Saint Mary, Lower Slaughter

The belief that in the 12th century Lower Slaughter had an independent parish church derives from a wrong assumption, and the claim that in the late 12th century the tenant for life of Lower Slaughter manor had given demesne tithes there to Evesham Abbey seems groundless. It may derive from the annexation of the living of Lower Slaughter to the rectory of Bourton-on-the-Water, of which the abbey was patron. By 1235, when from architectural evidence there seems to have been a church at Lower Slaughter, the Rector of Bourton had some glebe in Lower Slaughter, and two years later he successfully intervened with the king on behalf of several of its inhabitants. The nonappearance of Lower Slaughter in ecclesiastical records of the late 13th century indicates that by that period, if not before, it was annexed to Bourton. From the 16th century to the 18th the church was usually described as a chapel of ease, but in the 19th century it was more often called a parish church. The change may have resulted from the keeping of separate registers for Lower Slaughter (from 1813) and from the establishment of a right to burial there. In the 16th century some inhabitants at least were buried at Bourton, and although between 1667 and 1699 there were a few burials inside Lower Slaughter church none is recorded in the churchyard before 1770. In 1741 the inhabitants claimed and the rector denied the right of burial at Lower Slaughter. The burials there from 1770 on were evidently a departure from former practice. In 1954 Lower Slaughter was severed from Bourton and the benefice united (the parish remaining distinct) with Upper Slaughter. 

In 1650, when it was suggested that Lower Slaughter should be separated from Bourton, the value of the Lower Slaughter living was put at £60 a year. Fifty years later the endowment included a house and farm buildings, two yardlands amounting to 50 a. with the usual stints for commons, and tithes. By the inclosure award of 1731 the glebe and tithe were commuted for c. 250 a. worth over £100 a year ten years later.

This income, however, went to the rectors of Bourton or their farmers, who from 1532 maintained a curate at Lower Slaughter. In 1563 it was complained that the cure was inadequately served, but in 1593 the curate was a graduate and a preacher. The curates may often have been responsible for Clapton, another chapel to Bourton, as well as for Lower Slaughter, as they were in the earlier 19th century, but by 1741 the rector did not provide even one curate for the two chapels. In that year the inhabitants of Lower Slaughter complained that the rector would perform services not more than once a week and sometimes less, and communion only three times a year; that he refused burial in the churchyard, and private baptism to sickly babies; and that he hardly ever visited the sick. In 1750 there were services every Sunday afternoon; in 1851 there were morning services only. The number of services, particularly of communion services, increased with the building of the new church in 1867 and the arrival of curates to live in the village. From then on some of the curates stayed more than a few years, and the house they occupied in the village was known as the Parsonage. A new house was built for the curates on land given by the lady of the manor c. 1930, and it was this house that became the glebe house of the united benefice of Upper and Lower Slaughter in 1954. Miss Maud Mildred Whitmore (d. 1944) left £2,500 for the augmentation of the curate's stipend; after the union of benefices, when there was no named curate, the trustees were empowered to use the income for the maintenance of church services.

In the early 16th century a chantry of St. Mary, whose date of foundation is unknown, provided in theory for an additional priest, though the stipend was evidently not sufficient to keep the priest in the parish. In 1933 the £150 realized by the sale of the schoolroom was invested in trust for ecclesiastical purposes.

The church of ST. MARY, a building of stone with a Cotswold stone roof, comprising chancel, nave, north aisle, organ chamber, and vestry, and a western tower with spire, was almost completely rebuilt in 1867 by the lord of the manor, Charles Shapland Whitmore, in the Early English and Decorated styles. It contains, however, an early 13th-century arcade of four bays and a piscina of the same period. The arches of the arcade are of two chamfered orders supported on plain round columns with octagonal scalloped cushion capitals; the easternmost bay may be a 19th-century copy. The piscina has a semi-octagonal projecting basin, scalloped inside. The arcade suggests that the rebuilding was roughly to the plan of the earlier church, and c. 1700 the church had a north aisle and a western tower with a saddleback roof. By 1851 there was a gallery.

The church contains monuments, from the late 17th century, to members of the Whitmore family buried in the north aisle. Of the six bells, one is thought to be by Robert Hendley of Gloucester (fl. c. 1500), two are by Edward Neale of Burford, 1683, and three were made in 1866. The plate includes a chalice and paten cover of 1576. Baptisms, marriages, and burials at Lower Slaughter were entered in the registers of Bourton-on-the-Water until 1813.