History
The Romans built the London to Lewes Way across what is now the garden of Waystrode Manor. The first owners of the manor received it from King John in 1208. Crippenden Manor, built in about 1607, was once the home of another ironmaster, Richard Tichbourne.
The village appears as Cudena in Textus Roffensis.
In 1649 Robert Tichborne petitioned the House of Commons in favour of the execution of Charles I. He was one of the Commissioners who, in 1651, prepared the way for the union with Scotland and he was knighted in 1655 by Cromwell and made a peer in 1657. After the Restoration he was arrested and sentenced to death, but he was reprieved, imprisoned in Dover Castle and died, in 1682, in the Tower of London. The family, however, did not die out in Cowden until 1708, when John Tichbourne was buried there.
This is old Wealden iron country, recalled by the cast iron memorial slab in the church, to John Bottinge, dated 1622. This was a time when the area was producing guns for the Army and navy, as well as domestic and agricultural ware. Cowden had its own blast furnace from 1573 until sometime in the 18th century. The rumoured second 'upper' Cowden Furnace is now know to have been Scarlets Furnace nearby in East Sussex.
Read more about this topic: Cowden
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)