Fitting somehow that Sir Hardy Amies (1909-2003), the urbane and witty designer of The Queen’s clothes for almost 50 years, should have lived and died in the village of Langford, in west Oxfordshire.

The village was listed as a Royal estate in the Domesday Book of 1086 and the church of St Matthew – in the graveyard of which Sir Hardy is buried – may well be the oldest in the county. And Nikolaus Pevsner suggests in his Oxfordshire guide that this royal connection may account for the extraordinarily high quality of the craftsmanship there.

He wrote: “The central tower and south porch incorporate the most important Saxon remains in Oxfordshire.”

And he adds that the work could have been carried out by Saxon masons after the Conquest. “The sculpture and architectural decoration shows a knowledge of developments in the chief centres of art in England in the C10 and C11 and are certainly not by local craftsmen.”

Those craftsmen, whoever they were, knew how to introduce a timeless simplicity of line into their work – of which Sir Hardy must certainly have approved. Approaching the south porch, for instance, it is all too easy to mistake the Saxon effigies of Christ Suffering and Christ Triumphant for modern sculptures – by Epstein perhaps, or even Henry More.

That the two statues are weather-beaten merely emphasises this, as does the fact that at some point in their long history they have been wrongly re-set: Christ’s arms have been reversed (left for right) in the crucifixion, and the attendant figures of St Mary and St John now look away from Christ instead of towards him; and Christ Triumphant, with his long fluted tunic and outstretched arms, is now, sadly, decapitated.

An exhibition to celebrate the centenary of Sir Hardy’s birth – Sir Hardy Amies: A Century of Couture, viewable by appointment only (call 0207 734 2436) – opened earlier this month at 14 Savile Row, London, where he started out in business in 1946. It has refocused attention on his extraordinary war record in the Special Operations Executive, during which he personally assassinated two high-profile Nazis. Surely this church and village must represent the kind of Englishness for which he was fighting.

He was born in Maida Vale, the son of a valuer with the London County Council, and a dressmaker mother – who had an enormous influence on him and introduced him to London couturier Lachasse for his first job in 1934.

He bought the 17th-century School House in Langford in later life in order to be near his sister Rosemary who had already bought a cottage there. Immensely rich – his business turned over £250m in 1995 – he studied the ways of the English upper crust unashamedly, and revelled in the role of a self-confessed snob. He described his Langford house as “almost a gentleman’s abode” and furnished it with William and Mary furniture.

He told The Oxford Times in 1999: “I have been successful because I have lots of gifts, including the ability to see a thing finished. With the Royals, as with all my customers I make a point of seeing them myself.”

He added: “Without being impertinent, the Queen hates bullshit and I never give her any of it.”

He had a huge sense of history and was keenly aware that a sense of fashion, of the moods of ages, always influences decorative arts. All the same, a kind of seamless common sense – tweeds in the country; silk in town – was what he sought to achieve when designing clothes.

He used Anglo-Saxon words where he deemed them appropriate. He once said: “What’s the use of f***ing up the cloth with a whole load of seams?”