St Cosmas and St Damian Church, Keymer

St Cosmas and St Damian Church in Keymer, a village in the Mid Sussex district of West Sussex, bears one of the rarest dedications in the Church of England — to the twin saints Cosmas and Damian, fourth-century Christian martyrs who, tradition holds, were brothers practising as doctors in Roman Syria, well-educated in science and medicine and famous for treating people without expecting payment, until they were put to death in 303 during the Diocletianic Persecution. Only three other extant English churches share the dedication — at Challock and Blean in Kent, and Sherrington in Wiltshire, with a redundant fourth near Leominster — making the Grade II listed Keymer church a member of a very select company.

The site's history reaches back beyond the Conquest. The medieval manor of Keymer appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, held by William de Watevile for William de Warenne, builder of Lewes Castle, and a church already existed on the present spot; in 1093 a successor of de Watevile gave it to the great Cluniac priory at Lewes. The present building incorporates twelfth-century structural elements — the chancel walls and the Norman apse — and from the fourteenth century until the Victorian era the structure changed little. In 1866 it was rebuilt by the Brighton architect Edmund Scott (best known for the majestic St Bartholomew's in his home town), who took the unusual and respectful course of matching the church's largely fourteenth-century style rather than redesigning it — a rebuilding "in a style similar to the Saxon building it replaced", keeping the ancient stone dressings of the east window and the remains of what may be an original piscina, now lacking its basin, in the apse.

The walls are of flint laid in an irregular style reminiscent of crazy paving, with a small tower and two-stage spire at the south-west corner. The plan comprises the chancel with its Norman apse, nave, aisles and a south porch — the south aisle built in the 1866 reconstruction, the north added in 1890. Six bells were hung at various dates: one in 1791, another at the rebuilding in 1866, and a peal of four in 1911. The patron of the church, holding the advowson, is Brasenose College, Oxford.

The large churchyard contains a war memorial and five Commonwealth war graves — three soldiers of the First World War and two of the Second — and the names on the memorial have been researched and published, putting stories and details to what would otherwise be bare names. With the original churchyard full, a new burial ground was established in a field opposite the church: acquired by Mid Sussex District Council on behalf of the parish and transferred to Hassocks Parish Council, it is now the Hassocks Burial Ground and Garden of Remembrance.

The churches of Keymer and Clayton have been connected since their founding, but the parishes were only formally united on 25 July 1978 by Order in Council. St Cosmas and St Damian is now one of three churches in the combined parish, alongside the famous eleventh-century, Grade I listed St John the Baptist's at Clayton — with its celebrated medieval wall paintings — and the modern St Francis of Assisi's in Hassocks, built in 1975; the parish covers the three villages and surrounding countryside, its eastern edge following the West Sussex–East Sussex border. The church received its Grade II listing on 21 June 2007, and the old centre of Keymer village around it was designated a conservation area in January 1989, the district council noting that "the church sited on higher land which can be seen from all approaches" was one of the area's defining features.

The church keeps a generous welcome: two Sunday services most weeks, services on Wednesdays and alternate Saturdays — and the doors open during daylight hours every day, in the spirit of the unpaid physician-saints whose names it bears.