Sussex (England) -- Description and travel; Sussex (England) -- History; Sussex (England) -- Pictorial works
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
[Illustration: SINGLETON]
[Sidenote: 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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