St Mary Magdalene's Church, Tortington

St Mary Magdalene's Church is the former Anglican parish church of Tortington, a hamlet beside the River Arun in the Arun district of West Sussex, a mile or so from Arundel. Founded in the twelfth century to serve a priory and the villagers of this riverside manor, the little flint and Caen stone building has changed remarkably little in nearly nine hundred years, and it shelters one of the strangest treasures of Sussex church art: a chancel arch alive with "grotesque, boggle-eyed monsters" — rare beakhead carvings that have glared down at worshippers since about 1140. Standing in a picturesque setting behind a farm, the church was used for worship until 1978 and is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, listed at Grade II for its architectural and historical importance.

Tortington is ancient ground. The manor is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, and a medieval Augustinian monastery, Tortington Priory, stood nearby; an agricultural hamlet had developed by the twelfth century, and its layout and function have changed little since. The church is first mentioned in the mid-twelfth century, when there was a rectory, and it was built primarily to serve the priory. From that era survive the south doorway and the "delightful" chancel arch, both dated to about 1140, and the layout and fabric of the church remain largely twelfth-century despite later restoration. In the thirteenth century a two-bay aisle was added on the south side of the nave — the doorway being moved to accommodate it — and lancet windows were inserted in the north and south walls of the chancel. The aisle was destroyed during or before the eighteenth century and its arcade blocked up. The church was also quick to adopt seating for parishioners as this became standard in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — before then, churches simply had none — and some of those early plain, straight-headed wooden benches survive. Medieval features now lost include a Lady chapel, of which a recess on the outside of the chancel wall may be a remnant, a leaded steeple, and a porch that survives only in fragments. The steeple gave way in the eighteenth century to a white timber bell-turret, similar to that at St Andrew's, Ford, nearby — apparently painted white to help with navigation along the adjacent River Arun. The chancel arch and chancel roof were remodelled in the same century, the nave having already acquired its timber king-post roof in the medieval period.

Where many Sussex churches were drastically restored by the Victorians, Tortington escaped lightly. The reordering of 1867 was modest: a new south aisle replaced the lost thirteenth-century one, the arcade was unblocked, and the doorway returned to its original position. A vestry was added on the north side in 1892, and the antiquarian architect Philip Mainwaring Johnston undertook further work in 1904. The church as it stands has a nave, a narrower chancel, the north vestry reached from the nave, the south aisle behind its arcade of chamfered arches on round abaci and octagonal responds, the timber bell-turret, and a steep clay-tiled roof that sweeps down as a catslide over the aisle. Flint and stone rubble are the main materials, with quoins of Caen stone, and the remains of the original south porch can still be seen.

The Norman carvings are what bring visitors. The south doorway, its door hung on decorative strap hinges, carries three layers of carving in its semicircular arch — chevrons, stars and grapes. The zigzag chevrons run down to the jambs and capitals, grape-like motifs fill the angles where they meet, and the labels carry a repeating star pattern; Nikolaus Pevsner judged the work as "keeping inside the established pattern" of such carving, without the "extraordinary ... mannered and extrovert" quality of the doorway at nearby Climping. The chancel arch inside is another matter entirely: around it crowds "an amazing congregation of grotesque monsters", boggle-eyed creatures "with beaks, tongues and squid-like tentacles, that frown and glare at visitors below", the roll mouldings of the arch gripped in the beaks of these "fearsome", "wide-eyed horrors". Such beakhead decoration is a little-understood feature of Late Norman architecture — in churches it may have been meant to capture the congregation's interest, or to inspire fear and awe — and it is rare in Sussex, found elsewhere only at St Mary's, Broadwater, and St Mary de Haura at Shoreham-by-Sea. The arch's two orders contrast tellingly: the outer lavishly decorated, the inner plain.

The interior holds more quiet riches. Large round-arched Norman windows with deep splays survive alongside the chancel's thirteenth-century lancets, some filled with stained glass by Charles Eamer Kempe — his St Richard of Chichester has been called "of exceptional quality compared with most windows of this period in Sussex" — while the east window's glass is attributed to Thomas Willement. The oldest fitting is the twelfth-century Caen stone font, with a round bowl decorated with honeysuckle foliage, mouldings and an arcade motif with scallop-shaped capitals. An "interesting" plain Jacobean pulpit of the early seventeenth century stands on legs rather than the usual single stem and may be the work of a local craftsman; fifteenth-century panelled pews survive in the south aisle; and two eighteenth-century funerary hatchments hang above the chancel arch.

The parish's history is as tangled as the church is simple. For most of its existence Tortington was a parish church with its own vicar, though from the early nineteenth century the incumbents generally lived in nearby Arundel; the church at Binsted lay within the parish in the sixteenth century. In 1897 the parish ceased to be independent, joining a benefice with Arundel, to which South Stoke was added in 1929 — though the parishes were never merged, and Tortington's identity survives to this day in the legal name of Arundel's parish, "Arundel with Tortington", and its benefice, "Arundel with Tortington and South Stoke". The advowson — the right to appoint clergy — was first mentioned in 1214 in the hands of William d'Aubigny, 3rd Earl of Arundel; it passed to Tortington Priory by 1380 and remained there until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, then went to the lords of Tortington Manor through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the Earl of Arundel apparently held it again in 1579, and the Crown made three appointments in the seventeenth century), through various noblemen in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and finally to the Bishop of Chichester in 1897.

The twentieth century brought decline to this sparsely populated corner: congregations dwindled, and the Diocese of Chichester declared the church redundant on 1 August 1978. On 21 April 1980 it passed into the care of the Redundant Churches Fund, now the Churches Conservation Trust, becoming one of five former churches in West Sussex administered by the charity, with others at Chichester, Church Norton, North Stoke and Warminghurst. Listed at Grade II since 5 June 1958, St Mary Magdalene's endures as it has for nearly nine centuries — a farmyard church by the Arun where Norman monsters still bare their beaks above an empty chancel, kept safe for anyone who comes to look.