Shelley is a partly rural village and partly residential conurbation in the Ongar civil parish of the Epping Forest district of Essex, England. The former civil parish of Shelley focused on the parish church and the manor house of Shelley Hall at the north of the parish, and was bounded at the north by the civil parish of Moreton, the south by the A414 Harlow to Chelmsford Road, the east by the B184 road from Chipping Ongar to Great Dunmow, and the west by the southeast-to-northwest Moreton Road which edges Shelley Common with its Roding tributary of Cripsey Brook. The village church is just west off the B184 Fyfield road, and north, separated by farm and fields, from the conurbated southern area of Shelley contiguous with the small market town of Chipping Ongar. Shelley is west from the county town of Chelmsford. History In the Domesday Book, Shelley is listed as "Senleia". Shelley manor was of 13 households, with five villagers, five smallholders, and three slaves, and included one lord's plough team and two men's plough teams. There were of meadow, and woodland with 150 pigs. Before the Conquest, lordship was held by Leofday, under the overlordship of Esger the Constable; after which in 1086 the manor was given to Reginald, under Geoffrey de Mandeville who was Tenant-in-chief to William the Conqueror. Shelley was described in 1848 as "a small parish of scattered houses, between the river Roding and Cripsey Brook, 1½ miles north from Chipping Ongar". At the time, Shelley Hall, west from today's parish Church of St Peter, was home to the Lord of the Manor and principal landowner. Of Elizabethan style, it was extensively restored in 1869. Shelley Hall is today a Grade II* listed gabled, timber framed and brick clad house dating to the 14th century with 16th- to 18th-century structural additions and internal fittings. By 1848, the former mansion of Bundish Hall, 1⁄2 mile (800 m) north from the church, had been reduced to a moated farmhouse, and is today partly within Moreton parish. The church in 1848, built in 1811 on the site of a decayed and unused former church, consisted of a small nave, a brick chancel and a western wooden turret with one bell. The parish incumbency, in the gift of the Lord of the Manor, was held by the rector of Stapleford Tawney, with Shelley glebe land, attached to the rectory