Great Tew is an English village and civil parish in Oxfordshire, about 5 miles (8 km) north-east of Chipping Norton and 8 miles (13 km) south-west of Banbury, close to the Cotswold Hills. The 2011 census gave a parish population of 156. This qualifies it for an annual parish meeting, not a monthly parish council. The village has largely belonged since the 1980s to the Johnston family, as the Great Tew Estate, with renovations and improvements.

In Old English, the toponym Cyrictiwa – "Church Tew" – distinguishes the village from neighbouring Little Tew, which then lacked a church, and Nether Worton which seems not to have had a place of worship until the 12th century. In the 17th century, some Raynsford family genealogical records mention the village as "Tew Magna".

Evidence that the area has been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age includes a barrow about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of the village. Under Roman rule, a villa connected to a road was located 1.5 miles (2.4 km) southeast of the village at what is now Beaconsfield Farm. The villa was rediscovered in the 17th century and excavations have subsequently revealed a hypocaust and mosaic floors, pottery from the 3rd and 4th centuries, and some evidence that Roman occupation may have begun early in the 2nd century.

The main settlement moved to its present location in the Anglo-Saxon era. Ælfric of Abingdon held the manor of Great Tew by 990 and became Archbishop of Canterbury in 995. Ælfric died in 1005, leaving Great Tew to Saint Alban's Abbey. In 1049–1052 the abbey leased Great Tew:

Leofstan, abbot, and St Albans Abbey, to Tova, widow of Wihtric, in return for 3 marks of gold and an annual render of honey; lease, for her lifetime and that of her son, Godwine, of land at Cyrictiwa, with reversion to St Albans.

William the Conqueror granted the manor to his half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. It was recorded among Odo's estates in the Domesday Book in 1086.

Tew Great Park was created before the latter part of the 16th century. Sir Lawrence Tanfield, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, bought Great Tew estate in 1611 from Edward Rainsford. He deprived the villagers of timber, causing some cottages to fall into disrepair. Tanfield enclosed part of Great Tew's lands in 1622. However, most of the parish's common lands remained unenclosed until an enclosure act for Great Tew was passed in 1767. After Tanfield died in 1626, followed by his wife Elizabeth in 1629, Great Tew passed to his young grandson Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland. In the 1630s Lucius gathered together a Great Tew circle of writers and scholars, who included Abraham Cowley, Ben Jonson and Edmund Waller. During the English Civil War the young Viscount fought on the Royalist side and was killed in 1643 at the First Battle of Newbury. Great Tew remained in the Cary family until the death of Anthony Cary, 5th Viscount of Falkland in 1694.

Viscount Cary lived in a large manor house that seems to have been built in or before the early 17th century and extended in the latter part. In 1736 the political manager Susanna Keck married Anthony Keck MP who had inherited the manor. It was demolished in about 1800, but surviving adjacent structures from about 1700 include stables, a dovecote and a stone gate piers.