East Lavant is one part, which along with Mid Lavant make up the

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred ...

of Lavant in the

Chichester Chichester () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and civil parish in West Sussex, England.OS Explorer map 120: Chichester, South Harting and Selsey Scale: 1:25 000. Publisher:Ordnance Survey – Southampton B2 edition. Publi ...

district A district is a type of administrative division that, in some countries, is managed by the local government. Across the world, areas known as "districts" vary greatly in size, spanning regions or county, counties, several municipality, municipa ...

West Sussex West Sussex is a county in South East England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the shire districts of Adur, Arun, Chichester, Horsham, and Mid Sussex, and the boroughs of Crawley and Worthing. Covering an ...

, England. It lies just east of the A286 road north of

. It is in the

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authorit ...

of Lavant. East Lavant has a collection of historic cottages and a public house. The manor appears in Domesday as ''Loventone''.

History

East Lavant (''Loventone'') was listed in the

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manus ...

(1086) in the ancient

hundred 100 or one hundred (Roman numeral: C) is the natural number following 99 and preceding 101. In medieval contexts, it may be described as the short hundred or five score in order to differentiate the English and Germanic use of "hundred" to des ...

Singleton Singleton may refer to: Sciences, technology Mathematics * Singleton (mathematics), a set with exactly one element * Singleton field, used in conformal field theory Computing * Singleton pattern, a design pattern that allows only one instance ...

as having 26 households: 15 villagers and 11 smallholders; with ploughing land, meadows and a mill, it had a value to the lord of the manor, Ralph, Archbishop of Canterbury, of £18. In 1861, the population of the parish (with West Lavant) was 421, and the area was . The principal landowner was The Duke of Richmond; the third duke had acquired it in 1775.

St Mary's Church

St Mary's Church was founded in the 12th century. The North aisle was added in the 13th century - one of the columns separating the nave from the north aisle remains, the others are 19th-century. The lancet window is also original. The 15th century appears to have brought the five stalls with their

misericord A misericord (sometimes named mercy seat, like the biblical object) is a small wooden structure formed on the underside of a folding seat in a church which, when the seat is folded up, is intended to act as a shelf to support a person in a par ...

s. The south tower was constructed in 1671 and the south west window nave window was inserted at the same date. Most of the north aisle, the arcade between the nave and the north aisle, much of the nave and chancel seems to have been rebuilt in 1863. In 1628, an ecclesiastical case is preserved that relates to a game of

cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by str ...

being played at East Lavant on a Sunday. Two defendants, Edward Taylor and William Greentree, were charged with playing cricket at the time of evening service.McCann T (2004) ''Sussex Cricket in the Eighteenth Century'', pp.xxxiv–xxxvii. Sussex Record Society.

The Royal Oak

This restaurant is called "The Royal Oak". It was believed to be haunted by a lady in white who appears in a front upper floor bedroom. However, her son confirmed that it was an idea by the landlord's daughter Marjorie Pafford to attract more custom. In the 1940s it drew national attention due to the famous "Drinking Pig". A local farmer used to give one of his pigs, the runt of the litter, a drink of beer to build it up. A national paper heard the story and sent a reporter. Unfortunately the beer had worked and the pig had been slaughtered. The resourceful farmer merely found another pig and this appeared in the newspaper article. Thus a fine picture of the pig and the farmer appeared in the paper, with the landlord, James Pafford and his family standing proudly behind the bar.

References

External links

{{authority control Cricket in Sussex English cricket in the 14th to 17th centuries History of Sussex Villages in West Sussex