Looking at Sussex Churches

St Mary, Chithurst

2011-12-31T12:42:00.000Z

Of the family of churches on the banks of the River Rother, Chithurst church is the poor one. As a result, it appears today much as it was built at the time of the Conquest.

Its position is a curious mixture of remoteness and proximity. Chithurst itself is only a small huddle of houses and there are five other churches within three miles, so few people have cared for this humble building over the millenium that it has stood on its curious mound next to the bridge over the river.

The church is a typical layout with a nave and chancel separated by a narrow arch, pressed down at the top as though collapsing under the weight of the roof.

The main alterations were made in the 13^th century to bring in more light, including an east window with two lights and a cusped lancet in the north wall.

In the south wall of the nave, a large pointed window with tracery was punched into the centre, but in Victorian times it was moved to the east and a matching copy inserted to the west. Intriguingly, the mason who made the copy could not resist sexing it up a little with fancier mouldings.

The only other alterations were the addition of a charming half-timbered porch and a little bellcote. Buttresses were added and then all but one removed. A circular window, recycled from Iping church, was inserted into the west wall and then taken out again for structural reasons. The ceilings were plastered and then unplastered. Chithurst church seems to actively resist alteration.

Sussex Communion Rails

2011-09-05T10:49:00.000+01:00

Communion rails are a surprisingly recent innovation, probably dating only as far as late medieval times when people began to kneel to receive the bread and wine instead of standing up. They may have also been intended to keep animals out of the sanctuary.
The earliest altar rails date from the 16th century, and the church at West Wittering (above) has a splendid set dating from that time.

By the reign of James I, altar rails had become fairly standard and a fine set from that period survives at Didling church (left). Short, fat balusters support a deep rail carved with semicircles, as though the designer wanted an aqueduct but couldn't find anyone capable of carving the arches.

As with almost all aspects of church furnishing, communion rails became higly controversial in the run-up to the Civil War. Charles I's Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, decreed that all altars should be made of stone and surrounded by rails to prevent profane use, which was regarded as close to popery by the Puritans.
Most of Laud's stone altars were destroyed in the Commonwealth, and were not, by and large, brought back at the Restoration but replaced with wooden tables. But the rails were kept – they were just too convenient for resting your elbows on when waiting for the bread and wine.

In the 18th century communion rails became more slender and elegant, often with balusters turned in a lovely barleytwist shape, like the lovely rails at Kirdford (right).

The Victorians seem to have regarded the balusters as looking too much like a fence for excluding the laity from the abode of God, and began to introduce communion rails on metal posts that could be spaced much more widely.

In the Catholic church, altar rails became controversial again after the Second Vatican Council. Many were removed, to the consternation of some congregations. The Catholic church has since back-pedalled somewhat, allowing rails to be kept if they are of historic significance.

The latest trend in church design is the Demountable Sanctuary Stage, a structure for multi-use spaces using technology developed for temporary theatres. The raised altar can be installed quickly and easily, with the communion rail slotting into holes in the front.

All Saints, East Dean

2011-08-29T09:03:00.000+01:00

The basic shape of East Dean church is unaltered from the time of its construction between the middle of the 12^th century to the first part of the 13^th. The cross shape with the tower at the middle is still there, with the impressive south door with its columns and multiple arches.

A north aisle was added in the 14^th century and later removed, leaving only the traces of an arch visible in the outside wall. A wooden spire came and went.

The tower arches were beefed up with segmental curves at some point, and it is said the tops of the original medieval pointed arches are still visible above the plaster ceiling in the crossing.

The basic plan even survived the Victorians, who in 1870 brought in not one but two architects. The rector, who was responsible for the chancel, employed the nationally-known Ewan Christian, but the parishioners, who had to pay for the rest, got John Marshall, a local builder who was presumably much cheaper. Fortunately, although much of the stonework was replaced or sharpened up, they did not interfere too much.

A pair of lovely 18^th century gravestones in the churchyard nicely illustrate two contrasting approaches to memorialising death. One is covered with symbols of mortality – a skull, a funerary urn and what looks like a bell. The other has symbols of the afterlife – the rays of God's glory, two cherubs and bunches of grapes.

It would be lovely to know if the first was erected to the gloomy old pessimist of the village, and the other to the local sunny optimist.

Monumental Brasses

2011-08-13T10:14:00.000+01:00

Margaret Camoys, Trotton

The craft of engraving a memorial into a sheet of brass and letting it into a stone slab began in the early 13th century and reached its zenith in the 14th, when the classic brasses of knights in armour and ladies in wimples were produced.

Lord and Lady Camoys, Trotton

The brass to Margaret Camoys in Trotton church is exactly what we think a brass should look like. She died in 1310 and her memorial is the first full-size brass, and the first to a woman. Wearing a wimple and flowing garments, her feet rest on a dog. Originally, enamelled shields were set on her dress. The portrait is simple, bold and moving.

Close by is a huge and superb brass to Lord and Lady Camoys, dating from a century later, showing the couple rather charmingly holding hands.

John Wantele,
Amberley

Few brasses were as large as the Camoys'. John Wantele in Amberley, for example, died in 1424, and his brass is only a couple of feet tall. It shows him in armour and surcoat, his sword by his side and his dog beneath his feet. It still has traces of the enamel that originally picked out his coat of arms.

In medieval times memorial brasses were a surprisingly large industry, dominated by several workshops in London. All the metal, an alloy of copper and zinc, was imported from Germany, which had the monopoly, so it was often referred to as latten (old German for plate) or cullen (from Cologne).

Warminghurst

In the 16th century, brasses were taken up by the middle classes. The plate got thinner and the engraving got shallower and fussier. Whole families are often portrayed, the husband and all the sons lined up on one side and the wife and daughters on the other – there is an excellent example at Warminghurst.

Henry Wilsha, Storrington

The 1591 brass to Henry Wilsha, vicar of Storrington shows him in academic dress, but the lines are barely visible after centuries of Brasso. Shortly thereafter, brasses ceased to be made until a remarkable revival in Victorian times. Arundel church even has a fine brass to the Duke of Norfolk in his Garter robes, made in 1979.

St George, Trotton

2011-08-04T08:46:00.000+01:00

Outside, Trotton'schurch is a plain 14^th century box with an earlier tower,but inside it is bursting with treasures, notably a tremendous muralon the west wall, an inspiration for the good and a warning for thebad.

It was painted in thelate 14^th century, possibly funded by a bequest of thirtysheep by Margaret Camoys, whose memorial brass is in church's centralaisle.

At the top standsChrist in Judgement, flanked by angels. Below him is Moses, holdingthe tablets with the commandments, making clear the rules for a godlylife.

But the most prominentparts of the composition are the giant figures on either side of theprophet, Spiritual Man on the right and Carnal Man on the left.Spiritual Man is surrounded by little scenes of the seven virtues,but Carnal Man is girt with dragons about to swallow figuresindulging in the seven deadly sins.

Spiritual Man is aserious, bearded chap wearing a cowl and holding his hands in prayer.Scrolls proclain his possession of the three cardinal virtues, Spes(Hope), Caritas (Charity) and Fides (Faith).

The seven virtues aretaken mainly from the Beatitudes, and start at the top with Clothingthe Naked – a woman helps a man in a loincloth into a robe. Tendingthe Sick is a rather touching scene of group round a bed, seenthrough a hole in the wall of a timber medieval house.

Inevitably, Carnal Manis much more vigorous and memorable. He is naked, and the dragons'tails point to the parts of his body that cause the particular sin.Gluttony, for example, comes from the mouth and shows an enthusiastictoper upending a bottle, with a plate of food behind him. Envy comesfrom the head, and Sloth from the left foot.

You are now wonderingwhere Lust (pictured as a naked couple embracing) is based, andindeed the dragon's tail points to the obvious place. According toProfessor Tristram, who uncovered the painting in 1902, Carnal Manwas egregiously lusting when he was originally painted, though it isno longer visible. Whether the area concerned has faded since then,or was tidied up by censorious churchwardens is not known. It isunfortunate but perhaps appropriate that Carnal Man has decayed a lotmore that Spiritual Man over the centuries.

The mural at Trottonrepresents the last gasp for wall painting. The early work such asHardham and West Chiltington are powerful and pictorial, whereTrotton is abstract and now assumes that some parishioners at leastcould read. It would not be long before images would be swept awayand replaced by the purer message of the bible on the lectern and thecommandment boards on the walls.

St Mary the Virgin, Upwaltham

2011-07-31T22:48:00.000+01:00

The church at Upwalthamis an amazing survival, almost unaltered from when it was built inthe 12^th century.

Its location away fromany big settlement meant that there was never pressure to extend itor money to restore it, but its position close to the Chichester toPetworth road meant that it never fell into disuse and decay as manymore remote churches did.

It was a jolly closerun thing, though. From 1833 to '51 the rector of Upwaltham andneighbouring East Lavington was the dynamic high churchman HenryManning, later one of Britain's most high profile converts toCatholicism, second Archbishop of Westminster and a cardinal. He hadEast Lavington church so brutally restored and extended barely anyoriginal features survive today.

Luckily, he never gotround to 'beautifying' Upwaltham. Perhaps he just liked it the way itwas – in in later life he described the church and its downlandsetting as "only less beautiful then heaven."

Standing alone, halfwayup the hill, the church is a simple rectangle with an apsidalchancel. Unusually, there is no east window. Instead, there arewindows on either side. The chancel arch is 13^th century(the 12^th century arch would have been considerablynarrower).

The beams of thekingpost roof may also be original, another unusual survival giventhe dangers of rot and fire over the centuries.

In the chancel thepiscina or basin for washing the communion vessels is ornately carvedwith spirals called volutes. It is possible that it came fromChichester Cathedral.

St James, Selham

2011-02-13T11:57:00.000Z

We tend to assume that architecture changed from Anglo-Saxon to Norman the instant King Harold was killed at Hastings, but in fact the transition had already started under Edward the Confessor and would not be complete until decades after the Conquest.

Edward, who was half Norman, had adopted the Romanesque style but it only became official when William began an enormous building programme designed to overwhelm the population with a sense of the power and wealth of their new overlords. While the designers imposed the new style, much of the actual work was done by Saxon masons who were either unwilling or unable to adapt.
The period has become known as the Saxo-Norman overlap, and you can see the results perfectly at Selham's lovely little church.
The thin walls and tall, narrow proportions of the nave and chancel are typically Saxon, as is the tall, thin north doorway.
But the walls are laid in herringbone courses with a rubble core, and the cornerstones are proper quoins instead of the long-and-short work characteristic of the Saxons.
Look at the chancel arch, however, and it gets really confusing.
The arch seems to be Norman, and the capital on the north side has carved volutes that are typically Romanesque.
The capital on the south side is pure Saxon, however, carved with writhing snakes grasping their own tails in their mouths, a symbol of eternity.
The slabs of stone on top the capitals, called abaci, are similarly disparate, with Saxon plaiting on the north and stylised foliage that could be either Saxon or Norman on the south.
The top stones on which the ends of the arch rest are called imposts. The one on the north has a sophisticated moulding on the inside face, leading one authority to claim it as a Roman fragment, but is carved on the nave side with stylised foliage. The impost on the other side is carved with the head of a beast, a Viking symbol denoting the exclusion of evil from the sacred space of the chancel.
It is difficult to believe that all these crudely-carved components were carved by the same hand. Was one side done by a Norman and the other by his Saxon underling? It is also possible that a Norman mason assembled the arch from recycled Saxon stones, filling in the gaps with his own work.
Whatever the process, the result is a memorable work of art.

St Botolph, Hardham

2011-01-15T12:23:00.000Z

The white plastered walls of the homespun little church at Hardham could not be plainer, but inside is a riot of wall paintings dating back to about the year 1200.
Scenes from the creation of the world to its final end cover almost every inch of the walls, painted by a group of travelling artists who also worked at Clayton, Coombes and Plumpton. It is one of the few places where one can get some feeling for the intensity and drama of churches in medieval times, despite the loss of some sections and the fading of the colours.
The church itself is a simple two-room building. The only light would have come from the east window and some tiny lancet windows high up. The only alterations since then were some larger windows and, in Victorian times, a north porch and a rather charming little bellcote.

The church was still new when the painters arrived. They plastered the stone walls to create a base which was divided by a grid for the various subjects. Each painter put on a skim coat and worked directly al fresco, onto the wet plaster.
The pigments were simple and local – red and yellow ochre washed from clay, lime white from chalk quarries and carbon black from the soot of oil lamps. The only imported material was the green malachite used in some of the haloes on the east wall of the nave.
The paintings follow a programme, starting with Adam and Eve on the back wall of the chancel. The first parents are shown not simply naked but transparent – their organs are shown as funny sacks and their bones are visible. Eve holds her hand behind her to accept a piece of the forbidden fruit from the serpent, who is winged to indicate his identity as the fallen angel Lucifer. On the other side of the arch, the fallen couple labour away, Eve milking a huge cow and Adam picking fruit in a tree.
The central image of Christ in Majesty on the east wall was destroyed when the window was enlarged but the surrounding figures of seraphim, the twelve apostles and the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse survive.

The upper images on other walls are filled with pictures of the life of Christ.
The lower images in the nave are devoted to the legend of Dives and Lazarus, including a vigorous depiction of a demon dragging the soul of the rich man to hell, and a famous sequence of the life of St George.
St George had just become wildly popular because of his miraculous appearance to help the Crusaders at the battle of Antioch in 1098, and the church was then dedicated to him. The saint is shown being tortured to death for his faith, and then on horseback with a lance smiting the infidels.
The paintings were whitewashed by the 13th century and discovered in 1866.

St Lawrence, Lurgashall

2010-12-27T18:04:00.000Z

Churches were busy places in medieval times. As the largest roofed space in the village, they would be used for many assemblies such as councils, court hearings, schools and even shops as well as for worship.
The church was the venue for tax assessment hearings. Wealthier parishioners known as burgesses would be ‘at scot and lot’, liable to pay tax (scot) but also qualifying for trading and other privileges (lot). If anyone managed to persuade the court that they owed no tax but were still eligible for the benefits, they got off ‘scot-free’.
Tithes were also set by courts sitting in the church. Tithes were not payable by everyone, and farmers would often hotly dispute their liability to pay. The church was even used to store beer made from tithed barley, which must have enlivened many a boring meeting.
In the early medieval period, few could read and virtually the only people who could write were priests. As the country got wealthier, however, parish priests began to make a bit of money on the side by teaching. And, of course, lessons were held in the church.
Gradually, all these essentially secular uses began to be regarded as inappropriate for the House of God and special buildings were erected for courts, schools and markets.
At Lurgashall, at some time in the 15th century the rector became concerned about people who had travelled a considerable distance to Sunday services were staying in the church for the day, eating, drinking and chatting. His solution was to build a lean-to cloister along the south wall of the nave for them to stay in the warm between morning and evening services.
From 1622, when the priest was granted a licence to teach, it was also used as a schoolroom.
The cloister is a lovely structure, roofed in huge stone slabs above a line of oak mullions forming a horizontal band of windows that might have been designed by a modernist architect today.

Holy Trinity, Ebernoe

2010-12-04T19:30:00.000Z

Ebernoe church is an oasis of order, calm and rationality in the wild countryside. All around is the wooded Weald, but the neat little church stands precisely in the middle of its exactly square churchyard wall.

It was built in the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign, in 1867, to bring the church to the local population of poor farmers, market gardeners and brickmakers.
Ebernoe then was not at the top of the social tree - a bit like Hogglestock in Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset.
The money was given by Squire Peachey of Ebernoe House, who brought in a London firm of architects, Habersham and Brock, to design it.
The outside is a triumph of polychromatic brickwork, red, yellow and black, in bands along the walls and particularly attractively in the window arches. All the bricks were made locally - a brick kiln of the period still exists.
Inside, everything is white, bright and clean. The broad nave has a simple A-frame timber roof, and the chancel arch is inscribed with the stern injunction from Leviticus: “Ye shall observe my sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary.”
The fittings are plain but of good quality, but the pulpit is surprisingly modest - a simple box for the parson to support himself on as he launched into the hour-long sermons that Victorian congregations expected.
All in all, Ebernoe church is the embodiment of the hard Victorian virtues of practical charity, cleanliness, labour and polished boots on Sunday but the polychromatic bricks make it lovable by adding a little touch of Noddy’s house.

St Andrew, Didling

2010-11-26T21:25:00.000Z

This humble little “shepherd’s church” is famous for its setting in the lap of the Downs, with a glorious sweeping view north across rolling Sussex farmland.
The church itself is a simple one-room building that has been little altered since it was built in the 13th century. The end walls were reconstructed in brick in about 1800 and a small bell cote added, but they reused the old stone lancet windows so inside it is as if nothing changed.
The font is the oldest thing in the church, dating from the 12th century. It is a simple tub, slightly irregular and crudely finished, but with all the natural power of unpolished stone that was lost by so many fonts that were recut and ruined by well-meaning Victorian vandals.
The ancient oak pews with their curlicue ends, made by a local carpenter, may date back to the time the church was built. The tops are impregnated with centuries-worth of wax dripping from the candles set on them for evening services.
The small panelled pulpit and the communion rail are carved with stylised patterns betraying their Jacobean date.

It is a miracle that St Andrew escaped restoration in the 19th century and ‘reordering’ in our own times. Even today it has no electricity. The latest addition to the church, a new chair and desk for the minister, is a simple copy of the pews. The wood is bright and gold today but will, in future centuries, blacken to blend in with the old work.

Quaker Meeting Houses

2010-11-20T19:36:00.000Z

Mounting block - listed Grade II!

The Religious Society of Friends or Quakers were strong in Sussex right from their beginnings in the 1650s, when George Fox preached in the area and William Penn came to live in Warminghurst.
One of the very first purpose-built meeting houses was constructed at Ifield in 1676, and it remains remarkably unchanged to this day.
The meeting house is a simple room attached to the side of an existing cottage. The walls are faced with local sandstone, with large mullioned windows to let in as much light as possible.
Inside, the plain wooden furnishings include a raised pew for the elders and a screen that separated the men and the women, with sliding partitions so both parts of the congregation could be linked when appropriate. The Quakers no longer have elders or separate the sexes but these interesting features still survive. There is even a hidey-hole to conceal the preacher when disputes with authority turned violent, and persecution was one reason why early meeting houses tended to be in isolated positions, as was the lovely Thakeham meeting house.
William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, was one of prime movers behind the purchase of a farmhouse near Thakeham called Little Slatters, which was converted into a meeting house by adding a gallery in the hall of the lovely half-timbered building.
Penn used to walk six miles across the fields from Warminghurst, arriving 'full of matter', not stopping as he doffed his hat and strode to his habitual position, starting to speak even before he reached his seat.
Later, the meeting house somehow acquired the curious name 'Blue Idol', how nobody knows, but is is otherwise almost unaltered from Penn's time. It stands at the end of a country lane in beautiful gardens devoted to the memory of the great man.

By the time Littlehampton Meeting House was built in the 1830s the Quakers were accepted and respectable, so the building is not in the remote country but in the centre of town. It looks more like a church than a house, with flint walls and pointed Gothick windows, but it still retains the charm and simplicity of all Quaker meeting houses.
Ifield Quaker Meeting House is currently being restored so donations are extremely welcome.

St Mary, Thakeham

2010-09-05T15:19:00.000+01:00

Thakeham church is a classic cruciform shape, with a chancel, north and south transepts and nave.

It looks as though it must have been designed that way from the start, but it actually came together over the centuries more or less by accident.

The nave was built first, in Norman times, as shown by a small window on the north wall.
In about 1200, the chancel was added (or rebuilt) and a tower constructed to the north, with an arch into the nave. The chancel and tower arches are typical of the early 13th century, with a plain chamfer on the edges rather than complex moulding. The tower arch is much deeper than the chancel arch, indicating the heavier load it had to support.
A transept was added on the south in the later 13th century, shown by the more sophisticated concave chamfers on the arch. Both chancel and transept have a piscina, a stone basin in an arched recess used for washing communion vessels, showing that the transept would have had its own altar.
At some point the north tower was demolished, possibly when the existing west tower was built in the 16th century in the Perpendicular style. At this point the base of the tower became a transept and the accidental cruciform plan of the church was complete. As with many churches, the design evolved rather than being created by an architect.
As an appendix to last month's article on monuments to knights in armour, Thakeham contains the alabaster tomb chest of William Apsley who died in 1527. William is depicted in full late medieval armoural in lines deeply incised in the slab and filled with pitch, a type of decoration unique in Sussex.
One of the main things visitors remember about Thakeham is the slightly perilous climb up the stone path to the church, and the fabulous view from the churchyard.

Knights on Tombs

2010-06-24T19:52:00.002+01:00

Earl of Arundel in Chichester Cathedral, 1375

Many a Sussex church contains a tomb of a knight in armour, recalling days of chivalry when war was waged for faith and honour. In theory at least.

Many legends have grown up around these effigies. Some say that if his legs are crossed below the knee he went on a Crusade, and that if they are crossed at the knee he went twice.
Others claim that a knight holding a drawn sword died in battle.

Sullington, 13th century

Unfortunately it seems that it is all nonsense. Crossed legs are a common feature of effigies dating from the time of the Crusades, but they continue well into the 14th century, long after the fighting had finished. One of the few cross-legged effigies that can be positively identified, that of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, in the Temple church in London, never went to Palestine which seems to contradict the theory. It seems that sculptors just liked the impression of vitality and movement the crossed legs gives to the monument.
The same is probably true of the drawn sword - it may be more symbolic of fighting the spiritual fight as St Paul describes.
The figure of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, in Chichester Cathedral dates from about 1375. It was originally placed in Lewes Priory but moved when it was dissolved. He is shown with his legs stiff and uncrossed, his feet on a lion suitable for an aristocrat. He holds his wife Eleanor's hand, a touching gesture. She has her feet on a dog, a symbol of fidelity.
At Sullington church a badly mutilated but very fine image of a knight in chain mail is shown cross-legged. He dates from the 13th century.

Sir Anthony St Leger, Slindon, d1539


Sir John de Ifield, Ifield, d1317

The effigy of Sir Anthony St Leger at Slindon is unusual in being made of wood in 1539. It is a beautiful image, his hands together in prayer but his head slightly to one side in a very lifelike pose.

John Apsley, Thakeham, 1527

Ifield church contains the superb images of Sir John de Ifield, who died in 1317 but is portrayed in the armour of twenty years later - keeping up with the latest fashions even in death?
Small fragments of the original paint can still be seen, showing how vividly coloured it must have been when it was first unveiled.
Thakeham has a most unusual tomb, an alabaster slab incised with the figure of John Apsley, who died in 1527. The lines were filled with pitch. By this time, armour was mainly ceremonial.

Holy Sepulchre, Warminghurst

2010-05-18T11:35:00.000+01:00

Most churches are the result of centuries of getting the builders in, adding aisles, rebuilding chancels, replacing the roof and so on, but Warminghurst has only been altered once since it was built in the 13th century, in the reign of Queen Anne. Even the Victorians, who ruined many a fine church by over-restoration, left Warminghurst alone.
From the outside, it looks like a simple one-room church from about 1220, with lancet windows and a little spire at the west end.
Step inside and you are instantly taken forward to about 1700, when James Butler, the local landowner, refurnished the interior in a simple but elegant English baroque style.

Overhead, the medieval single-frame roof extends from one end to the other, creating an illusion of length. It must have seemed even longer before the 18th century carpenters inserted the wooden chancel screen with three arches on slim columns.

The semicircular space under the roof, called a tympanum, is exuberantly painted with the arms of Queen Anne, with drapery swirling about. In the chancel, the communion rails were given elegant barley-twist balusters.

In front of the screen stands the plain panelled pulpit with the clerk's seat below. The clerk must have been a big man in every sense - the seat has enough room for two normal-size clerks. All the box pews with their doors still survive, showing by their size and position the social status of the occupants.
The 18th century update even went as far as the font, which is a simple bulbous eight-sided stem.
Warminghurst sits in the middle of the South Downs with only a farmhouse for company, and is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust. The upside of this is that nobody will now be tempted to meddle with this magical building.

St Mary, West Chiltington,

2010-04-20T09:38:00.000+01:00

Entering a church in medieval times would have been a huge shock. The natural wood, stone and white plaster we are used to would have been covered in a riot of paintwork.
Pictures of the life of Christ and the saints in painted architecture would have covered every inch of the walls and often the ceiling too. The outlines of the aisle arches and windows were accentuated by jazzy zigzag ornament, bands of formal foliage ran along the tops of the walls and stenciled flowers and leaves dotted any space too small or awkward for anything larger. The effect would have been overwhelming and, to modern eyes, more than a little vulgar.

Cathedrals were painted on the outside too, which must have transformed them into beacons in a drab world.
Almost all of this great art was either whitewashed over or completely destroyed at the Reformation, as were the paintings at St Mary in West Chiltington. They lay concealed until 1882.
The scheme is unusually comprehensive, covering all the walls of the nave and aisle.
The oldest paintings are simple geometrical patterns probably dating back to the 12th century, when the south aisle was built. A circular medallion is a cross in the form of an endless rope, a motif that is found in mosaic form at Fishbourne Roman Palace.

The paintings in the nave date from the 13th century. The pictures on the south wall show the Passion, from the Entry into Jerusalem to the Angel at the Tomb. Each scene is framed in a painted niche, with columns and trefoil arches.
The north wall has scenes from the Nativity on two levels, starting with the Annunciation. It also includes a curious figure of Christ standing amid the tools of labour including shears, a cleaver, a square, a weaver's shuttle and a cartwheel. Also shown is a pair of dice. The picture is apparently a warning not to work (or, presumably, gamble) on the Sabbath.
The chancel wall would probably have had a picture of the Second Coming, with graphic images of the souls of the damned being dragged into hell, but nothing of this survives except a small figure of an angel playing a fiddle, which is no longer in its original place.

Hatchments in Sussex

2010-03-10T17:15:00.001Z

Tortington

In these days when half the congregation at a funeral won't be wearing a suit, let alone a black tie, the way our ancestors carried on seems somewhat bizarre. Death was a serious business involving processions of black-clad mutes, horse-drawn hearses with black plumes, miles of black crepe and months of formal mourning.

Aldingbourne

Many churches still have reminders of old funeral practices hanging on the walls in the form of hatchments, the diamond-shaped painted panels with the coats of arms of local families.

Warminghurst

Hatchments were erected over the main entrance of the home of the deceased, remaining there for a year after which they were transferred to the church and the family could finally put their deep black mourning clothes back in the wardrobe until next time.
The word hatchment is a corruption of achievement, the technical term for the full heraldic works of shield, helmet, crest, supporters, and any coronets or other items depending on rank.

Warminghurst

Coats of arms usually come in two halves, the arms of the holder on the dexter side and those of his wife on the sinister side. "Dexter" means right and "sinister" means left, of course, but because they are relative to the person holding the shield, for the viewer dexter is on the left and sinister on the right of a hatchment. Conventionally, if the husband died but the wife was still living, the dexter background would be painted black and the sinister white, and vice-versa. Hatchments of people with no 'other half', that is, the unmarried and widowed, were all black.


Warminghurst

Hatchments appeared in the British Isles, Belgium and the Netherlands in the 17th century and continued into Victorian times.They were painted on wood or canvas in a wood frame, usually by the same itinerant craftsmen that did pub signs.
The tiny church at Burton Park has two hatchments for male members of the Biddulph family that lived in the big house next door. One has the shield surrounded by ribbons – the ribbons were often knotted for the arms of women.
Other fine examples are at Tortington, Warminghurst and Aldingbourne, the last having been beautifully restored recently.

Burton

St Mary the Virgin, Shipley

2010-02-13T19:57:00.000Z

Shipley church looks like a cross-shaped church that has lost its transepts, having just a nave and a chancel with a tower in the middle.
But this rather odd-looking layout was quite common in about 1125 when it was built - there are other examples in Surrey and Norfolk. You can see it was originally built without transepts by looking at the south wall and observing the way the nave and the tower are one structure.

The round-headed windows are a clue to the date, being splayed both inside and out. Later windows are usually splayed only on the inside.
Inside, the massive arches of the tower form a dramatic frame to the chancel, which is quite short. The western arch is no less than 8ft thick, but it is possible that the tower was originally built with two matching arches but started to subside just when it was finished, forcing the builders to add an extra reinforcing arch. The new arch is supported on two grimacing devilish faces with hungry-looking teeth, a warning to the sinful not to venture into the holy place, perhaps.
It is a large and imposing church for such a small village as Shipley, but it was built not as a parish church but as the chapel of the Sussex preceptory or local headquarters of the Knights Templar.
No traces of the associated administrative and monastic buildings survive. Shipley had been given to the Templars by the de Broase family of Bramber Castle, together with Sompting.

Lancing College Chapel

2010-01-10T17:18:00.001Z

West Sussex does not have many good Victorian churches, but the chapel of Lancing College is one of the best as well as one of the biggest in the whole country.
The interior is astonishing - a soaring stone vault 90ft from the floor to the ridge. For comparison, Chichester Cathedral is just 61ft high.
The original design had a spire as well, which would have been 350ft tall, against 277ft for our cathedral. Its dramatic position on a hill overlooking the River Adur would have made it look even taller.
Lancing College was founded in 1848 by Nathaniel Woodard, a local clergyman who saw a gap in the market between the great public schools and the grammar schools. He went on to found a corporation that now comprises 40 schools for which Lancing Chapel is a sort of cathedral.
Woodard clearly foresaw that the huge chapel would take almost as long to build as the Gothic cathedrals it was based on. It is said he ordered the masons to build the apse at the east end to its full height before starting on the rest, to make absolutely sure that if he died leaving it unfinished it would be impossible for his successors to reduce it in the interests of economy.
And indeed, construction was a long-drawn out process, partly because the sloping site necessitated digging foundations some 70ft deep to the chalk bedrock. Until 1911 the school worshipped in the darkly vaulted crypt.

The chapel was very much a family affair. The masons lived on site, and one family was responsible for hewing all the stone from the quarry at Scaynes Hill, near Haywards Heath.
The first architect, R.C. Carpenter, designed the school but unfortunately died before the chapel was started, leaving its design to his son, R.H. Carpenter. After Woodard himself died, his son Billy oversaw construction without professional help. At one point, the vault was taken to full height but two buttresses were missing, causing alarm in visiting surveyors.
Eventually, in 1947 the planned tower was abandoned and the architect Stephen Dykes-Bower was brought in to finish it off. He designed a new west end with a wonderful rose window that is 32ft across - the largest in England.
But even today the chapel is not quite finished - funds are being raised for a great porch that will finally complete this wonderful building.

St Mary the Virgin, Sompting

2009-12-17T09:24:00.006Z

Sompting's tower is one of the few Saxon towers still in existence, and its 'Rhenish helm' roof is unique in England. But its fame may also be due to its dramatic position standing out in front of the South Downs, where every holidaymaker can admire it from the traffic jam on the A27.The tower was started before 1000AD and was complete by 1050. The cap, with its stone gables and shingled diamond-shaped roofs, was developed in Germany as a way of preventing snow from building up on the tower in winter, but Sompting is the only remaining example over here.
The cornerstones are characteristic Saxon 'long and short work', using both tall stones with occasional flat ones to hold the corner together. On the east and west sides the bell-openings are topped not by arches but by pairs of stones leaning together to form a triangle, another typically Saxon feature. The church is also notable for some crude but vigorous carvings.

But Sompting church is much more than the tower - it has a very unusual layout dating from the time it was a local headquarters for the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, better known as the Templars.
William de Braose, lord of Bramber, gave the church, its lands and its tithes to the Templars in 1154, making it part of a Europe-wide operation devoted to supplying men and money for the fight to keep Jerusalem in Christian hands. In about 1180, Sompting church was adapted to its new role by the addition of a private chapel on the south side, and a transept on the north side.
The south chapel was a large square room with a shallow, vaulted sanctuary at the east end. Originally, it was completely separate from the church, accessed only through a small door leading from the sanctuary into the chancel.
The north transept has two lovely arches on the east wall to form a pair of chapels, also for the use of the Templars. The main nave was used by the parish - part of the condition of the gift was the Order had to employ a vicar for the local people.

The church would have been used as a centre for administering the Order's land, collecting tithes, recruiting fighting men and as a place for travelling members to stay. In many ways it would have been a local branch of what has been described as the world's first diversified multinational corporation, with subsidiaries in farming, industry and banking.

When the Templars were suppressed in 1324, Sompting was passed to the rival Hospitallers and finally became an ordinary parish church at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540. In Victorian times, the wall between the Templar's chapel and the nave was punched through by a large arch, so it now looks more like a south transept.

Priory Church of St Mary and St Blaise, Boxgrove

2009-10-31T19:04:00.002Z

Boxgrove Priory is a magnificent church for such a small village. It was built soon after the Conquest by the Benedictine monks of Lessay in Normandy, and became the parish church at the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536.

All monastery churches that also served as parish churches were divided into a part for the exclusive use of the monks, and a separate area for the laity. At Romsey Abbey, the parishioners used a north aisle and in Chichester Cathedral the locals had to make do with an altar in the north transept. At Boxgrove, the parish had most of the nave but were separated from the chancel, tower crosssing and transepts by a stone screen called a pulpitum which enabled the monks to keep their seclusion.

At the dissolution, the parish moved into the grander chancel, the pulpitum was built up to the vaulting and the old nave was mostly demolished. Today, only a few bays exist, dating from about 1170.

The old chancel, built in about 1220, is a cathedral in miniature with stone vaulting and elaborate stonework. Outside, flying buttresses prevent the vaulting from spreading outwards and collapsing, but they are also very impressive in their own right - almost like sculpture.
The chancel arcades are arranged with two arches inside a bigger arch. Above, a lancet window and two blank arcades are squeezed under the stone vault. The arrangement is very unusual, only seen elsewhere at the retrochoir in Chichester cathedral and the chancel of the church that was to become Portsmouth cathedral.
The details are pure Early English, dating from about 1220. The mouldings on the arches are deep and complex, and some of the columns have become clusters of slender attached columns of Purbeck marble.
Another link with Chichester is the floral decoration on the vaulting, which was painted in the 1550s by Lambert Bernard, who did a similar job in the Lady Chapel at Chichester as well as the huge paintings in the transepts.
Boxgrove is reaching the end of a huge restoration programme and is expected to be re-opening in the middle of October.

Churchyard Yews

2009-10-28T22:37:00.003Z

Legends abound to explain the yew trees that flourish in most English churchyards. Some say they were planted to supply wood for longbows, others that their poisonous leaves deterred livestock from trampling across the consecrated ground.
The truth is even more extraordinary - the yews were there before the churches.
Yews were sacred to the Ancient Britons, who regarded them as symbolic of the cycle of life because they live for hundreds, possibly thousands of years and, being evergreen, they do not 'die' in the winter. Yews were often planted in sacred groves in the woods, away from settlements, especially in Sussex.
When Christianity arrived, Pope Gregory advised missionaries not to destroy the sacred groves but to build churches there, and the tradition of planting yews in churchyards was established. Some of the ancient pagan trees still survive - the Fortingall yew in Scotland is between 2,000 and 5,000 years old. Local legend says the the infant Pontius Pilate played in its branches!
Yew for longbows was taken not from churchyards, where they were protect by their consecrated status, but from the forests. Military demand was such that by Elizabethan times yew had been wiped out throughout Europe, and might now be extinct but for churchyards.
Longbows were more accurate over longer ranges than Tudor guns - guns were adopted not because they were better but because suitable bow wood was unobtainable.
The majestic avenue of yews at Westbourne church was planted at the end of the 15th century, and is claimed to be the oldest in the country.

St Mary Our Lady, Sidlesham

2009-09-02T09:01:00.007+01:00

The most lavishly decorated part of most churches is the chancel, but somehow Sidlesham has lost what must have been most impressive feature.
The church was originally built in the early 13th century in a cross shape, with a pair of transepts and a tower at the crossing. The chancel must have been imposing as it had side aisles, very unusual in a parish church.
The tower was the first to go, probably in the 15th century when the new tower was built at the west end. The chancel was pulled down in the late 17th century, leaving the church a strange T shape.
The only traces of the chancel are fragments of the pointed arches that led into the aisles, now set into the wall like fossils in a cliff. The new east window was cobbled up out of 15th century tracery from the old chancel, which looks lovely from the inside but from the outside protrudes from the east wall in a very odd way.The reasons for the disappearance of the church's finest feature are lost in time, but it may have been something to do with disputes over maintenance costs.
In medieval times, the parish paid for maintenance of the nave, but the rector was responsible for the chancel. He paid for it out of income from tithes and the glebe, farmland owned directly by the church. Could some 17th century rector of Sidlesham have decided he had better things to do with the money than prop up an old chancel, and simply left it to fall down?
This theory gets some support from the fact that tow small square stones were let into the columns at the end of the nave, inscribed: "Chancel Boundary 1814", clearly a reminder to the rector that he still had some financial responsibilities.
Chancel repairs would be a forgotten detail of medieval church finances if it were not for a succession of legal twists that make it a hot topic even today.
In late medieval times, monasteries began to buy up the right to appoint rectors, known as advowsons. They would wait for the current rector to die, appoint one of their own monks and appropriate the rectory, glebe and tithes. It was a very profitable diversification of their core business.
When the monasteries were dissolved in 1536, Henry VIII distributed their property to institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge universities and to his cronies. The responsibility to repair the chancel went with the land.
Over the centuries following, tithes that were originally paid in wheat, wool, milk and so on where replaced with money payments, and finally abolished as late a 1936. But the responsibility of the owners of former rectorial lands to repair the chancel was retained.
Recently, owners of charming country houses around the country have been startled to discover that they are responsible for repairing part of a church that may be miles away. And restoring a medieval structure to today's conservation standards is an expensive business.
Even now, the government is not abolishing this anomaly, simply setting a time limit for chancel repair liability to be registered on the title deeds as a charge so owners can get insurance. For them, simply letting the chancel disappear is not an option, as it seems to have been for rector of Sidlesham all those centuries ago.

Royal Arms

2009-07-21T22:35:00.003+01:00

The tradition of setting up the royal arms in church goes back to the Reformation when Protestant iconoclasts swept away everything they regarded as idolatrous, including the rood or crucifix set up on the rood screen that separated the nave from the chancel.
When Henry VIII finally broke with Rome, someone had the brilliant idea of replacing the rood with the royal arms, which are both decorative and a very public statement of loyalty to the new Head of the Church of England.
As time went on, rood screens themselves fell out of favour and were mostly removed, the royal arms being moved to less prominent places in the nave.
At Racton church, however, the royal arms remain in their original position over the roof beam that is the only division between nave and chancel, although the current arms are those of George II and date from the mid-18th century, as does the lovely lacy tracery on either side.

The royal arms could be very provocative in the centuries following the Reformation. At Burton church, the arms of Charles I are painted in the plaster with the admonition “Obey them that have the Rule over you, Heb, 13, 17” inscribed above. It was lucky the church was hidden within the park of the great house of the Royalist Goring family, or it would almost certainly have been erased in the Commonwealth years.

The arms of most monarchs since then are represented in local churches.
William III is in Aldingbourne, which also has the arms of George III. Both have been recently restored.

Queen Anne’s arms are at Midhurst.

The arms of George III with particularly lively lion and unicorn, are at Slindon.
Coats of arms were usually painted by itinerant sign painters whose main line of business was inn signs. Exposed to the weather, few inn signs survive so the royal arms in churches are often all we have of the work of these craftsmen.
According to Norman Pound’s History of the English Parish, it was never compulsory in law to put up the royal arms in churches, but curiously a big court case erupted over plans by many churches to put up the arms of Elizabeth II to celebrate the coronation in 1953.

West Tarring church in Worthing applied to the diocese for a faculty to erect the royal arms, which was granted, but the government then intervened saying the Queen’s permission was also needed. The Queen evidently approved, because her arms adorn the nave to this day.

St Mary, Bepton

2009-06-11T09:15:00.008+01:00

Bepton church sits under the Downs south of Midhurst as though immortal, but it has changed remarkably over the millennium since the first Christians in the area built the church mentioned in the Domesday Book.
The church was completely rebuilt in the 13th century with a simple but unusual plan: a west tower, a nave without aisles and a chancel the same width as the nave but separated from it by an arch (usually, if the chancel is the same width as the nave there is no arch).
There was trouble from the very start, as can be deduced from the fact that the walls of the tower are over three feet thick, but the tower is only as high as the roof ridge. Why were the walls so substantial for so short a tower?
It is believed that the original plan was for a much taller tower, but it began to subside during construction so the builders stopped as soon as they reached roof height, simply topping it off with a plain pyramidal roof.
Later, in about 1620, the tower began to lean again and it was shored up with two massive diagonal buttresses of brick. They have the effect of making it look even squatter.
In 1878 the north wall of the nave, the whole chancel and the south porch were all rebuilt by Lacy W. Ridge, so little of the 13th century remains. Little, except for one feature that is worth going to see in itself.
The tomb of one Rado de la Hedol is set in a niche with a lovely stone canopy dating from about 1300, as the Early English style morphed into the Decorated. The canopy has a ‘roof’ topped by a finial that in the Early English period would have consisted of formal, stiff leaves but this finial looks more like a bunch of shallots in a rubber band.
The crockets up the sides are all of different sizes, flame-like rather than leaf-like. The space under, known as the tympanum, is filled with cusped tracery. The composition is bold and vivid. Rado’s name and a worn brass plate carries an inscription in Lombardic letters calling for the Lord to have mercy on him (probably).

St Mary Magdalen, West Lavington

2009-05-04T09:10:00.006+01:00

This is an important church, built in 1850 for the rector, Henry Manning, by William Butterfield. Manning preached his last sermon here before converting to the Roman Catholic church, where he rose to become Archbishop of Westminster and a cardinal.
Butterfield was working at the time on his masterpiece, All Saints Margaret Street in London, but here he uses the local Sussex style but in a typically forthright way.
Unfortunately, the church was made redundant in 2008 and access is no longer possible, apparently on safety grounds.

St Mary Magdalene and St Denys, Midhurst

2009-05-04T08:44:00.006+01:00

The guidebooks are a bit dismissive about Midhurst's church. “A disappointment...there has been too much restoration” says Ian Nairn in Buildings of England. “Little left for us to see,” says Arthur Mee of The King's England.
The usual assumption is that Victorian architects (and their clients: the rectors, PCCs and benefactors) exercised their own egos by gratuitously altering and rebuilding ancient churches. But often they were presented with the same problems we find today.
In 1880, Midhurst church was in a bad state. The hodge-podge of additions over the centuries had created a space that was unusable for modern worship. It was too small for the growing congregation and the massive nave roof was forcing the walls out, threatening collapse.
The diocesan Surveyor of Ecclesiastical Dilapidations, Lacy W Ridge, was brought in to restore and update the church. Ridge had just restored the exterior of St Mary Appledram and went on to design several new churches in Sussex including ones at Burgess Hill and Brighton.
He enlarged the 16th century nave, lengthening it to the west and added a clerestory so it would be higher and lighter. The most prominent features of the exterior of the church are his – the west wall with its chequerboard stonework and traceried window, and the oddly-shaped broach spire.
The Perpendicular style chancel arcades and south aisle are original, as are the lower parts of the tower and the Southampton Chapel. Ridge cannot be blamed for the loss of the Southampton Chapel's glory: the Cowdray monuments that were removed to Easebourne in 1851.
But Ridge created a church that works. The western entrance was recently re-ordered so the main entrance is not directly off the traffic-infested street, but his changes have mostly stood the test of time.

St Mary, Climping

2009-04-07T20:50:00.010+01:00

It's the tower that makes Climping so memorable. It is tall, square, solid and Norman, and placed in an unusual position at the end of the south transept, so everyone assumes it was intended as some sort of fortification.
Some say it was a watch tower to give early warning of invaders coming up the River Arun, others that it was a sort of safe haven for parishioners.
The impression is reinforced by the curious pair of slots on either side of the ornately-carved door, which look as though they were intended to support the ends of a drawbridge. Unfortunately, there are no holes for the chains that would have been necessary to haul it up, so they must be ornamental.
The tower was added to the original Saxon church in about 1180, when Henry II was busy enlarging Arundel Castle so it is possible it might have had some military function. Today, it is the extraordinary ornament that attracts attention.
The round Norman arch over the main door is has a pair of massive cusps on the inside, then lines of chevrons and zigzags creating a rich and memorable effect.
On the first floor, the lancet windows are also framed in thick zigzag mouldings that are almost too big to get round the top comfortably.
The church itself was rebuilt in about 1230, probably by the rector, John of Climping, who later became Bishop of Chichester. It is a total contrast with the tower, in a strict Early English style relying on proportions rather than ornament for its effect. Magically, it remains almost unaltered to this day and has been recently restored so it looks fabulous.
The windows are tall, plain lancets, and the arches have simple roll mouldings that are models of elegance compared with the exuberant Norman carving on the tower. It is amazing how radically tastes had changed in just 50 years.
The artist Heyward Hardy gave a number of paintings to the church in the 1920s. This one shows local people including the rector and war wounded, with Christ at the centre blessing the children.

St Mary, Burpham

2009-03-05T11:18:00.013Z

Burpham church looks plain and matter-of-fact from the outside. You have to step inside to discover what a complex and lovely building it is.The church was originally a plain Norman cross-shaped church that was altered and extended over the course of the 12th century. Today it presents a text-book illustration of the change from round to pointed arches.
The arch to the north transept (in the background of the picture on the right) is the oldest, dating to before 1150. It is little more than a semicircular opening in the wall.
The south transept arch was built in about 1160 and is much more ornate. Three attached columns on either side support the arch, with deep cut zigzag and chevron ornament. It is so lavish it may have been the entrance to a lost chapel or tower.
It was at this point the pointed arch arrived in Sussex. Pointed arches had been invented in the early part of the century and used at Durham Cathedral in 1130, but it took until the end of the century to spread round the country.
The chancel at Burpham was rebuilt shortly after 1180 with a lovely rib-vaulted roof that demonstrates exactly why pointed arches were useful. Round arches can be used in vaulting, but the diagonal arches rise higher than the arches on the sides so the vaulting goes up and down like the Loch Ness monster’s humps.
Pointed arches can be easily designed to rise to the same height, giving a straight ridge. The vaulting at Burpham shows how lovely the effect can be: subtle but simple and strong.
Beware the chancel arch, however. In 1869 the original Norman arch became unstable and was replaced with the current Early English style arch by the architect Sir Thomas Jackson. Jackson was one of those rare architects who produced original and characteristic work when designing from scratch, but hauled in his ego and respected the fabric when restoring and altering existing buildings. He also almost invisibly rebuilt the south wall of the church.
The illustrator and author Mervyn Peake lived in Burpham and is buried in the churchyard. The view of Arundel Castle across the valley may have influenced his vision of the mighty fortress of Gormenghast.

Sussex Fonts

2009-02-04T07:53:00.012Z

The font is at the heart of any church, and is often one of its most ancient stones.
The commonest type of font in Sussex dates from Norman times, and is a square bowl of marble, supported by a big central shaft and a column at each corner. The sides of the bowl are usually carved with a line of arches and columns.
The font at Felpham (above) is typical. The bowl is black marble from the Weald, with an arcade rather crudely cut in the sides. The central shaft is limestone, and the corner shafts are in light blue marble. It dates from about 1200, so it was probably installed when the north aisle was added.
Stoughton church has a similar font (right), probably slightly older. One side has the branches of the tree of life rambling all over it, but all the tendrils derive from the central stem.
The other main type of Sussex font is the tub, circular and standing on a single shaft.
The tub font at Tortington (left), dating from the 12th century, is particularly large and heavily carved. As usual, an arcade runs round the top, but the mason has replaced every other column with a floral motif such as the honeysuckle visible in the picture.
The 15th century brought a building boom in England and many fonts date from that period. The typical design is an octagonal bowl with the panels carved with quatrefoils, on an octagonal stem with tracery. The font at Climping (below) is an excellent example.The font at Chidham (right) is a rather shapeless tub, round at the top morphing into square at the bottom, mounted on a pyramid of square blocks. It was discovered buried under the church during restoration work in the mid 19th century. It is so plain it could be any date: the church guidebook says possibly Saxon, the Victoria County History says 1660.
The old font at Ford is a rough square block of Bath stone, which still has the hasps for a padlock, to prevent witches from draining off the holy water for their satanic rituals.
Witch-proofed fonts are quite common, but Ford has a second font that is very unusual.
Tucked away behind the chancel arch is a tiny pottery font, barely a foot across, with a lid like a casserole. It is supported by a column so long and slender it is a miracle it was not knocked over and broken years ago. It dates from the early 19th century.

St Mary, Yapton

2009-01-02T08:52:00.013Z

There are few churches more endearing than Yapton, an effect created by 800 years of make-do and mend rather than rebuilding or restoration.
The basic structure is very much as it was when it was built sometime around the year 1200. The nave has three arches on either side supporting massive tie-beams with king posts in the middle holding up the ridge of the roof.
The roof itself sweeps down to cover the aisles as well as the nave. This has the advantage of being simple to build and very robust – there are no valleys for leaves and water to collect in. Many Sussex churches were originally built this way.
The disadvantage is that the aisles are very low and dark. The builders tried to bring some light in by punching two tiny circular windows in the south wall. Most churches of this design were revamped in late medieval times to create higher aisles, despite the added maintenance required by the complex roof. At Yapton, they inserted dormer windows instead, leaving the original structure for us to see.
Many parishes would have rebuilt the tower when it started to subside alarmingly, but at Yapton they simply shored it up with a massive buttress. And when that started to go, they just added another, even bigger buttress next to the original one. It all adds up to a place of infinite village charm.
There is only one intrusion from the big city here, a monument to Stephen Roe, a Yapton boy who went to London to make his fortune, eventually dying in Islington in 1766 and leaving £1200 in 1 per cent South Sea Annuities for the benefit of the poor in the place of his birth. But even this memorial to an urbanite is notable for its rustic ‘Gothick’ style and even more rustic verse.
His generosity is recorded in fulsome tones, but someone must have mistranscribed the last line. It should read “Their blessings on his head” surely?
Soft Pity now shall comfort Woe
And Ignorance learn, her self, to know
By Bounty taught and fed
Orphans and Widows more and more
And Children yet unborn, shall pour
Their blessings on him, dead.

St John the Evangelist, Chichester

2008-12-29T10:31:00.006Z

Throughout the 18th century Chichester’s tiny medieval parish churches heaved at the seams but their restricted city sites made rebuilding impossible. Eventually everyone agreed that a new church was urgently needed, but none of the parishes would agree to lose area.
The solution was to build a non-parochial church in the form of a proprietary chapel, owned and run by trustees and funded by donations and pew rents. A site was provided in a new development being built in the city, called Newtown.
To secure the agreement of the existing parishes, the new church would be barred from conducting baptisms, weddings or funerals, which were important sources of income for parish priests.
Construction began 1812 to a design by James Elmes, a London-based architect who was Surveyor of the Cathedral. The plan is a rectangle with the corners cut off to form octagonal ends. The west end has a little bell turret on top, modelled on the famous Choragic Monument in Athens.
The inside is designed for preaching in the Low Church tradition, with pews and galleries looking towards the pulpit, positioned high on a barley-twist column so everyone in the church can see the preacher.
Desks for the minister and clerk are placed on either side of the pulpit. Originally, they were in front of it in the classic ‘three-decker’ arrangement – it is not known why they were altered.
The communion table is hidden behind the pulpit and under the gallery, used once a month in a communion service held as a sort of afterthought to morning prayer.
The untouched Georgian interior is a very rare survival. The Victorian passion for ritual caused almost all of them to be swept away and replaced with new chancels designed for elaborate eucharists.
Proprietary chapels faded away as well, made unnecessary by reform of the parochial system.
Originally, they had been a useful way of creating places of worship for Anglicans outside the mainstream, both low and high church. Unfortunately, they also became useful operations for the less scrupulous such as the Rev Dr Alexander Keith, who conducted instant marriages for eloping lovers at his chapel in Mayfair at a guinea a time. The practice was outlawed, which is why elopers had to flee to Gretna Green thereafter.
The Rev Dr William Dodd had huge success as a preacher at his two West End proprietary chapels, but his enormous income failed to cover his gambling habit and he unwisely forged a cheque to pay the bookies, for which he was publicly hanged in 1777.
St John’s itself was eventually absorbed into the parish of St Pancras, and closed in 1973. Today, it is maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust.
Only a few proprietary chapels survive. One is St John’s Downshire Hill, Hampstead and another is the controversial Emanuel Church in Wimbledon, which maintains the tradition of the proprietary chapel as a non-parochial home for evangelicalism to this day.

St Michael, Amberley

2008-10-27T19:05:00.009Z

Amberley is the show village of Sussex, sitting on a hill above the water meadows with its church and castle forming an unforgettable skyline like a smaller, cosier version of Arundel a few miles south.
Artists have always been attracted to Amberley with its unique combination of rustic charm and a reasonable rail service to London. In 1907, Kelly’s Directory listed no fewer than five artists living and working there, including the genre painter Edward Stott, the watercolourist Cecil Ross Burnett and Arthur Wintershaw, whose painting ‘Summer’, showing cows drinking in the river Arun, is a hardy perennial in the repro market.
The churchyard is full of them. The high wall separating the church from the castle has a stone lettered by John Skelton in memory of the illustrator Arthur Rackham and his wife Edyth, also a highly talented artist, who lived at Houghton House on the other side of the valley throughout the 1920s.
The biggest memorial in the churchyard is to Edward Stott ARA, who lived in the village from 1889 to his death in 1918. He is still famous for his rural scenes such as Changing Pastures, showing cows being led through a gate, almost certainly sketched close to Amberley. His tall monument has a bust on top carved by his friend, the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood. It shows Stott dressed in the studiedly casual uniform of an artist of the day, with a big floppy tie. Wood himself lies close by, his grave marked with one of his own bas-reliefs, a pieta in bronze he originally designed for a west London church.Inside the church is a semi-circular stained glass window to Stott, designed by Robert Anning Bell. Other windows have inscriptions by Eric Gill and his assistant Joe Cribb.
But all these artists have not made the church into a gallery, however. It is actually rather plain, the most dramatic note being its Norman chancel arch, heavy with zigzag ornament and supported by double columns with leaf shaped capitals. Only the size of the nave windows and the chancel arch, enormous by Norman standards, reveals that that it was built for a bishop, not just as a parish church.
For it was the Bishop of Chichester who owned the manor house formed the basis of the castle built by Bishop Rede in about 1380. Like Bodiam, which was built at almost exactly the same time, it is a toy fort rather than a real defensive structure, demonstrated by the fact that the church tower is taller than the castle wall, so any besieger could dominate the walls with just a few archers.

St Mary, Stoughton

2008-10-16T19:21:00.009+01:00

The Saxo-Norman Overlap sounds like a patent galosh but is the term used by architectural historians for churches built in the short period after 1066 when Saxons were doing the work but Normans were giving the orders. At this point, churches were still built with the big, box-like proportions the Saxons liked, but details such as arches became bigger and more ornate to cater to the Romanesque tastes of the new overlords.
The process is seen at work particularly vividly at Bosham and Stoughton, ironically as both places were owned by King Harold until his death at Hastings.
St Mary at Stoughton is a complete late 11th century church, with no aisles but transepts to the north and south. The proportions are tall and the walls are thin at only 2ft 5in, indicating an originally Saxon design, but the chancel arch is early Norman with its triple columns and roll mouldings.
The chancel used to be almost as tall as the nave but in the 14th century somebody decided to give it a wagon roof rather than the original beam and low-pitched rafters still evident in the nave.
At the same time, the chancel windows were enlarged and embellished with attached columns, but the new lower roof meant there was no space for the arched tops of the north and south windows, so they were simply chopped off. The original shape can still be seen in the east window. The Victoria County History says that it is quite possible the builder simply did not realise that the new roof would cut off the tops of the windows and truncated effect is the result.
The church contains very few monuments, which adds to the open, uncluttered feel of the tall open rooms.
There is a simple brass plate to Philip Harwood Francis, vicar from 1957 to 1997, who is described as an “athlete teacher mathematician author eccentric and master of the short sermon.”
In the north transept there is a particularly attractive basin for washing the communion vessels, called a piscina. It was made in the middle-13th century. The trefoil arch has dog-tooth ornament running round underneath and a lovely little head, full of life, at either end.

Burton Church

2008-09-02T21:44:00.011+01:00

It’s said that no one knew about Burton church until a hunting party came across it by accident, and even today it is not easy to get to because it stands in the private grounds of Burton Park.
But you can walk, and the walk is very lovely. A public footpath starts at the Catholic church in Duncton, just 500 yards away on a ridge with a stunning vista over the park and the Downs beyond.
Burton church dates back to Norman times but was practically rebuilt in 1636, when the war drums were beating in England.
The Gorings of Burton Park were recusants, Catholics who had stayed loyal to Rome, and diehard Royalists to boot. They covered the interior of the church with biblical texts in black letter that amount to political propaganda.
Notable is an extremely rare coat of arms of Charles I, with the motto “Christo auspice regno” (I reign under Christ’s authority) and the text “Obey them that have the Rule over you, heb, 13, 17”. It is amazing they survived the Commonwealth – and in fact the whole church has survived amazingly intact from that period, being spared Georgian ‘improvement’, Victorian ‘restoration’ and even the comprehensive redevelopment of Burton Park into housing about ten years ago.
In fact, the new residents have transformed Burton church from a neglected relic into a thriving congregation.
The original 15th century rood screen is still in place, with its delicate tracery and battlemented top, though the rood or crucifix that would have stood on it has gone. An original bench is kept in the west end, and the Victorian pews incorporate a lot of old linenfold panels.
Several large monuments to the Gorings give the small church a crowded feeling. In the chancel, a little lady barely four feet tall lies beneath a pointed arch with crockets carved on it, a charming memorial. The monument to Sir William Goring, who died in 1553, is a tomb chest with columns supporting a vaulted canopy, with brasses let into the back. Sir William’s brass has gone, but his wife Elizabeth still kneels there, dressed in a tabard covered with her family badges, very unusual for a woman.
On the south side of the nave is the brass to John Goring, who kneels at a prayer desk in his armour. A scroll coming from his mouth reads ‘Delicta juventut meae, et ignorancias meas, ne memineris Domine’, from Psalm 25 v7. The King James bible has it: “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness' sake, O Lord.’
What on earth had the young John Goring got up to?
At the top of the hill, Catholic descendents of the Gorings erected a church in 1866 designed by Gilbert Blount and dedicated to SS Anthony and George, with a presbytry on one side and a school on the other. It was run by Jesuits, who are commemorated with a rather military-looking line of identical gravestones next to the chancel.

St Andrew, Ford

2008-08-09T15:30:00.007+01:00

A pretty church standing in the fields close to the junction of the old Chichester Canal with the River Arun. The little shiplap bellcote is painted white, like Tortington's - according to local legend, so they could be easily seen by bargemen navigating the river.
The walls are basically Norman, though little survives. The south porch was rebuilt in brick with a Dutch gable above, a triangular pediment supported on curved gables. It dates from 1637 when Dutch architecture was all the rage.
Inside, the chancel retains its narrow Norman arch, so often replaced in Victorian times, and the east window features nice reticulated tracery. Reticulated tracery (Dr Johnson defined reticulation as "made of network; formed with interstitial vacuities") was made possible by the development of the S-shaped ogee curve in the 14th century. At first, ogees were used to create this simple, attractive net in stone, but it was not long before masons went mad with ogees and created riots of swirling tracery that take the breath away.

Wiggonholt

2008-07-01T08:37:00.000+01:00

Wiggonholt church is on a lane to nowhere, but it is known and loved by the many people who see it prettily perched on the hill above the Wild Brooks nature reserve.
It could hardly be simpler, four walls and a roof with a small bell turret. The materials are elemental. The random stone blocks of the walls are barely faced, and even the corner stones are all different sizes. The roof is of mighty slates, decreasing in size from the eaves to the ridge. The bell turret is hung with plain wooden shingles.
The walls date back to the 12th or 13th century – it is impossible to date them precisely – but the character of the church is now early Tudor. The side and west windows are rectangular, with cusped tracery, and the east window is a pointed arch divided into three lights with perpendicular tracery.
The interior is almost puritanically plain, with hardly any decoration or monuments except for a pair of Commandment boards on the east wall and matching Creed and Lord’s Prayer boards on the west wall. The only splashes of colour are provided by the stained glass windows.
The east window is by the noted Victorian firm of Powell & Sons, made in 1859. It has an unusually plain diamonds design, with just one picture (Christ walking on the water) instead of the usual array of saints and stories. Whether the donor had simple tastes or just wanted to economise is not known.

St Mary the Virgin, Aldingbourne

2008-05-31T21:56:00.004+01:00

Just as you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't date a church by its exterior.The outside of any building takes the brunt of centuries of wind, rain and ice while the inside remains snug and protected. So it is unsurprising that when the Victorians went to work restoring churches, the exteriors were often almost entirely renewed.
At Aldingbourne, the outside got a more than usually thorough going over in 1867 when just about all of the stonework was replaced. Even after nearly 150 years the Victorian stone is hard and sharp-edged.
Inside, however, much softer stones have survived more or less unchanged since they were carved in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the nave, simple Early English round columns with scalloped caps support plain pointed arches, and the faint outlines of medieval wall paintings can be traced on the walls.
But there are two rather grander survivals from Aldingbourne's unsuspected past. The Bishops of Chichester had a palace here from early times until the Civil War, when it was assaulted by Parliamentary troops and was afterwards abandoned.
The occasional presence of the Bishop might explain the ornate twin sedilia, or stone seats, in the chancel. The canopy has two pointed arches with carved priest’s heads at each end. In the middle, the arches are supported by a corbel stone carved with two layers of the pyramid-shaped ornaments known as dog-tooth.
At the end of the south aisle is a chapel, located where a transept would be in a much larger church. Despite its small size, it has lovely stone vaulting with lines of dog-tooth along its ribs, and the columns have beautifully carved capitals, one crocketed and the other the characteristic Early English 'stiff leaf' ornament.
The vault looks just like part of Chichester Cathedral magically relocated four miles eastward. Indeed, it is probable that the Bishop brought cathedral masons in to carve both the vault and the sedillia.
A curious feature of the church is the memorial window to Engineer Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald Skelton, who sailed to the Antarctic with Scott and served in submarines in the First World War. It must be the only stained glass window anywhere to feature both a penguin and a submarine.
Further down the south aisle is another naval window, this time in memory of Judith, widow of Adml Sir Sidney Meyrick. At the bottom right hand corner, a lovely little brig bowls along, with terns swooping behind.

St Mary Magdalene, Tortington

2008-04-30T08:32:00.000+01:00

Tortington Church reveals itself as Norman the instant you turn into the churchyard, by the round arch of the south door and its zigzag ornament so characteristic of the 12th century.
The arch is particularly lavish in having two circles of zigzag, the outer one with curious objects looking a bit like bunches of grapes in each angle, and an outer circle of stylised flowers. It is very typical of the Norman style.
Step inside the church and another typically Norman feature is revealed. Every stone of the chancel arch has a weird and fearsome carved animal head. Birds with bulging eyes and beaks like toucans, fish-like creatures with great crests, snakes with bulgy bodies and rearing protruberances on their heads and creatures so bonkers they defy classification.
These creatures are called beakheads, and although they occur fairly frequently further north, there is only one other example in Sussex, at New Shoreham.
No-one seems to know what they represent or why they came into fashion. Some say they were the ‘signature style’ of one of the groups of Norman masons who toured the country picking up work during the building boom after the Conquest. Others claim they are derived from Nordic pagan symbols.
Perhaps they were linked in some way to the wall painting of the second coming with its inevitable gruesome scenes of sinners being dragged into hell that usually decorated the wall over the chancel arch.
The beakheads at Tortington still have small remnants of the bright colours they would have been painted originally. They must have looked truly terrifying to a congregation of country folk that had never seen the Muppets on the telly.
The plain keystone and the stone with the coat of arms were inserted in 1750 when the arch shifted and had to be repaired.
Below the arch is a brass to Roger Gratwik, lord of the manor of Tortington Cheynesse, who died in 1596. The epitaph is typical of the time, both in its preachy tone and its spelling. Even in Jacobean times, the engraver must have known about “i before e”, surely:

Behould and see a freind most deare

The Lorde hathe thaken him awaye,

Amend your lives whilst you be here

For flesh and bludd must nedes decay.

Earnley Parish Church

2008-04-01T20:53:00.000+01:00

It is a pleasant surprise coming into Earnley from the tackiness of East Wittering. The ancient little church sits on a triangle surrounded by a few cottages and trees, seemingly just as it always has. But look closely, and change and decay all around you’ll see.
The church was originally built in the 13th century, a simple box with a bell turret at the west end. A chancel was added a hundred years later. And that is, to a casual glance, was that. Examine the walls, however, and you soon observe whole sections that have clearly been patched in using different types of stone.
Inside, the roof timbers are medieval but the roof above is not. It has been replaced at least twice in living memory, first when it was blown off by a German bomb in the war (the parishioners continued to hold services in the road to show Hitler that business was as usual) and more recently when death watch beetle was found.
A new roof was installed over the existing one, the space at the eaves being bricked in rather than built up in stone so the new work would be honest.
When I visited, I happened on local geologist Roger Cordiner who explained the variety of stones used in this simple building. Apparently, most of the quoins (the cornerstones) are hard chalk quarried in medieval times at Stoke Clump, near Lavant.
The walls have a lot of Mixon stone, a yellow limestone found in a reef off Selsey. Mixon stone was used a lot by the Romans, and the west wing of Fishbourne Palace was faced with it. A lot appears in the walls of Fishbourne church, probably recycled from the palace.
Some stones at Earnley are clunch, a rather lumpy chalk, and some come from Quarr on the Isle of White. A surprising amount was shipped in from Caen in Normandy, the same high quality building stone used for the bulk of Chichester Cathedral.
Roger explained that until the coming of the railways, builders used the closest stone that was fit for purpose, as road transport was hugely expensive. In fact, bringing stone in from Caen by ship may have been cheaper than bringing it from Lavant by ox cart.
This month's bonus picture (exclusive to the web!) is of the evocative window in memory of the sculptor Yvonne Rusbridge, who was secretary of the PCC. The stained glass depicts the story of Jonah and features images from her work, and was dedicated in 1987. I love the way the spirit of the word of God passes over the waters, and the monsters of the deep.

St Michael, Up Marden

2008-03-08T08:41:00.000Z

It is sometimes very difficult to work out how an ancient building became what we see today. Changes such as adding an aisle, replacing the roof or building a tower usually involved sweeping away parts of the original structure, making it hard to envisage how the building grew.
The remote and lovely church at Up Marden is very simple to ‘read’, except for one mystery. The building is almost completely 13th century, unaltered and mercifully unrestored. It doesn’t even have electricity. Indeed, whereas most church guide books consist of a long list of the changes the centuries have wrought, the guide to Up Marden has lengthy tales of the many disputes over repair bills, so perhaps we have Sussex tight-fistedness to thank for the unmolested beauty of the building with its simple lancet windows and wagon roof.
The only loss is the wall painting, of which only a fragment survived the Reformation.
The mystery is the chancel arch, which is a crude triangular opening that looks very Saxon. Arthur Mee, author of The King’s England, called it “something that may go back a thousand years.” But Mee had not spotted another arch, clearly 13th century, seemingly embedded in the wall above.
Ian Nairn in Buildings of England said that the triangular arch was inserted later, to prevent a collapse. He wrote: “The triangular arch is not, as it looks, Saxon, but an emergency 16th century repair to the 13th century arch which can be seen above it.”
Nairn is not entirely certain, however. A footnote says: “It could conceivably be Saxon work renewed: the VCH [Victoria County History] suggests that it might have come from the former church at West Marden.”
But even Nairn may have got it wrong. The latest theory is that the 13th century masons rebuilt a Saxon church, starting work on a larger chancel arch but abandoning the idea for some reason. So is the arch a Saxon survival, a 13th century bodge, or 16th century scaffolding? Difficult to say, but it certainly adds interest.

Iron Grave Markers

2008-02-04T21:22:00.000Z

Not all gravestones are stone. Many were wood, though very few survive being set in the wet ground for long, and iron used to be a popular alternative.
Some of the very first iron gravestones are in Sussex, back in the days when the county was the centre of England’s iron industry. The church of West Hoathly, near East Grinstead, has a pair of large cast iron gravestones dating back to 1619 and 1624, commemorating ironmasters Richard Infield and his son, also Richard.
The plates were made by pouring molten iron into sand moulds impressed with the letters of the inscription. Unfortunately they don’t photograph well because they have lost all the paint and gold leaf that would have ornamented them when they were new.
The Infields may well have used iron to advertise their products from the grave, but the material did not come into its own until the railways made it possible to distribute them easily from the foundries of industrial Britain.
Scottish foundries in particular seemed to specialise in iron gravestones. The Etna foundry in Glasgow supplied a fancy cast iron gravestone in Bosham churchyard, adorned with typically Victorian symbols of death – an urn with a wreath, partly covered by a cloth. Unfortunately the inscription is eroded too badly to make it out properly, but the name is possibly Thomas Parrenden.
Most iron gravestones are much simpler, just a Celtic cross, a cross in a ring. William Loton’s grave in the empty churchyard at Treyford simply records his name, age and day of death in 1900, but on the back is the name of the maker, Hadden Edinburgh, and the warning “Registered” – even gravestones are copyright.

Laura Blunden’s attractive grave at Cocking, dated 1889, has nice Gothic detail, but many cast iron gravestones were obviously chosen for economy.

Plain crosses were held in stock at the undertakers and the inscriptions painted on as required. Almost inevitably the paint has disappeared over the years. At Didling, for example, there is a group of cast iron crosses in circles, absolutely without paint.

Tangmere church has a line of four iron memorials in the shape of a ring with a cross piece for the names, presumably of a family. Unfortunately the paint has gone and they look more like signs for a bizarre miniature Tube line.
Fishbourne church has an unusual variant in the memorial to the Strudwicks, dated 1907 and 1936, which is not cast iron but wrought. The inscriptions seem to have been stamped onto metal shields attached to the iron frame of the crosses, which has the advantage that people can be added to the memorial later, something that cannot be done with a cast iron gravestone.
The classiest type of iron grave marker was a chest tomb or sarchophagus. There is a fine example at Climping, to the memory of James and Sarah Gray. Her inscription is at one end and his at the other, possibly because inscriptions cannot be added to cast iron later, unlike stone. It seems as though Sarah died in 1868 aged 72, and James followed later. Curiously, despite cast iron's incredible hardness, James's inscription on the wind-swept west end of the tomb is weathered to the extent the date is almost impossible to make out (1875?) whereas Sarah's at the east end is still sharp and clear.

St Mary, Felpham

2008-01-06T15:39:00.000Z

Sussex is rich in the Norman and Early English styles, but when the Decorated style arrived in the late thirteenth century it failed to take off here.
As its name implies, the Decorated style is all about carving. Masons went mad, covering every surface with statuary, foliage, gargoyles and grotesque faces. Builders took full advantage of cheaper glass to make windows much bigger. Glass still came in very small pieces, however, so it had to be held together by strips of lead, in turn supported by stone tracery.
Tracery started off as simple bars of stone, but soon developed into riots of fanciful floral and teardrop shapes filling the space under the pointed arch. Ogee curves, bending first one way and then the other, were developed at this time.
The Decorated style is rare in Sussex, partly because the splurge of church construction in the early medieval period had provided most parishes with an adequate building. The wool boom passed the south coast by, so Sussex has few equivalents of the vast and heavily carved churches the newly-rich wool merchants built all over East Anglia and the Cotswolds. And it may be something to do with a Sussex preference for the plain and honest over bling.
One of the few examples of the Decorated style in this area is the chancel of St Mary’s church in Felpham, built sometime after 1345. It was rather brutally restored by the Victorians but the design is original.
The east window has three lights, divided by slender mullions, instead of the individual lancet windows that had been the norm until then. The tracery is curvilinear, bending to and fro to form strange leaf-like shapes under the pointed arch. The tall, lovely side windows are simpler, two lights with a circle enclosing a quatrefoil. The effect is somewhat marred inside because a huge organ case blocks one window.
Felpham is famous for William Blake, who stayed in a cottage belonging to local landowner William Hayley, but has not been kind to their memory. Hayley's home, The Turret, was pulled down and replaced by cheap flats in the 1970s, and the owner of Blake's cottage feels compelled to raise the fence ever higher to keep out the gaze of Blake fans. No longer can you imagine the poet experiencing visions in the street that now bears his name:
"Away to sweet Felpham for heaven is there;
The Ladder of Angels descends through the air
On the turrett its spiral does softly descend
Through the village it winds, at my cot it does end."

St Andrew, Tangmere

2007-12-01T20:18:00.000Z

Ask most people what a typical Sussex church looks like and they will say it is a simple box with a small spire sticking out of the west end of the roof. St Andrew at Tangmere is just like that – a simple Norman nave, 13th century chancel and a shingle-clad spire. It is only when you go in that you see how unusual it is.
Stand inside most churches and you see little sign of the existence of the spire and its bell chamber, except for a rope dangling from a hole in the ceiling. At Tangmere, however, the whole west end is dominated by an extraordinary support structure for the bell-turret above, so the weight of the spire and the three bells is carried directly on the ground rather than the walls.
Four mighty posts stand on either side, supporting beams level with the top of the walls. Another pair of posts stands on each beam to hold up the bell chamber and spire above. The corners are strengthened by curved wind braces, forming a cat’s cradle of beams that gives a slightly barn-like feel to the interior.
Outside, the church has another odd feature: a crude carving above a tiny lancet window, possibly a Saxon fragment reused. It is so weathered it is difficult to make out, but it looks as though it depicts Herod presenting Salome with John the Baptist’s head on a plate. Rather gruesome.
In the immaculately-kept graveyard, ranks of white military headstones are carved with British and German names, no distinction being made between them.

St Olave, North Street, Chichester

2007-11-02T21:22:00.000Z

Today, inner-city churches are usually hemmed in by shops, as though they were branches of CofE Boutiques or something. But they originally had their own churchyards, which were gradually built over as congregations moved out to the suburbs and the centre was taken over by commerce.
The little church of St Olave in North Street still has evidence of the loss of its surrounding burying ground. It entered today by the west door, but if you look to your right as you go in you will see a tall, narrow alcove that was the old Saxon south door. If you went though it today you would go straight into the bookies next door instead of the graveyard.

When it was built, sometime between 1030 and 1066, North Street would have been a narrow dirt track lined by a few thatched hovels. The church itself would have been a freestanding single room where the nave stands now.
The church as it appears today is mainly 14^th century, with flint walls and a typical pointed west window with flowing tracery. The curved leaf-shapes in the tracery are called foils, so the circle in the top of the main window is a quatrefoil and the triangular blank window above is a trefoil. The pointy bits between the foils are cusps.
Gradually, North Street was widened until it reached the west door and the shops moved in on either side. Finally, the church itself has become a shop, albeit an SPCK bookshop. An annual service is held on St Olave’s Day - July 29.
But why St Olave? He is the patron saint of Norway, after all, having converted the country in the early 11^th century, with no connection to Sussex. The answer is that Olave’s right hand man in the rather bloody missionary effort was a Saxon called Grimkell, who returned to England to become Bishop of Selsey. He founded the church, dedicating it to his friend and hero.

St Peter, Racton

2007-09-13T20:46:00.000+01:00

The Racton estate was owned for centuries by the Gunter family, which found fame when Colonel Gunter masterminded Charles II’s escape to France after the Worcester disaster.
Despite their long rule, the village shows little trace of the Gunters. Their house, Racton Manor, has disappeared and the famous folly tower is actually part of the neighbouring Stansted Park. But they left a fascinating series of monuments in the church that form an illustrated guide to how tastes in tombs changed from medieval to modern times.

The oldest monument is a magnificent stone table tomb with a fancy canopy above, erected in about 1520 in memory of either Hugh or John Gunter.
It is entirely medieval in style, covered in panels carved with formalised plants, heraldic beasts and shields. At the back, the Gunter family kneels before the Risen Christ, women on the left, men on the right. It is a deeply religious monument.
By the time Sir George Gunter and his wife Ursula put up their memorial in 1624, architecture had become more classical and tastes more secular.
The design is based on a Roman triumphal arch, with flat columns called pilasters on either side of a round arch under which the couple kneel in prayer. The stone figures above are of Justice and Charity flanking a gigantic stone carving of the Gunter arms. Christian ideas of the second coming have given way to a celebration of civic virtues.
By the time Sir Charles Gounter Nicoll died in 1733, the age of the heroic individual had arrived. Sir Charles himself is the centre of the composition, in the form of a superb bust in white marble on a black marble tomb chest, all brilliantly carved in the best style.
The bust stands inside an aedicule, Greek for ‘little house’, a sort of window-frame with urns and the Gunter arms on top. Sir Charles’s knightly accoutrements – helmet, shield and gauntlets – hang from the roof above.
The inscription is in language of lavish, almost toe-curling adulation:

He had all the Qualifications
Of a compleat and accomplish’d Gentleman,
Amiable in his person,
Graceful in his Address.

And so on. He was only 30.

St Paul, Elsted

2007-07-25T09:40:00.000+01:00

The survival of Elsted’s pretty church is a fable of the triumph of humility over pride.
In the 19^th century, the living of the combined parishes of Didling, Elsted and Treyford was in the gift of an aristocratic lady, who installed her clerical husband as rector. She regarded the three ancient but tiny churches as unsuitable, and built instead an imposing ‘Cathedral of the Downs’ with a tall spire on a prominent hill at the centre of the parish. It was completed in 1849.
The old churches were left to rot. Elsted lost its north aisle, and in a storm in1893 a tree fell through the nave roof. By the middle of the twentieth century little remained but the north wall and the chancel.
But the monster Victorian church had not reached its centenary before it was found to be structurally unsound and, with its builder long dead, no money was available for repairs. In 1947 it was torn down and no trace of it remains, though the graveyard is still in use and immaculately maintained.
So worship returned to Elsted church, which was sensitively restored by architect J.E.M. Macgregor. He pulled off a difficult trick: building the new parts in an unashamedly modern style but in harmony with the old. It is fascinating to see how the building has evolved through the ups and downs of its long history.
The original Saxon church was a simple rectangular box of spectacular herringbone masonry, best seen from the outside of the north wall.

Here you can see exactly how the Norman masons set about extending the church in the 12^th century, when a north aisle and the chancel were added.
Holes would have been punched through the walls and the stone arches inserted one by one, so as not to weaken the wall and risk collapse. When the north aisle was removed the arches were filled in again, the aisle windows being reused in the new wall.

Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Singleton

2007-07-01T21:57:00.000+01:00

One look at the massive tower of Singleton church betrays its great age. The crude cornerstones and the small arched windows show it was built a thousand years ago in Saxon times.
The rest of the church looks 15th century from the outside. The tracery in the windows has the plain vertical bars and flat arches characteristic of the Perpendicular style. So it comes as something of a surprise go in and find a Saxon nave even older than the tower – an incredibly tall room lit only by a tiny window at the top of the east end and the light filtering in from the later aisles.
It is believed that the nave may originally have had an upper room to house the priests serving the other churches in Singleton Hundred, and a doorway in the west end, now stranded close to the roof, supports this idea. The doorway itself has a typically crude Saxon arch made simply by cutting a couple of stone blocks in triangular shapes.
The columns and arches of the aisles were punched through the Saxon walls in 13^th century, and the chancel arch was rebuilt at that time.

Arthur Mee, author of The King’s England guidebooks, was shocked to see “when the chancel arch was about 400 years old, some lout passed by and carved his name on it.” He clearly did not read the graffiti, for the names are those of notable local families like the Courts and one, James Sicklemore, was the vicar!
Sicklemore served at Singleton in the Civil War, changing sides half way through when he paid the local blacksmith to make swords for the Parliamentary army. At the Restoration, he left the living to become a founder of the Baptist church in Chichester.
Another great local character was Thomas Johnson, the Duke of Richmond’s huntsman. The Duke erected a huge monument for him when he died in 1744 “as a reward to the deceased and an incitement to the living”. Below the eulogy is the poignant verse:

Here JOHNSON lies.
What Hunter can deny
Old, honest TOM the Tribute of a Sigh
Deaf is that ear,
which caught the op’ning Sound
Dumb is that Tongue,
which chear’d the Hills around
Unpleasing Truth –
Death hunts us from our Birth
In view; and Men, like Foxes, take to Earth.

Even more touching, however, is a tablet close to the north porch. Without sentiment it records that in the space of three weeks in 1831 a local infantry officer lost to illness both his young wife and their three year old daughter.

St Mary, Chidham

2007-06-04T08:23:00.001+01:00

Chidham church looks as though it has remained more or less unchanged since it was built in the 13^th century, but a fascinating collection of old prints and photographs in the church shows that all is not what it seems.
The walls are punctuated with simple lancet windows. The east end has a group of three, typical of the 1220s. A plain bellcote rises from the west end.

But the pictures show the church before its restoration in 1864. They show that until the Victorians got to work, several of the windows were late medieval, with tracery, and the bells were hung in a weatherboarded spire.

The restorer clearly felt the need to take the church back to its Early English simplicity, and he generally succeeded by resisting the temptation to overdo it and go for the lavish carving the Victorians loved so much. The only duff note is the bellcote, which is ever so slightly too big.

Inside, the narrow chancel arch was left instead of being enlarged as so many were. The chancel wall has two heavy monuments of the type known as a cartouche, an oval shape originally used for the arms of women and clergymen, to avoid the military implications of a shield.

Cartouches became popular for everyone in the Baroque era because they could be pulled out into extravagant shapes, and the Chidham monuments are particularly lavish with weeping cherubs above and skulls below, all draped with funerary folds of crepe. They date from 1707 and 1708.

Chidham’s real charm lies in its surroundings, however. The village is as isolated on its peninsula as if it were deep in the Downs. The jumble of houses is completely unplanned and as lovely as any formal composition.

Church of the Assumption, East Wittering

2007-05-24T20:55:00.000+01:00

When the art historian Ian Nairn researched East Wittering for the Sussex volume of Buildings of England back in the early 1960s, the church stood ‘by itself half a mile inland’. Alas, no longer. The church is surrounded by indifferent houses and reached through a vile industrial estate. It is not even signposted.

The church itself is standard Sussex, a simple early Norman box with a 13^th century chancel, all heavily done over in 1875 except for the south door, which is what makes the Assumption worth a special visit.

It is a rather grand Norman arch with a strong chevron pattern with drops on the points, like a veil thrown over a bride’s head. A simple, strong and effective device as only the Norman masons knew how to get away with.

(Note - this entry did not appear in Fishbourne Parish Magazine)

Selsey's movable churches

2007-05-11T22:20:00.000+01:00

At the edge of Pagham Harbour stands little St Wilfrid’s, Selsey’s incredible shrinking church.
In Saxon times, it was the cathedral church of St Peter. Not much seems to be known about it, because the Normans knocked it down when they transferred the see to Chichester in 1070 and built a new, smaller, parish church on the site.
A small castle was built next door, and when it became obsolete for military purposes they hung the church bells in the keep.
From then on, it was all downhill. The chantries and side chapels were removed at the Reformation and the castle keep collapsed in about 1720 leaving the bells useless on the ground.
There was one high point, however. In 1537, John Lewis and his wife Agatha commissioned a lovely monument to themselves. Originally, it would have had a big centrepiece, probably a Trinity, but that has been lost. The panel on the left shows St George and that on the right is a graphic portrayal of the agonising martyrdom of St Agatha, whose breasts were cut off because of her unswerving refusal to marry a pagan. Unfortunately, it looks a bit as though she is being adjusted with a pair of spanners but that may be looking back through modern binoculars....
But the most remarkable change came in Victorian times. Selsey’s beach front was becoming a popular resort and the old church was inconveniently far away at Church Norton, so the rector decided to move it into the expanding new town.
In 1864 the nave was demolished and as much of the materials as could be reused taken on farm carts to Selsey, including the stone columns and arches, the wooden roof and the marble font.
Only the chancel of the old church remained, the chancel arch being walled up to create a new west end. In 1917, it was rededicated to St Wilfrid, its founder.
Today it stands rather lonely in the middle of its cathedral-size graveyard. It is mainly 13th century work, shown by its Early English lancet windows.
The new church in Selsey looks totally Victorian (by Piers StAubyn) from the outside, so it is a bit of a shock to find the ancient stones within.The columns are plain cylinders with simple moulded capitals supporting the plain round arches so characteristic of the Normans. It’s very plain, even a bit grim, except for one arch which is carved with the heads of a Norman knight and his wife. The knight is straight out of the Bayeux tapestry, with a nose guard on his helmet, chain mail round his neck and a bristling moustache.
His wife, on the other hand, is a little pudding with a nose like a plum tomato. I do hope she never saw the way the rustic sculptor preserved her image for posterity.

St Mary, North Marden

2007-03-27T15:05:00.000+01:00

The tiny church of St Mary is very unusual not just because of its great age or its remarkable position almost alone on top of the South Downs but because it is a single room with a round east end. There are only three others in England, though the layout is relatively common on the Continent.

It is called a single cell apsida, an arrangement that came in with the Normans. Apses became unpopular here in the later middle ages, many being rebuilt with square east ends when churches were expanded to serve a growing population. St Mary, however, has been altered hardly at all since it was built by the conquerors in the early 12^th century – the date is given away by the round heads of the windows, even though all but one were replaced by over-zealous Victorian restorers. Another date clue is the round arch over the south door, which is carved with the heavy zigzags that Norman masons loved. Like Chichester Cathedral, the arch is made of stone from Caen in Normandy.

Inside, the small windows and the lack of electricity give an atmosphere of primeval gloom at this time of year. When wooden shutters were the only protection against the winter wind, services must have been chilly indeed.

St Andrew, West Stoke

2007-02-13T19:53:00.000Z

What an endearing little church this is, a humble building set on the magnificent sweep of the Downs. Its nave is small enough, but it overshadows the little tower with its pyramid roof.

From the outside the church looks to be entirely 13^th century, the Early English style, with narrow lancet windows and a pointed arch with detached columns in the south doorway under the tower.

Go in, however, and you immediately see a plain round-headed arched doorway opposite, showing that the nave walls are Saxon or Norman, dating back to the 11^th century.

Ever since the Reformation the walls have been painted pure white, but a few years ago a startling strip of medieval wall painting was discovered above the chancel arch, behind a roof beam which obviously made it too awkward to chip away so it was just painted over. The remnant is still difficult to see, but shows that the walls must have been a riot of colour, with a depiction of the Last Judgement over the pulpit, just to remind the congregation what to expect if they failed to take note of the preacher’s message.

Today, the only splash of colour is a lovely memorial to Adrian and Mary Stoughton, erected in 1635. They face each other at a prayer desk, him in his BA gown, her in a ruff and hood. Below, there seven surviving children also kneel, some holding sculls in memory of the couple’s nine other offspring who died in infancy.

The inscriptions are poignant. Above Adrian it reads:

Let those alone set open

The floodgates of their eyes that have no hope;

If true report but will instruct thine eare,

Then ye can find no subject for a teare;

Death could not wound him, only clos’d his eye,

And made him dye to live, that lived to dye.

And over Mary:

She does but sleep, can she

That lives to Heaven, be counted dead to thee?

Her soule’s forsaken flesh may chance to lye

Rak’d up in dust; but virtue can not dye:

Tyr’d with ye world, she takes a soft repose,

To wake with joy, when ye loud trumpet blowes.