Avening, a village and a parish in Gloucestershire, 4 miles S of Brimscombe station on the G.W.R., 2 1/2 S of Minchinhampton, and 7 SSE of Stroud. It lies within the parliamentary borough of Stroud, and has a post office under that town; money order and telegraph office, Minchinhampton. The parish includes the hamlets of Aston, Forest-Green, Nags Head, and Windsors-Edge, and part of the chapelry of Nailsworth. Acreage, 3724 ; population of the civil parish, 894; of the ecclesiastical, 1908. The manor belonged anciently to the Saxon Earl of Gloucester, of which he was deprived by the Conqueror, who gave it to the nuns of Caen. At the suppression of the foreign monasteries it was held by the kings till it was given to the nuns of Sion House, and passed by exchange for lands near Windsor, from Henry VIII. to Lord Windsor, from whose family it passed to the Shepheards. A large tumulus, known as the Longstone, and supposed to be the sepulchre of a Danish chief, occurs in a field near Gatcombe Park, and there are several barrows in which human skeletons have been found. The living is a rectory in the diocese of Gloucester and Bristol; value, £273. The Norman part of the church was built by the direction of the Conqueror, whose architects, who built the two monasteries at Caen for him and his queen, doubtless directed the building of the Norman part of Avening Church, which corresponds in many features with the architecture of the church at Caen. There is a Baptist chapel. Dr Frampton, a former rector, was made Bishop of Gloucester in 1681, and became one of the Non-jurors. Another rector, Dr Bull, was appointed Bishop of St David's in 1705.
