Church of St Mary the Virgin, Great Bedwyn

The Church of St Mary the Virgin is the parish church of Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire, a Grade I listed building of the twelfth century standing over substantial Saxon remains — and the resting place of Sir John Seymour, father of Henry VIII's queen Jane Seymour and grandfather of King Edward VI, whose splendid armoured effigy makes this village church a place of Tudor pilgrimage.

The church's origins are Anglo-Saxon: in AD 905 the Bishop of Winchester purchased land in Great Bedwyn to build a church, and the remains of that Saxon building lie beneath the present one. The Domesday survey of 1086 recorded a church at "Beduinde" held by Brictward the priest, with church lands worth one and a half hides, and in 1091 the income from the church, with St Michael's at Little Bedwyn, was granted to Salisbury Cathedral — beginning an ecclesiastical arrangement of unusual grandeur. From the late eleventh century the Bedwyn prebendary at Salisbury was rector of the church, holding the status of an archdeacon with jurisdiction over Great Bedwyn, Little Bedwyn and later Collingbourne Ducis — a jurisdiction known as the peculiar of the Lord Warden of Savernake Forest, whose visitation court survived the prebend's dissolution in 1543 and ceased only in 1847. The prebendal manor belonged to the Tottenham House estate from 1567 until the 6th Marquess of Ailesbury sold the land to the Crown in 1950.

The cruciform church is built of flint with limestone dressings. The arcades are late twelfth-century — though Pevsner judged the capitals "over-restored" by T. H. Wyatt's Victorian work — the chancel was rebuilt and lengthened in the late thirteenth century, and the crossing, transepts and tower are early fourteenth-century, the tower's openwork battlements added later. Pevsner found the crossing tower "of just the right height in relation to nave, chancel and transepts". The transept end windows carry ogee tracery in a barbed design found also at the cruciform church at Downton and at Malmesbury Abbey. Wyatt's restoration of 1853–55 renewed the roofs throughout and supplied a stone font and pulpit in what Julian Orbach calls "muscular Gothic" — the fifteenth-century font being transferred to Weston in Hertfordshire — while the fourteenth-century oak chancel screen was moved to the north transept and replaced by delicate wrought-iron rails. In the south transept are two early fourteenth-century tomb recesses, one holding the stone effigy of a knight with shield and drawn sword, said to be Sir Adam de Stokke (died 1313), builder of the transepts. All six bells are seventeenth-century, the oldest cast by John Wallis at the Salisbury foundry in 1623, with a sanctus bell of 1741 by John Cor of Aldbourne.

The chancel holds the church's greatest treasure: the monument to Sir John Seymour (1474–1536) of Wolf Hall — the manor just two miles away whose name Hilary Mantel made famous. His chest tomb, displaying heraldic escutcheons, carries his recumbent effigy fully dressed in armour, hands in prayer, head resting on his helm with the sculpted Seymour crest of a pair of wings, feet on a lion, a sword by his side. The long inscribed tablet above tells the whole astonishing family story: his marriage to Margery Wentworth and their ten children — Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector of England and uncle to Edward VI; Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley, High Admiral of England, who married Katherine Parr, "Queene of Englande, and wydow to Kinge Henry the Eight"; and "Jane Qveene of Englande, wyfe to Kynge Henry the Eight, and mother to Kynge Edwarde the Sixt". Sir John was first buried at Easton Royal priory among his Seymour and Sturmy ancestors, but when that church fell into ruin, his grandson Edward, Earl of Hertford, had the body moved and entombed here at his own cost on the last day of September 1590, "as well for the dutyfull love he beareth to his said grandefather, as for the better contynuans of his memory". The antiquary John Aubrey transcribed the monument's inscriptions and recorded its heraldry — much since lost — on his visit in 1672. The church also keeps the elegant tomb of Frances Seymour, Duchess of Somerset (1599–1674), daughter of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, Elizabeth I's favourite executed for treason in 1601, and wife of William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset. Another famous name was baptised here: Thomas Willis (1621–1675), the great Oxford physician and natural philosopher who named the "circle of Willis" in the brain, was born at Great Bedwyn and baptised at the church on 14 February 1621.

In the churchyard, north-west of the church, stands the Grade II* listed base and shaft of a fourteenth-century limestone churchyard cross capped with a seventeenth-century polyhedral sundial, and facing the Church Street entrance is the parish war memorial of about 1920, a tall shaft with ornately carved cross above a three-sided wall naming the dead of the First World War; the chest tombs include several for the Tanners of Wexcombe (1797–1845) and Elizabeth Pinckney of Tidcombe (1800). The ancient parish was vast, with chapels of ease at East Grafton, Marten, Wilton, Little Bedwyn, Chisbury and Knowle — only the buildings at Little Bedwyn and Chisbury survive — and it gradually contracted as Little Bedwyn became a separate parish, East Grafton gained a church in 1844, and St Katharine's was built on the Tottenham House estate in 1864. The benefices of Great Bedwyn, Little Bedwyn and St Katharine were united in 1982, and today the parish belongs to the Savernake Team of eleven village parishes — the church of the Seymours still presiding over the country of Wolf Hall.