Introduction
St Mary’s stands at the rounded end of Pulborough’s greensand ridge, above the River Arun and the water meadows that separate the village from the South Downs. Domesday Book recorded two churches at Poleberge in 1086. One is generally understood as the predecessor of St Mary’s; the other is generally thought to have been the church at Wisborough Green, although a later tradition placed St Helen’s near Newbridge and neither identification can be proved.
The present building begins to disclose its history in the late twelfth-century font and the early thirteenth-century chancel. Masons enlarged the eastern arm before a far greater campaign transformed the church after 1400. John Tregoz supported the bell tower, and Rector Thomas Harlyng gave money for a new church, vestments, a gilded chalice, service books and ten years of prayer.
The Reformation changed how those spaces were used. Rood, images, side altars and medieval books disappeared or lost their former purpose; the Onley chapel became a vestry, bells were recast, and galleries and enclosed pews crowded the nave. In 1858-59 William Sinclair removed much of that arrangement, rebuilt the north chapel and established open seats that were free rather than privately assigned.
The twentieth century brought war memorials, urgent roof repairs, electric light and the work of two generations of the Comper family. Sir Ninian reshaped the western end with screen and glass; Sebastian reordered the chancel and made the north chapel into the Lady Chapel. Later fittings brought the altar closer to the nave and supported wider use. The longer history begins with the two churches entered under Poleberge in 1086.
Two churches at Poleberge, 1086
In 1086 a Domesday scribe entered two churches among the ploughlands, meadow, mills and fisheries of Poleberge. No dedication, position or description accompanied the count, and the estate recorded by the commissioners did not correspond neatly with later parish boundaries. One church is generally understood as the predecessor of St Mary’s. The second may have been the church at Wisborough Green, where the earliest masonry belongs to about the end of the eleventh century and proves that a church stood there at roughly the right time. Later local tradition placed that second church at Newbridge in the northern part of the old Pulborough parish and associated it with St Helen. Neither identification is decisive. The small Mille funerary chapel, once standing near the south-west corner of St Mary’s churchyard, may also have entered local memory and blurred the distinction between a parish church and a family burial chapel. The Domesday entry establishes two churches within the estate; it does not allow either to be named with certainty.
The history of the Pulborough church can be followed most clearly at the ridge-end site. The churchyard lies where the ridge narrows above the Arun, with old routes approaching from the Weald and descending towards the river crossing. Roman objects found around Church Place show activity on the hill, but they do not prove a Roman church beneath the medieval one. Nothing visible can be assigned confidently to the building used in 1086.
Its walls may have been timber, stone or both, yet baptism, burial and Mass had already fixed a sacred use to the ground. The first material link with the later church is a font carved more than a century after Domesday.
Font, chancel and chapel, c.1150-1400
The first object to carry the history forward is the font. Its square bowl, carved from Purbeck marble during the later twelfth century, has a row of round-headed arches on each face. The bowl now rests on a later sandstone base; marks at its corners show where small marble supports once stood. Purbeck marble had to be quarried in Dorset, shaped by specialist workers and moved into Sussex by water and road. The choice gave the parish a durable and costly vessel for the rite that marked entry into Christian life. It may have stood in the church that preceded the present chancel, but the evidence does not connect it directly with either Domesday church.
During the early thirteenth century masons rebuilt the eastern part of St Mary’s. They formed a long chancel with plain lancet windows and an east group of three lights, then opened its north wall through a two-bay arcade into a chapel. The chancel was the principal setting for the high altar and the clergy; the chapel offered another altar, a place for endowed prayers and a favoured position for burial. From the nave, the eastern arm turns noticeably towards the north. The bend has sometimes been called a ‘weeping chancel’ and given a symbolic explanation, but changes of alignment more often arose when a new campaign met older foundations or a different setting-out line. At Pulborough the angle is most readily explained by the joining of two building phases. During the following century the chancel continued to develop. Three stone sedilia were inserted into the south wall during the fourteenth century so that the priest, deacon and subdeacon could sit close to the altar during solemn services. Their canopies overlap the earlier windows, exposing the sequence in the wall. A piscina carried away water used to cleanse the vessels. The ogee-headed window at the east end of the south aisle belongs to the same broad period and shows that masons were also experimenting with richer tracery. By 1400 the eastern arm contained nearly two centuries of work, while the narrower nave beside it was about to be replaced.
The bell tower and Harlyng’s new church, 1404-1435
On 30 June 1404 John Tregoz of Goring left twenty shillings towards the bell tower at Pulborough. The brief Latin bequest catches the work at its practical beginning: sandstone had to be quarried and hauled uphill, lime burned for mortar, oak selected for floors and bell frames, and scaffolding raised above the western end of the old church. The tower was strengthened by buttresses and a stair turret, finished with battlements and built around a tall arch opening into the nave. Carved corbels and the springing of ribs show that a stone vault was intended over its lower stage, but the design stopped before completion. Once bells hung above, the church could announce services, funerals and festivals across fields and water meadows to households beyond sight of the ridge.
The rector who gave the enlargement its scale was Thomas Harlyng, instituted at Pulborough by about 1402 or 1403. He was also a canon and archdeacon of Chichester and held other benefices, including Ringwood in Hampshire; curates therefore carried much of the daily parish work while Harlyng moved through a wider ecclesiastical world. His will, dated 18 January 1422, returned part of that wealth to Pulborough. He left £51 13s 4d towards building a new church, a complete set of damask vestments with a cope, a silver chalice well gilded, a manual for the rites used by the priest and a processional for services that moved through or beyond the building. One hundred marks were to pay a chaplain for ten years to celebrate and pray for Harlyng’s soul wherever his body was buried. That burial depended upon where death found him. Harlyng asked to lie in Pulborough chancel if he died in Sussex, or at Ringwood if he died in Hampshire. His canopied brass, now on the north aisle wall, presents the rector in ecclesiastical dress with hands joined in prayer; the will places the image within a longer programme of repeated Masses, books, vestments and paid service. He also directed substantial resources towards the rebuilding of Stopham Bridge. Church and bridge belonged to the same travelled landscape: one gathered the parish for worship and burial, while the other carried clergy, carts and animals over the Arun.
By about 1435 the old nave had given way to four-bay arcades, north and south aisles, a tall clerestory, a timber roof carried on tie-beams and kingposts, and the north porch. The porch retained a holy-water stoup, stone benches and slots for the bar that secured its door. Inside, the font stood near the entrance; farther east a screen crossed the chancel arch, carrying the great rood above. Harlyng’s damask and metalwork supplied colour at the altar, candles burned before images, and side chapels gave families and other donors places for Masses and remembrance. Much of the nave remained open. Parishioners stood or knelt, moved forward with offerings and followed Latin worship through a familiar sequence of sound, gesture, image and procession.
Books, brasses and parish gifts, 1494-1538
Late-medieval wills bring named objects and named families into that interior. In 1494 Thomas Cvmbe asked to be buried in Pulborough church and left twenty shillings towards a new breviary, sharing the spiritual credit with Richard Mylle. The book contained the offices recited through the hours and seasons of the year; the gift turned money into repeated prayer. A tomb now in the north chapel has been associated with Cvmbe, although movement, damage and later inscriptions have obscured its first use.
The Mille family maintained a separate funerary chapel close to the churchyard. Its brasses, later brought into St Mary’s, commemorate Edmund Mille, who died in 1452, his wife Matilda and their son Richard. Within the church the north chapel became associated with John Onley, also called John Coton. His will of March 1510 requested burial in ‘my chapel’ between two pillars on the choir side beneath a marble tomb a yard high. The wording may indicate patronage or family use rather than private ownership, for clergy still served the altar and the chapel remained part of the parish church. Smaller bequests show how the building was maintained. Richard Sutton left money for repair of the bells in 1521 and black cloth to the curate. A cow was given for a trental of thirty Masses; a sheep went to the high altar in 1530; four sheep formed church stock in 1538. Churchwardens had to pasture, value or sell those animals before their worth became wax, wages or masonry. Wills also referred to Our Lady of Pity, Our Lady of the Assumption and the Chapel of Our Lady at Pulborough. These titles locate St Mary’s within a religious culture of lights, images and intercession that would soon be dismantled by successive royal governments.
Reformation, register and galleries, 1538-1822
No complete sixteenth-century inventory records what happened to every Pulborough image, book or vessel, so the change must be followed through national orders and the altered building. An English Bible was ordered for parish churches in 1538. Under Edward VI the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 replaced the old Latin forms, stone altars gave way to movable Communion tables, and roods, subsidiary images and many lights were removed. Mary restored Catholic worship for a few years; Elizabeth’s settlement of 1559 again required royal supremacy and an English liturgy. At St Mary’s the screen and great rood disappeared, the side altars lost their former service, and the elaborate Marian titles found in wills fell out of ordinary use. The medieval walls remained, but attention shifted increasingly towards scripture, preaching, the royal arms and Communion.
The parish register begins in 1595, widening the record from property-owning testators to generations entered at baptism, marriage and burial. Political conflict then reached the rectory. In 1646 Randolph Apsley was accused of being a ‘common drinker and scandalous liver’ after he had been seen in a Stopham public house. Parliamentarian authorities displaced him in favour of the Puritan John Goldsmith; Apsley returned after the Restoration in 1660. Bells dated 1636 and 1665 belong to the same unsettled century, while a bequest by Rector John Mille in 1676 converted the former Onley chapel into a vestry where records, vestments and parish business could be kept.
Faculties granted in 1737 and 1738 authorised galleries. Timber floors and fronts entered the tall nave, providing more places and accommodation for singers or instrumentalists, while enclosed pews gave households assigned spaces of their own. The Mille chapel in the churchyard fell out of use and was demolished during the second half of the eighteenth century; its brasses came into the south aisle, and stone from the structure may have been reused when the south porch was added around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The church that had been planned for processions, several altars and a largely standing congregation gradually became an auditorium arranged around reading, preaching and fixed seats.
Austin, Sinclair and the Victorian church, 1822-1904
John Austin became rector in 1822 and treated the inherited interior with a mixture of energy and severity. Jesse Greenfield, the long-serving parish clerk, later said that Austin attacked John Onley’s great tomb with a pickaxe; fragments were used as steps on the path rising from the road cutting to the churchyard. Another medieval monument acquired inscriptions to Austin and his wife.
The north chapel served as a vestry and probably housed the barrel organ listed in an inventory of 1842, whose four pinned cylinders supplied a fixed choice of tunes. Austin enlarged the burial ground in 1852, then left £3,367 for the education of poor children, a bequest that would connect the next church restoration with new parish schools.
William Sinclair succeeded Austin in 1857 after service in the Madras Cavalry and two decades of church and school work in Leeds. He first established schools at Pulborough, North Heath and Nutbourne, then closed St Mary’s for a restoration directed by the architect George Morgan Hills in 1858-59. The north chapel was rebuilt, masonry repaired and the interior stripped of the arrangement accumulated since the eighteenth century. A newspaper described galleries from which it had been difficult to see or hear, high square pews and a huge pulpit with a revolving reading desk that blocked the view of the chancel. Open oak seating replaced them. On 18 April 1859 a church meeting resolved that the sittings should be ‘free and unappropriated’, ending the claim of particular households to rented or customary pews.
The restoration also filled the east triplet with glass commemorating Austin’s educational gift. A Forster and Andrews organ was installed in the north chapel in 1874, the same year that a chancel window honoured Helen Ann Burrell, founder of the parish almshouses. After Sinclair’s death in 1878, the blocked fifteenth-century opening in the south wall of the chancel was reopened and rebuilt, then filled with memorial glass for the rector and his family. His successor, George Wingfield Bourke, provided carved choir stalls and prayer desks in 1880, a five-arched reredos and improved lamps. Three new bells completed a peal of eight for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, requiring a new iron frame within the medieval tower.
War, repair and the Compers, 1905-1979
The parish magazine, founded in 1905, records the church through smaller decisions that earlier centuries often conceal. The north porch was repaired before the First World War, but a proposal for new oak seating in 1914 was overtaken by the conflict. The external memorial was dedicated in 1920 and an alabaster tablet naming sixty-eight dead followed in 1921. That year a fabric report described a decayed main roof, north buttresses held together by ivy and walls beginning to perish. Rector Ernest Frost organised repairs, and in 1923 the south porch was cleared of stored material, given oak doors and adapted as the choir vestry.
Archdeacon Hoskyns urged the restoration of the north chapel in 1926, but the organ still occupied it. Work began elsewhere. Colonel Godman designed wrought-iron gates across the chancel in 1927; William Glasby’s Annunciation glass entered the fourteenth-century window in the south aisle; and the old side chapel beneath it was rededicated in 1931, its piscina giving material evidence for an earlier altar. Sir Ninian Comper transformed the western end in 1929 with an oak tower screen, the west window and a baptismal window funded by parishioners who had been baptised in St Mary’s. Electric light followed in 1934.
During the next war several tons of churchyard railings were removed for the national salvage campaign. A second memorial tablet was dedicated in 1952.
The north chapel could be reconsidered only after the 1874 organ was removed. In 1947 a Bryceson Brothers instrument, built in 1895 and brought from Holmwood, was installed beside the tower. The tower itself was refurbished in 1955, and the parochial church council then appointed Sir Ninian’s son, J. B. Sebastian Comper, to reshape the east end. Work began in 1957 with colour-washing the nave, aisles and tower and moving the font from beneath the tower to a place visible from the principal entrance. Comper rebuilt the weak north wall of the former Onley chapel, introduced a broad four-light window, replaced three square-headed east openings with a lancet and painted the timber ceiling in black, white and red with Marian emblems. The room became the Lady Chapel. Comper lowered and repaved the sanctuary, moved the rail west so that the medieval sedilia stood within it, removed the Victorian reredos and exposed the full height of the east windows. A new altar stood before hangings suspended between angel-topped riddell posts; chandeliers softened the light. The altar was consecrated on 21 December 1958, a silver processional cross followed in 1962, and the Lady Chapel east window was filled in 1968 with St Anne teaching the young Virgin Mary, beneath an RAF crest commemorating Flying Officer Richard Crowther. Comper’s ashes were buried in the chancel in 1979.
A church still being altered, 1976-2013
Later changes continued the opening of the east end. An aumbry for the Holy Oils was installed beside the piscina in the south chapel in 1976, and the iron chancel gates of 1927 were removed the following year. Robert Tunnell made a nave altar in 1981 so that Communion could be celebrated nearer the congregation; floodlighting made the tower visible across the valley after dark in 1982. The Bryceson organ was restored in 2001, the ringing bells were cleaned, tuned and repaired in 2005, and a cracked bell was recast in 2012. A catering facility added in 2013 allowed the old building to support gatherings as well as services.
The church received each of these additions through the same practical sequence that can be traced back to John Tregoz and Thomas Harlyng: a defect or need was identified, money gathered, a craft commissioned and an old space adjusted. The late twelfth-century font, thirteenth-century chancel, fifteenth-century tower, Victorian glass and Comper work now meet within one building because no generation left St Mary’s untouched. The sharpest join remains the turn from the fifteenth-century nave into the thirteenth-century chancel.
