Church of St Mary the Virgin, Harlow

St Mary the Virgin — known locally as St Mary-at-Latton — stands in Latton, now part of Harlow in Essex, a Grade I listed Norman church that has watched its quiet parish become a post-war New Town. Anglican and liberal Catholic in tradition, it served the ancient parish of Latton for nearly nine centuries before Harlow New Town, created in 1947, swelled the population so greatly that the parish was divided in three, the northern portion keeping the old name.

The Norman church was built in 1087, the year of the Conqueror's death, and the eleventh century still shows through: a Norman window survives in the south wall, and the Norman door arch is visible above the now disused south door. The west tower had been built by 1234 — and claimed an early victim, for the chaplain Ernold of Latton fell to his death from it that very year, as the parish's remarkable list of priests records. That list reaches back to about 1198, when Roger and Anfred, "Priests of Latton", served as possibly joint rectors, and runs in substantially unbroken sequence to the present day.

The church's greatest enrichment came in 1466, when the north chapel was completed for the chantry of Sir Peter Arderne, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, whose Mark Hall estate lay nearby; fragments of its medieval wall decoration are still visible. Arderne's altar tomb, set in an opening between chapel and chancel, carries fine brass effigies of the judge and his wife Bohun (1467), and a brass of 1492 probably depicts his daughter Elizabeth with her husband Richard Harper. The church became, in effect, the mausoleum of Mark Hall's successive owners. The Altham family, who acquired the estate, added the porch in 1562 and rebuilt the tower and the west end of the nave late in the sixteenth century; their monuments include a wonderful alabaster of 1583 showing James Altham, his wife and eleven children all kneeling, and a marble monument of 1632 to Sir Edward Altham with pilasters, pediment, urns and angels. There are brasses to Frances, wife of Richard Franklin (1604), and to Emanuel Wolley (1617) and his wife Margaret (1635), a wall tablet of 1680 to the vicar Thomas Denne — one of two Thomas Dennes who between them held the living from 1600 to 1680 — and further tablets to Althams and to the Lushington, Burgoyne and Arkwright families, the Arkwrights supplying vicars from 1820 to 1864.

The church weathered the changing tastes and accidents of later centuries. About 1800 the north wall of the nave was faced in brick, its doorway and windows blocked and plastered over; the interior was restored in 1848, the tower extensively repaired in 1873 and the chancel in 1888. Then came two twentieth-century disasters. In 1945 a V-1 flying bomb damaged the church, destroying the stained glass on the south side; repairs took until 1950. And in 1964 fire — thought to have started when a workman's cigarette rolled into the organ — destroyed the rood screen and forced a complete restoration in 1965. The blaze might have consumed the whole church had it not been spotted early by a parishioner tending her son's grave. A vestry was added on the north side of the nave in 1971, and the tower was restored once more in 1977.

Today St Mary-at-Latton continues as an active parish church of the Diocese of Chelmsford, its vicars since the Second World War running from J. Oliver White through Ian Stuchbery, Barry Rose, John Pratt, Peter Beech and Shaun Conlon to the Rev Lynn Hurry, vicar since 2008 — the latest in a line of pastors stretching back more than eight hundred years, serving a Norman church that has outlived the manor families it commemorates and gathered a New Town around its medieval walls.