WEST HAM
MILITARY VALUE OF LEWES
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.
LEWES CASTLE