St Andrew and St Cuthman's Church, Steyning

The Old Way from Southampton to Canterbury visits Steyning, a pilgrim destination since medieval times thanks to a miracle church and the relics of a local saint

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Highlights

• Apparition of Christ
• Church and memorial to St Cuthman

St Cuthman was a shepherd who led a life of impeccable devotion, caring for his disabled mother after his father died. At Steyning, his labours were repaid by an appearance of Christ himself, in one of the few apparitions of the Savior recorded in England. The church in Steyning marks the hallowed site, though it has been rebuilt several times.

The saint built the original church here with his own hands around the year 700. Sussex had just been converted by the missionary St Wilfrid, and it was a period of intense struggle between pagan and Christian beliefs. Some of the villagers tried to block St Cuthman’s efforts. One woman, Fippa, impounded his oxen, for which she was divinely punished, flying into the air and then vanishing beneath the grass on landing.

One day St Cuthman ran into more conventional building problems: a roof beam would not fit. A stranger approached and managed to fix the carpentry. St Cuthman asked his name and the helper replied: “I am he in whose name you are building this church.”

A similar miracle is told at Christchurch in Dorset, where you can see the beam that Christ the carpenter fixed. Unfortunately at Steyning nothing survives of St Cuthman’s miraculous wooden church. The village has a handsome Norman structure, built in honour of St Cuthman by monks from Fécamp Abbey.

The French monastery received Steyning in the 11th century as a gift from St Edward the Confessor, to thank the French for their support during his exile. The monks took the saint’s body back to their abbey in Normandy.

Although St Cuthman’s relics and original church have long gone, the memory of the saint is very much alive in Steyning. A modern sculpture was installed on the green in the year 2000, the stone figure gazing thoughtfully across the road at the church he founded.

Originally believed to come from Chidham, near Bosham on the south coast, the saint abandoned his life as a shepherd to become a full-time carer. Fashioning a rudimentary, single-wheeled chair, he took his mother everywhere with him, begging from door to door. When the rope towing her chair broke here at Steyning, he decided to stop and build a church.

Sussex was well known as a bastion of pagan belief in the 7th century. An unusual carved stone was found built into the churchyard gate in 1938. Believed to be a pre-Christian totem, it is now displayed inside the church porch. The sculpture of St Cuthman opposite the church shows him resting his foot on this defeated pagan symbol.

Another carved stone displayed on the porch is believed to be the gravestone of King Ethelwulf, father of Alfred the Great. It has three crosses – the Saxon way of marking the grave of a king.

A side chapel in the church is dedicated to St Cuthman, with a colourful modern stained-glass window in the south aisle. When I first visited in 2007, the church was dedicated to St Andrew. Since then, in an unusual but inspiring move, the parish rededicated itself to St Andrew and St Cuthman. The ceremony took place in 2009 on 8 February, his saint’s day.

The saint was born around 681. It is therefore possible that he was baptized by St Wilfrid himself during the bishop’s mission to Sussex in 680–685. St Cuthman is often depicted with a wheelbarrow or as a shepherd.

The Chidham Connection

As mentioned, St Cuthman was possibly born at Chidham on the south coast near Bosham, about 25 miles west of Steyning. As a young boy, he worked there as a shepherd and rested on a large rock to watch his flock. The rock was later said to have miraculous healing powers.

This field is next to the Cobnor Activities Centre, about a mile south of Chidham itself beside the sea. It is referred to as Cullimer’s Field on the OS map, said to be a corruption of St Cuthman’s name. I couldn’t see a rock anywhere in the field, but it does have a large pond in the corner, referred to in the 17th century as St Cullman’s Dell. The field and pond are just behind a row of holiday houses called Canute Cottages.

I wouldn’t recommend a special trip to Chidham, but if you want to look it up on a map, the GPS coordinates are 50.8181N 0.8756W.

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Directions

St Andrew and St Cuthman’s Church, Church Street, Steyning BN44 3YQ

steyningparishchurch.org

W3W: panther.variation.bats

GPS: 50.8900N 0.3251W

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The church is on Church Street near where it meets Vicarage Lane, north of the town centre, and was open when we visited. The statue of St Cuthman is on the other side of the road, near Steyning’s library and town museum. For more on the saint’s life at both Steyning and Chidham, there is an article by J Blair in the Sussex Archaeological Collections volume 135, ‘Saint Cuthman, Steyning and Bosham’, printed in 1997.

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