Origins of settlement and Farming

Burgess Hill was not a defined area of self-government, such as a parish or a manor, until 1863 when the parish of St. John the Evangelist was formed and when, in 1894, it became an Urban District Council within the county of East Sussex. When the town began to develop as an urban area in the earlier 19th century it still fell under the administration of its old manors and the mother parish of Clayton-cum-Keymer. The manors governing it were Keymer, Clayton and Wickham which originated as ‘manors’ in the late-Saxon period and which are all mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. Wickham was a small manor based near Stonepound in Hassocks but it also held land in the area of the Woolpack public house in Burgess Hill.

In the Roman period, approximately 70-350AD, Wickham was at the focal point of a ‘small Roman town in which both Roman officials and local British people lived and worked alongside each other. It lay where the ‘Greensand Way’, the east –west Roman Road, was crossed by the south to north  Southwick/Brighton Roman Road heading for London’ This passes through what is now the town centre of Burgess Hill. Recent archaeology has revealed some Roman and Iron Age land use – minor settlement and rural industry etc. – along the line of the Burgess Hill by-pass and the A23 link road; and further north where Rocky Lane joins the Hayward Heath by-pass. Recent housing development has proved an Iron Age settlement at Theobalds in Theobalds Road on the NE edge of our town. It is entirely possible that some of the early farms of Burgess Hill may have their roots in this period.

By looking at all relevant early records of local land holding, which survive sparsely from the 13th to the 16^th centuries, then fully from 1600 on, and by analysing the terms of tenure to which people were bound and the type of rents they paid, it is possible to distinguish which farms paid rents which reflected a pre-Norman type of land use. They belonged to an Anglo-Saxon, co-operative farming system.  By contrast, when we look at early- medieval colonisation of new land, from around 1100 -1350AD, which was fairly rampant in the Burgess Hill area, (below) we can detect the newer tenancies which were created after the Norman Conquest. They were detached from the old co-operative ways of farming. The new colonisers simply paid a fixed rent and they neither contributed to common agriculture nor, in return did they receive any land rights outside their perimeter fences. They did not possess automatically rights of common, meaning they could not graze their animals on the commons nor could they legally gather the produce of the commons.

Our area grew good oats and was rich in trees of all sorts, timber and coppice-wood, and this provided  wood-craft jobs for a local population.  The manors were set out in long north-bound territories, each stretching miles into the Weald. This is because in our part of the Weald of Sussex the different soil types run east to west in narrow bands, so each manor can get a slice of each type. The southern sections of our local manors ended at Ashenground Road in Haywards Heath, and at Chownes Mead in Cuckfield. After a gap, the farming tenancies of the same manors continued through Balcombe and, excluding the Forest of Worth itself, went on through the Three Bridges area right up to the county boundary with Surrey.  The ‘good reason’ for this was that it ensured a balanced economy throughout the manor. Wherever you lived, you could produce a crop – be it wheat, oats, hay or coppice wood, which your fellow tenants elsewhere in the manor might need.  Within the rules of the manor all tenants were allowed to barter and exchange surplus produce freely with their fellows in another part of the manor. But if one sold outside the manor, the lord took his cut in the form of a ‘fine’.

In the Burgess Hill area we find a strong correlation between the earlier, Saxon-type tenures and the farms occupying the better local soils. Along with similar tenants throughout the whole length of the manor, the fiscal details of these farms will have been collected by the agents of the new Norman king, William I, for his great land survey of his new English kingdom, known as the Domesday Book. Each contributing farm’s details will thus have played its part the overall assessment of their manor’s worth. If we take Keymer manor as an example, the 36 farming families (villani) and the 11 smallholders (bordarii) seem to have been spread thinly but evenly through the entire manor in each of its main areas. These were Hassocks (east of the London Road), Burgess Hill (east of the same), Haywards Heath (south of Ashenground Road), the west and south parts of Balcombe parish, and finally, the Worth Church area and north to the county boundary at Tinsley Green near Gatwick Airport. When eventually published in 1086 , this great enterprise was called the ‘Domesday’ survey because it would for ever stand as the definitive ‘doom’ or judgement, for settling land disputes.

To sum up on the Domesday survey, it is a government tax record not a gazetteer of places. Its compilers were only interested in ensuring that the new King got his due amount of tax based on land values and that his tax collectors knew where to turn up to demand it. That would have been the manor houses in the actual villages of Clayton or Keymer. But we can rest assured that all our earlier Burgess Hill farms enumerated below will have been counted and their rents contributed to the value registered under their particular manor.  The respective values) of our local manors in 1066 (before the battle of Hastings were: Clayton, £10, Keymer £14, Ditchling £80. The latter had been a royal manor and had very substantial up-Wealden holdings. Earl Warenne, the new Norman overlord, possessed all our local manors but, while Clayton, Keymer and Wickham were sub-let, he kept Ditchling in hand for himself, as a formerly important Royal manor. The ‘Saxon-type’ tenancies in Ditchling were in the village itself and further up-Weald, but not the east side of modern Burgess Hill, because that area was all part of the great wood called Frekebergh which belonged personally to the lords of the manor. The colonization of the wood started later, as we will see below.

It was the stream-side land that was generally settled first because people, animals and crops need drinking water. An equal factor was that, in a clay territory like Burgess Hill, the insignificant, small streams and rivers swell mightily in the winter rains. This is a good thing because they overflow their banks and deposit nutrients onto the adjacent meadows. This helped our locals, whose wheat crops were generally insignificant, and they benefited from a good, lush hay crop in early summer. When horses and oxen provided the only means of inland transport, hay was a vital crop, the fuel for driving the plough and the wagons. It was the reverse side of the coin for those living in the actual villages of Clayton, Keymer and Ditchling. They had plenty of good wheat but not so much hay. This provided scope for bartering and exchange between the two geographical areas.

The main streams which fed early settlement in Burgess Hill were the Pookbourne and the upper reaches of the eastern Adur, from its source at Wellhouse Farm. The former rises from the west -facing side of the hill at Burgess Hill, now part of the Oakhall estate, and flows west, giving birth to our earliest farms, Burgess Hill farm, Grovelands farm, Hammonds, Tibbalds (later called Peppers, then ‘Little Hammonds’ and eventually St. John’s Lodge), from which the Victoria Pleasure Gardens was developed.  The eastern Adur flows north from its source and east along St. Andrews Road into Wivelsfield before returning west to Fairplace Hill and West End Farm. Only a short distance from Wellhouse, but on the west-facing slope at Batchelors farm, a tiny stream flows south at first into Ockley – but eventually finds its way west north west to join the eastern Adur. Other small streams rise from the higher ground around Worlds End and together flow past Freeks/Lowlands Farm to join the Adur east of Fairplace bridge. And finally, Fairplace Hill itself gives birth to a little stream either side of the main road, each of which played its part in attracting early settlement. Together, as part of the main Adur flowing south from Bines Green in Ashurst, they all enter the sea at Shoreham.

Between the Adur and the combined Worlds End streams, west of Bedelands, lies a large farm held by the atte Ferghthe family, which is one of our earliest. Further east the Adur flows through the Valebridge Mill pond, across land dedicated as common and therefore not in agriculture. The name atte Ferghthe refers to the rough woodland that became Bedelands, but the implication in the name is that it was there before Bedelands was created. It later developed as two farms, Freeks and Lowlands.  Its east part has now been added to Bedelands Nature Reserve. Further west, Bridge Hall lay on the north side of the river at Fairplace Bridge, around which the Oak Barn public house and golf course have since been created. This is most likely to have been a pre-Domesday establishment. The river was a fishery belonging to the local overlords and it seems likely that the occupier of this house had a role in the management of this fishery.  (See Burgess Hill’s Name for more on Bridge Hall.)

The photos below show:

First – the settlement time span. The map below depicts in colour the centuries through which the Burgess Hill area gradually came into farming and other use, down to the 19^th century. Key, Green: late Saxon, before 1086. Blue: early medieval circa 1100-1350. Mauve: Turor land release circa 1550. Orange: cottages and industry circa 1550-1828. Yellow: open commons; St John’s and Valebridge extinguished, but Ditchling still open as a “country Park”. Base map: OS 1st ed, sheet 39, 6in to 1 mile, 1874-1879.

Second – Burgess Hill farm meadows.

Third – Hammonds Place: home of the A-Wod family before 1550 and afterwards by a branch of the Michelborne family.

NB – all official records in England used Latin text before 1733. However, local farm and place names and people’s surnames are always in English.

By comparing the spasmodic early records that survive with the later land ownership recorded in the manor court books, we can get a fairly clear idea of how the land had been settled.  The list of names near the top, the ‘Homage’ is the executive panel, drawn from the tenants who were in court that day.

The name at the bottom of the left-hand column is Stephen Jenner who was tenant of Sheddingdean Farm. Several others in the list were from Burgess Hill, which is unsurprising as all four transactions on that page relate to land holdings in Burgess Hill:  i) le Bedellande; ii) its adjacent Coupars (Coopers Close area); iii) a cottage called Lottmottes, in Keymer Road, later developed as Woodside, now Wigmore House;  iv) a cottage plot, now  (with a house) built on it, and a rood of land (¼ acre) on Studforde Common. [St. John’s Common].

Tenant John Poulter, who had had the plot since 1584, had died and he says that his only son Henry is his heir. A proclamation is ordered – to see if any other contenders come forward to claim it. Manorial land locally was held by ‘customary tenure’ and passed to the youngest son if no other arrangement had been agreed; or youngest daughter if there were no sons. The  precise location of the cottage is unclear, but it was probably part of the later Meeds brick and tile site.

There are a group of tenancies in the Keymer rentals which did possess rights of common and did have tenures with some liability to the common custom of their manor, but which at the same time seem to be a second wave of land colonisation in the later Anglo-Saxon period, on the not-quite-so-good-lands. They are Batchelor’s Farm (near the water tower), Franklands (off Greenlands Drive) and Fowles Farm. The latter is substantially on the clay but does have a seam of sand and a spring-fed pond, which perhaps encouraged settlement.  Also in this later-Saxon category was the 30-acre Lyelands (Leylands Farm) on the north side of Leylands Road . Its name means ‘the open land (land) in the wood clearing (legh). This holding and its counterpart uphill on the south side of Leylands Road, called ‘part of Lyelandes’ (20 acres) were described as ‘quarter virgates’ and they both had rights of common. The latter came to be known as ‘North Blackhouse’. Its old farmhouse, lying just north of Noel Green has miraculously survived the tide of redevelopment. Further west, Sheddingdean farm (its farm house less fortunate), is in the same group. It lay substantially on the north sloping clay north of Leylands Road, but its soil is tempered with iron nuggets. Fowles Farm which protruded into the west side of St. John’s Common is also one of the Anglo-Norman group of farms.

The photos below show:

First – Batchelor’s Farm in recent decades. It takes its name from members of the Bacheler family cited as Keymer tenants: Walter and Helewyse, 1344; Geoffrey, 1382 and John in 1421;

Second – North Blackhouse, formerly ‘part of Lyelands’, owned by the A Kent family in 1600;

Third – Fowles Farm was the home of William le Foghel in 1296 and 1327.

On the west side of town, Bedells (the land of the beadle of Clayton) later became Povey’s Farm on which Southway School now stands.  Bedelands Farm on the north east side of town, was the land of the beadle of Keymer manor. They are both of late-Saxon origin. Their tenancies were each held for life, requiring them to act as the beadle of their manor, announcing meetings, collecting rents and other duties arising from the business of the manorial courts.  As essential officers of the manor, the land to sustain them must have been granted out when the manors first started, which was in either the 10th or the early 11th-century when these two manors were formed out of what was once a much larger area belonging exclusively to Ditchling. The Clayton beadle’s land allocation was 16 acres, and the Keymer beadle probably had a similar acreage. Whoever accepted the tenancy of these plots was excused their rents. In exchange for their duties.

Several photos exist of the Keymer beadle’s former house (since demolished), standing high on the ridge just west of the railway foot crossing. This, however, was a secondary site for the Beadle. It stood on a ‘new’ cottage plot granted out of Frekebergh in 1468 century to a tenant called Wakelin. We know nothing about him other than that his new plot was called Wakelin’s Inholmes.  By 1600 the records tell us that Roger Virgo, the then Beadle, held Coopers and Wakelins Inholmes as well as Bedelands. He or his predecessor presumably preferred to live at the more-elevated site. With the two extra plots, Bedelands then had 30 acres.

So, where did the earliest beadles of Keymer live? In 1344 there was an argument between Simon the Cooper (whose name means barrel-maker) and Ralph the Beadle. The former had fenced around a spring called Bedelleswell and was stopping the beadle from using it. We don’t know how the row ended as there are no further surviving records.  The spring itself is still marked just west of Long Wood on the large-scale OS Explorer map sheet 22 (Nat. Grid ref. TQ 317204). The wide glade just south of the open fields on the footpath into the Nature Reserve from Coopers Close is, I believe, the most likely spot for both the beadle’s and the cooper’s homes. An archeological investigation would be good.

The ‘Big Wood’ in Bedelands Nature Reserve is the final remnant of Ditchling manor’s original great wood of Frekebergh. The colonisation of the east side of Burgess Hill from this wood is told below.

On the Clayton side of town, Bedells had also been allocated out of a large demesne wood called the Homewood. It once ran approximately from the Hammonds mill stream in a narrowish strip right up the north-west side of Clayton manor/parish. The name Hammonds derives from its 15^th -century owners, but an earlier name associated with the estate was Ockenden, meaning ‘at the oak wood -pasture’ which perhaps refers to the Homewood. This wood lay along the west side of Hammonds and continued north to Gatehouse Lane. In the 17^th century the office of beadle was held, unsurprisingly, by a member of the Homewood family, a surname which was still to be found in the town in the 20th century. An older, medieval farm in this area, previously called ‘atte Homewood’, later ‘Malthouse farm, lies just west of the Clayton-Hurstpierpoint parish/manorial boundary and was historically in Hurstpierpoint parish. But it deserves a mention because it is now well and truly encompassed by the western spread of Burgess Hill.

On the west of Town, a new intake from St John’s Common in the 14^th century was called ‘Barbush thorne’. Its house and lands nestled up to Fowles Farm in Westhill Drive off Orchard Road.  It was technically a ‘cottage’ but it had 20 acres eventually and must have functioned as a farm. However, Fowles and Barbushthorne – by then known as Barbyes or Barbers- had merged into one holding by 1800 and the latter’s house was not needed. A pleasant Victorian House now stands on the site in Westhill Drive off Orchard Road.  A later farm labourer’s cottage was erected at the edge of Barbers land, facing the common -which survives off Orchard Road and is called Barber’s Cottage, but it is not the former medieval farm site.

By the end of the medieval period there were several more colonisations of Clayton’s Homewood. South of Poveys, and keeping east of the old parish boundary with Hurstpierpoint, they form the west side of the Factory estate down Charles Avenue to Tesco’s supermarket. South of Jane Murray Way, Scotches Farm, originally held by the atte Quecche (at the hawthorns) family, is an older settlement.  North of Poveys farm, the wood stretched up to Denham Road and Gatehouse Lane, parcelled into smallholdings called Love’s Acre and Easton Bushes. These two were later bought up by the family of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the 19^th century and became ‘Shelleys Farm’. Finally, there was Marle Croft and Cooper’s Croft on the site of the Tesco’s Local on the roundabout at the west end of West Street. Marl was a chalky lighter soil, often extracted where it occurred because it could be dug into the heavier clays to lighten them at the point of new colonisation.

In the same period that the Homewood was colonised, approximately 1150-1350 AD, all the housing area around Wisden Avenue across to Howard Avenue in the north-west of town also stand on land of Clayton manor. It was being granted out in plots to new farming tenants by at least 1250 if not earlier.  Plot names given in the manor court records are Northlands, Perryfield and Perryfield Mead, Wilmot’s, Grayling’s and Hobbs. But expansion was short-lived. Instead of finding new land for a rising population, The Black Death of the 1340s caused a complete reversal. It had killed so many people that for the next 50-100 years there were not enough tenants for the land available. This encouraged a new trend whereby the better-off local freeholders bought up the earlier small holdings and merged them into larger, more-viable units. Thus, all the old plots above became just two new units, Fairplace and Brewer’s farms.

An earlier, late Saxon land settlement west of these had converted 90 acres of ‘swine pasture’ into agriculture in three separate 30-acre holdings. These cover the Woolpack Inn and all the land west as far as the Triangle Leisure Centre. It was known as Floods Hatch farm because if the farmer of Floods farm, the next farm west, wanted to come into St. John’s Common he had to go through a hatch gate adjacent to where the Woolpack now stands. By the mid-17^th-century the 90 acres of Floods Hatch was in the hands of a single tenant.

By the mid -18^th century the whole sweep from Fairplace to the Triangle had become a single farm run from the farmhouse at the west end of St. John’s Common, now the Woolpack. Then and later the tenant farmer and his labourers took orders from an absentee land owner, where eight or nine independent family farmers had once tilled their own land. It is a story repeated in very many places throughout the Weald of Sussex. It means, for further research, that the old medieval dwelling places are now ‘lost’ and their sites, if not irrevocably bulldozed, await discovery. Residents in this part of town should keep their eyes peeled for bits of old broken pottery or other signs of earlier occupation.

To conclude, the better lands near rivers and streams in Burgess Hill were in cultivation from at least the late-Saxon period or earlier.  By 1296, the surnames of half of the taxpayers, that is the better-off freeholders, in all of Clayton and Keymer derive from farms in our part of the two parishes in 1296. (See notes below). In 1327 the tax collectors themselves for the two parishes came from Burgess Hill –Thomas Fraunkelyn (Franklands in Keymer) and William Avery (Woodfield Lodge in Clayton, ‘Northern Arc’ area). But the real advance in settlement between 1086 and 1350 was made by small farmers in the extensive ancient woodlands which occupied much of the land area of the modern town. Numerous poorer families had been allowed to make a home on their own modest semi-woodland plot, pushing the limits of the manors’ common grazing land steadily inwards.

This means two important things. First, that in the early medieval period, before 1350, St. John’s Common and its surrounding farms, that is the central and western partwere the population ‘hot spot’ of the two parishes of Clayton and Keymer. A somewhat-larger number of families lived here than in the ‘parent’ villages of Keymer and Clayton. The community even had its own place of worship, the Chapel of St. John on Fairplace Hill.  Moreover, the common itself – all the rough pasture that was left for the farmers of Keymer and Clayton to use for common grazing, was much the same size in 1350 as it was in 1828-1857 at the final extinction of the commons (for which, see Birth of the Town). In its own small way, and in common with numerous other wooded areas of the Sussex Weald, the early medieval period had produced Burgess Hill’s first population boom.

The late-Saxon creation of the various new manors in our locality was a reaction to the Viking raids that were plaguing England at the time. Big royal estates like Ditchling began to be carved up to create new local military men (thegns) as lords of manors, who could muster their tenants to help defend the land. In founding the new borough of Lewes at a hilly river port for easy defence, King Alfred and his successors began to carve up the old, inland, Ditchling estate which was downgraded and abandoned as a royal seat. I would estimate that at least five new dependent lordships, or ‘manors’ in our part of the Weald, from East Chiltingon in the east to Clayton in the west were created out of King Alfred’s former Diccelingum.  Each of the new manors created were given its own place of refuge and trade inside the walls of the new borough of Lewes and Domesday Book records how many they still had in 1086. Clayton had 9 sites and Keymer had 7, while Ditchling manor had 11; and, being the more important place, despite the carve up, it also had six burgesses in Lewes, allowing it a role in the governance of the new town. Allowing people to colonise under-used scrub and clay lands not only created more soldiers in times of peril but the tenants were improving the value of the lord’s estate by their own labour. It was a win-win solution for the lord of the manor.

Much of what is now the east side of Burgess Hill remained part of Ditchling parish until the early 20^th century, that is, most of Manor Road, the upper part of Cant’s Lane, all the Keymer Tile Co. clay pits recently developed for housing, all of the’ Folders Lane Estate’ and all the houses on the south side of Folders Lane east of the Kings Way T-junction. It was taken into Burgess Hill in the 1930s.

The name Frekebergh means ‘the woodpasture of the hill’. Ditchling retained the larger portion when it was divided between Ditchling and the new manor of Keymer. The boundary between the two can be traced on the map (above) because the Ditchling side was allowed to be colonised by small farmers in the medieval period (blue), while Keymer’s share east of Keymer and Junction Roads is mauve because it  was not farmed out until the Tudor period.  The precise extent of the 9^th century chase of King Alfred is unclear, but it seems to have started just north of Lodge Hill in Ditchling and perhaps terminated north of the Eight Arches viaduct at Folly Farm.

Although most of Frekebergh lay east of Keymer and Junction roads, the boundary had once swung west at Burgess Hill’s hill to run north along Grove Road and onwards in the same alignment as far as the ‘Big Wood’ in Bedelands Nature Reserve. The latter remained a possession of the lord of Keymer in early modern times. On the Ditchling side the 200-acre farm called Fragbarrow, south of Folders Lane (which includes the Ridgeview winery), together with the numerous smaller farms north of Folders Lane, several hugging the west edge of Ditchling Common, were all created after the Norman Conquest, from around 1150 AD onwards. The seat of the medieval overlords of our local manors, the de Warennes, was at Lewes Castle and they also had a residence at Cuckfield. With the exception of Ditchling Park (south and west of the village centre) where they kept horses, they were not the least involved with Ditchling, Keymer or Clayton and were happy to get some return from it in the form of rent.

Ditchling manor’s part of Frekebergh contained the land now known as the Folders Lane Estate, as well as all the former Keymer Brick and Tile company land, and pits, Cants Lane, most of St. Andrews Road and much of Manor Road and the modern housing estates leading off it.  Colonisations probably began here during the 13^th century in the southern part of the block, creating Burdocks, Hope Farm and Savages, Folders, Pollards and Freckborough farms as well as various indistinct ‘inholmes’ (land taken in to farming). None of these new holdings were given any rights of common on the main Ditchling common, as it would have overburdened that resource. That was reserved for the old farmers of Ditchling village. The colonisers may once have had rights to graze the more northerly parts of Frekebergh itself, south of Janes Lane.  But, by the 1500s, that area had also been sold out (mainly to the Attrees of Great Ote Hall in Wivelsfield) so even that resource was lost. St. John’s and Valebridge Commons belonged strictly to Keymer manor, so were also out of bounds.

During the 15^th and early 16^th centuries, as population numbers recovered, modest new holdings were granted out of the strip of Frekebergh in Keymer manor which lay west of Junction Road. This created Yew Tree, later known as Grove farm as a slim 20-acre strip. To its north a 10-acre strip strip known as mal cleys – ‘bad clays’ was taken in and combined with ‘part of Lyelands’ (North Blackhouse)  At Grove farm the clay was tempered by sand, but out on top of the ridge the clay seams were deep. In time, however it became the farm known as Blackhouse, its house now demolished and Blackhouse Lane occupying the site. A little further north east, on the north side of Leylands Road at Worlds End a new 10-acre holding called North Inholmes was created before 1500. It was fed by a stream which is conduited under the Worlds End Rec and under the railway which eventually enters the Bedelands Nature Reserve via a small wood at the end of Maple Drive/Coopers Close. The surviving curve of North Inholmes’ perimeter hedge in Leylands Road has defined the curve of the terrace of houses since built there – on either side of the World End Post Office stores. Beyond the North Inholmes was Wakelin’s Inholmes (above) which was absorbed into Bedelands.

The most identifiable part of Keymer manor’s Frekebergh is that which lay east of Keymer Road and Junction Road. It was apportioned out in large, identifiable, square blocks in the 16th century. Certain uses of this land had been restricted to the benefit of Lewes Priory, but once King Henry VIII’s Reformation had suppressed its rights, it all came onto the property market,  mostly as freehold plots. It thus attracted people with an eye for business, who concentrated on the timber and coppice wood trades. Several of these plots were called ‘Cants’ and ‘Inholmes’. Where woods were coppiced (cut back to the ground) in a seven-year rotation, only one seventh of the whole was cut each year. Each section cut was known as a cant.  Purton’s farm in the south belongs to this Keymer part of Frekebergh, as does Manor Field School and Worlds End Recreation Ground at the north end. The Lord of the manor himself retained this northern part of the whole, which is why the name ‘Manor Field’ was later given to the ‘Junction road Schools’. Around 1580 George Goring of Danny in Hurstpierpoint was the Keymer lord who held it and he kept a ‘little house’ in it, where Stirling Court Road and Stirling Close have since been built.

Any houses relating to the new ‘cants’ and ‘inholmes’ will inevitably be post-medieval. But the house called High Chimneys in Keymer Road. May be earlier. It stands on the homestead of the former (early medieval) ‘wood warden’, the person who looked after the wood when it belonged solely to the manorial lord. As a dwelling site, therefore, High Chimneys could still retain features that are pre-Tudor. The structure and fabric of the house itself looks as if it is much later (see photo in Hugh Matthews’ Burgess Hill, p. 48) but nevertheless it should be historically assessed together with the land on which it stands.

The photos below show:

First – Blackhouse Farm, the medieval ‘bad clays’, in more recent times.

Second – the house known as High Chimneys, this was formerly ‘Woodwards’, in Keymer Road, we assume to have once been where the ‘wood warden’ of Frekebergh; lived.

And finally, the wonderful, leather-bound ‘Danny Survey’ of 1582 which describes many of our Burgess Hill farms in which George Goring of Danny had a financial interest as one of the lords of Keymer manor. He built in brick the Elizabethan mansion Danny House which still stands today in Danny Park, Hurstpierpoint.

When King Alfred made his will in 880AD neither the manors nor the parishes of Clayton or Keymer existed. The Diccelingum (Ditchling), he referred to in the will was not just the Ditchling we know today, but it encompassed the ancient villages of Clayton and Keymer, all the Burgess Hill area, much of Wivelsfield and a good deal more lying further north in the Weald. At that time, we were all part of his extensive royal manor of Ditchling; except, that is, the part of Burgess Hill which has spread into Hurstpierpoint. That was owned by the Earls Godwin, and later the ‘de Pierpoint’ family as Norman overlords. It has had a rather different land-settlement history to the rest of our town. But that would be another story….

There has not yet been a full appraisal to date of prehistoric land use in the Burgess hill area. The information cited here is mainly culled from recent archaeological reports in Sussex Archaeological Collections (hereafter SAC – copies at Burgess Hill Library, on request, and also on line). An important article on Roman Wickham is by J.E.Couchman, A Roman Cemetery at Hassocks, SAC 66, illustrated with reproductions of Roman epitaphs and funerary urns.  Local archaeologist Chris Butler set up a Mid Sussex Field Archaeological team (F.A.T) when he lived in this area a few decades ago and produced reports. Some of his work is in B.A.R. (British Archaeological Reports). He excavated at Wickham/Stonepound in Hassocks, and confirmed Professor Barry Cunliffe’s former thesis that the area was a  Romano British ‘small town’ (see Cunliffe’s The Regni in which discusses Hassocks’s place in the Roman administration of Sussex). Local archaeologist Simon Garrett living in Keymer in the 1980s asked people at Wickham to report finds from their gardens and, inter alia, this brought to light a Roman ‘intaglio’ ring (for verifying waxen seals), which proved that Hassocks was a Roman administrative centre. Archaeologist and Adult Education lecturer David Rudling who lives at Ditchling is currently our main local authority on the Roman period.

It is worth mentioning that, Alfred’s kingdom was not the whole of England which was still held in three Kingdoms at this time. Alfred was king of Wessex which was everything from Kent to Cornwall, up to the Thames and the Severn Estuary, with Winchester as its capital. North of Wessex lay the Kingdom of Mercia, and Northumbria north again. They were all united as ‘England’ in the reign of Edgar, 959-973AD. 

If you go to ‘Domesday Book Online’ and type in the manor name it will give you little more than the bare statistics that I have mentioned here. Far better, to get a good idea of the extent of the whole Sussex survey, and to understand how our area fits in, would be to read or buy a copy of the paperback edition which covers the entire county, John Morris (ed.), Domesday Book: Sussex, (Phillimore, 1976). Our area is entered under ‘Section 12, ‘Land of William of Warenne (aka, Lewes Rape) in which Clayton, Wickham and Keymer are entry nos. 37-39. Ditchling (entry no. 12, 6), comes earlier in the section as it was more important and held by the Earl Warenne himself.

Rural life in the early Middle Ages is ably portrayed in E.Miller and J. Hatcher, Medieval England (part of the Social and Economic history of England series; published by Longman 1978; and by Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: the people pf Britain 850-1520 (Penguin) 2003

I researched the basic early landscape history of Burgess Hill from 1978-1985 using manorial records in Latin text.  It was not until 1733 that these records used English. For those who wish to pursue the subject for themselves, they are:

At ESRO/ the Keep, for Keymer: –SAS Aber 1-22; SAS Acc. 964-982; for Clayton: ADA 1-5; for Wickham, ADA 16; at Arundel Castle  for all three manors,– M529, A 1916 and a recent accession Acc 171/1-6. Other repositories holding Tudor and earlier sources are:  TNA (The National Archives -formerly called Public Record Office) and the British Library. Both E. and W. Sussex Record Offices hold early title deeds of our area . The Land Survey dated circa 1582, created for the Goring family at Danny House, Hurstpierpoint, which has has interesting descriptions in English of some of the farms in Keymer manor (ref. ESRO DAN 1152) is at ESRO.  There is further relevant source material in my Place–name article, in SAC, vol 127. The evidence for the de-consecrated chapel of St. John is in SAC vol. 13.  The SAC vols are available at Burgess Hill Library, on request, to study on in the Library, not to borrow; and also on line.

Re. Frekebergh and Ditchling’s early past as a villa regis or Saxon royal town, the Ditchling History Study Group have produced a typed copy of my unpublished paper, Ditchling Parish Survey, which resulted from a year’s work as archive researcher on the East Sussex Archaeology Project (E.S.C.C., 1985). I also have draft copies at home.  At the Norman Conquest, the de Warenne earls, as regional overlords used Lewes Castle as their seat. But the essential demesne lands of that seat remained as they had been at King Alfred’s time, the manor of Ditchling and its surrounding territories, including Clayton and Keymer and all their up-Wealden land. They included the Forest of Worth which was an integral part of the manors of Ditchling, Keymer and Clayton itself. This Forest has wrongly been cited as part of Surrey in recent editions of Domesday Book. SRS vol 34, The Book of John Rowe (steward of the Earl of Abergavenny), c. 1610, clearly states that the manor of Highley (i.e, Worth) is a member of the Barony of Lewes. All these lands in mid Sussex belonged historically to E. Sussex, but since 1974 they are split between both E and W Sussex).

The part of Frekebergh in the Manor Field area of Worlds End c. 1580, owned by Sir George Goring of Danny in Hurst, is cited in ‘the Danny Survey’, ref. ESRO/The Keep, DAN 1126.

Of the twenty six names of taxpayers under listed Clayton and Keymer in 1296 (Sussex Record Society, (hereafter SRS ) vol. 10, pp. 45-46, thirteen can be ascribed to farms in or immediately outside Burgess Hill, viz,  atte Huse, Godeson (Northern Arc area), atte Broke (Brooklands farm), le Bedel (Bedelands), de la Chapele (Chapel  farm), Burgeys (Burgess Hill farm), Kapenore (Hammonds Mill area), Ferth (Freeks farm), Queycche (Scotches farm – just S. of Green Circle at Tescoes), Kupere (Cooper’s Close), Fughel (Fowles farm), Stuttesf’[ord] (Bridge Hall); also Atte Wood (Fairplace Farm and further north). However, this tax list does not give a comprehensive view of the extent of settlement at that date because the Earl Warenne himself gave a large sum in tax, which represented the value of the customary (or copyhold) tenancies of his manors of Clayton and Keymer. Burgess Hill farm, Fowles farm and others in our area were still copyhold, meaning that the tenants of those farms in 1296 were not named, and neither were the occupiers of all the small new land settlements. So, the percentage of the population of Clayton and Keymer who lived in the Burgess Hill area at that time may have been around two thirds of the whole. John Burgeys and others are named, I believe, because they had purchased some new freehold land in the area, which brought their names into the tax list as being responsible for paying their own tax. Their surname in the tax list therefore proves that their place of origin existed.  The 1327 and 1332 tax lists are on pp. 76-77 and 290-291 of the same volume.

NB Sussex Record Society vols. Are now on line.