon Massey, Essex [Colchester, 1906], 132; A.E. Salter, "Sarsen, Basalt and other boulders in Essex", Essex Naturalist, xvii (1912 /14), 192; A.S. Newins, A History of North Weald Bassett… (North Weald, 1985), 1. In 1717, the miller John Strutt placed an erratic outside his Moulsham Mill for use as a mounting block. The boulder was about 4 feet by 3 feet by 18 inches (0.51 cubic metres). It is not clear whether it was a recent discovery or had been moved from another surface location. C.R. Strutt, The Strutt Family of Terling ... (privately printed, 1939), 7. Salter, 190, reckoned that the Cripsey Brook boulder was the largest in Essex: it measured 9 feet, 3 and a half inches (2.83 metres) by 7 feet, 2 and a half inches (2.2 metres) by 1 foot, 8 inches (0.51 metres). Ploughing, drainage and excavation for construction have undoubtedly gone deeper in the past two centuries.  Hunter informally likens a chalk boulder unearthed while digging foundations for a factory at Saffron Walden to a giant cheeseburger. Hunter, The Essex Landscape, 9.

^[35] A historian-vicar insisted that there was "ample evidence" for the Peter / Paul dedication, but one of his forerunners, in 1475, had referred to "Seynte Petry's Church in Dakenham" (the apostrophe would have been added by a Victorian editor). J.P. Shawcross, A History of Dagenham… (London, 1904),  37.

^[36] Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 355 (Weeley). Reaney did not discuss Wigley Bush at South Weald, which I have first traced to a very late example ("Weekly Boush") in the Chapman and André atlas of Essex, 1777. The name is suggestive but the evidence is not persuasive enough for certainty.

^[37] Post-Ice Age rivers flowed at much higher levels, gradually cutting the valleys we see today. Very often the streams that now occupy them are 'misfits' (i.e. much smaller than the rivers which cut the original landscape.)

^[38] The original Wickham Bishops church, dedicated to St Peter, was replaced in 1850 by the more conveniently located church of St Bartholomew. In 1996, the old building was converted into a house and artist's studio.

^[39] Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 425. Victoria County of History of Essex, iii, 158-9 for an extended discussion of the Roman remains under West Mersea church.

^[40] There is a Roman concrete floor 7 feet (2.13 metres) below the churchyard of the Colchester church of St Peter. Victoria County of History of Essex, iii, 104.

^[41] Victoria County of History of Essex, iii, 89 for the evidence of a Roman house under Great Coggeshall church.

^[42] Stondon Massey is another possible example of a Roman building nearby.

^[43] James Bettley echoes Pevsner himself in assuming that "[m]ost Saxon churches were no doubt of timber" (20), a view taken by a notable authority A.C. ['Gus'], in A History of Essex (rev. ed., London, 1962, cf. 1^st ed. 1958), 10.

^[44] Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 76. Salter (Essex Naturalist, xvii, 190) described the stone in the churchyard at Beauchamp Roding as "a large flat triangular sarsen with a layer of flint pebbles". In 1984, it was erected upright by an unauthorised group who called themselves the Markstone Liberation Front. There are other stones outside the churchyard. A 'legend' was recorded in the mid-20th century that church builders had attempted to remove the stones to a more convenient site in a nearby village, but the stones flew back at night. Such legends are common, and there is no village nearby. Essex Countryside, Summer 1956, 140-1. 

^[45] Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (North-East Essex volume, 3). The final syllable in the place-name derives from the Anglo-Saxon "-tun" (enclosure). It has been interpreted as "-stone" in modern times. One of the sarsens was built into the wall of the nave – as the glacial hypothesis mightrequire  – into the chancel, where an altar would be situated. Essex Countryside, October 1964, 594-5.  

^[46] Salter, Essex Naturalist, xvii (1912 /14), 191-8. An erratic also protrudes from the nave of Broomfield church: Essex Countryside, Summer, 1956, 141 for photograph. Stones are also reported as incorporated into churches at Chadwell St Mary, Fyfield, North Weald, Stifford and Wormingford, but these may simply have been rubble used by medieval builders without any special significance being attached to them. Essex Countryside, May 1962, 296-7. 

^[47] Hunter, The Essex Landscape, 9-11. Salter's paper ("Sarsen, Basalt and other boulders in Essex") was written in 1912, but the collected volume of the Essex Naturalist was published in 1914 (xvii, 186-99). Salter was cited by K.M. Clayton, "Some aspects of the glacial deposits of Essex", Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, lxviii (1957), 1-21. "Lying unnoticed in our country churchyards, or in the footings of our ancient churches, are many silent witnesses of the dark and unrecorded days of our Saxon past." I agree with Lilian Rudge's conclusion to "Pagan Stones and Essex Churches", Essex Countryside, Summer 1956, 140-1. Unfortunately, she and her busband Dr E.A. Rudge were enthusiasts for a prehistoric trackway theory. 

^[48] Hunter, The Essex Landscape, 9. It is likely that smaller erratics were moved to more convenient locations, e.g. at Ugley Green, a small stone at the roadside protects the communal pump, a location that can hardly be a coincidence. This is almost a mile from the church, dedicated to St Peter, and unlikely to be related.

^[49] Puddingstone is also called Hertfordshire (or Herts) Conglomerate. I should add that I have no idea how this fusion process operated. For the Newport leper stone, Essex Countryside, Winter 1953-4, 58-9.

^[50] https://www.hiddenea.com/Essex%20PTD.htm.

^[51] Rudge's map is at https://www.hiddenea.com/Essex%20PTD.htm.

^[52] A puddingstone at Stanton, near Ware, in Hertfordshire, is locally regarded as a female figure. It is said to have been erected by a clergyman in the early twentieth century.

^[53] Some churches were substantially reconstructed in the later Middle Ages, e.g. Sible Hedingham, which dates from the mid-14^th century.

^[54] A point confirmed by the overall survey of building materials in the county by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (iv, xxxiv).

^[55] Hunter, The Essex Landscape, 10.

^[56] E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars… (New Haven and London, 1992), 472, 568; Oxley, The Reformation in Essex, 164; M.K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed … (Cambridge, 1991), 225.

^[57] Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 556; Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 41-3. In 1951, Council staff tidying the centre of Waltham Abbey for Festival of Britain celebrations smashed a boulder that lay outside the church to clear it out of the way. Essex Countryside, February 1963, 158-9.

^[58] I count 51 rural dedications to St Peter alone, plus one in Ipswich and a late-medieval chapel of ease at Sudbury.