St Sampson's Church

St Sampson’s Church stands in the small town of Cricklade in Wiltshire. It is a large church with aisles and a central tower, built mainly in the late 12th century but with older Anglo-Saxon stonework still visible. The church is dedicated to Saint Samson of Dol, a Welsh bishop who helped spread Christianity in Brittany during the late 5th century. A stone church stood on this site as early as 973, and the Domesday Book of 1086 recorded it as belonging to Westminster Abbey. Small fragments of Anglo-Saxon masonry remain in the south wall of the nave. The church’s architecture tells a long story of additions and changes. The north arcade dates from the late 12th century, while the south arcade was added in the 13th. The chancel was built in the 13th century and later altered in the 14th and 15th. Nikolaus Pevsner called the tower ‘proud and self-certain, somewhat heavy and certainly not elegant’, and Simon Jenkins described it as ‘massive rather than graceful’. The Hungerford chapel was built for Sir Edmund Hungerford, who died in 1484. Inside, a limestone tomb with a black marble top marks the resting place of Robert Jenner, a wealthy silver merchant who left money for a local school. Outside, the churchyard holds two medieval crosses. One is a broken shaft set on an octagonal base near the northern gate. The other is a complete 14th-century limestone cross with a carved head, moved here from the High Street crossroads around 1820. The church once shared its parish with St Mary’s until 1952, when the two were united. St Mary’s was later demolished, leaving St Sampson’s as the sole parish church. Today it belongs to the Upper Thames Group of parishes, which includes several churches along the river.