3400 x 5100 px | 28,8 x 43,2 cm | 11,3 x 17 inches | 300dpi
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There has been a church on this site for over 900 years and its name is usually taken to mean that it is the oldest of the City churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Stow, in his 1598 Survey of London, mentioned various dignitaries who were benefactors or who were buried in the early church. These include Richard Chaucer, vintner, a relative of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. In 1510, Sir Henry Keeble, a grocer and Lord Mayor, financed the building of a new church on the site. When he died in 1518, however, the tower was substantially unfinished and remained so until 1629 when two legacies enabled it to be completed. The church was said to have been among the largest and finest of the City's churches and a number of City notables were buried there. John Milton, the poet, married his third wife in the church in 1663. The parish registers date from 1558, the year Elizabeth I ascended the throne. All documents now extant are deposited in the Guildhall Library. The post-Fire church, built in the period 1679-82 under the supervision of John Oliver, one of Christopher Wren's deputies, does, however follow the Late Perpendicular style of the Keeble church. There are probably several reasons for this: the fact that it was the wish of the parish that the structure of the new church should as far as possible be like that of the old, the greater independence which the parish had in the design of the church because they were not reliant on money from the Coal Tax, and the economic sense of making use of the walls and the foundations that remained after the Fire. The church is the only surviving Wren church in the City of London built in the Gothic style.
