MY wife and I recently attended a Christening at Maldon’s All Saints Church.

It was a lovely occasion, made even more special by the exemplary behaviour of baby Emma and the excellent explanation of the Baptismal Rite by the Reverend Canon Stephen Carter (vicar there since 2009).

As we all gathered around the font, Stephen talked us through the signing of the cross on Emma’s forehead with oil of Chrism (or Myrh) and the pouring of water, symbolising the washing away of all sin.

It is a time-honoured ceremony that has its Biblical origins with the ministry of John the Baptist which, according to the Gospel of Luke, started around 28-29AD.

So, at that moment, on a happy Sunday afternoon in 2019, the present touched both the past and the future.

It was the beginning of Emma’s Christian journey and, later in life, she will doubtless tell people that it started at All Saints.

We don’t know when the first christening, or baptism, took place at All Saints – after all it is a 13th-century building on a presumed Saxon site.

It could even owe its origins to St Cedd’s mission to convert the local heathen tribes of the East Saxons in 653AD.

In the centuries that followed, throughout the Middle Ages and into the early Tudor period, Maldon residents would have been baptised in one of our three parish churches – at All Saints, St Peter (united with All Saints in 1244) and St. Mary the Virgin (where regrettably the original font is still missing from the building).

These special, very personal occasions went largely unrecorded until the 16th century. Then in 1538 Thomas Cromwell (chef minister to Henry VIII from 1532 to 1540) issued an injunction requiring registers to be kept of all baptisms, marriages and burials. Emma’s details are in the latest volume at All Saints, so I wanted to find the very first recorded baptism at All Saints.

Armed with my trusty copy of Lionel Munby’s Reading Tudor and Stuart Handwriting (Phillimore 1988), I consulted the now yellowed, parchment covered book that is headed in a spidery, barely legible script: “A register of the names of all such persons as haue bene either Baptized maryed or buryed within the parish of All Sainctes in Maldon, from & since the beginning of the raigne of the Quenes most excellent Maiestie that now is” (Essex Record Office reference D/P201/1/1).

The record begins in 1558, but in actual fact the entries from that year until 1598 are a transcript (made in 1598).

Nevertheless, I was on the trail of the first known baby to have been baptised at All Saints.

Sure enough, there on a page headed “Babtizmiys” is a margin date of 1558 and the following: “Rebecca Balle the daughter of John Balle was babtized the six and twenty daie of December in the year of our Lorde…”.

It’s an unusual spelling of the surname, but further research reveals that the Balles were a well established Maldon family – a Richard Balle having been the witness to a local deed as early as 1433.

His descendant, Rebecca, would have been welcomed into the church by one of Stephen Carter’s far off predecessors, Rev. William Dawes, priest at All Saints from 1551, until his resignation in 1561.

The font that William used would not, however, have been the present one.

Rather unkindly described by Rev. Leonard Hughes in his church guide of 1909 as “ugly and very modern”, it is in fact mid-Victorian.

I don’t mind it personally, but as Hughes laments: “…the original font, after lying 30 years in the crypt, was given in 1896 to St. Saviour’s Church, St. Alban’s”.

That older example was partly carved in the 15th century and enriched with roses that Rebecca Balle’s family would have noticed on that Boxing Day back in 1558, when the talk of the nation was of a humiliating defeat at the hands of the French during the Siege of Calais.

It is some consolation that the ancient font still survives at St Saviour’s, the church guide there describing it as coming from: “All Saints, Malden (sic) in 1896. The bowl is 15th century and the stem and cover (are) 18th century”.

And we might now add with certainty, it was used to baptise Rebecca Balle in the mid-16th century. Similarly we can say that the current All Saints font was used to baptise baby Emma in the 21st century, when the news was the Brexit debate.

Those two babies might be divided by the passage of 461 years, but they are somehow strangely close, thanks to the continuity of faith and written records that give us a real window into the lives of successive generations of Maldon residents.