Amberley, Sussex

Historical Description

Amberley, a village and a parish in Sussex. The village stands on the river Arun, under the South Downs, 4¼ miles N by E of Arundel, and has a station on the L.B. & S.C.R., 55 miles from London. There is a post, money order, and telegraph office under Arundel. It is a quaint, old-fashioned, picturesque place. A palace at it, now used as a farmhouse, was a residence of the Bishops of Chichester, originating soon after the Conquest, castellated in 1379, forming a parallelogram, with square towers at the corners and round towers at the gateway, and seized and dismantled by Waller in 1643. The parish church is variously Norman and Early English, and has a fine Norman chancel arch, and a very rich Early English south door. The Wild Brook marsh adjacent is flooded in winter, but yields profusion of turf and cranberries in the summer. The river Arun runs through it, and contains here choice salmon peel, which have long been noted as Amberley trout. The parish includes also the hamlet of Eackham. Acreage, 1941; population, 525. The living is a vicarage, united with that of Houghton, in the diocese of Chichester; value, £420. Patron, the Bishop of Chichester. There is a Congregational chapel.

Administration

The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.

Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.

Civil Registration

For general information about Civil Registration (births, marriages and deaths) see the Civil Registration page.

Directories & Gazetteers

We have transcribed the entry for Amberley from the following:

• Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Amberley)

Maps

Online maps of Amberley are available from a number of sites:

• Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• Google Streetview.
• National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
• OpenStreetMap.
• old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
• Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)

Newspapers and Periodicals

The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Sussex newspapers online:

• Mid Sussex Times
• Chichester Express and West Sussex Journal
• Sussex Agricultural Express
• Hastings and St Leonards Observer
• Sussex Advertiser
• Brighton Gazette
• Bexhill-on-Sea Observer