The Church of St Peter-on-the-Wall
The chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, near the Essex saltmarshes where the river Blackwater meets the sea, isn't an obvious place to find traces of Britain's earliest brush with empire. And yet, embedded in the walls are tiles made back in the third century. The stones of those walls, and the masonry blocks at the building's corners, were cut around the same time.
This is a building made from Roman materials, but not by Romans.
Most really old churches have layers of history to them. You can see where they’ve changed over centuries, and how the way they’re used has changed. At first glance, St Peter-on-the-Wall doesn't have that. You'd be forgiven for thinking this was just a countryside barn. In fact, for a few hundred years, that's just what it was, and you can still see the filled-in outline of the old barn doors.
That's our first clue that all is not as it seems.
St Peter-on-the-Wall is actually one of Britain's oldest intact churches, dating to the seventh-century, and most of its changes have been losses. Back then, the chapel had a rounded end with a semi-circular chancel, and a sacristy built on one side. In 1442, it was recorded as having a porch and a belfry. Now, all that's left of those features is the outline of their foundations. Only the rectangular nave remains.
Which wall is St Peter's on, exactly?
The chancel, porch and sacristy aren't the only things to have disappeared. The chapel is pretty isolated now, but it wasn't always like this. St Peter’s was built in what was once the main gateway of a Roman fort called Othona. One story has St Peter sitting to rest for a time on the old fort's wall, hence the chapel's name.
There’s barely any sign of Othona now, for two reasons: one is that half of it has fallen into the sea, and the other is that the chapel was built using material taken from the fort itself – those stones, tiles and masonry blocks. There was no danger of damaging the fort's defences though; by then, Othona had likely been abandoned for nearly two centuries.
Othona Fort and the Saxon Shore
There are two main theories about why the Romans built the Othona fort. Perhaps it was meant to defend against barbarian Saxons from across the North Sea, who may have been taking advantage of Rome's decline by raiding along the east coast. Or perhaps the enemy was the continental Roman empire, during the times when Britannia became a breakaway province with rebellious rulers. The area was put to similar use in the 1940s; you can still see the anti-tank ditches prepared in case of German invasion.
But those defences were never used, and recent research suggests that the Romans didn’t intend Othona for actual military action either. Instead, the second theory is that this was a logistics outpost, connecting Britain to northern Europe and mainly used for supplying the Roman army with meat.
Like the other forts of the so-called Saxon Shore, Othona stands in an isolated spot near the sea, and attracted people to form a new settlement. It's the first (and so far, only) instance of people living in that area permanently.
These forts were built around the same period (late third/early fourth-century), and together they ring the south-eastern corner of England's coast – so modern historians have tended to label them collectively as the Saxon Shore forts. However, it's not clear that they were all built for the same reasons, or that they were intended to be a group with any common purpose. Some, like Othona, remained occupied for a while after the Romans officially left Britain around AD 410, and some fell out of use even earlier.
What shall we do with an abandoned fort?
After the Romans left, Britain broke up into competing small kingdoms, including several in south-eastern England made up mostly of Saxons who'd crossed the North Sea to settle. In 653, the monk (later Saint) Cedd was sent by the Northumbrian king to become the bishop of the East Saxon kingdom in modern-day Essex. He landed near Bradwell-on-sea and chose the abandoned Roman fort as the site for his first church.
Academic opinion is divided, but I think the current St Peter's probably isn't Cedd's church. It's more likely he had a timber church, maybe intended to be temporary, maybe within the fort's remaining walls. Cedd's task was to convert the pagan Saxons, and for that he needed a minster – a base for sending out missionaries – not a place to house worshippers. The chapel that drew its materials from the old fort probably came a little later, when something more permanent was needed, and reflects design choices that became common across Britain only after Cedd's death.
Even with the apse and sacristy, St Peter's seventh-century chapel was a plain structure, built of necessity with freely available second-hand local material. This speaks of a time when a church's purpose wasn't, as in later centuries, to provide a community hub or a place to gather; these missionary churches were flags planted in hostile pagan territory.
The afterlife of Roman building materials
Othona isn't the only Roman structure to have been repurposed by later generations, but St Peter's is unusual in surviving for so long. And arguably, the site's purpose didn't change that much after Cedd's arrival; it was still part of a project to impose on Britain values and practices brought across from Rome. It's fitting that a site built as part of Rome's imperial control was later used to convert the barbarians to the religion first brought to Britain by those same Romans. If Cedd was aware of the site's history, he may well have chosen it for exactly those associations with the imperial past, as well as the handy building supplies and secluded, monastic location.
The modern St Peter-on-the-Wall
Thanks to its remote and peaceful location, St Peter's is now in regular if infrequent use, and is the destination of an annual pilgrimage. But this chapel was never intended to make a statement glorifying God, like you see with later church designs. A Society of Antiquaries report in 1770 considered that the chapel's use as a barn was a fall from grace, but that slightly misses the point – after all, wasn't Christ born in a common stable? The chapel's humble appearance and uses seem quite fitting. St Peter's, with its no-frills simplicity, is a step on the road from functional, domestic Roman-era house churches (essentially a private room in a house) towards the grand statements of medieval cathedrals. And the modern world has space for both.
Image Credits
---
Further Reading
Online
Anglo-saxon Churches: http://www.anglosaxonchurches.co.uk/bradwell.pdf
Bradwell Chapel online: https://www.bradwellchapel.org/
British Pilgrimage Trust, St Peter's Way: https://britishpilgrimage.org/portfolio/st-peters-way/
English Heritage, the Saxon Shore: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/romans/roman-coastal-defences/
Escomb Church, County Durham, for another, larger, Saxon church built from Roman materials: https://escombchurch.co.uk/
National Churches Trust: https://www.nationalchurchestrust.org/church/st-peter-wall-bradwell-sea
Society of Antiquaries: https://archive.org/details/archaeologiaopt241sociuoft/page/439/mode/1up
St Albans' Cathedral, Hertfordshire, for an abbey, also built (on a much larger scale) from Roman materials: https://www.stalbanscathedral.org/
Norwich Anglican Cathedral, for more on Saxon conversion.
St Alban's Cathedral, for more reuse of Roman materials.
Tyler Bell, ‘Churches on Roman buildings: Christian associations and Roman masonry in Anglo-Saxon England’ in Medieval Archaeology 42 (1998)
Tyler Bell, The Religious Reuse of Roman Structures in Early Medieval England (2005)
DJ Breeze et al, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: The Saxon Shore and the Maritime Coast (2022)
J Cotterill, ‘Saxon raiding and the role of the late Roman coastal forts in Britain’, Britannia 24 (1993), 227–39
Johanna Dale (ed.), St Peter-On-The-Wall: Landscape and heritage on the Essex coast (2023)
Mateusz Fafinski, Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain: The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone (2021)
Richard Hoggett, The Archaeology of the East Anglian Conversion (2010)
Richard Hoggett, ‘The early Christian landscape of East Anglia’ in The Landscape Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, N. J. Higham and M. J. Ryan (eds.) (2010)
Morris & Roxanne, ‘Churches on Roman sites’ in Temples, Churches and Religion, Warwick Rodwell (ed.). (1980)
A Pearson, The Roman Shore Forts: Coastal Defences of Southern Britain (2002)
John Potter, ‘The Occurrence of Roman Brick and Tile in Churches of the London Basin’ in Britannia, Vol 32 (2001) - Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies: https://doi.org/10.2307/526953
Stuart Rigold, 'Litus Romanum – The Shore Forts as mission stations', in The Saxon Shore, D E Johnson (ed.) (1977)
W&K Rodwell, Historic Churches: A wasting asset. (1977)
Comments