Sompting is a village and civil parish in the coastal Adur District of West Sussex, England between Lancing and Worthing. It is half grassland slopes and half developed plain at the foot of the South Downs National Park. Twentieth-century estates dovetail into those of slightly larger Lancing. Etymology The village's name comes from the Old English *sumpt + -ingas, meaning "(settlement of) the dwellers at the marsh". Its earliest recorded form is Suntinga, in a document of 956, but Domesday Book (1086) renders the name as Sultinges, its Norman-speaking clerks being unfamiliar with the consonant-cluster -mpt. As the toponymist Adrian Room noted, there is no obviously marshy land there nowadays, but it is low-lying and near the sea. Landmarks and major buildings The Church of St Mary the Blessed Virgin is a Grade I-listed Anglo-Saxon and Norman church, separated from the centre of the village since 1939 by the busy A27 road. Its tower is topped with a "Rhenish helm"—a four-sided gabled pyramidal cap which is unique in England. The church was originally built by the Saxons c.960 AD, then was adapted by the Normans when William de Braose, 1st Lord of Bramber granted it to the Knights Templar in the 12th century. The church later passed to the Knights Hospitaller in the 15th century. The Sompting Abbotts building, designed by Philip Charles Hardwick and completed in 1856, is a preparatory school. However this has been the site of one of Sompting's manor houses since Norman times, when it was owned by the abbot of Fécamp in Normandy, and later owned by the abbot of Syon Abbey in Middlesex. In 1248 the abbot of Fécamp had a prison in the village. Queen Caroline, consort of King George IV stayed at Sompting Abbotts in 1814 on her way across the English Channel to the Continent. The old Sompting Rectory building, now used as a nursing home, dates from 1791, however the Rectory has a long history, having previously been owned by the Knights Templar from 1154 and like Sompting Church, passed to the Knights Hospitaller in the 15th century. During the First World War a prisoner-of-war camp was built on the Rectory Farm estate, on the west side of Busticle Lane. Sompting's Parish Hall was originally built as a reading room in 1889 by HP Crofts of Sompting Abbotts manor: his Crofts/Tristram family have owned farmland and built property in the