A thousand-year lease under the Manor of Bury
The first secure early reference to Fletchings Farm is earlier than the seventeenth-century material used in some previous accounts. John Buckwell, the Brighton solicitor and Sussex Archaeological Society member who published ‘Stories of Loxwood’ in 1914, placed Fletchings within the Manor of Bury. He wrote that in the second year of the reign of Elizabeth I a lease of Fletchings Farm was granted for 1,000 years at an annual rent of twenty-two pence. Elizabeth came to the throne in November 1558, placing the lease in 1559-60.
Buckwell recorded the Manor of Bury as property of the Duke of Norfolk and noted that it had belonged to the Earls of Arundel. A later local research note also records “Flitchfold alias Flitchings” in the 1614 inquisition post mortem of John Laker. The sixteenth-century lease is the earlier direct reference to Fletchings Farm and belongs closely to the proposed construction date of about 1540.
The very long lease was not unusual in the manorial material described by Buckwell. He also found a 2,000-year lease at one shilling a year in the thirty-ninth year of Elizabeth I and other leases for periods as long as 10,000 years. The small annual rent on Fletchings therefore belonged to a system designed to preserve a nominal manorial payment over an exceptionally long term.
Josiah Garton, butcher, at Fletchings
The ownership and occupation of Fletchings can be followed in detail from the late eighteenth century through the surviving land-tax chronology. From 1790 to 1798 the owner was recorded as Mr Potter and the occupier as Josiah Garton. In 1790 the register of duties paid on apprentices’ indentures also names Josiah Garton of Loxwood as a butcher and records Hugh Mitchell as his apprentice.
From 1799 Josiah Garton was both owner and occupier of Fletchings. He remained the owner through 1818. From 1819 to 1825 the land-tax record continued to name Josiah Garton as owner while Josiah Garton junior was the occupier. The elder Josiah died in 1826, and the Fletchings notes cite his will, STC I/49 f.380, describing his son Josiah junior, who was then living at Fletchings, as a butcher.
Fletchings therefore appears to have been connected to the Garton butchery before the family moved its household into the centre of the village. Josiah junior left Fletchings in the late 1820s and was at the High Street property now called Garton House by 1828. His son John Arthur Garton was born there in 1829 and later became a highly successful London butcher. That later history belongs to the Garton House article; the family trade in Loxwood can be followed back to Josiah Garton at Fletchings in 1790.
Edward and Anne Napper and the Brewhurst estate
Ownership changed after the death of Josiah Garton senior. In 1826 and 1827 Fletchings was owned by Edward Napper, while Josiah Garton remained the occupier. Edward Napper was associated with Ifold House and had married Anne Seward in 1803. Anne was connected with the Brewhurst estate, and the Fletchings research notes state that from 1826 the property descended with Brewhurst.
From 1828 to 1832 Edward Napper remained the recorded owner while the occupiers were Seward and Botting. The Botting name later became closely associated with Brewhurst Mill and other milling and farming interests around Loxwood. The land-tax record calls the property Flitchings or Flitchens during these years.
The Steer family in 1841
The 1841 census begins a long run of Steer family occupation at Fletchings. William Steer, aged forty-six, was an agricultural labourer. His wife Mary was thirty-nine. Their children at home were William, aged twenty; George, nineteen; John, twelve; Mary, eight; James, four; and Esau, one. Sixteen-year-old Thomas Tickner, also an agricultural labourer, lived with the household.
The household was large and closely tied to paid agricultural work. William senior and Thomas Tickner were already earning wages in the fields, while the two oldest Steer sons were reaching working age. The census places three generations of the family story that can be followed through the next forty years under the same property name.
Mary Steer and her sons in 1851
By 1851 Mary Steer was a widow and head of the household at Fletchings, aged forty-nine. Her sons William, thirty, George, twenty-eight, and John, twenty-two, were all agricultural labourers. Daughter Mary was twenty, James was fourteen and already working as an agricultural labourer, and the youngest son Esau was ten.
Four men or boys in the household were therefore recorded in agricultural work in 1851. William Steer senior had disappeared from the return between 1841 and 1851, leaving Mary at the head of a working family whose older sons continued to live at Fletchings.
Butchers at Fletchings in 1861
The occupation of the Steer family changed by 1861. William Steer, aged forty, was now head of the household and worked as a cleaver butcher. His wife Ann was forty-three. William’s brother George, aged thirty-eight, lived with them as a lodger and was also a cleaver butcher.
The two brothers were therefore working in the same trade from the house that had been occupied by the Garton butchers earlier in the century. The census does not state where the Steers worked, but it records both William and George under the same specialised butchery occupation at Fletchings.
Timber hewing, teaching and lath binding
In 1871 William Steere, aged fifty, remained head of the household. He was then recorded as a timber hewer, cutting and preparing timber in a district where woodland work remained a regular source of employment. Ann, aged fifty-three, was recorded as a school mistress. Fourteen-year-old Sarah Tickner lived with them as a domestic servant.
Ten years later William and Anne were still at the property. The 1881 census records William Steer, aged sixty, as a lath binder and Anne as sixty-three. Laths were thin strips of timber used in plastered walls and ceilings, so William’s later occupation still depended directly on local woodland and building work. The Steer household had moved from agricultural labour to butchery, timber hewing, teaching and the preparation of building material while remaining at Fletchings for several decades.
Alfred and Mary Ayling
By 1891 the Steer occupation had ended. Alfred Ayling, aged thirty-five, was recorded as head of the household at Fletchings and worked as an agricultural labourer. His wife Mary was twenty-four.
The 1901 census again places Alfred and Mary Ayling at Fletchings. The local transcription records Mary as thirty-four and also names their niece Mary Wadey, aged fourteen. The occupation entered for Alfred is difficult in the surviving transcription but appears to refer to wood work and a cottager status. The Ayling household carried Fletchings into the opening years of the twentieth century.
Fletchings Green and the old approach
Historic maps place Fletchings beside open ground remembered as Fletchings Green. Local property research records an older entrance path running from the cottage towards the main village road opposite the church, on the line that became Vicarage Hill. The path passed beside the later Memorial Hut site. By the 1895 Ordnance Survey the Victorian schoolhouse stood on waste ground beside Fletchings Green.
The cottage therefore remained slightly apart from the main High Street group while still having a direct path towards the church, school and centre of Loxwood. Brewhurst Lane ran eastwards through the Brewhurst estate and past the mill, the properties with which Fletchings had been associated since the Napper ownership of the 1820s.
For sale in 1927
Fletchings appeared in the West Sussex County Times on 28 May 1927. John Churchman & Sons were instructed to sell the freehold by auction at the Town Hall, Horsham, on Wednesday 15 June. The advertisement called it a “picturesque old-fashioned country cottage” known as “Flitchings”, pleasantly situated near Loxwood and about three and a half miles from Rudgwick railway station.
The sale included a “capital garden & orchard”. The whole property measured about 2 roods 21 perches, a little over half an acre. Prospective buyers were told to apply on the premises to view it. The advertisement offered the cottage as a compact freehold property rather than a farm, after centuries in which the Fletchings name had appeared in manorial, land-tax and estate records.
Walter Booker and George Day
The sale did not end the question of occupation. On 3 August 1927 the Chichester Observer reported a possession application by Walter Booker of Loxwood for the cottage at Fletchings, then occupied by his former employee George Day. Booker told the court that Day had been dismissed for lack of work and had been given notice to leave twelve months earlier.
Day lived at Fletchings with his wife, two daughters and a son. He had occupied the house for eight years and, because it came with his employment, had paid no rent. Day told the court that he had contracted with builders for a bungalow of his own, that the ground was already being cleared and that the new house should be ready by 29 September.
Booker said that he wanted Fletchings back so that he could renovate and sell it and was not willing to let Day remain until the end of September. The court made an order for possession in six weeks. The May auction advertisement and the August possession case record the same period in which Booker was trying to dispose of the cottage while the former employee and his family were still living there.
W. O. Roper and the Botting tenants
By 1928 the property records name W. O. Roper of Reigate, Surrey, as owner of Fletchings. The later notes then place Maurice and Thomas Botting in the cottage as tenants. They belonged to the Botting family associated with milling at Brewhurst and Wanford, returning Fletchings to a family name that had already appeared among its occupiers under Edward Napper in 1828.
In the mid-twentieth century a small outbuilding in the garden was known as The Hut or The Garage and was let as holiday accommodation. A surviving rent book records Mr and Mrs E. S. Leigh of Mill Hill, London, staying there in 1947. E. S. Leigh painted Fletchings and also made an interior view of The Hut.
Leigh wrote a sonnet titled “Interlude”, dated “Inspired at Fletchings Loxwood 1947”. The poem describes The Hut as a place away from business and work, set in the old garden of Fletchings cottage. The rent book, paintings and poem record a short period when the grounds of the Tudor cottage were being used to accommodate visitors from London.
Other recorded uses
Local Fletchings notes also record the property being used at different times as a school, an animal shelter and a dispensary. The surviving summary does not give dates for those uses. They belong to the later history of a house that had already served as a butcher’s home, an agricultural labourer’s cottage and the base of households working in woodland, teaching and rural trades.
