St Mary Our Lady, Sidlesham

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.

St Mary, Climping

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 the Virgin, Aldingbourne

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.

Iron Grave Markers

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

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."