Church of St Andrew

The Church of St Andrew is the Anglican parish church of Ogbourne St Andrew, a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, in the south-west of England. Dating from the twelfth century and belonging to the Diocese of Salisbury, it has been listed at Grade I — the highest category — since 27 February 1958, recognised for its particular historic and architectural interest, and it stands on the western side of the village within sight of a Bronze Age barrow in its own churchyard.

The church's medieval history is bound to one of the great monasteries of Normandy. Maud of Wallingford confirmed her gift of the church to the Abbey of Bec in about 1148, and after the abbey appropriated the church at the end of the twelfth century it was served by a chaplain. A vicarage was ordained in 1208, with the Abbot of Bec presenting as prebendary of Ogbourne, and under Edward I the prebendary received the right of archidiaconal jurisdiction in the village — a right exercised by officials of the Prior of Ogbourne and, later, by the Dean and Canons of St George's Chapel, Windsor, or their lessees, from the fourteenth century until the mid-seventeenth. The Crown presented to the vicarage in the fourteenth century as keeper of Ogbourne Priory, though the Abbot of Bec tried to recover the patronage in 1335, and in 1421 the advowson passed with the prebendal estate to the Dean and Canons of Windsor. The parish was served in plurality with Ogbourne St George from 1951 until the benefices were united in 1970, and in 1974 the united benefice joined the Ridgeway group ministry, whose rector is named by a patronage board of five members including a representative of the Dean and Canons of Windsor.

The vicarage was poor by the standards of the diocese's prebendal churches, though in 1535 the vicar's annual income exceeded the Marlborough deanery average. In the mid-thirteenth century he received two shillings from the Prior of Ogbourne on St Andrew's Day, and in the 1660s £20 a year from the Dean and Canons of Windsor to supplement his tithe income; by the fifteenth century he held all tithes except corn, hay, wool and lambs, gaining the wool and lamb tithes (except from Poughcombe and Rockley farms) in the seventeenth. The vicar's house was humble — three rooms on each of two floors in 1650, described in the early nineteenth century as a country cottage unfit for habitation, which made non-resident vicars common — until a new brick vicarage by William Butterfield, tile-hung above the ground floor, was built in 1848 and sold after 1951. The parish's clerical history has its episodes: in 1607 the vicar Obadiah Sedgewick was prosecuted for refusing to wear the surplice or make the sign of the cross at baptism, and Bartholomew Webb was ejected in 1662. About a hundred people attended services on census Sunday in 1851; by 1864 there were morning and afternoon Sunday services, with monthly communion received by about ten communicants — and in the 1870s the faithful complained of too long a series of short incumbencies and unpopular clergy. The parish registers are complete from 1538.

The building itself preserves work of eight centuries. A new church may have been begun when the church was granted to Bec in the mid-twelfth century: the nave and its arcades survive from that era — presumed originally of three bays, reduced to two when the tower was built — with restored north and south doorways apparently added later in the twelfth century, perhaps a sign of slow progress in completing the aisles. The chancel arch was removed and the chancel rebuilt, presumably to align it with the nave, in the early thirteenth century; a new east window was inserted in the early fourteenth; and the fifteenth century brought the great changes — the tower, built intruding into the nave because the west end stood close against the churchyard boundary, the clerestory, and the widening of both aisles. The chancel roof was renewed probably in 1873, new pews were installed in the nineteenth century, and the plain post-medieval south porch was rebuilt in 1914. In 1553 the church's plate was considerable — 280 grams of silver were confiscated, a chalice of some 325 grams left to the parish — and new silver was given in 1861 to replace pieces destroyed by fire. Of the three bells recorded in 1553, one fifteenth-century bell survives, joined by three seventeenth-century bells and a fourth from the eighteenth. The church was restored between 1847 and 1849 by William Butterfield, who also made the pulpit, altar rails and pews.

The church is built of sarsen and rubble stone with sandstone dressings, its plan comprising chancel, clerestoried nave with north and south aisles, south porch, and the west tower occupying the nave's final bay. The three-stage limestone tower has a polygonal stair turret at the south-west, two-light openings to the bell chamber and a crenellated parapet; its door has flattened moulded jambs beneath a Perpendicular-style window. The aisles, first built in the twelfth century, were rebuilt in the fifteenth as their Perpendicular windows attest; the buttressed thirteenth-century chancel has lancet and ogee windows and a reticulated east window; the north door keeps a round arch with mask stops; and the roofs mix shingles, lead, slate and stone slabs over the porch. Inside, the massive round Norman piers with late twelfth-century trumpet capitals — the south-east one carved, the north-east mutilated — are the oldest fabric; the medieval roofs of nave and aisles are fifteenth-century; the tower's barrel vault covers what is now the vestry; the wall plaster is ancient; and the stoup reuses a twelfth-century trumpet capital as its base. The font at the west end is a plain octagon on a square base, and the nave's north window glass dates from 1884. The organ is a portable nineteenth-century American Estey.

The monuments are richly varied: in the chancel, a gilded alabaster wall monument of 1655 to William and Elizabeth Goddard, erected by their son Thomas, with busts clasping a skull in a recessed circular niche and, in the predella, eight kneeling children — six of them holding skulls, marking deaths in infancy; white marble and slate cartouches to Mary Tanner (died 1863, by Tanner of Swindon) and to William Large of Wilsford and his wife (died 1874); a seventeenth-century gilded limestone monument with broken scrolled pediment to Ann Seymour (died 1687); and a loose shaped ledger to Francis Wyer (died 1692). The north aisle holds nine white-marble-on-slate tablets including the Reverend Richard Heighway (died 1847) and John Pinnegar (by Tarrant of Swindon), and on its east wall a group of nineteenth-century Canning monuments — among them Sir Samuel Canning, who died in 1908, the engineering pioneer who laid submarine cables across the Atlantic and Mediterranean — while the south aisle has an early nineteenth-century polychrome monument with urn and flower basket to Robert Canning (died 1811) and his sister Jane. Four canvas-covered wooden Bible boards, a restored late seventeenth-century framed table serving as the south aisle altar, and an eighteenth-century panelled chest complete the furnishings of a church where Bec's monks, Windsor's canons and Butterfield's Victorians have each left their layer.