The Parish Church of St Giles, Shermanbury

St Giles' Church is the Church of England parish church of the small village of Shermanbury, in West Sussex. Standing on the site of a church recorded in the Domesday Book and largely built in the thirteenth century, it is a Grade II* listed building of great charm and antiquity — the church historian John Vigar called it "one of our Sussex gems", which he had "no hesitation in recommending to all". Set on a low rise above the flood plain of the River Adur and entirely surrounded by water, it is one of the most picturesque country churches in the county.

The church's setting is remarkable: it stands beside Shermanbury Place and its parkland, ringed by the River Adur and the old and new channels of its tributary the Cowfold Stream, so that water encircles it completely. It lies about half a mile from the nearest public road, reached only by a private road that doubles as a public bridleway. The mound on which it sits was almost certainly the site of the Anglo-Saxon burh, or fortification, that gives the village the second half of its name, and Domesday Book records a small church — an ecclesiola — at "Salmonesberie" in 1086. Some twelfth-century carved stones found around 1900 may have come from that earlier building, but the oldest parts of the present church date from the thirteenth century. By 1288 it had its own rector, presented by the lord of the manor of Shermanbury, whose successors held the right of appointment into the twentieth century. St Giles was never a wealthy living, valued at only a few pounds in the Middle Ages, and at various times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries its rectors were absentees and the church poorly furnished — until long resident rectorships in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought a series of restorations.

The result is a building of pleasingly mixed styles. The rendered walls of the aisleless nave are largely thirteenth century, with blocked medieval doorways on both sides and a thirteenth-century piscina, while the west end with its wooden bell-turret was rebuilt in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the chancel reshaped in a restoration of 1710, and the porch front rebuilt in 1885. The windows, originally lancets, were given square Georgian heads in the eighteenth century and some later restored to their medieval form. The octagonal font, decorated with alternating quatrefoils and stars, dates from around 1300.

The interior preserves several rare survivals. St Giles is one of relatively few Sussex churches — among them Warminghurst and Chiddingly — to keep its box pews, which date from about 1747 and, unusually, carry the names of the local farms to which they were appropriated. Above hangs a set of painted Royal Arms that are, exceptionally, those of Queen Anne, dating from the 1710 restoration. There is a gallery of 1748, several Neoclassical memorial tablets, and church plate of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries including a silver-gilt communion cup of 1686. The church also holds fine stained glass by two of the most admired Victorian studios: the east window's Annunciation and a north chancel window depicting the legend of St Giles are both by Charles Eamer Kempe, made in the early 1890s and praised for the richness of their colour, while later windows include heraldic glass by James Powell and Sons and a 1937 design by Christopher Charles Powell. The west window contains fragments of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century glass collected and reset in modern times. The parish registers survive from 1653.

In 1978 the parish was united with those of Henfield and Woodmancote in a single benefice. The church was threatened with closure in 2002, but the danger was averted, helped by the Friends of St Giles', Shermanbury, founded in 2007 to support its repair — most notably raising the funds to replace the wooden bell tower in 2011. Services are held on the first and third Sundays of each month, though at other times the remote church is normally closed.

From its Domesday origins on an Anglo-Saxon mound, through its thirteenth-century walls, its Queen Anne arms and farm-named box pews, to its Kempe glass and its water-girt setting, St Giles' Church, Shermanbury, remains a true Sussex gem — a small, ancient and deeply atmospheric country church still cared for and loved after more than seven centuries.