There are known early references between 710 and 716 to Wintra, Abbot of Tisbury, and in 759 monks of Tisbury are mentioned in a grant of land to Abbot Ecgnold and his familia (community) at
Tisbury Grange. The monastery may have been founded as early as 705 and may have been sited near an old cemetery discovered north of Church Street. at
Place Farm|alt= The Saxon settlement came into the possession of
Shaftesbury Abbey, as recorded in
Domesday Book of 1086, when there was a relatively large settlement of 90 households at
Tisseberie. The abbey's administration centre was the
monastic grange, where the 14th-century building, now a house at
Place Farm is
Grade I listed, as are the outer and inner gatehouses, built in limestone in the 15th century. The thatched
tithe barn is also Grade I listed; it is now used as a multi-purpose gallery and arts centre, managed by
Messums Wiltshire. The village's 13th-century prosperity came from the quarries that produced stone for the building of
Salisbury Cathedral, and from the wool that supported a local cloth industry. The village suffered a serious setback with the
Black Death in the mid-14th century but slowly recovered. Gaston Manor, close to the High Street, is a former 14th-century
hall house which was rebuilt and then extended in the 16th and 17th centuries. To the southwest of the village centre are the remains of the village of Wyck, a
deserted medieval village abandoned in the 14th century. Some idea of the population of the area in the 14th century is given by the number assessed as being liable to the
poll tax of 1377: every lay person over the age of 14 years who was not a beggar had to pay a
groat (4d) to the Crown. The number of taxpayers in Hatch, East and West (in Tisbury) was 152, and in Tisbury there were 281. On
John Speed's map of
Wiltshire of 1611, the village's name is recorded as
Tilburye: the cartographer or the engraver clearly having mistaken a
long s for an
l. At
Wardour, some southwest of Tisbury, the 14th-century
Wardour Castle was badly damaged in the 1640s during the
Civil War. It was superseded in the 1770s by
New Wardour Castle, a country house in
Palladian style, which was the seat of the
Lords Arundell of Wardour until the 20th century. Both the ruins and the house are Grade I listed. The Fonthill estate, formerly the site of country houses including
Fonthill Splendens (18th century) and
Fonthill Abbey (from 1796), straddles the parishes of Tisbury, Chilmark, East Knoyle, Fonthill Bishop, Fonthill Gifford, Hindon and West Tisbury. Most of the ornamental
Fonthill Lake is within the parish, as the stream which marked the parish boundary was submerged when the lake was expanded.
19th century onwards Quarrying of stone increased from the mid-18th century, and by 1846 there were 40 quarries in the parish. The industry was most active later in that century and into the early 20th, although none of the quarries extended underground. At first only passengers were catered for, but goods traffic started on 1 September 1860 with the line being extended to Exeter. Services were operated by the
London and South Western Railway. From 1861 the room above a building near to St John the Baptist parish church, known as The Rank, was used as a glove factory. It employed 36 women, and production continued until the early 1970s. In 1873 St. John's Infants' School was built midway up the High Street at the suggestion of Rev. F.E. Hutchinson. It was paid for by Lord Arundell, Sir Michael Shaw-Stewart and Alfred Morrison. After the workhouse on Church Street closed in 1868, Archibald Beckett converted it to a brewery; it was later replaced by a steam brewery which in turn was rebuilt in 1885 after a fire. Beckett carried out other improvements including the construction of a new road through the village, the present-day High Street. From 1914 the brewery buildings housed a steam-powered flour mill, and later a mill for animal feed, which closed in 1964. An
Army Cadet Force detachment was based at the Victoria Hall from 2015 to 2025. ==Religious sites==