780 years ago, Richard de Wych became Bishop of Chichester. Within a mere nine years of his death he became Saint Richard of Chichester, whose feast day is marked in the Church of England on the 16th June.
As the patron saint of Sussex, the date is now also used to mark Sussex Day, a day commemorating the historic county. Despite their focus on tradition, county days are for the most part a fairly new phenomenon, with Sussex Day having first been celebrated in 2007 at the instigation of Henry Smith during his time as Leader of West Sussex County Council.
The level of interest in Crawley has always seemed muted. We are, after all, a New Town built from three counties and yet it’s hard to ignore the level of interest in local history. You can see it in the number of followers of local history pages on Facebook and my blog posts about historical topics always tend to attract a significantly greater number of readers than those on politics. As Labour’s candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner recently suggested, maybe I should consider becoming a tour guide.
We live in a historic county the Romans once called home. At the time Crawley was being founded as a small Anglo-Saxon town, Sussex wasn’t merely a county, but a kingdom, the smallest of the heptarchy. It was here that Norman Britain began and which became the heart of Britain’s industry until deforestation saw it move North in search of new fuels.
The area found a role to play in British imperialism too, with many of the Quaker families which followed William Penn out to found the state of Pennsylvania coming from Sussex–to this day many of its settlements bear the names of Sussex towns–and it was from the Sussex coast that many prisoners set sail to their exile in Australia. For almost three hundred years, Brighton, our leading city, has been at the bleeding edge of fashion and culture, and the county as a whole has provided the country with leading artists, authors, academics and entertainers.
So, for all my love of New Town history and intense dislike of the county council, there is much in Sussex that is worth celebrating (and if you don’t want to wait another year to do it, the 27th July is Belloc Night celebrating the one of the county’s leading poets in much the same spirit as Burns Night).
Peter Lamb for Crawley 