This tendency of lands to remain in the same hands till the close of the Middle Ages, and then to be bought up by a new race of squires, may be traced in many another parish. There is Graffham, which does not change hands until after the Armada, when a certain Garter of London buys it; it then passes by the marriage of an heiress to the first of the Sargeants; an heiress of the Sargeants after many generations marries the man who was afterwards Cardinal Manning; another heiress (by this time the family held Lavington close by) marries Wilberforce, the bishop, and, right in our own time, his son sells it to a Scotch distiller.
Or consider again Madehurst which, until the reign of Elizabeth, holds of the Arundel earls; then one Dixse has it in fee; then it passes to the Kemps, and they sell it to Sir George Thomas (whose family sold it again), after which it passes by a second sale in 1825 to John Smith; and at last we see it in the middle and end of the nineteenth century in the hands of a manufacturing family who had chosen to assume the ancient name of Fletcher.
Eartham (to quote another example) went to King Henry VIII. in exchange for Michelham Priory; in the middle of the eighteenth century a Chichester man bought it, one Hayley; a generation later, Huskisson, the politician; then the Milbankes; and then again, quite recently, a man whose name is connected with a custard powder.
Singleton went down traditionally until the Reformation; nay, till that year after the Armada, when Graffham also had slipped; then, in 1589, it changes hands, passing from a noble to a squire. It remained in his family till the beginning of the eighteenth century; it is sold and re-sold, passing from hand to hand. Within present memory first a squire, and then a northern Quaker, and at last a wealthy racing family have held it, one after the other.
As might be imagined, the Church lands, their lineage abruptly torn apart at the Reformation, suffered fates even more revolutionary, and produced a squirearchy even more tenacious by its
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wealth, and even less attached by tradition to the county of Sussex. Thus Newtimber, which had come down from Doomsday, is seized by Thomas Cromwell. The King chucks it to Anne of Cleves; then you find a Darrell in possession; then a Bellingham (holding of Lord Abergavenney in the sixteenth year of Charles I.) It is left to one Woodcock, whose daughter, after the Restoration, marries a Cust; and then, following the universal fate, it is sold to a yeoman of Poynings, one Osborne, whose grandson in 1741 sells it to a Newnham, whose grandson, again, early in the last century, sells it to a Gordon, etc.