Introduction
St Mary and All Saints stands at Church Green, apart from the houses, school, hall and former shops that later made Dunsfold Common the everyday centre of the village. The position makes sense once the medieval parish is understood. Dunsfold grew through scattered farms, woods and small holdings on the heavy clay of the Western Weald, and the church served people who approached from several directions rather than from one compact street.
Most of the stone church was raised in one campaign about 1270-1290. Its cruciform plan, chancel, transepts and aisleless nave remain clear, together with the triple sedilia and piscina beside the high altar, piscinae in both transepts and the timber bellcage over the west end. The nave acquired its remarkable oak benches in the early fifteenth century. Wills then bring candles, Masses, burial, family remembrance and gifts for the fabric into the same interior before the Reformation removed altars, images and older devotional endowments and introduced a different pattern of Communion and preaching.
Later generations altered the church without erasing its medieval form. Seventeenth-century bells and the parish register added new layers; eighteenth-century rectors were often absent while curates maintained local worship; an 1828 repair and west singers’ gallery belonged to the Georgian interior remembered by older parishioners. Henry Woodyer transformed the chancel and transepts in 1881-1882, and the nave restoration of 1892-1893 exposed medieval wall paintings and created a ring of six bells. Dunsfold passed from the Diocese of Winchester to Guildford in 1927, the church was listed Grade I in 1960, and later repair has continued around the thirteenth-century walls and fifteenth-century timber frame.
A church built for the fold country, c.1266-1305
Dunsfold first appears by name as Duntesfaud in 1266. Before then the district belonged within the great Bramley estate, whose church relationship ran north to Shalford. Canon S. L. Ollard, who researched the parish in the early twentieth century, once considered whether one of the unnamed churches recorded with Bramley in Domesday Book might have stood at Dunsfold. John Blair’s later reconstruction of early medieval Surrey places the established estate churches elsewhere and treats Dunsfold’s separate ecclesiastical development as a later event. The present building can be dated much more securely: its main fabric belongs to the later thirteenth century.
Between about 1270 and 1290 masons and carpenters created a church that was ambitious for a dispersed Wealden community. An aisleless nave led into north and south transepts and a chancel, producing the cruciform plan that still determines movement through the building. The walls use Bargate stone rubble with ironstone galleting, while Horsham-stone slabs appear at the eaves and timber carries the roofs, bellcage and spire. Most of the windows use the pointed forms, trefoils, circles and quatrefoils associated with the campaign. In the south transept a freestanding pier carries the beginning of an arcade arch, as though an aisle was contemplated and abandoned before the plan was finished. The chancel contains the most elaborate medieval stonework. Three clergy seats and a piscina are combined beneath four arches carried on Sussex-marble shafts; the piscina provided the drain used when sacred vessels were washed after Mass. Each transept has another piscina, placing an altar in both arms of the cross. A timber screen once divided nave and chancel, with the rood above it, while a squint from the north transept gave a restricted view towards the high altar. The south porch belongs to the medieval church, and the entrance later received the planked and studded door with Tudor roses in the spandrels that is now used by worshippers and visitors.
The church stood in a parish whose households remained spread across miles of clay lanes. Dunsfold Farm, High Loxley, Mill Farm, Rickhurst, Hurlands, Wintershull, Blacknest, Burningfold and the Common later appear repeatedly in parish records, and none formed a single medieval village around Church Green. The bellcage gave those farms a sound that could travel farther than the building could be seen; baptisms, weddings and funerals brought families to the same place even when their daily work kept them widely separated. Paths and roads converged on the churchyard from several directions, and burial fixed successive generations to the ground around the new church.
By 1291 the new church stood at the centre of an independent rectory. The Taxatio Ecclesiastica valued Ecclesia de Duntesfalde at £13 6s 8d, or twenty marks, and assessed its papal tenth at £1 6s 8d. A payment of 3s 4d remained attached to the living in recognition of Shalford’s older rights, a small annual reminder of the mother church from which Dunsfold had separated. In February 1294/95 Bishop John de Pontissara instituted Alan de Dollyng, also read as de Rollings, the first rector whose name can be followed securely in the episcopal record.
Edward I changed the patronage in 1305 when he granted the advowson – the right to nominate a priest when the rectory became vacant – to the Hospital of St Mary outside Bishopsgate in London, usually called St Mary Spital. The London canons did not become Dunsfold landowners and they did not build the church, which was already standing before their connection began. A royal licence in 1342 would have allowed the hospital to appropriate Dunsfold and convert the rectory into a vicarage, but that scheme never took effect.
The medieval church in use, 1310-1533
One of the earliest incidents after the church was built began with trees in the churchyard. In March 1310/11 Bishop Henry Woodlock ordered the rural dean to summon Richard, the Dunsfold sacristan or sexton, after trees had been cut down against the rector’s wishes and carted away. Richard was said to have admitted his part openly before clergy and lay people. The bishop ordered Richard to appear after the feast of St Benedict; no outcome is recorded.
The legal rectory changed hands repeatedly during the fourteenth century. Clergymen exchanged Dunsfold for livings in Kent, London, Oxfordshire, Sussex and elsewhere, and several studied or sought other preferment while holding the benefice. The building itself depended less on any one rector than on the local clergy and parish officers who kept services going. Thomas Southam, rector by the early fifteenth century, also worked for church authorities in both Chichester and Winchester. During the first half of the fifteenth century the nave acquired the oak benches for which Dunsfold is now especially known. Older accounts placed them close to the date of the church, but dendrochronology has dated the timber to trees felled between 1409 and 1441. Their heavy ends rise into paired knobs separated by a deep cusp, and the benches brought fixed places into a nave that had previously allowed more flexible standing and seating. The timber bellcage over the west end also belongs to the fifteenth century, supporting the bells and shingled spire without the expense of a masonry tower.
The fittings explain how the medieval building worked. Parishioners occupied the nave while the high altar stood in the chancel beyond the screen; further altars occupied the transepts. Baptism took place at the font, funerals moved into the churchyard, and the bells called households across fields and woods. English parish worship also brought processions, feast days, prayers for the dead and repeated Masses into such interiors. At Dunsfold, the two transept piscinae mark the positions of subsidiary altars where Mass could be celebrated away from the high altar.
During the long incumbency of Henry Dyer, instituted in 1462, John Maundefyld made his will in 1483 and left 3s 4d ‘for the work’ of Dunsfold church, with four pence to the mother church of Winchester. Three years later Thomas Hook gave the same offering to Winchester and left a heifer to provide a light at Dunsfold. The animal or its value could supply income for the wax required by that light. The records become richer in the generation before the Reformation. Joan Marche directed in 1525 that five Masses should be said or sung at her burial and another five at her month’s mind; for seven years her executors were to arrange a dirige and Mass for her husband, herself and her son, followed by the family commemorative drinking. Richard Mandefield left money to the high altar in 1531/32 for forgotten tithes and endowed an annual obit from land at Piper’s Hatch. In 1533 Anne Mandefield ordered ten Masses at her burial, ten more at the month’s mind and gave a cow valued at 6s 8d to maintain a one-pound taper before the Sacrament.
The Reformation remakes the interior, 1538-1602
The religious house that had presented Dunsfold’s rectors for more than two centuries disappeared in 1538 when St Mary Spital was dissolved and its rights passed to the Crown. The church itself was then valued through the rectory rather than as a separate estate: the Valor Ecclesiasticus recorded £12 5s 6½d from parsonage, garden, arable, meadow, pasture and greater and lesser tithes before the usual diocesan charges. The Valor Ecclesiasticus recorded the rectory at £12 5s 6½d before the usual diocesan charges. Commissioners in 1549 valued lands and rents supporting obits and lights in Dunsfold church at 9s 6d a year. Three years later another royal commission listed the goods still present: a silver chalice weighing four ounces, a second double-gilt chalice of three ounces, an embroidered blue velvet cope, a vestment of fine silk, two surplices and three great bells. Thomas Pulter, William Bobroke, Thomas Bromall and Stephen Downs received the objects into their custody, and the inventory noted that small parcels had been given to the poor by the parish priest.
National orders changed the arrangement around those objects. Stone altars gave way to the Communion table required by reformed worship, the rood and associated imagery were removed or altered, and medieval painting was covered. John Marche of Burningfold made his will in July 1552 during this transition. He left five shillings to the poor and 13s 4d towards repairing the highway from his house towards Dunsfold church.
William Langborough was instituted in December 1560 and remained in Dunsfold for more than forty years. The church acquired a Communion cup dated 1564, replacing the older chalice in the new rite; a silver cover followed in 1578 and could also serve as a paten for the bread. In 1583 William Knight of Reading cast a bell with a Latin inscription wishing that John’s bell might sound for many years. Archdeaconry visitations repeatedly place Langborough beside named churchwardens and parishioners, including William Poulter and John Manfield in 1575 and Nicholas Yoman and John Woods in 1578.
Bells, registers and the churchyard, 1602-1800
The bellring above the nave continued to develop in the seventeenth century. A bell cast in 1621 carried the words ‘Our Hope is in the Lorde’ and the initials of churchwarden Philip Gringoe and bell-founder Richard Eldridge. The parish register begins in 1628, bringing baptisms, marriages and burials into a continuous local record. John Shipsey, rector from 1633 and described on his former chancel gravestone as a chaplain to Charles I, remained through the Civil War years; Bryan Eldridge cast another bell for Dunsfold in 1647. John Holney became rector in 1652 and turned the register into something much fuller than a list of life events. He recorded twelve of the fourteen children born to himself and his wife Jane, sometimes giving the exact hour of birth, and wrote down changes in parish office as government shifted from Commonwealth to Restoration. Stephen Holney was appointed parish register in 1653; Robert Arnold became parish clerk in 1661.
One long entry divided responsibility for the post-and-rail fence around the churchyard. Dunsfold Farm, Great Rickhurst, Wintershull, Hurlands, Spronks, Mill Farm, Blacknest, Rushett, High Loxley, Tickner’s Heath, New Inn, Common House, Ifold Farm, Pound Farm and Burningfold appear among the holdings required to repair particular rails, gates or stiles. Some lay miles from Church Green, and Rushett belonged to Dunsfold until the creation of Graffham parish in 1863.
Holney also recorded discipline and sudden death. Sarah Pick performed public penance in a white sheet in 1665/66, and J. Barnes and his wife Ann undertook private penance the following year. In October 1669 William More of Mill Farm was buried late at night after his team mortally injured him while he was returning from Petworth. Robert Penfold was buried on 26 July 1671 after a load of chalk killed him.
The eighteenth century altered the clerical household more than the architecture. Joseph Richardson became rector in 1680, and his family remained closely connected with Dunsfold for decades; his daughter Elizabeth married the clergyman and poet Thomas Warton in the church in 1720/21, and their son Joseph Warton was born at the Rectory in 1722. After 1756 several rectors held other benefices and lived elsewhere, leaving resident curates to conduct baptisms, marriages, burials and Sunday services. Edward Eliot, already rector of Hambledon, signed the Dunsfold register as curate through much of the period from 1775 to 1790.
Repair, gallery and worship before Victorian restoration, 1800-1881
Richard Bartholomew had served Dunsfold as curate for ten years before becoming rector in 1800, restoring a resident incumbent after the long period of pluralism. His death in December 1826 was followed almost immediately by a problem with the building itself. In 1827 the church was formally presented as out of repair. At a vestry meeting on 1 May 1828 the parish agreed works costing £150 11s 6d, paid through the locally levied church rate.
The interior of this repaired church was still Georgian in character. Under the Honourable John Evelyn Boscawen, rector from 1827, a singers’ gallery was erected at the west end, raising the musical leaders above the nave. Enclosed and appropriated pews occupied part of the church alongside the old oak benches.
Boscawen also presented a silver paten in 1832, inscribed with his name and the words ‘The humble gift of John Evelyn Boscawen, Rector, 1832′. A hatchment with the arms of George IV and the date 1828 hung within the repaired interior. A sketch made in 1804, later published by J. Lewis André, records the exterior before the singers’ gallery and the Victorian alterations.
Erskine William Holland became rector in 1838 and held the living for almost fifty years. His incumbency spanned the first national censuses, the growth of the school on Dunsfold Common and the separation of Graffham in 1863, which removed Rushett and other north-eastern holdings from the old parish. Jonathan Botting, parish clerk for many years, died in 1870 aged seventy-five; Holland placed a memorial praising his faithfulness, efficiency and trustworthiness ‘in Church and State’. From 1873 Holland’s health kept him largely in Brighton and curates-in-charge carried much of the local ministry. Canon Ollard later collected memories of the church before restoration. Men sat chiefly on the south side of the nave and women on the north, while the last old bench on the north side was remembered as the churching pew used by women returning to public worship after childbirth. Older men were said to touch the forelock before entering their seat. Sunday worship under Holland centred on Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, with a sermon at one of the services; Holy Communion was celebrated less frequently and attracted comparatively few communicants. Holland’s own visitation sermon of 1855 used the image of a parish priest hearing the church bell toll for a death and going out to discover who had died.
By the later nineteenth century those arrangements were increasingly at odds with the direction of Anglican church restoration. Architects and clergy placed renewed emphasis on the chancel, sanctuary and frequent Communion, while galleries and high box pews were commonly removed and older medieval work brought back into view. Dunsfold’s east end, chancel arch, seating and floors became the focus of the campaign promoted in 1881 by Canon Vernon Musgrave of Hascombe and the curate-in-charge A. W. Watson.
Henry Woodyer and the two Victorian restorations, 1881-1893
Musgrave and Watson employed Henry Woodyer, the Guildford-born Gothic Revival architect whose work already included churches and restorations across Surrey and Sussex. Woodyer’s first campaign concentrated on the chancel and transepts in 1881-1882. He widened and heightened the chancel arch, raised the east window, blocked the priest’s doorway in the south chancel wall, altered floor levels in the transept chapels, removed later box pews and created an organ chamber. Woodyer retained the triple sedilia, piscinae, transept arches and main cruciform plan, then created an organ chamber beside the restored east end. A drawing of the interior before the work records the church that Woodyer was changing. The older chancel arch was lower and narrower, box pews crowded the nave and the east end had the proportions inherited from earlier repair. After the restoration the nave opened more directly towards the chancel, and the fifteenth-century benches became easier to distinguish from later seating. The drawing records the lower chancel arch and box pews before those changes.
William Henry Winn became rector in 1888 and carried the work into the nave. The restoration of 1892-1893 opened plastered surfaces and brought medieval painting back into view. Later descriptions identify figures of St Christopher and St George on the north wall, with further traces of colour elsewhere in the building and floral painting beneath the porch roof.
The same campaign reorganised the bells. The cracked bells of 1583 and 1621 were recast, three additional bells were supplied and Dunsfold acquired a ring of six in 1893. The timber bell structure was taken down, repaired and rebuilt before the bells returned above the west end, while the ringers continued to work from floor level inside the church. A lychgate was added to the churchyard and a painted list of rectors placed on the north-west wall; the list repeated errors from Manning and Bray and omitted William Langborough, whose Elizabethan incumbency is documented in wills and visitation records.
Church Green, the Holy Well and twentieth-century care
The church’s setting acquired a new reputation during the late nineteenth century. A spring between the church and the river was known as the Holy Well, and E. A. Judges, the Guildford writer who visited Dunsfold for Some West Surrey Villages, recorded in 1901 that its water was fetched particularly for sore eyes. Rector William Henry Winn told him that the spring rose naturally to the surface and did not run dry. Judges also described visits by Roman Catholic priests from St John’s Seminary at Wonersh, while later guidebooks associated the place with a Marian apparition. Canon Ollard searched for documentary evidence for the apparition and found none.
Ollard himself became rector in 1914 and served only until 1915, but his later research transformed knowledge of the church. He reconstructed the rectorial sequence from the Winchester registers, corrected the painted list in the nave, transcribed wills and parish material and examined the church’s dedication. Medieval Dunsfold wills do not give a patronal title; the antiquary Richard Symmes called it All Saints in the seventeenth century, while John Ecton’s Thesaurus listed St Mary in 1763.
A major administrative change came in 1927 when Dunsfold left the Diocese of Winchester after more than six centuries and entered the newly created Diocese of Guildford. The church received Grade I listing on 9 March 1960, recognising the completeness of the late-thirteenth-century building, its medieval fittings and the fifteenth-century bellcage. Dunsfold Church Conservation Area followed in 1974, extending protection to the rural group at Church Green, its churchyard, lanes, trees and open relationship with the surrounding fields. Repair has continued around those older elements. A two-manual electronic organ by Copeman Hart was installed in 2006, and the Surrey Churches Preservation Trust recorded a £5,000 grant towards re-roofing in 2015. A large parish tapestry on the west wall, 17 feet 3 inches long and worked by eighty-five parishioners, adds a modern record of Dunsfold life within the medieval building. The six bells are rung from the floor beneath the fifteenth-century timber frame.
