[5][6] From 1536 The Swan was the coaching inn, and permitted a change of horses for the royal couriers of the King's Post en route from London to the coast, before the long climb up the South Downs at Bury Hill.

[10] The Swan on the north side of the Rother Navigation is a coaching inn with history possibly going as far back as the late 14th century.

The guild was created "to foster the noble Art and gentle and healthy Pastime of froth blowing amongst Gentlemen of-leisure and ex-Soldiers".

Lager beer was ineligible, The Swan rule book stating: "it is unseemly and should be avoided always excepting by Naval Officers visiting German Colonies.".

One of the Visitors' Books contains music and words to 'A Song to the River' by composer Sir Hubert Parry[14] visiting for a boating trip.

An area around Coates Castle has been designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest which contains the entire known remaining British population of the Field Cricket Gryllus campestris.

B. Simpson widely credited as the "inventor" of a method of harmonic tuning church bells, publishing two papers in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1895 and 1896.

Reginald Rex Vicat Cole (1870–1940) was an English landscape painter, and founded a School of Painting together with Byam Shaw.

Author Hugo Donnelly spent a year in Fittleworth in the 1960s as a young waiter at The Swan and his writings are included in the anthology Sussex Seams.

[24] Donnelly also refers to the Explorer lending him the book Some West Sussex Superstitions Lingering in 1868 collected by Charlotte Latham from the cottage-people of Fittleworth while she lived at the Old Rectory of St. Mary's Church.

As late as 1860 there are sincere accounts of an 'audaciously large' dragon which would rush out of its lair in Fittleworth woods 'with a terrible hissing', to terrorise passing cottage-people.

Hilaire Belloc mentions Fittleworth 'where the Inn has painted panels' in his thoughts of Sussex, within one of his best known works The Path to Rome (1902).