The Cotswold village of Upper Slaughter is 4 miles (6.4 km) SW of Stow-on-the-Wold. The village spans the River Eye, with a ford between the two sides. Upper Slaughter is one of the small number of Thankful Villages which lost no men in WWI. The village also lost no men in WWII, an achievement known as a Doubly Thankful Village. The church of St Peter lies on a high point above the village centre on the S bank of the river. It is noteworthy as the parish church of the Reverend F. E. Witts, whose diary was used as the basis of ‘The Diary of a Cotswold Parson’ by David Verey, recording the life of a well-off parson in the early 19thc. The Reverend Witts is buried in a splendid mortuary chapel added to the N side of the chancel in 1855. The nave has a N aisle and S porch. A tower was built inside the W bay of the nave in the 14thc. The church was sympathetically restored by J. E. K. Cutts in 1877 (Cutts 1877 and 1882).

Upper Slaughter was held as two manors by Offa and Lewin in 1066 and as one manor by Roger de Lacy and his mother in 1086 (Domesday Survey). The manor may have been subinfeudated by the late 12thc. to members of a family who used Slaughter as a surname (VCH).

It is assumed that the tower arch and fragments of Romanesque sculpture in the tower come from an earlier tower at the W of the nave, although there is no sign of this on the W face of the present tower. Furthermore, at the height of the heatwave in 2022 no parch marks could be seen where the foundations of such a tower might have been. Alternatively, the sculpture might have come from the chancel, which was rebuilt in the 14thc.

The S doorway has also had a chequered history, having been blocked in the 1822 work on the building and re-opened by Cutts in 1877. It is possible that the tympanum comes from the original S doorway. According to Cutts: 'Of the old South Doorway, many voussoirs of moulded work, some caps and the greater part of a tympanum were found in the South wall, and have been built into the new Porch for inspection and preservation' (Cutts 1877, 129).