RUDGWICK – Holy Trinity Church

A church on the ridge

Rudgwick’s church occupies the highest part of the old settlement, close to the line that divided Sussex from Surrey and above ground which descends sharply to the north. Church Street follows the ridge; Lynwick Street drops towards Bucks Green; Naldretts Lane leads west towards Warhams, Wanford and the Arun; and the eastern roads pass through Rowhook towards Slinfold and the Surrey Weald. A household in The Haven or at Tisman’s Common might be several miles from Holy Trinity even though both places lay within the same parish. The church was a centre reached by journeys, not the church of a densely built medieval village.

Regwick is recorded in 1210 and has long been interpreted as a farm or settlement on a ridge. The description fits the topography, but it does not reveal when the first church was founded. Rudgwick has no separate entry in Domesday Book, and the later parish cannot be projected backwards as though it had already formed one estate in 1086. Land within its eventual boundary belonged to several lordships, including Pulborough, Dedisham, Hope and Polingfold. Polingfold, centred at Ewhurst in Surrey, reached so close to the churchyard that houses beside Holy Trinity could be described through a manor lying across the county boundary.

By the thirteenth century these different tenures shared one ecclesiastical centre. The Fleming lords of Pulborough held the advowson, the legal right to present to the benefice, and in 1260 Henry III granted Alard le Fleming a fair on the vigil, feast and morrow of the Holy Trinity. Walter de Lisle and Florence, one of the Fleming heiresses, held it in 1279. Temporary stalls and traders consequently gathered beside a churchyard already used for burial and around a building to which children were brought for baptism. The commercial arrangements remained attached to the site for centuries: the 1733 lease of the property later known as the King’s Head included a Fair Hovell and rights to erect standings when the fair returned.

The first building and the broad west tower

Before the tower, the building is difficult to recover. A functioning parish institution certainly existed by the thirteenth century, and the vicarage was established before 1272, yet no foundation charter, excavation or early plan fixes the form of the church that stood first on the ridge. The font has often been drawn into the argument. Its square marble bowl carries shallow arcading and stands upon a central shaft with four corner supports, but the ogee forms in the base point towards a later date than the twelfth century traditionally assigned to it. The bowl may have been recut, replaced or combined with work of another period; without close material study it cannot date the first church securely.

With the tower, uncertainty gives way to masonry.

Built principally in the early thirteenth century, the west tower is unusually broad and relatively low, with great clasping buttresses at the western corners, a double-chamfered west doorway, lancet openings and a corbel table below the pyramidal roof. The buttresses are bonded into the walling and belong to the original conception rather than to a later attempt to hold a failing structure upright. Their mass gives Holy Trinity its characteristic profile: not a needle against the skyline, but a compact block of stone set across the ridge. Grimm drew that mass from the south-west around 1790, immediately recognisable beneath its low roof although a timber porch then sheltered the west doorway.

Parts of the south nave wall may belong to the same phase, although render, later windows and repeated repair make the boundary difficult to trace. The tower nevertheless fixed the western end of the church. Builders could extend eastwards, open the nave to a north aisle and reconstruct the chancel, but every later campaign took its limit from this early block.

The fourteenth-century transformation

The decisive enlargement came in the early fourteenth century, when builders replaced or extended the eastern part of the church with a long chancel, opened the north wall of the nave into a new aisle and linked the two spaces by an arcade. The chancel arch and alterations within the tower belong to the same broad period. What had been a comparatively compact ridge-top church became an aisled building capable of receiving a congregation scattered among farms, mills and hamlets across several miles of the Low Weald. The new work was more ambitious than its simple outline first suggests: a quatrefoil-headed opening appears on the north of the chancel, a low-side window with a sexfoiled head on the south, and the north aisle displays cusped spherical triangles, ogee-trefoils and quatrefoils in a sequence whose patterns change from bay to bay.

Some stone was renewed in the nineteenth century and several arcade piers were replaced, but the variety belongs to the medieval design rather than to Victorian invention. Near the altar, architecture followed use. An aumbry in the north chancel wall provided a secure recess for vessels, books or other objects required during services; opposite it, a piscina drained water used in cleansing sacred vessels. A holy-water stoup stood near an entrance. Horsfield’s account of 1835 also recorded three stone seats beneath plain rounded arches in the chancel, with an embattled treatment above.

A fifteenth-century window was later inserted in the north wall of the chancel, and the east end changed again before the Victorian restorations. A drawing made in 1805 showed panelled tracery with the lower part blocked.

Inside the medieval church

Rudgwick’s own records do not describe a complete medieval Sunday, but the building belongs to the pattern reconstructed from English parish evidence. Parishioners entered through a porch, used holy water at the doorway and gathered in the nave and aisle, while the chancel formed the principal working space of the clergy. The vicar prepared books, vestments, bread, wine, lights and vessels; a clerk assisted with responses, music and practical arrangements; churchwardens accounted for repairs and furnishings. Sunday was not necessarily one compact service. Depending upon local staffing and season, matins might be followed by the principal Mass, with evensong later in the day, and banns, feast days, fasts, charitable collections or matters affecting the parish could be announced between the liturgical actions.

The year altered the church repeatedly. Advent and Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost brought different texts, colours and ceremonies. Rogation processions moved prayer from the building into the fields; Easter imposed particular obligations of confession and communion; funerals travelled from house to church and churchyard. On the feast of the Holy Trinity, the dedication of the building coincided after 1260 with the fair outside, joining liturgy to the temporary noise of trade on the ridge.

Late-medieval parish churches were richer in colour and devotional points than the later Protestant interior. Altars, images, lights, textiles and painted or glazed scenes gave particular devotions a place within the building, although no complete Rudgwick inventory has been located. Nineteenth-century observers found remnants of richly coloured glass and the three chancel seats; the piscina and aumbry still indicate work once carried out around the principal altar. Distance sharpened the importance of these rites. A family from Bucks Green approached along Lynwick Street, people from The Haven travelled north through minor lanes, Tisman’s Common lay across the western district and Rowhook stood several miles east. Winter rain turned Wealden clay into deep going, yet baptism, marriage and burial attached families to Holy Trinity even when another church stood closer across the Surrey border.

Rectory, vicarage and Salmon’s Chantry

Rudgwick possessed both rectorial and vicarial interests from the thirteenth century. The distinction was not merely a difference of title. The rectory received the greater tithes and other substantial income, while the vicar served the cure of souls through worship, baptism, marriage, visitation of the sick and burial. Their houses occupied separate places within the small ridge-top settlement: rectorial property lay close to Holy Trinity, while the vicarage stood farther down Lynwick Street. In 1445 the rectorial income was annexed to the chantry founded by Thomas Salmon at the collegiate church of Arundel, and William Baynton was presented in that year. Grain tithes, rents, land and income from Rudgwick thereafter supported commemorative worship many miles to the south while the vicar continued the parish ministry.

A nineteenth-century description of the rectorial estate listed fifty-three acres of tillage, ten acres of woodland, quit-rents, suit of court and two watermills. Those later figures cannot simply be carried back into 1445, but they show how deeply the rectory was embedded in the parish’s fields, woods and water-powered economy. The link with Arundel ended when the chantries were suppressed in 1548, not because the fields ceased to yield tithes, but because the religious purpose for which part of the income had been assigned was abolished.

Reformation, register and a different interior

The Reformation reached Holy Trinity through property, language, ceremony and objects. Royal supremacy was followed under Edward VI by English prayer books and attacks upon chantries, images, side altars, lights and prayers for the dead; Catholic worship returned under Mary before the Elizabethan settlement again imposed an English liturgy. Sussex records show that the pace varied. At Bolney churchwardens sold vestments, altar cloths, a pyx and other fittings, while Lindfield’s roodloft remained until 1583. These examples establish the diocesan setting, not a timetable for Rudgwick. The firm local sequence is narrower: Salmon’s Chantry was dissolved in 1548, Crown arrangements followed, and a lease of the former impropriation was made to Thomas Wiseman in 1554.

No reviewed Rudgwick account lists every image, altar or light removed from Holy Trinity. The coloured glass fragments and chancel seating noted in the nineteenth century show that reform did not reduce the church to bare masonry at a single stroke, but they cannot identify all that had once stood inside it. Preaching, Scripture and the reformed Communion service gave new importance to pulpit, reading desk and Communion table. The present altar table has been linked by tradition with Archdeacon Henry Edward Manning before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, though the documentary basis of that story has not been established.

The parish registers begin in 1558. From then on baptisms, marriages and burials turn the church into a continuous archive of local families, complementing the scattered names in deeds, wills and manorial records. An entry of 1564 records the baptism of Richard, son of William Naldrett, placing a family associated with land at Wanford and Naldretts within the sacramental sequence of Holy Trinity.

Parish government, bells and the Georgian interior

After the Reformation Holy Trinity remained the place where Rudgwick worshipped, recorded its life cycle and conducted much of its local business. Churchwardens dealt with fabric and fittings; the vestry considered rates, poor relief, roads and parish appointments; clerks, sextons and ringers performed work that joined public worship to the administration of a large rural community. Meetings might begin in the church and adjourn across the churchyard to the King’s Head, where warmth, tables and refreshment allowed discussion to continue. The registers carried households through generations, while monuments fixed selected names within the building. Horsfield noted memorials to Humphry Crawley and George Naldrett, who died in 1778 aged seventy-one, as well as a table tomb in the chancel from which the inscription had already disappeared.

Bells gave the ridge a voice far beyond Church Street. A wall painting dated 1770 at the King’s Head commemorated the first peal rung at Holy Trinity; the painted plaster remained in the inn until alterations in 1924, when it was removed and later transferred to the Sussex Archaeological Society. The full sequence of founders, recastings and frame alterations has not been established in the supplied records, but the present ring contains eight bells. By the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the interior also held arrangements later removed by restoration: a gallery occupied part of the church, seating had accumulated in different forms, and several windows had been blocked or altered.

Grimm and Horsfield record the pre-Victorian church

Grimm’s watercolour of about 1790 is the clearest early view of the exterior. Holy Trinity stands in an open churchyard, seen from the south-west, with the broad tower under its pyramidal roof, a timber porch before the west doorway, another porch on the south, the nave and the long chancel. Headstones are scattered rather than densely packed, fields press close to the precinct and the western buttresses carry the same visual weight found in later photographs. The west porch remained for more than another century, still visible on postcards around 1900.

Thomas Walker Horsfield supplied the written counterpart in 1835. He described a church of nave, north aisle, chancel and west tower and called the interior ‘neat’. The large chancel contained the three stone seats; coloured glass remained in fragments; the table tomb had become unreadable; and the register series began in 1558. His account also recorded the vicarage in the deanery of Storrington, valued in the King’s Books at £7 10s, with the Bishop of Chichester holding the advowson. In 1809 the impropriate manor and rectorial tithes had been sold to the Duke of Norfolk under land-tax redemption arrangements, while the bishop’s right of presentation was reserved.

Harrison’s restoration, 1843-47

By the 1840s accumulated repairs, gallery seating and altered windows had produced an interior very different from the medieval arrangement and increasingly criticised by church reformers. J. P. Harrison directed the first documented Victorian campaign between 1843 and 1847. The application to the Incorporated Church Building Society placed removal of the gallery and reseating among the principal objectives, so the work addressed sight-lines, order and capacity as well as stone and timber. Regular rows of fixed seats replaced a more mixed pattern; the gallery no longer interrupted the vertical space above them; and the east end gained a stronger visual focus. The present east window, with intersecting tracery, probably belongs to Harrison’s campaign, together with a south chancel window of elongated Y-tracery. J. Powell and Sons supplied coloured glass for the east window in 1866. An etching by Nibbs in 1862 already shows an exterior close to the modern outline, although roofs, bell openings, pointing and porch would receive further attention under St Aubyn. Harrison retained the broad tower, north arcade, long chancel, aisle and medieval recesses; by 1875 expenditure associated with the campaign was put at about £700.

St Aubyn, the roofs and the windows

J.P. St Aubyn’s campaign of 1887-88 addressed the parts of the fabric most exposed to weather and structural movement. The present tie-beam roofs were introduced above nave and aisle; masonry was repointed; windows were renewed; and the tower was repaired. At the bell stage, paired lancets were placed beneath a rounded containing arch, altering the face recorded in earlier views. The timber south porch is probably associated with this campaign, though its exact date has not been securely established. Grimm had shown a porch on the same side a century earlier, so any late-Victorian work renewed an established entrance rather than creating a new approach. The west porch remained in place.

A north vestry was added in 1898, with a lower apsidal projection to the east. It supplied a dedicated room for clergy, choir, robes and service books, relieving pressure upon the chancel and aisle. The windows were also becoming a record of nineteenth-century patronage: Powell’s east glass dated from 1866; H. Hughes of Ward and Hughes supplied a south nave window in 1880; J. Hardman and Company made the west window in 1896; later work by Jones and Willis and further Powell glass extended the sequence. No medieval glass has been securely identified in the windows now in place. Furnishings carried the same mixture of old work and later intervention. The piscina, aumbry and stoup belonged to the medieval working church. Altar rails and chairs appear nineteenth-century, although pieces have been said to incorporate timber from a former rood screen; without detailed analysis, that attribution remains unproven.

Two porches, a mission church and the First World War

At the opening of the twentieth century Holy Trinity still presented two roofed entrances. The south porch faced the usual approach from Church Street, while the western porch projected from the base of the tower in front of the double-chamfered doorway. It was removed in 1912, exposing the medieval arch and giving the west front the severe, open appearance familiar now. The parish’s geography prompted another change almost immediately. Horticulture and housing had expanded around Tisman’s Common, several miles west of the ridge, and in 1913 the Bishop of Chichester licensed a brick mission room dedicated to St John the Baptist. It opened for worship on 12 October, allowing western households to attend Anglican services nearer home while baptism, burial and the institutional centre remained associated with Holy Trinity.

The First World War entered the church through glass and names. Edward Teshmaker Busk, an engineer and experimental aviator connected with Hermongers, died on 5 November 1914 when an aircraft caught fire during wartime work. Archibald Keightley Nicholson designed a memorial window showing Elijah and the chariot of fire, a subject chosen in direct reference to the manner of Busk’s death; it was dedicated in February 1916. His brother Hans also died in service that year. In 1920 a brass tablet brought the parish dead together within the church, with names connected to farms, railway households, shops and estates across Rudgwick.

Gaskyns supplied another thread in the early-twentieth-century church. Geoffrey Claude Barker served as churchwarden and choirmaster while the estate functioned as a centre of parish events. When the family left Rudgwick in 1930, the Revd Wynn presented two watercolours of Holy Trinity by the local artist James Matthews.

Bells, protection and modern use

Holy Trinity was listed at Grade I on 22 September 1959, recognising the national importance of the broad early tower and the substantial fourteenth-century church built beside it. Listing did not place the building beyond change. Roofs, stone, glass, heating, electrical services and churchyard structures continued to demand repair, while worship and music required spaces suited to current use. The most conspicuous recent alteration inside the tower was the creation of a first-floor ringing chamber as a millennium project. Ringers now work within the early-thirteenth-century mass beneath the bell frame, and the ground floor can be used differently from the arrangement shown in older photographs. Outside, Woes faces the churchyard, the Old Parsonage stands close by, timber-framed houses occupy the western side of Church Street and former glebe to the east was developed much later. At the churchyard edge, the King’s Head site recalls the Trinity fair and the vestry meetings that crossed between sacred and licensed premises.

Reading Holy Trinity today

A visitor entering from Church Street can follow the building without needing a complete architectural plan. The low tower and clasping buttresses establish the early-thirteenth-century church. Beyond them, the arcade opens into the north aisle and the eye is drawn towards the long fourteenth-century chancel. Varied tracery gives each part a distinct rhythm; the aumbry and piscina locate work at the altar; the stoup marks entry; the font records repeated baptism even though its own date remains unsettled. Above, St Aubyn’s tie beams cross spaces shaped more than five centuries earlier.

Other changes are visible through absence. The west porch has gone, the gallery removed by Harrison no longer interrupts the interior, and the medieval objects displaced at the Reformation cannot be reconstructed from a complete local inventory. In their place stand Victorian glass, the Busk window, the 1920 brass and the apsidal vestry. When the eight bells are rung from the millennium chamber, their sound leaves the thirteenth-century tower and travels over the old approaches from Bucks Green, Tisman’s Common, The Haven, Wanford and Rowhook.