St Peter-On-The-Wall

Landscape and heritage on the Essex coast

Edited by Johanna Dale

£35.00

ISBN: 9781800084360

Publication: May 15, 2023

Paperback £35.00 Open Access PDF £0.00 Hardback £50.00

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The Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the ruins of a Roman fort, dates from the mid-seventh century and is one of the oldest largely intact churches in England. It stands in splendid isolation on the shoreline at the mouth of the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, where the land meets and interpenetrates with the sea and the sky. This book brings together contributors from across the arts, humanities and social sciences to uncover the pre-modern contexts and modern resonances of this medieval building and its landscape setting.
The impetus for this collection was the recently published designs for a new nuclear power station at Bradwell on Sea, which, if built, would have a significant impact on the chapel and its landscape setting. St Peter-on-the-Wall highlights the multiple ways in which the chapel and landscape are historically and archaeologically significant, while also drawing attention to the modern importance of Bradwell as a place of Christian worship, of sanctuary and of cultural production. In analysing the significance of the chapel and surrounding landscape over more than a thousand years, this collection additionally contributes to wider debates about the relationship between space and place, and particularly the interfaces between both medieval and modern cultures and also heritage and the natural environment.

Praise for St Peter-on-the-Wall

'Dale has expertly marshalled a series of expert contributors to what is an attractive, wideranging and hugely informative volume. The chapter by Kevin Bruce and Christopher Thornton (Ch. 7) does a thorough job in charting the missing medieval centuries, exploring evolving lands, owners, farms and fisheries, to which St Peter-on-the-Wall will have been a quiet, neglected witness.'
Medieval Settlement Research

'A major contribution to the historical record, and is beautifully edited, and handsomely produced. It would be great to see this book in every public library in Essex, so if you live near one do order it for their shelves.'
The New English Landscape

Johanna Dale is Research Fellow in the Department of History at UCL.

List of figures
List of tables
List of abbreviations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: A contested landscape
Johanna Dale

Part I: St Peter’s Chapel and its pre-modern contexts

1 St Peter’s Chapel: What the building has to tell us
David Andrews

2 The Roman fort of Othona
Andrew Pearson

3 Dengie, Ythancaestir and Othona: The early medieval landscape context of St Peter-on-the-Wall
Stephen Rippon

4 Cedd, Bradwell and the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England
Barbara Yorke

5 Put to good use: The religious afterlife of the Saxon Shore forts
Richard Hoggett

6 Early medieval monasteries on the North Sea coast of Anglo-Saxon England
David Petts

7 Land, marsh and sea. Transformations in landscape and farming at Bradwell on Sea, c.1086–c.1650
Kevin Bruce and Christopher Thornton, assisted by Neil Wiffen

Part II: St Peter’s Chapel and its modern contexts

8 ‘A building of altogether exceptional interest’: The rediscovery of St Peter’s Chapel in the nineteenth century, and its restoration in the twentieth
James Bettley

9 ‘And withal a great silence’: The spiritual landscape of the Othona community and St Peter-on-the-Wall
Ken Worpole

10 A case study in vulnerability: Bradwell A, a trial environment for nuclear power Gillian Darley

11 The St Peter’s Way: Leisure, heritage and pilgrimage
Johanna Dale

12 Maldon and the Blackwater Estuary: Literature, culture and practice where river meets sea
Beth Whalley

13 The last of Essex: Contemporary architecture and cultural landscape
Charles Holland

14 Care and maintenance in perpetuity? The nuclear landscape of the Blackwater Estuary
Warren Harper and Nastassja Simensky

Index