Pulborough

Poleberge in 1086: two churches between ridge and water

In 1086 the Domesday commissioners fixed Pulborough in writing. Their entry called it Poleberge and counted sixty-six households: thirty-eight villagers, nineteen cottagers and nine enslaved people. It also recorded eighteen ploughlands, thirty acres of meadow, woodland assessed for twenty-five swine, two mills, two fisheries and two churches. Five plough teams worked the lord’s land and fourteen belonged to the inhabitants. The annual value had risen from sixteen pounds in 1066 to twenty-three pounds and fifteen shillings, placing Pulborough among the larger settlements recorded in the survey. Domesday was concerned with lordship and taxable resources rather than streets or daily routines, yet its compressed figures reveal arable fields, hay meadows, woodland pasture, flowing water and a population already organised around labour, rent and worship. Within those totals, the social distinctions mattered. Villagers held more land and shared in the plough teams; cottagers occupied smaller holdings and depended more heavily upon wages, service or access to common resources; the nine enslaved people possessed no independent legal freedom. None of them is named. Wulfric, the pre-Conquest lord, gave way after 1066 to Norman landholders under Earl Roger of Shrewsbury, but the fields still had to be ploughed, grain still passed through the mills and fish still came from the river. The Conquest changed the hierarchy above the settlement more quickly than it changed the work required to sustain it.

Pulborough’s name places that work within a precise landscape. The Old English pol could mean a pool, tidal creek or stream, while beorg described a rounded hill or the knob at the end of a ridge. There is no detached hill at Pulborough. St Mary’s occupies the rounded end of the greensand ridge, about thirty metres above the low ground, and looks south across what was once a much broader tidal compartment of the Arun. The river shifted through wet meadows below; firmer ground carried roads along the slope and over the ridge. Poleberge therefore joined water and height in one word, long before later engineers confined channels, cut roads or built a permanent bridge.

The two churches show that organised Christian worship belonged to Pulborough before the Norman castle. The standing fabric of St Mary’s is later, but the church on the ridge is the direct successor to one of the Domesday buildings. A later tradition placed the second church near Newbridge and associated it with St Helen, yet the  evidence does not establish that identification securely. It is safer to leave the second church unresolved than to turn a plausible tradition into fact. What Domesday proves is already significant: two religious centres served an estate whose households were numerous and dispersed. A parish church did not depend upon a compact village around its walls. Households could live beside farms, mills, woods or meadows at some distance and still be drawn repeatedly to the same consecrated ground. Infants came to the font; marriages entered a public and legal order; the dying received the ministry of the priest; bodies returned to the churchyard. Sundays and feast days interrupted agricultural labour, while bells, once installed, carried farther than the roofs of the settlement. Tithes and offerings brought part of the produce of fields and animals into the support of the church. The ridge became a meeting place because worship, memory and obligation converged there.

The Domesday entry begins Pulborough’s continuous written history, but the commissioners were describing an inherited landscape. Stane Street, the Roman road between Chichester and London, approached from Hardham, crossed the Arun valley and climbed towards the ridge on a line broadly preserved by London Road and Church Hill. South of Pulborough, excavations at Hardham revealed a Roman station, masonry, pottery and a cemetery in which cremated remains, vessels, animal bones and leather sandals had been placed in timber-lined graves. Farther east, the Roman villa and bath building at Wiggonholt belonged to the same settled valley. These remains explain the antiquity of the route and crossing; they do not prove that the Roman posting station moved to the church ridge or that a Roman church stood beneath St Mary’s.

By 1086, then, Pulborough already combined old roads, productive land, river resources and Christian institutions. The Norman generation would impose a new stronghold upon that arrangement, placing an earth-and-timber castle above the Arun while leaving the church and estate to continue their older work.

Castle, manor and parish after the Conquest, 1086-1252

Soon after the Conquest, labourers raised a steep mound west of the church and cut ditches around an adjoining bailey. The motte is roughly seventy-five metres across at its base and rises about twenty-five metres, while the bailey extends westwards behind a deep separating ditch. A timber tower and palisade would have occupied the summit; the enclosure below provided space for quarters, stables, storage and workshops. From the mound the holder could watch the Arun, the approaches from the Downs and the routes crossing the estate. The castle concentrated Norman authority in a form visible from the land that supported it. The stronghold’s active history was strikingly brief. Pulborough did not grow into a fortified town, and the timber stronghold was never replaced by a major stone castle. The settlement had existed before the mound was thrown up, and its economic life remained in fields, mills, fisheries and river crossings rather than within defensive walls. By the middle of the thirteenth century the motte appears to have stood inside the manorial park, its military purpose already spent. That early abandonment preserved the earthworks unusually well: later lords did not rebuild them into a succession of stronger fortifications, and the original Norman form remained legible beneath woodland and pasture.

Lordship continued elsewhere through the manor. The lord’s court regulated customary tenants, rents, inheritance and obligations; the demesne was the land retained for direct exploitation; mills and fisheries produced income; woods, meadows and grazing rights bound scattered holdings into one estate. Among the most valuable rights was the advowson, the legal power to present a priest when the rectory became vacant. A rector received income from glebe land and tithes and carried responsibility for the cure of souls, sometimes through a resident curate. Manor and church were separate institutions, but inheritance of the advowson repeatedly joined the history of the estate to the appointment of Pulborough’s clergy.

The church itself was rebuilt gradually. Historic England dates the chancel to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, while the large Purbeck-marble font is generally assigned to the twelfth. The font may therefore have served an earlier building before being retained in the later church. Its survival matters beyond architectural dating. Generation after generation was brought to the same basin, while walls, windows and roofs changed around it. The oldest object in the church continued to perform the rite that admitted an infant to the Christian community and, in doing so, linked the living parish to a building no longer visible. The church’s position also served routes running north and south along the ridge and east and west through Church Place and Rectory Lane. An undated medieval reference to three shops on Church Hill suggests that small-scale exchange gathered near this meeting point, although it does not establish a formal market. Pulborough acquired neither borough status nor a planned marketplace. Its plots remained irregular, houses accumulated by use and inheritance, and the principal centre was defined by church, road and nearby manorial authority rather than by urban privilege.

By the early thirteenth century the castle had become less useful than the park, manor house and productive estate around it. A fire in 1252 would expose that change with unusual clarity, for the royal licence issued afterwards concerned the rebuilding of domestic and agricultural buildings, not the renewal of a fortress.

Fire, inheritance and the divided manor, 1252-1400

In 1252 the houses and buildings of Alard le Fleming’s manor burned by accident. The first royal grant permitted rebuilding with crenellation, but it was cancelled; a replacement allowed Alard and his heirs to rebuild within Pulborough Park, where his ancestors had lived, without fortifying the new work. The correction is revealing. The Crown recognised a substantial manorial residence, yet the estate no longer required the military language of the motte. Hall, chambers, barns, stables, kitchens, stores and farm buildings had become the practical centre of lordship, and the response to disaster was a new domestic complex rather than a renewed castle. The site of the burnt buildings remains uncertain. A dry rectangular moat north of the railway may mark it, although no excavation has proved the connection. The enclosure is large enough for a manorial residence and lies within land later associated with New Place. If the identification is correct, Alard’s rebuilding shifted the principal house after the fire; if it is not, the moat still records a high-status medieval site whose precise place in the estate remains uncertain.

Alard died by 1263 or 1264. His daughters, Florence and Joan, inherited as co-heiresses: Florence married Walter de Insula, or Lisle, while Joan married Henry Hussey. Their inheritance divided Pulborough into two moieties, each legally a half share of the manor, and later records trace them as the estates known as Old Place and New Place. The division did not cut the parish into two self-contained villages. Tenants, fields, mills, roads and rights remained intermingled, while both shares continued to use the same church and landscape. Early antiquarian accounts blurred the distinction between the two shares, assigning the Apsleys and Milles to the wrong buildings and merging separate lines of descent. Hedley Hope-Nicholson, a twentieth-century historian of the manor, reconstructed the documentary sequence and corrected the error. The Lisle share passed through the Onley family and later owners associated with Old Place; the Hussey share was sold in the fifteenth century to Edmund Mille and eventually descended through Anne Mille to the Apsleys at New Place. The correction matters because buildings should not be made to tell a family story that the documents contradict.

Old Place nevertheless preserves the physical economy of a medieval estate with exceptional force. W. D. Peckham found a long range built of Pulborough sandstone below and timber framing above, arranged with the house, millpond, watermill and other buildings around a working court. Several central bays formed a barn with high doors for the loaded wain; adjoining spaces served animals, storage and estate workers, while rooms above some bays provided accommodation. The roof of the house retained the structure of a great hall after lower walls and partitions had been altered almost beyond recognition. Corn entered the barn unthreshed, oxen and horses occupied the byres and stables, servants moved between hall and service rooms, and the mill converted part of the harvest into food and rent. The elaborate mouldings that once encouraged visitors to call the range a chapel or monastery belonged instead to an ambitious farmstead.

The moieties also reached far beyond those buildings. In 1279-80 Walter de Insula and Florence claimed free warren and a three-day fair at Newbridge for the feast of St Simon and St Jude. Newbridge lay in the northern part of the old parish near Billingshurst, not at the later Pulborough bridge, and its grant cannot be used to create a medieval market at Swan Corner. Trade undoubtedly took place at road junctions, church gatherings and landing places, but Pulborough never developed the institutions of a borough. The parish remained broad, rural and divided among holdings whose inhabitants met without living in one continuous street.

Water provided transport but resisted crossing. A ferry over the Arun is recorded from the late thirteenth century. Farther west, a bridge existed at Stopham by about 1309, replacing or supplementing older fords and ferries on the route towards Petworth. As carts, livestock and travellers adopted the stone crossing, the main east-west road shifted away from the older line through Church Place towards the route now represented by Station Road and the A283. The church did not move, but one of the roads that had sustained its immediate centre began to descend elsewhere.

During the fourteenth century the parish changed without leaving a continuous narrative. The Black Death and later outbreaks affected Sussex, but there isn’t an account of Pulborough that shows the local mortality numbers. Building fabric and inheritance provide firmer evidence. The chancel gained sedilia for the clergy and a piscina for washing sacred vessels; manorial shares passed through families; timber houses appeared along the ridge and lower road. By 1400 the castle was an earthwork, the manor was divided, and the church was about to become the site of the largest medieval building campaign in Pulborough.

A new church, a new bridge and a changed parish, 1400-1500

On 30 June 1404 John Tregoz of Goring left twenty shillings towards the bell tower of Pulborough church. The bequest is brief, but it catches the building at a moment of change. Stone had to be quarried, dressed and hauled to the ridge; oak was selected for floors, roofs and bell frames; lime was burned for mortar; ropes, wheels and scaffolding raised the work above the older nave. The tower also altered the reach of the church. Once its bells were hung, services, funerals, festivals and alarms could be announced across fields and water meadows to households that could not see the church itself. The rector who gave the rebuilding its scale was Thomas Harlyng. Instituted at Pulborough by about 1402 or 1403, he was also a canon and archdeacon of Chichester and held a succession of benefices and offices elsewhere, among them Ringwood, Compton and Yeovil. Such pluralism allowed a well-connected cleric to draw income from several churches while resident curates performed much of the daily pastoral work. Harlyng’s movements between Sussex, Hampshire, Chichester and other places help to explain both his wealth and his concern with roads. His will, dated 18 January 1422, joined Pulborough church and Stopham Bridge within the disposal of one estate.

He left £51 13s 4d towards building a new church at Pulborough, a sum associated with the new nave, aisles and north porch built around the older chancel. He gave the Church of the Blessed Mary a complete set of damask vestments with a cope, a silver chalice well gilded, a manual containing the rites used by a priest and a processional for services that moved through or beyond the building. One hundred marks were set aside to employ a chaplain for ten years, at ten marks a year, to celebrate and pray for Harlyng’s soul wherever his body was buried. The books, cloth, metalwork, wages and masonry belonged to one conception of the church: walls created the setting, but repeated worship gave the setting its purpose. His gifts were inseparable from his arrangements for death. Harlyng expected burial in Pulborough chancel if he died in Sussex, or at Ringwood if death found him in Hampshire. That conditional choice reveals the practical world of a travelling medieval rector. Burial fixed the body beside an altar; the salaried chaplain then returned to that place with prescribed prayers, carrying commemoration beyond the funeral into the following decade. Harlyng’s  brass presents him in ecclesiastical dress beneath a canopy, but the will is more revealing than the image. It records servants, friends, churches and relations, including a gift of one hundred shillings to his niece Joan to help her marry, before directing the residue towards the bridge at Stopham.

The bridge had stood in some form since the early fourteenth century, and Harlyng’s bequest supported the stone rebuilding generally dated to 1422-23. Arches lifted the road above the Arun and made the route between Pulborough, Petworth and the western parishes more dependable than a ford or ferry. The same rector could value church and bridge because both gathered movement: one drew parishioners towards worship and burial; the other carried clergy, carts, animals and merchandise across the river. As the bridge became the preferred east-west crossing, journeys that had once passed closer to Church Place followed the lower road towards the A283 line.

The new interior at St Mary’s would have appeared very different from the pale, open building known today. Harlyng’s vestments supplied changing colour at the altar; the manual and processional ordered words, gestures and movement; candles burned before images and on major feasts; a rood, usually showing the crucified Christ with Mary and John, marked the division between nave and chancel. Side altars allowed separate devotions and commemorative masses. The exact arrangement at Pulborough cannot be reconstructed in every detail, but local wills for lights, books, bells and prayer place the parish within the religious culture described for late-medieval England more generally. For many parishioners that culture was learned through repetition rather than private reading. Latin services were heard within a familiar sequence of bells, music, incense, movement and seasonal change. Advent, Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Rogation processions and the feasts of saints gave the year a sacred structure alongside sowing, haymaking and harvest. Primers allowed wealthier and literate lay people to follow prayers through the day, while images, sermons and memorised forms carried teaching to others. The church gathered unequal households into one congregation without removing distinctions of rank: manorial families sought burial inside or close to the chancel, while most bodies entered the churchyard outside.

A rebuilding campaign of this scale drew labour and materials through the village. Masons and carpenters required food, lodging and transport; carts climbed the ridge with stone and timber; smiths produced nails, hinges and tools; donors converted crops, animals, rents and cash into fabric. Such work could continue for years as windows, roofs, screens, altars and furnishings were completed in stages. When the scaffolding came down, maintenance began. Bells needed ropes and repair, wax had to be bought, vestments mended and books replaced as constant use wore them out. The same century survives in domestic buildings as well as church stone. The Old House on Church Hill began as a small two-bay open hall, five metres wide and seven metres long, probably occupied by a prosperous trader or craftsman close to the church and road. Smoke from a central hearth rose into the roof before later occupants inserted a chimney and upper floor. Farther down the slope, the Wealden house now represented by 73-79 Lower Street shows that substantial building had also reached the lower route. Its recessed open hall and jettied end bays belonged to a form common among successful households in Sussex and Kent, placing investment beside the road that led towards the river.

Manorial inheritance continued to shape burial and property. In 1451-52 Sir Henry Hussey sold the New Place share of Pulborough and the advowson of the church to Edmund Mille. Richard Mille died in 1476 holding the moiety, its capital messuage and lands called the Mote, Motelond and other names. Richard’s son William was judged incapable of managing his affairs; the estate thereafter descended through Richard’s sister Anne to her husband William Apsley. The family would later display its arms on the gateway at New Place, while its dead maintained a privileged relationship with St Mary’s.

Thomas Cvmbe of Pulborough made that relationship explicit in 1494. He asked to be buried in the church and left twenty shillings towards a new breviary or service book, sharing the cost with Richard Mylle. A tomb now associated with Cvmbe, made of Purbeck and Sussex marble beneath an embattled canopy, survived later movement and reuse. Nearby, the Mille family maintained a sepulchral chapel in the churchyard until the eighteenth century. Books, brasses and tombs carried names across generations, but they did so only while later parishioners continued to read, preserve or rearrange them.

By 1500 the church on the ridge had reached substantially its present medieval form. The ferry and Stopham Bridge had drawn routes lower; houses stood at Church Place and along Lower Street; Old Place and New Place followed separate lines of descent. The next half-century would fill the church with further gifts before successive governments ordered much of that inherited religious world to be altered or removed.

Wills, worship and Reformation, 1500-1603

On 13 March 1510 John Onley, also called John Coton, ordered that his body should be buried in his chapel within Pulborough church, between two pillars on the choir side, beneath a marble tomb a yard high. Onley belonged to the line of owners associated with Old Place, and his will allowed his widow to continue living in the manor house. Property, marriage and burial were arranged together. The widow remained within the estate, the heir received the inheritance, and the dead owner occupied a conspicuous place beside the chancel where prayers and family memory could continue around him. That tomb still survived, though already defaced, when James Dallaway described the church in the early nineteenth century. Its later destruction did not make the original choice meaningless. Onley had claimed space within the building used by the whole parish, placing lordship physically beside the choir and altar. His chapel was separated from the nave without being private in the modern sense: clergy served there, memorial services could be said there, and parishioners saw the tomb whenever they entered that part of the church.

Other Pulborough wills reveal devotion in less monumental forms. In 1521 Richard Sutton left money for repairing the bells and gave four yards of black cloth to the curate, Sir Henry Bullock. One parishioner assigned a cow for a trental of thirty masses; another gave a sheep to the high altar; in 1538 four sheep were left as church stock. Churchwardens had to feed, pasture, value and sometimes sell such animals, turning livestock into wax, repairs, payments to clergy or relief. The parish church possessed an economy as well as an interior, and the boundary between sacred gift and agricultural asset was crossed whenever a bequeathed animal entered the wardens’ accounts. The names given to the church and its chapels carried their own devotional emphasis. Harlyng had written of the Church of the Blessed Mary. Wills of 1520, 1531 and 1540 referred to Our Lady of Pity, Our Lady of the Assumption and the Chapel of Our Lady. These titles placed Pulborough within a religious world in which Mary and the saints were approached through particular images, feasts, prayers and stories. A light burning before an image required a supply of wax; an altar required cloths, vessels and books; an anniversary service required money or property that could yield an income. The material arrangements made repeated devotion possible.

A primer used in a literate household might contain the Hours of the Virgin, penitential psalms, prayers for the dead and devotions promising spiritual benefit to those who recited them. In the church, painted figures and carved images gave saints recognisable forms, while the rood above the chancel arch made the Passion visible from the nave. Some practices moved close to the uncertain boundary between approved prayer, popular remedy and charm, particularly when words, objects or sacred names were used for protection in childbirth, sickness or danger. No Pulborough evidence permits each of these practices to be located within the parish, but its wills belong unmistakably to the same culture of intercession, sacred presence and confidence in repeated prayer.

Worship and parish administration occupied the same building. The vestry, an assembly of parishioners rather than simply a room, dealt with the repair of the building, the raising and spending of rates, the conduct of officers and the needs of poor households. Manorial courts continued to regulate copyhold land and custom, while the church oversaw another set of communal obligations. A tenant could therefore encounter authority in the manor court, the ecclesiastical court and the parish vestry, each touching a different part of landholding, conduct, worship or relief. Beyond Church Place, the two manorial lines continued to change. The New Place moiety passed from the Husseys to Edmund Mille, then through Richard Mille’s sister Anne to the Apsleys. A  gateway dated 1569 carries Apsley arms into the landscape, evidence of a family establishing identity through masonry after gaining the estate by marriage. The Old Place share remained with the Onleys until the seventeenth century. Neither family lived apart from the parish: their advowson, chapels, tombs, servants, tenants and marriages repeatedly returned their private inheritance to the public space of St Mary’s.

The first change imposed by Henry VIII was one of authority. The royal supremacy of the 1530s displaced papal jurisdiction, yet Mass, images, lights and many familiar observances initially continued. An English Bible was ordered for parish churches in 1538, placing a large printed book where clergy and lay people could hear or read the text in a new form. The more visible dismantling came under Edward VI. The Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 replaced the Latin liturgy with English services; altars were removed or altered, images and lights suppressed, and the understanding of the Eucharist changed. Royal injunctions reached Pulborough through bishop, archdeacon, rector and churchwardens, even though the  local accounts do not preserve every payment and act of removal. A missing Pulborough inventory places a necessary limit upon this local reconstruction. No document now lists each image taken down, each vestment sold or each altar stone displaced. The standing church nevertheless records the result. The medieval rood and its loft disappeared; wall paintings were lost or covered; the open relationship between nave, chancel and side chapels changed as new forms of preaching and congregational hearing gained importance. Royal arms eventually proclaimed the authority of the Crown where saints and benefactors had once dominated the visual order.

Mary I restored papal obedience and Catholic worship after 1553, requiring some of the furniture and ceremonies removed under Edward to be returned. Elizabeth I reversed the settlement again from 1559, retaining an episcopal church and a set liturgy in English under royal government. Chichester Cathedral’s clergy passed through these changes with striking variation: some office-holders accommodated successive regimes, while others were deprived. Pulborough’s parishioners experienced the same national sequence through concrete demands: a book to be bought, an object to be removed, a service to be spoken differently and an oath to be accepted.

The local evidence also preserves continuity through the rupture. In 1549 a testator left the curate, Sir John Full, a best gown; resident pastoral work still depended upon a named priest serving people who continued to baptise children, marry, bury relatives and make wills. Farms changed hands, mills worked and the ferry crossed the Arun while governments redefined worship. The Reformation altered the meaning of the church’s interior more rapidly than it altered the need for a parish institution.

A lay subsidy of 1524 names thirty-five Pulborough taxpayers. Converting that figure into a total population is uncertain, though an estimate near 170 has been proposed; the units cannot be compared directly with Domesday’s sixty-six households. The names nevertheless confirm a settlement still dispersed among the church centre, manorial houses, Newbridge, Nutbourne, Marehill and farms beside the river and northern clay. Lower Street was growing, but no single continuous village enclosed them all. In 1595 the  parish registers begin. Their paper pages changed the scale of local evidence. Medieval wills preserve mainly those with property or goods worth distributing; registers record baptisms, marriages and burials across a far wider part of the population, including families who left no estate, tomb or brass. From then onwards St Mary’s did more than receive successive generations at the font, altar and grave. Its clergy wrote the sequence through which many of those generations can now be followed.

Registers, Civil War, river and road, 1603-1757

In 1646 Randolph Apsley, rector of Pulborough, was accused of being a common drinker and a scandalous liver after he had been seen in a Stopham public house. The words survive because clerical conduct had become part of a political and religious struggle. Parliamentarian authorities were removing clergy judged hostile to reform, and the Pulborough living, reportedly worth about £400 a year, offered a valuable reward to a replacement. Apsley was displaced by the Puritan John Goldsmith and spent the following years in a much poorer benefice, while relatives supported his children. Goldsmith died shortly before the Restoration, and Apsley returned to St Mary’s in 1660. The accusation carried national conflict into a parish accustomed to judging more ordinary faults through vestry, manor and church court. A public house at Stopham became evidence in a contest over doctrine, patronage and income; a rector’s reputation was tested by ministers and elders; the result changed who occupied the pulpit and received the tithes. Yet registers continued to receive baptisms, marriages and burials during the upheaval. The institution endured even when the identity and theology of its minister were contested.

After Charles II returned, royal arms were again required in parish churches. The arms of George III now kept beneath the tower belong to that later tradition of displaying secular authority within sacred space. Their position at the west end marks a century in which the rood and saints had disappeared from prominent places and the monarch’s emblem entered the visual order of worship. The Onley Chapel changed with the restored church. In 1676 Rector John Mille left five pounds towards repairing and fitting the former family chapel as a vestry. A space created for private burial and intercession became the room where parish officers kept records, stored equipment and conducted business. The conversion was practical, but it also marked the altered status of late-medieval commemoration. John Onley’s tomb remained nearby; the services for which his chapel had been founded did not.

Parish government reached well beyond the walls. The vestry assessed rates and supervised relief, roads, officers and the church fabric. Churchwardens accounted for repairs and discipline; overseers distributed help to poor households; surveyors dealt with highways whose condition affected every cart and burial procession. The rector presided with an influence reinforced by property and custom. Before elected councils, many decisions that later belonged to civil government were argued within an institution still centred on St Mary’s. Those responsibilities were exercised in a changing parish population, though the figures are difficult to reconcile. An ecclesiastical return of 1676 has been interpreted as suggesting a population near nine hundred, while a 1724 account recorded only eighty families, perhaps about 360 people. Boundaries, methods and omissions may explain part of the difference, but the contrast points towards instability rather than smooth growth. Epidemic disease, migration, harvests and the fortunes of river and road could alter a rural population quickly without leaving one decisive local record.

Religious division remained limited. Roman Catholic recusants are not recorded for Pulborough in the  returns, and only two or three Protestant dissenters were noted in 1724. Conformity did not mean that every parishioner attended with equal devotion, nor that disagreement vanished; it meant that St Mary’s retained an unusually dominant position in local worship at a time when chapels and meeting houses were appearing elsewhere in Sussex. The same building served families whose political sympathies had divided sharply during the Civil War.

Below the ridge, the Arun was becoming a more deliberate commercial route. Work in the late sixteenth century had extended or restored navigation as far as Stopham Bridge, and by 1623 enough money had been spent to allow traffic to Newbridge. The precise engineering is obscure, but the purpose is clear. Barges required a passable channel, towpaths or hauling arrangements, and places where cargo could be landed or transferred; merchants and landowners wanted grain, timber, chalk, coal and other bulky goods to move more cheaply than carts could carry them over poor roads. Near the tidal limit, Pallingham acquired a wharf and became a point of exchange between river and inland routes. Pulborough did not control all of this traffic, yet Lower Street and the ground towards the ferry lay close enough to benefit from stopping boats, warehouses and carts. A craft could be hauled against the current, delayed by tide or flood, unloaded at a wharf and reloaded after goods had been stored or sold. River work followed the pace of water rather than the clock, and the settlement grew where people and cargo had to wait.

Road travel remained less direct than the modern map suggests. John Ogilby’s survey of the London-Arundel route in 1675 left Stane Street north of Pulborough and crossed the Downs by Wickford Bridge, Wiggonholt, Amberley and Houghton Bridge. The choice probably reflects the difficulty of the Arun floodplain and the absence of a reliable bridge at Pulborough. A road could descend the ridge readily enough; the wet meadows beyond might still be impassable after heavy rain or high water. A survey of inns and alehouses in 1686 found Pulborough a modest provider of beds and stabling, comparable with other large villages north of the Downs rather than with the established coaching centres of Petworth and Midhurst. Inns nevertheless mattered at several points. They fed travellers and horses, provided rooms for sales or meetings, and connected local drink with wider traffic. The Five Bells and Chequers served the upper road; the Swan grew beside the ferry and later bridgehead; premises along Lower Street combined hospitality with trade.

The Old House on Church Hill preserves the seventeenth century at household scale. Its occupants inserted a brick chimney, upper floor and partition into the medieval open hall, replacing a smoky communal space with warmer rooms and greater privacy. When the hearth was uncovered in 1966, rubble yielded an empty Bellarmine stoneware flask and a small glass medicine bottle, both dating from about 1650. They had been sealed into the work when the fireplace was built, ordinary vessels made durable by reuse and concealment. The garden also yielded a more dangerous object. At a depth of 1.35 metres the excavators found a brass mould made to cast false shillings of William III, dated 1696. Molten alloy had been poured through a funnel between engraved faces separated by a washer the thickness of a coin. Counterfeiting silver was treason, and the mould had been broken and hidden; whether the maker worked in the house or merely disposed of the evidence there cannot be proved. Its discovery places the risks of a national currency crisis within a small property beside Church Hill, far from the official institutions that defined the offence.

By about 1700 Pulborough had acquired three recognisable centres. Church Place retained St Mary’s, the rectory, old houses and the descending London road. Swan Corner gathered the ferry, inn and approach to the floodplain. Lower Street extended eastwards from the junction with Rectory Lane, where shops, cottages and premises serving river trade formed a separate line of activity. Fields still divided these places, so a journey between them passed through open ground rather than one continuous village.

Poor relief acquired a permanent building within the lower settlement. A poorhouse or workhouse probably existed by the early eighteenth century and certainly by 1764, east of Henleys in Lower Street. Its location placed institutional poverty close to the commercial road rather than beside the church, although vestry officers continued to administer relief. The building would later become almshouses when the new Poor Law transferred responsibility to a union beyond the parish. At the upper centre, faculties issued in 1737 and 1738 allowed galleries to be built. Such structures could hold musicians or increase seating, lifting part of the congregation above the nave in timber enclosures that altered sight and sound. Their precise form at Pulborough is not recorded, but they belonged to an interior increasingly arranged for sermons, congregational music and ranked accommodation. More than a century later they would be condemned as obstructive and removed.

In 1757 Parliament and turnpike trustees brought a more abrupt change to the ground outside. The Guildford-Arundel road was placed under toll, and labourers began cutting into Church Hill to ease the descent from the ridge. The old road, houses and churchyard had to adjust to an engineered gradient designed for wheeled traffic. Pulborough’s upper centre had long drawn movement towards itself; the new cutting treated that inherited landscape as an obstacle to be reshaped.

Cutting the hill and bridging the Arun, 1757-1816

The first turnpike cutting left the Old House in a position its builders could never have imagined. The fifteenth-century hall had been raised level with the churchyard, beside a road that followed the natural slope; after 1757 the improved carriageway passed below it, exposing rock foundations at the edge of a steep descent. A retaining wall protected the property while coaches and carts gained a gentler gradient. The work made Church Hill easier to climb by removing part of the ground on which Church Place had developed. The trustees charged tolls and directed revenue towards repair, drainage and engineering. Their road followed Stane Street south from Adversane through Pulborough before continuing towards Arundel, giving the village a more important place on the north-south route than Ogilby’s map had allowed eighty years earlier. The scheme could improve the ridge but not the floodplain. Travellers still depended upon a ferry over the Arun, and rain or high water could make the southern approach unreliable even after the hill had been cut.

The church lost one of its separate memorial buildings during the same decade. In 1765 the Mille family’s sepulchral chapel in the south-west corner of the churchyard was taken down, and the  brasses were moved into St Mary’s. Stone from the chapel may have been reused in the south porch. A structure founded to keep one family physically distinct from ordinary churchyard burial was absorbed into the parish fabric: its metal figures survived on an interior wall, while its masonry entered another use or disappeared. Ecclesiastical patronage changed hands during the same years. In 1775 the third Earl of Egremont bought the advowson of Pulborough, acquiring the right to nominate a rector when the living became vacant. The purchase placed the parish within the influence of the Petworth estate without transferring the church itself into private ownership. An advowson could be sold like other property because it carried both status and the power to reward a cleric, though the bishop still instituted the nominee.

Activity below the ridge was already concentrating beside the river. In 1780 William Harwood built a warehouse opposite the Swan, where cargo could be stored between barge and cart. Maltings and lime kilns occupied the same quayside district. Grain arriving from farms could be malted for brewing or assembled for sale; chalk and coal supplied lime burning; timber, stone and other bulky goods moved most economically by water. Lower Street gained buildings because cargo required places to land, wait, be processed and continue its journey.

Parliament transformed those local works into a larger project in 1785. The Arun Navigation Act created powers to improve the river between Houghton Bridge and Pallingham Wharf, continue navigation towards Newbridge, acquire land, cut channels, raise banks and build bridges. A company of proprietors could levy tolls in return for making the route more dependable. The Act made navigation dependent upon active intervention, authorising work in fields, channels, roads and private property along a river whose bends and seasonal levels had previously dictated the limits of traffic. The most visible result at Pulborough was the bridge. Completed in 1787, it carried the road across the main channel in three round-headed ashlar arches, replacing the ferry as the normal crossing. The bridge made Swan Corner a permanent bridgehead, where traffic from Church Hill met the east-west road before crossing the floodplain. Ferry Mead remained as a field name on the tithe map long after the boats ceased carrying ordinary travellers, preserving an earlier geography beside the new stonework.

The same legislation sent part of the river traffic around Pulborough. Engineer James Edwards designed the Coldwaltham Cut to avoid the winding channel between Greatham and the Arun near Hardham, and a brick-lined tunnel carried the navigation for 357 metres through the ridge. Construction began in 1787, halted when money ran short and resumed before completion in 1790. On 14 August cannon announced the opening; a public meal followed, and a prize rewarded the fastest barge to pass through carrying thirty tons of chalk. The ceremony made speed and capacity into a public spectacle. The tunnel immediately exposed the risks behind the celebration. A section collapsed in December 1790 where the arch had not been adequately covered with earth, and repairs were required within months of the celebration. Barges thereafter entered a dark, narrow passage built partly by cut-and-cover and partly by boring through the hill. The work shortened the navigable route and avoided difficult bends, but it also bypassed the wharves at Pulborough. A toll of ninepence a ton encouraged some boatmen to remain on the old river, preserving traffic past Lower Street even when the engineered channel offered a more direct course.

The bridge and tunnel altered movement in opposite ways. One brought road traffic firmly into Swan Corner; the other allowed some water traffic to pass beyond sight of the village. Pulborough benefited from the improved navigation while competing with its own bypass. Warehouses, the Swan, wharves and lime kilns remained active because the old channel was free of the tunnel toll and because local goods still needed a landing place.

The turnpike proved less secure. South of Newbridge it was disturnpiked in 1799 as travellers adopted alternative routes to the coast and the floodplain continued to obstruct reliable passage. The turnpiking of the Arundel-Petworth road through Fittleworth in 1803 drew more traffic away, while the navigation company transferred its barge-building and repair docks from Pulborough to Pallingham in 1804. A low bridge at Clements, west of Pulborough Bridge, imposed another obstacle on vessels using the old channel. Neither setback emptied the quayside. Barges continued to choose between tunnel and river, farmers still brought produce towards Lower Street, and the Swan stood where road and water met. The village had acquired the engineering works that later accounts would treat as signs of progress, but each work redistributed advantage.

In 1816 the Wey and Arun Junction Canal opened northwards from Newbridge to the Wey Navigation at Shalford. The Arun system now formed part of an inland waterway between the Thames and the English Channel. Pulborough remained a riverside service centre, attached through its river, bridge and warehouses to a route whose locks and channels reached far beyond Sussex.

Canal, causeway, school and coaches, 1816-1859

The canal opened with a promise larger than the traffic it would ever carry. From Newbridge, boats could pass through locks and cuts to Shalford, enter the Wey Navigation and continue towards London; southwards, the Arun reached Littlehampton and, after 1823, an additional waterway connection led towards Portsmouth. War with France had encouraged the idea of a secure inland route, but peace weakened its strategic purpose before trade had justified the expense. Even so, the canal increased movement on the Arun and brought more cargo within reach of Pulborough’s wharves. Boatmen approaching from the south nevertheless retained a choice. They could take the Coldwaltham Cut and pay the tunnel toll, or remain on the older river past the village. Enough preferred the free channel to sustain waterside work despite Clements Bridge and the transfer of repair docks to Pallingham. Coal, chalk, timber and manufactured goods came inland; grain, flour, malt and agricultural produce travelled outward. Barges moved slowly enough for local trades to form around loading, repairs, storage, horses and refreshments.

Pot Common, east of Lower Street, reveals how institutions occupied land as the lower centre expanded. A school had been built on or near the common by 1818, giving children from labouring households some regular instruction under Anglican auspices. A sawpit was permitted there in 1822, and later school building took another piece. Enclosure came through accumulation rather than one decisive act: small grants, fences, cottages and public uses gradually reduced an open resource until roads and plots replaced much of the shared ground. Road improvement was equally piecemeal. A causeway built across the Arun floodplain in 1828 raised the approach above the wettest ground, though floodwater could still cover it. Engineers deepened the Church Hill cutting in 1830, lowering the gradient again, and a fourth southern arch was added to Pulborough Bridge in 1834. Ridge, channel and water meadow had to be treated as one difficult route; improving only the hill or only the bridge left the other obstacles in place.

The Swan Inn gained most from that sequence. By the 1830s it served coaches travelling between London and the south coast, with covered accommodation for horses and vehicles on its eastern side. Its corn exchange held a Friday market and possessed a cut from the Arun, so sacks could pass between farm cart, store and barge without leaving the complex. Auctions, dinners and entertainments used the same rooms. Swan Corner became busy because transport, trade and sociability required space at the point where road and river met.

The 1841 tithe map fixes the settlement immediately before its railway age. St Mary’s and the old houses remained separate on the ridge; Swan Corner occupied the bridgehead; continuous frontage had formed along parts of Lower Street; fields and the piece of Pot Common still lay between roads. Beyond them stretched Park Farm, New Place, Coombelands, Broomers Hill, Marehill, Nutbourne and Newbridge. Owners and occupiers were linked to one parish without being gathered into the built-up village. The same landscape also belonged to a new organisation of poverty. After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 Pulborough joined the Thakeham Union, whose guardians directed institutional relief from a workhouse outside the parish near Storrington. The old Pulborough poorhouse in Lower Street became almshouses. Responsibility moved from a building administered by local vestry officers to a wider union system, yet the former structure remained among the households whose poverty it had once contained.

The Post Office Directory of 1851 captures Pulborough at the height of road-and-river exchange. It described a parish of 6,610 acres with 2,006 inhabitants and a village forming a long street in its south-western corner. William King combined farming, coal dealing, the Swan Inn and inland-revenue duties; James Stone built barges; James Payne made agricultural machinery; William Payne worked as gunsmith, currier, tanner and bootmaker. Millers, maltsters, brickmakers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, saddlers, grocers, drapers, bakers, tailors, surgeons, teachers and carriers supplied an economy much broader than one dependent upon farming alone. Its entries also show how movement structured the week. The corn market met at the Swan on Fridays; an Easter Tuesday fair sold toys and pedlary; a coach ran to Horsham; carriers connected Pulborough with Chichester and neighbouring towns. These services joined farms and outlying districts to Lower Street. A household at Nutbourne or North Heath could bring produce to market, collect goods from a carrier, consult a tradesman and continue uphill to church or parish business without treating the settlement as one compact centre.

Rector John Austin, who had held the living since 1822, left a contradictory mark upon St Mary’s. According to Jesse Greenfield, the long-serving parish clerk, Austin was so eager to remove John Onley’s yard-high tomb that he worked at it with a pickaxe. Fragments were reused as steps from the road cutting to the churchyard, while an older medieval memorial was adapted to commemorate Austin and his wife. The same rector extended the burial ground in 1852 and left £3,367 to promote the education of poor children. Destruction and benefaction belonged to one energetic incumbency. After Austin’s death, William Sinclair succeeded him in 1857 after an earlier career in the Madras Cavalry and two decades of church and school building at Leeds. Within two years he opened schools at Pulborough, North Heath and Nutbourne, carrying out Austin’s educational bequest on a parish-wide scale. The main National School rose on Pot Common, replacing the earlier building near Rectory Lane; stone, classrooms and salaried teaching gave permanent form to a charity that had begun in a rector’s will.

Sinclair then closed St Mary’s for restoration. When it reopened in May 1859, obstructive galleries had been taken down, high square pews removed and a large pulpit with a revolving reading desk replaced by oak fittings that allowed the chancel to be seen. Open seating filled nave and aisles, and a church meeting resolved that the sittings should be free and unappropriated. The alteration belonged to a national Anglican campaign for more visible liturgy and an end to private pew ownership, but its local effect was immediate: families who entered the old building encountered a different social and spatial order.

Before that year ended, a second reconstruction opened below the church. The railway reached Pulborough in October 1859, placing steam transport beside the road that led from Swan Corner towards Stopham. The new line would do more than add another option. It would take traffic from the coaches and barges whose activity had shaped Lower Street for generations.

Railway, market and the Victorian village, 1859-1914

The station opened on the line from Horsham towards Petworth, west of Swan Corner and close to fields that still separated the village from Old Place. Its buildings, platforms, goods facilities and sidings created a new point of arrival whose timetable ignored tide and weather. Four years later the line from Hardham Junction reached Arundel and the coastal railway; the western branch extended to Midhurst in 1866. Pulborough became a junction between London, the coast and the western Sussex countryside even though its own streets remained small. The new timetable weakened coaching almost at once. The Railway Hotel opened opposite the station in 1859, transferring hospitality towards the new transport, and a cattle market followed in 1866 on land now used for station parking. Farmers could walk livestock to the market and load animals or produce onto trains without driving them towards a distant town. Parcels, newspapers and passengers arrived to a clock; coal and manufactured goods could be handled in quantities no carrier’s wagon could match.

The cost fell upon older trades. The Wey and Arun Junction Canal closed in 1871, the statutory Arun Navigation followed in 1888, and commercial use of the tidal river dwindled into the twentieth century. Wharves did not vanish on the day of closure, and some cargo continued past Pulborough for decades, but barge building, hauling and the coaching economy contracted. The railway lines crossed above Hardham Tunnel, placing the machinery of replacement over the brick passage built for the previous transport revolution. The station did not immediately draw housing around its platforms. Railway Cottages appeared along Stopham Road about 1875, and the station district acquired yards, sheds and a brickfield, but fields remained close to the platforms. Population had fallen between 1831 and 1851, recovered only slightly by 1871 and declined again towards 1901. The railway probably checked the deeper depopulation experienced by neighbouring rural parishes; connection preserved activity before it produced extensive building.

The older centres continued to develop on their own terms. Lower Street carried shops, inns and continuous frontage; Church Place retained the rectory, churchyard and medieval houses; Swan Corner remained the road junction beside old and new transport. Stone terraces and later brick fronts filled gaps without destroying the inherited lines. Pulborough became more town-like through the accumulation of services rather than through one planned expansion.

St Mary’s churchyard had been enlarged in 1852, and in 1861 almshouses were built below the lychgate for retired clergy and their wives or widows. Founded through Helen Ann Burrell’s generosity, the cottages placed organised charity beside the old burial ground. The church also gained a new organ in 1874 and further repairs, while the parish school was enlarged in 1894 as enrolment outgrew Sinclair’s first provision. New premises carried those institutional ambitions beyond worship. The Coffee Tavern and Reading Rooms opened in 1882 at the junction of Church Hill and Lower Street, offering refreshment and reading without the public house. It occupied the point between upper and lower centres until it closed and was converted to a bungalow in 1904; church rooms built in Glebe Field in 1906 then provided space for meetings, entertainments and parish societies. The shift from inn room to purpose-built hall reflected the multiplication of organised leisure and voluntary activity.

Local government separated gradually from the vestry. The Local Government Act of 1894 created elected parish councils, and the Honourable George Wingfield Bourke, rector of Pulborough since 1878, became the first chairman. A cleric still presided, but authority now rested in a civil body with statutory responsibilities rather than in the older assembly that had combined church repair, highways and poor relief. The institutional division was new even where the same names continued to lead. Bourke also altered the parish’s soundscape. For Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 he gave three new bells, completing a ring of eight after the old frame had been found unsafe. Five earlier bells, including one  from the later Middle Ages, were rehung with them. The peal linked a modern royal commemoration to a tower begun almost five centuries before, carrying a changed but continuous public voice across the expanding settlement.

Commercial buildings became more specialised. A purpose-built post office appeared in Lower Street in 1906, the same year as the church rooms, while a terrace on London Road about 1910 introduced a more urban frontage near the old north-south route. The railway and postal system accelerated communication; shops concentrated below the church; the station district served livestock and goods. Public authorities now built homes as well as roads and schools. Four pairs of houses at Alpha Cottages in Lower Street opened in 1912 as Pulborough’s first council housing. Their semi-detached form differed from the irregular plots and inherited cottages around them: design, rent and site were determined as one scheme. Further council building north of the railway and at The Moat would extend that intervention after the First World War, when housing need became inseparable from the consequences of conflict.

War, motor traffic and public services, 1914-1945

In June 1914 St Mary’s applied for permission to replace its stained deal pews with oak seating more suitable to the medieval building. War stopped the scheme. Money, labour and public attention moved elsewhere, and the parish magazine turned towards relief, service and morale as men left farms, shops, railway employment and households for the armed forces. A proposed improvement to the church remained on paper while absence became visible across the village. Its scale survives in the alabaster tablet inside St Mary’s. Sixty-eight names record those from Pulborough who died during the war of 1914-18, bringing different occupations, addresses and family histories into one ordered list. Medieval donors had secured individual tombs, lights and anniversary masses; the twentieth-century parish created a collective memorial intended to be read by everyone. Commonwealth war graves in the churchyard gave some deaths an individual place within the same consecrated ground.

A freestanding war memorial was unveiled and dedicated on Easter Day 1920. The honours tablet followed on 4 August 1921, exactly seven years after Britain entered the conflict. The parish magazine expressed disappointment that the church was not full, attributing the attendance to rain, the evening’s cinema entertainment and fading memory. Commemoration had to compete with ordinary life almost as soon as it was created.

The war left buildings and services in need of attention. A 1921 report described decaying roofs, failing buttresses and walls held together in places by ivy. Repairs continued through the decade; the south porch was restored for use as a choir vestry in 1923, and an infants’ school opened opposite the National School in 1925. The Masonic Hall followed in Station Road in 1926. Education, voluntary association and church repair occupied separate premises within a settlement whose institutions no longer depended upon one vestry. Planned housing extended the growth begun at Alpha Cottages. New groups appeared north of the railway and at The Moat, placing families on land beyond the old roadside frontages. The recreation ground and bowling green were established by the Second World War, preserving part of the former Pot Common district for organised sport after school, housing and roads had taken much of the open land.

Motor traffic returned the north-south road to prominence, but vehicles demanded more space than the inherited junction could provide. Shops standing within Swan Corner were demolished in 1935 to widen the crossing. A new A29 bridge opened beside the eighteenth-century structure in 1936, carrying through traffic on a broader alignment while the old ashlar arches remained intact. The bridgehead survived, but buildings that had grown around the earlier crossing were sacrificed to the movement it had encouraged. The same decade brought electric light to St Mary’s in 1934, replacing an earlier sequence of candles, oil lamps and nineteenth-century fittings. The installation changed the appearance of evening worship more quietly than the turnpike or bridge changed the exterior, yet it belonged to the same modernisation of the village. Electricity, motor traffic, telephone and rail compressed distances while the church still occupied a site chosen before any of them existed.

In 1940 the Norman castle mound again became part of a defensive landscape. Pulborough lay on the inland Covering Line prepared to delay an invasion from the south coast, and an artillery emplacement was built near the motte with a commanding view across the Arun floodplain. Routes and topography that had shaped medieval lordship determined fields of fire, road blocks and defended crossings. Part of the gun position survives beside the much older earthwork. The station district also became a place of war production. A factory beside the railway manufactured shell cases and nose cones from 1940, employing men and young women before the components travelled to Woolwich Arsenal for filling. The station that had displaced barges now carried materials for industrial warfare. Employment expanded, but the work also tied daily routines to blackout, security, shortages and the demands of a distant front.

Evacuation brought another movement along the railway. Children and staff from Peckham Central Schools were received in Pulborough, and on 28 March 1942 they presented St Mary’s with a painted plaque thanking the village for its kindness. The arms of London and West Sussex, a lion and sprays of London Pride gave the visitors a permanent place within the parish church. Hospitality, schooling and worship met in an object small enough to hang on the north-aisle wall. Even the churchyard contributed metal to the war effort. Between four and five tons of iron railings were removed in 1940 in response to the national appeal. The gap they left altered the boundary around burial ground that had expanded across centuries. When fighting ended in 1945, Pulborough retained its bridge, railway, factory, defences and memorials, but housing pressure and commuting would soon fill much of the open land between them.

Housing, commuting and conservation, 1945-2026

An RAF aerial photograph taken in 1947 shows how much open ground still separated Pulborough’s historic centres. Church Place remained distinct on the ridge; Lower Street formed a line to the east; Swan Corner occupied the bridgehead; the station and cattle market lay beyond fields to the west. Post-war building would occupy many of those spaces, turning a settlement of related parts into a more continuous built-up area without entirely concealing the earlier pattern.

The first obligation was remembrance and repair. Eighteen names were added for those who died during the Second World War, and the new memorial was dedicated in November 1952. St Mary’s also replaced its worn organ in 1947 and began a longer programme of restoration funded increasingly by the congregation rather than by the personal wealth of a rector. The change reflected the reduced endowment and public authority of the benefice: the church remained prominent, but it could no longer command resources in the manner of Harlyng, Austin or Bourke. Beyond those immediate repairs, housing spread south of Lower Street at Rivermead, north of Rectory Lane and east of London Road. Council bungalows appeared at The Spinney, private houses filled gaps along older roads, and blocks of flats used riverside and sloping sites where views across the Arun increased the attraction of higher-density building. Most growth added to existing structures rather than sweeping them away, so medieval houses, Georgian frontages and modern estates came to stand within the same streetscape.

Transport changed again. Passenger services on the branch towards Midhurst ended in 1955, and later goods closures removed much of the sidings-and-yard economy, although the main line through Pulborough remained open for London and the coast. The cattle market survived until the mid-1970s before its site became station parking. An industrial estate grew near the railway, with additional factories between the line and London Road, preserving employment beside the station even as commuting became more important. Another transport landmark changed more radically when the Swan Inn was rebuilt in 1958, losing much of the fabric associated with the coaching age, and the replacement was demolished for housing in 2002. Skeyne House and other buildings linked to the former wharf economy also disappeared. Their loss made relationships more important: the old warehouse, bridge, street line and river edge now carry parts of a history once explained by a larger group of structures.

Education moved out of Pot Common. The National School had been enlarged in 1894 and 1924 and supplemented by the infants’ building, but both closed when the present primary school opened on New Place Road between 1968 and 1972. The old buildings became housing. Children no longer gathered in classrooms founded directly through a rector’s bequest beside Lower Street, although the Austin charity continued to support the Church of England school. Religious provision also moved with the population and broadened as the parish grew. The United Reformed church served Lower Street, the Roman Catholic church of St Crispin and St Crispinian opened in Church Lane after the war, and the Salvation Army had maintained an earlier twentieth-century presence near the post office. St Mary’s ceased to be the only visible place of worship, just as the parish council and district authorities had taken over its former civic responsibilities. Its churchyard, memorials and position nevertheless kept it connected to more periods of Pulborough’s public history than any later institution.

Planning policy began to protect the spaces between monuments. Church Place and Lower Street were designated separate conservation areas in 1973 because each contained a concentration of historic buildings and land forms. Later review treated them as related parts of one discontinuous conservation area, recognising that views, field boundaries, local sandstone, road alignments and open ground contribute to character alongside listed buildings. The 2018 appraisal extended that understanding to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century structures whose significance had previously been overlooked. The protected townscape still had to coexist with an active river, and the Arun continued to resist complete control. A new channel about a kilometre long was cut through former water meadows south of the village in the 1990s to reduce flooding. It joined a sequence extending from medieval ferry and bridge to eighteenth-century navigation, nineteenth-century causeway and twentieth-century road crossing. Engineering changed the river’s course and the route across it, but the low ground remained a limit upon development and a defining part of the view from the ridge.

By the twenty-first century the civil parish contained more than five thousand residents spread through Pulborough, Codmore Hill, Marehill, North Heath, Nutbourne and surrounding countryside. Lower Street and Swan Corner carried most everyday shopping; the A29 and A283 channelled traffic through inherited junctions; the station supported commuting as well as local travel. Modern journeys were faster, yet they still converged on the narrow ground between slope, railway and floodplain. Within that larger parish, the Pulborough Neighbourhood Plan was formally made on 8 October 2025 and placed decisions about housing, employment, green space, movement and heritage within a statutory local framework to 2031. Manorial court, advowson and vestry no longer determined the use of land, but the questions remained recognisable: where building could stand, how routes should cross the settlement, what open ground must remain and which inherited structures should guide change. In 2026 Pulborough continued to negotiate the same ridge and water that Domesday had made measurable nine hundred and forty years earlier.

The church on the ridge and the routes below

Pulborough can still be read by walking downhill. At Church Place the churchyard, medieval houses and  line of the old road belong to the settlement recorded in 1086. West of the railway, the motte and bailey preserve the short Norman phase of defended lordship, while Old Place keeps the hall roof, farm ranges, millpond and local sandstone of the divided manor. These sites are separated in the modern village, as they were when different households reached them by lane, field and estate track. Descending from the church, Church Hill carries the next transformation in its cutting. The road drops below the level on which the Old House was built, then reaches Swan Corner, where the bridge of 1787 stands beside the wider crossing of 1936. The ferry has vanished, yet Ferry Mead, the bridgehead and the alignment across the floodplain preserve its former position. A traveller passing through the junction follows a route assembled from Roman road, turnpike engineering, navigation legislation and motor-age widening.

Lower Street tells a more commercial history. The fifteenth-century Wealden house survives among later shops and dwellings; the warehouse belongs to barges and wharves; former inns recall coaches, sales and market dinners; the station approach leads towards cattle, goods traffic and commuting. Alpha Cottages and post-war estates show public authorities turning fields and common-edge land into planned housing. Each layer altered the use of the one before it rather than beginning on empty ground.

St Mary’s provides the longest sequence because the building survived by being repeatedly remade. A Norman font remained while the chancel and nave were rebuilt; medieval lights and images gave way to royal arms and English services; family chapels became vestries; galleries and private pews rose and fell; war memorials occupied walls once claimed by individual tombs. The church’s continuity lies in use, repair and adaptation. The accumulated evidence of successive use tells more of Pulborough’s history than an imagined untouched medieval interior. The Arun has been equally persistent beneath these changes. Domesday fisheries, medieval ferry, Stopham and Pulborough bridges, eighteenth-century cuts, Hardham Tunnel, canal traffic, railway competition and the modern flood channel belong to different economies, but all answer the same water. Pulborough grew where routes tried to cross or follow it, and shifted whenever a new crossing, toll, tunnel or timetable changed the advantage. Poleberge remains an accurate name: the settlement is still understood through the relationship between the rounded ridge and the water below.