CIVIL AND DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE 



Under this heading are comprised not only the old houses ot every 

 degree, but the few ancient public buildings of secular character which 

 Sussex can boast, and of which some collective notice is required. The 

 remarks as to materials and construction found under the heading of Ecclesias- 

 tical Architecture have a general application to this section. The material 

 readiest to hand was used: oak timber and clay plaster (or 'wattle and daub') 

 for the lesser houses and cottages, except where flints, chalk, and sandstone 

 could be easily obtained. Horsham slabs were used for the ' healing ' of 

 roofs, equally with reed thatch, in Western Sussex. Tiles were mostly of later 

 introduction. Caen stone was a luxury reserved for the churches and a few 

 of the larger houses near the sea or the rivers. Bricks were strangely little 

 used, as compared with other counties. Down to the sixteenth century 

 window glass was seldom employed, except in the great houses. 



Sussex is fortunate in possessing a very early example of a manor-house, 

 now called Barton or Manor Farm, Nytimber, in Pagham parish. 1 This 

 rare survival has only lately been made known through some extensive 

 alterations having been carried out in the group of farm buildings in which 

 the primitive aula of the manor and a later chapel were buried. The tiny 

 aula was found to be a small rectangular building, lying north and south, 

 with walls 2 ft. 10 in. thick, and measuring internally 18 ft. roj in. by 

 1 7 ft. 6 in. The walls are built of water-worn pieces of milliolite limestone 

 from the Mixen rocks at Selsey Bill, used in their natural state and regularly 

 disposed in herring-bone work. It still retains a doorway in the north and 

 another in the south wall, and the latter opening has a circular arch, very 

 regularly built of neatly dressed and accurately gauged voussoirs, in a fresh- 

 water Chara Limestone, probably brought from the Isle of Wight. A few of 

 these stones appear in most of the old buildings in this district of south-west 

 Sussex (notably in such undisputed pre-Conquest churches as Bosham, 

 Singleton, Sompting, &c.), where their position and character give reasons 

 for supposing that they had been employed in yet older buildings. The fact 

 of the doorways being pierced straight through without a rebate suggests 

 possibly a pre-Conquest date. 2 The foundations of a larger building abutting 

 upon the northern end of this were lately uncovered, and at the same time 

 the remains of an early thirteenth-century chapel (46 ft. by 20 ft. 3 in. 

 internally), lying to the west, were disinterred from the farmhouse of which 

 they formed a part. 



At South Mailing, near Lewes, a wall of the manor-house belonging to 

 the archbishop of Canterbury, now a garden wall, remains, and is probably of 

 eleventh-century date. Old Erringham, a manor-house near Coombes and 



1 See the detailed account of this discovery, by the writer and Mr. H. L. F. Guermonprez, A.R.I. B.A., 

 inStus. Arch. Coll. xlvi, 14.5-54., where the possibility is discussed of this building actually dating from the 

 granting of Pagham to Wilfrid in A.D. 687. 



1 Cf. south door at Lyminster church and north door at Selham. 



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