Saxons And Knuckers

Lyminster is a little village north of Littlehampton and south of Arundel. It used to be an important place in Saxon times, a place where the king would stop on his rounds and hold court and dispense justice. There was a nunnery there. I expect the king- as was customary- installed one of his sisters as the mother superior.

St Mary Magdalene, Lyminster was originally the nunnery chapel. You can tell the building is Anglo Saxon because the chancel arch is so narrow. The Saxons liked their arches narrow and the Normans liked them wide. According to the sacristan- who took time out to tell me most of the information in this paragraph and the one above- Lyminster has the tallest Saxon arch in Sussex.

The site of the convent buildings is now occupied by a working farmyard. I like it when churches sit next to farmyards.

I fell in love with Lyminster, partly because of the Sacristan, partly because of the chancel arch, partly because of its situation and partly because of the legend of the knucker.

Knuckers are Sussex water dragons and they live in knucker holes. The Lyminster knucker had its hole close by the church. The hole is still there, so effectively fenced off you can barely catch a glimmer of it behind the barbed wire and the trees. Knucker holes are supposedly bottomless, but when myth-busting divers explored it a few years back they found the Lyminster hole bottomed out at around 30 feet. The knucker has gone- of course- slain by a dragon slayer a thousand years ago- and the present owners use its hole to breed trout. There are various versions of the knucker-slaying story, the most colourful of which has a local lad called Jim Pulk or Puttock poisoning the beast with a monstrous pie- after which he inadvertently did himself in by wiping his lips with hands poisoned from handling the pie whilst celebrating his victory at the Six Bells. There's old tombstone in the church which is said to have once marked the knucker-slayer's grave- and next to it a modern screen with stained glass infill which illustrates the legend. The screen was dedicated in 1998 and is the work of Caroline Benyon. I think it's fabulous.



Knuckers live in pools but they also have wings- so they're creatures of water and air- as opposed to the common or garden dragon which is a creature of fire and air. The word knucker is Anglo-Saxon and turns up in Beowulf. Odd county, Sussex. Odd, singular, askew, not perfectly aligned with the rest of the UK. Or, as Kipling put it,

The heathen kingdom Wilfred found (Wilfred being the saint who converted Sussex to the new religion)
Dreams, as she dwells, apart....

Lyminster Again

The guy who's taking my mother's funeral was once rector of Dunsfold and Hascombe in Surrey- and boasts that he was thereby in charge of one five hundredth of the best churches in England. The reference is to Simon Jenkins' England's Thousand Best Churches- (the church crawler's Bible)- in which both Dunsfold and Hascombe make the cut.

I refer to Jenkins all the time- and I've never known him recommend a dud (Dunsfold desrves its place for overall prettiness and Hascombe for being bonkers in the way only the Victorians could manage) but I've sometimes visited an unlisted church and thought, "How could he have overlooked this?" St Mary Magdalene, Lyminster is a case in point. If it were up to me it would get at least one star for its Saxon arch, its Knucker screen and its connection to a rattling good yarn.

Here's the arch.



It's often said that the invention of the pointed arch allowed builders to go high, but not having the pointed arch didn't stop the Saxons and Normans from soaring, now did it?