Place:North Stoke, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

North Stoke is a village in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England. It is just over 2 miles (3 km) north of Arundel on the eastern edge of Arundel Park and 0.7 miles (1 km) south of Amberley railway station at the end of a no through road.

The village is on a spur of slightly higher ground on the east bank of a loop of the River Arun, surrounded by water meadows. It is in the middle of the gap eroded through the South Downs by the river.

North Stoke is a medieval village, recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. In the thousand years since, it has lost most of its population, possibly due to Black Death in the Middle Ages and because the landowner (the Duke of Norfolk) preferred to enclose his land for sheep pasture.

The church is a notable example of a Norman and Early English Gothic church, which is Listed Grade I, but has now been declared redundant and is maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust.

South Stoke on the west bank, another small parish, is about 0.5 miles (1 km) to the southeast and can be reached by a footpath and a footbridge over the river. It is noted that South Stoke is in the Arun District while North Stoke is in the Horsham District. Both parishes have populations of under 100 and in the UK census of 2011 were counted in with the parish of Houghton.

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 North Stoke
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the Poling Hundred.