The Georgian Period

 

 

When the eighteenth century is considered in terms of the changing landscape of this country two things are apparent - first, the tremendous zest with which the landowners vied with one another in an endeavor to shape the landscape according to preconceived ideas of natural beauty: second, the revolution in agricultural methods and techniques which changed the shape of farms, fields and villages in many parts of England. Sussex had its full share of the first, though less of the second.

 

With the decline of the iron industry nature slowly reconstituted much of the oak forest and mixed woodland of the Weald. Towards the close of the seventeenth century this was helped forward by careful planting. As early as I664, John Evelyn of Wootton (near the Sussex border in Surrey) advocated in a policy of systematic reforestation: in fact, quick growing soft woods were often chosen to replace the indigenous woods.

 

At the close of the seventeenth century landscaping was limited to the immediate environs of the great houses - artificial mounts, long terraces, avenues and orchards. All this was merely an extension of the Tudor walled and formal gardens which separated the house from wild and uncontrolled nature. Stimulated by the park at Versailles, and its English reflection in the avenues and canals added to the royal palace at Hampton Court, this developed into an obsession with grandeur and size - with the planting of broader, and taller, and ever longer avenues, which cut across hill and dale, in many cases for several miles.

 

Few of these now remain in Sussex; the best example is perhaps the latest, the avenue at Stansted (1781), now crossed by the main road from Rowland's Castle to Emsworth, but still extending for two miles and providing a vista reaching to the Solent. These great avenues and vistas traversed the landscape but did nothing to mould it. The real triumph of the later eighteenth century was the development of landscaping on principles which followed, but at the same time organized and controlled, nature; and did both on the grand scale. Much of the Sussex landscape, not merely the remaining eighteenth century parks, owes its quality to this considered control, whether in the planting of trees, such as the clump on Chanctonbury or round Singleton, the many lakes, apparently natural but in fact artificial, or the siting of eighteenth-century farms and cottages.

 

Although all the great parks in Sussex, such as Cowdray, Arundel, Petworth, Goodwood, Sheffield, Hurstmonceux (to mention some which are open to the public), were reshaped in the eighteenth century under the influence of Capability Brown, in fact only four in the whole county were designed by him personally - Hills Place, near Horsham, Petworth, Ashburnham and Sheffield.

 

Hills Place and Park were destroyed to make way for agriculture early in the nineteenth century, while both Ashburnham and Sheffield have been considerably altered. Sheffield Park in June and early autumn provides, round its lakes and connecting bridges (designed by Brown), a magnificent sequence of exotic flowering trees and shrubs with rich coloring, but these are all plantings of the Victorian period or later, and have little relationship to Brown's conceptions, which were based on the modification rather than the remaking of existing features, and he almost invariably used trees and shrubs native to the locality. The peculiarly English quality of the best eighteenth-century landscaping was often destroyed by the search for the exotic and the unusual in the nineteenth.

This can be seen in one characteristic aspect of the period - the building of 'follies'. There is a world of difference between the elegance and practical usefulness of summer houses such as Carnes Seat in Goodwood park or the now ruined Nore Hill folly in Slindon Park and the quite useless and visually inappropriate structures such as the Sugar Loaf at Brightling built at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the local landowner

Jack Fuller to simulate the spire of a nonexistent church, or the narrow chimney like tower on Toat Hill above Pulborough.

Somewhere between these two worlds of rational sophisticated leisure and romantic make-believe are the ruined summer house towers in Racton Park and Up Park, dating from the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Toat Tower 1827

Although some of the leading figures in the agricultural developments of the eighteenth century were Sussex farmers and landowners, the Sussex landscape did not suffer the dramatic change by enclosure which transformed the Midlands during this period. In Sussex, enclosure had already taken place gradually and continuously from the time of the Black Death.

What Sussex did share with other counties, particularly East Anglia, was an intense interest in new techniques of land improvement which created an agricultural revolution, without which the expanding towns of the North could not have been fed and the industrial revolution would have been frustrated. The leadership came from the greater landowners, and in some cases from the larger yeoman farmers. The latter had increased in number steadily since Tudor and Stuart times at the expense of the smaller yeoman farmers, who had formed the core of the rural population in the seventeenth century and were the descendants of manorial tenants who had enclosed their holdings.

These, with an equivalent number of poor cottagers, and landless agricultural labourers depending on wages had formed the great bulk of the population; but by the mid-eighteenth century this class had shrunk considerably. Some had sunk into the growing class of landless labourers, while a smaller number by skill and energy had become large-scale farmers.

The Ellmans of Glynde are an excellent example of the latter. They had concentrated particularly on the improvement of the South Down breed of sheep, both in weight and in quality of fleece. By the end of the eighteenth century they had become famous and the South Down breed was known throughout the country. John Ellman, who died in 1832, still preserved an earlier tradition, housing his unmarried workers under his own roof, and dining with them at a common table, and providing them with cottage and stock on marriage--a nineteenth-century version of the patriarchal quality of the medieval manor, but with a totally different and more flexible economic basis.

Perhaps the best example in Sussex of the great landowner devoting himself whole-heartedly to the scientific development of agriculture is that of the third Lord Egremont, already referred to. The landowners by the possession of capital assets could promote large-scale schemes which were quite beyond the means of the wealthiest practising farmers. Lord Egremont financed the Rother navigation, the canal connecting Midhurst and Petworth with the Arun, in the hope of improving agriculture in the Rother area.

Arthur Young in 1813 wrote:

 

'By this most useful and spirited undertaking, many thousand acres of land are necessarily rendered more valuable to the proprietors. Timber is now sent by water. Large falls(fellings) have been exported which would scarcely have been felled ...an additional tract of country is also supplied with lime from the Houghton and Bury pits....'

 

The general prosperity of agriculture in Sussex during the eighteenth century is reflected in the number of elegant houses built in towns and villages, and of farmhouses and labourers' cottages in the surrounding countryside. These almost always display that simplicity combined with good taste which was characteristic of the period. They reveal a feeling for the right use of materials--whether brick, stone or flint-and a sense of balance and proportion in the design of window and door space, or in the placing of decorative details.

 

There is hardly a village without one or two good examples, while towns such as Lewes, Chichester and Arundel are probably richer than any other towns of similar size in Britain. In the towns, owners were often content to rebuild the facade only; behind these facades may be found, on examination, buildings which may date from any period from the fourteenth century onwards.

 

Apart from these many new comfortable houses, the most striking general change that would have struck any traveler in Sussex towards the close of the eighteenth century, if he could have remembered the early or even the middle years, would have been the general increase in the amount of ploughland, the size of many of the fields, the large areas now growing root crops, and the almost complete disappearance of fallow, made possible by more scientific crop rotation.

 

 

 

 

 

Top of Page       main page:  www.yeoldesussexpages.com