St Michael & All Angels, Horsenden, a Grade II* listed building, stands adjacent to the grounds of Horsenden Manor. There has been a church on this site since at least 1210, although the present church is part of a larger 15th century building.
There were a few subsequent alterations: in 1765, the nave and the west tower were demolished and the present tower built (it contains a bell dated 1582); and in the late 19th century, the chancel was extended 8ft to the east.
Inside, a 16th c screen separates the chancel from the nave, with 14thc patterned tiles, almost certainly made near Penn, on the floor. Either side of the altar there are remarkable Victorian tiles depicting an eagle with the head of a calf and vice versa. The stained glass in the south windows (right), regarded as some of the best of its period (1900), is by Westlake.
Horsenden occupies an very important footnote in history: Edward Stone, Rector from 1737 (and related by marriage to the Grubbe family, see the History page), working on the principle that, as he wrote, 'the general maxim that many natural maladies carry their cures along with them or that their remedies lie not far from their causes,' discovered, when thoughtfully walking along a river bank one day, that chewing willow bark helped his rheumatism, and reported this landmark discovery to the Royal Society in 1763. The active ingredient was later shown to be salicylic acid or aspirin. Stone, a keen amateur scientist, also wrote scholarly papers on astronomical parallaxes.
He later served in various parishes around Chipping Norton, where a blue plaque has been erected to commemorate his discovery of aspirin, but was, at his own request, buried in Horsenden.
This parish originally consisted of two separate manors (St Mary and St Nicholas) with two benefices and churches. These were consolidated around 1450.
Writing in 1728 to John Grubbe, Lord of the Manor of Horsenden, the antiquary Dr. Browne Willis said St Michael's had a chancel, a nave with a blocked south arcade, an embattled tower, and extended about as far as the present stables of Horsenden House. However, by 1765 it was so delapidated that the nave and tower were demolished, and only the mutilated remains of this chancel of 45 x 20ft remained, with a western tower built from salvaged material of the old nave.
Tower: this has two stages with an embattled parapet. The belfry openings in the lower stage are square-headed, and above these is a west window of two trefoiled lights, with a plain chamfered west doorway beneath. There is one bell in the tower, dated 1582.
Windows: The church has five 15th century windows (somewhat restored), all of the same design; each has three cinquefoiled lights with smaller trefoiled lights over and two-centred heads. There is a squint at the west end of the south wall, its opening now blocked, which at one time opened into the south aisle of the old church.
The roof is modern, as are all the fittings apart from the upper part of a 15th-century screen, now leaning against the west wall; this is divided into narrow trefoiled openings by stout chamfered mullions, and the spandrels are filled with alternating rosettes and leopards' faces. The modern font is octagonal, with 15th-century detail.
On the walls are memorials of the Grubbe family, the earliest to Bathewell Grubbe, 1666, the wife of an earlier John Grubbe, who died in 1700, and to whom there is another tablet.
The church plate consists of a chalice of 1661 and a small 18th-century standing paten with illegible hall-marks.
There is only one old book of the registers, containing baptisms from 1663 to 1809, burials from 1637, and marriages from 1707 to 1754, the latter entries being continued in a printed book from 1754 to 1841.
The advowson of the church has been held by the lords of the manor since 1210, when it passed from John de Horsenden to Robert de Braybrook. In 1660, however, Brian Duppa, the Bishop of Salisbury, collated to the rectory, presumably during the forfeiture of Sir John Denham's lands.