FERRING : AN OUTLINE HISTORY
By Ed Miller, Secretary Ferring History Group
Email: [email protected]
There are two main sources for Ferrings history:
archaeology and the written record. The archaeology is still being revealed,
as new housing and road developments yield artefacts and ancient disturbances
of the soil and subsoil: the written records are well-known to local
historians, except that every ten years a new decade of the census records is
opened up to reveal details of the people who lived in the village a hundred
years earlier.
The discovery of flint tools (and flint mines) on the Downs
shows that the Stone Age people lived close by but the earliest remains
found in Ferring itself are from the Bronze Age (approx. 1000 BC). There was a
Bronze Age community on Highdown Hill, and probably a trackway along the Rife,
where the hoard of palstaves or Bronze Age axe-heads were found in 1983. Next
came the Iron Age people, who built the hill fort at Highdown and left many
artefacts behind. The parish has many Roman sites too, including the remains
of a bath house (actually a few metres over the border into Angmering) and
several cremation-urn burials.
The Saxon Village
The village name is indisputably Saxon; the -ing termination
is widespread over Sussex (the land of the South Saxons), denoting people
of. This was the settlement of the people of a leader called Ferra. Ferras
people originally buried their dead on Highdown, close to the old hill fort;
the cemetery there has yielded great treasures (now in Worthing Museum) and
showed some bodies buried in pagan alignments and some clearly east-west
in the contemporary Christian style. By the 8th Century however,
they must have been living (and being buried) where the core of the village
now stands. In 765 we have the first written record the charter in which
Osmund grants his thegn Walhere land .. for the building of a monastery at
.. Ferryng. Then, in a charter dated 792, Ealdwulf donates to his bishop a
piece of woodland to support the church of St Andrew which is situated in
the territory which is called Ferryng.
The present Norman church was presumably built on the ruins
of that Saxon church, and Domesday Book records the Bishop (of Chichester) as
holding Ferring (Feringe) as his own demesne in 1086. It was
mainly arable land, but with some meadow and woodland, with grazing for pigs.
Part of the manor was held by Ansfrid (believed to be what was later
called East Ferring).
Yeomen and Churchmen
Ferrings documented history for the next 750 years is
nearly all taken from ecclesiastical records those of the Chichester
cathedral and the archdeacons and consistory courts, and, from 1558, the
Parish registers. The Bishop was the overall landlord (at least of West
Ferring) and let out the manor (and the manor house just south of the church)
to a succession of tenants and sub-tenants who farmed the land. These tenant
farmers were the yeomen whose leases, wills, probate inventories and
other transactions feature very strongly in the mediaeval and post-mediaeval
records. Among them were the Franklin family, first mentioned in a document of
1327, still here in 1655, who gave their name to Franklands Green. Other
notable names are in the lists of Vicars (from 1405) and Churchwardens (from
1607).
During the Civil War the manor was seized by Parliament,
says a Victorian history of Sussex, and sold to Anthony Stapley. It
passed back to the Bishop of Chichester at the Restoration and was leased to
the Westbrooke family; then, through marriage, the lease passed to the
Richardsons. There are 18th Century memorials to both families in
St Andrews Church, and 17th Century entries in the Parish
Register. The next few owners (among them Sir John Shelley, a relative of the
poet) did not live in Ferring, but William Henty, from Littlehampton, bought
the lease in 1785 and was living in the old manor house by 1790, and the
Hentys stayed until the 1920s. The rebuilt manor house (The Grange) then
became a school, later a hotel, and the land the family had acquired (by this
time three-quarters of the village) was sold for building plots.
Victorian Farming Community
All through this period the village remained a farming
community and the record of the villagers crops is shown in the tithes they
paid to the Vicar and to the Prebend at Chichester. Tithes were
originally paid as, literally, a tenth share of the crops and livestock but
were later taken as money and often paid to an intermediary who paid only a
proportion to the church. In 1836 the tithes were abolished in return for a
regular rent charge, based on yields in which was to be no longer dependent on
yield. This rental was assessed for each occupier of land and involved a very
comprehensive survey of the ownership, occupation, usage and value of every
piece of land in the country. The settlement for Ferring (1840) gives us a
complete inventory of land holdings and land use and is a vital link between
the ecclesiastical and manorial records of the earlier centuries and the
census returns and Ordnance Survey maps of the later 19th and 20th
century.
Analysis of these records (especially by Richard Standing in
The Great Tithe of 1836, and in unpublished work by Frank Leeson) shows
that two-thirds of the parish was arable land (wheat and other crops), just
under a quarter was meadow (for cattle and hay-making, mainly along the Rife)
and pasture (for sheep, mainly on Highdown); there were 40 acres of woodland
(to the north-east of Highdown, still there). Henty was already the main
land-owner (with half the parish, most of it let out to tenant farmers based
on Home Farm and Franklins). Other significant landowners were the Duke of
Norfolk (an eighth, behind Highdown), David Lyon (an eighth, mainly either
side of Sea Lane and linking up with Goring Hall), and William Richardson
(somewhat less, in the south-east corner, again linking up with land in
Goring).
This survey lays out the parish field by field, with its
crops, rental value, ownership and occupation. The 1841 census return
complements this very well by listing all the households, their ages,
birthplaces and occupations. Edwin Henty is there with a young family and five
servants. William Marshall, his principal tenant farmer, is there with his
wife baby daughter and seven servants . And so are all the agricultural
labourers (by far the most common occupation ) and a few craftsmen (shoemaker,
joiner, bricklayer etc) and their wives and children. Later censuses add more
details (relationship to head of household, name of cottage etc) and make it
possible to trace individual families through successive generations to the
1901 census and even the current telephone directory.
Modern Times
The population of Ferring remained at around 250 for nearly
all this period, and had probably been at that level for many centuries.
Little changed, in either the farming economy or the size of the population,
until the 1920s (although the hiring and firing practices of the farmers meant
that only a minority of the agricultural labourers and their families survived
from one census to another). At that time, better transport links and
increasing social mobility began to create a demand for homes (originally
holiday homes) on the south coast, and the last of the Henty landlords began
to sell off the farmlands for building plots. This development was well
underway by the outbreak of war in 1939, with much of the West Drive/Ferringham
Lane/South Drive area already covered with bungalows (and a few larger
houses), and the population up to 2000. In the 1950s building picked up again,
and the modern history of Ferring is very much that of property development
and efforts to contain it. One hopes that its population has stabilised at its
present level of just over 4000.
The northern half of the parish is now safely within the
proposed South Downs National Park: Highdown and the woods and fields
behind it are preserved pretty much as they have been for the last few
centuries. The village nucleus of the church and half a dozen thatched
cottages from the 17th and 18th Centuries is also well
preserved, and there are a dozen more cottages and farmhouses of this period
marking out what were the old hamlets of East Ferring, Hangleton and Franklins
Green. The foreshore is also evocative of the past no roadway or concrete
promenade, no flats, only the shifting shingle to remind us of the constant
battle with the sea - another theme in Ferrings long history.
[For a more substantial account, see: Ferring
Millennium History by Kath Worvell, and Ferring Past by
R Kerridge and M Standing both in Ferring Library.]
Copyright Ed Miller 2002 |
