The church of St Michael and All Angels, Withyham

The Church of St Michael and All Angels at Withyham, in the East Sussex Weald, is an Anglican parish church best known as the burial place of one of England's great aristocratic dynasties — the Sackville and Sackville-West families, Earls and Dukes of Dorset, whose chapel here is filled with some of the finest funerary sculpture in the county. A Grade I listed building in the Diocese of Chichester, the church stands at the centre of its village on the B2110 south-east of Hartfield, and its long history is bound up with the great house of Buckhurst nearby, the Sackvilles' Sussex seat. Its story is also one of disaster and recovery, for in 1663 the medieval church was all but destroyed by a single bolt of lightning.

There has been a church at Withyham since very early times. It is mentioned in 1291, when Edward I of England sent money to Pope Nicholas IV towards a crusade and Withyham was assessed for its contribution — proof of an established church by the late thirteenth century. The building was almost completely rebuilt in the fourteenth century, by which time it was already of considerable size, with a nave flanked by north and south aisles, a chancel and a west tower; at the east end of the north aisle stood the chapel of the locally pre-eminent Sackville family. For three centuries the medieval church served the parish and the family — until catastrophe struck.

On 16 June 1663 the church was hit by lightning. The bolt struck the tower, partly melting its bells, and ran on into the body of the church as far as the chancel, where it shattered the Sackville family's funeral monuments. The family steward wrote to his lord that he had been "much troubled to see so fair a building and so stately monuments so suddenly turned into lime and ashes" — a vivid testimony to the scale of the destruction. The damage was assessed at the enormous sum of £1,860, and the Privy Council issued a decree authorising the collection of funds across Sussex and the neighbouring counties so that the parishioners of Withyham could begin to rebuild. Rebuilding started, but progressed slowly, and was not completed until 1672; the Sackville chapel itself was not restored until eight years later still. Of the old medieval church, only the lower part of the tower, the west wall from the belfry door to the north-west corner, and the north and south-east walls were incorporated into the new building, so that the church as it stands is largely a creation of the 1660s and 70s, with medieval fragments embedded in it. A new parsonage was built at about the same time. The bells, melted in the fire, were recast two years later, a sixth was added in 1715, and these served until 1908, when they were recast again and augmented to the ring of eight that hangs in the tower today.

The nineteenth century brought a thorough Victorian reworking, as at so many English parish churches. The west gallery was removed, a south aisle was built, the low ceiling was taken down and the chancel arch raised in solid masonry; the old box pews, pulpit and Carolean panelling were swept away, the elaborate seventeenth-century south porch was replaced, oak seating was installed along the south and central aisles, and a screen was erected between the tower and the nave. The church was listed at Grade I by English Heritage in 1953, recognising its special architectural and historic interest. Its plan today comprises the chancel, a vestry to the south, the Sackville chapel to the north, a double nave, a south aisle, a south porch and the west tower.

But it is the Sackville chapel that gives St Michael and All Angels its fame, and the reason visitors seek it out. Since the death of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, 1st Earl of Dorset — the Elizabethan statesman, poet and Lord Treasurer who part-wrote the early English tragedy Gorboduc — the chapel has been the burial place of the Sackville family and, later, of the Sackville-Wests, the family of Knole whose name would in time include the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West. Generation after generation of one of the most distinguished families in English history lies here, and their monuments turn the chapel into a gallery of English sculpture across three centuries. The most celebrated is the monument to a younger Thomas Sackville, who died in 1677, the work of the great Danish-born sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber — father of the actor and playwright Colley Cibber — and reckoned among the finest funerary monuments of its age, the boy depicted between his grieving, kneeling parents in a composition of remarkable tenderness. The chapel's wealth of tombs, recording the Sackvilles, the Earls and Dukes of Dorset and the Sackville-Wests, makes it one of the great aristocratic mausolea of southern England.

The setting matches the history. Withyham lies in the high Weald of East Sussex, on the edge of Ashdown Forest — the woodland that inspired A. A. Milne's Hundred Acre Wood — in a landscape of wooded ridges and deep lanes. The Sackvilles' seat of Buckhurst Park is close by, and the church stands centrally in the village near the junction of Withyham Road and Hartfield Road, its tower rising above the trees. From a church assessed for a crusade in 1291, through a medieval rebuilding, a lightning strike that turned "stately monuments" to "lime and ashes", a long seventeenth-century reconstruction and a Victorian restoration, St Michael and All Angels has gathered seven centuries of Wealden and aristocratic history into one building. It remains the living parish church of Withyham in the Diocese of Chichester — and, in its Sackville chapel, the resting place of a family woven through the literary and political history of England, watched over by Cibber's grieving parents and their lost son.