Cowfold

Book excerpt: Cowfold: the history of a Sussex village is a detailed account of the over 780 year life of the village, from very earliest times to the present day. Equally it is the story of the people who have lived in and around the village and have made it what it is today. Cowfold village has never been the subject of startling or momentous historical events. Rather it is a typical Sussex village where life has followed a well-defined, familiar and easy pattern over the centuries of its existence; that is the village’s charm and its legacy. This book records Cowfold’s history through pictures, photographs, and the charming memories of a number of those who have witnessed, as school children and adults, the changes to village life over the last 90 years. It chronicles the development of the village from a small settlement in a clearing in surrounding dense woodland (the origin of the name “Cowfold”), through the emerging village growing up around its Church and heavily influenced by the surrounding farms and nearby manors, to the self-sustaining community of the 19th and early to mid-20th century, and to the diverse and thriving village of today. This book is a tribute to, and legacy of, that development and those people, past and present.