Tisbury, United Kingdom

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 2 miles (3 km) 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 It was superseded in the 1770s by New Wardour Castle, a country house in Palladian style, which was the seat of the Lords Arundell of Wardour until the 20th century.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. The estate is currently the seat of Alastair Morrison, 3rd Baron Margadale, who owns land and property in Tisbury including the former abbey site at Place Farm.

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.

The Salisbury and Yeovil Railway opened Tisbury station with the first section of its line, from Salisbury to Gillingham, on 2 May 1859. The original plan for a railway west of Salisbury was to bypass Tisbury and Shaftesbury but the Quaker activist John Rutter campaigned for the line to be routed through both settlements. 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. By 1870 the line had been doubled, although the part crossing the parish was reduced to single track in 1967.

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.