Writing in 1931, Victor Strode Manley, as part of his Regional Survey Of Warminster And District, made the following notes about All Saints Church at Norton Bavant:
Patron – Lord Chancellor.
The Church is on slightly raised ground, is small, and though it has been much restored, looks very ancient. Yet we know nothing of its history except – “there is an excellently carved head of Edward I or II built into the wall of the Vicarage (History Of Warminster, page 124).
It contains the mausoleum of the Bennet-Stanford family. Its cure is a rector, i.e. one who need not be a priest (in which case he must have one to assist him) but who receives the Great Tithes and not the lesser. In my Folkore Of The Warminster District, page 30, I have noted the old custom of the rector “Takin’ Seisin’, a young pig of his own choosing. This is the Herezeld or Sasine, as mentioned by Sir Walter Scott in “Guy Mannering’, chapter 55, but it seems to have fallen into desuetude. As the Scots Infeftment it was “to give a title to heritable property.”