Place:Billingshurst, 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

Billingshurst is a village and civil parish in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England. The village lies on the A29 road (the Roman Stane Street) at its crossroads with the A272, 6 miles (10 km) southwest of the town of Horsham and 5.5 miles (9 km) northeast of Pulborough. The parish includes the hamlet of Adversane which is redirected here.

The civil parish has a land area of 7,952 acres (3,218 hectares) and at the 2001 UK Census had 2,677 households and a population of 6,531 people. This had increased to 8,232 at the 2011 Census.

Billingshurst has four churches. St Mary's Church (Church of England) is the oldest. Billingshurst Unitarian Chapel, set back behind the High Street, was founded in 1754 and is one of southeast England's oldest Nonconformist places of worship. Other churches are St Gabriel's Church (Catholic), Billingshurst Family Church (Evangelical) and Trinity Church (United Reformed).

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"BILLINGSHURST, a village, a parish, and a [registration] subdistrict in Petworth [registration] district, Sussex. The village stands on the Roman Stane-street, adjacent to the Mid-Sussex railway, near the Arun and Wye canal, 7 miles SW of Horsham; and has a station on the railway, a post office‡ under Horsham, and fairs on Whit-Monday and 8 Nov. It probably got its name from being a settlement of the great Saxon tribe of Billing.

"The parish is divided into East and West Billingshurst. Acres: 6,758. Real property: £6,234. Population: 1,495. Houses: 296. The property is much subdivided. Gratwick House is the seat of R. Bascoby, Esq. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Chichester. Value: £170. Patron: Sir --- Goring, Bart. The south side of the church is very early Norman; the rest, chiefly perpendicular English. There are two dissenting chapels, a national school, and charities £7."

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 Billingshurst
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the West Easwrith Hundred.
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for Horsham Rural District.