The old cemetery in South View (Holy Ghost cemetery) was the town’s graveyard or Liten from the time of King John.

During a dispute between King John and the Pope in 1208, England was excommunicated, and burials could not take place in churchyards.

The townspeople buried their dead on the chalk slope to the north of the town.

By 1244, a chapel was built, dedicated to the Holy Ghost.

For the next 700 years, it was the town’s graveyard.

The west end of this chapel survives.

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This early chapel was enlarged in the early years of the 16th century when William, 1st Baron Sandys of The Vyne, Sherborne St John, built onto the earlier chapel to create a fitting and very grand chapel as a burial place for his parents and descendants.

This chapel was dedicated to the Holy Trinity.

It had tomb slabs of black Tournai marble and the finest Flemish painted glass windows and, it is said, a splendid painted roof – the building must have looked very fine on the hill above the town.

Sadly, just a couple of decades later, during the English Reformation, the chapels were stripped of their statuary (only the niches remain) and of an image which ended up in the possession of Thomas Cromwell before no doubt being destroyed.

Two of the black tomb slabs are visible today, although not where they would have been originally.

It is possible to make out emblems on them of the Sandys’ and other connected families.

William’s parents, his wife, and the 1st Baron himself are buried here in what must be a substantial vault beneath the floor.

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A new book, The King’s Chamberlain: William Sandys of The Vyne, Chamberlain to Henry VIII, by John Jenkins, tells the story of this man whose legacy is part of our town’s history and who had to steer a careful path through Henry VIII’s troubling reign.

William Sandys was a Knight of the Garter and Jenkins points out that a fragment of glass in the south aisle of St Michael’s, which originally came from the Holy Trinity chapel, shows the Garter chain.

He also points to the pomp and ceremony which the funeral of a Garter Knight or of his widow merits.

It’s interesting to imagine the splendour when Marjorie, wife of Baron William was buried here in 1539.

By the time the last Baron Sandys was buried in 1684, the chapel would have looked as it does today – roofless and without the fine glass it once had.

The glass had been removed from the chapel and installed eventually in The Vyne chapel.

Painted glass given to St Michael’s by Reverend Chute was further damaged in the 1940 bombing and it is fragments which survive in the church today.

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