History of Christ Church Fairwarp - the beginnings
- t44tea
- Jun 30
- 4 min read
In July 2023, the FADLHS held a talk on Christ Church, our village church,
presented by Fr John Caperon.
From about the 12th century AD, the Church in England developed the parish system. This meant that every area of the country – whether village or town – had a church building and a parish priest, a ‘parson’, who was responsible for the spiritual care of the people. In his ‘Canterbury Tales’ written in the late C14th, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer describes a ‘poor parson’: someone who taught the Gospel and lived it himself, giving assistance to the poor and taking trouble to visit all his parishioners, however remote their dwellings. This priest, says Chaucer, was ‘a shepherd, not a mercenary’, which suggests that there may have been all too many priests who were in it for the money!
Under the parish system, every place was in a parish. Even the wilder and less hospitable places – like the Ashdown Forest – were in a parish, and a parish priest’s responsibility. But Christ Church, Fairwarp’s history began only in the late C19th. In 1873, a new priest, The Revd J B M Butler (1839-1897) - a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge - was appointed
Rector (parish priest) of Maresfield, and at that time the parish boundary extended all the way to Hartfield, including a swathe of the Forest.
Arriving at Maresfield, Mr Butler found a church (dating back to the Norman era) in need of restoration, and gathered a group of worthies – well-to-do folk from the big houses – who would support him in this work. At the same time, he became aware of the desperate poverty of one of the outlying areas of his parish – Fairwarp – where many people were itinerant and without proper homes. To Butler and his associates, the Forest was a place of ‘spiritual destitution’ as well as physical poverty.
The same view was expressed by Coventry Patmore, a popular Victorian poet, who bought and named the Heron’s Ghyll estate, which included Oldlands Farm.
Patmore wrote later that:
Christianity did not appear ever to have been promulgated among the ‘foresters’ (‘How I managed and improved my Estate’, 1886). So the Forest was seen by new-coming members of the higher classes as a place that needed Christian faith and civilisation generally.
Mr Butler – who was Rector of Maresfield for 25 years until his death in 1897 - wasn’t only well-educated; he was also well-heeled, with a prosperous father who was a successful businessman and MP. His main local allies and financial backers were Alexander Nesbitt (1817 – 1886), who had Oldlands Hall built in 1867; Elphinstone Barchard (1827 - 1893) of Horsted Place, who also happened to be a Trinity College graduate; and Louisa, Lady Shelley (widow of Sir John Villiers Shelley, Bart (1808 – 1867) of Maresfield Park.
In the light of the ‘destitution’ of the Forest people, Mr Butler’s strategy was first to provide them with education, in the form of a school for infants (up to the age of eight).
He persuaded the De La Warr family of Buckhurst Park, who then owned the Forest, to donate land alongside the road across the Forest, on which a ‘National School’, funded by the Church of England National Society was built in 1873 (It’s now ‘The Old School House, next to Christ Church). Butler’s approach was very similar to that of Anglican missionaries at the time in East Africa: they first built schools, and then taught the Christian faith. Education and Christianity went together.
Soon, Mr Butler began holding Sunday services in the schoolroom, only to find that they were so popular that numbers outgrew the space available. The decision was taken to build a church, next to the school, so that services could accommodate more people, up to 150 or so; this would be a ‘chapel of ease’, a church built to enable far-flung Maresfield parishioners to attend church without having to walk the two or so miles to St Bartholomew’s. The architect who’d designed the school, M R Hawkins (1821-1884), was persuaded to undertake the church design pro bono; the De La Warr family donated a further plot of land; and the total cost of around £2,000 was raised, largely from the backers mentioned earlier – and for good measure, Mr Butler himself contributed £100 of the total.
In 1881, Christ Church was consecrated by the Bishop of Chichester and opened for services. It had been an extraordinary eight years for Mr Butler: he had undertaken the restoration of St Bartholomew’s (though the standard guide to church buildings, Pevsner’s ‘The Buildings of England’, says dismissively that the church is ‘over-restored’!). He had built the Maresfield schools as well; and he had built the ‘Forest school and the Forest church’ for outlying Fairwarp. We owe the existence of Christ Church to this one man’s vision, energy and determination.
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