When Sean Moran first set foot in Tisbury, Massachusetts, in autumn 2023, it felt like home, even as he debarked onto foreign soil. The quaint town, semi-seasonal, ensconced in rolling hills and rambling woodland was all strikingly similar to the village 3,000 miles away in Wiltshire county, on the island of Great Britain, that he had just left: Tisbury, England.
“It’s almost exactly the same as Martha’s Vineyard,” he said during an interview over coffee and biscuits in the village of Tisbury last fall. “What shocked me when I was driving around [the Island] was I could have been on one of the back roads here, with sheep in the fields…. The only difference between us is that they have coastline.”
The existence of the two Tisburys (well, actually three, but let’s leave the suburb of Tisbury in New Zealand aside) is far from coincidence, especially for Moran. The link goes back to the founding of Martha’s Vineyard as an English colony, to Thomas Mayhew Sr., baptized at St. John the Baptist Church in Tisbury, England, before he crossed the sea and named a town in its honor.
It was in service of that church that Moran came to the Island, from one Tisbury to another, to raise money for the new stained glass in the church’s east window. He succeeded not only in fundraising, but also in rekindling a flame of connection between the towns, a tinted window bridging two worlds whose links waxed and waned over the past four centuries.
It all began with that aforementioned Mayhew, a small-time merchant who became the seventeenth-century owner and honorary governor of the Vineyard. He and his family were the only early settlers from Wiltshire county, the rest mostly coming from the poorer Kentish Weald. Mayhew was a common name around Tisbury and neighboring Chilmark in Wiltshire, though in many variations. Dr. Charles Banks, who in his multivolume The History of Martha’s Vineyard (1911) compiled the family’s history, recorded Mayhowe, Mao, Maow, Meye, Mayeo, Maiewe, Mayhue, Mahu, Maho, and Maihew among the spellings he found in English documents at home and abroad. Banks also confirmed Mayhew’s relation to Thomas Macy, born in Chilmark, England, to whom he “sold” Nantucket for thirty pounds sterling and two beaver hats: “one for myself and one for my wife.”
Aside from genealogy, little is known of Mayhew’s early life. His father, a “yeoman,” died when Mayhew was young. After growing up in the village of Tisbury, Mayhew settled in nearby Southampton as a merchant, shipping goods to New England colonists before becoming one, eventually buying the Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands in 1641 from colonial authorities.
Thirty years after his purchase, a then-octogenarian Mayhew created “Tisbury Manor” and the municipality of Chilmark, which later became separate towns. “At four score years the thoughts of the elder Mayhew had doubtless turned to the place of his birth, and the scenes of his boyhood days,” wrote researcher Ida M. Wightman in a 1921 article for the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America. “Mayhew had risen to an unique position among his colonial confreres, and the recollections of the Tisbury in ‘Merrie England’ with its manor house and tithe barn aroused within him a desire to become the first of a line of Lords of the Manor in another and younger Tisbury in this new-found world.”
How strange that two old English toponyms – the archaic use of the word “Tissebiri” dates back to at least 759 C.E. and was apparently named after the Saxon leader Tysse, while “Chieldmearc” was likely named for a waypoint – should end up on these sandy shores. And yet, though the names endured, their connection wavered.
It was Banks who rekindled these links. He was a guest of the Tisbury, England, vicar in 1898. Upon returning to the Island, Banks gifted Grace Episcopal Church in Vineyard Haven a replica of the St. John’s baptismal font, where Mayhew was christened. The churches remained a touchpoint of connection. In the 1960s, Grace Church rector Donald Lyons established correspondence with the English church. That culminated in a gift to the Island: a cutting from the ancient yew tree from the St. John’s churchyard, one of the oldest in England and a powerful symbol of the village. The cutting still grows adjacent to Grace Church.
Local historians on both continents, too, have kept those links alive, as Tisbury, England, historians Jill and Peter Drury wrote in A Tisbury History (HarperCollins, 1980). “Two travelers from America who came to Tisbury in 1977 were looking for more tangible evidence of the past. They were Mrs. Shirley Mayhew and her daughter, descendants of Thomas Mayhew,” they wrote. “Mrs. Mayhew had come to search through the parish records for details of her family. Not only did the visitors find what they were looking for, they also made friends with many people in Tisbury and Chilmark,” which, they wrote, “led to exchange visits, which again forged the link between Chilmark and Tisbury, England, and their counterparts in the U.S.A.”
It was a 2022 letter to the editor in the Vineyard Gazette from Island historian Thomas Dresser writing about the original Tisbury that awakened my own interest. He wrote of the strange coincidence of the Black Dog pub in Chilmark, England, and the project at St. John’s to refurbish the old east window. To an amateur local historian and seeker of less-celebrated aspects of the Island’s past, it seemed the crowning jewel of Vineyard arcana.
The more I learned of the two towns’ strange connections – the (famously ornery) sheep farmers of English Chilmark, the semi-seasonal economy, the strong presence of Londoner blow-ins as a landlubber’s analogue to Island washashores, and their varying camaraderie and tension with the locals – the less this felt to me like mere historical bric-a-brac. Something interesting, I felt, was at the heart of this cross-Atlantic phenomenon. When I moved to Italy in the summer of 2024, the barrier of distance to investigate it all but disappeared. So, in September of that year, I booked a flight and a couple of trains and prepared for an encounter with the original Tisbury, hoping to add my own chapter to this cross-oceanic history.
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When you first get a glimpse of St. John’s church in Tisbury, you see a little piece of the soul of that village: quaint, worn, earnest, stone, a gathering place for the Tisburghers – a local name for denizens of the village – now as in millennia past. “The thing about Tisbury is, it’s been here a very long time,” said local historian Christina Richard, in a group interview with Moran and east window project organizer Rosalind Russell.
It was no exaggeration: Stonehenge, constructed around 3,000 B.C.E., is just next door, and Tisbury once had a Neolithic stone monument too (later deconstructed by a rogue Romantic aristocrat). Later came Celtic fortifications, Roman dominion, Anglo-Saxon settlement, and an eighth-century abbey built on the current church site.
Though the church itself has only been present for around 800 years, the yew in the churchyard is much older. It is an imposing figure. Its hollow core, now filled with cement, was once so large that villagers would host picnics within it. Some estimates put it at 2,000 years old, others at 4,000, among the oldest in England, perhaps sacral to the druids.
Once built, St. John’s church became, and remained, a community keystone. “The church was really the center of what became the village,” Richard said. And while it has accrued elements in many styles over its lifetime (Norman Romanesque, Gothic, Jacobean, Victorian, Modern), the east window was particularly significant. It previously held a work from famed Victorian artist Charles Clutterbuck, but his glass art has significantly degraded over time – although some of the best-preserved panels will be reincorporated into other church windows.
“This was not one of his greatest windows,” Russell said. “There’s a suspicion that it was done by his son, and it wasn’t fired properly. So, a lot of the details just deteriorated.” A later attempt at restoration exacerbated the issues, and during a structural evaluation more than a decade ago, the church congregation was told they had to decide whether to restore or replace the window. The decision wasn’t easy – some hoped to hold on to the ancestral window – and was complicated by the small size of the congregation, who could not alone fund it. “The only way to go forward was to try and get everybody in Tisbury involved in some way, shape, or form, that they saw it as their window. That’s what we had to tap into,” Moran said.
That effort eventually extended to the other Tisbury as well, where Moran recalled a warm meeting with Grace Church’s Rev. Stephen Harding and other church officials soon after arriving on-Island in the fall of 2023. “They took a decision on the afternoon that I visited to make a significant donation,” he said. One of the window tracery elements now bears the name of Grace Church, forever memorializing Islanders’ contribution to the project.
“We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just give one piece to them, and have that [piece] belong to Tisbury, Massachusetts,’” Moran said. “So now there’s a reason for Martha’s Vineyard residents to come and visit.”
In the book commemorating the completion of the window – which was dedicated on February 9, 2025, twelve years after the congregation found out that they had to replace the window – a message from Grace Church appears next to their panel at Tracery No. 19, which features a little lavender moth on glowing-white trefoil ground. “The connection we share is deep and abiding, both as to Tisbury and in God,” the Island congregation wrote in a memorial message, before quoting the English poet John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” “Our two souls therefore, which are one, /…endure not yet / A breach, but an expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat.”
Besides strengthening the connection between the two Tisburys, the fundraising efforts for the east window also served to bring the Wiltshire community together around a common goal: raising the £228,000 to complete the restoration. “I just think that’s such a wonderful thing,” Moran said. “We’re all very different people, but we’re all very enthusiastic about Tisbury…they took it on as their own window because they live here,” he said of the village’s organizers and donors.
For a project focused on unity, Moran said, they could not have made a better choice than selecting stained-glass artist Thomas Denny – who combines artistic and spiritual sensitivity in his work – to do the restoration.
When I first met Denny, minutes after stepping off the tracks at the Tisbury train station, he made an immediate impression. I had disembarked after a long voyage onto a quiet path beside the River Nadder, which babbled along in its channel beside the lush-green churchyard, ancient lichenous sarcophagi, and gravestones peeking up from the grass. And there was Denny, wispy white hair and ice-blue eyes, in repose of the yard’s stone benches. After excitedly showing me the church’s fifteenth-century wooden scissor arches, Denny explained his youthful love of old buildings (his father was an architect) and his early inspiration to contribute to them, to work in the context of their well-worn beauty.
“I was interested in the idea of stained glass because of the idea of making works of art for beautiful and sacred places and thinking about how a work of art can be incorporated into something that’s already beautiful and complete,” he said. Over the past decades he has completed windows in prominent churches across the Isles and in the United States at Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York. Working within the constraints of the highly technical medium, Denny said, provides its own inspiration – a kind of common language focuses his artistic expression.
“This project is really special because so many people from Tisbury are involved,” he said. Its composition is organized around the themes of seeing and revelation, tying together scripture and local scenery into “a kind of Wiltshire Epiphany.” Yellow, blue, and fiery orange strike across the scene with vivid luminosity from the central Messiah in Epiphany before followers and wild beasts of the Wiltshire countryside. An ancient yew, Nadder Valley alder, and Neolithic monument provide Tisburghian context, while delicate moths, symbolizing resurrection, pepper a composition jaggedly laced by leaden webbing.
“This is all about seeing, and then it’s also placed in landscapes that evoke Wiltshire,” Denny said, describing the window, “and it’s also about those people and, in a way, the whole community of Tisbury and how they’ve contributed to [the window] and feel about it and want it to be important to them.”
To work within an ancient church still charged with the passions of the contemporary community brings a deeper richness of meaning to Denny’s work, he said. “The tendrils of history are just entangling us…. That is a wonderful thing about history, and something I’ve always wanted to draw into what I do.”
This church, this window, and the movement to replace it, in their ever-interweaving of past and present, are in their way representative of the greater movement toward connection between the Tisburys. The window is more than just the locus of this renewed connection, though it is that as well. It is representative of this tendency, among residents of these two towns, and two islands, and of mankind in general, to seek out the past and to tie it back to the present, a present that includes oneself.
