Lewes Rape, which we have just been considering, is the very central Rape of the whole county. If a line be drawn through Stanmer Park from north to south, and prolonged to the sea on one side and to the Surrey border on the other, such a line will be discovered to bisect the county into two almost exactly equal areas, and to bisect the Rape of Lewes in very much the same proportion. Lewes Rape is not only central, but is also the backbone, as it were, upon which the county has been built up. It is this which makes its development so typical of the general history of Sussex. The three Rapes to the west of it and the two Rapes to the east have been somewhat more open from the beginning of history, but not until one has understood Lewes Rape does one understand the growth of the Bramber, Chichester, and Arundel Rapes to the west, nor of those of Pevensey and Hastings to the east. For all, like Lewes, grew up from the sea, from the harbour mouth and a castle at the back of it, on northward through the old British villages under the Downs, till at last they stretched into the Weald and overlapped into what should properly be Surrey. But this process, though common to all, was modified in every special case by special circumstances to which we shall presently allude. The Rape of Pevensey is of a curious shape. It narrows somewhat towards the middle and bulges out towards the top, or north end. This appears to be the contrary of what one would expect in a Sussex division, the important part of which always lay round the sea coast, but the cause of the shape thus assumed by the Rape is that in its northern part the iron industry had arisen long before the Norman Conquest, and had thus opened up the Weald; it had also made the [Illustration: PEVENSEY CASTLE] [Sidenote: PEVENSEY RAPE] government of the area and the collection of taxes from it a subject of ambition for the strongest of the neighbouring lords. Such a lord was found in the Earl of Moreton, the brother-in-law of the Conqueror, who held the Castle of Pevensey, and who was the first controller of the district after the full Norman organisation began. Here, as in the case of Hastings, but unlike every other Rape, the seat of government, Pevensey, was actually upon the sea. The name of Pevensey is instructive of its antiquity. It is probably derived from Celtic roots signifying “the fortification at the far end of the wood,” which would exactly describe an important and fortified sea-coast town situated as Pevensey was situated to the forest from which it took its Roman name; for “Anderida,” or “Andresio,” certainly refers to the Weald, the Celtic forest of “Andred,” of which the Saxons made “the Andredswald.”