History of Christianity in Sussex

[6] At Wiggonholt, on a tributary of the River Arun, a large lead tank with repeated chi-rho motifs was discovered in 1943, the only Roman period artefact in Sussex found with a definite Christian association.

[10] The written evidence for the foundation of a bishopric in Sussex comes from the The Life of Wilfrid attributed to Stephen of Ripon and Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

[13] In an obvious exaggeration[14] the Life of St Wilfrid claimed that Sussex "was inaccessible, having a rocky coast and thick forests, which allowed it to maintain its independence".

Contra to Bede and Stephen's narrative, the historian Michael Shapland suggests that it is possible that on Wilfrids arrival, the people of Sussex would already have been Insular Christians.

[23][24] In the late 7th or early 8th century, St Cuthman, a shepherd who may have been born in Chidham and had been reduced to begging, set out from his home with his disabled mother using a one-wheeled cart.

[29] Various monastic houses were established in the Saxon period in Sussex including at Selsey Abbey, Lyminster Priory, Aldingbourne, Beddingham, Bosham, Chichester, Ferring and South Malling, near Lewes.

During this period Sussex has been described "as an anomaly: a southern county with a religious dynamic more in keeping with those of the north, connected to the Continent as much as the rest of the country, an entity that resisted easy co-option into Elizabeth I's 'little Israel of England'.

[44] Day opposed the changes, and incurred the displeasure of the royal commissioners, who promptly suspended him as Bishop and allowed him only to preach in his cathedral church.

[48] Mary expected her clergy to be unmarried, so Bishop Scory thought it prudent to retire as he was a married man, and George Day was released and restored to the see of Chichester.

[50] Martyrs included Deryck Carver, a French-speaking Flemish man who had sought refuge in Brighton from persecution for his Calvinist beliefs; and Richard Woodman, an ironmaster from Buxted.

[53] This was particularly so in the east of the county, with its trade links to Protestant areas of northern Europe and it[clarification needed] covering a large part of the Weald, as well as being close to the Kentish border.

[39] Elizabeth re-established the break with Rome when she passed the 1559 Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity: the clergy were expected to take statutory oaths, and those that did not were deprived of their living.

In 1580 leading Sussex Catholics including John Gage of Firle and Richard Shelley of Warminghurst were imprisoned for recusancy and continued to pay the taxes and fines demanded.

[62] West Grinstead Park, home of the Caryll family, became a Roman Catholic mission where priests arrived, generally at night up the River Adur to await "posting".

[citation needed] In 1588 two Catholic priests, Ralph Crockett and Edward James, were arrested at Arundel Haven (now Littlehampton), taken to London and executed outside Chichester.

[70] He also complained that Waller's troops... "... brake down the Organs and dashing the pipes with their Pole-axes..." Mercurius Rusticus p. 139 Destruction of the cathedrals' music seems to have been one of the objectives, as Ryves also said, of Waller's men, that... "they force open all the locks, either of doors or desks wherein the Singing-men laid up their Common-Prayer Books, their singing-Books, their Gowns and Surplesses they rent the Books in pieces and scatter the torn leaves all over the Church, even to the covering of the Pavement.." Mercurius Rusticus p. 140 In 1643, Francis Bell, one of the priests at the Catholic mission in West Grinstead, was executed, along with other priests.

[63] During Cromwell's interregnum, Rye stood out as a Puritan 'Common Wealth', a centre of social experiment and rigorous public morality under vicar Joseph Beeton and his successor John Allen.

[72] Until the passing of the Toleration Act received royal assent in 1689 Quakers in Sussex and elsewhere had suffered considerable persecution, many of whom were imprisoned in Horsham Jail.

[citation needed] The 1684 Chichester Quarter Sessions recorded that William Penn "being a factitious and seditious person doth frequently entertain and keep an unlawful assemblage and conventicle in his dwelling house at Warminghurst to the terror of the King's liege people.

[75][76] The Quakers in Sussex debated with Matthew Caffyn, a General Baptist preacher and writer, including George Fox and William Penn.

in 1696, Caffyn's increasingly radical, unorthodox beliefs caused a schism in the General Baptist Assembly, and its response to his changing theology was significant in the development of Unitarianism.

[93] In 1805 the priest in charge, a French émigré, started to raise money for a permanent building; a site on High Street, east of the Royal Pavilion and Old Steine, was found, and the Classical-style church was completed in 1807.

A piece of undeveloped land on the estate of the Marquess of Bristol was bought for £1,050, and William Hallett, later a mayor of Brighton, designed and built the new church of St John the Baptist.

[111] Hostility to the Roman Catholic church, strong shortly after the Reformation had virtually died out by the early 19th century when religious tolerance was dominant mood.

The railway, coincidentally or otherwise, linked all the large and growing centres of Anglo-Catholic worship spreading from London to Brighton and then east and west along coast of Sussex to the neighbouring counties of Kent and Hampshire.

In the early 2000s, the sexual abuse scandal in the Arundel and Brighton diocese hurt the public's trust in the work of local diocesan officials.

Appointed as Bishop of Chichester in 1929, George Bell was a vocal supporter of the German resistance to Nazism and a pioneer of the Ecumenical Movement that aimed for greater co-operation between churches.

The LDCC later persuaded BBC to make a Songs of Praise TV programme in Lewes on the theme of religious tolerance, broadcast on 5 November 1989.

There are parallels with the carnival celebrations that took place across western Europe when the established order was turned upside down and the lord of misrule held sway for the day.

[134] The turn of the 21st century saw the rise of so-called mega-churches and neo-charismatic and evangelical churches including Kingdom Faith in Horsham, set up by Colin Urquhart and the Newfrontiers group founded by Terry Virgo.