All this fell to the Montgomerys. Very shortly afterwards, by the failure of that family, the guardianship of the castle at Arundel and the headship of the Rape went to the De Albinis; to them succeeded the Fitz Alans, and to them again, when they ended in an heiress, succeeded the ubiquitous and ever watchful family of Howard, who snapped up that inheritance before it could fall to any other, and the new Duchy of Norfolk added not only the Rape of Arundel to that of Bramber, but also a sort of headship over the Rape of Chichester,—for Chichester had gone with Arundel in the original grant to Montgomery.
AMBERLEY CHALK PITS
ARUNDEL TOWN
The town of Arundel is singular among English sites of the first rank, from the fact that it has neither increased nor diminished to any considerable extent for at least a thousand years.
It is probable that there was here in Roman times a crossing of the river, though the point is hotly denied by the more pedantic among our historians, because, so far, no Roman remains have been found under the soil of the town, or at least none have been identified by casual visitors. But, whether it was a Roman town or not, it is certain that from the moment the isolated spur upon which the castle stands was crowned with strong fortifications and garrisoned by the central authority of England, a town of much the same size as the modern Arundel must have been grouped round its base.
Those who deal most with the statistics of the early Middle Ages seem most blind to the conclusions of common sense. When they are told that only ten or twenty burgesses are to be discovered in a particular town, according to the evidence of some taxing list, they are willing to jump to the conclusion that only ten or twenty families existed in the place at the time the list was made. Instead of appreciating the very natural attitude of any tax-gatherer to save himself all possible labour, and the certitude that he would put down only those who were assessed in his particular tax, and instead of grasping the fact that, until the later Middle Ages, men paid taxes, not by localities, but by categories (some as King’s men, some as local baron’s men, some as the Church’s men, others according to all manner of local apportionments), they take the very crude way of estimating the particular document they have as an index of total population. It is this, for example, which has led to the astounding conclusion that England at the time of the Norman invasion held less than two million souls, and it is this which makes people misunderstand, if they read modern histories, the nature of a town like Arundel.
So long as the spur above the Arun was protected by marshes and isolated by a narrow neck from the main range of the Downs, so long would it tempt men to form a stronghold there, and the moment that stronghold was held by national forces under the obedience of a national King, it presupposed a county town. It presupposed defence for a market (the later license for a market is quite a different thing; the market existed often for centuries before the license which was usually
