St Mary and St Peter's Church, Wilmington

St Mary and St Peter's Church stands in the village of Wilmington, East Sussex, at the foot of the South Downs and within sight of the famous Long Man of Wilmington carved into the chalk hillside above. Founded in the late eleventh century, it is an active Anglican parish church in the deanery of Lewes and Seaford, the archdeaconry of Lewes and Hastings and the Diocese of Chichester, and a Grade I listed building — yet it began its life with a double identity, serving both the farmers of the village and the monks of the adjoining Wilmington Priory, to which it was physically connected.

After the Norman Conquest of 1066, monks from Grestain Abbey — a Benedictine monastery in Normandy — took possession of the land around Wilmington and founded Wilmington Priory to administer their territory. It was never a large community: only two or three monks lived there, and no separate abbey church was ever built. Instead the monks shared the chancel of the village church, which was in existence by 1100, serving the farmers and villagers of "Winelton" as the place was then known, and was joined to the priory by a cloister. In common with England's other alien priories — monastic houses owing allegiance to French mother-abbeys — Wilmington Priory was suppressed by King Henry V in 1414, during the French wars, and fell into ruin; from then on the church functioned solely as a parish church. The site itself may be far older than the Normans: a vast yew tree in the churchyard, scientifically dated at 1,600 years old and with a girth of twenty-three feet, suggests the spot was sacred to pre-Christian people, and a "strange, gargoyle-like" figure known as the Wilmington Madonna — originally on the outside wall, preserved in the chancel since 1948 — may be further evidence of pagan worship in the area.

The building grew by accretion. During the thirteenth century a north chapel or transept was added toward the east end of the nave, along with a two-bay south aisle that had the look of a transept, separated from the body of the church by a two-bay arcade. The nave was rebuilt in the fourteenth century; the fifteenth brought the north porch and the east window, along with diagonal buttresses at the east end — possibly because the insertion of new windows had weakened the chancel walls. The great Victorian campaign came in 1882–83, when the Lancaster architects Paley and Austin — among the most distinguished church architects of their day — restored the building at a cost of £1,790. They replaced the two-bay south aisle with a full-length aisle, removed the west gallery, laid new floors, added an altar with rails, stalls, a lectern and a reading desk, reseated the church, repaired the north transept and inserted the elaborate high chancel arch in thirteenth-century Early English style. The church has been praised for having "benefited from sympathetic restoration" across the centuries — a process tested in 2002, when fire severely damaged the north transept, by then in use as a vestry, and destroyed the organ. The damage was repaired and the church rededicated in 2004; a well-regarded stained glass window depicting British butterflies and bees, badly damaged in the blaze, was replaced by a new design that kept the same theme but added images of St Peter and a phoenix rising from the flames.

The church consists of a nave with north porch, south aisle, north transept and chancel, its walls of flint with small areas of rendering, very thick but with splayed window openings to admit more light. At the west end rises a pretty weatherboarded bellcote with a shingled broach spire. The chancel is Norman work, retaining two original round-headed windows, a carved triangular string-course and traces of a round-headed south doorway; the nave windows are Decorated Gothic and the east window Perpendicular. Around some windows is evidence of blank arcading, a feature shared with St Michael and All Angels at nearby Little Horsted, and the roof is of king post construction. Most unusual of all is a set of inward-facing stone seats attached to the inner walls of the chancel — benches of a kind often found in eleventh-century churches, though usually in the nave, and almost always swept away in later rebuilding.

The furnishings span the church's nine centuries. The wooden pulpit is Jacobean, of about 1610, with back panel and sounding board — a splendid and unusual fitting that contrasts with the simplicity of the surrounding Norman work. The font is fourteenth-century: a plain square bowl on a central column with four corner shafts. The chancel holds two square-headed aumbries and the weathered Wilmington Madonna, dated to the eleventh or thirteenth century. On the nave's north wall are the remains of a seventeenth-century painted inscription, on the south wall a painted panel of the Royal arms of Queen Victoria, and in the south aisle an Elizabethan monument with Classical detailing.

Listed Grade I on 30 August 1966 — a designation reserved for buildings of "exceptional interest" — the church was, as of 2001, one of forty-seven Grade I buildings among the 2,173 listed structures of the Wealden district. Its parish of about 200 souls covers a rural area north of the South Downs, crossed by the A27, and forms part of the united benefice of Arlington, Berwick, Selmeston-with-Alciston and Wilmington, five downland village churches served by a rector and assistant priest, each with its own churchwardens. Services are held on Sunday mornings — using the Book of Common Prayer in alternate weeks — with Evening Prayer on alternate Mondays: quiet, ancient worship beneath a yew that was already old when the first monks of Grestain came over with the Conqueror.