NEWS RELEASES
Horsham's Lost Landscape Rediscovered!
29th May 2007
In 1812, notices were put up around the ancient market town of Horsham telling its inhabitants that the Common – a vast stretch of uncultivated land - was going to be enclosed. Although that was nearly 200 years ago, the reverberations of that momentous event, engineered through Parliament by Robert Hurst on the demand of The Duke of Norfolk, can be felt today. In a two year long study, Alan Siney has dramatically shown how the past has forced its way through the Victorian, Edwardian and post-war layers of history to reveal itself today in the highways and byways of Horsham. Now, thanks to the Friends of Horsham Museum, this painstaking research, re-discovering a lost landscape, has been published.
The Enclosure of the Commons is a highly emotive subject in history, condemned at the time and for many years later as robbing the poor of their livelihood. Historians, brought up on a diet of labour struggles, saw it as the rich stopping the poor from collecting firewood and feeding their animals on the rough grassland. But, as early as 1975, Jane Bowen disproved this in a hitherto unpublished account of the enclosure of Horsham Common. For over thirty years her account circulated around Horsham, available only to those who knew of its existence, but now it forms one of the four volumes that explores one of the most important documents and events in Horsham’s rich history.
Over the last twenty to thirty years, interest in local and family history has grown apace, with television recently picking up on this passion. For decades the enclosure of Horsham Common was seen as an important political and economic document, fascinating for those interested in the power politics of the Duke of Norfolk and Robert Hurst, as well as the development of Horsham. But now the enclosure and the detailed account of who lived where and got what can be seen as a Regency directory of names and places. This important and new resource for local and family historians has been fully explored and elaborated by Susan Djabri in her accompanying notes to the schedule and index of owners of property.
If an intricate re-drawing of the Enclosure award Map and a detailed account of owners and their property weren’t enough, the four volumes also contain extensive notes and transcriptions of some of the manuscripts held in Horsham Museum, the original source material for all this research.
The four volumes, which can be bought individually, are a must have for anyone at all interested in Horsham’s history, or those that live on the Common today. As that covered around one square mile of Horsham, it encompasses many people. If that isn’t sufficient reason to buy them, then perhaps the knowledge that all profits of the publication are going towards the care and acquisition of Horsham Museum’s collections will be an additional incentive.
The four volumes individually are for sale between £5 and £7.50 per volume or the set at £20 from Horsham Museum only.
For further information please contact Jeremy Knight, Curator.
Horsham Museum
9 Causeway, Horsham, West Sussex RH12 1HE
Tel: (01403) 254959 Fax: (01403) 282594
Email: museum@horsham.gov.uk
http://www.horshammuseum.org/