Introduction
Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace on 24 March 1603. James VI of Scotland succeeded her as James I of England without a battle for the crown. Anthony Watson was Bishop of Chichester, the Book of Common Prayer supplied the services used in English churches, and the officers who had served the old queen carried royal orders under a new name. The Tudor dynasty had ended, but most of the people who administered a Sussex parish went to work under James in the same offices they had held under Elizabeth.
At Loxwood the change of dynasty began beside buildings and land already familiar from the Elizabethan story. St John the Baptist’s chapel stood within Wisborough Green parish and the Diocese of Chichester. John Irelond, one of the men named when the chapel property was renewed in 1558, was alive when James came to the throne. Across the road stood Loxwood Place. Beside the chapel stood the former medieval oratory, by then used as the priest’s house. The medieval altar stone removed from the chapel during Edward VI’s reign lay hidden inside that house. Farther downhill a bridge carried the road across the River Lox, and eastwards Brewhurst Mill worked beside the river. During James’s reign new deeds, new owners and new timber-framed houses would add further detail to this part of the Western Weald.
James was thirty-six when he inherited the English throne. He had been King of Scots since infancy after his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to abdicate in 1567. His claim to Elizabeth’s throne came through Margaret Tudor, Henry VII’s daughter. James brought the Stuart dynasty into England after more than three decades of rule in Scotland. He also brought a wife, Anne of Denmark, and three surviving children whose futures would affect English politics: Henry, Elizabeth and Charles.
James VI Comes South, 1603
James left Edinburgh in April and travelled south through England. Towns, nobles and county officers received a king many of them had never seen. Plague restricted some of the celebrations around London, but James and Anne were crowned at Westminster Abbey on 25 July. Proclamations and writs had already announced the new sovereign in the counties long before the coronation placed the crown on his head.
The accession joined the English and Scottish crowns in one monarch. It did not create one parliamentary kingdom. England kept its Parliament, courts and law; Scotland kept its Parliament, courts and law; the Church of England kept bishops while the Scottish Kirk had its own organisation. James pressed for a closer union and in 1604 adopted the title King of Great Britain in royal usage, but Parliament did not merge the two states. English law governed deeds concerning land at Loxwood, and English courts recorded disputes and transfers throughout his reign.
Sussex also kept the county government James had inherited from Elizabeth. Sheriffs, justices of the peace, constables and parish officers carried statutes and royal orders into the countryside. Chichester supplied the diocesan centre for Loxwood, Wisborough Green, Kirdford and much of western Sussex. Immediately north of Loxwood, Alfold belonged to Surrey and the Diocese of Winchester. The boundary divided church government, but roads, marriages, tenancies and trade crossed it every day.
James also inherited Elizabeth’s long war with Spain. He chose negotiation, and England and Spain made peace in 1604. Sussex had spent the Armada years behind a coast prepared for invasion and naval war. Peace reduced that immediate pressure. The county supplied men, money, horses and goods when later royal orders demanded them. The roads through Arundel, Petworth, Horsham and the Weald stayed part of the network through which those demands travelled.
Hampton Court and the Church James Inherited, 1604
Religion reached the king almost as soon as he reached London. Ministers who wanted further Protestant reform presented complaints about ceremonies, clergy and church discipline. James summoned bishops and selected ministers to Hampton Court in January 1604. Over several days they argued about the Prayer Book, preaching, baptism, church courts and the government of the Church. James accepted some changes but kept bishops and the existing parish structure.
At Loxwood the English Book of Common Prayer continued to order worship. Morning and Evening Prayer, Holy Communion, baptism, marriage, burial and the thanksgiving of women after childbirth all had authorised English forms. The bell called people to worship; the minister read prayers and Scripture; parishioners answered aloud; a sermon or homily could follow the readings. Wisborough Green remained the mother church and kept the parish register in which a baptism at Loxwood had already been entered in 1587.
The Canons issued in 1604 placed duties on clergy and churchwardens. Ministers had to use the authorised services and accept episcopal government. Churchwardens answered for the repair of the church, attendance at worship and offences that had to be presented to ecclesiastical officers. Loxwood’s chapel trustees performed a different task. They held land and houses that produced income for the chapel, arranged leases and kept the legal title alive when older trustees died.
One proposal made at Hampton Court would outlast almost everything else discussed there. James approved a new English translation of the Bible. Scholars at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge were organised into six companies. Their work would take seven years. The project joined a national argument about Scripture to a diocese that would soon receive one of its most important translators as Bishop of Chichester.
The peace with Spain signed in 1604 also changed the setting in which these church arguments took place. Elizabeth’s later years had kept Sussex alert to Spanish invasion and naval war. James’s treaty ended fifteen years of open conflict. Coastal musters and fortifications did not vanish from memory, but government could turn more attention to religious settlement, finance and the proposed union with Scotland.
Catholics initially watched the new king closely because his mother had been Mary, Queen of Scots and because peace with Spain appeared to offer a different tone from Elizabeth’s final years. James did not restore Catholic worship. The Prayer Book, bishops and royal supremacy in church government stayed in force. Disappointed hopes among a small group of Catholics formed part of the background to the conspiracy that erupted in 1605.
1605: Gunpowder, Petworth and Drungewick
Anthony Watson died in 1605 and Lancelot Andrewes became Bishop of Chichester. Andrewes was already a prominent preacher and linguist. He had taken part in the religious business surrounding the new reign and would lead the first Westminster company of Bible translators. His appointment brought the man directing part of James’s translation project into the diocese that contained Loxwood.
That same year brought a very different religious event. Robert Catesby and a group of Catholic conspirators planned to kill James and the members of Parliament by exploding gunpowder beneath the House of Lords at the State Opening. Officers searching the cellars during the night of 4-5 November found Guy Fawkes with the explosives. The government arrested or pursued the conspirators, and the surviving leaders were tried and executed.
Parliament made 5 November an annual day of public thanksgiving. Ministers in parish churches and other usual places of common prayer were required to hold the prescribed service and give thanks for the king’s deliverance. The date entered the religious year beside the older Sundays and feast days already marked by the Prayer Book. Wisborough Green parish, with its dependent chapel at Loxwood, belonged to the church organisation required to observe the new anniversary.
The plot also touched a great Sussex estate. Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, held Petworth as one of the principal Percy properties. Thomas Percy, one of the conspirators, was his relative and had served him. The government suspected Northumberland of involvement. He was never one of the men who stored the gunpowder, but the investigation sent him to the Tower of London, where he remained for about seventeen years. Stewards continued to administer the Percy property while its lord lived under confinement.
A quieter transfer of land took place much nearer Loxwood in the same year. In Easter term 1605 Richard Threele of Loxwood acquired the Manor of Drungewick. The surviving fine names Drungewick with property extending through Wisborough Green, Kirdford, Slinfold, Warnham, Rudgwick and Billingshurst. The recorded purchase price was £1,600. The surname Threele had appeared in Loxwood’s chapel history since Richard Threel joined the original petitioners in 1404; the surviving records do not establish the exact family descent between the two men.
Drungewick had once been one of the northern houses of the Bishops of Chichester. Robert Rede used it while dealing with the petition that led to Loxwood’s first oratory, and later bishops conducted business there. By 1605 the bishops no longer kept their household at the manor. Richard Threele’s purchase put the estate in local lay hands while Bishop Andrewes exercised church authority over Loxwood and Wisborough Green from Chichester.
Catholic Loyalty and the Oath after 1605
The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot did not make every English Catholic a conspirator. Catholic families continued to live in Sussex, and many separated private belief from political loyalty. Some attended Church of England services, some avoided communion, some paid recusancy penalties and a much smaller number sheltered missionary priests or took part in political schemes. The government tried to distinguish allegiance from doctrine while also increasing pressure on people who refused the established Church.
Parliament passed new measures against recusancy after the plot, and an oath of allegiance required subjects to recognise James as lawful king and reject any claim that the pope could depose him. Justices of the peace could administer the law; bishops and churchwardens recorded absence from worship; constables and other officers could become involved when warrants or searches were issued. The process brought a dispute about Catholic loyalty into county sessions, parish records and private households.
Western Sussex already had recent experience of Catholic noble families. The Howard inheritance at Arundel had been drawn into Elizabethan prosecutions, and the Percy lordship at Petworth now had its earl in the Tower. Those great estates did not stop producing rents, employing servants or dealing with tenants because their owners faced political suspicion. Estate business and religious politics could move at very different speeds.
No surviving James-period record used here names a Loxwood recusant. The records name trustees, land, houses, a mill and a chapel. Wisborough Green’s officers could check attendance, and the parish had to observe the annual 5 November thanksgiving. The private religious choices of individual Loxwood families cannot be reconstructed without further presentments, wills or household records.
Lancelot Andrewes and Worship in the Western Weald, 1605-1609
Andrewes’s surviving orders show how episcopal authority could reach a parish without the bishop travelling to every chapel himself. In 1606 he instructed churchwardens to record people who stayed away from church on Sundays and holy days, pass their names to the minister and make the information available to ecclesiastical officers. A churchwarden could write down an absentee’s name and pass it through the minister to an archdeacon or bishop’s court.
Wisborough Green’s churchwardens served the parish that included Loxwood. The chapel trustees did not replace them. A trustee might hold the title to Cokkes or another parcel that supported the chapel, while the vicar and churchwardens answered to the bishop for worship and discipline. The two sets of duties met at the same building when money from local property paid for repairs to a chapel whose services had to follow the Prayer Book.
Inside the chapel the physical changes of the Tudor Reformation were already old enough to be part of local memory. The congregation used a communion table for the authorised service. Beside the chapel, the medieval altar stone had been removed and hidden in the former oratory during Edward VI’s reign. No source used for this article records it being returned to the chapel under Mary, Elizabeth or James. The stone survived inside the priest’s house while Protestant services were held next door.
The old dedication to St John the Baptist also survived. The Prayer Book calendar kept the Nativity of St John on 24 June. The service commemorated the biblical preacher and baptiser; it did not restore the medieval lights, images or intercessory Masses that had once accompanied devotion to saints. A Loxwood worshipper could hear St John’s Gospel story in English in a chapel that carried his name while the medieval altar made for an earlier form of worship lay hidden a few yards away.
Andrewes left Chichester for Ely in 1609. His four years in Sussex had linked the diocese to James’s new Bible project and to the enforcement of Sunday and holy-day worship. Samuel Harsnett succeeded him and would govern Chichester through the years in which the new Bible was printed and Loxwood’s chapel property was leased and renewed.
A Working Chapel through the Jacobean Year
The chapel served local worship throughout the year. Sunday prayer brought families to the building week after week. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and the remaining holy days changed the lessons and prayers. The feast of St John the Baptist on 24 June gave the chapel its own named day within that calendar.
Baptism brought infants and godparents to the minister. Marriage required public vows and a church service. The Prayer Book supplied a thanksgiving for women after childbirth, a rite that had particular resonance at Loxwood because Bishop Rede’s original 1404 grant had specifically allowed women to receive that ministry locally when the journey to Wisborough Green was difficult. Burial usually drew the parish back towards its churchyard rights at the mother church.
The surviving records do not provide a complete Jacobean timetable for services at Loxwood or name every minister who served there. They do record an established chapel within Wisborough Green parish and property held for its upkeep. The trustee deeds name the houses and land that supported a building whose weekly service books and attendance records have not survived in equal detail.
Cokkes, Calletts Haw, Fletchings, Brewhurst and the adjoining farms were names used to identify rent, inheritance and responsibility. When a trustee wrote one of those names into a lease, the deed tied the chapel’s income to a particular field, house, tenant or road.
Samuel Harsnett, the Cathedral and the Parish, 1609-1611
Samuel Harsnett became Bishop of Chichester in 1609. His surviving questions about Chichester Cathedral are unusually practical. He asked why vicars and lay vicars had been absent, whether the choir had enough singers, whether the boys were properly taught, what had happened to copes and vestments, who kept the books and why alehouses were operating in the cathedral close. The questions show a bishop dealing with people, objects, money and behaviour rather than an abstract programme of church government.
The scale at Loxwood was much smaller, but a rural chapel also depended upon ordinary maintenance. A roof leaked, windows broke, timber decayed, a bell needed fittings and books wore out through use. The trustee lands provided money for those needs. Wisborough Green’s clergy supplied the parish ministry and the bishop licensed and supervised the clergy. The surviving documents do not record Harsnett visiting Loxwood, so his cathedral questions should not be turned into claims about defects at the chapel.
In 1610 John Speed’s map of Sussex showed the bridge at Loxwood. The map did not record every track or house, but the bridge confirms the crossing as part of the mapped road network at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Wisborough Green register had already used the words ‘at loxwood brydge’ for a baptism in 1568. By James’s reign a traveller could cross the River Lox and climb the road towards the chapel and Loxwood Place, while another route ran east towards Brewhurst and Drungewick.
The same year James and Parliament failed to settle a long argument over royal income. The proposed Great Contract would have exchanged some old financial rights of the Crown for a regular parliamentary payment. Negotiations collapsed. Such disputes belonged to Westminster, but Parliament’s power to grant taxation mattered in every county. When a subsidy was granted, county and local assessors converted it into sums due from taxpayers rather than leaving the argument inside the Palace of Westminster.
Harsnett’s episcopate coincided with a visible growth of the road settlement around Loxwood. The bridge was already established, older houses stood beside the route and property transactions were giving precise names to small parcels around the chapel. The written record and surviving buildings begin to overlap more closely in these years, allowing the reign to be followed through both paper and timber.
The road itself was no engineered highway. Rain softened the Wealden clay, carts cut ruts and low ground held water. A journey to Wisborough Green, Kirdford, Horsham or Guildford depended on season, horse, load and the condition of each stretch. The bridge over the River Lox removed one obstacle, but it did not turn the route into an all-weather road.
The Bible of 1611
The new Bible appeared in 1611. Its title page described a translation made from the original languages with earlier English versions compared and revised, and it carried the words ‘Appointed to be read in Churches’. The later name ‘Authorised Version’ was not the ordinary title used by people when the book first appeared. Printing began a new stage in a translation project that had started with the Hampton Court decision seven years earlier.
Six companies had worked at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge. Lancelot Andrewes led the first Westminster company. The translators worked from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and compared previous English Bibles. Tyndale’s language, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishops’ Bible all lay behind portions of the new text. The scholars revised one another’s work before the final version went to the King’s Printer.
No dated copy of the 1611 Bible has yet been identified for Loxwood chapel or Wisborough Green church. The publication date cannot establish that a copy reached the village in 1611. Printers and booksellers supplied church books, clergy read Scripture aloud, and bishops and churchwardens oversaw the books used in public worship. The new translation could be heard locally once a copy reached a church or minister.
People did not need to own a large folio Bible to hear its language. Lessons were read at Morning and Evening Prayer. Psalms, commandments and Gospel passages formed part of the services. Sermons repeated and explained biblical phrases. Godparents answered questions at baptisms, couples made promises at marriages and mourners heard Scripture at burials. A Bible placed in a church could reach many more ears than the number of households able to buy one.
Other English Bibles did not disappear in 1611. The Geneva Bible remained in private use and the Bishops’ Bible had served churches for decades. Catholic readers could also use the Rheims New Testament and the Douai Old Testament. James’s translation entered a country already accustomed to hearing and reading Scripture in English; its importance grew through repeated public and private use after publication.
John Ireland, Alfold and the Chapel Lands, 1612
A surviving lease dated 1612 brings the story back from the royal Bible to two small pieces of land near Loxwood. John Ireland of Loxwood, described as a yeoman, leased property to Thomas Gratwick of Alfold, also a yeoman. John Ireland was the surviving trustee John Irelond, who had entered the chapel trust in 1558 and carried that responsibility into James’s reign.
The lease included Cokkes, about two acres, and Calletts Haw, also about two acres. Both names already belonged to the property associated with the chapel. Earlier records place Cokkes among the Loxwood holdings and describe Callettehaw beside Oakhurst and the road from Loxwood towards Horsham. The 1612 deed gave Thomas Gratwick a term of twenty-one years, required maintenance and set the annual rent at forty shillings.
Forty shillings was not an abstract endowment. A tenant had to produce the money from the use of the property and pay it at the appointed time. Fences, buildings and boundaries had to be kept in a condition that protected the holding. The surviving lease does not say which chapel expense received each payment, but income from chapel property could pay for the building, books, glazing, timber, metalwork and other recurring costs.
Thomas Gratwick lived at Alfold, immediately across the county and diocesan boundary. Alfold answered to the Bishop of Winchester while Loxwood answered to Chichester. John Ireland could lease Loxwood land to an Alfold farmer, and both men could use the same roads towards Guildford, Horsham and the surrounding markets.
The royal succession changed in the same year. Prince Henry, James’s eldest son, died in November 1612 at the age of eighteen. His younger brother Charles became heir to the English and Scottish crowns. A year later James’s daughter Elizabeth married Frederick V, Elector Palatine. Those two events would draw the royal family into the European religious and dynastic crisis that dominated the last part of the reign.
Kirdford, Plaistow and Ifold in the Jacobean Neighbourhood
The villages west and south of Loxwood belonged to another web of parish and estate relationships. Kirdford was the mother parish for Plaistow, just as Wisborough Green was the mother parish for Loxwood. Plaistow possessed a chapel of ease dedicated to St Thomas by the early sixteenth century. People in the northern part of Kirdford parish could attend a nearer chapel without creating a separate parish.
Loxwood and Plaistow each served households living at some distance from a mother church. Their chapels had different foundations and different local histories, but people travelling through this part of the Weald faced the same clay roads, woods and stream crossings that could make a journey of only a few miles slow in wet weather.
Ifold lay between these communities. Shortly before James came to the throne, Sir William Browne sold the Manor of Ivolde or Ivolls to John Gratwicke of Wisborough Green in 1596. The manor entered the Stuart period in new hands. The surname Gratwicke also appears in the district’s later records, but the surviving evidence used here does not prove that John Gratwicke of Ifold was the same family branch as Thomas Gratwick of Alfold in the 1612 Loxwood lease.
Kirdford’s own documentary record becomes particularly rich from the opening Jacobean years. A series of probate inventories begins in 1611. Those inventories list the goods that executors found after deaths: livestock, grain, tools, household furniture, stored food and debts. The series belongs to Kirdford rather than Loxwood, but it provides direct evidence for the mixed farming and household economy operating a few miles from the chapel lands during James’s reign.
The chapel trustee network crossed the same district. In 1558 John Irelond came from Rudgwick; in 1615 new trustees included men associated with Loxwood, Kirdford and Wisborough Green. Drungewick property in 1605 extended into Kirdford, Rudgwick and Billingshurst. Local deeds repeatedly join places that modern maps may present as separate villages because landholding, kinship and routes ran across parish boundaries.
1614-1615: Fletchings, New Trustees and the Glass Furnaces
In 1614 another local document fixed a familiar place-name. An inquisition post mortem for John Laker used the form ‘Flitchfold alias Flitchings’. Fletchings stands on Brewhurst Lane and its timber-framed house is earlier than the Jacobean record, probably dating from the sixteenth century. The 1614 wording does not date the building, but it places the name in a legal record during James’s reign.
James called another Parliament in the same year after four years without one. It sat for only a few weeks and granted no subsidy, earning the later name Addled Parliament. Arguments over finance, elections and royal influence prevented useful agreement. The short session did not stop local courts, manors and private land transactions. While Westminster failed to produce a financial settlement for the king, local owners settled deaths, inheritance and title through deeds and inquisitions.
In 1615 the Loxwood chapel trust was renewed. John Irelond had carried the legal chain from the 1558 group. The new body included John King the elder of Loxwood, Richard King the elder of Kirdford, William Napper of Kirdford, Edward Phillippe otherwise Mill of Wisborough Green, Henry Ireland and John Laker of Wisborough Green, together with other members of the King and Phillippe families. The names show the trustees drawn from the same group of neighbouring villages that supplied tenants and witnesses in earlier centuries.
A 1615 conveyance also recorded a messuage and garden near Loxwood chapel occupied by Abraham Willins. Earlier local records name Willins as the chaplain in 1575. Later property records associate the messuage and garden with the house now called Willetts. It was separate from Church Cottage, which contained the medieval oratory. The deed places an occupied house and garden beside the chapel when the new trustees took responsibility for the chapel property.
Brewhurst appears in the records during the same year under the spelling ‘Brewers’. The estate had contained a watermill since at least 1554. The surviving seventeenth-century deed sequence keeps the Myll or Mille family attached to the property. Water diverted from the River Lox drove the mill, while farmers brought grain along Brewhurst Lane and the surrounding tracks for grinding. The exact machinery seen at the mill in later centuries belongs to later rebuilding and should not be projected back into 1615.
The most direct royal intervention in a neighbouring industry also came in 1615. James issued a proclamation forbidding glassmakers to burn wood as furnace fuel. Glasshouses in the Surrey-Sussex Weald had depended on abundant woodland, and Alfold formed part of that glassmaking district. Glassmaking operated around Sidney Wood, just across the Surrey boundary. The prohibition struck at furnaces that consumed large quantities of timber and pushed glassmakers towards coal-fired production elsewhere.
The royal order did not remove every glass furnace from the Weald in a single day, and surviving evidence shows attempts to continue wood-fired production after the proclamation. It did, however, end the legal basis of the old woodland method. The order reached the Loxwood border through furnaces, woodcutters and the supply of fuel rather than through any ceremony at court. Wood that had been bought for glass competed with building timber, domestic fuel, fencing and the needs of other local trades.
Houses Rise along the Road through Loxwood
Several standing houses along the road through Loxwood contain timber, brickwork and hearths dated broadly to the opening decades of the seventeenth century. The dating is not precise enough to assign every alteration to one year, but the surviving work records builders enlarging older houses and erecting new dwellings beside the road between the river bridge and the chapel.
The long timber range now divided between Box Cottage and Ryley Cottage began with a two-bay house built around 1500. During the early seventeenth century builders added two further bays and inserted a central chimney. Hearths then served rooms on more than one floor. The alteration required carpenters to joint new framing into old work and masons or bricklayers to build the chimney through the house.
Near the river, the building later known as the Onslow Arms also contains timber framing dated broadly to about 1575-1625. Its first firm history as an alehouse belongs much later, so in James’s reign it should be described as a farmhouse or substantial house beside the bridge. Its position put it beside the road climbing north from the River Lox towards the settlement around the chapel.
Farther uphill, the timber-framed core now divided into Hilltop Cottage and Alameda is dated to the seventeenth century or earlier. That range is too broad to prove construction during James’s reign, and the later tradition that it was an inn is not firm enough to use as a Jacobean fact. The building belongs among the group of early houses that developed along the route, while its exact date remains open.
Around 1620 builders erected the timber-framed house later known as Garton House. It stood on rising ground below the old chapel centre. Later owners covered parts of the frame with brick and tile hanging, but the core belongs to the closing years of James’s reign. The new house gives the reign a physical endpoint in Loxwood: by the 1620s the road from the bridge to the chapel carried a growing sequence of timber-framed houses between older farms, gardens and fields.
Loxwood Place stood at the older centre of this settlement. Archaeology around the farmstead has found occupation from the thirteenth century, including medieval pottery, roof tile, post-holes and ironworking waste. A building appraisal also recorded a seventeenth-century barn containing reused medieval timbers.
The work consumed local materials. Oak frames needed mature trees and skilled carpenters. Smaller timber supplied floors, partitions and roof work. Clay could be turned into tiles and bricks; iron supplied hinges, nails and latches. Carts moved the heavier materials over the same roads that carried grain to the mill and parishioners to church. A new chimney or a pair of house bays was the finished result of woodland management, fuel, transport and paid craft work.
Work, Land and Parish Responsibility
The land around the houses supported most of the activity recorded in the deeds. Cokkes and Calletts Haw produced rent because someone occupied and worked them. Fletchings stood with land beside Brewhurst Lane. Brewhurst combined a house, farm buildings and watermill. Kirdford inventories list cattle, crops, tools and household goods. The exact balance varied from holding to holding, but the surviving records show agriculture, woodland and milling joined within a small area.
A watermill made the dependence between holdings visible. Grain grown on one farm had to be carried to the mill, ground and taken away as flour or meal. The miller needed a controlled flow of water, sound banks and sluices, a maintained wheel and gearing, and passable access for carts or packhorses. A flood, a damaged sluice or a blocked channel could interrupt work even when the harvest itself had been good.
Woodland supported another set of jobs. Large oaks supplied frames and heavy construction timber. Underwood supplied fuel, poles, fencing and charcoal. Ironworking increased demand for charcoal elsewhere in the Weald, while the glassmakers around Alfold had used wood until the 1615 prohibition. Pigs could also feed in woodland under rights and customs attached to particular holdings. Owners regulated felling and grazing because badly timed cutting or uncontrolled feeding could damage future income.
Markets and larger estates connected this work to places beyond the immediate villages. Horsham served as a major market and administrative centre in the northern Sussex Weald. Petworth drew business to the Percy estate. Guildford stood north of the Surrey boundary, and Billingshurst linked roads across western Sussex. The improved Arun navigation reached Pallingham in Wisborough Green parish, giving bulky goods a route towards Pulborough, Arundel and the coast.
Parish government also dealt with poverty. The Poor Law enacted at the end of Elizabeth’s reign required churchwardens and overseers to raise money for people unable to support themselves and to arrange work or help according to the law. Loxwood belonged to Wisborough Green parish, so the parish officers there carried those duties for Loxwood households. The chapel trustees handled a different fund: their rents paid for the chapel rather than the statutory poor rate.
No surviving James-period account used here lists the name of a Loxwood person receiving poor relief or gives a complete annual budget for the chapel. The jurisdiction is clear even where the individual payments are lost. A householder could pay rent under a private lease, contribute to a parish rate and appear in church records for worship or discipline within the same year, each obligation recorded by a different officer.
George Carleton, Alfold and the War in Europe, 1618-1621
By the late 1610s James faced a European crisis that involved his own daughter. Elizabeth had married Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in 1613. In 1619 Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia. His defeat the following year drove Frederick and Elizabeth into exile and turned the recovery of the Palatinate into a major question in English politics. Protestant supporters pressed James to act more forcefully while the king preferred negotiation for much of the crisis.
Chichester received a bishop with recent experience of an international Protestant assembly. George Carleton had served as one of James’s English delegates at the Synod of Dort in the Dutch Republic in 1618-1619. He became Bishop of Chichester in 1619. Carleton came to Chichester directly from debates that involved Reformed churches from several European states.
The same year Lancelot Andrewes became Bishop of Winchester. The boundary north of Loxwood now placed Carleton over Loxwood and Wisborough Green while Andrewes governed Alfold. Andrewes had earlier been Bishop of Chichester and had led one of the companies that produced the 1611 Bible. A farmer crossing from Loxwood into Alfold passed between two dioceses whose bishops had both taken part in major religious debates of James’s reign.
European war did not turn Loxwood into a battlefield. It did change the subjects of royal proclamations, sermons, parliamentary debates and taxation. News of James’s daughter and son-in-law circulated in print and from pulpits. If Parliament granted money for military action, county officers assessed and collected it. Sussex roads could carry men and supplies towards the Channel coast and the naval ports if policy turned from negotiation to war.
Parliament, the Spanish Match and the Last Years, 1621-1625
James summoned Parliament in 1621 after seven years without one. Members attacked monopolies, discussed the Palatinate and pressed the king over foreign policy. James defended his control of diplomacy and objected when the Commons claimed a broad right to debate affairs of state. The quarrel ended with dissolution, leaving the king short of the political agreement he needed for an expensive intervention in Europe.
At Loxwood, the long leases and buildings continued through this political argument. Thomas Gratwick’s twenty-one-year term over Cokkes and Calletts Haw had more than a decade to run. The trustee body renewed in 1615 held responsibility for chapel property. Garton House had recently been built. A parliamentary crisis could end a session in London within weeks; a local lease was written to survive several sessions and, in this case, the death of the king who reigned when it was sealed.
James spent much of the early 1620s trying to secure a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles. In 1623 Charles and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, travelled to Madrid in person. The negotiations failed. Public and parliamentary opinion moved towards a harder policy against Spain, and the Parliament of 1624 approved money for preparations that brought England closer to war.
War required practical resources. Ships needed timber, cordage, iron, food and money. Soldiers required arms, clothes, horses and transport. Sussex lay behind the Channel coast and on the routes towards Portsmouth and the south coast. County officers and justices organised assessments and musters when orders came from the Crown. The same horses and carts used for farms and markets could be requisitioned or hired for military transport when government demanded it.
The last years also exposed the limits of James’s attempt to govern through negotiation. He had kept England out of a major continental war for most of his reign, but the Palatinate crisis, the failed Spanish Match and Parliament’s hostility to Spain pushed policy towards conflict. Charles would inherit that change before he had settled his own relationship with Parliament.
James Dies and Charles I Succeeds, 1625
James I died at Theobalds in Hertfordshire on 27 March 1625. He had ruled Scotland since 1567 and England for twenty-two years. Charles succeeded him as Charles I. George Carleton was Bishop of Chichester, and Lancelot Andrewes governed Winchester on the other side of the diocesan boundary at Alfold.
The local documents crossed the royal death without needing to be rewritten. John Ireland’s 1612 lease had been granted for twenty-one years and extended well into Charles’s reign. The chapel property conveyed to the 1615 trustees also passed into the new reign under the same legal title. At Brewhurst the mill continued to use the River Lox; Fletchings stood beside Brewhurst Lane; the house later called the Onslow Arms stood by the bridge; Box and Ryley contained their early-seventeenth-century extension; and Garton House had joined the line of buildings along the road.
Charles inherited a kingdom divided over foreign policy, royal finance and the direction of the Church. He also inherited the King James Bible, the Prayer Book, bishops and parish government that had shaped worship under his father. At Loxwood, the trustees held rent-bearing land for St John the Baptist’s chapel, Wisborough Green remained the mother church, and farms and houses lined the roads around the older chapel settlement. Charles began his reign moving towards war with Spain and preparing to marry Henrietta Maria of France, while arguments with Parliament and over the direction of the Church were already sharpening.