The Peoples Church of Lewes

Sir Henry Goring first built a large back addition to the medieval Bull Inn in 1583 as a town house, hard against Lewes’s West Gate. In the Foyer hangs his Coat of Arms high up on the wall. Also to be found in the Foyer a diagram that indicates how the area was laid out at the time. The building would have appeared much more prominent and imposing than it does now. A Picture hanging in the Vestry shows this too. Go round to Bull Lane and look at the old Elizabethan doorway and you can see where the kitchen staff used the stone doorway to hone their knives wearing away the stone in the process. You can see also outlines of the Tudor windows if you look at the flint work above. Less than one hundred years later the building had just become an extension of the Bull Inn rather than the house of the Goring family.

After the religious upheaval caused by the Act of Uniformity of 1662 the first members of our tradition of freedom of religious thought and practice were expelled from the Church of England and were called English Presbyterians

Goring Coat of Arms

NOTE (Some 2000 clergy of the Church of England and their congregations left when it became law to only conduct services strictly according to the Book of Common Prayer. They were also required to accept the rule of Bishops and Kings who were not using the Bible as their basis for faith as they perceived it. A tradition of inherited power being the right of some to govern over others like the monarch or Lord of the manor became and still is the Authority of the Church of England and the Catholic Churches. English Presbyterians believed in a more democratic process of courts or committees made up of clergy and members of the churches within a district to govern the local churches. This was all on the basis that authority was to be found in the Bible and it was argued this was a more biblical pattern of governing, rather than Bishops, Archbishops, Kings or Popes having the final say. Independents were very similar except that they did not see the need for their churches to be governed from outside at all, so an Independent church was exactly that, it based its authority on its interpretation of the Bible alone).

English Presbyterians hoped for a return to the Church of England that at the time was strictly governed, but they could not in all honesty agree to the articles of Faith that became the basis of the State Church. They would meet secretly until the Declaration of Indulgence of 1687 finally allowed non-conformists to worship legally. Many non-conformist congregations met in the back rooms of public houses before this. Prior to conversion it is likely that the Bull Inn’s back areas were used by what became Westgate Chapel’s congregation later on. These were local nominally democratic congregations with Ministers supported directly by them; often the Ministers had been Church of England Clergy. In the Chapel is a Memorial Tablet to Edward Newton (Rector of St Anne’s, Lewes) and Walter Postlethwaite (Rector of St Michaels, Lewes), who became the Ministers of these early meetings. The members were from all backgrounds but mainly the better-educated members of society. For a while the English Presbyterians still hoped to return to their place in the Churches they had been forced to leave by the Act of Uniformity. When this did not happen they started to look for a permanent meeting place.

St Annes