Church of St Mary the Blessed Virgin, Sompting

The Church of St Mary the Blessed Virgin is the Church of England parish church of Sompting in the Adur district of West Sussex, and it is famous throughout England — and indeed internationally — for one extraordinary feature: its Anglo-Saxon tower, crowned by a "Rhenish helm". This four-sided, gabled pyramidal cap, common in the Rhineland of Germany but found nowhere else in England, makes Sompting's tower unique in the country, a survival of the eleventh century that draws students of architecture from across the world. Standing on a quiet rural lane north of the modern village, retaining much of its eleventh- and twelfth-century fabric, and listed at Grade I for its architecture and history, St Mary's is one of the most important early churches in the south of England.

People have lived around Sompting since the Bronze Age, through the Iron Age and into the Roman era, and by the eleventh century two distinct villages had formed here: Sompting, strung along the ancient east–west trackway running from the cathedral city of Chichester towards Brighton, and Cokeham to the south. At the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 these were separate manors, both held on behalf of William de Braose, the powerful 1st Lord of Bramber. There was already a church on the site of the present building by the early eleventh century, and some of its structure survives — most importantly the lower stages of the celebrated tower, with its distinctive Saxon long-and-short stonework and its pilaster strips, the hallmarks of late Anglo-Saxon building.

The church's medieval history is bound up with two of the great religious-military orders of the Middle Ages. William de Braose held the advowson — the right to appoint the priest — at the time of Domesday, but in 1154 his grandson, the 3rd Lord of Bramber, passed it to the Knights Templar, the order of warrior-monks founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. The Templars made many changes to the church: they widened it by rebuilding the nave and chancel to the same width as the Saxon tower, and in about 1180 they erected a large chapel to the south — effectively a separate church in its own right, which remained distinct until the nineteenth century, when an arch was cut to link it to the nave and turn it into a de facto south transept. They also added a north transept with an aisle and two chapels, and paid for a vicar and his accommodation, establishing the church as a substantial place of worship.

When the Knights Templar were suppressed across Europe in 1307, amid scandal and persecution, Pope Clement V conveyed ownership of the church in 1324 to the Knights Hospitaller, another great religious order. The Hospitallers extended the nave on the north-west side to form a chapel with openings into both the nave and the tower, built a porch on the south side, and carried out further work on the walls. Although the advowson later passed out of the order's hands, it was restored to the Knights of St John in 1963 by Major G. H. Tristram — a remarkable continuity, for the order, dissolved in England in 1538, had been re-established in 1831 as the Venerable Order of Saint John and went on to found the St John Ambulance organisation, so that Sompting's church retains to this day a living link with one of the most ancient orders of Christendom.

Like so many rural churches, St Mary's fell into decay during the eighteenth century, when the living was poor and the villages of Sompting and Cokeham supported only a small population. Repairs in the 1720s and 1760s proved insufficient, and in 1791 two of the church's bells had to be sold to pay for proper repairs. A more thorough restoration was carried out in 1853 by the architect Richard Cromwell Carpenter, who re-roofed the church, replaced the shingles on the spire, rebuilt the Templars' chapel as a south transept, improved the aisle of the north transept, and cleaned the stonework, bringing the building substantially to the form in which it survives today.

It is the tower, however, that makes Sompting unforgettable. Known nationally and internationally as an exemplar of Anglo-Saxon architecture, it rises in stages of characteristic Saxon masonry to its crowning glory: the Rhenish helm, a tall, four-sided cap of timber and shingles, each face rising to a gable and the whole sweeping up to a point. Such helms are a familiar sight on the Romanesque churches of the Rhineland, from which the name derives, but Sompting's is the only example of its kind in England — a unique and beautiful survival that gives the church its instantly recognisable silhouette and its place in the history of European architecture. Within, the church preserves fragments of medieval carving and the atmosphere of great antiquity, its various chapels and transepts recording the successive labours of the Saxons, the Templars and the Hospitallers.

The church stands on a rural lane on the lower slopes of the South Downs, just north of the urban area that has grown up around Sompting between Worthing and Lancing, in West Sussex. The South Downs National Park rises immediately to the north, with its chalk hills, ancient trackways and the long-distance South Downs Way; the historic flint barn and the village of Sompting lie close by, while the seaside towns of Worthing and Lancing, the famous chapel of Lancing College on its hilltop, and the wider Sussex coast are all within easy reach.

From a Saxon church of the early eleventh century with its unique Rhenish-helm tower, through the medieval rebuilding by the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller, its long centuries of rural service and its Victorian restoration, the Church of St Mary the Blessed Virgin gathers a thousand years of Sussex and European history into one remarkable building. A Grade I listed church and the only one in England crowned by a Rhenish helm, it remains the living parish church of Sompting — a treasure of Anglo-Saxon architecture beneath the South Downs, and one of the most distinctive churches in the whole of England.