Dauntsey is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England. It gives its name to the Dauntsey Vale in which it lies. The village is set on slightly higher ground in the floodplain of the upper Bristol Avon.

Today, the parish is split by the M4 motorway, with a chain of historic smaller settlements spread either side. Dauntsey Green is north of the motorway, along with Dauntsey Church at the entrance to Dauntsey Park; to the south are Greenman's Lane, Sodom and Dauntsey Lock. Dauntsey Lock is on the Wilts & Berks Canal (presently being restored), the course of which runs alongside the Bristol-London mainline railway.

Malmesbury Abbey was granted an estate at Dauntsey in 850, and the Domesday Book of 1086 recorded a settlement of 26 households. The Brinkworth Brook defined the northern boundary of the parish, and the Avon most of the western; to the south the natural boundary is the ridge which forms the southern limit of the Vale.

Dauntsey Park House, north of the church and overlooking the Avon, has a 14th-century core; it was remodelled in the late 17th century or early 18th, and again c. 1800. The house is a Grade II* listed building. To the north, on the road to Little Somerford, are Home Idover Farmhouse (late 18th) and Idover Demesne Farmhouse (early 19th, a remodelling of an earlier building).

Sir Henry Danvers left land for a school and almshouse, together with further land to provide an income to maintain the school, in his will of 1645. The school was built c. 1667 and continued in use until it was replaced by a National School, built 1864–1866.

The family which took its name from the manor of Dauntsey is said by Macnamara to have originally been called "Oldstock", which he deduced from its Latinised name Vetus Ceppus in early charters. Ceppus or Cippus signifies in mediaeval Latin "stocks", in which a felon's legs and feet were locked.

The oldest memorial in the church is that of Joan Dauntesey who died c. 1455 and her third husband John Dewale who predeceased her. Joan was the daughter of Sir John Dauntesey who died in 1413 and it was through her that the Dauntsey Estate went to the Stradling family. Joan was born in about 1394, and when very young became the second wife of the elderly Sir Maurice Russell (d.1416) of Dyrham, Gloucestershire, who had only two daughters by his first wife. Joan produced for him a son and heir Thomas, who however died as a young man in 1431 leaving a pregnant wife named Joan, whose resulting daughter named Margery died at two days old. Thus ended the line of Russell of Dyrham. Joan Dauntsey married again, almost immediately after Russell's death, to Sir John Stradling (d.1435), the second son of the lord of St Donat's Castle in Glamorgan. The marriage was possibly arranged by Russell's son-in-law Sir Gilbert Denys (d.1422) who was from Glamorgan and was related to the Stradlings. Stradling thus obtained a life interest in Joan's dower, consisting of one third of the Russell manors. The marriage was conducted with such haste that the obtaining of the necessary royal licence for a widow of a tenant-in-chief to remarry was overlooked. The couple were fined heavily in 1417 for their transgression, as the following entry in the Patent Rolls dated 8 July 1418 reveals:

"Pardon, for 40 marks paid in the hanaper, to John Stradlyng, chivaler, and Joan late the wife of Maurice Russell, chivaler, tenant in chief, of their trespass in intermarrying without licence."