Ringing Down at Aldingbourne, West Sussex

Описание: St Mary the Virgin’s Church in Aldingbourne, West Sussex, is a Grade I listed parish church with over 900 years of continuous Christian worship, growing from a small Saxon and Norman settlement first recorded in the Domesday Book era and serving as the spiritual heart around which the early village developed. Architecturally, the building preserves elements from several key medieval phases: an 11th-century nave core, 12th-century aisle work, a finely detailed late 12th- to early 13th-century south arcade and vaulted bay, and a mid-13th-century chancel and tower, reflecting the influence of nearby Chichester Cathedral and the church’s early importance as a manorial and likely minster site under the bishop’s lordship. Over the centuries the fabric evolved further, with the loss of the north aisle in the later Middle Ages as the local population shifted east after the Black Death, and with successive post-medieval and Victorian restorations in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries that renewed windows, refaced the chancel in flint, rebuilt the aisle, regularised the tower top with battlements, and subtly reshaped the exterior while preserving the character of a small rural Sussex church. Inside, the church retains a rich collection of historic features that speak to its long devotional life: a late Norman font and a second rough medieval font bowl, early English arches separating nave and aisle, traces of medieval wall paintings and later black-letter texts in the nave, a pre-Reformation altar slab now beneath the high altar, sedilia and piscina in the chancel, early-modern royal arms, and a worn 13th-century tomb-slab near the east end of the nave. Today, St Mary’s continues as an active parish church within the parish of Aldingbourne, Barnham and Eastergate, celebrating its patronal festival of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary each September and welcoming worshippers and visitors who encounter both a functioning village church and a layered record of Norman, medieval, post-Reformation and Victorian faith and craftsmanship in the West Sussex landscape.

The tower holds a ring of five bells. The front three were cast in 1996 by Eijsbouts and the back two were cast in 1615 by Thomas Wakefield. The treble of the former ring of three prior to 1996 was recast at the time of the rehanging and augmentation. The tenor was retuned and all the bells hung in a new steel frame lower in the tower by Eayre & Smith.

5 bells, 6-1-14cwt in B.