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Who We Were
The church of Southover originated as a 'hospitium' or guest house to serve the nearby
Priory of Saint Pancras.
By about 1330 AD a new guest house had been built, perhaps because the original had by
then become too small. So, the first guest house was then available for the growing lay
parish that had been growing up outside the great gates of the Priory, in the new 'suburb'
of Lewes, south over the Winterbourne stream which separates Southover from Lewes.When William de Warenne founded the Priory of Saint Pancras in 1077 AD, he gave the monks a little chapel, once made of timber but which he had re-built in stone, to serve as a nucleus for the Priory to be. This old chapel had been dedicated to Saint Pancras 'of old', since it had been in existence for long before the Norman Conquest. By 1121 AD there is on record a 'Chapel of St John the Baptist within the Priory Cemetery'. In about 1260 AD there is the first evidence of the move of the Chapel from inside the Priory to its present position outside the gate, and within fourteen more years the 'parish' is referred to as such for the first time. 
By 1320 AD the Chapel had become a Church, and by 1374 it is precisely described as
'the Parish Church of St John, near the gate of Lewes Priory'.
Thus, from at least the twelfth century a Chapel of St John the Baptist, although then inside
the gate of the Priory, seems to have served the needs of the lay population of Southover.
When it emerged outside the gate in the thirteenth century, to take over the building
of the vacated first guest house, it was then set on the development which led to the
fully fledged parish church of today.The right of presentation to the living of the church was given by the then Bishop of Chichester to the Prior and Chapter of the Priory, and there it remained until the dissolution of the Priory in 1537, part of the greater dissolution of the Monasteries under King Henry VIII. Then, along with all the other possessions of the Priory, it was given with the Manor of Southover to Thomas Cromwell. When Cromwell was sentenced to death, although the Manor of Southover and most of the rest of the Priory lands were given to Henry VIII's divorced wife Anne of Cleves, the right of presentation (the 'advowson') remained with the Crown. Later the Lord Chancellor presented, and then the right passed into lay hands. In the 19th Century the right was bought by a Rector, and from him it passed to the present holders, the Church Pastoral Aid Society. 
Thus for over 850 years, the Church of St John the Baptist, Southover, Lewes has served the needs of its members,
its parishioners, and of an increasingly widening body of worshippers, who now with the easier
availability of transport come from a much greater area than the limits of the original parish.
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