the story of St Paul's church (part 1)

simple, modest and peaceful

St Paul's is a simple, modest church in a peaceful village setting. It is a small building consisting of a white limewashed nave and greystone chancel separated by a horseshoe arch. The history of St Paul's is equally modest, most remarkable is the fact that the little village church has survived the centurys at all. What follows is an extract from The Story of St Paul's, written in 1952.

…the little thirty-by-fifteen foot nave was in Pre-Conquest times the whole church, already there in the reign of Edward the Confessor and mentioned as of “Halestede” in the Doomsday Book. All the north and east walls, a large part of the west, and the lower portion of the south are the original builders’ work, and together provide one of the finest examples of Saxon herringbone masonry in the country. In the 12th century the Normans pierced the east wall with the present plain but beautiful horseshoe arch and added a small chancel. At the same time they made a north aisle, about half the width of the nave, the arches to which are also still there, though now blocked in. In the 13th century the Norman chancel was replaced by the existing larger Early English one. The lancet windows in the sides are interesting in that they are completely unsymmetrical: the two western ones are not opposite each other; of the remaining two, which are opposite, the southern has double lights under a single arch. And in that form the chuch of St. Michael (for that was then its dedication) settled down to exist for the next six hundred years, though in the early 17th century a south porch was added.

By the middle of the 19th century, however, the ancient little church was found to be in a bad state of dilapidation, as also were those (almost as old) of the tiny parishes of Treyford and Didling, which, themselves united in the 15th century, had both been annexed to Elsted twenty years earlier. The Honourable Caroline Mary Harcourt, in whose gift was the living at the time, together with her husband the Rev. Leveson Vernon Harcourt, M.A., conceived the idea of building at their own expense one big new church, “with the highest steeple one can build”, to replace the three decaying ones. And so in 1849 a large Gothic-Revival church, dedicated to St. Peter and known later as “the Cathedral of the Downs”, came into existence midway between Treyford and Elsted villages; and the others were officially closed. Didling was later repaired and survived but Treyford slowly disintegrated into the roofless overgrown ruin it is today, and Elsted began to follow the same sad road. About twenty years later, however, Elsted church was partially re-opened for worship in 1873. But the expense of maintaining the big new church prevented full re-building, and the north aisle was removed. The west window of this aisle was incorporated in the easternmost of the blocked-up arches between it and the nave, whilst the east window (double-light trefoil-headed) was moved to the west wall of the nave. During these limited and somewhat perfunctory repairs the nave walls were scraped and lime washed, thus unfortunately practically obliterating an underlying early 14th century mural painting north of the chancel arch; it was carefully uncovered in 1900 but hardly anything was then to be seen except a small delicately limned head of a bearded man, and it has long since disappeared completely.

This restored St. Paul’s did not last long. In 1893 a tree was blown down on to the nave roof and the resultant damage was neglected. Eventually, in 1906, the whole roof was demolished, leaving the Saxon walls exposed to the weather for the next half century. Although the west end of the chancel was boarded up so that it could once more serve as a place of worship for about twenty people, and the inner and outer arches of the porch were preserved by being re-erected against the north wall of the nave, three-quarters of the south wall of the nave slowly disappeared together with the top of the west wall, and St. Paul’s was pathetically marked on the 1914 Ordnance maps as “Church (Remains of)”

(continues...)