England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Chitterne All Saints

The Parish

The parish of Chitterne All Saints lies in southern central Wiltshire roughly 7 miles east of the market town of Warminter. The village of Chitterne, home to both All Saints & St Mary's parishes, sits on and immediately north of the B390 road which connects Heytesbury with Shrewton. Even today Chitterne shows two faces, the portion of All Saints largely being confined to a valley running northwards from the B390 whilst that of St Mary lines that road to the west. Chitterne sits upon chalk and its position was created as a spring-line settlement where the water-table first creates a flowing stream, to the north most water sits sub-surface. The landscape surrounding Chitterne is part of the early landscapes preserved on the thin-soiled downlands with tumuli, barrows and ancient field systems documented on modern Ordnance Survey maps. Sitting within the Wiltshire Downs Chitterne's economy would have been dominated by the grazing of sheep, largely for the wool trade, today much of the downland has been ploughed and is definitely arable. In modern times the downland has been requisitioned by the army and most of the land to Chitterne's north is out-of-bounds being within the firing ranges of the Imber Ranges. The small stream which rises within sight of All Saints' church drains the parish southwards soon meeting the River Wylye, that heads southeast merging, in turn with the Nadder and then the Avon before reaching the south coast and the English Channel through Christchurch Harbour. Chitterne is sited at around 90 metres above the sea but spreading downland rises mostly northwards reaching 189 metres at the nearby Knook Barrow site. All Saints' parish was the larger of the two parishes by both acreage and population, the parish covered almost 4,300 acres of mostly downland and supported a population of close to 400 parishioners. Even in Domesday times Chitterne was shared by two landowners, perhaps the origins of the two parishes lies with the separate manors held by Edward of Salisbury & Earl Aubrey de Courcy; collectively the two manors totalled 13 ploughs and the usual meadows, pastures & woodland.

The Church

All Saints' church sits a couple of hundred yards north of the B390 on the eastern side of the lane heading for Tilshead, Sadly this is not some medieval masterpiece nor, indeed, is it the venue for these marriages as it was built to replace the medieval predecessor in the early 1860s. The church is built in a representation of the Perpendicular style using fint & stone to create a chequered effect. The basic structure follows the standard late-medieval layout of nave & chancel with a western tower but is augmented with a polygonal apse at its eastern end. The church was clearly of little architectural interest for Pevsner as his account is a mere 3 lines of descriptive text. The street passing, Townsend, is suffiecitly broad to allow parking outside the churchyard which is surrounded with a low brick wall. The churchyard is little bigger than its church with insufficient room to allow the photographer to get far enough away in the favoured southeastern aspects, hence the better views are from the west and from outside the churchyard.