[4] Cocking (Cochinges) was listed in the Domesday Book (1086) in the ancient hundred of Easebourne as having 32 households: 18 cottagers, eight smallholders and six slaves; with ploughing land, five mills and a church, it had a value to the lord of the manor of £15.

The school has Gothic-style windows and door arches, is faced in flint, and has a red-tiled roof and decorative barge-boards to the gables.

[10] To the north are a few traces of the Chorley Iron Foundry, which cast the waterwheels now at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum[11] and at the Coultershaw Beam Pump.

[18] A railway once used to serve the area at Cocking Station, on the Chichester to Midhurst line opened in 1881, but was completely closed from 1953.

A number of buildings in the village belong to the Cowdray Estate, distinguished by their external woodwork painted yellow.