Wisborough Green

Introduction

Wisborough Green looks like a compact Sussex village gathered around a broad green, yet for centuries it governed a territory almost twice the size of the modern civil parish. The historic parish covered about 8,592 acres and stretched from the Arun valley in the south to Loxwood and the Surrey boundary in the north. Farms, woods, commons and small roadside settlements lay several miles from the church while still sharing the same system of worship, poor relief, highways and local government.

The green and the parish church of St Peter ad Vincula supplied the common centre. Roads approached from Petworth, Billingshurst, Kirdford, Loxwood and the river country around Pallingham. Fairs, inns, shops, the school and the workhouse gradually gathered beside these routes. The village therefore grew as the meeting place of a scattered community rather than as the centre of one compact manor.

The old parish contained districts with distinct characters. Drungewick and Malham lay towards the north-east; Newpound and Roundstreet Common followed the road towards Loxwood; Harsfold, Shipbourne, Orfold, Pallingham and Newbridge occupied the agricultural and river corridor; Bedham and Strood Green belonged to the wooded western edge. Loxwood became the strongest secondary settlement and eventually formed its own ecclesiastical and civil parish.

The church, fair and green created a centre

The oldest surviving masonry in St Peter ad Vincula dates from around the late eleventh or early twelfth century. The church stood on raised ground above wet meadows, where the name Wisborough probably combined an Old English word for marshy meadow with a word for a hill or ridge. Its position was practical as well as symbolic: the building could be reached from the surrounding farms and could be seen across the open land.

Two records from 1227 show the centre taking clearer form. Wisborough became a separate prebend of Chichester Cathedral, linking the parish directly with the cathedral chapter, and Henry III granted a weekly Thursday market and an annual fair around the feast of St Peter ad Vincula. Worship and trade therefore met beside the same green.

For medieval parishioners the church organised far more than Sunday attendance. It marked baptism, marriage, churching, sickness, burial and the festivals of the Christian year. Bells announced services, feast days and emergencies. Inside were painted images, subsidiary altars, a rood and screen, lights and memorials. The surviving thirteenth-century wall paintings preserve part of this richly furnished interior.

The annual fair outlived the medieval market. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries residents still remembered livestock and pig sales spreading between the Three Crowns and the Cricketers Arms. The green also became the setting for cricket, celebrations, public meetings and remembrance, retaining the communal role first established by church and fair.

Bishops, chapels and a long journey to worship

Distance shaped religious life across the old parish. Travelling to Wisborough Green from the northern farms meant several miles along clay tracks that became deep and difficult in winter. In 1404 the villagers of Loxwood, along with the vicar of Wisborough Green petitioned Lord Bishop Robert Rede, Bishop of Chichester, for permission to build an oratory where Mass and other services could be celebrated. Permission was given and the the grant reserved burial to the church at Wisborough Green while bringing regular worship closer to the hamlet. A later chapel of ease served Loxwood for centuries.

Lord Bishop Rede knew the district well. At Drungewick the Bishops of Chichester held a moated estate, chapel and provisioning centre. From the thirteenth century the manor supplied livestock and produce to the episcopal household. Bishops stayed there, conducted business and held ordinations. In the early fifteenth century Lord Bishop Robert Rede repeatedly used Drungewick as an active centre of diocesan administration.

These connections placed Wisborough Green within a wider ecclesiastical landscape. The parish church, the cathedral prebend, Drungewick and the Loxwood chapel of ease linked an isolated Wealden community with the government of the Diocese of Chichester.

Fields, woods and water provided the work

Agriculture remained the foundation of the parish economy. The heavy Wealden clay suited a mixed system of arable, pasture, meadow and woodland. Farms kept cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry while producing grain, hay, milk, fruit and timber. Families, servants and hired labourers worked together, and many households combined farming with a trade.

Woodland supplied fuel and raw material. Medieval glassmakers worked around Malham, using sand, ash and great quantities of wood. Ironworking later developed at Pallingham, where an Elizabethan furnace stood beside the Arun. Charcoal burners, sawyers, carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths and other craftsmen drew their living from the same landscape.

Water gave power and transport. Streams served mills, ponds and meadow drainage, while the Arun connected the southern farms with wider markets. Pallingham became the effective head of navigation. The 1785 Act improved the river from Houghton Bridge to Pallingham Wharf and extended navigation towards Newbridge. The Wey and Arun Junction Canal, opened in 1816, carried the inland waterway north through the parish before declining after the arrival of the railway.

The railway reached the district in the 1850s but passed to the east, with stations at Billingshurst and Pulborough. Wisborough Green remained a road village, relying on carriers, carts and later motor transport to connect farms, shops and households with those stations and market towns.

The censuses reveal a working village

From 1841 the censuses named the residents of farms, cottages, inns and village institutions. Agricultural labourers formed the largest group, joined by farmers, domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, millers, shopkeepers, teachers, publicans, carriers and parish officers. The records show large farming households in which children, servants and labourers shared the same property, as well as small cottages occupied by families dependent on seasonal work.

The parish workhouse stood near the green. It expressed the local responsibility for poor relief before the creation of the larger union system. The building later acquired several community uses and its oldest range became the village hall in 1955. Wisborough Green School gave the parish a permanent educational centre during the nineteenth century, while the church, inns and meeting rooms supported clubs, concerts, reading, sport and parish business.

Crime and policing also began as local responsibilities. The Wisborough Prosecution Society was founded in 1792 at the Three Crowns. Subscribers created a fund for rewards and legal costs when property was stolen or members were assaulted. Its records describe cases involving timber, livestock, tools, clothing and itinerant suspects, revealing both the vulnerability and the close organisation of a rural community before a professional county police force.

New boundaries, war and modern village life

Loxwood’s growing population and institutions gradually changed the old parish. It became a separate ecclesiastical district in 1873 and a separate civil parish in 1938. The modern Wisborough Green parish consequently covers about 4,340 acres, roughly half the former territory. Newpound remained with Wisborough Green, while Drungewick, Brewhurst and much of Roundstreet Common entered Loxwood.

The two world wars brought national events directly into the village. Residents served overseas, agriculture adapted to labour shortages and women worked on surrounding farms. During the Second World War Canadian troops were stationed locally. Men of the 2nd Canadian Division left the district for the Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942, where heavy losses gave the village a lasting connection with Canada. Memorials at the church and on the green preserve both local names and the Canadian association.

After 1945 tractors, milking machinery, improved roads, telephones, electricity, water and sewerage altered daily life. Farms required fewer workers, former agricultural buildings gained new uses and housing expanded around the centre. Restoration of the Wey and Arun Canal from 1970 gave the old transport route a new purpose in conservation and recreation.

The old parish remains visible

Modern Wisborough Green contains a population similar in scale to that of the much larger nineteenth-century parish, so more people now live within a smaller and more concentrated settlement. Even so, the older geography remains clear.

The church tower and green still mark the shared centre. The Three Crowns and Cricketers Arms recall the road, fair and meeting culture of the village. Farm names such as Malham, Harsfold, Shipbourne, Orfold and Pallingham preserve the districts of the old parish. Moats at Drungewick and Pallingham, waterways at Newbridge, the canal, old mill sites, woodland lanes and boundary settlements show how land, faith, industry and transport developed together.

Wisborough Green became a village because a wide rural parish needed a centre. The church, fair and green brought scattered households together; farms and woods supplied their work; roads and waterways connected them with the wider county. The modern village is the concentrated heir of that much larger community.

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