West Flegg hundred: Ness

NESS

Is a common and general name for lands that project towards the sea, or any great water, and make a promontory: from the Saxon word Nass, or Ness, thus we find the island of Foulness in Essex; Sheerness in Kent, and East Ness, by Southwold in Suffolk.

At the survey Roger Bigot, ancestor to the Earls of Arundel and Sussex, was lord of it by the grant of the Confessor, a freeman being expelled, who had 15 acres, 2 oxen, an acre of meadow, and three parts of a salt work, valued at 16d. (fn. 1) Ailwin in the time of the Conqueror had seised on it, but Roger Bigot recovered it to his fee.

This afterwards was part of Winterton, and so remains, as I take it. William de Ness was petent, and Walter Cobbe, tenent, of 15 acres of land, in the 10th of Richard I. and Simon de Ness was one of the jury for the hundred in the 20th of Edward III.

At this Ness is a light-house, erected as it is said by Sir William Erskyn, Knt. and John Meldrum, Esq. and a difference arising between them and the coast-men, concerning the pay for the maintenance of it, it was laid before the council in June 1688.

Sir Edward Turner of Parndon Magna, in Essex, had a grant of this light-house and that of Orford Ness in Suffolk, with divers privileges, and one penny per ton for every vessel sailing by, at 20l. per ann. commencing at Lady-Day 1687; alderman Gore of London also had it before.

About January 15, 1665, the high tides washing down the cliffs here, there were found several vast bones, of which a leg-bone was brought to Yarmouth, weighing 57 pounds and 3 quarters, the length 3 feet 2 inches, which the physicians and surgeons there affirmed to be the leg-bone of a man: See the London Gazette, November 20, in 1665.