Church of St John the Baptist, Horningsham

The Church of St John the Baptist is the Anglican parish church of Horningsham, a village on the south-western edge of Wiltshire hard by the great Longleat estate, whose lords have shaped the church's fortunes for centuries. A place of worship has stood on this elevated site since the twelfth century; the present building, with its fifteenth-century tower, is a Grade II listed building in the Diocese of Salisbury.

The church was built in 1154 by Sir Robert de Vernon, Lord of Horningsham, who chose his site with care — the nearby spring of water was surely a deciding factor in that age. Sir Humphrey de Bohun endowed it with land, animals and a house to guarantee the presence of a priest. The earliest description we possess comes from a pastoral visitation of 1224: a stone church with a shingled roof, called St John the Baptist though not yet formally dedicated, possessing a baptistery but no proper font. There was no churchyard and the site was unfenced, leaving animals free to wander among the graves. By a visitation of 1408 a font, a cemetery and a fence had been added — though the fence was found damaged, and the parishioners were ordered to repair it before Christmas or pay a fine. The church records of the seventeenth century paint a picture of a building constantly "out of service": doors, windows and walls forever needing repair, a state of affairs the documents blame squarely on the negligence of the priest, whose numerous failings they describe at length.

The first major reconstruction came in 1783, when the south wall was demolished and rebuilt and the porch moved to the north side; inside were two galleries, one reserved for the singers. In 1810 the chancel was rebuilt and the north aisle raised to align with the rest of the church, the work financed by Lord Bath, with services held in the chapel at Longleat while the builders were in. The singers' gallery was rebuilt in 1817, and the music in those days was provided by three clarinets, a flute and a viola da gamba — a classic west-gallery village band.

By 1835 the growing population had outgrown the old church, and thoughts turned to a new one. Construction began in 1843 and was completed in September 1844, to designs by T. H. Wyatt and D. Brandon, who rebuilt everything except the fifteenth-century tower in dressed limestone: a north aisle was added and the rest of the church enlarged to seat a further two hundred people, the entire cost borne by the third Marchioness of Bath. The result is a handsome Perpendicular-style church of nave and aisles, chancel with south chapel and north organ chamber, north porch, and the medieval tower at the south-west over the entrance — three storeys with diagonal buttresses, a Tudor-arched west portal with ornamental-hinged Victorian double doors, Perpendicular windows, pierced decorative louvres to the belfry, and a moulded string course with carved grotesque animals beneath an embattled parapet with crocketed corner pinnacles. An octagonal stair turret with embattled parapet rises on the north side of the tower, and the north porch carries a quatrefoil-and-lamb cornice.

Inside, the nave runs to seven bays, the west bay divided off by an ashlar wall with a pointed doorway, a painted inscription frieze and a carved stone royal arms. The arch-braced nave roof is finished with carved pendants, the arcades rise on slender columns with foliated capitals, and the tall, wide chancel arch is hollow-moulded with composite responds. The chancel, the full width of the nave, has a four-bay roof with carved angels on the trusses; medieval tiles survive in its polychrome-tiled floor, and the sacristy keeps pierced screens and painted biblical inscriptions on its friezes. The furnishings include a pierced stone reredos, brass candelabra, a cylindrical stone pulpit with pierced panels, an octagonal stone font at the west end and well-made benches. The east window holds a Crucifixion, and the glass in the south chapel and west window dates from the 1860s. In the sacristy are monuments saved from the earlier church: a classical marble tablet to Thomas Davis (died 1807) by H. Westmacott, another to William Crumbleholme (died 1828) by Chapman of Frome, and a Baroque stone tablet of 1727 whose inscription is no longer legible.

A snapshot of 1910 catches the church in its Edwardian heyday: full every Sunday, with bells welcoming the congregation, the schoolmaster Thomas Welborn serving as both organist and choirmaster, the whole Bath family in their pew to hear the sermon, the servants and tenant farmers seated behind them and the rest of the village behind those — attendance being expected of everyone. English Heritage listed the church at Grade II on 11 September 1968, and the last major conservation work was carried out in 2003. St John the Baptist remains open to visitors and holds services every week, as it has — despite negligent priests, wandering livestock and broken fences — for nearly nine hundred years.