Holy Trinity Church is a

Grade I listed In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern I ...

Anglican Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of t ...

church, a parish church in

Bosham Bosham is a coastal village and civil parish in the Chichester District of West Sussex, England, centred about west of Chichester with its clustered developed part west of this. Its land forms a broad peninsula projecting into natural Chiche ...

West Sussex West Sussex is a county in South East England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the shire districts of Adur, Arun, Chichester, Horsham, and Mid Sussex, and the boroughs of Crawley and Worthing. Covering an ...

. There was a church on this site in Saxon times, and the oldest parts of the building date from that time.

History

Background

Bede Bede ( ; ang, Bǣda , ; 672/326 May 735), also known as Saint Bede, The Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable ( la, Beda Venerabilis), was an English monk at the monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul in the Kingdom ...

wrote that Bishop

Wilfrid Wilfrid ( – 709 or 710) was an English bishop and saint. Born a Northumbrian noble, he entered religious life as a teenager and studied at Lindisfarne, at Canterbury, in Francia, and at Rome; he returned to Northumbria in about 660, and ...

, visiting Bosham in 681, found a small monastery with five or six brethren led by Dicul, an Irish monk. The building may have been on or near the site of the present church.Church History
boshamchurch.org.uk. Retrieved 25 July 2018.Holy Trinity, Bosham, Sussex
The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland. Retrieved 25 July 2018. Before the Norman Conquest, Bosham Church and its estate were given by King

Edward the Confessor Edward the Confessor ; la, Eduardus Confessor , ; ( 1003 – 5 January 1066) was one of the last Anglo-Saxon English kings. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 to 1066. Edward was the son of Æt ...

to his Norman chaplain Osbern FitzOsbern. Osbern retained these after the Conquest; he became

Bishop of Exeter The Bishop of Exeter is the ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Exeter in the Province of Canterbury. Since 30 April 2014 the ordinary has been Robert Atwell.

in 1072 and attached these holdings to the bishopric. Succeeding Bishops of Exeter continued to hold the church and estate of Bosham until the Dissolution of the Monasteries."Bosham"
''A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 4, the Rape of Chichester'', ed. L F Salzman (London, 1953), pp. 182–188. British History Online. Retrieved 25 July 2018.

The building

The font at Bosham parish church - geograph

Roman remains have been found in Bosham, and it is thought the church may be on the site of a Roman

basilica In Ancient Roman architecture, a basilica is a large public building with multiple functions, typically built alongside the town's forum. The basilica was in the Latin West equivalent to a stoa in the Greek East. The building gave its nam ...

. The church is built of rubble with

ashlar Ashlar () is finely dressed (cut, worked) stone, either an individual stone that has been worked until squared, or a structure built from such stones. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, generally rectangular cuboid, mentioned by Vitruv ...

dressing; it has a tiled roof and a shingled spire. The lower part of the tower of the church, the chancel arch, and the tower arch, are Saxon. The

chancel In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar, including the choir and the sanctuary (sometimes called the presbytery), at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building. It may terminate in an apse. ...

was extended to the east in the 12th century, and again in the 13th century when a

sacristy A sacristy, also known as a vestry or preparation room, is a room in Christian churches for the keeping of vestments (such as the alb and chasuble) and other church furnishings, sacred vessels, and parish records. The sacristy is usually locate ...

was added on the north side; about this time aisles were added to the nave. The top storey of the tower is of the 15th century. The font is of the late 12th century; it is an octagonal block with two shallow arches carved on each side, supported by a thick central shaft and four slender shafts. The south porch is of the 16th or 17th century.

King Canute's daughter

There is a tradition that a daughter of

King Canute Cnut (; ang, Cnut cyning; non, Knútr inn ríki ; or , no, Knut den mektige, sv, Knut den Store. died 12 November 1035), also known as Cnut the Great and Canute, was King of England from 1016, King of Denmark from 1018, and King of Norw ...

drowned in a nearby millstream and was buried in the church. A small stone coffin was found near the chancel arch in 1865, but it is not known if there is any connection.

King Harold

Bosham was the principal home of

Harold Godwinson Harold Godwinson ( – 14 October 1066), also called Harold II, was the last crowned Anglo-Saxon English king. Harold reigned from 6 January 1066 until his death at the Battle of Hastings, fighting the Norman invaders led by William the ...

, King of England in 1066; the Bayeux Tapestry shows him and his retinue riding to Bosham before sailing to Normandy to meet William, Duke of Normandy. In 1954, workmen replacing stones under the chancel arch rediscovered the coffin thought to be of King Canute's daughter, and also found a coffin containing a headless and legless skeleton; the coffin was resealed after examination of the remains by a coroner.King's grave mystery may be unearthed
BBC News, 24 November 2003. Retrieved 25 July 2018. In 2003, amateur historians sought permission from the

consistory court A consistory court is a type of ecclesiastical court, especially within the Church of England where they were originally established pursuant to a charter of King William the Conqueror, and still exist today, although since about the middle of the ...

of the Diocese of Chichester to exhume the remains, in order to confirm if they were those of King Harold. DNA was to be compared with DNA of three people claiming to be his descendants.Exhumation of "Harold" refused
BBC News, 10 December 2003. Retrieved 25 July 2018. Permission was refused. It was stated that exhumation should only be carried out on "special and exceptional grounds" or for a "good reason"; the court heard that the three supposed descendants each had different DNA.

References

External links

Holy Trinity Church Bosham
Choral Evensong {{DEFAULTSORT:Bosham, Holy Trinity Church Grade I listed churches in West Sussex Church of England church buildings in West Sussex English churches with Norman architecture Churches with elements of Anglo-Saxon work