Cowdray, Sussex
Historical Description
Cowdray, a ruined seat 1½ mile E of Midhurst in Sussex. The estate around it belonged to the Bohuns, went in the time of Henry VIII. to Sir David Owen, passed soon to Sir Anthony Browne, created Viscount Montague, and was sold in 1848 to the Earl of Egmont. The mansion was built about 1530 by the Earl of Southampton, visited in 1591 by Queen Elizabeth, occupied by all the seven Viscounts Montague, and destroyed by accidental fire in 1793. It was a quadrangular pile in pure Tudor, was furnished to the last in antique fashion, and had splendid decorations. The rooms of it, including a chapel, are ivy-clad, but show traces of architectural beauty and wall-painting. Cowdray Lodge, the cottage of the Earl of Egmont, is about a mile distant.
Maps
Online maps of Cowdray 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: