ITS ECCLESIASTICAL CHARACTER
making for the lowlands of the Rother valley, or farther on for the rich pastures of the Wey (where later was to spring up the wealth and magnificence of Waverley), such a sailors’ raid would certainly have proceeded up the Arun and tried to force its way past Amberley Castle. It would never have made the attempt through Chichester.
There is, then, a clear topographical and strategical reason for the immunity of the Rape of Chichester from military conditions. There is also an ecclesiastical reason. It is a thing not to be forgotten, that from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance the contrast between the ecclesiastical and the civil method of government was a reality. It afforded for men’s minds something of the foil or background which to-day the legal aspect of society gives us as against the commercial, or the conception of a gentleman as against the conception of a rich man. The contrast was, of course, much more vigorous and satisfactory than any of our modern contrasts can be. We see it in a thousand ways illuminating the history of the Middle Ages; by way of sanctuary, by way of the ecclesiastical courts, by way of the atonement which men paid for violence when they founded great monasteries, by way of the technical abstention from capital sentences which the Church rigorously preserved. It is not fantastic to ascribe to this cause the fact that the Rape of Chichester held no important castle and was the site of no great battle. Nor is it ridiculous to imagine that the somewhat ungeographical inclusion of the parish of Slindon into the hundred of Aldwick, and therefore into the Rape of Chichester, had something to do with this ecclesiastical quality. For Slindon was Canterbury’s; Stephen Langton died there.
Here, as in the Rape of Arundel, everything within a march of the sea was in Doomsday, and the actual entries from the sea are known before Doomsday; for example, there is Bosham, from which we have seen that Harold sailed on that pleasure trip of his to Normandy. Right up in the Downs Doomsday parishes continue, as Singleton, which is the mother of West Dean, and lies in the same internal valley or fold of the hills as does that other parish of Upper Waltham, which we have already discovered to be included in the Doomsday Survey in the Rape of Arundel. So with the loam belt to the north of the Downs in this Rape. Graffham is in Doomsday, Cocking is in Doomsday, and while Heyshott is not actually in
SINGLETON
SCILLY SUSSEX
Doomsday, it is alluded to a little later as Percy Land held of the Montgomerys. But once we get into the neighbourhood of the Weald the dates fall later. Midhurst is a full borough in the early fourteenth century under Edward II., and not before.