Place Name
A church has stood in Battersea since as early as AD800. Indeed the church lasted throughout the Middle Ages with occasional structural work as featured in the records of 1379. But in the late 18thCentury the parishioners of St Mary’s decided that a new building was needed and Joseph Dixon was brought in to design a brick building with a square tower and a spire. The name Battersea itself was first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon charters of AD693 as Badrices īeg or Badrices ege or even Batrices ege (according to an 11thCentury copy of the charter) it comes from a man’s name, Beaduric or Badric, and the Old English word ēg meaning island, referring to a dry patch of land surrounded by marshes. Before the Norman Conquest the land was in the hands of the crown but the newly installed King William gave it to the church. By the time of the great Domesday survey of England in 1086, the land was owned by the abbey of St Peter at Westminster, whose monks used the place as a convalescent home and one of their principal manors supporting the Abbey, and it was being referred to as Patricesy. By the 14thCentury it had reverted to its original name mentioned as Batriseye in 1366 and various other spellings including Batricheseie and Batricesege. In 1595 it was being written as Battersea.
