History of Ramsbury

Domesday Book of 1086 recorded a large settlement of 156 households at Ramesberie.

The earliest written history of Ramsbury can be traced from the Saxon era when the bishopric of Ramsbury was created in 909 AD. The Bishop of Ramsbury was an episcopal title used by medieval English-Catholic diocesan bishops in the Anglo-Saxon English church. The title takes its name from the village of Ramsbury, and was first used in the 10th and 11th centuries by the Anglo-Saxon Bishops of Ramsbury. In Saxon times, Ramsbury was an important location for the Church, and several of the early bishops went on to become Archbishops of Canterbury

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The Roman Villa at Littlecote is also in the parish.

Between 1942 and 1946, during the Second World War, there was a Royal Air Force airfield known as RAF Ramsbury on a ridge of high ground to the south of the village.

Fairs

Throughout the Middle Ages, Ramsbury traditionally held two annual fairs – a livestock fair in the spring, and a hiring fair or Mop fair at Michaelmas. Nearby Marlborough's tradition of holding one Mop each side of Michaelmas ("Little Mop" on the Saturday before and "Big Mop" on the Saturday after) was originally a means to accommodate the (then) more prestigious Ramsbury Mop. By the 19th century, both fairs had become cattle fairs. The spring cattle fair (traditionally held on 14 May) ceased in 1939. The Michaelmas fair slowly lost its original agricultural connections, becoming purely a funfair in 1946 before ceasing in the 1950s.

An annual carnival was instituted to replace the fairs and survived until the 1990s, but has in turn been replaced with a biennial street fair which sees the High Street closed from the Square to the Memorial Hall.

Burdett Street

Ramsbury Building Society

The Provident Union Investment Society was founded in Ramsbury 1846, becoming the Ramsbury Building Society in 1928. It was headquartered in the Square until 1982 and took as its logo the ancient wych-elm which grew immediately opposite. Subsequent mergers saw the building society being subsumed into the Regency and West of England Building Society, then the Portman Building Society, and finally the Nationwide Building Society.