Adams Lane

The extract from the 1794 map shows what was then called Adams (Addams) Lane. The Adams family also gave their name to  Adams Corner  and Adams Grove in West End or Middlesex. Addams Lane linked what is now known as Coles lane  and Dudwell Lane in the East End tithing.  The modern Adams Grove is in what was the Middlesex tithing may have been where some of the Adams family lived. Earl Waldegrave was recorded as paying poor rates for the Middlesex part of the Adams estate  in the 1730s and 1740s but other records in the Hampshire archives refer to a ‘roofless estate called Adams’  in or near to the site of Chewton House which was then owned by the Kingsmills and in possession of the Yorke family. The Fillis or Redsheard properties are posibilities for what was the Adams house  mentined in the churchwarden accounts and poor book dated 1730 to 1769.

The early records  give no idea where the Adams estate was situated apart from sometimes it was in the Town tithing which suggests that Addams Lane lead to fields or strips farmed by the Adams family at one time. Although that puts Adams Lane and their possible home at different ends of the village, both locations are in easy walking distance of eachother. Farm houses were in the centre of the village when the medieval system of farms holding strips in common fields was in use and remnants of that system can still be seen in the 1794 map.