On the Ouse above Lewes.
CHAPTER XXVI
LEWES
The Museum of Sussex—The riches of Lewes—Her leisure and antiquity—A plea from Idlehurst—Old Lewes disabilities—The Norman Conquest—Lewes Castle—Sussex 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 Sussex martyrs.
Apart from the circumstance that the curiosities collected by the county's Archæological Society are preserved in the castle, Lewes is the museum of Sussex; for she has managed to compress into small compass 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 scrape 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 circumstance; 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.
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 assize 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.)