Chiselhampton

[3] The Domesday Book of 1086 does not mention Chiselhampton by name, but it ascribes a fee of land here to William Fitz-Ansculf of Dudley Castle.

Maps of 1628 and 1743 record it as a four-gabled mansion with a large dovecote and an orchard, and an estate plan of 1741–42 shows the house's west front as having eight bays.

[3] Chiselhampton's oldest building is Camoys or Camoise Court, a moated stone-built farmhouse of the 14th century.

[10] The exterior is plain but the entrance hall has a fine, curved, cantilevered staircase, galleries at the first and second floors and is lit by a glass umbrella dome.

St Mary's had no graveyard: villagers buried their dead at Stadhampton, which was another of Dorchester Abbey's chapels and Peculiers.

[12] Until 1706 St Mary's chapel was reported to be in a good state of repair, but by 1717 the parish curate had taken the villagers to the peculiar court in Dorchester for failing to pay the church rate for the building's upkeep.

In 1763 Charles Peers told the court that St Mary's was in "so ruinous and decayed a condition that the inhabitants cannot assemble for worship without manifest hazard [to] their lives", and so he requested permission to demolish the chapel and build a new one.

[3] In 1763 Charles Peers had the Medieval chapel demolished and the materials re-used to build a Georgian church on a new site beside the main Oxford - Stadhampton road.

The interior is fitted with box pews, a west gallery on Tuscan columns,[13] a carved altarpiece and a Jacobean pulpit which is presumed to have been re-used from St Mary's chapel.

Concealed electric lighting was installed in the pews in 1956 but St Katherine's is still largely lit by its candle-lit candelabras.

[17] Services are still held in St Katherine's three or four times a year, including reenactments of historic Anglican liturgy and west gallery music.

A bridge has existed since at least 1398, when a presentment complained that "the King's road" at "Cheselhampton Brygwey"[18] was flooded so that "men with horses and carts cannot pass thereby".

Over the years it has been rebuilt with stone arches, altered by successive repairs, extended, and in 1899 widened with steel troughing.

[20][21] By the time the English Civil War broke out in August 1642 Chiselhampton was a strongly Puritan community.

On the night of 17 June Prince Rupert led about 1,000 cavalry and 800 infantry from Oxford across the bridge[3] to try to capture the payroll of the Parliamentarian army of the Earl of Essex.

The payroll evaded capture, but on the morning of 18 June the Prince overpowered Parliamentarian garrisons at Postcombe and Chinnor.

The Prince returned his infantry to Chiselhampton to secure the bridge while his cavalry ambushed a pursuing force in a skirmish at Chalgrove Field, mortally wounding one of the Parliamentarian commanders, Colonel John Hampden.

The crash was variously attributed to either a Luftwaffe night fighter or friendly fire by a local anti-aircraft unit.

Inside St Katherine's parish church
Armstrong Whitworth Whitley V similar to Z6667, which crashed on Chiselhampton Hill