Or consider again Madehurst which, until the reign of Elizabeth, holds of the Arundel earls; then one Dixse has it in fee; then it passes to the Kemps, and they sell it to Sir George Thomas (whose family sold it again), after which it passes by a second sale in 1825 to John Smith; and at last we see it in the middle and end of the nineteenth century in the hands of a manufacturing family who had chosen to assume the ancient name of Fletcher. Eartham (to quote another example) went to King Henry VIII. in exchange for Michelham Priory; in the middle of the eighteenth century a Chichester man bought it, one Hayley; a generation later, Huskisson, the politician; then the Milbankes; and then again, quite recently, a man whose name is connected with a custard powder. Singleton went down traditionally until the Reformation; nay, till that year after the Armada, when Graffham also had slipped; then, in 1589, it changes hands, passing from a noble to a squire. It remained in his family till the beginning of the eighteenth century; it is sold and re-sold, passing from hand to hand. Within present memory first a squire, and then a northern Quaker, and at last a wealthy racing family have held it, one after the other. As might be imagined, the Church lands, their lineage abruptly torn apart at the Reformation, suffered fates even more revolutionary, and produced a squirearchy even more tenacious by its [Illustration: MICKLEHAM PRIORY] [Sidenote: NEWTIMBER] wealth, and even less attached by tradition to the county of Sussex. Thus Newtimber, which had come down from Doomsday, is seized by Thomas Cromwell. The King chucks it to Anne of Cleves; then you find a Darrell in possession; then a Bellingham (holding of Lord Abergavenney in the sixteenth year of Charles I.) It is left to one Woodcock, whose daughter, after the Restoration, marries a Cust; and then, following the universal fate, it is sold to a yeoman of Poynings, one Osborne, whose grandson in 1741 sells it to a Newnham, whose grandson, again, early in the last century, sells it to a Gordon, etc. An historian might make many exceptions. The fortified places have most of them held out (as it is their nature to hold out) against change. We have already pointed out that Bramber and Arundel have had a continuous tenure. Bosham goes right down from the confiscation after the Conquest to the nineteenth century without alienation. But take Sussex land as a whole: the sixteenth century first and the Restoration afterwards have dug an impassable gulf. It is pleasant for those who love certitude to pass from such vicissitudes to something allied to the tradition of the land, but more permanent than it: the tradition of the owners of the land. It is pleasant to note the continuity of certain Sussex families, their origin, and their grip upon the soil.