Upon these downs, and especially upon the range to the seaward, the early sea-kings seem to have pitched their resting-places. Here are still found such hill-camps as Woolstonbury, Caburn, Rookshill, and Cheukbury, circular in form, and therefore neither British nor Roman, and besides these, several others, as Newhaven, Seaford, and Burling, which are segments of circles, and, like Flamborough Head, enclose headlands, and are attributed, with some probability, to the Danes. It seems the general opinion that these circular or segmental earthworks preceded the mounds and banks found in the interior of the country and upon lower ground, the work of the same people after their settlement and civilisation.
Sussex is the only county the primary divisions of which bear the names of rapes; of these it contains six: Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, Arundel, and Chichester, subordinate to which are sixty-five hundreds; each rape contains a portion of seaboard, a river, a haven, and a fortress. The rivers are the Lavant, which nearly encircles the city of Chichester, and falls into one head of the Bosham estuary, the port of Chichester—the name is thought to be a corruption of the Saxon hlifian, a rising, because the springs rise annually from deep sources;—the Arun, which descends the dell bearing its name, cleaving the chalk-range, and reaches the sea at Little Hampton; the Adur, the river of Bramber, which, also by a pass in the chalk, reaches the sea at Shoreham; the Ouse, the river of Lewes, which, through a narrow gorge, now joins the sea at Newhaven, instead of, as formerly, flowing out at Seaford. The Cuckmere is the river of Pevensey, but it leaves that haven far to the east, and descends, also by a gap in the chalk, to the sea, west of Beachy Head; and, finally, the Rother, the river of the rape of Hastings, but the common boundary of Sussex and Kent, and which falls into the sea at Rye. Pevensey Haven, though deprived of the Cuckmere, is the receptacle for a number of lesser streams, by which the upland waters formerly flooded that extensive level.
The fortresses of the rapes are also six:—Chichester, probably of Roman origin, long since destroyed; Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, and Hastings, all of præ-Norman date; Pevensey, of Roman origin. Ella, who landed a.d. 477, took possession of Chichester. All were the seats of English lords, and all were accepted by the Normans as well-chosen positions, and by them were occupied and strengthened. Knepp or Knapp Castle, subordinate to Bramber, in the same rape, like it, is of English origin.
Of the six castles, three, Arundel, Bramber, and Lewes, are posted at the upper openings of narrow gaps in the chalk downs. Chichester is placed to the east of and outside the chalk range. Pevensey stands within the weald, among the low marshes by which that tract opens upon the sea; and Hastings, also within the weald, stands upon the sea-cliff, on the rocks and sands to which it has given geologically its name.
All the six, as well as Knapp, possessed, on a larger or smaller scale, the conical mound so characteristic of English strongholds, and each, after the Conquest, became the chief seat of a barony, and was held by a powerful noble. Robert de Eu had Hastings; William de Warren, Lewes; the Earl of Moreton, Pevensey; Chichester fell to Roger de Montgomery, who there founded a castle upon the site of the earlier works, of which part of the mound remains. The castle stood within the city enclosure, in the north-east quarter. It became, with Arundel, the property of the D’Albinis, and was destroyed by order of King John, after which the third Earl of Arundel founded on its site the Grey Friars, of which the house was probably built with the materials of the castle. It is said that upon the mound stood a circular or polygonal keep, as at Arundel, and that the traces of its foundations were long visible on its summit. The mound has survived all its Norman additions, and is the only relic of the ancient fortress that is extant. The city, within which the castle stood, is also an early strong place. The cruciform streets are, doubtless, Roman, as are the coins and inscribed stones occasionally dug up; but the outline of the city is not rectangular, and is enclosed within a bank and ditch of irregular outline, once of formidable strength, and still in parts tolerably perfect. It is not improbable that these earthworks are post-Roman, the work of the Romanised Britons, and therefore earlier than the date of the castle mounds. The later wall was built against the bank, which thus still, where it remains, forms a broad ramp or terrace.
Arundel Castle, next eastwards to Chichester, and its superior in military importance, stands on the right bank of and high above the Arun. The pass is of a more open character than those to the east of it. This castle has already been described.
Knepp Castle is in Shipley parish. It had a shell keep upon the mound, of which traces remain, but which is said to have been destroyed as early as 1216.
Bramber, the castle next eastwards of Arundel, is held to be the English “Brymmburgh,” a fortress upon a brim or brink. It was the head of a barony, and the chief place of the rape to which it has given name, and which includes forty-two parishes. The rape extends about twenty-four miles from the Surrey border to the sea, with a width of about eight miles. Narrow as it is, it contained till 1832 the four Parliamentary boroughs of Shoreham, Bramber, Steyning, and Horsham, returning eight members to Parliament, now reduced to three. The castle stands on the west side of, and just above, the channel by which the Adur reaches the sea at Shoreham. The pass thus commanded is four miles long, and half a mile wide; the bottom flat and marshy, the sides very steep and rising to 600 or 700 feet. New Shoreham, founded about a.d. 1200, by the Norman lord of Bramber, stands upon the seashore; but old Shoreham, the English port, is now half a mile inland, the deposits from the river and the débris of the chalk range having encroached considerably upon the sea. Combe and St. Botolph’s, ancient parishes, are placed within the pass, and higher up upon the same side is the village of Bramber, standing upon slightly rising ground at the foot of the western hills, and upon the edge of a broad tract of level land, still wet, and formerly impracticable, across which the sluggish and frequently flooded Adur takes a rather winding course.
The castle is placed a little to the north-west of the village, and, as was the English custom, close to the parish church. From thence a raised causeway is carried across the valley, leading to the village of Sele or Beeding, the Bedinges of Domesday, where was once a religious house dependent upon the castle. The village, composed of one short street, adjoins the causeway, and near it was discovered, in 1839, the piling and piers in masonry of an ancient bridge by which the road was carried across one of the bye-streams of the Adur. A charter of 1075 refers to this bridge and to a chapel upon it, as “Stᵘˢ. Petrus de veteri ponte.” The causeway, however, claims to be of higher antiquity, and to have carried a Roman road across the marsh then probably flooded by the sea.
In the construction of the fortress, advantage was taken of a knoll of the lower or grey chalk, roughly oval in figure, and about 120 feet high above the river. This was levelled on the top and scarped round the sides so as to form a more or less rounded area, 560 feet north and south, by 280 feet east and west. The scarp descended above 180 feet at an angle of 45 feet, or a slope of one to one, into a ditch about 20 feet wide at the bottom, and the opposite side of which, or counterscarp, rose about 40 feet at a similar angle, so that the ditch at the counterscarp level was 100 feet broad, and the crest of the scarp rose 30 feet to 40 feet above the ground opposite. A very formidable defence. Towards the east, where the ground was low, the counterscarp was not above 20 feet high, and to add to the depth of the ditch, it was crested by a light bank, from which the ground sloped towards the marsh. On the north and north-west, where the ditch was at its deepest, and the ground was high, the slope outwards is gentle, falling off for a furlong or so. To the west, where there is a valley now occupied by the railway, the ground is low, and here the outer side of the ditch, forming the crest of the counterscarp, is a narrow ridge, as at Arques, succeeded by a very steep slope. Thus those who approached the place on that side, after toiling up a steep and dangerous ascent, would only find themselves on the outer edge of a deep ditch, with a second still higher and steeper ascent beyond it. Towards the south the ditch crosses instead of skirting the hill, and is much less deep. Here was the entrance, and upon the small tail of the knoll thus cut off is placed the parish church, standing, therefore, just outside the ditch, and in its turn defended by the slope of the hill, and by a hollow way which runs a few yards within the edge of the marsh, the level of which is 8 feet or 10 feet below it.