June 24 2006. Continuation of reading following the visit to Ingatestone (mainly Reaney’s Place Names of Essex Cambridge University Press 1969) indicates that it is situated in that part of the East Saxon Kingdom which became Chelmsford Hundred, extending along the Roman Road from London to Braintree and Bury St. Edmunds, from the crossing of the River Wid 20 and half English miles from London, to less obviously defined wooded backcountry now termed Young’s End nearly at the 38th mile post. In other directions the hundred was not extensive, but did join the probably originally superior Rochford Hundred at the old crossings of the Crouch estuary at Hull and Battlesbridges.

Ingatestone Parish Church is one of the few situated near this route in Essex and like other exceptions is probably a late addition to East Saxon settlement which avoided Roman roads and former settlements. Later extensions of these villages around old church sites are a mile or more away on the redeveloped Roman Road and given names such as Margasetting Street, the Street in Little Waltham etc. New market towns like Chelmsford and Braintree had the original church off the road. The new Braintree church was built on the Roman settlement and directly in line with the road. It has a glacial erratic boulder incorporated into a tower built after the market opened in 1199. Widford is another church on the road. The building has apparently been even more extensively “restored”, like the rest of the exterior walls at Braintree. At Ingatestone the erratic boulder was left in the churchyard, and not reused. At the time of the Domesday Survey the name Inge was sufficient for the manors most adjacent to the stone, and the previous extended moot area given allied names later such as Mountnessing (Ginga in 1087) and Margaretting (Ginga). However, when one of the central but secular manors of Inge had a second St. Mary’s Church built on it, probably at the same time as the present c.1100 Ingatestone Church exterior, it was obviously helpful to refer to the original site where rents were paid to the nuns as Inge at the Stone. Later when King Henry II gave the other old St. Mary’s Church to Friars of Jerusalem Hospital, it became Frierning. The first known use of the name Ingatestone was therefore after the arrival of the Friars, when it was recorded as the nuns’ property Ginges ad Petram in 1254. Having gone over much of the ground himself, R. Reaney goes with Morant and the consensus and rejects the idea which he credits to the 1913 book by Wilde and Christie, linking to stone to some hypothetical Roman milestone, rather than the more conspicuous erratic stone still in the churchyard. Probably the ancient Saxons knew nothing about Roman milestones and very little about their roads, but did find the erratic a convenient marker for meetings along the old track. What has undermined this interpretation has been the previous emphasis on the erratic also being used as a milestone by the Romans. This seems highly unlikely even though their mark would have been 30 yards beyond it if they wished to indicate 25 Roman miles from London along the route surveyed for the 18th Century 22nd milestone.