Mattingley Church

Mattingley Church is a Grade-I listed timber framed church. The building of the present church was probably started towards the end of the 15th Century.

The walls are of vertical timbers with brick nogging (where the gaps between the timbers are filled in with brickwork) in herring-bone fashion and plastered on the inside.

Mattingley Church has always been associated with Heckfield, apart from the years 1863 to 1949 when it was a completely separate Parish with its own Vicar. Rotherwick joined Heckfield and Mattingley in 1974.

The first church or chapel on the present site was probably built towards the end of the l4th century. In 1425 Pope Martin granted a licence for a cemetery at the Chapel because the inhabitants found it inconvenient to carry their dead to Heckfield; the land between the two places being frequently flooded.

The building of the present church was probably started towards the end of the 15th Century; the bricks which are made as parallelograms and not oblongs seem to have been designed specifically for herringbone work and may well have been "burnt" on Hazeley Heath. Up to 1837 the whole building was the same width as the present chancel but in 1837 the Nave was widened and the porch in its present form added.

The Church has no patron saint - possibly because the original building on the site was, to start with, a moot hall - that is, a place where meetings were held. On the other hand it may have been because it was, in the early days, a "chapel of ease" to the Parish Church of St. Michael and All Angels, Heckfield.

Cit. hugofox.com/community/mattingley-parish-council-10113/parish-church