Place:Hardham, Sussex, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Hardham is a small village in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England. It is on the A29 road 1.2 miles (2 km) southwest of Pulborough. Since 1933 it has been part of the civil parish of Coldwaltham.

The village is on the line of the Stane Street Roman road, which changes direction here, leaving the modern A29 road which has followed it from Capel, to head southwest to Bignor and Chichester.

The Church of England parish church or St Botolph has some of the oldest surviving wall paintings in the country, including an image of Saint George at the Siege of Antioch in AD 1097.

On higher ground on the south side of the village are the remains of Hardham Priory, the Priory of St. Cross, which was an Augustinian monastery established in the middle of the 13th century.

In the late 18th century a canal tunnel was built on the Arun Navigation to avoid a large loop of the River Arun. The railway line from Pulborough to Midhurst passed over the tunnel, and when the canal closed the railway company broke into the tunnel and filled that part of it under the rails with chalk.

Research Tips

• The West Sussex Record Office is located in Chichester. Because it holds the records of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester, which covers the whole of Sussex, it has church records relating to both parts of Sussex.
• An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the West Sussex Record Office is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• West Sussex Past - database of 2 million records from West Sussex heritage organizations.
• The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies' Sussex Collection (PDF). This is a 9-page PDF naming the files relating to Sussex in their collection-a possible first step in a course of research.
• The National Library of Scotland has a website which provides maps taken from the Ordnance Survey England & Wales One-Inch to the Mile series of 1892-1908 as well as equivalent maps for Scotland itself. The immediate presentation is a "help" screen and a place selection screen prompting the entry of a location down to town, village or parish level. These screens can be removed by a click of the "X". The map is very clear and shows parish and county boundaries and many large buildings and estates that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Magnification can be adjusted and an "overlay feature" allows inspection of the area today along with that of 1900. The specific map from the series can be viewed as a whole ("View this map") and this allows the inspection of the map legend (found in the left hand bottom corner. Becoming familiar with the various facilities of these maps is well worth the trouble.

• GENUKI on Hardham
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the Bury Hundred.
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for Thakeham Rural District.