England of My Heart : Spring

by Edward Hutton

But the great day of Lewes Castle was that of Simon de Montfort—I shall deal with that later. Here it will be enough to point out that only a fragment of the great building with its double keep, whose ruin we see to-day, dates from the time of the first De Warenne, the rest being a later work largely of Edward I's. time.

Let me now return to the Priory which, in the development of the town, played a part at least as great as that of the Castle.

The Priory had always been famous for its piety, and in 1199, Hugh, who had been Prior there till 1186, was raised to be Abbot of Cluny itself. This is interesting and important for we have thus an ex-Prior of Lewes as Abbot of Cluny during the great dispute between the Order and the Earl of Warenne. In 1200 Lewes was without a Prior, and Abbot Hugh appointed one Alexander. For some reason or other De Warenne refused to accept him and even went so far as to claim that the appointment lay with him, an impossible pretension. Yet even within the Priory he is said to have won support, certain of the monks claiming that, save for a tribute of one hundred shillings a year to Cluny, they were independent. The Pope was appealed to and he of course gave a clear decision, not in the English way of compromise, which is the way of a barbarian and a coward, but like an honest man deciding 'twixt right and wrong. His judgment was wholly in favour of the Abbot of Cluny. The Earl then began to bluster and to attempt to appeal beyond the Pope; he even dared to place armed men at the Priory gate and to stop all communications with Cluny. The Abbot replied by an interdict upon Lewes, and things were in this confusion when the Pope appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of Chichester and Ely to hear what De Warenne had to say in excuse for his violence. The Abbot of Cluny himself came over and was insulted in Lewes by De Warenne's men. In appointing English judges to hear the case the Pope must have known that all would end in a compromise. At any rate this is what happened, and it was decided that in future, when a vacancy occurred, the Abbot of Cluny should nominate two candidates of whom De Warenne should choose one for Prior. This ridiculous judgment decided nothing. Of two things, one; either the Abbot was right or he was wrong. If he were right why should he forego his claim, to satisfy De Warenne who was wrong? A decision was what was needed. In 1229 the Pope rightly declared the compromise null and void, and the Abbot of Cluny regained his rights. At once the moral condition of the house improved, and when it was visited in 1262 everything was reported to be satisfactory, and unlike any other Cluniac house in England this of Lewes was not in debt.

The turning point in the history of the Priory would seem to have been the one great moment in the story of the town; the appalling affair in which it was involved by Simon de Montfort in 1264 when he took the town, then Henry III.'s headquarters, and captured the King and young Prince Edward. It would seem that De Montfort's soldiers had very little respect for holy places, for we read that not only were the altars defiled but the very church was fired and hardly saved from destruction.

The quarrel between the King and his barons would seem, too, to have involved the monks, for we find the sub-prior and nine brethren were expelled from Lewes for conspiracy and faction and went to do penance in various houses of the Congregation. Indeed such was the general collapse here that before the end of the century the Priory was practically bankrupt.

That Lewes suffered severely from the Black Death of 1348-49 is certain, but we know very little about it, and indeed the history of the house is negligible until, in the beginning of the fifteenth century the whole system of Cluny was called in question and it was claimed on behalf of Lewes that it should be raised to an abbacy with the power to profess monks. It will be remembered that the Abbot of Cluny—the only Abbot within the Congregation—alone could profess, and in times of war, such as the fourteenth century, this must have been very inconvenient. Indeed we read of men who had been monks their whole life long, but had never been professed at all. It is therefore not surprising that such a claim should at last have been put forward. It is equally not surprising that such a claim was not allowed. The Abbot of Cluny refused to raise Lewes to the rank of an abbey, but he granted the Prior the privilege of professing his monks; this in 1410. So things continued till in 1535, the infamous Layton was sent by Thomas Cromwell to inquire into the state of the Priory of Lewes, to nose out any scandal he could and to invent what he could not find. His methods as applied to Lewes are notorious for their insolence and brutality. He professes to have found the place full of corruption and rank with treason. And in this he was wise, for his master Cromwell wanted the house for himself. Upon November 16, 1537, the Priory of St Pancras at Lewes was surrendered. It was then served by a Prior and twenty-three monks and eighty servi; and it and its lands were granted by the King to Thomas Cromwell.

Such was the end of the most famous Cluniac house in England, the sanctuary founded by that De Warenne who had built up Lewes between his Castle on the height and his monastery in the vale. Almost nothing remains to-day of that great and splendid building, but in 1845, in building the railway, the coffins of the founders De Warenne and his wife Gundrada were found. These now lie in St John's Church, here in Southover close by, which belonged to the Priory. It was originally a plain Norman building of which the nave remains, the rest of the church as we see it, being for the most part either Perpendicular or altogether modern.

Of course the Priory of St Pancras was not alone in the fate that befell it at the hands of the Tudor in 1537. The only other religious house in Lewes suffered a like fate. This was the convent of the Franciscans, dedicated, as most authorities agree, in honour of Our Lady and St Margaret. The Friars Minor were established in Lewes before 1249, and their convent was one of the last to be surrendered, in 1538.

From St John's Church, the visitor, not without a glance at the old half timber house close by said to have been the residence of Anne of Cleves, will pass up to the High Street where, under the Castle, stands the parish church of St Michael, the only ancient part of which is the round Norman tower, a rare thing. A fourteenth century brass to one of the De Warennes is to be seen within. Further west is the Transitional Norman church of St Anne, with curious capitals on the south side of the nave. Here is a fine basket-work Norman font, and in the south aisle at the east end a vaulted chapel. To the north of the chancel is a recessed tomb.