Part 27 (1/2)

CHAPTER XXVI

LEWES

The Museum of Suss.e.x--The riches of Lewes--Her leisure and antiquity--A plea from _Idlehurst_--Old Lewes disabilities--The Norman Conquest--Lewes Castle--Suss.e.x curiosities--Lewes among her hills--The Battle of Lewes--The Cluniac Priory--Repellers of the French--A comprehender of Earthquakes--The author of _The Rights of Man_--A game of bowls--”Clio” Rickman and Thomas Tipper--Famous Lewes men--The Fifth of November--The Suss.e.x martyrs.

Apart from the circ.u.mstance that the curiosities collected by the county's Archaeological Society are preserved in the castle, Lewes is the museum of Suss.e.x; for she has managed to compress into small compa.s.s more objects of antiquarian interest than any town I know. Chichester, which is compact enough, sprawls by comparison.

The traveller arriving by train no sooner alights from his carriage than he is on the site of the kitchens of the Cluniac Priory of St. Pancras, some of the walls of which almost sc.r.a.pe the train on its way to Brighton. That a priory eight hundred years old must be disturbed before a railway station can be built is a melancholy circ.u.mstance; but in the present case the vandalism had its compensation in the discovery by the excavating navvies of the coffins of William de Warenne and his wife Gundrada (the Conqueror's daughter), the founders of the priory, which otherwise would probably have been lost evermore.

The castle, which dominates the oldest part of the town, is but a few minutes' stiff climb from the station; Lewes's several ancient churches are within hailing distance of each other; the field of her battle, where Simon de Montfort defeated Henry III., is in view from her north-west slopes; while the new martyrs' memorial on the turf above the precipitous escarpment of the Cliffe (once the scene of a fatal avalanche) reminds one of what horrors were possible in the name of religion in these streets less than four hundred years ago.

[Sidenote: THE RICHES OF LEWES]

Here are riches enough; yet Lewes adds to such mementoes of an historic past two gaols--one civil and one naval--a racecourse, and a river, and she is an a.s.size town to boot. Once, indeed, Lewes was still better off, for she had a theatre, which for some years was under the management of Jack Palmer, of whom Charles Lamb wrote with such gusto. Added to these possessions, she has, in Keere Street, the narrowest and steepest thoroughfare down which a king (George IV.) ever drove a coach and four, and a row of comfortable and serene residences (on the way to St. Ann's) more luxuriantly and beautifully covered with leaves than any I ever saw. (Much of Lewes in September is scarlet with Virginia creeper.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: _High Street, Southover._]

[Sidenote: ”BRIGHTHELMSTONE, NEAR LEWES”]

[Sidenote: JOHN HALSHAM'S DREAM]

Although less than half an hour from Brighton by train, and an hour by road, Lewes is yet a full quarter of a century behind it. She would do well jealously to maintain this interval. Lewes was old and grey before Brighton was thought of (indeed, it was, as we have seen, a Lewes man that discovered Brighton--Dr. Russell, who lies in his grave in South Malling church); let her cling to her seniority. As a town ”in the movement,” as a contemporary of the ”Queen of Watering Places,” she would cut a poor figure. But it is amusing to think of the old address of a visitor to Brighton, ”at Brighthelmstone, near Lewes,” and to read the county paper, _The Suss.e.x Weekly Advertiser; or, Lewes Journal_, of a century ago, with its columns of Lewes news and paragraphs of Brighton correspondence. Lewes will cease to have charm the moment she modernises. In the words of the author of _Idlehurst_, as he looked down on the huddling little settlement from the Cliffe Hill: ”Let us keep a country town or two as preserves for clean atmospheres of body and soul, for the almost lost secret of sitting still.... I find myself tangled in half-dreams of a devolution by which, when national amity shall have become mentionable besides personal pence, London shall attract to herself all the small vice, as she does already most of the great, from the country, all the thrusters after gain, the vulgar, heavy-fingered intellects, the Progressive spouters, the Bileses, the speculating brigandage, and shall give us back from the foggy world of clubs and cab-ranks and geniuses, the poets and painters, all the nice and witty and pretty people, to make towns such as this, conserved and purified, into country-side Athenses; to form distinct schools of letters and art, individual growths, not that universal c.o.c.kney mind, smoke-ingrained, stage-ridden, convention-throttled, which now masquerades under the forms of every clime and dialect within reach of a tourist ticket.”

The customs of Lewes at the end of the Saxon rule and the beginning of the Norman, as recorded in the pages of the Domesday Book, show that residence in the town in those days was not unmixed delight, except, perhaps, for murderers, for whom much seems to have been done. Thus: ”If the king wished to send an armament to guard the seas, without his personal attendance, twenty s.h.i.+llings were collected from all the inhabitants, without exception or respect to particular tenure, and these were paid to the men-at-arms in the s.h.i.+ps.

”The seller of a horse, within the borough, pays one penny to the mayor (sheriff?) and the purchaser another; of an ox, a half-penny; of a man, fourpence, in whatsoever place he may be brought within the rape.

”A murderer forfeits seven s.h.i.+llings and fourpence; a ravisher forfeits eight s.h.i.+llings and fourpence; an adulterer eight s.h.i.+llings and fourpence; an adultress the same. The king has the adulterer, the bishop the adulteress.”

[Sidenote: THE PROVIDENT DE WARENNES]

With the Conquest new life came into the town, as into South Suss.e.x generally. The rule of the de Braoses, who dominated so much of the country through which we have been pa.s.sing, is here no more, the great lord of this district being William de Warenne, who had claims upon William the Conqueror, not only for services rendered in the Conquest but as a son-in-law. When, therefore, the contest was over, some of the richest prizes fell to Earl de Warenne. Among them was the towns.h.i.+p of Lewes, whose situation so pleased the Earl that he decided to make his home there. His first action, then, was to graft upon the existing fortress a new stronghold, the remains of which still stand.

Ten years after the victory at Hastings the memory of the blood of the st.u.r.dy Saxons whom he had hacked down at Battle began so to weigh upon de Warenne's conscience that he set out with Gundrada upon an expiatory pilgrimage to Rome. Sheltering on the way in the monastery of St. Per, at Cluny, they were so hospitably received that on returning to Lewes William and Gundrada built a Priory, partly as a form of grat.i.tude, and partly as a safeguard for the life to come. In 1078, it was formally founded on a magnificent scale. Thus Lewes obtained her castle and her priory, both now in ruins, in the one of which William de Warenne might sin with a clear mind, knowing that just below him, on the edge of the water-brooks, was (in the other) so tangible an expiation.

The date of the formation of the priory spoils the pleasant legend which tells how Harold, only badly wounded, was carried hither from Battle, and how, recovering, he lived quietly with the brothers until his natural death some years later. A variant of the same story takes the English king to a cell near St. John's-under-the-Castle, also in Lewes, and establishes him there as an anchorite. But (although, as we shall see when we come to Battle, the facts were otherwise) all true Englishmen prefer to think of Harold fighting in the midst of his army, killed by a chance arrow shot into the zenith, and lying there until the eyes of Editha of the Swan-neck lighted upon his dear corpse amid the hundreds of the slain.

[Sidenote: THE CASTLE'S CURIOSITIES]

The de Warennes held Lewes Castle until the fourteenth century; the Suss.e.x Archaeological Society now have it in their fostering care.

Architecturally it is of no great interest, although it was once unique in England by the possession of two keeps; nor has it romantic a.s.sociations, like Kenilworth or even Carisbrooke. The crumbling masonry was a.s.sisted in its decay by no siege or bombardment; the castle has been never the scene of human struggle. Visitors, therefore, must take pleasure chiefly in the curiosities collected in the museum and in the views from the roof. A few little rooms hold the treasures ama.s.sed by the Archaeological Society; ama.s.sed, it may be said, with little difficulty, for the soil of the district is fertile in relics. From Ringmer come rusty s.h.i.+eld bosses and the mouldering skull of an Anglo-Saxon; from the old Lewes gaol come a lock and a key strong enough to hold Jack Sheppard; and from Horsham Gaol a complete set of fetters for ankles and wrists, once used to cramp the movements of female malefactors. Here, in a case, is a tiny bronze thimble that tipped the pretty finger of a Roman seamstress--one only among scores of tokens of the Roman occupation of the county. Flint arrow heads and celts in profusion take us back to remoter times. A Pyecombe crook hangs on one wall, and relics of the Suss.e.x ironworks are plentiful. The highest room contains rubbings of our best bra.s.ses. Outside is an early Suss.e.x plough. In a corner is a beadle's staff that once struck terror into the hearts of Sabbath-breaking boys; and near one of the windows is a little bra.s.s crucifix from St. Pancras' Priory. But nothing, the custodian tells me, so pleases visitors to this very catholic collection as the mummied hand of a murderess.

[Sidenote: THE BATTLE OF LEWES]

Looking down and around from the roof of the keep, you are immediately struck by the wide shallow hollow in which Lewes lies. It is something the shape of a dairy basin, the gap to the north-west, between Malling Hill and Offham, serving for the lip. Nothing could be flatter than the smiling meadows, streaked with tiny streams, stretching between Lewes and the coast line to the south-east (with the exception of one symmetrical hillock just out of the town). Among them curls the lazy Ouse; just beneath you Lewes sleeps, red-roofed as an Italian town, sending up no hum of activity, listless and immovable save for a few spirals of silent smoke. The surrounding hills are very fine: Firle Beacon in the far east; Mount Caburn, a n.o.ble cone, in the near east; Mount Harry to the west, on whose slopes Henry III., a.s.sisted by the fiery Prince Edward, fought the Barons. So fiery, indeed, was this lad that he forgot all about his father, and gave chase to a small detachment of the enemy, catching them up, and hewing them down with the keenest enjoyment, while the unhappy Henry was being completely worsted by de Montfort. It was a b.l.o.o.d.y battle, made up, as old Fabian wrote, of embittered men, with hearts full of hatred, ”eyther desyrous to bring the other out of lyfe.” Great fun was made by the humorists of the time, after the battle, over the fact that Richard, King of the Romans, Henry's brother, was captured in a windmill in which he had taken refuge. This mill stood near the site of the Black Horse inn. In _The Barons' Wars_, by Mr. Blaauw, the Suss.e.x antiquary, the whole story is told.

Lewes has played but a small part in history since that battle; but, as we saw when we were at Rottingdean, it was one of her Cluniac priors that repulsed the French in 1377, and her son, Sir Nicholas Pelham, who performed a similar service in 1545, at Seaford. As the verses on his monument in St. Michael's Church run:--

What time the French sought to have sackt Sea-Foord, This Pelham did repel-em back aboord.