Liss (previously spelt Lys or Lyss) is a village and civil parish in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, 3.3 miles (5.3 km) north-east of Petersfield, on the A3 road, on the West Sussex border. It covers 3,567 acres (14 km2) of semi-rural countryside in the South Downs National Park. Liss railway station is on the Portsmouth Direct Line. The village comprises an old village at West Liss and a modern village round the 19th-century station. They are divided by the River Rother. Suburbs later spread towards Liss Forest.
Heritage
Prehistory
Flint spearheads, arrowheads, scrapers, flakes and cores dating from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic times have been found.
Evidence of Neolithic activity is present in axe heads and flint implements. An Irish decorated axe and two bracelets engraved with parallel lines and chevrons have been found, and there are plentiful Bronze Age features on the chalk hangers above the village and at Berry Grove, the Wylds and at Peacewood, Farther Common. There was settlement in the Rother Valley by the Bronze Age. Bowl barrows and other Bronze Age features exist at Berry Grove (bowl barrow located in the garden, 12 m in diameter and 1.5 m high, with two large oaks growing on it), the Wylds (bowl barrow 23.0 m in diameter, and 2.0 m high, surrounded by a tree ring of dry stone walling planted with fir trees; traces of human and animal hair were found in a tree trunk coffin burial), and at Peacewood, Farther Common (an almost circular enclosure on a slight northern slope, containing trees).
Roman archaeology
There is evidence of Roman settlement in Liss.
Saxons
No direct evidence of habitation or Anglo-Saxon architecture exists in the current Liss village area, and the early Saxon period is also slightly represented archaeologically in the whole area of East Hampshire. It seems unlikely that there was any major community on the site of the original or the current villages.
However, the comparative remoteness was useful when in the late Saxon at 900 Alfred the Great created an Abbey at Lyss Place under the control of St. Mary's Abbey at Winchester as a retreat for nuns.
In the time of Edward the Confessor (1042–1066), the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king, there was a mill in operation at Liss paying an annual rent.
Local historians indicate their belief that St Peter's Church has Saxon footings, and that the remaining plan reflects an earlier Saxon Church on the site. However, Taylor and Taylor do not list St Stephen's and no fabric is evident. Hopefully future opportunities for specialist archaeological work will clarify the order of construction.
Norman period
The earliest written mention of Liss (as Lyss or Lis) may be that found in the 1086 Domesday book in the Hundred of Meonstoke.
At the time of the Domesday Survey, the manor of Liss might have formed part of the original endowment of the Abbey of St. Mary at Winchester. The manor was later known as Liss Abbess, and the Abbess and nuns of Winchester kept the land until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1538.
The earliest wooden church is normally regarded as one of the two churches mentioned as being held by two priests of the manor of Odiham in Domesday Book. It would have been deeded by King Stephen, with the churches of Bentworth and Odiham for the master of the Choristers' School of Salisbury and the chancellor of the cathedral.
13th century on
The village centre in what is now West Liss around Church Street and the nearby triangular patch of ground, the Plestor (derived from 'playstow', or playground – see Plestor House). The Village Stocks were sited here, near an ancient oak which, now entirely hollow, remains in front of the current Spread Eagle Inn.
Liss developed economically in the three centuries following Domesday although being of limited significance politically or economically other than in relation to the monastic establishment at Lyss Place. Part of Liss Place Farm, West Liss. dates from the 14th century with an addition of 19th-century date, and a prosperous farming community can reasonably be assumed. Farms existed throughout the parish. To the East, timber-framed houses and farms were constructed in the 17th and 18th centuries.
A traditional fair was held in May in the field between the Spread Eagle Inn and Church Street, opposite the glebe meadow where Liss Cricket Club now plays.