of Oxford, who copy what they see written in the popular histories. The Weald was never an impenetrable forest; no Northern European forests are. It was not cut by great lines of marsh, which are the chief obstacle to men under primitive conditions. It was not even dense, as are some of the English forests, for example the beech forests of the Downs. Those pieces of the Weald which have been left uncultivated, and which remain to-day almost in their original state, show us clearly what the whole district once was. It was simply a vague, long belt which it did not pay to cultivate in early times. Small, strong oak-trees stood in it, never very close together. Here and there on sandy wastes and heaths were furze and ferns. The clay did, indeed, give rise to many pools, stagnant meres, and sodden patches of soil. But there could never have been great difficulty in getting across it northwards, nor any lack of forest tracks from one side to the other, nor any great prevalence of dense thickets in which enemies could hide. Its chief character as a barrier was that of loneliness. For some sixteen or twenty miles, for a full day’s march that is, you had a chance in the early centuries as you went across the Weald of not meeting a man, and this old character is still remembered by any one who walks along the Stane Street from Five Oaks Green to Ockley. But you certainly could not have gone five miles without seeing some evidence of man’s activities—a road, a wall, a well, a felled tree, or a cast weapon. The Weald was, therefore, never a military obstacle, and to talk about the “impenetrable forest of the Weald” checking William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings is to show complete ignorance of the nature of Sussex. It was, however, an obstacle to the spread of ideas, speech, folklore, and the rest, and did maintain the isolation of Sussex down to quite recent times. It keeps traces of that character still.

William then was not prevented from his march on London by the Weald. He went back at his leisure to the sea coast to secure his communications, marched up to Dover, garrisoning every harbour on his way, and then took the great north-east road through Kent, which has been the line of invasion, of commerce, and foreign travel in our island from the very origins of history.

His own personal effort appears after this to pass from the history of the county, but the effect of the invasion upon Sussex was, as we have just remarked, enormous. It will be seen from what has preceded this that the field lay open for the effects

of the new vigour. Nowhere had the remnants of Roman civilisation more thoroughly decayed. The old British stock and the admixture, such as it was, of Teutonic blood had mixed to form a population very much what we see to-day in the villages of Sussex, where most of the people are short, with dark, keen eyes, but a few tall and large, with the light hair, the slow gait, and the heavy bodies of the marsh men from Frisia and the Baltic.

Again the reorganisation of Sussex begins from the sea.

In the administrative division of the county Rapes, as they are called, were mapped out, though it must not be imagined that there was anything original in the selection of the particular districts. The clear Norman brain and the weighty Norman power would certainly make definite boundaries where before there had been nothing but the vague, local feeling of the countryside to determine the limits of the separate parts of the county; but the general set of the divisions was certainly inherited by the Norman from the older and semi-barbaric state of things. Moreover, even after the Norman organisation was fully established, the exact boundaries of each Rape were not always very well determined. Thus the parish of Slindon remained for centuries doubtful between Arundel and Chichester Rape, to which last it has finally been attributed.

In number the Rapes were six, and were called after the towns of Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings.

It will be noted that in each case a town which could be reached by ships was chosen as the basis of the division, and that the tides of the Channel here, as always, were the creators of the county.

The importance which the county was to hold in the new state of affairs is marked at once by the names of those to whom four of the Rapes were given: Montgomery, Braose, Warren, and Moreton, all of them closely connected with the family of the Conqueror, and all of them set, not as proprietors, but as military overlords over a vast number of manors. It would probably be seen, if an exact computation were taken, that, with the exception of the counties Palatine, feudal power was nowhere more concentrated than on this stretch of the sea coast. Here it was that William’s invasion had proved successful; here that new dangers might be expected; here, therefore, that he organised in the most thorough manner and under chiefs most closely connected with himself and his family, the

defence of the land. These few men count between them five-sevenths of the whole county.

Before speaking of what was probably the principal economic factor in the new life which Sussex received from the invasion, the foundation of monasteries, it is of interest to show how a rape was built up from the sea by the new-comers, and the best example we can take to exhibit this process is the rape delivered into the hands of Warren, the Duke’s son-in-law, in overlordship. We shall see it spreading from the centre of its ancient capital, fed, it may be presumed, from its ancient harbour, and slowly extending northward a jurisdiction gradually acquired over the Weald, and later even overleaping the northern boundary of the forest ridge. The whole process occupied about two hundred years. Here then are the chief points in the growth of this Rape of Lewes.

Let us note, in the first place, its natural boundaries. The Ouse bounds it to the east and the Adur to the west, and the strip of land runs north and south between these two river valleys; it starts from the sea coast by which entry is made into the county, and loses itself in the forest to the north.

Its principal town, Lewes, has all those characteristics which distinguish the central towns of the countrysides of Western Europe, save that it possesses no cathedral. It is a place naturally susceptible of fortification. It is Roman, and probably pre-Roman in its origins. It possesses a natural means of approach in the shape of the river beneath it; good water, a dry and naturally well-drained soil, and (a peculiar feature which is to be discovered in every case throughout Gaul, Northern Italy, Western Germany, and Britain) it lies, not in the centre, but right to one side of the countryside which takes its name from it. This feature, which is so marked in the case of the great Norman bishoprics and of most other divisions of the later Empire, is probably due to the fact that where a river or range of hills or great forest formed a natural boundary for a district, it at the same time formed the main natural defence for the chief stronghold of that district. Whatever the cause may be, the chief towns of the various divisions into which Western Europe has fallen are nearly always near the frontier of those divisions. Canterbury is near the sea; Edinburgh near the north of the Lothians. Rouen is by no means central as to Normandy. Even Avranches, Bayeux, and Coutances are upon the edges of their

respective dioceses. And in this county of Sussex, Chichester, the cathedral town, is close to the western border, Arundel is right up against the border of its own Rape, Bramber within a stone’s throw of its eastern boundary. Pevensey alone is somewhat central. Hastings is again thrown up towards the eastern side of the belt which takes its name.

Lewes, then, is the stronghold upon which the chance division of the county had grown up in the Dark Ages. The Normans come; they add to the Saxon fortifications a great Norman castle, and they define more accurately the Rape whose general conception they have inherited from the men whom they have just conquered. They survey (the results of their survey remain in Doomsday), and, having done so, for the next four or five generations they push northward, increasing the agricultural value of the villages as they cultivate them, and extending the rule of man over nature farther and farther into the forest of the Weald.

The constructive effort of the Norman begins by his arrangement of government. He settles upon each of the great divisions the head of some great family, who is nominally the overlord of numerous parishes within that boundary, and who is practically the head of the garrison of the central castle, and the receiver of certain small dues from the numerous villages or manors of which he is technically the lord. In the case of Lewes this function fell, as we have seen, to William of Warren, who was a son-in-law of William the Conqueror, and had distinguished himself in the fight upon Hastings Plain. His residence is in the Castle at Lewes, and undoubtedly his chief political function is to guard this entry to the county. He rebuilds that castle, and he is the custodian of the local survey.

What he does for a port we cannot tell at this distance of time. We know that the marshy land at the foot of the castle was not an estuary of the sea at this epoch, and was probably even passable in the eleventh century. We know this from the coins and relics which have been found in it. We know also that the present harbour of Newhaven was diverted later than the Conquest, and that the old mouth of the river ran somewhat to the east of it. We may conjecture with great probability that the port upon which Lewes was dependent for its commerce and provisions and reinforcements was somewhere near the old mill-pond between Newhaven and Seaford.

Chief among the manors dependent on Lewes and the personality of De Warren we find Brighton under its old Saxon name. It is a large and important place. It controls the chief arable district which falls within the command of Lewes Castle and of the Rape thereto appertaining. Rottingdean, next to it, also comes into the great survey, for Rottingdean is along the sea, and the parishes along the sea, as we have so frequently had occasion to repeat, are historically the first and economically the most valuable of Sussex.

The next belt inland, the belt of the Downs, was uninhabited then as it is to-day, and will be perhaps throughout a remote future. But the old villages upon the strip of fertile land to the north of them are already well developed by the time the Normans come. Nay, they were Roman before they were Saxon, for Clayton and Ditchling, the two principal centres of the string of villages in this part, contain Roman remains. Keymer also is in Doomsday. So is Hurstpierpoint, under the name of Herste. Immediately northward you get the line of villages which are not developed until the wealth and the population of England have increased with the advent of the new civilisation. Typical of these is Cuckfield. It is not mentioned in Doomsday. It was then perhaps mere forest. It is not until the thirteenth century that it gets its market (from Henry III.), and we know that at that moment it was land held of the Warrens. Finally, at the very end of the same century, within a few years of the meeting of the great parliament of Edward I., and in the seventh year of his reign, we get the first hint of the demarcation of the Sussex border on the forest ridge. There is an inquiry into the rights of the Warrens to the free hunting of ground game in the forest of Worth, which extends over the crest of the forest ridge and down on to the Surrey side.

Here we have an excellent example of the way in which the overlapping of Sussex into what is geographically Surrey occurred. The Warrens are very powerful nobles, much more powerful than those lordships in the Surrey towns who hold positions of no strategic importance, and whose garrisons were therefore not heavily endowed at the time of the Conquest. Being great lords the Warrens extend their hunting as far north as they can into the Weald. They go right up through the forest, over the ridge, and down on to the Surrey side. There is (it may be presumed) some complaint against them for this extravagance,

or some jealousy on the part of the Crown. They are examined, and under the inquisition come out triumphant; so that the effect of their family and of the Conqueror’s original disposition in the Rape may be said to have come to its final result when their claim over the extreme limit of the forest ridge was granted by Edward I., and Worth Forest was admitted to be within their jurisdiction and therefore within the county.

This sketch model, as it were, of the way in which a rape has been built up,—first, the sea fortress, then the Wealden market-town, and lastly, the definition of the forest boundary,—may be borne in mind as we deal with the other five similar divisions into which Sussex fell.

Lewes Rape, which we have just been considering, is the very central Rape of the whole county. If a line be drawn through Stanmer Park from north to south, and prolonged to the sea on one side and to the Surrey border on the other, such a line will be discovered to bisect the county into two almost exactly equal areas, and to bisect the Rape of Lewes in very much the same proportion.

Lewes Rape is not only central, but is also the backbone, as it were, upon which the county has been built up. It is this which makes its development so typical of the general history of Sussex. The three Rapes to the west of it and the two Rapes to the east have been somewhat more open from the beginning of history, but not until one has understood Lewes Rape does one understand the growth of the Bramber, Chichester, and Arundel Rapes to the west, nor of those of Pevensey and Hastings to the east. For all, like Lewes, grew up from the sea, from the harbour mouth and a castle at the back of it, on northward through the old British villages under the Downs, till at last they stretched into the Weald and overlapped into what should properly be Surrey. But this process, though common to all, was modified in every special case by special circumstances to which we shall presently allude.

The Rape of Pevensey is of a curious shape. It narrows somewhat towards the middle and bulges out towards the top, or north end. This appears to be the contrary of what one would expect in a Sussex division, the important part of which always lay round the sea coast, but the cause of the shape thus assumed by the Rape is that in its northern part the iron industry had arisen long before the Norman Conquest, and had thus opened up the Weald; it had also made the

government of the area and the collection of taxes from it a subject of ambition for the strongest of the neighbouring lords.

Such a lord was found in the Earl of Moreton, the brother-in-law of the Conqueror, who held the Castle of Pevensey, and who was the first controller of the district after the full Norman organisation began.

Here, as in the case of Hastings, but unlike every other Rape, the seat of government, Pevensey, was actually upon the sea.

The name of Pevensey is instructive of its antiquity. It is probably derived from Celtic roots signifying “the fortification at the far end of the wood,” which would exactly describe an important and fortified sea-coast town situated as Pevensey was situated to the forest from which it took its Roman name; for “Anderida,” or “Andresio,” certainly refers to the Weald, the Celtic forest of “Andred,” of which the Saxons made “the Andredswald.”

Incidentally one may digress to point out how crude and insufficient is the greater part of our hurried modern philology. But for an accident no one would have been able to work out the meaning of this name of Pevensey. It was gradually shortened (after passing through the strangest forms) to “Pemsey,” a comparatively recent change in the spelling, due perhaps to local patriotism, or perhaps to the affectation of some studious landlord who, in reproducing the ancient form, gave us the present spelling of the word, from which we are able to trace its ancient Celtic roots; but how many place-names up and down South England must have been wrongly ascribed to Teutonic origin from our ignorance of the local method of pronunciation!

It is doubtful whether anything of Roman structure remains in Pevensey, though much of the material used in the castle is Roman, and though the towers of that fortification are round. It is enough to remark, that after the long night of the Saxon period the town shared in the general renaissance of South England which followed the Norman Conquest. To give but one indication of this: it trebled in population in twenty years. There is little doubt that at this period, that is, throughout the end of the eleventh century, the whole of the twelfth, and beginning of the thirteenth, the harbour lay beneath the mound of the present ruins. The contour lines, slight as they are in elevation, and the nature of the soil are enough to prove this; nor is it difficult, as one stands on the height of Pevensey Castle, to reproduce the scene which must

have presented itself to the eye of a man living six hundred years ago when he looked northwards and eastwards at high tide. The great marshy flats of the Level were a shallow bay covered by the sea, out of which bay there rounded in towards him a harbour protected from every side except the north-east, and even from that side exposed to no long drive of the weather. This harbour, which was naturally shallow, was probably deepened artificially, whether before or during the Roman occupation; it remained serviceable until past the close of that twelfth century which produced so many great changes in the physical condition as in the political constitutions of Western Europe. Thus Pevensey is one of the first of the lesser towns of England to receive its borough charter. It gets that charter in the ninth year of King John, and it counts as being politically the most important of the Cinque Ports, until there falls upon it the fate which has fallen upon every south-country harbour in turn. It was destroyed by that upon which it had lived, the sea. The beginning of the disaster, a mixture of drift silting up the harbour and of encroachment and breaking-down of its defences, may be dated from the middle of the thirteenth century, and after this date the decline continues with such rapidity that before the end of the French wars Pevensey is hardly a town. It has declined ever since.

You get in the Rape of Pevensey, as in that of Lewes, the universal Sussex rule that the inhabited places are first found in the neighbourhood of the sea. But this rule is modified in the case of Pevensey Rape by the ironstone of the Eastern Weald. But for the industry arising from the use of this the forest ridge of Ashdown would have remained as lonely as that of St. Leonards. As it was, many places upon either slope of the ridge are known to have been inhabited from the earliest times; for instance, Mayfield, which may properly be regarded as a foot-hill of Ashdown Forest, and as a part of the true Weald, is connected with the name of St. Dunstan, and formed one of that procession of ecclesiastical palaces which the See of Canterbury held all along the centre of the county, and of which the last westward is Slindon. Again, Rotherfield is, quite possibly, as old as Offa, or older; at least, dues from that parish were claimed by the Monastery of St. Denis near Paris, which dues were said to have been bequeathed by Bertoald, one of Offa’s lieutenants, during the lifetime of Charlemagne, and before the close of the eighth century. Frant, though we do not hear of it by name

until much later, was undoubtedly of great antiquity, and formed a sort of appendage to Rotherfield.

When, however, one gets over the empty ridge of Ashdown and south on to the slope which looks at the Downs, the natural isolation of the Weald is to be traced. Buxted, for instance, is not heard of before 1298, though later it has the fine reputation of having cast the first cannon ever made in England. Uckfield close by is of no importance until the sixteenth century. When we turn to the sea coast, on the contrary, everything at once proves the antiquity of settlements in that neighbourhood. For example, you have discoveries at Alfriston, just behind Beachy Head, of British coins; you have Hailsham, mentioned in the Norman Survey; and on Mount Caburn, just above the Vale of Glynde, are some of the most perfect prehistoric fortifications in the county.

The Rape of Hastings has, further, exceptions of its own, for here we come to the narrow eastern end of the county where there is no long hinterland of Weald to give us the normal development of the Sussex Rape. But even here there is a trace of that slower rising of the inland as compared with the sea-coast sites; thus Robertsbridge is the child of a monastery of the central Middle Ages. Battle was so little known until the great fight of 1066 that even its name appears in doubt at that epoch. On the other hand, Crowhurst we know to have been held by Harold. Bexhill is mentioned in Doomsday, and we know of the existence of Winchelsea and of Rye at the same epoch.

The mention of these two towns cannot be allowed to pass without some description of their fate as seaports.

Winchelsea, like Pevensey, contained, hooked in behind a peninsula of land, a harbour protected from the prevailing south-westerly winds, and here, as at Pevensey, it is possible to stand to-day and notice what original opportunities must have led to the later and partly artificial harbour. Its importance continued, as did that of Pevensey, into the middle of the thirteenth century, when the first of its disasters began in an overwhelming high tide. Rye is still a port, the port of the mouth of the Rother; but what a port, only those know who have attempted to make it even in the smallest of craft! Unless there should arise some local industry which will make it worth while to dredge the river and establish an expensive system of leading marks into its mouth, Rye within another hundred years will be no more than Sandwich.

The antiquity of the town of Hastings itself is among the most interesting points in the history of Sussex, as is also the name which the town bears. This name is usually ascribed to the pirate Hasting, or Hasten, who ravaged the coast and later sailed up the Thames, at the very end of the Danish invasions, during the reign of Alfred. It is at any rate one of the very few important Sussex names which are certainly and wholly Teutonic, and, if its derivation be exactly guessed, it is the only place-name in the county derived from the name of a man, for the derivation of Chichester from Cissa, the son of Aella, is obviously as legendary as the derivation of Portsmouth from “Port,” or indeed any other of the Anglo-Saxon myths.

The antiquarian does not discover at first sight what feature it was which led to the early importance of Hastings. But, on a further consideration, it may be conjectured that the rise of the place depended upon the conjunction of two things not often found together, a safe beach and a strong isolated hill.

Allusion has already been made, in the earlier part of this book, to the importance of a good beach in early navigation. As common a way as any other of making land, until the development of shipping in the later Middle Ages, was that still adopted by our South Coast fishermen. The vessels, though large, were of a shallow draft and of a broad beam; they were run upon the beach with a careful choice of the right moment between the breakers, and before the momentum of their “weigh” was wholly spent, two or three hands standing ready forward had leapt into the shallow water, and had prepared to direct the bows of the vessel over some form of roller when the next sea should thrust her farther up the shore. When once the bows had taken the roller above the sea line, the rest was easy. The advancing seas would necessarily push the vessel farther up the slope, and when a second or third roller had been placed under the keel a dozen or so of the crew could move even a heavy vessel up out of the way of the high tide. Nor would craft with so shallow a section as those used in the Dark and early Middle Ages have careened over to one side or another at all dangerously during the process of beaching. But for this manœuvre to be successful a particular kind of beach is required; the slope must be even, or one might damage one’s vessel against an abrupt bulge of it. It must not be too steep, or the rolling of the vessel will be too laborious for the crew. It must not be too slight, or the distance along which the

vessel has to be rolled will be too great to make the effort worth while. In material it must be firm and hard—a quality which gave its pre-eminence to the sand of Deal, for if it be shifty or sinking the difficulty of beaching the boat may be insuperable.

Now all these characters are to be discovered in the shingle at Hastings, and added to these is the presence of a strong and easily fortified eminence.

The importance of this sort of refuge can easily be minimised by the modern historian, but those acquainted with the conditions of an earlier time will appreciate its value. A fortress now serves, as Napoleon well put it, “to save time,” and serves little else in military purpose. In a sense this has always been the chief value of a fortress, but when one was dealing with smaller forces, more passionate and less constant in motive than those of to-day, and far more easily disintegrated than is a thoroughly civilised army, time was of far greater value in a campaign. Again, the defence was easier with a smaller body of men on account of the comparative inefficiency of projectiles, the comparative lack of training of the assaulting infantry, and the pre-dominance of cavalry tactics, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the invention of fire-arms. It may be roughly asserted that the power of the defensive behind properly constructed works grew to a maximum from the fifth to the middle of the twelfth century, remained almost stationary till the close of the thirteenth, and only slowly declined during the sieges of the French wars in the succeeding hundred years.

Now under such conditions the importance of hills such as that of Hastings was very great. Here a garrison could, properly commanded, hold out almost indefinitely; it could, therefore, cover a landing or repel an invasion; it could gather under its protection a large and increasing population. The shape of the hill was precisely that required for fortification in the Dark and Middle Ages. It is, in its best form, an example of what you will find also at Chateau Gaillard in Normandy and, to a lesser degree, at Lewes and Arundel in this same county of Sussex, namely, a sort of peninsula or spur with a crowning summit of its own, united with the hills behind it by a comparatively narrow neck, over which assault should be impossible. In the modern sense and referring to modern artillery, such positions are extremely bad, for they are commanded by the higher range at their back; as Arundel is commanded by the heights of the

Park, Lewes by Mount Harry, and Chateau Gaillard by the woods locally known as “La Ferme”; indeed, in the case of this latter castle the conquest of Philip Augustus was largely due to the fact that missile weapons, even in his age, were just within range of the castle from the heights to the south and east. But though, under modern conditions, such situations are bad, under the conditions of at least the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, they were ideal. When William the Conqueror held Hastings there were no methods by which projectiles of sufficient strength could be thrown at the castle from the hills to the north-east, though a hundred years later, by the time of the Third Crusade, and later still, during the attack on the Norman castle already mentioned, such weapons had been developed. One has but to stand on the platform of the ruined stronghold of Hastings to see that, for at least the first hundred years after the Conquest, the place must have been, under any proper command, impregnable. And indeed we find attached to it in Anglo-Saxon times the epithet “ceaster,” which is never given to any place that has not been properly fortified, whether by the Romans or by their successors.

This fortification of Hastings Hill leads one to mention two other castles which lie within the Rape, and which are illustrative of a feature to be discovered in Sussex alone among the English counties. This feature is the presence of subsidiary castles to strengthen the gates of the county, and to stand behind those principal castles whose primary function it is to defend the entries into the land. These subsidiary castles may be best explained to modern readers by using a modern metaphor, and saying that they act as “half-backs” to the great seaport castles of Sussex.

The seaport castles have already been mentioned; we will repeat the list to refresh the reader’s memory: they are Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, and Arundel.

Of these Lewes alone did not, so far as history knows, possess a subsidiary castle to the north of it, and that for this sufficient reason, that the road immediately north split eastward and westward, and forced an army either to pass within striking distance of Hurstmanceaux or within striking distance of Bramber, for the old road did not go over the bleak and deserted ridge of Ashdown as the modern one does. And the historic marches down south upon Lewes were undertaken in a

circuitous manner, as, for instance, that famous one of Henry III., which ended in the defeat of the King in 1264.

In the case of every other great defensive work a secondary work exists behind it. Hastings has Bodiam, Pevensey has Hurtsmanceaux, Bramber has Knepp (which has been more completely ruined than any of the others), Arundel has Amberley. Hurtsmanceaux should logically fall into the Rape of Pevensey, to which it strategically belongs. The accident of a river course makes it fall into the Rape of Hastings, and on this account we mention it here. The other castles will be dealt with in their proper place under each Rape as we deal with it; for Knepp is in the Rape of Bramber, and Amberley in that of Arundel.

As Moreton had been given the overlordship of Pevensey, the government of its Rape, and many manors within it, and as Warren had been given Lewes, so Bramber fell to Braose, and that great name still stands written like a title over the history of this part of the county. The castle itself and some few of the many manors with which the family was richly endowed enjoyed a fate extremely rare in the case of English land, and on account of its rarity the more pleasing, when it is discovered; there has been a long and true continuity in their manorial lordship. With the French this continuity was quite common up to the Revolution, and to this day there are many French families, several Italian, and a few German, who can trace their lineage and their connection with particular portions of the soil well beyond the crusading epoch and even to the ninth or early tenth century. But our English aristocracy is exceedingly modern. The bulk of such few families as boast any antiquity at all can barely trace themselves to the Reformation; the mass of those who pose for lineage end in the mist of the seventeenth century. Bramber and some of the De Braose lands had better luck. For ten generations it remained in direct succession. When this ended (much at the same time as the Lancastrian usurpation) in an heiress, this heiress married a Mowbray, upon which family, almost immediately afterward, was conferred the Duchy of Norfolk. Ten successors, Mowbrays, held it in the direct line when, about a century after the first change, and a generation before the Reformation, it ended again in an heiress who married into the then undistinguished family of Howard, whose various branches had been careful, above all things, to increase their wealth by opportune

alliances. To this new family the Duchy of Norfolk was soon conveyed, and after another ten successors the De Braose inheritance of Bramber is still to be found in their hands. It is a remarkable and a delightful example of a succession unbroken by purchase.

The last sign of the ancient importance of Bramber lay in the fact that it returned, until the Reform Bill, two members to Parliament as a borough. It was then as it is now a small village, and there remained then as there remains now of its ancient castle nothing but one vast wall.

Here, as is the case throughout all the other Rapes, the parishes along the sea coast or near it come earliest in history, and those of the Weald come last. Thus Lancing is in Doomsday; so is Coombes; so is Buttolphs (under Annington); Beeding is actually in Alfred’s will. Shoreham, as we have seen, entered history hundreds of years before, and Henfield is in the great Norman survey under the lordship of the Bishop of Chichester; but as you go northwards the names begin to fail you. Shipley, if we may judge by its church, was probably a development of the next century. Horsham is first mentioned as a town of importance in the thirteenth century, when it sends two members to the Parliament of the twenty-third of Edward I. And little Rusper, up in the far north, we do not hear of until there is mention of a convent of the same date. As for the forest of St. Leonard’s we know that De Braose held it, but, no more than in the case of Worth, is there any proof of its inhabitation or even importance till a much later date.

The port of this Rape, Shoreham, has an interesting history as being yet another of those many ports which the long history of Sussex has seen decline. It lay so directly south of London, and, once communication was established across the Weald, it was so excellent a port of disembarkation for any one coming from the mouth of the Seine or any of the Norman ports, that it maintained a very high political importance right on into the fifteenth century. Thus it was the landing-place of John when he returned to England after the death of his brother.

In the French wars under the third Edward it was assessed to furnish as many ships as Plymouth and two more than Bristol or London. Shortly after its decline began. That great bank of shingle, which is now covered with a very unpleasant little town of iron bungalows, grew up and obstructed

the issue of the river, so that to-day the mouth of the harbour is far eastward of New Shoreham. The burgesses complained that they could no longer pay the old taxes, the borough rights lingered on; but even these at last disappeared in the eighteenth century, when the town was disfranchised and the whole Rape was represented together in its stead. Oddly enough it was at this very moment that the town began to revive; the trade in coal proved useful to it; it became, before the railways, the natural port for Brighton, which lies close by, and, year by year, it gradually though somewhat slowly recovered its old position. It now has probably as much trade as any other Sussex port except Newhaven, though the bar is still difficult for vessels of any draft, and the sharp turning at the entry of the harbour adds to the inconvenience of that refuge, as does the narrowness of the river and the steepness of its banks opposite the town itself.

Its gradual revival did not re-enfranchise it; the Rape still remained the parliamentary unit to which it belonged, and the first member to sit for that division was a Burrell of Knepp Castle.

With this name we get not only one of the famous Sussex squires, whose position will be dealt with later, but the principal historian of the county residing in one of its most ancient centres. The Burrells were lawyers of Horsham who purchased Knepp in the second half of the eighteenth century, a true Sussex family growing upon Sussex soil. The founder of the present baronetcy collected all the new material which has been worked in by subsequent writers into the history of the county. Much of this is luckily preserved in the British Museum, but some parts, unless the present writer is misinformed, disappeared during the recent fire in the modern house of Knepp Castle.

Of the original fortification nothing remains but one little fragment in the south of the estate to the right of the Ashington road. The land has still one local distinction, however, in that it holds a sheet of water, Knepp mill-pond, which is said to be the largest unbroken area of water south of the Thames.

Next in order to the Rape of Bramber comes that of Arundel. Here again the typical upgrowth of a Sussex Rape is modified by local conditions, for the Weald at the northern end of this Rape has been traversed since the beginning of our history by the great line of the Roman road. Arundel Rape has therefore been always accessible from

the Thames valley, and the Thames valley from it. On this account there occurs, as one might imagine, a very early and very thorough development of all its habitable portion. A mere list of the places mentioned in Doomsday in this Rape, places which are still most of them quite small, and have never supported any great number of inhabitants, is surprising. Some, such as Arundel itself, and Climping and Felpham, go back to Anglo-Saxon times. One, Amberley, counts as part of the original foundation of the Church at the close of the eighth century, and Lyminster had a convent before the arrival of the Normans, while Littlehampton was certainly a port before the same date. Meanwhile a rapid survey of the names appearing in Doomsday, all within a walk of the sea coast, are sufficient to show how thoroughly the Arun valley, the subsidiary valley of the Western Rother, and the coastal plain west of the mouth of the river, had developed before the close of the eleventh century.

Thus Barnham (to begin with the flat lands along the sea) is in Doomsday; so are Eastergate, Walberton, Tortington, where later was the famous priory which preserved the early records of the mayoralty of London, and in whose destruction the chief monuments of London history were lost. Binsted is in Doomsday. Turning to the slope of the Downs we find Goring is in Doomsday. Angmering below it, and on the belt of good loam land to the north of them Sutton, Barlavington, Duncton, Burton, Stopham, and Petworth are all to be found, as are Bury, Bignor, and Hardham, where later was to spring up the priory of the Hauterives. On the far side of the river Parham and Burpham are mentioned, so is Storrington, and on the river itself Pulborough; while even such lonely nooks of the Downs as Upper Waltham come into the Norman Survey.

All this fell to the Montgomerys. Very shortly afterwards, by the failure of that family, the guardianship of the castle at Arundel and the headship of the Rape went to the De Albinis; to them succeeded the Fitz Alans, and to them again, when they ended in an heiress, succeeded the ubiquitous and ever watchful family of Howard, who snapped up that inheritance before it could fall to any other, and the new Duchy of Norfolk added not only the Rape of Arundel to that of Bramber, but also a sort of headship over the Rape of Chichester,—for Chichester had gone with Arundel in the original grant to Montgomery.