The Assizes are not "on" just now; it is not a
market-day nor a fair-day; the independent
electors of Lewes are under no present necessity
of choosing any one to represent them in
parliament; there are no races at the
racecourse, which has now fallen into a state of
decay, though in the time of George the Gentleman
it made a great figure in the annals of the
turf; and, if the citizens are given to
volunteering, this is evidently not one of the mornings
on which they turn out for martial
exercises. There is nothing going forward of a
nature to rouse a solid old country borough from
comfortable lethargy; so it dreams on
undisturbed. Yes, there is something, after all—a
flower-show in the grounds of the Priory ruins.
But that is a little way out of the town, and
does not trouble its repose.

The Lewesians are far from a frivolous people,
We have just seen how the once famous races
have declined to the brink of extinction; and
a local historian proudly tells us that "the
inhabitants of Lewes are too commercial in their
pursuits (and, shall we add, too intellectual in
their character?) to need the excitement of public
amusements." Accordingly, a theatre which
formerly existed has been transformed into a
mechanics' institute. Perhaps, however, this is
hardly surprising in a country town buried
amongst hills—a town where relics of the past
meet you at every turn; where a house is pointed
out at which Anne of Cleves is said to have
resided after her repudiation by Henry the
Eighth; where another bears the date 1577 on
its porch, cut in figures that are unmistakably
those of the period; where yet another, at the
corner of an alley (a dwelling once the
residence of Thomas Paine, the free-thinker), has
the angle of its overhanging upper story
supported by a grotesque crouching figure in
timber, which must have been wrought and
placed there in the days when men built
houses after some pattern in their dreams;
where there is an inn with an ancient vaulted
cellar, in which, according to a tradition of the
town, the Protestant heretics of the reign
of Queen Mary were imprisoned previous to
being burnt at a stake in front of the building;
where the ruins of a Norman Priory adorn the
neighbouring fields, and the battered towers of
a Norman castle dominate the High-street.

Both the Priory and the castle owe their
origin to the same person—William de
Warenne, one of the Norman Conqueror's
companions at Hastings, and Gundred or Gundrada,
his wife, a daughter of the soldier-king. De
Warenne was an earl, and a great favourite of
his royal master, who bestowed on him immense
estates in the counties of Sussex, Surrey,
Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Yorkshire. Lewes
was even at that time a walled town of
some importance, and in the reign of Saxon
Athelstan had possessed two mints, while
Hastings and Chichester could only boast of one
each. In the later days of Edward the
Confessor, according to Domesday Book, some
curious and not very reputable customs prevailed
in the borough. The purchaser of a man (those
being times in which servants were the property
of their lords) paid fourpence to the mayor,
who thus had an interest in the slave trade of
the period. A murderer might escape punishment
by the payment of seven shillings and
fourpence; while, in the case of those
transgressions which now bring the perpetrators
into Sir Cresswell Cresswell's court, the
damages were assessed at eight shillings and
fourpence, and nothing more was thought about
the matter. In these and other instances, the
king and the feudal lord shared the profits, in
the proportion, respectively, of two-thirds and
one-third. Whether William de Warenne did
anything towards reforming these customs does
not appear. Possibly not, for he seems to have
been a rough violent soldier, who probably
cared for nothing more than "getting on in the
world," after the fashion of the eleventh
century. He died very much out of favour with
the Church, two-and-twenty years after the
Conquest; that is to say, in 1088. The monks of
Ely accused him of seizing some of their lands,
and they reported that, on the night of the
earl's death, the abbot, while lying in bed, heard
the soul of de Warenne shrieking for mercy as
it was borne through the air by Satan.
Gundrada was a very different person. She appears
to have been as pious as the most exacting
abbot could require, and was doubtless the chief
agent in the establishment of the Priory, which
was dedicated to St. Pancras: a Phrygian
beheaded at Rome in the reign of Dioclesian, for
refusing to abjure Christianity. The endowments
were munificent, and the monks seem to
have lived in right jovial style in the midst of
their manors, granges, fisheries, meadows, and
woods, the description of which carries one's
thoughts, in the glowing language of Pope,

     To happy convents, buried deep in vines,
     Where slumber abbots, purple as their wines.

For, as no small quantity of wine was made in
England in those days, the comfortable recluses
may have had a vineyard about their precincts,
for anything we know to the contrary.

Many noble persons were from time to time
buried in the church and chapter-house, in
exchange for which favour they left gifts of land
and money to the Priory; and in this way the
monks increased in prosperity as the centuries
wore on, until the storm of the Reformation
burst over the land. In the year 1537, the
existing prior surrendered the establishment
into the hands of Henry, whose Vicar-General,
Thomas Lord Cromwell (a man in many
respects very like his still greater namesake of
a century later), sent one of his agents to effect
the demolition of the magnificent abbey. The
agent was certainly not deficient in zeal; for he
soon reduced the stately edifice to a heap of
ruins. All that can now be seen of the
Priory consists of a few scattered blocks of
massive masonry, draped in ivy, weeds, and grasses;
a subterranean apartment; and a mound of earth,
with a spiral pathway leading to the summit, on