Chapel and Church

There was only one religion available to people in rural England before the Reformation of 1536 and that was Roman Catholicism.  Our local farmers will have trudged the 3-4 miles to Clayton or Keymer Church each Sunday and on the more-important holy days. Standing there, from earliest childhood, in the main part or ‘nave’ of the church, they would see the deities, the devils, the saints and the stories of their faith painted in bright colours on its walls. It would bring them a sense of awe and a gradual understanding of how, by duty to God and neighbour, by hard work and charity to the poor and sick, they might eventually gain Heaven and avoid Hell.  Lurid depictions on church walls of people tumbling headlong into the flames of Hell was a powerful message to promote the Ten Commandments and good behaviour on Earth. At Clayton Church much of the original late-Saxon wall paintings still survive. (See notes below.) Clayton was the main parish, while Keymer was a ‘chapelry’ and they both shared the same rector or vicar. Our former ‘Chapel of St. John’ on Fairplace Hill was a second chapelry of Clayton.  Keymer Church did have early paintings once, but nothing of the old nave has survived. Only the 12th-century chancel and apse survive from the original building. The remainder was rebuilt in 1866.

After church, neighbours might negotiate their business deals before returning home, or visit the local ale house, or both. The parish clerk was often in demand because he was one of the few people who could read, let alone write, in Latin (which was then a requirement for formal documents). In my working life I have catalogued numerous medieval Latin deeds which are dated on a Sunday, or on the Eve, Feast Day or the Morrow (day after) of a locally-important saint. On Sundays some people stayed on to play games in the church yard. Ball games were often cautiously tolerated, so long as nothing got damaged.  ‘Church ales’ were also held, with snacks, – social gatherings like modern ‘coffee mornings’ – to raise money for the church; and there were pageants, plays and parades associated with the principal saints days, as well as the maypole dancing and all the other seasonal festivities. It is clear the Sabbath and the saints’ days were socially cohesive ‘holidays’ for local people in both senses of the word.

There is evidence in 1343 that Ralph the Cooper (who lived near modern Coopers Close on land now part of Bedelands Nature Reserve) was the ‘Collector’ of money for Wivelsfield Church from residents of Keymer manor. I take this to mean that those living on the north sides of St. John’s and Valebridge Commons had some sort of dispensation to use Wivelsfield from time to time, perhaps when the weather was particularly bad, as their church. Farmland of Keymer manor stretched right up to the Vale/Sheppeys and Ashenground areas of Haywards Heath, meaning that Wivelsfield Church was by far the nearest option for them.

As to our own St. John’s Chapel on Fairplace Hill, apart from the early 16th-century references to the three-day ‘wakes’ around the midsummer feast of St. John the Baptist, coinciding with the Sheep Fairs, we have absolutely no evidence as to how the chapel was used. A forerunner of the King’s Head would perhaps have provided the ‘cakes and ale’ once the formalities were over. A previous inn there, mentioned around the year 1600 (when the extant records start) was called Le Unicorn. When the French definite article (‘le’) is used for a place name, it usually infers a medieval origin of the place in question. We do not know when the chapel was built but the mention of Richard of the Chapel as a taxpayer in 1296 seems to imply that it had been provided by then, to accommodate the growing number of families living around the common. It is a timber-framed structure with later brick infilling. A site survey or excavation would have been useful when its old 5-acre plot was in-filled with new houses in the 1990s.

As well as at midsummer, it is also likely that St. John’s Common would have played a part in the old May Day revels. It was often customary for the young women of a locality to go up to their local common to gather may blossom early in the day to make garlands, before dancing later around the maypole in the churchyard. There is a ‘lost’ cottage site called ‘Mayhouse’, situated at the ridge on the south side of Burgess Hill, near the entrance to Clayton Priory. It had been absorbed into the Hammonds estate before 1598. Many of the may-gathering destinations did have a bothy or shelter for the villagers taking part.  The other place-name in that area, a short distance to the west along the ridge, is a farm formerly known as atte Quecche, meaning ‘at the hawthorns’.  This ridge does seem to have been the first piece of rough land north of the medieval tilled fields of the Hassocks area and one part of it near Hammonds is recorded in the early 1600s as a ‘den’ – a rough foraging area. As hawthorns were, and are abundant around Burgess Hill, it would be pointless to define a farm’s name by them, unless the trees in question had a particular role in peoples’ lives. Once the pre-Reformation custom had died away, the medieval significance of the farm name would have been lost. It has gradually morphed over the centuries into ‘Scotches’, a name which appears to have no topographical or personal significance in that locality.

The first two photos show the chancel transept paintings as a whole and in detail;  with thanks to photographer Ian Pack for the latter; and lastly, the gates of Clayton Priory, (built in the 1820s)  adjacent to the former ‘Mayhouse’ Cottage plot.

Participation by the whole community in a shared belief was broken by King Henry VIII’s Reformation. Their parish church remained as the hub of peoples’ worship, but its interior was adapted to suit the reformed Protestant message. Wivelsfield’s records show that local people had removed their statues of the Saints and their other ‘idols’ most unwillingly, and put them up again the moment Mary came to the throne in 1553, only to have to take them all down a year later. Throughout the land, church officials whitewashed over the old wall paintings, put up the Ten Commandments in their place and stamped upon any lingering frivolity in the church yard. I believe that as a nation, we get our very first reference to ‘football’ by its being forbidden to be played after church in our newly Protestant land. Nonetheless, Protestantism succeeded because, in general, the population was ready for the change, ready to work out their own path to God rather than to have to rely on the mediation of priests.

As we have seen in the previous linked articles, St. John’s Common was seeing its first influx of brickmakers and their labourers at this time, and the new poor laws had brought a weight of civil responsibility on to the shoulders of every Church of England parish. These developments began to create elite groups of educated farmers to run things in the parish. Small subsistence farmers in those days were often unable able to read and write and this excluded many of the St. John’s Commoners from helping to run their parish. But in general, the brickmakers and other skilled craftsmen and traders were more likely to have acquired some basic literacy by the 18th century. One William Brand, for example, a small brick producer and brick-mason in the 1720s, at what is now the American Express site, was able to sign his full name on the title deed of the house he lived in (a cottage called Lotmottes, since demolished, on the west side of Keymer Road, opposite the junction with Folders Lane.

In 1538 each parish had been required to install and to read aloud an English translation of the Bible so local people could hear its message in English rather than in the mumbo jumbo of Latin. These people now wanted to be able to read it themselves and to educate their children to do the same. During the Commonwealth period, if not before, they began to determine their own form of worship and access to literacy as equals in their own congregations, divorced from the Church of England’s inherited hierarchies of bishops and archbishops. Involvement in their nation’s democracy was entirely beyond their reach, because they lived in small properties which did not qualify them for a vote, but at least they could have a say in how to run their own meetings.

All of Sussex east of the Adur was very much in the vanguard of this progressive, self-determinist movement and by the mid-1600s there was a strong network of ‘Dissenters’, or ‘Non-Conformists’ in mid Sussex. By 1700 our county town of Lewes had around 700 folk from the countryside all around, attending its dissenting congregations. The then Bishop of Chichester declared it to be ‘miserably overrun’ with them. They and the Quakers were reported to Quarter Sessions and to the Bishops’ courts by local informers, for non-attendance at church. But the movement was too strong not to survive.

Locally, the earliest house to be licensed was that of Thomas Hurst’s (Hurst House Farm in Wivelsfield, just south of Princess Royal Hospital), mentioned in 1662.The congregation there was reported to be mainly ‘the middling sort’, that is, small farmers and traders.  It came as no surprise to me to discover that Thomas Hurst was a brickmaker!  As well as his own business at Wivelsfield, he was involved with Grove Farm, (the forerunner of the Meeds yard in Burgess Hill). The authorities observed in 1669 that a ‘conventicle’ in Westmeston had over 200’ local people attending from all around, ‘many of good estate’. These meeting places were at first reported to Quarter Sessions because they were technically deviant and illegal – having separated themselves from the approved national form of worship. They could only operate under license until the Toleration Act of 1688 came in. This act was well named because, although it brought congregation members freedom to worship together as they wished, in many other respects they were just that, ‘tolerated’.  They, and those who still adhered to Roman Catholicism, were excluded from ‘the professions’ such as the law, teaching or medicine, or from putting themselves up for any sort of political election, a measure which was not repealed until 1828.

In 1728 a plot of land in Ditchling was purchased which, by 1744 would become the first ‘meeting house and burying place’ for local dissenters and by the 1740s the Ditchling Meeting House had been built. A well-heeled family of local farmers, the Chatfields of Streat, were the trustees to the purchase and, after opening, William Marten of Clayton, Michael Marten of Keymer, and Michael Marten of Ditchling were trustees. They were all substantial local land owners. The first of these three was at New Close Farm, while the two latter farmed Fragbarrow land, over 200 acres lying on the south side of Folders Lane.  By 1782, a splinter group of the congregation had founded their own new chapel, the ‘Bethel’ right at the far north of Ditchling Common.  In the meantime, a third chapel hardly a stone’s throw from the Bethel had arrived as a result of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon preaching to local people from the oriel window overlooking the gardens at Great Ote Hall. This third local chapel to be known as the Oathall Chapel and the movement was known as the ‘Countess of Huntingdon’s Connection’. It promoted the belief that all people of whatever position in life, were equal in the eyes of God. The first trustee was a considerable landowner, John Hunt of Little Oathall, on whose land all the houses south of Janes Lane and east and north of Manor Road now stand.

The following photos show: First,Thomas Hurst’s house at Fox Hill, Wivelsfield, the first gathering place for nonconformists in the locality; Second,Ditchling Meeting House, founded 1728; And third the  oriel window (central, projecting), at Great Otehall, off Janes Lane where the Countess of Huntingdon preached to local people.

Local brickmakers had produced the brick and tile from which all three new chapels were built.  The Oathall Chapel was the nearest both to the Ditchling Potteries and those of Burgess Hill, and the message of the movement had a profound appeal to those in the trade. James Baker of the King’s Head on Fairplace Hill became a trustee.  William Gravett, a brickmaker and potter, became a lay preacher and in 1817, after training, he acted as the minister there until his retirement in 1853. The only official training then available was within the Church of England but the Countess of Huntingdon had set up her own independent college for ministers of her chapels. Gravett’s trading life was mainly centred on the Ditchling Potteries, but later he later bought William Shaw’s large works in the London Road Burgess Hill, which we now refer to as Gravett’s Yard. He died in 1872. Looking at the surnames of members of the congregation, many have a familiar ring – Avery, Brooker, Broomfield, Marten, Packham, Ridge and Welfare.

It is perfectly understandable, however, that as soon as the Burgess Hill members got the chance for a chapel on their own home ground, they seized it with both hands. Nathaniel Borrer who owned Sheddingdean farm in 1828 when that part of St. John’s Common was enclosed, got a small triangle of land as his free allotment of common, between his northern hedge and Lye Lane (Leylands Road). At the speed of light, a ‘Congregational’ chapel had been built on this new land by William Brooker, using bricks and tiles given by William Norman and other local producers The land was donated by Thomas Packham, who must have negotiated for it with Mr. Borrer while the enclosure proceedings (1828-1829) were still running.  The foundation stone implies that it was all built and complete during 1829. William Brooker was described at that time as a ‘bricklayer’ but the term really means ‘builder’ in modern English. His main home was in Clayton on the west side of Fairplace Hill (no. 73 and neighbours) but by 1840 he had also built cottages on the Keymer side of the road.

This enthusiastic haste and co-operation of the Burgess Hill folk to build their own local chapel is impressive and it stands in sharp contrast to the rather tardy response by the Church of England to do the same for St. John’s Common. It was a story repeated throughout England wherever new manufacture had brought a swelling population. People found God and good company in chapel along with a freedom to explore new ideas about how society might be better run, to the benefit of all. The Church of England woke up rather late in the day both to the spiritual and to the earthly needs of an urban populace.

However, although it took a further 34 years for our own new Church of England parish church to be built, Burgess Hill was fortunate that, from 1836, the Diocese of Chichester was in the hands of a ‘progressive’ bishop, William Otter.  He had previously been the very first Principal of King’s College, London, a new C. of E. foundation created to counter ‘the Godless College of Gower Street’ (University College London).  His mission was to bring education to the poorer classes within the teachings of the ‘established church’ and by April 1840 he had opened the first teacher training college in the County. Later known as Bishop Otter College it is now part of Southampton University. One of his archdeacons was a clever Oxford academic and ‘Professor of Poetry’ the Venerable James Garbett. He was a keen ‘evangelist’ (see notes below), who had recently been installed as rector to the parish of Clayton cum Keymer.

The appointment was a happy marriage of a sympathetic ‘missionary’ with a growing urban area. Garbett did not fail and he soon campaigned not only to get child labour out of the brickyards and into school but also to build the school itself, the former ‘London Road School’. The site is now occupied by ‘School Close’.  Until Burgess Hill’s new parish church could be built, the Ven. Garbett had bought some land on the west side of London Road which had been used for stables, used in the coaching hey-day. In the 1840s, he had a temporary Church of England school built there, which was also used on Sundays for church services. Musical accompaniment was in the ‘old-fashioned ‘west gallery’ style, on flute, fiddles, viols and a clarinet played by Charles Stone of the Fairplace Hill smithy. (See note 5 below).  The new C. of E. School opened in 1850 on the east side of the London also carried out the dual role of school and ‘Mission’. I have often wondered whether the dedication of the new parish church in 1863 to St. John the Evangelist was to celebrate the hard work of an ‘evangelist’ rector of a growing young town. (See notes 4 and 5 below). Once the new church was built, as rector, he appointed vicars to minister there; but he retained a close involvement with the church and the community of Burgess Hill until 1879 when his death at the age of 77 deprived the parish of a much-loved local cleric.

The following images show: First, the Bethel chapel, Wivelsfield; Second, the Leylands Rd Chapel, 1829; and third, houses opposite the west end of Station Road that are on the footprint of the first Church of England School during weekdays, and a makeshift church on Sundays.

The ongoing story of Burgess Hill’s churches is told on the Places of Worship page. 

1. For a general study of parish churches through the ages, including the medieval era, see J. H. Bettey, Church and parish: a guide for local historians (Batsford, 1987). The 16th-century upheavals are covered in, C. S. L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism, Fontana Press, 1995; festive pre-Reformation church customs and their loss are fully explored in, Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the ritual year 1400-1700, (O.U.P., 1994). At Clayton Church you can see depictions of the surviving wall paintings and there is a useful leaflet on sale there about the building and its history

2. 18th-century Non-conformity in Lewes is covered by C. Brent, Georgian Lewes: the hey-day of a County town, (Colin Brent Books, 1993, pp.152-166. Details of the measures taken against the dissenters are in his article, “Lewes Dissenters outside the law, 1663-86”, in SAC *123, pp.195-214.

For more-local non-conformity, see Reynolds, Morley and Hall, Cap. 8, Chapel and Church 1672-1851, in : H. Warne (ed.), Wivelsfield: the history of a wealden parish (Wiv. History Study Group 1991)

Quakerism, which does not feature at St. John’s Common so far as we know, was flourishing in Lewes, Hurstpierpoint and Lindfield in the18th century and might have drawn St. John’s Commoners to its meetings. At Hurst, there were several imprisonments for non-payment of tithes. See Ian Nelson (ed.), Hurstpierpoint kind and friendly  (Hurst History Study Group, 2001)

3. The information on James Garbett is partly from the Concise Dictionary of National Biography (drawn from the Internet) and partly from a parish history, The Story of Burgess Hill, parish church (1950) by Rev. Eric Marsh (vicar). Re. William Otter’s College, see T. Brighton and H.Warne, A portrait of Bishop Otter College Chichester, 1839-1990 (W. Sussex Institute of Higher Education, 1992). There is a memorial plaque to Garbett as Rector of Clayton cum Keymer in Clayton parish church.

4. D. Robert Elleray in The Victorian Churches of Sussex, (Phillimore 1981) discusses the movement back to traditional medieval styles of architecture and away from plain classical forms of the 18th-century town churches. He also covers the rise of the ‘Oxford Movement’ and their preference for ‘high church’ ritual. James Garbett had been a leading opponent of the latter while at Oxford, attracting the label ‘evangelist’; which, so far as I can judge – though I am not expert in these matters – simply meant he wanted to concentrate on the basic message of Christianity and to minister to all people of whatever rank or condition.

St John’s Church, Burgess Hill, was built in the ‘Decorated’ style of the late 13th century.

5. The conveyance of land for the first Church of England school, on the west side of London Road, is at WSRO, among the Clayton Parish records but I have currently mislaid its reference. See also, A. H. Gregory, The Story of Burgess Hill (Charles Clarke, 1933), p. 40.

6. A note of church dedications: in circa 1181 AD, Clayton church was dedicated to All Saints and Keymer to the Blessed Mary (quoted on p.134 of my article in SAC *123, ref. TNA/E 40/14149). Clayton is now ‘of St. John the Baptist’ and Keymer parish church ‘of Ss. Cosmas and Damian’.  At Wivelsfield, after the suppression of their old pre-Reformation Chapel of St. Peter, the parish church added ‘…and St. Peter’ to its name. By analogy it is likely that the mother church at Clayton took the dedication of St. John the Baptist after our pre-Reformation Chapel of St. John was suppressed.  These changes would have ameliorated the sense of loss that the stranded congregations must have felt. By 1863, we could not rejuvenate St. John the Baptist for our new church, because it had already been done.  St. John the Evangelist was chosen, perhaps for reasons given in note 4 above.

*SAC: Sussex Archaeological Collections: copies available at Burgess Hill Library. The text of all 150+ volumes is now on line.