Hartney Wintney is a village in Hampshire, 3mi NW of Fleet and 8 mi E of Basingstoke. The cruciform church of St Mary comprises a nave and chancel faced in flint and puddingstone rubble, with later N and S transepts of red brick, and an imposing flint-faced W tower. The original church - with an aisleless nave and chancel - was largely (if not entirely) rebuilt in the 13thc., although there is a surviving pillar piscina. The building, notable for its wall paintings, galleries and box pews, is now in the hands of the Churches Conservation Trust.

Hartley Wintney belonged to the manor of Odiham which, in 1086, had two churches. The advowson of St Mary Magdalene’s in Hartley Wintney was granted to Wintney Priory, a convent of Cistercian nuns founded nearby between 1154 and 1171 (Hare, 2015). Various dates have been suggested for this grant, with the VCH suggesting that St Mary's was part of the original endowment of the Priory. Most authors have assumed that church served the Priory as well as the parish. The Priory’s calendar of prayers records the rebuilding of the church in stone in 1234. This may have been a partial rebuilding, since it has been suggested that the chancel has Anglo-Saxon features (Bullen et al. 2010, 314). Wintney Priory was dissolved in 1536.

Brick transepts designed by William Gover were added to the church in 1834 and the W tower was erected in 1842-43. St Mary’s was superseded by a new parish church dedicated to St John the Evangelist, designed by E. A. Lansdowne, in 1869-70. Thenceforth, the building was used principally for burial services.

The church guidebook suggests a date of 1220 for the pillar piscina. The fieldworker suggests that it appears to date from the late 12thc; a date of c. 1200 seems likely. Being a discrete object, it could have been retained from an earlier church on the site.