Saintbury is a tiny hamlet on the western escarpment of the Cotswold, just a stone’s throw from the fantastically famous town of Broadway. It’s a place we might easily have passed by.

It’s a slightly straggly place, with some beautiful farm buildings and some fine houses both large and small, but it is the church that drew us, and that sits outside the village, high on the hill.

Our interest was sparked by Herbert Evans, our trusted travelling companion from the very start of our travels, who wrote in 1905, “It was as vicar of Weston and of Saintbury that one of the pioneers of the New Learning in England spent the evening of his days. This was the learned and modest William Latimer, the friend of Grocyn, Linacre and Erasmus. Himself a fellow of All Souls he shares with the two former the honour of planting the study of Greek at Oxford.

Like Grocyn, he left behind him hardly any written proofs of his scholarship, but both for his intellectual and moral worth we have the unimpeachable testimony of Erasmus: in one of his epistles, he styles him “Vere theologus integritate vitae conspicuus”

In another he begs Latimer to help him prepare a second edition of his Greek Testament for the press, from which Latimer excused himself on the ground that he had not touched Latin or Greek for some years and was engaged in other studies. He died in 1545 and was buried in Saintbury churchyard.

I am told that in the East window may be seen the figure of an ecclesiastic in the attitude of prayer with the legend “San Nicolas priet pur W.L.”

This is most likely a portrait of Latimer.