Professor Burrows is entitled to the credit of setting forth the theory, in his little book upon the Cinque Ports,[6] that Edward the Confessor 'had evidently intended to make the little group of Sussex towns, the "New Burgh" [? afterwards Hastings], Winchelsea, and Rye, a strong link of communication between England and Normandy', by placing them under the control of Fécamp Abbey. He holds, indeed, that Godwine and Harold had contrived to thwart this intention in the case of the latter; but this, as I shall show in my paper on the Cinque Ports, arises from a misapprehension. This theory I propose to develop by adding the case of Steyning, Edward's grant of which to Fécamp is well known, and has been discussed by Mr Freeman. It might not, possibly, occur to any one that Steyning, like Arundel, was at that time a port. But in a very curious record of 1103, narrating the agreement made between the Abbot and De Braose, the Lord of Bramber, it is mentioned that ships, in the days of the Confessor, used to come up to the 'portus S. Cuthmanni' [the patron saint of Steyning], but had been lately impeded by a bridge that had been erected at Bramber. Here then was another Sussex port placed in Norman hands. Yet this does not exhaust the list. Mr Freeman seems to have strangely overlooked the fact that the great benefice of Bosham, valued under the Confessor at £300 a year, had been conferred by Edward on his Norman chaplain, Osbern, afterwards (1073) Bishop of Exeter, whose brother, in the words of the Regius Professor, was the 'Duke's earliest and dearest friend', and who, of course, was of kin both to William and to Edward. Now this Bosham, with Thorney Island, commanded a third Sussex harbour, Chichester haven.[7] But at London itself also we find the Normans favoured. The very interesting charter of Henry II, granted by him, as Duke of the Normans, in 1150 or 1151, to the citizens of Rouen, confirms them in possession of their port at Dowgate, as they had held it from the days of Edward the Confessor.[8] Here then we have evidence--which seems to have eluded the research of our historians, both general and local--that, even before the Conquest, the citizens of Rouen had a haven of their own at the mouth of the Walbrook, for which they were probably indebted to the Norman proclivities of the Confessor. The building of 'Richard's Castle' plays a most important part in Mr Freeman's narrative of the doings of the Normans under Edward the Confessor. We hear of its building, according to him, in September 1051: