Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin

St Mary the Virgin is the Church of England parish church of Henley-on-Thames, standing close to the river at the heart of the Oxfordshire market town whose name derives from the Old English heahleah, the high wood or clearing. With its commanding sixteenth-century tower rising above Hart Street and the five-arched Georgian bridge of 1786, the church forms one of the most familiar riverside views in southern England, the backdrop against which the crews of the Henley Royal Regatta have raced since the nineteenth century.

The church's history is bound up with the deliberate creation of the medieval town. Henley does not appear in the Domesday Book of 1086, and the first record of a substantial settlement comes from 1179, when King Henry II is recorded to have bought land "for the making of buildings"; King John granted the town and manor of Henley to Robert Harcourt in 1199, and a church at Henley is first mentioned in 1204, just as the new river town was taking shape. The town received a tax for street paving in 1205, the bridge is first mentioned in 1234, and in 1278 Henley was still described as a hamlet of Benson with a chapel, its street plan probably established by the end of the thirteenth century. As a demesne of the crown the manor was granted in 1337 to John de Molyns, whose family held it for some two hundred and fifty years, while the town's Thursday market, believed to have been chartered by King John and certainly in existence by 1269, and the Corpus Christi fair granted by charter of Henry VI, filled the streets around the churchyard. The Black Death of the fourteenth century carried off some sixty per cent of Henley's population, a catastrophe the parish church witnessed at close hand; by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the rebuilt town stretched along the west bank of the Thames from Friday Street to the manor now called Phyllis Court, and it was in that century that the church received its great tower, still the dominant feature of the building. Next to the churchyard stands the Chantry House, one of Henley's two Grade I listed buildings, a timber-framed medieval structure unusual in having more storeys on one side than on the other, a survival of the chantry foundations attached to the medieval church.

Henley suffered at the hands of both sides in the Civil War, and in 1688 William of Orange rested at nearby Fawley Court, the Wren-designed mansion just outside the town, on his march to London, receiving a deputation from the Lords. The town's prosperity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rested on glass and malt manufacture and the trade in corn, wool and timber down the Thames to London, and the parish church presided over a town of maltsters, bargemen and innkeepers whose oldest dated building, the Old Bell on Bell Street, goes back to 1325.

The churchyard and church hold an unusually colourful company of the dead. Mary Blandy, who lived at Blandy House in the town, was hanged at Oxford in 1752 for poisoning her father Francis, who had opposed her engagement to an already-married Scottish officer; on the scaffold she asked, "Gentlemen, don't hang me high for the sake of decency." Despite the law forbidding the burial of a murderer in consecrated ground, she was laid to rest with her parents at St Mary's, and she is said to haunt the Kenton Theatre, her family house and the churchyard itself. Charles-François Dumouriez, the French Revolutionary general who won the battles of Valmy and Jemappes before defecting from the Republic and ending his days an exile in England, was buried at the parish church in 1823. The Victorian painter and angler John Greville Fennell, who lived in Henley, lies here too. Most visited of all is Dusty Springfield, the great soul singer, who died in 1999 and whose funeral was held at St Mary's, where her memorial stands in the church grounds; part of her ashes were scattered at Henley and part at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, and each year her fans gather in the town for "Dusty Day" on the Sunday nearest her birthday in April. The parish has brushed wider history many times besides: Humphrey Gainsborough, brother of the painter Thomas and himself a notable inventor, ministered in the town as a dissenting pastor in the eighteenth century; William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons who defied Charles I in 1642, was born in Henley; and the town's later residents have ranged from George Harrison at Friar Park, whose gardens he lovingly restored, to prime ministers, Olympians of the Leander Club, and the actress Dame Gladys Cooper.

Today St Mary's continues as the civic and spiritual centre of a town of some twelve thousand people, its services marking the rhythms of a community famous worldwide for the Royal Regatta held each summer on the straight reach of river just north of the bridge, royal since Prince Albert became patron in 1851. The church tower, photographed from the bridge and the towpath by countless regatta visitors, remains what it has been for five centuries: the emblem of Henley, watching over the high clearing by the Thames where Henry II once bought land to make a town.