About Us

There is a printed guide to the church, available for £3, and we also have a digital InfoPoint tour which works on your mobile phone or tablet, and includes audio guides and puzzles.

St Peter’s church dates from about 1200, and is an excellent example of the Early English and Decorated styles of architecture. Pevsner and Sherwood describe it as ‘an impressive church for a small village, with many fine details’ (The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire, 1974). The elegant arcades separating the nave from its north and south aisles belong to the first period. The original structure was enhanced by a perfect late-13th-century chancel. In the 14th century the north and south aisles were extended to include two side chapels. The present tower was added in the early 15th century but retains the original doorway. In the early days of the Oxford Movement, St Peter’s was chosen as the subject of the very first volume published by the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture, as an excellent example to be copied. That led to a first major restoration in the 1840s, by the architect John Macduff Derick, a pupil of Sir John Soane who built the Bank of England. There was another restoration at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly of the chancel and the south aisle, by George Frederick Bodley and Thomas Garner. Between the wars a last significant refurbishment of the interior was carried out by the Muirhead family of Haseley Court.

There are many fine windows, by John Hardman, Charles Gibbs, Burliston and Grylls, Geoffrey Webb, and Stewart Bowman. Among other items of particular note are the Norman font, mediaeval encaustic tiles, two mediaeval stone coffins, the 12th-century effigy of a knight, the piscina, triple-sedilia and tomb recess in the chancel, a 16th-century table tomb, a reproduction of Sir William Barendyne’s ‘tilting helm’, and the Jacobean pulpit.

The manor lands of Great Haseley belonged for centuries to the royal family and their close allies. In 1467 Edward IV gave the manor to his queen Elizabeth Woodville, who in 1478 granted it to the Dean and Canons of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. They became patrons of the living, and in recent years we have been invited to an annual service at St George’s at which prayers are said for the parish.

In 1542 Henry VIII persuaded Windsor to appoint as Rector the noted poet and ‘father of English local history’ John Leland, who had composed verses for Anne Boleyn’s coronation a few years earlier. As the richest of the livings belonging to Windsor, Great Haseley soon attracted high-fliers, many of whom held other appointments and never resided in the parish, but employed curates to do the work. Owen Oglethorpe, as Bishop of Carlisle, crowned Queen Elizabeth I in place of the Archbishops. One of the few Rectors who did live here was John Harding, one of the translators of the Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible in 1611. Christopher Wren, father of the architect, and Rector from 1638, rarely visited Great Haseley, but he did install the bells. Bruno Ryves, Rector and also Dean of Windsor after the Restoration, donated the splendid silver communion set, now housed at St George’s (and on display at our annual visit).

Thomas Delafield, who was born in Little Haseley in 1690, and became Vicar of Great Milton, wrote an extensive account of our village in his unpublished Notitia Hasleiana. Of the village he says: ‘It hath a good Air, and a pretty cleanly Scite, being founded on a Natural Rock, and is (in short) an Healthful and agreeable place of Habitation.’ In the nineteenth century William Birkett, curate from 1832 and Rector from 1846 to 1875, presided over the first restoration of the church. Then his successor Henry Ellison, Rector from 1875 to 1894, who had founded the Church of England Temperance Society in 1862, turned his energies to providing wholesome activities for the village people, centred on the new Village Institute.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen big changes in church attendance and organisation, as well as in patterns of worship. Since 1988 Great Haseley has been linked with Great Milton and Little Milton in a three-parish benefice, with the Rector being based not in our village but in Great Milton. St Peter’s still seeks to be ‘the church at the heart of the community’ of Great Haseley parish, which includes Little Haseley, Latchford, and Rycote. Whether you are a local resident or a visitor from further afield, you are warmly welcome, and we hope you enjoy looking round.