King's Stanley.

King's Stanley sits in a fold of geography that does three things at once. North of the village the ground flattens into the Severn Vale and the Stroudwater Navigation runs east-west on its restored line, Ryeford Double Lock half a mile from the village edge and the towpath now walkable all the way through to Stonehouse and on toward Stroud. East, the River Frome (the Stroudwater) carves the parish boundary and powers the mill. South, the escarpment climbs hard to 700 feet at the crown of Selsley Common, with Penn Wood and the former Stanley Wood — once part of the great Buckholt — folding over its shoulder. The parish is 1,664 acres of unusually neat boundaries. Postcode GL10; post town Stonehouse; dialling code 01453. Population was 2,359 at the 2011 census and the village is one of the larger Five Valleys parishes — bigger than its uphill neighbours, denser than the Vale villages, with a settlement pattern that runs King's Stanley proper at the centre and Middleyard climbing the hill behind it toward Selsley West. The Cotswold Way drops through on its way from Selsley to Stonehouse.

Every layer of community here was laid down by cloth. An early parish register records a large immigration of Flemish weavers under Edward III in the 14th century, drawn in for the upland wool. By 1608 the village had 81 people working in cloth against 18 in other trades and 27 in agriculture. By 1633, 800 people across King's and Leonard Stanley were dependent on the cloth industry. The handloom weavers' settlement at Middleyard is still visibly that — a tight grain of small cottages strung up the hill, and the pub at the top is still called The Weavers' Arms (now the King's Head) in memory of who lived there. The wealth of the trade brought the great clothier houses with it: Old Castle House (1563, William Selwyn, stone-mullioned with dripmoulds and a four-centred arched stone doorway) and Beech House (early 18th-century, internal panelling possibly by the Cotswold architect Anthony Keck, who lived there and served as churchwarden until 1797). The trade also bred Nonconformity hard: King's Stanley Baptist Church traces its fellowship to 1640, making it the oldest Baptist congregation in Gloucestershire. Before the 1689 Act of Toleration they worshipped illegally under a beech tree — the "Gospel Beech" in Penn Wood on the south slope — and members were fined, persecuted and imprisoned for refusing to conform. The chapel they eventually built sits up Meeting House Lane in Middleyard, hidden by design. The Marlings, mill-owners through the 19th century, did most of the village's visible Victorian work — the playing field on Marling Close donated in 1921 is theirs, and Stanley Park House on the slope above was theirs too. From it Samuel Marling commissioned G. F. Bodley to build All Saints, Selsley, 1861–62, with a saddleback tower borrowed from the parish church of Marling in South Tyrol where Samuel had stayed in the 1860s — and Bodley, friend of William Morris, gave the firm of Morris & Co. its first ecclesiastical stained-glass commission. Selsley is the only church in the United Kingdom where every window is by Morris and Co. The Rose window over the west door is one of the small canonical Morris designs. Adam and Eve at the Creation, made on a hill above a working Cotswold mill village, in a church paid for by the man whose family ran the mill.

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