WHAT’S great about an ancient parish church is that, beyond the things you can see – the architecture, the monuments and painted (or stained) glass – there are hidden secrets just waiting to be rediscovered.

Located at the top of Maldon’s High Street, overlooking the former medieval market place, the parish church of All Saints is no exception.

A unique combination of triangular tower, highly decorated south aisle, Purbeck marble columns, wide Georgian nave, chancel and two chapels, all come together to make this a very special place.

Nowadays the old building has a subtle patina of the past, but pre-Reformation churches like this one would have looked very different in their day – decorated with bright Biblical images on the now white-washed walls, carved and painted statues in canopied niches, rood lofts and screens where, if saintly images survive at all, holy faces have been scrubbed from memory.

The unforgiving 16th century marked a real turning point, as the old faith was stripped away and unceremoniously thrown on to a new Protestant bonfire.

The daily rhythm of spiritual life changed forever and this is amply illustrated by All Saints’ north chapel.

Today it houses the church’s 18th-century organ (moved to this position in 1867), a new vestry, storage and a small meeting space with mezzanine floor, but look carefully and there are clues to its original age and, therefore, its purpose.

Although the east window is largely “modern” (as the architectural historians put it), the splays and rear arch are clearly late 15th century.

South of that window is a door which generations of clergy have used to access the building – just a short walk away from the vicarage. The door has a two-centred arch and was, in fact, once an internal threshold to a long-gone vestry to the east (over what is now Church Walk).

To the right of the door are the remains of a small piscina – a basin used for washing communion vessels.

In the north wall of the chapel the three windows are also late 15th century, with ornate vertical tracery.

We must ignore the west wall and arch, because these resulted from a rather drastic alteration of the nave around 1728.

So with those few clues we can establish that this now “busy” corner of All Saints’ was once an open space, added in the perpendicular style around 1450.

But what was it used for?

In the days before social housing, unemployment benefit and easily accessible health services, people turned to church-based fraternities, or guilds, for their support.

These were made up of people who lived in the same community, or parish, and often worked in the same trades. They were a bit like early mutual societies that were there for the sick, to maintain standards in both work and play, and all within a well regulated framework of faith.

Often seen as a method of trade control and a sort of devotional club, the guilds were said to be “older than the Kings of England”.

They may have even existed here as early as the Anglo-Saxon period, at the time of the Battle of Maldon in 991, but they became particularly prevalent in the 15th century.

Authority was granted to them under royal charters, or certificates, and a number of these original documents survive.One guild certificate reveals that John Crakebon and Henry Hales, identified as the masters (part of the governing body), founded a guild in honour of the Holy Trinity in All Saints’ Church in 1377.

However, that guild met not in the north of the building, but in the south aisle.

A second guild was then set up in All Saints’ and dedicated to St Katherine of Alexandria, the daughter of the king of Cyprus, martyred under Emperor Maxentius in Egypt around 305, aged just 17 or 18.

Saint Katherine (or Catherine) was one of the most important saints of the late Middle Ages, with a cult following and a feast day of November 25. We discover that Maldon’s devotees of St Katherine met in that same north chapel.

The founder and first warden was Richard Lyon Shereman and under his leadership membership quickly grew. Those admitted were bound by an oath, paid an annual fee and would have made their daily pilgrimage to the chapel that was doubtless beautifully adorned with representations of their patron saint – of the young woman herself and of the wheel on which she was so cruelly tortured and executed.

Those in the All Saints fraternity were so loyal that they left money and possessions to St Katherine’s guild in their wills. These included John Dyreck, a Maldon butcher who in 1482 bequeathed a cloak for the image of St Katherine (a statue set up in the chapel), Henry Johnson, a shoemaker who bequeathed 16d, and, in 1536, John Cheyney, a tailor, 4d.

Little did John Cheyney and his contemporaries realise that only ten years later it would all come to a drastic and abrupt end.

Two successive Acts (of 1545 and 1547) gave King Henry VIII the power to dissolve the guilds as he so wished and St Katherine’s finally fell victim in 1548.

The guild’s lands and those of the other three Maldon guilds were sold to John Welles, a Maldon fletcher.

Meanwhile, in All Saints’ the chapel was emptied and all evidence of the 100 or so years devotion to St Katherine was entirely obliterated.

All then went quiet, but in 1630 the English antiquary and poet, John Weever, visited All Saints’ and made some notes on the surviving ancient monuments he saw there. Among them, in the north chapel, he noticed the damaged tomb of Richard Lyon Shereman.

Frustratingly the key elements of the inscription had been obliterated, but he could make out that it was the last resting place of the founder of the chapel of St Katherine.

The faint and barely legible Latin verse seemed to be Richard’s plea from the grave that “whoever passes, stop, read this and weep. I am what you will be, I was what you are, I beseech you, Pray for me...”.

And so, even though the tomb has also now disappeared, we might do just that.

I walked into All Saints’, to the peaceful ambiance of a place of sanctuary that has evolved over centuries.

The north chapel is now anonymous to most, but I (and you if you so wish) can still call it St Katherine’s.

In that respect, it is no longer shrouded in mystery and because we know its story, the spirit of fraternity is still all around us.

All Saints’ Parochial Church Council (PCC) has now agreed to reintroduce the guild name into the church and the north chapel meeting room is to be called the St Katherine Room.