In 1860, the Barkerville Sentinel newspaper reported that a new community called Vancouver had sprung up on the Canadian west coast.
The settlement would never amount to much, the Sentinel suggested, because it was too far from Barkerville.
The British Columbian city of Vancouver is today a flourishing major port, its population 700,000.The last resident of Barkerville died in 1957, leaving a once thriving community of 10,000 gold rush people a ghost town.
Barkerville lost its population when the gold ran out, today it has been reinvented and echoes to the sound of an old western piano and has chorus girl shows. Modern day tourists can now safely walk its 1860 style streets.
This Heritage town has been reinvigorated by the BC government to show people its colourful past by reproducing life there as it was in its heyday during the goldrush era.
No such good fortune for the East Sussex ghost village of Hamsey, which lies about 3 miles upstream from Lewes on the River Ouse.
The actual Saxon village has now totally disappeared, nothing but a 12th century church remains, standing in splendid isolation a half mile from the existing hamlet.
Hamsey does go one better than Barkerville, in one respect. It still has a population. The numbers aren’t precise, because Hamsey belongs to a wider parish. There are now but a handful of buildings and less than a handful of residents.
Yet as a Saxon port in the 10th century, when King Athelstan held his court there around 925, the village had over a thousand people. It was flourishing and, if it had had a newspaper back then, could justifiably have had articles reporting that Lewes would never amount to much, as it was too far from Hamsey.
Indeed, as Lewes was growing at the time of the Norman Conquest, Hamsey was flourished too. But times were perilous in medieval Britain and soon tragedy struck.
The village is ‘Hame’ in the Domesday Book In 1242, it became the property of a man called William de Say, who later added the family name to it, making Hamsey.
The Black Death, which killed half the population of England, first hit Lewes in 1389 and from there spread rapidly to Hamsey.
According to legend, the villagers, either from a sense of duty to their fellow man, or because they had nowhere to hide, barricaded themselves into their commune using spiky blackthorn hedges, keeping the infected inside the barricade and the healthy outside. Sadly, denied food, the villagers slowly died of starvation.
Those who were fortunate enough to have been outside the blackthorn thicket at the time, watched as their friends and relatives suffered an agonising death, then rebuilt the village about a mile away, naming it Off Ham, or as it is now called Offham, (Oaf-ham). In 2018, this village is a small but flourishing community with an attractive church, a successful pub, a farm shop and numerous farms and houses.
Apart from its strange beginnings, Offham also goes down in history as being the nearest village to the Battle of Lewes, fought in 1264 between Henry III and the Barons who were led by Simon De Montfort.
After the plague and starvation killed off its residents, Hamsey withered on the vine, although its leading family remained heavily involved in politics.
Edward Lewknor was thrown into the Tower of London and died there for taking part in a rebellion against Queen Mary in 1556.
Walking through the village’s single street, which hasn’t much architecture to commend it, the spirits of dead heroes and heroines linger along the river bank and whisper from the small tributary streams that gird the hamlet.
Hamsey however, refuses to lie down and be forgotten despite its devastating past.
A candlelit carol service is held in the ancient church every year, and once a month Evensong is celebrated within its time-worn walls.
The Parish named after it is quite expansive with several other thriving villages and hamlets listed. But so far did Hamsey’s fortunes fall that the Victorians planned to knock the church down. Luckily, they never got around to it,
All the signs are that Hamsey, if it had not been struck by the plague, would have had a prosperous future.
The Lord of the Manor built a grand new manor house in 1321.
There is nothing remaining of the building and indeed it was probably never completed. But until 1771, the foundations were plain to see, and its grandeur can be imagined from the extant contracts drawn up at the time.
As noted, the village and church were listed in the Domesday Book of 1086, and by the measurements used in that first ever audit of the nation, it was substantial.
The River Ouse has changed its course slightly, as waterways tend to do. Hamsey would no longer be a port if such plans were thought up today. The region is subject to flooding and that would have caused problems for any inhabitants as well as stymying its ability to benefit from regular river traffic.
Walk again down the short, winding street and savour the spirit of medieval Britain as it was in Hamsey.
Hey Ho, who’s that coming around the corner? A gang of tired, grimy miners lugging their picks and shovels?
Those ghosts get everywhere. But perhaps the miners who are now celebrated in Barkerville, British Columbia want to see a reconstruction of the golden days of Hamsey.
But better leave dead souls lie.
The village, as it is, is a memorial to brave villagers and a pointer to what might have been if events of history had treated it more kindly back in medieval times
The Ghost Village where King Athelstan once held his Court