Would you like to read an engaging, informative well-written account of Sussex and Chichester? If so, I strongly recommend The Rising Down (2024), by Professor Alexandra Harris – possibly the most significant contribution to the history of Sussex in the past decade, even this century.
The geographical span of the book, centred on the Arun valley, extends west to Chichester north to Pulborough east to Storrington and south to Arundel and the coast.
The text is a delight, informed by a narrative infused with humour, surprise and a generosity that is caught by its subtitle ‘Lives in a Sussex Landscape’. Alexandra’s purpose is to recover the voices of those who have lived and reflected on Sussex downlands.
She takes the reader on a downland walk; sharing parts of her biography, informed by her academic discipline in literary criticism and ever attentive to ‘the discovery of local truth’. Listening for the voices of those who stood in wonder at the beauty of Sussex. Among them are those who wanted comfort from their memories of the Sussex Downs as they fought in France during World War One, agents of the French resistance finding solace in Sutton, those who sought consolation as emigrants to Canada in the 1830s. She places the dislocation of emigration in context; agricultural depressions, wheat prices, Swing Riots, the demands for poor relief. There was considerable migration taking place across Britain, ‘thousands moving from rural to urban employment, and yet Sussex labourers and gentry farmers travelled 3,500 miles to Ontario rather than try Birmingham, or Derby or Sheffield’ (p. 272).
Imagination is a feature in all narrative history, that which is exercised in The Rising Down is grounded in an extensive range of original sources.
An innovative and fascinating chapter offers a reprise of one of the classics of local history published in the early 18th century, Richard Gough’s ‘Observations Concerning the Seates in Myddle and the Familyes to which They Belong. For Alexandra this is St. Leonard in South Stoke during the period in office of John Sefton, Rector from 1662 to 1675. His congregation is recreated from parish records, and we get to meet, for example, Robert Randall, the warrener and his wife Alice and get a glimpse of a life in this remote parish, ’downstairs a pair of ferrets and eighteen rabbits three days dead.’ (p. 76)
The landscape is populated, its shape and form made alive through the narrative that Harris has skilfully woven. We meet the Bartelots in Stopham and gain an understanding of the tasks facing William, water bailiff to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and the significance of swan-upping. There is the bargemaster of Petworth, John Doick, an ancestor of the current Rector of St. Paul’s Chichester. Then there is the ‘absurd, ingenious, irrepressible’ (p. 100) Richard Haines, a member of the Baptist congregation at Southwater near Horsham but resident of West Wantley house in Sullington. He dreamt of ending poverty through the invention of spinning machines in 1678 such ‘that a child three or four years of age may do as much as a child of seven or eight years old’ (p.105). This was in Sussex almost a century before Richard Arkwright.
Many CLHS members will be interested in an extension to the Henty story, not the bankers nor brewers nor those who lived in Oaklands Park house, but the branch that went to Australia. They sailed on the Caroline in June 1829 with a flock of merino sheep bound for the Swan River, Freemantle with mixed fortune and eventually a precious relic from St. Andrew’s Church Tarring.
She tells the story of the poet, William Collins and stimulates thoughts on the nature of commemoration. She notes that it is easy to call Collins a ‘Chichester poet’ but questions what that might mean. William was born in the city and spent his last years living with his sister and her husband in The Vicars’ Close; but his poetry is not about Chichester. His father, also William, was Mayor of Chichester in 1714 and again in 1721, and his family (including William junior) is commemorated on a memorial on the south wall of the Oxmarket Art Gallery. William (junior) is also commemorated by a plaque on the Halifax Building Society in East Street and by a memorial by John Flaxman in the baptistry under the south-west tower of the Cathedral. There is no doubt that William Collins (junior) was a Cisestrian. I note a contrast between William Collins and John Keats, the latter was not as Cicestrian, nor a poet of Chichester but has a statue in Eastgate Square and a street named after him. Keats stayed in Chichester from Wednesday 20 January 1819 until Saturday – three nights.
The Rising Down is a book that can be read as a novel, it is engaging, fascinating and stimulating; a book to read, a book to receive as a gift, a book for you to give to others to share your delight in living where we do.
Philip Robinson