Earlier History

By using the earliest written records that have survived and by comparing what they tell us with the local landscape, we can see where the good farm land was, and what areas were not farmed until later in history. This research shows that most of our farms were already in existence by the late- Saxon period. Even now, when our modern landscape is covered with streets and houses, we can look at old maps and work out fairly easily where the earlier farms were. They in fact lay along the two river valleys on the south and the north sides of the town centre, giving rise, on the south and west, to Burgess Hill farm, Grovelands, Tibbalds (the farm that preceded the Victoria Pleasure Gardens) and Bedells (now Southway School) and on the north, Lowlands Farm, Bridge Hall and numerous small farms which later became part of West End farm. These farms along the streams would have been  in existence by 1086 when William the Conqueror’s ‘Domesday Book’ was complete. It was an assessment of all his rent and tax incomes, manor by manor, throughout England – as far north as the Humber. Individual farm rents contributed to the values given for each manor but in general, Domesday Book did not mention the farms themselves by name.

The oldest part of West End Farm had 90 acres running north and west of the farmhouse, now ‘The Woolpack’, up to the River Adur and out to what is now the Triangle sports centre. It all belonged to the small manor of Wickham which the Domesday Book describes in 1086 as having a lord, Alwin, who had his own lands [at Stonepound and Friars Oak in Hassocks] and some other land  shared by 3 farming tenants. Deeds and documents from the 1200s onwards show us that this Saxon ‘ploughland’ was the above 90 acres at West End Farm. Alwin, an English man held his small manor before 1066 and he was still its lord after the Norman conquest. That was extremely unusual in this part of Sussex.

The land at the heart of our town, being heavy clay and hard to plough, was not settled and was left as rough pasture. It found its main use much later when the brick and tile makers came along. But nothing was wasted in early days and even rough pasture was useful. It could fatten people’s cattle for free . And so, a system gradually evolved whereby the farmers living all around would share this intractable land as their ‘common’, meaning a resource shared fairly between, and governed by, the local people. It stretched from what is now Burgess Hill Station on the east, as far as the Woolpack public house on the west; from Hammonds Place in London Road on the south to the bottom of Fairplace Hill on the north; and from (the now closed) Barclays Bank it went north either side of Freeks Lane, past Lidl’s supermarket and on beyond ‘The Hawthorns’. The common ended where the community recycling Centre stands and the new housing, Abbeville Park (in 2023) is being built.

The photos below show this part of the old common in 2020, and the restored barn nearby at Lowlands (formerly Freeks) – a name derived from the local rough woodland  or Ferghthe as it was spelt when the land was first settled in the Anglo-Saxon period.

All the land on the east part of the town, east of Keymer Road and Junction Road, was in a different system of land settlement. It was all part of the great wood of Frekebergh which stretched north to what is now Worlds End. It was privately owned and actively managed by the lords of Keymer and Ditchling manors. The earliest farms they allowed (from around 1250 onwards) were on either side of Folders Lane and along the edge of Ditchling Common. The rest remained as woodland and coppice for much longer. A small farm lay at its northern end , its land reaching up as far as Janes Lane, which the lord of the manor kept in hand. It was mentioned in 1580 as having ‘a little house’ in it and its old well is still there in two front gardens in Stirling Court Road. This connection with the lord of the manor gave rise today to the local school name, ‘Manor Field’. Old hedgerow oaks, remnants of this once enormous wood of Frekebergh are still a strong feature within the St. Andrew’s Road housing estate. A small brick and tile business had grown up by the early 1700s on a site near the top of Cants Lane – at a slight remove from where the Keymer Brick and Tile Company was later developed.

The first photo below was taken at the gate of Cant’s Farm, where S. Andrew’s Church now stands. Junction Road was originally named Cants Lane referring to the blocks or “cants” of land set out along its east side as coppices. Each “cant” or section of a wood was cut back to ground level every 7 or 14 years, leaving the other ‘cants’ to grow on. Thus, the wood as a whole could produce new poles each year in succession, for making hurdles and wattles for farm and domestic use. The cut ‘stools’ (the bases of the trunks) grew back as several new rods, which let light in as they grew. It was a system which kept the wood alive in rotations of growth that was benign to plants, butterflies and birds. Modern Cant’s Lane and this farm have helped preserve the memory of an ancient rural practice.

Returning to St. John’s Common, it was crossed by two important (late Saxon or earlier) through ‘roads’ (then unsurfaced tracks), one from Ditchling, the other from Brighton. They converged at the top of Fairplace Hill, heading for the River Adur at the bottom of the hill where there was a ford for ‘heavy horses’. Today there are two mini roundabouts and a bridge. Because the usual means of carrying goods in those days was by heavy horses, called ‘stots’, with packs and panniers, or sometimes pulling carts or log trailers, the common came to be known as ‘ the Common of Stottesford’. A smithy lay at the top of the hill just downhill from the King’s Head, at where the two roads the two roads joined. Smede’s was positioned between the two at their junction and is likely to have bee

Smede’s seems to have been in use very early on, as its name is an oln in business before 1066 as its name is an old English word for  a ‘smith’ .

The south part of Smedes is marked by the low white building just north of the and King’s Head and next is the house called Smedes which developed on the site. The two roads continued on their separate paths after crossing the river, as they do today.

The community of the Common grew in number during the 13th century as more land was taken in and as a result it was given its own small chapel, dedicated to St. John the Baptist. It lay halfway down Fairplace Hill on the east side, The 24th June was the feast of St. John’s nativity, the date of the great annual sheep fair that was held at the top of Fairplace Hill. We know these fairs were held as early as 1342 and that the chapel played a role in processions and services on Fair days. However, at Henry VIIIth’s Reformation, our little chapel was quashed and converted to a private house, and it remains as such to this day.  Elsewhere, wealden chapels sometimes managed to develop into proper parish churches. This was the case at Wivelsfield, though not without a struggle on their part against the mother Church of Ditchling.  After this, the local people, who presumably were very upset at the loss of their chapel, began to refer to the local common as ‘the Common of St. John’s’, and it is this name which has endured locally as the other older name gradually faded away. The quashing of our chapel in 1545 meant that we had lost our earlier chance to be recognized as an independent parish and had to wait until 1863.

The first image shows the grounds and a part view of the former St. John’s Chapel, looking east from Fairplace Hill in the 1980s, before the intervening houses were built. The second shows  the cottages which front onto the road today, built on the land of the caretaker of the Chapel. The chapel itself was suppressed by King Henry VIIIth’s Reformation in 1545 and converted to a house, which still stands today, as ‘Chapel Farm’.

To find out more about settlement in Burgess Hill before 1350 go to: The origins of settlement and farming, and for the names ‘Burgess Hill’, Fairplace, St. John’s and other local names go to: Our town’s name.

The community of St. John’s Common after 1350

The Black Death had raged during the1340s, causing a marked crash in population by 1350 in rural as well as urban areas. The farm land for which there was no living tenant was generally thrown in with that of a neighbouring farmer, if the local lord permitted it. This meant that with more acres to till several local farmers began to prosper. This process continued throughout the 1400s and those who held land gradually became ‘pillars of the community’, helping to run things. Unfortunately there are few local records surviving for this period so it is not really until the 1500s and the 1600s that we begin to get a window into some of the ways they led their life.

Though deeply rural, the people living in what is now Burgess Hill were strongly connected to each other as tenants of their particular manor and as members of their parish church. It was compulsory to attend and participate in one’s manor court meetings and one’s church services which, before King Henry VIIIth’s Reformation of the Monasteries, would have been the Roman Catholic mass. Apart from perhaps a few services in our St. John’s Chapel when a priest could visit, these activities took place in the villages of Clayton or Keymer, a long trudge from St. John’s Common. But Sundays after mass was the time for the community to mingle, business transactions to be sealed, games to be played in the church yard and ‘cakes and ale’ consumed at a local inn.

The images below show:

Clayton Church  – taken from the outside – The earliest mother church for our area’ dating from the late-Saxon period.

Keymer Manor  House – an aisled hall house in Keymer village, (opposite the shops) which was later demoted. By around 1600 the courts were no longer held there and it was converted into an ordinary village house.

Ham Farmhouse –  just west of Stonepound crossroads and its ‘butting hill’ which was the actual open-air early meeting place.

At the manor courts they might register a death and name an heir, sue a neighbour for debt, report wrong behaviour such as cutting down a timber tree, regulate how the commons could be used, and so on. Here, and in the local ‘King’s courts’, called ‘Hundred’ courts, they were allowed to elect, from among themselves, the panel which dealt with the actual business of the day. Along with Hurstpierpoint and Cuckfield and other villages around, Burgess Hill was in the Hundred of Buttinghill, so named from a mound just north of Ham Farmhouse at Hassocks. The business covered such things as upkeep of roads and bridges and the regulation of weights and measures. This may resonate with aspects of modern local government, but it seems that human need and human nature hasn’t actually changed much over the centuries.

From the 17^th century on, these meetings and the manor courts were generally held in local inns and the fore-runner of our ‘King’s Head’ would have played its part.  During the 18th century however, a new lord of Keymer manor lived at Brooklands, the large farmhouse which can be seen from Valebridge Common field in Bedelands Nature Reserve. See images below.

An industrial edge came to Burgess Hill as early as 1550, with the start of the local brick and tile trade. Tensions were raised by an influx of brickmakers and their workers, digging holes in the common, leaving it pitted and dangerous, and building themselves new cottages to live in. The local farmers who wanted to keep the common solely for the traditional pasturing of cattle, sought remedies at the manor courts, which has at least brought their stories to light.

This delightful survivor known as Farthings, is still standing in Keymer Road. It was built in 1604 for an incoming labourer in one of our brick yards, probably the one where American Express now stands. A great ‘rumpus’ was recorded in the manor courts by the established commoners who tried but failed to stop him setting up house here.  In the end they, rather grudgingly, agreed he could keep his little house and stay.

By around 1750 , however, things had settled down: the products of the new industry were useful and the commoners wanted to use them to improve their houses. Gradually St. John’s Common became a vibrant, cohesive society in which brickmakers and farmers rubbed along together and intermarried.

The first brick and tile entrepreneurs of Burgess Hill were financiers rather than producers, members of the rising local gentry. It is the Wood family (alternatively A-wod, or At-wood ) of Hammonds Place and others of their class who had bought up local plots of land from which clay could be dug without getting into arguments with the commoners. They put up the money for the building of kilns and other necessities of the trade. In what is now Burgess Hill Town Centre brick and tile production went on continuously from at least 1575 until the 1950s. In 1744 when producer Thomas Marten died (at what was later known as the Meeds Potteries) he was the 7th generation of a continuous line of brick and tilemaker ancestors who had worked our Town Centre clays since 1615. On the north side of town (off the north-west corner of Fairfield Road) Dunstall’s yard had been in continuous production since around 1650.

The images below show:

Hammonds Place –  ‘new’ brick frontage and porch – erected, using local bricks in the 1550s. The early owners of Hammonds, the Wood and the Michelborne families were brick and tile entrepreneurs from around 1520 to 1675

Grove Farm House – off Station Road is a lone survivor in the Town Centre of an early brickmaker’s house. It has the three great home improvements of the early brick and tile trade, brick infill, tiled roofing and chimney stack.

Dunstall’s Farm – a brick and tile site from 1650 to around 1850.

The 19th-century expansion of the industry that occurred after St. John’s Common was enclosed, rested on an existing 300-year legacy from the early pioneers in the same place. Their contribution to the history of our town now needs to be acknowledged.

Rising numbers of poorer labouring families began to live in the Weald of Sussex as the the brick and tile and iron industries proliferated throughout the area. The larger, amalgamated farms also needed labour. The situation got worse after King Henry VIIIth’s Reformation of the Monasteries in 1536. The poor lost the medical help, food and shelter they could formerly find at an abbey door. To help address these problems, parishes were given strong new powers of civil authority and could raise rates to resolve problems such as ‘vagrancy’ – poor people wandering the countryside in search of work. One solution was to provide small cottages in which a number of them could live and work. By and large, however, those who lived in pretty villages preferred to site them somewhere well away from the village street. Thus it was that St. John’s and Valebridge Commons hosted no less than seven ‘poor houses ‘– four in Keymer parish and 3 in Clayton, all built between around 1650 and 1820. One of them, sited near West End Farm (the Woolpack public house), in the late 1700s was actually provided for Hurstpierpoint parish, which had no commons left of their own!

The images below show:

“The Barracks” – cottages given as a Clayton Parish poorhouse, known as ‘the Barracks’ (formerly just north of Royal George Road, near the Gattons) provided as a poorhouse in the early 1800s.

Worlds End Houses –  A remarkable continuity: Marne Court in Worlds End (the house on the far right of the image, which backs on to the Rec), has recently been built in a continuum of social housing provision on the same spot as a Keymer parish cottage for the poor was built there in 1655. The image shows part of the post-World War I council houses ‘Marne Terrace’ by the entry to the Rec.

Manor Court – built for the elderly in the 1970s, now superseded by Marne Court.

Social unrest grew in the 1790s in the wake of the French Revolution. As fear of a copycat action grew among the English ruling classes, they took measures to prevent it. At the hill of Burgess Hill, at an inn called the Blue Anchor, probably a forerunner of the Top House, all the landholders of Keymer parish were brought together to sign an oath of allegiance to the Crown. Attendees were also encouraged to snoop against and report on any who might have ‘dissident’ views. Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man, had recently lived nearby in Lewes, and his ‘revolutionary’ ideas were circulating locally, in which the ‘dangerous’ notion of a free democracy and universal suffrage were major themes.

There is no record of a Clayton meeting but one may have been held. About two thirds of our local landholders seem to have attended. Half were illiterate and signed with a mark.
Thomas Paine had recently left Lewes and gone to America as a champion of the new democracy. Many ordinary families followed him from the surrounds of Burgess Hill, attracted not only to living in a democracy, but, more urgently, to the ability to feed, clothe and shelter their families on a labouring wage.

Illustrated is the middle page from the list of signatories. A total of 66 people signed, mostly at the meeting plus a few who were chased up later. Around ten names overall are recognisable as the larger landholders.  34 further residents signed their own names, some in a confident style, others in a rather laboured hand. In general these people will have been the smaller farmers and the more-prosperous craftsmen. There were 24 who simply made a cross as their ‘mark’.  This was still a very common practice at that time as the working classes in general, whether in rural or urban employment, were not given the opportunity to learn to read or write.

Each full name was written underneath their cross by the clerk of the meeting. It was important that everyone who had signed could be identified. It is no surprise to see that the many of the names we can recognize as ‘Burgess Hill’ surnames in later decades were signing with a mark.  St. John’s Common was the only part of the parish which had any industry and it employed a greater number of labourers.

The confident signature of William Taylor, the owner-manager of the brick, tile and pottery works which later became ‘Meeds’ in Station Road, is 5^th down. Thomas Packham (signing after Taylor) was perhaps farming the enclosed land (in the modern town centre) in which Packham’s Mill later stood. The Wickens family had been small farmers in the Grove Farm area since the 1600s and the Vincents (Hugh Vincent signs with a mark) were at Bedelands Farm from the 1600s. The Fords (signature John Ford) had previously run a shop on Fairplace Hill (selling everything a cottage family might possibly need), while John Gard (large confident signature) had a house on Fairplace Hill. The Marten, Jenner and Brooker families had been involved with brick and tile in the town centre area since around 1615, while the Normans and the Marchants (marks of James Norman and William Marchant) succeeded them in the early-mid 18^th century. These names tell us that, despite transforming a few decades later from a rural common to an urban area, we kept many of our indigenous population.

All the poor houses on St. John’s Common were sold off after 1836 when the Poor Laws were changed and the new Union Workhouses of ‘Dickensian’ austerity took in the poor and destitute from many parishes together. Our local one was at Cuckfield and there are many of our local population today will have first seen the light of day there. By the middle of the 20^th century the upper floors of the old workhouse had become maternity wards of Cuckfield Hospital, which served our area until the Princess Royal Hospital was built.

From 1828 onwards Burgess Hill began to be transformed into an area of high employment and opportunity for working people as St John’s Common was done away with and the new town of Burgess Hill began to grow and to look to a new, different future.

To find out about:

The early brick and tile making at Burgess Hill from 1550 onwards go to: Cottagers, brickmakers and the old locals.

How Burgess Hill folk played a role in the community go to: Obligations to the Community.

Rural poverty in the Burgess Hill area go to: The problem of the poor.

How Burgess Hillians related to religion over the ages go to: Chapel and Church.

Our old rural way of life came to a gradual end as St. John’s Common was extinguished and built upon. To read about how this happened and the town of Burgess Hill began go to, Birth of the Town.