Church of All Saints

All Saints' Church is the Church of England parish church of Burbage, a village at the eastern end of the Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire, about six miles south of Marlborough in the heart of the North Wessex Downs, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. A church has stood in Burbage for nearly a thousand years — one is recorded in the Domesday survey of 1086, alongside four landholders and fifteen households — and the present Grade II* listed building carries that long history in its oldest parts.

The original church was of the 12th century, rebuilt in the 14th and 15th centuries, when the tower was added, with the porch following in the 16th. In 1854 the building was rebuilt by T. H. Wyatt, the prolific Victorian architect who served as honorary architect to the Salisbury Diocesan Church Building Society and rebuilt or restored dozens of Wiltshire churches; a south aisle was added in 1876. Of the medieval church, only the tower and the porch survive in the present building. The church today belongs to the Savernake team ministry.

The parish it serves has an unusually resonant history. Three-quarters of a mile to the east lay the settlement of Wulfhall, or Wolfhall — recorded in Domesday with eight households — which in the 16th century was the seat of the Seymour family, among them Jane Seymour, queen to Henry VIII. The Seymour manor house was demolished in 1723 and replaced by a larger house nearby, and Wulfhall, anciently a tithing of Great Bedwyn parish, was transferred to Burbage parish in the late 19th century — bringing the site of one of Tudor England's most famous houses within the bounds of All Saints' cure.

The village name itself derives from the Old English burh bæc, "fortification by a stream" or "fortification by a ridge", and Burbage's position on a watershed gives it a curious distinction: streams to the east drain to the Thames by way of the Dun and Kennet, those to the south reach the Salisbury Avon via the River Bourne, and those to the north and west flow directly to the Avon. The Kennet and Avon Canal, completed in 1810, crosses the parish just north of the village through the Bruce Tunnel, and the Great Western Railway's line from Hungerford to Devizes followed in the 1860s, becoming part of the London Paddington main line to Plymouth in 1906. The arrival of the railway swelled Burbage's population to a peak of around 1,600 in the 1860s; it fell to about 1,000 a century later before recovering to its Victorian level in the 21st century — a congregation history written in the rise and fall of the village itself.

All Saints has not been the village's only place of worship. A small Wesleyan Methodist chapel was built at Eastcourt in 1822 and replaced by a larger building on the High Street in 1906, which closed in 1996 and is now a private house, leaving the parish church once more the sole active church in the village. The village's first school was built at Eastcourt in 1806 and rebuilt in 1856, its Grade II listed 19th-century buildings serving generations of Burbage children until 1989. Around the church, village life continues in the old pattern — the White Hart on the High Street, the village hall, the cricket club — with All Saints' medieval tower still the parish's chief landmark above the Vale.