MAYFIELD
HASTINGS RAPE
until much later, was undoubtedly of great antiquity, and formed a sort of appendage to Rotherfield.
When, however, one gets over the empty ridge of Ashdown and south on to the slope which looks at the Downs, the natural isolation of the Weald is to be traced. Buxted, for instance, is not heard of before 1298, though later it has the fine reputation of having cast the first cannon ever made in England. Uckfield close by is of no importance until the sixteenth century. When we turn to the sea coast, on the contrary, everything at once proves the antiquity of settlements in that neighbourhood. For example, you have discoveries at Alfriston, just behind Beachy Head, of British coins; you have Hailsham, mentioned in the Norman Survey; and on Mount Caburn, just above the Vale of Glynde, are some of the most perfect prehistoric fortifications in the county.
The Rape of Hastings has, further, exceptions of its own, for here we come to the narrow eastern end of the county where there is no long hinterland of Weald to give us the normal development of the Sussex Rape. But even here there is a trace of that slower rising of the inland as compared with the sea-coast sites; thus Robertsbridge is the child of a monastery of the central Middle Ages. Battle was so little known until the great fight of 1066 that even its name appears in doubt at that epoch. On the other hand, Crowhurst we know to have been held by Harold. Bexhill is mentioned in Doomsday, and we know of the existence of Winchelsea and of Rye at the same epoch.
The mention of these two towns cannot be allowed to pass without some description of their fate as seaports.
Winchelsea, like Pevensey, contained, hooked in behind a peninsula of land, a harbour protected from the prevailing south-westerly winds, and here, as at Pevensey, it is possible to stand to-day and notice what original opportunities must have led to the later and partly artificial harbour. Its importance continued, as did that of Pevensey, into the middle of the thirteenth century, when the first of its disasters began in an overwhelming high tide. Rye is still a port, the port of the mouth of the Rother; but what a port, only those know who have attempted to make it even in the smallest of craft! Unless there should arise some local industry which will make it worth while to dredge the river and establish an expensive system of leading marks into its mouth, Rye within another hundred years will be no more than Sandwich.
