St Mary Bourne is a rural downland village in the Basingstoke and Deane district of Hampshire, 4½ miles NE of Andover and 13 miles N of Winchester. St Peter's is a flint church with ashlar dressings situated on the E side of Church Street, the main road through the village. It consists of a chancel, a nave with aisles and a S porch, a W tower ands a N vestry, and is unusual in having a steeply-pitched, tiled chancel roof that is much taller than the low pitched lead roof that covers the nave and aisles. The wide 12thc chancel arch survives, as do the nave arcades of the late-12thc. The chancel is of c.1300, the 3 E bays of the S aisle were widened in the 14thc. to form a chapel. and the tower is 15thc. Romanesque features recorded here are an important Tournai font, the chancel arch and nave arcades, and a loose chevron voussoir. The chancel was restored in 1855, and the church by W. D. Caroe in 1905 and 1907.

St Mary Bourne has always been included in the manor of Hurstbourne Priors, and is thus not recorded by name in the Domesday Survey. Hurstbourne Priors was held by the Bishop of Winchester before and after the Conquest, and the manor (which also included St Mary Bourne, Binley, Egbury, Stoke, Week and Swampton), was assessed at 38 hides. The church was always a chapelry of Hurstbourne Priors.

The church is described by the VCH as 'one of the most puzzling in the county'. They postulate that the thick W wall of the S chapel may have been part of a S transept or a tower in an older stage of the building, and that the position of the present chancel arch was once the E wall of the chancel. Furthermore, the 2 nave arcades are out of synch with one another. The N arcade, apparently older, has a narrow E bay and then 4 bays of equal width and finally an incomplete bay at the W end. The S arcade has five bays, but the two E bays are sightly wider, and their capitals belong to the 13thc., while those further west are stylistically comparable with the N arcade. Most notably, none of the arcade piers face their counterparts on the other arcade.

The N arcade has been shortened at the W, and Pevsner suggests that the position of the tower E wall was set by pier 5 of the S arcade, which left the N arcade incomplete.

The so-called Tournai marble is a dense carboniferous limestone quarried on the banks of the river Scheldt near Tournai and either exported as freestone for decorative carving (as at Lewes Priory (Sussex)) or worked nearby and the products, mostly fonts, exported. This vigorous industry extended from the 12thc to the end of the 15thc. An English group of seven Tournai School fonts was established by Allen and Kitchen in 1894 articles. They were: St Mary Bourne, East Meon, St Michael’s Southampton and Winchester Cathedral (all Hants), Lincoln Cathedral and Thornton Curtis (both Lincs), and St Peter’s Ipswich (Suffolk). A fragment of a Tournai font was discovered in the town ditch in Ipswich in 1894, later being moved to Ipswich museum, but it was not included by Allen in his 1903 VCH contribution, probably because it was not in Hampshire. In fact it was largely ignored until the re-examination of the material by Drake (1993). Since Allen's original paper, three other fonts have been attributed to the group: Boulge, Romsey Abbey (Hants) and Iffley (Oxon). More recent scholars, notably Drake (1993 and 2002), have cast doubt on these attributions. According to Drake, the Romsey Abbey font was said to have been destroyed c.1850 during a restoration, but there is no other evidence that it ever existed. The Iffley font is of black limestone but is uneven in shape, undecorated and unlike other fonts in the Tournai group. As for the Boulge font; Drake asserts that the finish of the bowl is too smooth for decoration to have been chiselled off it (as suggested by Eden), and points out that the bowl is too tall for its width, in comparison with genuine Tournai School products.