The seaport castles have already been mentioned; we will repeat the list to refresh the reader’s memory: they are Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, and Arundel.
Of these Lewes alone did not, so far as history knows, possess a subsidiary castle to the north of it, and that for this sufficient reason, that the road immediately north split eastward and westward, and forced an army either to pass within striking distance of Hurstmanceaux or within striking distance of Bramber, for the old road did not go over the bleak and deserted ridge of Ashdown as the modern one does. And the historic marches down south upon Lewes were undertaken in a
HURSTMONCEAUX CASTLE
THE SECONDARY CASTLES
circuitous manner, as, for instance, that famous one of Henry III., which ended in the defeat of the King in 1264.
In the case of every other great defensive work a secondary work exists behind it. Hastings has Bodiam, Pevensey has Hurtsmanceaux, Bramber has Knepp (which has been more completely ruined than any of the others), Arundel has Amberley. Hurtsmanceaux should logically fall into the Rape of Pevensey, to which it strategically belongs. The accident of a river course makes it fall into the Rape of Hastings, and on this account we mention it here. The other castles will be dealt with in their proper place under each Rape as we deal with it; for Knepp is in the Rape of Bramber, and Amberley in that of Arundel.
As Moreton had been given the overlordship of Pevensey, the government of its Rape, and many manors within it, and as Warren had been given Lewes, so Bramber fell to Braose, and that great name still stands written like a title over the history of this part of the county. The castle itself and some few of the many manors with which the family was richly endowed enjoyed a fate extremely rare in the case of English land, and on account of its rarity the more pleasing, when it is discovered; there has been a long and true continuity in their manorial lordship. With the French this continuity was quite common up to the Revolution, and to this day there are many French families, several Italian, and a few German, who can trace their lineage and their connection with particular portions of the soil well beyond the crusading epoch and even to the ninth or early tenth century. But our English aristocracy is exceedingly modern. The bulk of such few families as boast any antiquity at all can barely trace themselves to the Reformation; the mass of those who pose for lineage end in the mist of the seventeenth century. Bramber and some of the De Braose lands had better luck. For ten generations it remained in direct succession. When this ended (much at the same time as the Lancastrian usurpation) in an heiress, this heiress married a Mowbray, upon which family, almost immediately afterward, was conferred the Duchy of Norfolk. Ten successors, Mowbrays, held it in the direct line when, about a century after the first change, and a generation before the Reformation, it ended again in an heiress who married into the then undistinguished family of Howard, whose various branches had been careful, above all things, to increase their wealth by opportune
BRAMBER RAPE