Clifton Hampden is a village on the N bank of the river Thames, 4 miles E of Abingdon in South Oxfordshire. The church stands in a elevated postion overlooking the river, approached by flights of steep steps from the main road through the village. Externally its appearance owes everything to G. G. Scott's restorations of 1844 and 1866, but the interior reveals its medieval origins, It consist of an aisled nave with a W bell-turret and a S porch. The elaborate bell-turret over the W gable is Scott's work as is the porch. The S aisle is 12th in its 3 western bays, but the E bay is 14thc and opens into a non-projecting transept chapel. It contains, set into its S aisle, a long 12thc. relief of a boar hunt. The N arcade is of 4 continuous bays, i.e. without capitals or imposts, and is 14th or 15thc. The chancel is 13thc in origin but was remodelled by Scott, who also added a N organ room and vestry. Romanesque features recorded here are the S nave arcade and the boar hunt relief.

Clifton Hampden was not mentioned by name in the Domesday Survey, but (following VCH) was certainly included with the Bishopric of Dorchester. In 1070 that see was moved to Lincoln, and Clifton went with it. The bishop, however, was obliged to enfeoff much of his land, including Clifton, to meet his feudal obligations, and the lordship of the manor was divided between to three of the bishops knights: The Le Moine fee was the main one and it was held by Robert Monachus from the Bishop in 1166 and apparently remained in the same family into the 14thc.

The chapel was a daughter to Dorchester Abbey, and and was part of its endowment when it was founded in 1140. It did not gain full parochial rights until the 19thc, although it was sometimes referred to aas a parish as early as the 16thc. Technically, however, it was a chapel-of-ease for the tenants of the manor as late as 1817.

Keyser (1890) remarked that the boar hunt relief 'may have been a portion of a former tympanum'. The VCH suggests that it was probably the tympanum of the original doorway. Sherwood and Pevsner prefer the idea that it was a lintel, 'even though the subject is secular', a much more likely suggestion in view of the geometry of the stone. Keyser (1904) notes other boar hunting scenes on the lintels of S doorways at Little Langford (Wilts), and Tutbury (Staffordshire). Both are badly worn, but the Tutbury lintel seems iconographically closer to this one, having the motif of the man trampled by a boar indicated by the head remaining at Clifton Hampden. The trampling, incidentally, appears in the Aper miniature of 13thc 2nd-family Bestiaries, e.g. British Library Harley 4751, f.21r. and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 764, f. 38v.