[6] ibid., p. 71.
[7] Supra, p. 421.
[8] The Cinque Ports, p. 26.
[9] The Professor's argument that 'the lordship of St Denis over the Saxon Hastings had ceased—probably when the Northmen took possession of the Seine valley and blocked out the French; that of Fécamp was the renewal of the old idea on an adjoining territory' (Cinque Ports, p. 27), is as baseless as that which follows it as to Winchelsea and Rye. For the 'charter of Offa, king of the Mercians' (p. 25), granting Hastings to St Denis, has been conclusively shown by Mr Stevenson to be a forgery.
[10] One cannot, of course, speak positively without seeing that 'identification' on which Professor Burrows relies. But, unless there is evidence to the contrary, it seems difficult to resist the conclusion that this estate of the Abbey 'in Hastings' was identical with that which it actually possessed in the Bourne Valley. For this by no means included the whole 'town in the Bourne Valley', but only that portion of it at the foot of the West Hill, which is bordered by Courthouse Street, Bourne Street, John Street, and High Street, together with St Clement's Church and its block of buildings (Sussex Arch. Coll., xiv. 67). And this conclusion is strengthened by the fact that in Domesday its rents are 63s 'in Hastings', and 158s in the 'novus burgus', while at the Dissolution they were only 35s 4d in Hastings. In that case we must after all look for the 'novus burgus' of Domesday at Winchelsea or Rye.
Nor is the history of Hastings harbour at all as clear as could be wished. 'The ancient Harbour once occupied', no doubt, 'Priory Valley' (Cinque Ports, p. 9); but I can find no trace of a haven 'formed by the Bourne between the East and West Hills', which replaced it on its silting-up. On the contrary, the old map of Hastings in 1746 (Sussex Arch. Coll., vol. xii) shows us the 'haven' (with ships) in the Priory Valley to the west of the Castle Hill. Was not this a later harbour (1637), and the real original one out to the south?]
[11] Chichester, Lewes, and Pevensey are all duly entered, under the names of their respective lords.
[12] The Cinque Ports, pp. 77-9.
[13] The Cinque Ports, p. 123. Compare the banishment of the Despencers (1321) by the 'piers de la terre, countes et barouns'.
[14] The courts of the Cinque Ports, for instance, greatly need investigation. One can only throw out as a mere conjecture the suggestion that if the Court of Guestling derived its name, as Professor Burrows admits is probable, from Guestling (the caput of a Hundred), midway between Hastings and Winchelsea, it may have been originally a Sussex Court for the Hastings group, while the Court of Broadhill—afterwards 'Broderield' and 'Brotherhood' (The Cinque Ports, p. 178)—may have been the Kentish one. The admitted corruption in the traditional derivation of both names, together with the court's change of locale, shows how much obscurity surrounds their true origin. Few, I think, would accept Professor Burrows' view that, because the Brodhull, when we first have record of it, was held 'near the village of Dymchurch' (p. 46), it was named from 'the "broad hill" of Dymchurch, which may well have been some portion of the wall which extended for three miles along the beach' (p. 47). As the Guestling was not a court of 'Guests', so 'the broad hill', from which the meeting derived its name, must have been originally somewhere else than down 'on Dymchurch beach' (p. 75), between Romney Marsh and the sea.