Church of the Holy Cross, Ramsbury

The Church of the Holy Cross is the Anglican parish church of the village of Ramsbury in Wiltshire, in the south-west of England, and it carries a history far grander than its quiet village setting suggests: for Ramsbury was once the seat of an Anglo-Saxon bishopric, and the church preserves some of the finest early sculptured stones in the county. A Grade I listed building in the Diocese of Salisbury, listed by English Heritage in 1966 for its exceptional historic and architectural interest, Holy Cross is a large flint church of many periods that still keeps, among its monuments, fragments of ninth-century crosses from the church that stood here when bishops resided in the village.

The dedication to the Holy Cross is recorded from at least 1405 and probably reaches back two centuries earlier; it may be connected with the feasts of the Invention and Exaltation of the Cross that gave their dates to the Ramsbury fairs granted by the king in 1240. But Christian worship at Ramsbury is far older. In the early tenth century a bishopric was established here — a fact that implies a church of considerable size — and the bishops continued to reside at Ramsbury until 1058, when the see was united with Sherborne. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 the church passed to the canons of Salisbury. The surviving Anglo-Saxon sculpture is the tangible memory of that vanished episcopal church, and it is set, fittingly, at the west end of the north aisle: a ninth-century limestone cross-shaft, three blocks from two interlaced crosses carved with a biting animal and inhabited scrollwork, parts of two ninth-century grave slabs (one with chain interlace, one with an interlaced forked cross ending in animal heads), and a third slab bearing a relief cross in the Scandinavian Ringerike style — a remarkable assemblage that places Ramsbury among the important centres of early medieval art in Wessex.

The building visible today grew up over the centuries on the site of that early church. Its oldest part is the long thirteenth-century chancel. By the late thirteenth century the nave had aisles, the easternmost bay of each aisle set apart and probably forming transepts that projected north and south. The west end — the two westernmost bays of each arcade and the aisle walls — was largely rebuilt in the fourteenth century, when the aisles were widened to absorb what may have been those transepts, and the tower too was raised in that century. A chapel was added early in the fifteenth century, when new windows were inserted in the chancel and the east end of the south aisle, and in the early sixteenth century the clerestory and a new, lower-pitched nave roof followed. A west gallery went up late in the seventeenth century, with galleries in the aisles about a hundred years later when both aisle roofs were renewed. Finally, an extensive restoration in 1891 largely rebuilt the aisle walls, giving them stepped buttresses and battlemented parapets, laid a new low-pitched roof on the south aisle, replaced the plain south porch with an elaborate late-medieval-style one, added a porch to the chancel, and swept away the galleries.

The church is built of flint rubble with ashlar dressings and comprises a chancel, a north chapel, an aisled and clerestoried nave with a south porch, and a monumental west tower. The tower rises in three stages on powerful buttresses; a great pointed three-light window lights the lower stage, a clock sits below a smaller window above, a sundial is set on the south wall, and the whole is finished with a low battlemented parapet, the roofs covered in lead and slate. Inside, the four-bay nave is divided from its aisles by pointed arches on wave-moulded piers, the two western arches and their piers more elaborate than the rest; the chancel arch has simple chamfers spreading into roll-moulded capitals, and there are carved corbels. The wide aisles, rebuilt in 1891, have eight-bay lean-to roofs against the outer walls on carved stone corbels, and the chancel keeps closely-set lancets in its north wall and a thirteenth-century doorway under a plastered vault. In the north-east corner stands the almost detached Darrell Chapel, with niches in the jambs of its east window crowned by ogee and crocketed canopies.

The fittings span many centuries. The font has a twelfth-century cup carved with a lozenge pattern that gives it the look of a pineapple — it was probably once an ornament from a doorway of Ramsbury manor house, reused when the doorway was replaced around 1775 — raised on a stem carved with scenes by Thomas Meyrick around 1842. The pipe organ in the north aisle has a painted case of 1838 and was restored about 1960; the pulpit, reading desks, communion rail and choir stalls are of limed oak, elaborately worked in the Gothic style in 1892–93, and the south aisle screen, also of limed oak, dates from 1943. There is a brass lectern, a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century panelled chest with elaborate locks, a large seventeenth-century Bible box, two brass chandeliers of 1751, and a nineteenth-century altar carpet, probably Persian; the mechanism of the church clock in the nave is the work of Robert Hay of London, dated 1866. The bells tell their own story: there were four in 1553, replaced by six cast by Abraham Rudhall of Gloucester in 1708, the tenor recast by Warner & Sons of London in 1865, the whole ring rehung in 1981. The parish registers are complete from 1678.

Holy Cross is unusually rich in monuments, several of them of national interest. In the chancel stands a fifteenth-century chest tomb of Purbeck marble, with four panelled bays, a massive canopy of nine-lobed arches and an articulated fan-vaulted ceiling on reticulated columns. Most striking is the monument of 1682 to Sir William Jones, Attorney-General to Charles II: a marble chest with a cartouche and inscription, the bewigged figure of Sir William half-reclining with a scroll in his hand, behind him a sarcophagus of black marble beneath a painted shield and an urn-shaped finial. A second Jones monument of 1775, by L. F. Moore of London, is built of black, white and red marbles, with a broad black obelisk, a medallioned bust and drapery held aside by putti above a sarcophagus. The Burdett family, lords of the manor, are commemorated by a series of memorials — to Mary Burdett (1797), William Jones Burdett (1840), the radical politician Sir Francis Burdett (1844) and Colonel Sir Francis Burdett (1892) — alongside many other tombs in the body of the church. In the Darrell Chapel three principal tombs of Purbeck marble, once enriched with brasses stripped away during the Commonwealth, all probably of the fifteenth century, recall the family for whom the chapel is named.

From an Anglo-Saxon bishop's church whose carved crosses still stand at the west end of the north aisle, through a thirteenth-century chancel and a fourteenth-century tower, to the Purbeck tombs of medieval lords and the marble monument of a Restoration Attorney-General, the Church of the Holy Cross gathers more than a thousand years of Wessex history into one large village church. It remains the living parish church of Ramsbury in the Diocese of Salisbury, its long story — bishopric, fairs of the Holy Cross, sculptured stones and all — held quietly within the flint walls above the Kennet valley.